Kindle. Billed as a spy thriller but really it's a discursive research dump. Quite often I wanted to throw the Kindle across the room as I waited for it to get good. It didn't; the final 10% or so does get moving but by then it's too late, and the concluding farce can't make up for what came before.
Our Californian narrator "Sadie Smith" bills herself as a spy. She's more of an agent provocateur though. The task which she chose to accept was to infiltrate a pseudo-kibbutz in the Guyenne region in southwestern France via the pants of a minor Parisian film auteur in ballpark 2010. Her actual job is to bore us witless at length with trivial observations about early hominids and excessive but inconsequential drinking. Does she (or Kushner?) really think that archeologists and anthropologists are so stupid that they do not understand survivorship bias? Everyone knows that left-wing French politics has been dead boring since 1968, and there's a lot of glory but not much substance in theory; I mean, it's just free association.
The early flashback structure demonstrates that Kushner put more value in finding homes for her research/notes from a holiday in France than in telling a good story; I tend to feel that if the narrative and characters have any strength then they can be presented linearly, from start to finish. If they don't, no amount of faux intellectualism is going to save things.
While chugging through this (in lengthier bouts as I realised there was nothing memorable in the offing) it struck me as mostly derivative of other works. Fundamentally there's Adam Johnson's Parasites Like Us but without its humour or actual erudition, and the entrapment of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. The tendentious and shallow concept of a person's "salt" struck me as a pale imitation of Persig's grappling with quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Perhaps, like in Gone Girl, someone found the sex sexy, maybe even including the repugnant bits. Ultimately I couldn't tell if Kushner was patronising her readers or actually intended her narrator to present as patronising and stupid. Or was it all an accident?
Widely reviewed. Like me, Brandon Taylor was completely unimpressed. Reading his article now, after the book, I see my beefs are a subset of his. The vacuity is laid bare by how "Sadie Smith" chooses to spend her retirement, by doing nothing much of anything. Dwight Garner gushed and also liked the bit about cave-dwelling Bruno getting head lice from a dead German soldier during the occupation of France. And so on. Hats off to the marketing team once again.
Pure fan service. The story makes little sense. The characters are weak. Loads of cameos (Wesley Snipes!) but not a thing is memorable.
At Middleback Arts Centre. I booked last week as I remembered that I was too preoccupied to go to anything at this time last year and just happened to get lucky. I hadn't been to a Bangarra performance before. Moderately full.
I read the brochure before going and so expected a strong narrative or at least an iconography that I could recognise. Notionally we're told a story of a soak in western South Australia that gets consumed by the steam locomotives transiting the Trans-Australian Railway in the 1920s or so. The final part takes us in a tacked-on way to the horrors of Maralinga.
As it was I struggled to find things to focus on with all the high-energy movement and I started to wonder what it looked like from different angles; I was in the middle perhaps 15 metres back from the front edge of the stage and felt I was looking down when I should have been looking across. There was a sense of the athleticism but not the danger that comes with circus. Many in the crowd dug it with a broad standing ovation.
Geraldine Higginson's review is somewhat tepid.
Over several nights as it is somehow engrossing and often toes the line of being too much. Written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang. This was his debut feature after a career in TV.
Taipei, Taiwan, feeling like the late 1980s. The traditional society that was breaking down in That Day on the Beach (1983) has broken down. The rain provides cover for the bad boys on motorcycles (dominant Chen Chao-jung, adjunct Jen Chang-bin) who are cracking everything coin operated (phones, vending machines) to pay for the night's entertainment at the video game parlour and endless cigarettes. Soon enough anithero Kang-sheng Lee has quit his crammer and burnt his bridges with his middle class parents, taxi driving Miao Tien and expositor-of-tradition Yi-ching Lu. There's a vibe that things are going to go all Taxi Driver but Lee is mostly mute. Along the way we learn that roller-rink attendant Wang Yu-wen is the only available girl in the whole city; in fact things are so bad for her that she keeps buying the boys dinner. I guess nobody gets what they want.
Pen-Jung Liao's realist cinematography is very effective. The morning-after early on is captured with some great tracking shots on the city streets as the boys go their separate ways. The flooded apartment is quite something. I don't think there's that much neon; the glare of the CRTs dominate in the arcade and the love hotels. Far less is made of the flouros at the restaurant than Christopher Doyle managed to in Chungking Express. The score by Shu-Jun Huang is often insistent.
#58 on the Golden Horse list of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films, on par with The Way of the Dragon. A. O. Scott in 2015 upon its U.S. release. Richard Brody, also in 2015. The phone dating is so weird.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Ariane Louis-Seize. Québécois, mostly in French with some English and Spanish.
It's almost entirely right there in the title; the only variable in the genre is what demographic these vampires are playing to. Unlike El Conde this is politically vacuous and in dank colour but shares its attitude that the world is as the creators say it is, carcass disposal and murder investigations be damned. Perhaps this couple eventually grows up and moves upriver to Detroit. The tepid humour cannot compete with What We Do in the Shadows; these guys aren't as fastidious about the provenance of the blood they consume as Jemaine Clement. Perhaps this is the next generation of Buffy.
More broadly there's a dash of quirky-/awkward-girl Amelie in a bland suburban aesthetic that isn't wild like a Tim Burton or fussy like a Wes Anderson. Lead teen Sara Montpetit is done up like 1990s P.J. Harvey. Her love interest Félix-Antoine Bénard is a bit walleyed like Marty Feldman's Igor. He wants to avoid a meaningless death (but apparently not a meaningless movie). The kids carry on like the young Americans they are. There is much object fetishism: vinyl records and egg chairs. Her first kill stands in for a loss of virginity. The fantasy fulfilment is uninventive. Things generally move along but do get bogged every so often. I guess you could say these guys are in favour of voluntary assisted dying.
More screwball from Frank Capra, again prompted by that book review. Also adapted by Robert Riskin from a short/magazine story by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Oscars all round, including Best Picture. #247 in the IMDB top-250.
Impulsive scion Colbert jumps off her father Walter Connolly's boat near Florida after he puts up a fight about her continuing to be (chastely) married to flying Jameson Thomas (not Oscared). Needing to get back to her man in NYC while avoiding the private dicks etc. of the era, she opts for a bus where she encounters Gable. The rest is inevitable, including the need to beggar these rich beautiful people to garner audience sympathy during the Depression. Larceny is OK if its in the service of love. It's not that screwy and again the last 30 minutes gets far too serious. I'm not sure which night it happened on.
Mourdaunt Hall at the time.
Kindle. George Mackay Brown's first novel. He certainly wrote about what he knew. Set in a fictional town (Greenvoe) on a fictional island (Hellya) in the Orkneys, he ably documents a dying way of life in an isolated community. The characters and their proclivities are closely and sympathetically observed. I got the feeling he split his own into a few people here. He does not shy away from the ugly things in life but greets them with gentleness. The nested and shifting story frames are smoothly and deftly handled. The writing is quite fine and the specialised vocabulary is a necessary part of the requiem. Far more engaging than you'd expect from what is structurally a soap opera.
As with Fankle-the-cat the outro here rails against the destruction of nature and deep history, the displacement of the locals, for expedient and withheld reasons. (Just what was Black Star?) It comes with a rush and a change of style and voice, a simplification of language, like he's explaining himself to a bureaucrat from London.
Goodreads. Calm, entertaining, thoughtful. Mystical. Robert Crawford on Mackay Brown.
Prompted by Andrew Katzenstein's review of Grégoire Halbout's book Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals in the New York Review of Books. A very young James Stewart, scion of a NYC banking dynasty, romances his secretary Jean Arthur while his father Edward Arnold looks to close the biggest deal ever, hinging, of course, on buying her grandfather Lionel Barrymore's sprawling abode. Directed by Frank Capra who won the best director Oscar. The film got best picture. Spring Byington was nominated for her very amusing diverted mother/wife. Adapted by Robert Riskin from a play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart.
It's clear the actors are having a ball. There are some great scenes — Jimmy Stewart dancing with a young girl half his height, the crow and the cones, the crazy inventiveness in the basement (evoking 1960s Doctor Who), ecumenical grace at the dinner table, some farcical court proceedings. There's a bit too much speechifying and out-of-character listening, and things start to drag in the last 20 minutes or so as the gears shift from screwball fantasy to moral fable. It's at its best when it's just having a laugh.
Thematically it foreshadows The Godfather — grandpa is beloved by the community — and the epic destruction of neighbourhoods by Robert Moses. I doubt many businessmen quit when they realise they're not having enough fun.
Frank S. Nugent at the time.
Excess Alain Delon completism. Prompted by Glenn Kenny's review in 2021 — a Critic's Pick! It took me several goes to make it past the first half hour.
The scenario has Delon holidaying with hot stuff Romy Schneider at a friends' villa in the south of France. She's a writer of some kind, as was he before he failed into advertising. They're still heavily into each other despite it being about two years since they met and both being powerfully inert apart from the scenes of staged friskiness. A friend/erstwhile lover in the tunes business arrives with his previously undiscovered nubile daughter causing the usual complications. Things then grind on as they must.
It's sexy in a camera-objectifying-female-bodies way; the male gaze is all we get as the women are too busy looking at the men. I found it boring as not much effort is put into developing the characters; for instance it's clear that Delon isn't drinking but we are never given a reason why. Another scene has Schneider getting annoyed at her chopsticks. The attempt to turn it into a detective flick in the last movement is lighter than air.
It's tagged at IMDB as a psychological drama and I guess you could bracket it with minor Hitchcock like Spellbound. At times I wondered if it was taking on more of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than it could swallow.
Bill Forsyth's first Hollywood feature. Inevitable after Breaking In. Adapted by him from a widely feted book by Marilynne Robinson. Over many nights due to a failure to grip.
Two young ladies (soon enough and mostly Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) are dumped by their mother Margot Pinvidic (looking a bit too much like Susan Sarandon) on their grandmother in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho. Her passing brings their free-spirited aunt Christine Lahti (...And Justice For All, Running of Empty) back to town and she is entrusted with their care. Her opinions on child rearing are not so much relaxed as entirely absent. Adventures ensure, some growing up occurs but none of the typical coming-of-age stuff.
It's billed as a comedy-drama but I found little of either. There are some of Forsyth's signature moves (repeated motifs, significant gestures). The initial scenes and themes of female freedom/wild abandonment/Pinvidic/road trip evoke Thelma and Louise and not Little Women. The described-but-not-shown epic train derailment points toward Magnolia and there's just a dash (maybe) of Welcome to the Dollhouse in Ruth's exclusion from Lucille's social life. Of course Forsyth is too gentle a filmmaker to take any of it to the limit.
Roger Ebert: four stars and much effusion. Lahti's Sylvia "seemed closer to a mystic, or a saint" than a mad woman. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Lahti plays "a siren of the open road". IMDB trivia: Diane Keaton was originally cast in the lead. Takes place in 1955. Further details at Wikipedia. Unlike Forsyth's other efforts there's not much of a soundtrack.
More Alain Delon completism. He passed recently. Directed and co-written by Luchino Visconti. Inevitable after The Leopard. Claudia Cardinale has a minor role as the oldest-brother's wife. In glorious black-and-white. Over two nights due to length.
After the passing of their patriarch, four of five brothers and their mother from feudal farmland in southern Italy join the eldest brother in frigid industrial Milan. Each brother gets named in a title card but really it's always about Delon's Rocco and Renato Salvatori's Simone. Both end up boxing and falling for the same woman, Annie Girardot's Nadia, a prostitute. The story maps the disintegration of the family as society's traditions crumble. It's not very subtle and things generally go as you'd expect, but despite this it is somehow engaging throughout. There's a great scene where an old bloke explains how housing works for those of meagre means.
Roger Ebert in 2008: a "great movie" for an instant four stars. Obviously points the way to The Godfather, Mean Streets. Operatic and exhausting. Bosley Crowther in 1961. The Grapes of Wrath. Vincent Canby in 1991. Rocco recalls Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. More details at Wikipedia.
Originally titled Bastarden (The Bastard). Directed and co-written by Nikolaj Arcel who was also responsible for the similarly fictional-historical A Royal Affair (2012) which also starred Mads Mikkelsen. He also co-wrote Riders of Justice with co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen. In two sittings as it neatly segments.
Pensioned soldier Mikkelsen gets sick of the poor house in the 1750s and decides to petition the Danish King. He offers to have a crack at farming the moorland/wasteland of Jutland in return for a peerage on success. Advisor Søren Malling (A Hijacking) is against it but comes around when he sees there is little chance of a payout and some political benefit in the meantime. Labour is sourced initially from some escapees (housekeeper Amanda Collin, Morten Hee Andersen) of the house of the local feudal lord (a hammy Simon Bennebjerg) and later a band of gypsies. As the cultivation is a tedious process the focus is more on a romantic opportunity with Norwegian heiress Kristine Kujath Thorp, the construction of a family with the housekeeper and a dark-skinned castaway ragamuffin (Melina Hagberg), and the power struggle with the provincial landowners.
The point, I guess, is that Mikkelsen learns that the noble title isn't worth it. The conclusion is very similar to Viggo's: people on a horse looking at the sea. There are some loose ends: where did he get that essential white clay from? how did Ms Norway fend off the laird for all that time? why is the king so powerless? Some scenes are over the top. Mikkelsen is back to being powerfully inert — his performance is all details, not dancing, and still the ladies cannot resist. Rasmus Videbæk's cinematography is often intentionally murky and effective.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed Arcel. Manohla Dargis: enjoyably serious. Sheila O'Malley. Peter Bradshaw: three stars of five. Generally compared with Barry Lyndon.
The things that Guy Pearce and Jacqueline McKenzie make me watch. Directed and co-written by Lee Tamahori. He looks to have struggled within the Hollywood vortex since Once Were Warriors (1994). Apparently this is the third entry of a trilogy with that and Mahana (2016). The other writers are Australian Shane Danielsen, who reviews movies for the Schwartz media, and Kiwi Michael Bennett. Based on a novel by Hamish Clayton.
Pearce leads as a minister of religion who has been mail-ordered by the upstanding settler folk of 1830s Epworth in New Zealand. En route, taking a transparently ill-advised break from Captain Dean O'Gorman's boat, he and his majestic white horse encounter Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) whose husband is soon executed by warlord Lawrence Makoare. The horse purchases her life for reasons of plot and it looks like we're in for a retread of the fish-out-of-water frontierism of The Last of the Mohicans and The Piano.
At the town Pearce (with Ngatai-Melbourne in tow) encounters outcast McKenzie whose Māori husband has also been killed in inter-tribal warfare. The locals are initially enthusiastic that their Christian needs will now be addressed but for reasons of plot Pearce goes another way, leading to an excess of talky history lessons and a graphically-violent L.A. Confidential climax.
There are some good bits in the small, such as when gun-running O'Gorman argues for self-regulating (musket) markets on the basis of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). The didactic opportunity is squandered however as Pearce does not rebut with the now-ignored moral bits of the famous tome. The cinematography by Gin Loane is fine but we've seen so much of the scenery before that we expect a horde of CGI orcs to burst forth at any moment. Or perhaps Sam Neill, once more unto the breach. The dialogue is occasionally rubbish.
Ben Kenigsberg. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Lee Tamahori. Tamahori asserts that without Christianity the Māori would have used the white man's muskets to wipe each other out. He has consistently taken women's points of view in these movies. Three stars of five from Luke Buckmaster: who exactly was the convert?
Bill Forsyth's second Hollywood feature. I have yet to see his first.
Late-career Burt Reynolds (in a dry run for Boogie Nights?) leads as an everyman/playboy burglar who meets-cute tyre mechanic Casey Siemaszko on a job in suburban Portland, Oregon and takes him on as an apprentice. It's a heist movie! — just like it says on the tin. There are some funny bits in the small and it does not try to be clever. There is no twist but instead lots of forgiveness with stakes more in line with That Sinking Feeling than Thief. The narrative arc somewhat inverts Knox Goes Away.
Reynolds was almost unrecognisable (to me) when he eventually shed his iconic moustache. Sheila Kelley was vaguely familiar from Matchstick Men. The soundtrack is obtrusive.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Character not caper. Vincent Canby. The dog is indeed very amusing.
Minor Burt Lancaster completism prompted by David Trotter's article on David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film in the London Review of Books. Based on Daniel Ford's story Incident at Muc Wa (1967) which is a rough contemporary of Halberstam's memoir and novel.
It's 1964 and a small group of American military advisers, led by Lancaster's Korean-War vet Major Asa Barker, find themselves in a locale called Penang somewhere in the south of Việt Nam. A mystifying expansion of the group is explained when General Harnitz (Dolph Sweet) helicopters in: they're to establish a garrison at the old French settlement of Muc Wa. The result, of course, is their own private Điện Biên Phủ.
Lancaster delivers all the funny lines quite flatly (some are quite amusing) but the attendant flatness of the other performances leaves it unclear if this is failing to be a comedy in the style of Altman's M.A.S.H. (about the Korean War, with the same racial slurs) or failing to be something more substantial. Amongst the stereotypes is an intelligence officer who is nothing like Daniel Ellsberg.
IMDB tells me it was shot in California with Vietnamese refugees. This makes me wonder if it wasn't one of the ingredients for that episode of The Sympathizer.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. The cliches did their duty. All the details at Wikipedia and more at IMDB trivia.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Jub Clerc a year ago. Steve Rodgers was the other writer.
The core of the story is about a group of at-risk youth from Port Hedland or thereabouts who are taken on a photography road trip out to Karijini. Shantae Barnes-Cowan leads. Her mum likes to party hard so it falls to her uncle Mark Coles Smith to provide some stability. Carlos Sanson Jr. and Tasma Walton (far better here than in Mystery Road) are the adults supervising the trip.
The Pilbara is as gorgeous as ever but it's as it's been shot to death it's difficult to get excited by the gasps of awe from the (notional) locals. Things go gently with some implied but toothless menace and a bit too aimlessly: there are a few attempts to lift the stakes by cliched (soap operatic?) means. The use of film cameras struck me as just as disruptive as phones; how often were 1980s holidays interrupted by the artifice of needing to shoot? The limited number of photos and expense involved is not exploited here, and in general there are no stakes, quixotic frame or timelessness of a Walkabout or Rabbit Proof Fence. On the plus side it's great to see a script that shunts the well-worn issues of the white/black interface to the edges of a self-contained mostly-indigenous universe. This is helped along by a cracker soundtrack.
Look Goodsell: sincerity is so uncool in a teen. I dissent, the camera lies: only someone who hasn't been to Port Hedland could deem it "eerily pretty". Based on Clerc's experiences on a "photo safari" with National Geographic in the 1980s. She also did a segment of The Turning. Played at Cannes Écrans Juniors 2024. Sandra Hall, blandly. Elsewhere: it invites comparison with The Breakfast Club.
#100 on David Stratton's list of marvellous movies. Mostly for Pamela Rabe who I saw in Ibsen's Ghosts a long while back. She's not great here. Directed by Samantha Lang from a script adapted by Laura Jones from Elizabeth Jolley's novel. I'm not in the target demographic and perhaps nobody is.
In a haircut that is almost fatal Mirando Otto appears at only child/spinster/Germanic Rabe's family farm somewhere near frigid Cooma/Nimmitabel as domestic help after a stretch in juvie. Patriarch Frank Wilson (Frank Wilson!) is almost dead and the only person with Rabe's interests in mind is relentlessly unromantic stock-and-station agent Paul Chubb. Things go as the themes force them to: a culture/music clash between 1940s isolated Europhile settler frugality and 1990s expansive hedonistic modernity, ease via capital gains and subdivision replacing honest toil, parental and male expectations from beyond the grave versus living orphanhood and sisterhood, obligation and responsibility against expediency, an unsound employer/employee relationship, mental unwellness. Too much misdirecting dead weight — much of it carried by single lines of dialogue, an expression on Rabe's face, a shared bed, a clean break in Otto's character, a repeated scene — robs the movie of its arthouse horror potential.
Mandy Walker's cinematography was generally terrible; the palette was too washed out though that may have been due to the format I saw it in. It is not an aesthetic triumph.
The Movie Show: David on the boost (satisfying, selected to compete at Cannes 1997 (!), The Servant, 4.5 stars of 5), Margaret more realistic (cheated (!), just a yarn, 3.5 stars of 5). Stratton at Variety at the time. A. O. Scott: The Blair Witch Project, Picnic at Hanging Rock. But it isn't at all scary; I think he and Stratton took more to the movie than the movie brought to its audience. Ozmovies claims they'll be back after a few weeks of renovation (here's hoping) and in the meantime they suggest we use archive.org for all the details. "[S]old at the time as a psychological thriller, but it’s short on psychology and definitely short on thrills." Theatrical. Rabe's character is a city person's idea of a farm woman. Perhaps I am insufficiently steeped in Freudianism.
Kindle. Inevitable after Andrina. Billed as stories for kids, and indeed the writing is direct and fine but the vocabulary requires an adult. The cat of the title is black (of course) and comes to live with a young school girl on an island in Orkney. The stories are in the vein of Oscar Wilde: gentle moral fables garbed in fantasy and magic realism. We visit ancient Egypt, imperial China, a pirate ship and the island itself in the present time. Fankle hates the snow. The coda is an acerbic take on man's relationship with creation.
Viggo Mortensen wrote, directed and (apparently unintentionally) starred in this. The poster at IMDB is in the classic style of an old Western and in many ways so is the movie.
Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) leads as a Francophile woman who's after a good time on her own terms in a place we're supposed to recognise as San Francisco in the 1860s. She's sick of her hectoring establishment lover Colin Morgan and meeting laconic carpenter Viggo on the docks seals the deal: off she heads to Nevada (I read later) with him to live an isolated quiet life in a wooden cabin redolent of her childhood. Being of independent mind she gets a job at a saloon in a nearby town. Viggo, also of independent mind, feels the need to see the nascent Civil War for himself (in New Mexico) and leaves her to the local heavily-drawn predators (Garret Dillahunt, Solly McLeod, Danny Huston) and our perplexity.
The themes of fatherhood and an unwell mother run throughout and are something of a compliment to Captain Fantastic. Both leads radiate quiet inner strength. Viggo is more restrained — have we seen him play a Dane before? (A quick google suggests yes.) The multilingual dialogue is a nice touch as it dodges (or at least complexifies) much that is problematic in this genre. I found the (mild) violence unwelcome; while it's not glorified it detracts from what is otherwise a gentle love story between two strong people where nothing particularly complicated goes on. I wish Viggo could have found some other way to raise the stakes than by compromising Krieps.
Ben Kenigsberg made it a New York Times Critic's Pick. The film has "a nested, at times unnecessarily complicated structure." Marcel Zyskind's cinematography is fine. Four stars of five from Peter Bradshaw and Wendy Ide (it flags whenever Krieps is off screen). San Francisco is "the end of the world" — tell that to the Chinese immigrants. Michael Wood: the trio of opening scenes (knight in forest, shootout in town, woman dying in bed) are disjointed, the juxtaposition awkward ... but has interesting effects. He proceeds to lay it all out for us. Eastern Promises. "This film is about class and money rather than who shot Liberty Valance." The middle section drags. Brian Tallerico at TIFF 2023. Three-and-a-half stars and many references from Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert's site. Loads of details at Wikipedia. I read later that Viggo also composed the music and produced. Nobody compared Krieps to Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West.
Written and directed by Bill Forsyth. Bill Paterson leads as an early-morning radio host who wakes Glasgow up with his good-spirited, G-rated japes. While driving his red BMW 313i coupé through the city, fantastically-permed Clare Grogan gives him an irresistible smile from an ice cream truck and we're off to the races. Forsyth's treatment of his mediation in their turf war is mostly gentle (like Andrina) though the seedy warehouses and low-level violence (mostly just property damage) gives it a harder edge (like That Sinking Feeling). It's a bit Glasgow Underbelly, sweetly, reflecting the changing ethnic composition and concerns. The conclusion is a homage to all the wily Scots in history.
The jokes are quite amusing: his dentist really does look like George C Scott, and how is it that everyone knows what Paterson looks like? Mark Knopfler provides a soundtrack less memorable than Local Hero's; much is lifted from Dire Straits's 1982 album Love Over Gold. Afterwards I learnt that Knopfler is actually Glaswegian and Clare Grogan also had a pop music career.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Forsyth "has made a specialty out of characters who are as real as you and me, and nicer than me." Vincent Canby replays the opening scenes where Paterson is summarily dumped by his klepto girlfriend Eleanor David and we think we're in for something quite different to what follows. A disappointment after Gregory's Girl and Local Hero (!). Jonathon Coe in 2009. The cinematography by Chris Menges is indeed great.
