More Brisvegas completism. Apparently third time around. The soundtrack is 2001-nostalgia for the early to mid 1990s. It'd be a total bust if it wasn't for Noah Taylor's occasional outbursts. Director Richard Lowenstein has some form for this kind of thing: the canonical Dogs in Space and Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard which I still have to dig up. Here Howard covers Iggy Pop's The Passenger, and I finally got around to listening to Moby's Play, which I bought on CD in late 1999.
A very lazy mid-afternoon paddle at Coogee after lunch with Amos and Johannes at UNSW. The clouds were coming over when I got in, which cooled what had been a warm to hot and stuffy day. Not many people down there, but some substantial roadworks on Coogee Bay Road did an equally good job of keeping the serenity in check.
Third time around, I think — last seen about a decade ago. I'm still amazed by Sacha Horler's efforts here, and there's even more to Peter Fenton's passivity now than then. I'd forgotten that Joel Edgerton plays the mate. The rating at IMDB is low with few votes, which goes to show exactly how many people want to re-slum early-90s Brisvegas. I expect all the old boarding houses are gone.
Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times. David Edelstein. Both loved it. All the details at Ozmovies.
This was Andrew McGahan completism; he wrote the screenplay and I'm too lazy to re-read the novel. I rank his output roughly as follows:
- Last Drinks
- Praise (the movie anyway)
- 1988
- The White Earth
- Underground
- Wonders of a Godless World
McGahan is far more comfortable in the past than the future (four are either personal- or Queensland-historic, one was futurism when written, the last is inspecifically present-day). Characters he lacks personal experience of are typically tendentious stereotypes. Four and five show that he could get worked up about politics (at the pub at least) but did not think of himself as an agenda-setter. The first three show his non-judgemental attitude towards libidinous hedonism; he probably took all he could get. The last two warn against writing about what you don't know, or in McGahan's case, haven't lived.
Early-afternoon paddle at Little Bay, straight after lunch. Not many people there on a beautifully warm late-summer day. Seemed very clean. On the way back I encounted an accident of some sort on Anzac Parade at Maroubra Junction (ambulance and police attending). After shopping there I got stuck in some heavy, irritating and dumb school traffic: so many distracted drivers.
On dead tree from the Maroubra branch of the Randwick City Library after I had no luck extracting it from the depths of the Waverley Library. McGahan's Franklin Miles winner from 1995, and the last of his adult novels for me to read.
It's 1992 on the Darling Downs and the dynastic pastoralists on the savanna (prairie?) are sweating Keating's response to the recent High Court decision (Mabo) that Australia was not, in fact, unoccupied back in 1788. One great-uncle ('great' being a relational distinction without a difference) tries to promote respect for Lockean property rights by evaluating his nine-year-old great-nephew's inheritance-worthiness after said nephew's incompetent farmer father is killed by fire. Somewhat like the current regime, he hotly rejects all aspersions that he is racist, and yet the mob he rallies to his property climaxes in cartoonish Klan action. There are inheritances based directly on Great Expectations, variants on Murray Bail's connection-with-land ruminations of Eucalyptus, a politician not so far from those in Last Drinks, and even a bunyip and a Voss-like explorer and hallucinatory sequence. Afterwards it all goes up in flames and how with a massive confluence of fire, drought-breaking rain, the Senate's vote on Keating's Mabo legislation, generational death (the old man has a heart attack! the mother dies while fetching the proof of inheritance!) and the rest. The symbolism is heavy: the childless daughter adopts the rootless boy. In brief, it is every inch the Great Australian Novel, or may have been if McGahan had held his nerve with the magic realism.
The two-track structure is as well-executed as it is well-worn. The cliffhangers get a bit irritating when the payoffs are such small potatoes: his characters play entirely to type, contrary to Patrick White's vituperative observations. The minor characters drink epically but that's not the focus here. Again McGahan is repetitive in the small: he says it, he says he said it, he reads it to us, and only then does the hand wringing begin.
Laksa King for lunch with the Digital Asset crowd, then coffee, then a late afternoon paddle at an almost-deserted Coogee. I'm making the most of this fine-ish weather: cloudy, mid-20s. Pretty flat with some detritus. Read some book on the headland after. It's getting cold out of the sun.
With the rain finally abating for a bit I made it to Coogee for a lazy paddle in the late afternoon. The strong onshore wind flattened things right out. Warm in, seemed clean-ish. Quite a few people about. Afterwards I dried out on the headland while reading some book and eating my leftover sandwich. It's getting cold out of the sun.
Queeg! In brief battle-scar(r)ed US Navy captain Bogart is found wanting in a large storm and deposed by his underlings. The latter half is lawyer José Ferrer having some fun, including a Nicholson-esque "you can't handle the truth" conclusion. Like the previous thing I saw him in (Whirlpool) there is much amateur diagnosis of mental disorders. Fred MacMurray is solid as the Judas, a proxy for the book's author. Subplot lead Robert Francis is a bit wooden. The peppy music gets annoying fast. It's a bit overegged and undercooked; the IMDB trivia suggests there was a larger movie trying to get out, and it is likely that would have been superior.
Watching this I realised Bogey would have been perfect playing Nixon.
Kindle. This is heroic reportage about a deeply weird individual: Paul Le Roux, Zimbabwean, South African, sometime Australian, computer geek turned gangster. He's the man who did what Ross Ulbricht set out to do: liquidating (in meatspace! for real!) the people he thought wronged him. Strangely it seems likely that the latter will get a far heavier sentence than the former. This writeup also reminded me of Andrew O'Hagan's on Craig Wright, but there's far less doubt that Le Roux is the real deal.
Briefly, Le Roux hit on a likely-legal get-rich-quick scheme: he opened an online pharmacy (RX Limited) targeting the U.S.A., with doctors there signing the prescriptions and similarly local pharmacies filling them. His edge was in shipping only uncontrolled substances, which should have left him beyond the reach of the Feds. A morally bankrupt operation, sure, but on Ratliff's telling not illegal; I kept thinking the health professionals should have taken more care in their roles.
The strange part is that Le Roux took the massive proceeds ($US300M+) of this quasi-legit business to finance criminal operations in a reverse Michael Corleone; he was the man who would be king with boys from Brazil. (I feel like we saw many of the same movies.) Even more strangely, it appears he didn't execute any particular thing well beyond his original RX Limited cashcow. The incompetency of the Fed in the legal proceedings against the online pharmacies is breathtaking, and it is perplexing that they have used Le Roux to round up his underlings.
Alan Feuer brought it to my attention; he publicised Le Roux's testimony about a year ago. Ratliff told most of the juiciest bits in a series of articles for Atavist back in 2016.
John Balaban: Remembering Heaven's Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Việt Nam.
Sat, Mar 23, 2019./noise/books | LinkSecond time around. I bought a dead-tree copy (a paperback) several months ago with the expectation that there'll eventually be a third.
A perplexingly poor Otto Preminger effort. The cast is stellar: Gene Tierney and José Ferrer amongst others. Nothing to see here at all.
Bosley Crowther at the time.
Another dead tree from the Georges River Library at Hurstville. This is McGahan's final (adult/literary) novel from 2009; for the next decade he wrote young adult fiction. I might unkindly suggest that he should have started sooner. Here we get some strange happenings in a madhouse/hospital on an island, once again recounted in first person, this time by an orphan. She's mentally underdeveloped but in fine tune with the planet. A devilish though physically inert man arrives and turns her world upside down. Together they embark on some dubious adventures and other unnamed characters cop it in the neck. Much hand wringing ensues before a very tidy ending. Then again, the orphan might be an unreliable narrator! The structure, metaphor and reasoning are cliched and tedious. Most reviews out there suggest there was more structure, metaphor and reasoning that I didn't get, but are very short on specifics.
Second time around. George Clonney goes to Italy circa 2010. The locals fawn all over him. Anton Corbijn tries hard to vary his static style that worked so well in Control.
Finding myself in Hurstville on Tuesday, I extracted a dead tree edition of this book the Georges River Library branch there. Again with the fraternal twins! — and similar dualisms.
Briefly, this is quick-read cinematic juvenalia: McGahan spills a lot of words in railing against the Howard era in 2006. (The end was nigh, but I guess few knew that at the time.) The plot pivots on the nuking of Canberra (!) and such fresh and deep insights as no one missing it. Somehow the resulting apocalyptic/fascistic conditions lead to a grand tour of the eastern states, from cyclonic far north Queensland to ghettoized Brunswick in Melbourne, but not really fortified Sydney. There's a Citizenship Verification Test which is (probably) far too close to the real ones. The prose is at best workmanlike once again. The structure is similar to Last Drinks: first-person revelatory, twisty, but with more action and less effect. It's all in that bias confirmation mode: you're expected to nod along or stop reading, but really Howard's dog-whistling Islamophobia of that time is a grim topic that doesn't pay anyone to revisit, as Peter Dutton is discovering now.
James Ley was unimpressed, as was David Pullar.
nth time around for large n. Michael Mann's masterpiece. Still #123 in the IMDB top-250.
More John Huston. Second time around. Apparently Eastwood made a movie about Huston's desire to go big game hunting while making this.
Kindle. A portrait of a pair of twins who exhibit White's dualisms: numbers versus literature, empathy and haughty withdrawal, the white and the blue collar. Brute strength against fine motor control. Semi-rural Sarsaparilla (Castle Hill) against the city (Centennial Park). There's far more here on the inner life than Smee managed to even gesture at. One point of commonality was Arthur's incapacity to externalise his thoughts for a variety of reasons (inability to formulate them convincingly, unwillingless to persuade or influence, laziness, the ability to see the whole but not its parts, the inadequacy of the medium, so on). Told in technically seamless and virtuosic flashback. White is down on Goethe, like others. The most enjoyable parts to me where the very brief punchlines where White cashes in his extensive descriptions. Some are quite brutal.
Second time around. More Richard Burton.
Second time around. Prompted by A Star is Born. Hmm.
A John Huston and Deborah Kerr jag from The Night of the Iguana. Robert Mitchum shares the lead. A U.S. marine and Irish nun find themselves stranded on a South Pacific Island and survive occupation by Japanese troops until the Americans arrive. It's all very proper and things go as expected with no offence given to the USMC or Catholic Church. Reading it another way it's a backhander: the skills of a marine will help you survive but may not get you the girl. There's some great cinematography. It obviously parallels Huston's The African Queen.
Quarterly Essay #72, Sebastian Smee: Net Loss: The Inner Life in the Digital Age.
Sat, Mar 16, 2019./noise/books | LinkOn the not-yet-dead iPhone via Overdrive, loaned from the Randwick City Library after quite a wait. Not at all what I thought it would be: Smee seems ignorant of such not-so-recent critiques as Jarett Kobek's i hate the internet and Amartya Sen's capabilities model that aims to move past the blockages induced by overly rigid notions of identity. When will social media be deemed as dangerous to society as Class A drugs? The hand wringing concern comes in commodified form, oh the irony. He avoids following any thought too far. I guess I had hopes for a meditation on what is worth concentrating our shredded attention on these days; this diffuse essay isn't it.
I only briefly scanned the responses to Laura Tingle's previous Quarterly Essay. Both were busts, I feel.
Excessive Marvel completism. This one got massively advertised on buses and bus stops in Sydney. Larry Fishburne! Why didn’t you say? Michelle Pfeiffer! Approximately as vacuous as the first one.
Marvel completism. Martin Donovan! Why didn't you say? Michael Douglas plays the same old tired note. Paul Rudd is pleasantly low key but I don't find him as funny as the movie needs me to. Evangeline Lilly is all face acting. If they'd made more of the fact most ants are female (the winged ones are typically males or queens) this may have been hailed as the first Marvel movie with a strong pro-female message. It's silly. I haven't seen lurv this strong since Interstellar.
I read the book ages ago, and that put me off seeing the movie until now. For Carey Mulligan, but ultimately Joel Edgerton who was the only one fully committed to taking this show over the cliff. When are we going to see him in a Marvel movie? DiCaprio leads (like in Titanic? — which I still haven't seen). His "old sport" just doesn't work. Tobey Maguire is the bemused Nick Carraway. I didn't recognise Elizabeth Debicki, which shows how engaged I was. The politics seem dated beyond belief: Daisy has no agency. The music is banal. There are Australians everywhere. It's just another over-egged Baz Luhrmann thing.
A. O. Scott says it's not as bad as other people were saying at the time, but it is that shallow. He's right that shame has gone missing since the 1920s. Dana Stevens. And many others.
With Dave. 3:30pm 3D session at the Odeon 5, $31-ish for us both. Maybe three other people. Released last Thursday. We had coffee/lunch beforehand at Bills Beans.
Low expectations and heavy politicisation made this seem more like a Star Wars episode to me. Dave was adamant that he was there for Jude Law and Ben Mendelsohn. (The latter reverts to his native strine when reunited with his refugee family, a fine rebuke that doubtlessly eluded most American commentators.) An anti-aged Samuel L. Jackson took on something of Larry Fishburne's Clean from Apocalypse Now. Brie Larson might have done her best. Annette Bening tried to make it into something. Arnie decided this was beneath him: the True Lies poster/stand thingie gets blasted and only Jamie Lee Curtis survives. Of course it should've been one for Pulp Fiction.
Reviews are dutiful. Dana Stevens: Finally, Women Have Their Own Mediocre Marvel Movie. Anthony Lane. The dogfight through canyons is what put me most in mind of Star Wars. A. O. Scott. The cat was a bit much.
Headed down to Coogee with everyone else to read my book for a bit in the late-afternoon sun, then a paddle off the southern rocks at Gordons Bay. Still quite a few people out, it being Sunday and all, the unis back. Pleasant in, mostly flat, high-ish tide, far cleaner than I expected given the recent rain. Read some more book afterwards on the headland. Beautiful end to a steamy summery day.
A David Stratton marvellous movie (#36). Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. I'd seen it before but didn't remember much. A fine twisty little noir.
A David Stratton marvellous movie (#86); this one is by far the highest rated on IMDB (8/10) so far. In two sittings. The draw was David Lynch. A few decades before the epic use of a mobility scooter to retrieve a boat from storage, Richard Farnsworth decided he needed to see his long-lost brother (Harry Dean Stanton) one last time. Being of weak hip and eye but stubbornly self-reliant he figures that the best way to get from Laurens, Iowa to Mount Zion, Wisconsin is on his ancient ride-on lawnmower. Suffice it to say he really doesn't make it to Grotto. The daughter he lived with is played by Sissy Spacek. There's a bit too much all-American hokum about family, and a slightly off-kilter reminiscence about World War II, but otherwise this is a picture-postcard perfect love letter to the small towns, the corn and wheat fields of the Midwest from Lynch. Freddie Francis's cinematography is excellent. There's a whiff of Terrence Malick about it, and also Twin Peaks — notably Badalamenti's music and Big Ed Everett McGill.
Ebert got right into it. Janet Maslin was astonished that Lynch could mesmerise with G-rated material.
Early-evening paddle at Gordons Bay off the southern rocks. Seemed clean. Flat, little wind, pleasant in. A few people about, many more on the northern side. Afterwards ate dinner on the Coogee headland. Warm day and evening.
A Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner jag from Seven Days in May: a black-and-white take on an Ernest Hemingway story made about 18 years previous. Briefly "Swede" Lancaster gets murdered in the opening scenes and the insurance investigation gets told entirely in flashback, somewhat like Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Lancaster is far too talkative to be a Swede. There's some boxing, some prison time, some noir; Edmond O'Brien leads in a Bogey kinda role and seems to to enjoy himself. Gardner is very young, and carries the femme fatale with insufficient conviction: she's often subdued (even a bit lifeless) and doesn't look very calculating. The plot is not very plausible and very tidily resolved.
An Ava Gardner jag from The Night of the Iguana. She's very different here despite these movies coming out in the same year or thereabouts. Kirk Douglas is essentially the same as he was in Paths of Glory, speaking truth to power in black and white. Burt Lancaster plays the wayward general, chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who thinks he can do a better job than President Fredric March, who in turn often sounds like GWB. It seems so old-fashioned for the man at the top to be combating conspiracies rather than promulgating them, though the big men of history is the same old timeless canard. The plot is earnest, much like Goodnight and Good Luck, and similarly virulently anti McCarthyist. Somehow this stuff always reminds me of Gil Scott Heron's B-Movie. Directed by John Frankenheimer.
UNSW Centre for Ideas: Writing War: Kassem Eid & Mohammed Hanif.
Wed, Mar 06, 2019./noise/talks | Link$10 booked 2019-02-23. The ticket included a drink so I got another 50 Lashes at IO Myers Studio. The sizeable audience sat in rows of chairs on the floor (they'd removed the risers). This pair of conversations was hosted by the Director of UNSW Centre for Ideas, Ann Mossop. Apparently they were both guests at the recent Adelaide Writers Week.
Briefly, Hanif wore a pink shirt, untucked, with sneakers and looked like he was in danger of sobriety. He owned to being born in 1965, that Pakistan has been at war throughout his life, and writing novels might be a bit childish but he's addicted to storytelling. Apparently writing Red Birds took most of the seven years since his previous novel. In his mind war is pure cynicism: some people make a lot of money from it, and careers are furthered. On a stage elsewhere he was told by a real Navy Seal that war was a lot like Call of Duty; absurdism rules the day. The present wars are very sanitised: little blood and few dead bodies, certainly no coffins, are shown on US TV. The classic Việt Nam movies were all focussed on an America traumatised by killing heaps of people: just stop it man. The current Pakistani government is a democracy but is censoring the press etc. like the military dictatorships.
In the brief Q/A session Eid suggests smoking a lot to get over trauma. Hanif's advice to his cadet journalists: don’t get fired, don’t get killed. There was also some discussion about citizenship.
Kindle. McGahan's third novel, and the third of his I've read. Apparently having exhausted his semi-autobiographical resources in his first two, he decided to give the all-Australian crime genre a go. Fellow Brisvegan John Birmingham wrote a boostery blurb (see also his own take), and a Ned Kelly was conferred.
Briefly this is a variation on the classic noirs. Taking, for instance, Sweet Smell of Success as a starting point, McGahan transplants the action from NYC to the epically corrupt pre-Inquiry Old Queensland of Joh and the epically cafe-d and bar-d Brisbane of now-ish, apparently amoral in a taking-the-fifth sort of way. He retains the focus on the social columnist as narrator and possible patsy. There's a femme fatale (not entirely a success, certainly not as much as Cynthia), the old mates, some graphic violence, and an excess of booze. So perhaps it's more Once Upon A Time In America with that love triangle, the unexpected marriage and the two-track, the good times going sour as they always do in stories like these. Similarly those guys only wanted to party all night. Or maybe there's too much Remains of the Day obliviousness; it's not funny, and too predictable.
So far McGahan has been structurally sound but very repetitious in the small, and across paragraphs, as if he is getting paid by the word. His excuse for the confessionals is that all players are Catholic. Marvin spilling the beans to George was particularly implausible. The South-East Queensland's electricity grid as a metaphor for politics was heavy-handed. Does going cold turkey in a motel room (at The Last Chance Motel of course) and an 11km mountain bushwalk owe anything to Trainspotting? Despite being essentially derivative, the core of this book is addiction and quite often McGahan nailed it.
Queensland is a rich seam and someone's got to have mined it more deeply than this. Joh's Wikipedia page is a ripping read. Chris Masters at the height of his powers (and thanks ABC for letting us download your archive). The cupidity! and so dumb. Bob Williams read this book so you don't have to.
Lunch and a lazy paddle at Yarra Bay. There are still signs up everywhere warning about the possibility of a cruise ship dock being built there. Beaut day for the most part. Some thunderclouds blew threw mid-afternoon. Read some book on the grass nearby. Quite a few people on the beach. Clean, flat with a light offshore breeze.
A David Stratton Marvellous Movie (#47). Over two sittings. Ex Ms Eastwood Sondra Locke directed; loads of details about her situation on her IMDB bio. She passed recently.
This is yet another exploration of the seamy side of life in Los Angeles. Lead actress Theresa Russell is gorgeous in classic go-getter 80s style. She's bait for the vice squad. Lead bloke, Jeff Fahey (looking much like William Petersen in To Live and Die in L.A. but a step closer to Michael Keaton), works for the D.A. and finds himself in need of her skills and so much more. Things go as you'd expect. The sexual politics is a bit suck-it-up-princess; there's not much empowerment but lots of harassment, some of which is welcome but most not. There's the suggestion that everything can be bought, but the window for closing the transaction might be narrow.
Its rating at IMDB is really low, but it's not that bad. Roger Ebert. Caryn James. I'm starting to think that Stratton would be happy watching daytime T.V.
Lunch at Lady Martin Beach, just to see what's there. It's almost private. The water was filthy along the shoreline. Afterwards I popped over to Woollhara Library at Double Bay, again just to see what's there. They have an indoor garden at the info counter and a surfeit of computers for doing admin. After that I hacked a bit on the Coogee headland and read some book in the strong wind. I had an early-evening paddle off the southern rocks at Gordons Bay: clean, high tide, not many people. The hot day cooled off rapidly, signalling a sort-of end to summer.
A Mike Leigh-directed short from 2012. Doesn't seem to add up to much, though the acting is as good as always. The reviews at IMDB explain why: it was apparently made for the London Olympics and is no more than a series of gags.
I have vague memories of Max Headroom from the 1980s, somehow juxtaposed with the ABC's Rock Arena. I thought it was something like a five-minute cartoon (a Bugs Bunny for the MTV generation) but it turns out to be a TV series. This was the pilot, which apparently later got remade. It is frustratingly inconclusive. Also it's English, not American — the accents are all over the map.
Early-evening snorkel off the scuba ramp at Gordons Bay with heaps of people. Tail end of a beaut summer day. Visibility was poor. Saw a couple of large female gropers, the almost-blue big one, some small fry, ludderick, no stingarees. Flat, high tide, no wind. Read some book on the Clovelly headland afterwards.
Danish Oscar bait. Scandi noir fused with the claustrophobic one-man one-set thing that worked so well for Tom Hardy in Locke. Yep, he's on the phone pretty much the whole time. There's a twist (but only one). The cinematography is washed out. It's a bust.
Jeannette Catsoulis got right into it.
Kindle. McGahan passed recently, and that prompted me to take another look at what he wrote after Praise. Where else to start but with this followup, its prequel.
Here a not-yet-smoking, pre-Cynthia Gordon takes a road trip in a Kingswood from Brisvegas to Darwin with Wayne, an effeminate and somewhat useless artist who mostly rubs him the wrong way, for a job at the Cape Don meteorology station. Yep, it's isolated. Yep, the blokes are unprepared and inept. There is epic drinking, epic circlework and epic boredom. Some Aboriginal dreaming. The more responsible characters are sketched. One is a frustrated desert-country Steve Irwin, parked by the NT conservancy management in this swampland largely because the previous guy was more alpha. Another is an elder who metes out some rough justice. Most if not all tropes of Australian manhood are trotted out and found wanting, and find Gordon wanting too. His ability to disappoint everyone, including himself, is his not-so-secret superpower. The shame he feels for his body overshadows it all. I think McGahan wedged in all the horror genre moves he thought he could get away with. The outro is a bust.
The prose is workmanlike and I enjoyed it more than I remember enjoying Praise. The Russian movie How I Ended This Summer has a similar setting with similar fishing and surprisingly far less epic drinking. Goodreads: I imagine the ratings fall along gender lines.
For various not-good reasons I haven't been getting enough sleep, so instead of continuing to execute tactics when I need to plan strategy I decided to walk down to Coogee in the early afternoon. I ate my leftover curry on the grass along Arden St and read some more book. Afterwards I had a brief early-afternoon paddle in the surf, which was totally flat and cleanish, modulo some seaweed. There were quite a few people about on a beautiful summer day.
Hello There, We've Been Waiting For You by Louris van de Geer.
Fri, Mar 01, 2019./noise/theatre | LinkA freebie from the UNSW Creative Practice Lab. Closing night, packed with family; the Italians near me chatted throughout. It was hot and stuffy inside IO Myers Studio once the players got going. Dinner at Pinocchio Sushi beforehand, and a 50 lashes pale ale. Loads of people out and about, uni being back and all.
This piece is exactly what the playwright says it is: slices of small-town Americana. The cast was large, the set minimal. Some of it is quite fun, such as the compere's mugging to the camera and audience, and his narcissistic interactions with the lady who seems to be his number-one fan. Also the ensemble-opening piece, with the actors completing each others' sentences. I found the beauty pageant parts dragged a bit, despite the performers' best efforts.
I realise now that it has many similarities to Magnolia.