Second time around with what IMDB says is Mike Leigh's second feature to get a cinematic release. Not so much class warfare, though there is some of that, but more class dislocation in Thatcher's London. Ruth Sheen is excellent as Phil Davis's squeeze; they are a working-class pair of the sort that was probably out of time in the 1970s. He rides a Honda CB 400 NC Superdream (twin). Lesley Manville has the most fun as the Princess Di half of a toff couple who have bought and renovated a council row house. She's far more sophisticated than her paramour David Bamber. Heather Tobias's artificial performance is a clanger in context: it's not credible that her histrionics would be so thoroughly ignored by husband Philip Jackson and family ... or is it? Everyone is childless now.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Hooray Henries! ... and I missed the markers that Jason Watkins's Wayne was mentally unwell (and not just thick). The passivity of the once-were revolutionaries. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin.
Second time around with this Altman after a sneaky rewatch of The Long Goodbye (1973). This was ill advised as Elliot Gould's running at the mouth is so much better in the other movie, perhaps because he's on a shorter leash. Written by Joseph Walsh; IMDB says this is his only writing credit.
Gould's a winner even though he's second on the bill after George Segal who somehow becomes a winner. Who ever said gambling could be problematic! There are scams, including a proforma basketball scam that was better cooked in White Men Can't Jump (1992); indeed the latter movie has a more expansive take on the world than mere gambling debts and sad ladies who can't get no satisfaction.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Vincent Canby.
Kindle. Prompted by the many positive reviews.
Szalay goes about it with clear intent: this is a portrait of a bloke, just like Small Things Like These, whose interiority is inaccessible to us. Life mostly just happens to him and he is mostly not disappointed, perhaps because it's mostly about sex and he rarely has to ask. He starts out in spartan post-Communist Hungary, living with his mother, where the cracking (and much remarked upon) first chapter reveals his irresistibility and easy facility with violence. (All descriptions are specific, sparing and not especially graphic.) After a bit more scene-setting but no foreshadowing or forethought we're taken to London for what I expect are Szalay's favourite topics: extreme wealth, luxe consumption, brand names, high-end real estate/development deals, art of the kind that is hung on walls, inheritance, shamelessness, blameless rise and fall. He doesn't hold the hands of those of us who don't live this stuff.
Szalay's prose is fine but never achieves the necessity of Atticus Lish's. It is often amusingly reductive. Presenting István purely as a surface works well but less so for the secondary characters such as Helen, the socialite married to a plutocrat; we see her reflected in her son's surprise that she's gone for such a protozoac man and wonder what her besties think. Nobody has a real job or career which means Szalay skips the most time consuming part of life that just maybe undergirds and circumscribes the substance. Despite its relevance to a bloke from Europe BREXIT goes unmentioned. The semi-solitary drinking "parties" ameliorate the COVID lockdowns for Helen. Almost all of it could have happened in the 1980s or, excepting the helicopter commutes between London and country piles and other inessential technological things, the nineteenth century.
But to what end? Is this supposed to be a Martin Amis sort of thing, a social commentary, a time capsule? (It's been too long for me but perhaps Money?)
Dwight Garner. Peter Craven: "No finer novel will be published this year." Keiran Goddard: "Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat." (Not much?) All bone. Sean O'Beirne: "not one of Szalay’s best books; the best, by far, is All That Man Is." Too much plot (and I concur). Goodreads.
Kindle. The greatest hits of wartime Sài Gòn from the 1930s to the 1970s. Specifically we follow the titular Chinese headmaster Percival Chen as he does little more than whore and gamble in Chợ Lớn while his brotherly lieutenant, fellow Chinese Mak, runs his English school. For whose benefit, we are supposed to ask, but it is always clear that Mak has deep roots in the Vietnamese independence movement that transcend the partition of the country.
As a semi-authentic, sentimental dynastic tale it's fairly engaging. The prose is flabby and needed a good edit; the repetition-in-the-small (paragraphs that repeat the previous paragraph but with a tad more colour) recurs so often, too often. Regularly stuffed in the middle is a tendentious sentence that asserts this is how things went, how things must go, as if the author lacks faith in the persuasiveness of his narrative structures. And of course so much could go other ways and did. The characterisation is generally weak; Percival is a muppet and Mak is underdrawn. The women are just sex objects or madams, all creatures of the demimonde, mostly victims. The dialogue is highly suspect: there's no chance that Chen would identify as Viet Cong to the occupying forces of Sài Gòn. It seems unlikely "Việt Minh" is the right term for Mak's network. Such inaccuracies are just laziness this late in history.
In a broader context, Andrew X. Pham provided a lot more colour and historicity in his recent Twilight Territory. The Chinese perspective is far more valuable than that of the Western journos of, for instance, Koch's Highways to a War (and see also Neil Sheehan's memoir) and I'd be keen to read a better treatment. I vaguely recall Violet Kupersmith mining a similar vein.
The second adaptation of a Claire Keegan short I've seen, the first being The Quiet Girl (2022). Directed by Belgian Tim Mielants.
The story runs adjacent to the Magdalene asylums scandal that apparently came to a head in the 1990s; here it looks like it's the 1970s or perhaps early 1980s when Irish omertà was experiencing its first cracks. Cillian Murphy works hard in the lead as a father of five girls in New Ross (southeast Ireland) whose softheartedness seems to be beyond the understanding of wife Eileen Walsh. She and publican Helen Behan operate on the basis of there but for the grace of God and cannot fathom why they would ever sacrifice their prosperity. Murphy counts his blessings a different way and we know he's a gonna when he discovers a young woman (Zara Devlin) locked in the convent's coal shed that he's being paid to refill, especially after an encounter with sinister Mother Superior Emily Watson.
One of the pleasures of this movie is that there's a lot of showing and not much telling, as if its makers trust their audience in a way that is entirely out of fashion now. The focus is always on the kids; the brokenness of Murphy's character is explored mostly in flashback, though his deep reservoirs of strength go unexplained. It is suggested that he is falling apart now after an extended period of robustness.
On the other hand I didn't enjoy much of the camerawork (by Frank van den Eeden) as I often struggled to understand if one character was looking at another, challenging or evading, and the layout of the buildings. The editing (by Alain Dessauvage) is often overly abrupt. The story itself is told with much fine detail but is not subtle; it is mostly a portrait of the man.
Luke Goodsell. He got the press pack: it's Christmas 1985. Murphy's "performance is a study in compassion and survival, in the ways one's own traumatic experience might lead to empathy instead of cyclical abuse." A Critic's Pick by Alissa Wilkinson. Both observe it's a gangster/mafia flick. Xan Brooks. Philippa Hawker.
Kindle. Thin Brunner is always a risk, as are any of his late-career works; apparently this was his final novel. Here he attempts a zany quest in the mode of Douglas Adams. There's a bit of lightweight social commentary that may've been insightful in the early 1980s. It was hard work to get through.
Bong Joon-Ho's latest, and first feature since Parasite (2019). Adapted by Bong from a novel by Edward Ashton.
Near as I could tell Bong watched Moon (2009) and figured he could do it better, or at least more existentially, than Duncan Jones. Or perhaps he wanted to one-up Neill Blomkamp. To that end he mixed his CGI-creature fascination from Okja (2017) with a significant number of A-list American actors and a few British ones. And Toni Collette, cast to what now seems to be her type: an upper class wife, transparently repulsive.
The first thirty minutes was pretty amusing as we get to know Robert Pattinson's character, an expendable in a self-knowing emo mode. (He's great. There's an undertow of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in his narration.) Squeeze Naomi Ackie is an enduring mystery to him and us. Mate Steven Yeun is stuck with thinly drawn venality; he had a lot more to work with in Minari (2020). They and many others are on a settler spacecraft more-or-less run as a personal fief by Mark Ruffalo and Collette, headed for the white purity of the planet Niflheim. After arrival things devolve to some pro forma conflict and species-ism that put me in mind of Peter Singer.
Ruffalo is more-or-less a hammy Trump and is as disappointing as he was in Poor Things (2023); it's beyond him to be as farcically presidential as Bill Pullman was in Independence Day. Thomas Turgoose has a disposable auxiliary role; he's making a habit of mediocrity. Anamaria Vartolomei ultimately does no more than bat her eyelashes at Pattinson.
The cinematography is generally OK, the CGI not too annoying.
Very widely anticipated and reviewed to wide disappointment. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. No 17 "has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler)." Dana Stevens: harks back to Snowpiercer (2013). Feels foreshortened.
Steven Soderbergh's latest. He directed a script by David Koepp (Carlito's Way, Jurassic Park, Panic Room, many blockbusters).
This is not a heist but an old-fashioned spy thriller. Robotic lead Michael Fassbender pays homage to Alec Guinness's George Smiley (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). His wife Cate Blanchett is also a spy who has her eyes on (Trump-tanned) Pierce Brosnan's job. The plot is notionally about stopping the use of a Stuxnet variant, engineered by these clowns, by a Russian. The whole thing is twentieth century: the McGuffin is a physical thing but everything else is computerised, though accessing anything requires being in the right room, having the right gizmo, shagging or having other leverage over the operator. (Everyone is suitably compatible on that score.) There's an experimental AI lipreader on a dongle. Naomie Harris, the in-house industrial shrink, has some truly terrible scenes.
The chief problem, more so than the risible dialogue, tedious and sterile high-end consumption, lack of motivation, suspense and stakes, general unsexyness and so on is that the first two-thirds give you no idea whatsoever how things will be resolved. The second dinner party is so purely revelatory that you're left wanting the butler to have done it.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. "It’s nonsense." Peter Bradshaw: three stars of five. Luke Goodsell.
At Middleback Arts Centre, at family-friendly 18.00. Fabulous circus. It was a lot easier to get into than Bangarra as I didn't need to puzzle out what anything meant; I could just go with the grain of the excellent acrobatics. The performers seemed to enjoy themselves immensely.
Kindle. In an afterword Koch billed this as a "companion novel" to Highways to a War (1995), calling the "double novel" / "diptych" Beware of the Past.
The novel has it that the aristocratic Irish revolutionary Robert Devereux was transported to Bermuda then Van Diemen's Land in 1848. This is his journal through to 1851 when he escaped to the United States. He left behind a bastard son who was the grandfather of Michael Langford from that earlier novel. Koch apparently drew inspiration from the actual Young Ireland movement.
All this we learn in a brief "Editor's Introduction" — Koch again adopts a secret document gambit — and the ensuing journal entries just put somewhat flabby flesh on that skeleton. Somehow he managed to keep me engaged despite the excessive foreshadowing that robbed the events of suspense. (All devices are Chekhovian which makes the diarist conceit completely implausible.) The repetition within each section, often within a paragraph or two, is a grind but I just moved on whenever my eyes glazed over.
Perhaps reflecting the limitations of the journal/diary format, the characterisation is generally weak and there's too much attention paid to the details of clothing and room furnishings, almost as if Koch is writing stage directions for a cinematic adaptation. Perplexingly for a revolutionary there's not much analysis of the colonial politics of the day though many words are spilt on gesturing at the French theorists and random parts of the canon of Western Civilisation; the Tasmania/Antipodes-as-Hades duality/doubling is overworked. This and the prolix prose made me doubt that Devereux was capable of inspiring the Irish people as Koch claims he did.
I couldn't tell if the occasional bout of nonsense was Devereux's or Koch's; for instance the claim that Tasmania was a "still-virginal island" in 1850 was unsustainable at the time given the (observed, diminishing) presence of the Aborigines and the immense suffering of the convicts, and even more so by 1999. Koch probably meant that it had yet to be despoiled wholesale by the (Anglo) profit motive, and he is keen to identify lands with women. (Devereux's violated Kathleen embodies Ireland, somewhat crassly, and only really comes alive in her Wuthering Heights scene.) Devereux is not an unreliable narrator so much as a tendentious one.
The usual Koch preoccupations appear in half-hearted form. Devereux is, of course, doubled ("I am a man of double nature") but to no end. Are fairies and faery lore Irish preoccupations that occlude the actual? Koch asks the same via his French-Jewish survivor/repository of wisdom Lenoir. Bushrangers! The essentialism, the contention that revolution is misguided, that democracy is a sham, a front for mob rule. Could it be that nothing is an improvement on ancient aristocracies, some kind of self-perpetuating ruling class? It would seem that Irish revolutionaries are not, in fact, better in the tropics. The sheer unmentionable irrelevance of science.
Goodreads dug it.
Mike Leigh's feature-film directorial debut. Pretty much what it says on the tin: late-20s accounting-firm secretary Anne Raitt (excellent) goes looking for connection with all the wrong people; the blokes are just too uptight to give her what she wants on a Saturday evening, especially notional boyfriend Eric Allan. One is left wondering how the English breed.
The vibe is a bit Pinter-ish — lots of stilted dialogue and pauses — which I guess was the mode of the day. There are some great visual compositions, especially the last scene where Raitt is presented as indistinguishable from the furniture. Leigh masterfully implies the culture, imperative but always just beyond the frame, a longing for the possible. Mike Bradwell embodies that as the bloke from Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire with a guitar, singing about drugs. It was so brave of him to write and perform. He rejects her offer of a binge (disappointing us as she lights up on the booze) because he's off to Les Cousins, placing this close to Pentangle and therefore Christopher Koch. Why didn't he invite her?
Leigh's treatment of mental disability (in the form of Raitt's older sister Sarah Stephenson) is excellent; she doesn't manifestly impair Raitt but instead illuminates her life and the lives of related characters (fellow secretary Joolia Cappleman and her mother Liz Smith).
Roger Ebert with amazing foresight: four stars and a lengthy review at the time. The emergence of realism. "This film is a masterpiece, plain and simple, and that is a statement I doubt I will ever have cause to revise." Janet Maslin was unimpressed in 1980. Bradwell "plays wretched renditions of American blues songs on his guitar." Leigh's self-review in 2013. Excess detail at Wikipedia.
Second time around with Mike Leigh's mid-1990s masterwork.
Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2009. Race might only flit through anyone's mind but class signifiers are forever. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. These reviews (by Americans) fail to observe much of the fine detail. Alan Riding's interview with Leigh was more considered.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah (2008)). It took me a few goes to get into.
Two young blokes from Senegal want to make it as pop stars in Europe and pay some people smugglers to make it happen. The journey is predictably rough initially but the latter half is somehow smoother, perhaps because it becomes more of a collective endeavour with manifestly real stakes and lead Seydou Sarr grows into it. The dashes of magic realism are welcome but insufficient. The final scene off the coast of Sicily is euphoric but surely what follows would be nasty. IMDB tells me that Casablanca stood in for Tripoli.
Katie Rife at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. Oscar bait. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis.
More Steve Buscemi completism. He co-wrote, directed and starred. Apparently this was about paying homage to Theo van Gogh by remaking his original.
The scenario has failing serious journalist Buscemi charged with interviewing soap star Sienna Miller (Live By Night (2016)), initially at a restaurant near her NYC loft but mostly at the loft for spurious reasons. A scandal is brewing in Washington, but isn't it always? The result is very uneven with an excess of unmotivated switchbacks; the structure is too rigid and the stakes too low for success.
I enjoyed Buscemi's directorial feature debut Trees Lounge (1996) but that was perhaps him at his most inspired. The best part of this was his clowning when he finally exited.
Roger Ebert: three stars. He hadn't seen the original. Peter Bradshaw: one star of five and the briefest review he's ever done (?). He did see the original. Manohla Dargis: "Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones."
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg. Two Jewish American cousins go to Poland to honour their grandmother who survived a concentration camp there. Kieran Culkin won an Oscar for his performance as the more unstable of the pair. Eisenberg himself plays a neurotic. Billed as comedic/cathartic. Not for me.
Kindle. Mishra's first novel in twenty years! — and in many ways coextensive with The Romantics of 1999 and his explication of Buddhism of 2004.
Notionally Mishra uses the divergent paths of three low-born blokes who make it into the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi to explore the horrors of the New India and the changing fashions among high end cosmopolitan dynasties, some of whom share his literary aspirations. Much of it looks like hard work for risible returns.
The prose is mostly OK, leaving aside an excess of adjectives that often tip reasonable descriptions into overly-precise incorrectness. And a heavy, deadening referentialism. And the short-order repetition. And the hefty foreshadowing, the selective drip of information. The ambient context is assumed known: temporal anchors are mostly provided by real-world political events.
The main flaw is weak characterisation. The three undergo a shock-and-awe initiation at IIT. Dalit Virendra Das (the lonely computer science major to the two mechanical engineers) remains shallowly drawn as a generic, cultureless, deracinated Wall St billionaire. Aseem Thakur is marginally more real as an editor of a literary journal of some kind. He's a fan of V.S. Naipaul and an all-in predatory, hedonistic individualist who somehow still feels a duty to improve the country. The author/narrator Arun Dwivedi (with the highest entry rank of the three) retreats to literary translation in the Himalayas after not making it in the Delhi social scene. In shades of David Williamson the latter two are more influenced by an encounter with a literature professor than anything in their degree programs. Indeed Mishra completely avoids engaging with the content of the exact sciences in any form; technology is reduced to brands, finance to insider trading. (If he'd done his research he'd know that everything is securities fraud.)
But all this is just a precursor to a painfully adolescent romance between late-40s pseudo-Brahmin Arun and mid-30s dream girl, Muslim/scion/social media star-not-influencer Alia Omar who has sown her wild oats and is now in need of a serious man. The death of his mother is messier but as conveniently timed as Charlotte Haze's in Nabokov's Lolita. The male insecurities that (inevitably) bring things unstuck put me in mind of Julian Barnes's Before She Met Me. Arun's retreat to a remote Tibetan-Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas was a severe and under-explained overreaction, though I guess his usual stupefacient, fiction, was shown to be ineffective during their London bout.
Mishra wants to examine the beast as a perennial outsider, in contrast to Mohsin Hamid's How to get filthy rich in rising Asia (2013) where the inside view was shown to be more powerful. The ascetic Buddhism portrayed here is not critiqued. The Tibetan situation is sketched but not engaged with. There's nothing in the way of resolution. I wish he'd either stick to his essays and social diagnostics or move past autofiction.
Bharat Tandon. Jonathan Dee hides behind some hefty extracts. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty: "new India, old ideas" — damn straight and ouch-y. At some point the fake is itself the substance. The anxiety of the narrator may be that of an author anxious to be understood. Goodreads: reviews are generally positive, the ratings entirely dire. (krn gives it a good hard working over.) A general flaw of the commentary is that these three blokes are not mates so much as frenemies.
Lengthy at 3h 39min. Has some moments, mostly in the historical footage. I wasn't aware of Simon's foray into movies with One-Trick Pony in 1980; that was indeed Lou Reed. Accusing Graceland of "cultural slumming" seems so quaint; surely he'd be accused of cultural appropriation now. Simon is very, very NYC. It's not especially sympathetic to Art Garfunkel. Director Alex Gibney has form for these sort of retrospectives. Overall Simon is presented as an innocent songwriter-savant.
Robert Ito at the New York Times. Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert's venue: it's not much of a biopic. Peter Bradshaw. Shelley Duvall was there in a still.
Written and directed by Barry Levinson. Did he see Glengarry Glen Ross (on stage, in 1983) and think he could do better?
Baltimore, 1963. Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito are selling aluminium siding (cladding obsolete for houses now but still used for caravans, Google suggests). It's a time of Cadillacs, high emotions and scams. Lots of scams, none particularly interesting. Barbara Hershey starts as DeVito's wife but he's not sorry to see her go. J.T. Walsh has a minor role, as does Seymour Cassel (Minnie and Moskowitz). The initial tepid comedy evaporates leaving a weak, misogynistic romance that yields to scenes of great insincerity between work buddies. The dialogue often malfunctions.
Fine Young Cannibals played live in one of the bars the salesmen frequent; the soundtrack is otherwise a period-appropriate collection of tunes. It was a bit jarring to recognise Insensatez by Antônio Carlos Jobim from Lost Highway.
Roger Ebert: three stars too many. Janet Maslin: nostalgic.
Prompted by some recent Oscar noise; it came away with Best International Feature Film. Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) directed a script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega from the memoir/book by son Marcelo Rubens Paiva. With a soundtrack by Warren Ellis! In two sittings.
The first half-hour or so is an advertisement for upper-middle class 1970s Rio de Janeiro, shot in the over-saturated colours of the day. The beach isn't that busy and one could just wander across the road to an abode sufficiently spacious for five children. It starts to lose momentum once the patriarch is arrested by the military regime, and the final third is a narrowly focused, dutiful and self-absorbed portrait of the matriarch (an all-in Fernanda Torres, Oscar nominated).
Clearly this is a worthy biopic that is an important story to many people; it's highly rated at IMDB and already sits at #146 in their top-250. This might all be a civilised facade on the anger now omnipresent. It was unclear to me why the patriarch was disappeared but not the other members of their small clandestine operation.
Five stars of five from Wendy Ide, but only three of five from colleague Xan Brooks and the same from Peter Bradshaw. Michael Wood.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's great interview with Ed Norton. Norton somehow always exceeds my expectations. I was less impressed by the preceding one with co-writer/director James Mangold. Jay Cocks helped him adapt a book by Elijah Wald. The eight Oscar noms received zero gongs.
As someone whose curiosity about Bob Dylan has never evolved into fandom I felt the story, tracking his arrival in NYC to famously going electric at a folk festival (Newport in 1965), was tepid accompaniment to those cracker songs of his early years. (I've always been partial to Roy Harper's take on Girl from the North Country which gets a few goes-around here.) Many events were meaningless in the provided context; I don't care what style he's playing or how the anonymous crowds of the day felt about it, and Mangold couldn't make me. Dylan is presented as magnetic but unreachably enigmatic.
The movie itself is as well-made as any of the industrial blockbusters Mangold has rolled out before. Timothée Chalamet does a solid Dylan impersonation, good enough to not bother me. Norton is fine as Pete Seeger. Monica Barbaro glowers as Joan Baez, simmering as she's entranced and eclipsed by the new kid. Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, better than he was in The Bikeriders. I can't imagine why anyone wants to see Elle Fanning so sad.
Manohla Dargis. Gets a bit Forrest Gump with its facts.
