peteg's blog

Spielberg, Colin Farrell (very bland), Samantha Morton (does what she can) jags from other recent movies. Second time around I think. Tom Cruise leads in this adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short. I did not enjoy the cinematography very much; at times the lighting is so harsh it eradicates all details. The omnipresent ads, some amusing, could've been dug into some more: we're almost there. At times the aesthetic echoes Bladerunner, and one scene is very A Clockwork Orange. The user interfaces prefigured Iron Man and similarly look too much like exercise. It's a bit Se7en (the inevitability) but is ruined by too much voiced-over exposition in the final movement.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time. Analog film making at its finest. Elvis Mitchell: "The performances are perfectly fine; no one is asked to do something new. And if poor Ms. Morton is asked to play a feral, near-mute victim one more time, she may be pushed beyond the range of her immense talents to find a different wrinkle." David Edelstein.

More #metoo on the big screen, or a proof-of-life from the legacy media (film and print). Carey Mulligan leads in her second go around with this topic (after Promising Young Woman). She's fine. Samantha Morton as the first lady to substantiate (provide documents about) the Weinstein story is excellent; I would've liked to see her in a scene with Mulligan as she's simply in a different class to Zoe Kazan. I also enjoyed Patricia Clarkson's muted performance, and Andre Braugher's decisiveness. The meat of the movie (beyond what everyone knows at this time) is essentially the legwork of investigative journalism, which for all it's import is not that gripping.

Alexis Soloski at the New York Times. Jason Di Rosso interviewed the director Maria Schrader. Peter Bradshaw: "perhaps [Ronan Farrow's] good-faith contribution could have been acknowledged with a bit more generosity?" And so on.

A leading contender for the coming doco Oscar, the internet tells me. I wanted more science and less anthropomorphism. Little information about what was actually discovered is conveyed; all we got is that there is some evidence that neutral-pH water was present on Mars a long time ago. I could've done with more background on Steve Squyres and details of the engineering, what sensors were carried, etc. I came away with no clue what Perseverance is looking for. Overall this was a poor packaging of what is fascinating raw material; it asked a lot less of its audience than Carl Sagan did in Cosmos forty years ago. And the soundtrack is not cracker.

Wikipedia has some details of the science, the rover engineering and an overview of the larger, ongoing program. Ben Kenigsberg managed to look past the excess personification.

Kindle. Prompted by the release of his new book. Notionally about the disappearing towns in the Central West of NSW, but sufficiently banal, insecure, repetitive and unassured that my eyes glazed over anything that may've been interesting or novel.

Widely reviewed (and, of course, feted) locally. Kerryn Goldsworthy (amongst many others) is quick to fend off the charge that Prescott is just aping Gerald Murnane. Goodreads. And so on. Even trawling the apologetic reviews is a slog.

Rian Johnson's latest, a followup of sorts to Knives Out from 2019. I see he's involved in yet another Star Wars trilogy.

Well, I didn't get too much into this one. There's way too much exposition, as if talking will paper over the holes and lack of twistiness in the plot, with every second line a shallow pop culture reference. The structure is like Gone Girl: there's a big shift in perspective near the midpoint. The cinematography is meh. There is a lot to trainspot I guess, set to a David Bowie soundtrack with the inevitable Lennon over the final credits.

The "how to host a murder" mechanic didn't work for me. Whoever was the putative murderer couldn't win it; did they know that? Kate Hudson does an airheaded look-at-me thing, tediously. Janelle Monáe from Moonlight (better there) plays the brains of the outfit. Was that a muscled-up Dode/Noah Segan in the painting? Most fatally, Edward Norton does not do dumb, unlike, for instance, Brad Pitt (cf the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading). And extremely fatally, the excess of dumb stuff made me wonder why the auteur couldn't give us something at least a little bit clever.

Dana Stevens watched it so you don't have to. A. O. Scott. Anthony Lane. And so on.

Spielberg semi-autobio. It's his usual American hokum but even less gripping than usual, although he does keep you on the hook insofar as you wonder how far he's going to take things (non-spoiler: not far enough). At the two-thirds mark of this overlong thing he switches to generic high school set pieces (bullying, antisemitism, girls) that were cooked to a far tastier pitch a long time ago (e.g. The Last Picture Show, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller, etc. etc.).

I was mostly there for Michelle Williams, who is as amazing as ever, but the best part was the closing scene where David Lynch plays John Ford in a Twin Peaks-reboot mode. Paul Dano does fine as the remote Bill Gates-esque father but the character is so generic that there's nothing much there. I was thrilled to see James Urbaniak as the school principal.

Dana Stevens. Manohla Dargis.

Kindle. A pointer from Robyn Creswell at the New York Review of Books. I did enjoy the language/translation but somehow the stories seemed shallower this time around; perhaps I mostly enjoyed the colour in Richard Burton's effort.

I'm not the biggest fan of Martin McDonagh's work; I found In Bruges too formulaic, and so it goes here again. In two sittings as I got bored. It's 1923 and while the Irish are warring we're on an island with Colin Farrell, his soon-to-depart sister Kerry Condon and his soon-to-be-ex mate Brendan Gleeson, the last of whom just wants to get on with writing pieces for the fiddle. There are a few Shakespearean touches (the witch, the arch language) and overly significant animals (the donkey, the dog). I think the point was that art too often bends to the nice, or, as demonstrated here, claims more for and of itself than it can justify.

Dana Stevens: it's a comedy! Say it ain't so. Yes, it's stagy, and if you know/expect he's going to repeat key phrases it gets tedious fast. Beckett this is not. A. O. Scott. And so on.

I found it entertaining, perhaps because I wasn't too invested. As you'd expect there are a few inspired visual moments.

Manohla Dargis. Yep, the musical numbers were ill conceived.

Idle Rolf de Heer completism. The suburban dreams of a young couple in Adelaide (Dan Wyllie, Bojana Novakovic) turn to nightmares, and no, it's not due to the RBA's recent rate rises as this was made a decade ago: this is about neighbours so hellish that earplugs and lawyers are insufficient. Gary Waddell plays the host-squatter King in a half-hearted Spiteri mode. There's a bit of The Castle here, mixed in with some Tarantino aspirationalism. Too often it falls flat.

David (three stars) and Margaret (four stars). Jake Wilson.

Second time around with this Rolf de Heer classic. It's amusing with some good cinematography. I didn't grasp the moral of the story, if there was one.

Stephen Holden dug it at the time. Margaret and David. Luke Buckmaster in 2016. All the details at Ozmovies.

Prompted by Luke Buckmaster's rewatch in 2015. Stephan Elliott's followup to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Buckmaster is about right — it must be a pisstake — but it's not very funny, clever or even all that human. The list of prior art is long: Wake in Fright, Crocodile Dundee (American lead Johnathon Schaech comes to the Central Australian Dead Heart in what must've been a career-stifling move), The Castle, incestuous Australian utopias, the oversexed Australian ladies ala Praise, and so forth.

The plot is perfunctory and infantile, merely a vehicle for exploring a series of grotesques: Daddy-O (Rod Taylor) anchors this Northern Gothic in a Collingwood singlet and sweatband, channeling Bryan Brown, downing the XXXX and shortchanging his desert-dwelling family. We're introduced by Susie Porter's demonstration that even she was young and dumb once. The beautiful scenery is almost entirely squandered. It was probably a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.

Excess details at Ozmovies. Margaret couldn't handle the vulgarity? Stephen Holden.

Third time around. Prompted by Dave, who delighted in a recent attempt to use a Spiteri defence (spoiler: it didn't work). I enjoyed it a lot more this time around as I was only here for David Wenham. In contrast Sam Worthington has never been more wooden.

Ozmovies has all the details. Luke Buckmaster in 2015.

Craig Foster and his brother Damon keenly filmed the mad tracking skills of some Kalahari hunters.

Lawrence van Gelder at the New York Times at the time.

Burnt-out South African doco maker Craig Foster recovers by making friends with an octopus in a kelp forest at Western Cape (False Bay near Cape Town) while free diving. Oscared as best doco in 2021. The cinematography is first rate. Far better than some thin speculation about octopus cultures.

Thinly reviewed, mostly retrospectively and salaciously.

Kindle. A bum steer from Nicole Flattery in the New York Times. A murderous, sapient octopus society near a sandy shoreline of Côn Đảo (I haven't been). I usually bitch about novels being overstuffed with research but here it's the other way around; this is a novel of other people's ideas that already have better treatments in the scifi canon. For "humans trying to make sense of exotic consciousness and/or society" see Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and sequels, Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life (filmed as Arrival), etc. For synthetic sapience, see positronic Asimov, etc. For connectionist ("cellular") artificial intelligence, see, well, the venerable field of connectionist AI. For "non-human species with a culture" try the elephants. The moral hand wringing and righteousness can be found anywhere.

There were so many bullshit assertions I felt like throwing my device across the troopy every few pages. (It's unfortunately quite a flabby trip to nowhere new.) Nayler has a character (that sounds like every other character) assert that "silicon based AI is no threat to humans" — as if he hasn't given a moment's thought to Cathy O'Neil-and-co's concerns. The memory palace acts as an index to data in the brain, so destroying an entry in that index is not the same as forgetting the information; you know, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. (In my experience magpies know this but cats do not.) Evrim is ridiculously sub-human: he could be Doctor Manhattan or Rutger Hauer or Arnie or whoever but is instead a purely emoting reactionary, like an extra on a teenage vampire series. (I found the pronouns tiresome.) Most offensive were the assertions (not arguments!) for lethal violence, as if there are no alternatives ever. I'll stop there.

Mystifyingly highly rated at goodreads.

I close with one of my favourite quotes, from Don Marquis: "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

Second time around. Three Oscars: best picture, best screenplay, Mahershala Ali in a supporting role. Trevante Rhodes went on to portray Mike Tyson in a biopic.

Second time around. Oscared for best foreign film in 2007. #58 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time. A. O. Scott. Dana Stevens.

Second time around. It has slipped out of the IMDB top-250 in the last decade. I see they consulted Christopher Doyle about how to make Hong Kong look fabulous.

Roger Ebert: three stars at the time.

I read Gleick's Chaos a long time ago and have fond memories of it. I dug this up after realising that I know little about Newton beyond his mathematics, physics, interest in alchemy and the dispute over priority with Leibniz. Unfortunately this book mostly just rehearses these topics, adding only a few biographical details: some but not all dates, where he lived and who he shacked up with, the politicking at the Royal Society (primarily with Hooke), the boosting by Halley, the heretical thoughts. Newton's Wikipedia page is broader, deeper and more interesting.

Goodreads.

This one has been on the pile for a year or two. Frenchman Florian Zeller adapted his stage play (Oscared) and directed. It's a wonderfully disorienting, acausal take on dementia. Anthony Hopkins (Oscared) plays the father in mental decline to Olivia Colman's dutiful daughter. Her various paramours become unimpressed by the living arrangements. There's a fair bit of interiority, some decent acting and a general air of bemusement. I'd say the arc is unsurprising, and while many themes are touched upon it doesn't rise above a shallow character study (somewhat in extremis). #130 in the IMDB top-250.

Dana Stevens: I would've liked to see what Frank Langella made of the lead role. Jeannette Catsoulis. Just now, Natalia Winkelman says that the souflé did not rise the second time around.

The second Florence Pugh feature for 2022. She plays a nineteenth-century English nurse charged with observing an Irish girl who apparently doesn't eat. It has a few moments, and many more non-moments. The costumery is gorgeous (Flo's blue dress and jacket are beautiful) but the cinematography is too often too dank to make out the details. Niamh Algar (The Virtues) does some more fine work. I don't know who they made this for.

Jake Wilson: three stars, insufficient payoff for the drawn-out suspense. Peter Bradshaw. Manohla Dargis.

Steve McQueen's TV miniseries was on the pile for a long time. Five episodes, some of which get on to feature length. Over many nights. The subject is the West Indian community in London from the 1960s to the 1980s, which was (specifically) topical at the time due to the Windrush scandal (so soon buried under countless other scandals and much political buffoonery). As you'd expect the cinematography is always good and often excellent. The huge cast is deployed well. At times it seems to be almost entirely about the music.

Several of the episodes focus on police brutality, which as we know in Australia, is approximately invariant and generic (sadly). The first instalment Mangrove is depressing but saved by its fabulous actors. I didn't get where he was going with the second, Lovers Rock — always expecting something to despoil what seemed to be an enjoyable party — but once I realised it was the vibe of the thing, the toeing of several dangerous lines but not crossing any fatal ones, it came away as one of the best. Similarly the final, Education, while clunky in its polemics, hit the right visual and moral notes. McQueen should direct a Cosmos remake!

Widely reviewed. Gary Younge at the New York Review of Books provides much valuable context. Jeannette Catsoulis at length.

Some days all you need are some Bruce Campbell one liners and farce. I thought his present-day girlfriend looked familiar: IMDB tells me that was Bridget Fonda. Last seen about a decade ago.

Roger Ebert: two stars and an inaccurate summary. I guess I was 14 in 1992 — bang on the target demographic for once. Janet Maslin. They made a TV series while I wasn't watching. And some other films and stuff.

Misguided James Caan and director Norman Jewison completism. It's an irredeemable dog. A mashup hyperviolent game in futurish corporatised America that keeps the peons consuming. The free man wins, and doubtlessly continues consuming. Ralph Richardson plays a fruity computer librarian.

James Canby at the time: humourless. I doubt many have watched it since.

Minor returns on some Howard Hawks and Robert Mitchum completism. John Wayne leads in what is apparently a remake of Hawks's Rio Bravo, also starring Wayne. A Western where the two stars defend a family from having their water rights thieved by some bad people. It has its moments but doesn't really go anywhere. James Caan plays a newbie to the seasoned old hands, refusing to be condescended to by anyone.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars and a dig at Pauline Kael.

Promising, on the strength of writer/director David O. Russell and the cast. We start with a heavily made up physician/surgeon/quack Christian Bale trying on the Tom Waits look in 1930s NYC. John David Washington (so successful in BlacKkKlansman and so disappointing since) plays his army and lawyer buddy. In flashback we meet the other leg of their wartime romance, Margot Robbie, who makes art out of the shrapnel she extracts from men's bodies. (Where else have we seen this kind of stool?) They get framed for murder, or was it for failing to be fascistic? Taylor Swift, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Zoe Saldaña, etc. etc. are all squandered, or maybe doing what they can with some saggy material. Michael Shannon allows us to have some fun when he plays spies with Mike Myers. (This is proof that he's worth watching in just about anything.) De Niro saves us all from the furies and fates but not the preaching. Somehow it's misguided, intrinsically broken, boring and incoherent.

Manohla Dargis. Luke Goodsell. And so many others.

Kindle. The Booker Prize winner for 2022. More historical magic realism from the subcontinent, like that other famous Booker winner. Throughout it struck me as very derivative. Written in the second person (like How to get filthy rich in rising Asia). We're taken by a hedonistic gay photographer into Colombo and more obliquely Sri Lanka's civil war in the 1980s (Tamils v Sinhalese v other minorities) with about twice as many words as are functional. The plot is notionally motored by who-killed-Roger-Rabbit (sorry, you) but circles this and other points often, and without significant progress. None of the characters are particularly engaging. The rules for the spirit universe are arbitrary and unenforced; just noise. There is lots of local colour but mostly it collects set pieces (like poker games) sourced from things like James Bond movies and the internet of the past decade. The life philosophy is bogus, and the author has no grasp of probability or risk. He is obviously angling for a movie version.

Reviews are legion and mostly fawning. Goodreads.

Carole Lombard completism. She's pretty good here. Also for Howard Hawks's direction. In black-and-white John Barrymore turns Lombard's lingerie model into a Broadway star. She outgrows him (he never grows) and becomes a Hollywood star. There's an epic reconciliation on a train on the "Twentieth Century" line from Chicago to NYC. It's a comedic, stagy commentary on staginess, like To Be or Not to Be, and while it has some early moments it overstays its welcome by about half an hour.

Mordaunt Hall at the time.

I'm at the diminished returns of Aubrey Plaza completism, I know. This is a yet another post-American Pie (etc. etc.) teenage sex farce. The times are fast in that summer between the end of school and start of college in 1993, and Ms Plaza has a lot to learn. I did laugh a lot at the first move (Me So Horny over the opening credits, cutting to the school principal saying (approx) "thanks for the a cappella version of the national anthem") but unfortunately that's the funniest bit. The soundtrack is a bit cringey. Clark Gregg plays her father. Post-Kickass Christopher Mintz-Plasse mostly just makes up the numbers. There are grammar jokes, just like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and some retro humour, like everything to do with Hillary Clinton.

Neil Genzlinger dug it.

Judy was cruel. She had that smart cruelty to her of someone who'd gotten what she wanted. And she'd gotten it the fairest way, through suffering.
— after a long digression on notions of fairness for the purposes of college entrance essays

Kindle. Prompted by Netanyahu's restoration to the throne of Israel and Cohen's amusing take on Jared Kushner's memoir. Told in the first person by a Pnin-ish academic in upstate New York. The Netanyahus come to visit for the purpose of a job interview at the local college. The setups are a bit clunky — it's often obvious where he's taking us — as the visitors are predictably horrible, the academic overweening, the backbiting. I probably missed many of the finely calibrated distinctions amongst the Jewish diaspora (ancestry, linguistic proficiency, cultural symbols) but there is still a lot to enjoy in the small, and he is damn funny. Overall, though, is there anything much to it?

This got Cohen the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Reviews are legion and generally tedious.

Aubrey Plaza completism. She's a pyscho Insta stalker who is, of course, eventually saved by Insta. I got the impression that some think this is her finest outing. Elizabeth Olsen plays her target: a Californian lifestyle influencer. It's an emoji movie, notionally a black comedy but more often submerged in cringe. I guess co-writer/director Matt Spicer saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and thought he could spin "I mean, it's literally like someone took America by the East Coast and shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on" to feature length.

Peter Bradshaw: it's a bit hideous. Ben Kenigsberg: O’Shea Jackson Jr's realism is almost more than the rest put together.

Completism for director/co-writer Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) and Michael Fassbender, who has done very little in the past several years. This mawkish snoozefest is doomed from the first frame. It's just after World War I. Fassbender returns from the war with the intention of tending a lighthouse but also marries inexplicably single Alicia Vikander at her unfathomable insistence. A baby arrives on a boat and changes everything into yet another Australian police procedural. Eventually Rachel Weisz's crinkled brow joins the classic early-1980s Australian cast (Jack Thompson, hammy in every scene, Bryan Brown, Gary McDonald!) and we get a minor riff on forgiveness. The locations are weirdly mashed up in an attempt to synthesise remote W.A. from the shops in Stanley, Tasmania, the nearby Nut, some expansive beach, and somewhere in New Zealand. The cinematography is too often too gloomy. Too many letters.

Dana Stevens. Stephen Holden.

Kindle. On the strength of his regular essays for The Monthly, which are mostly excellent. At book length (and seven years ago) he's not as taut or well structured. Marks hammers the restorative justice drum in a similar way to how I remember Nicholas Cowderey doing it in the 1990s, expecting data and money to persuade. Things have changed a bit since then (for instance McGowan in W.A. far out landslid Newman in Queensland) but remain essentially the same or worse.

I also read Marks's The Book of Paul immediately prior. It's brief and has its moments. On the other hand Keating's recent sprays about Barangaroo, Packer and casinos are some of the most asinine things he's ever said.

Goodreads. Yep, Marks needed to walk more of the less happy paths.

Highly rated TV on IMDB (#11). I enjoyed the space stuff the most as it was clearly closest to Carl Sagan's heart. He had what Americans would deem a healthy ego, and a delivery that is often hilarious. Things tended to fall away in the last quarter or half. At times I felt he was recycling Douglas Adams (e.g. interplanetary travel, alien life forms) and Martin Gardner (e.g. Flatland, attacking pseudo science), the latter of whom contradicts Sagan's bagging of Plato by observing that Einstein performed no experiments. (At times it's easy to see why Sagan's peers thought he was more show pony than scientist, canvassing other people's work without sufficient attribution.) There's a cracker 1970s synth soundtrack that forms the core of the musical accompaniment. The continuing robotic exploration of Mars is awesome.

For Florence Pugh, who is again (maybe) having a moment. I hope the other stuff in the pipe is better than this dreck. To me (and I'm not the target demographic) this is about Chris Pine's creation of a Matrix for incels to inter their significant others in as 1950s housewives. Flo (being the leading lady, and, well, Flo) gets red pilled. See, it has all the tropes. A cool retro vibe in the desert, that's all there is.

Manohla Dargis: "a clever mash-up between Mad Men and Get Out." I missed the clever part(s). Peter Bradshaw: a "handsomely designed but hammily acted, laborious and derivative mystery chiller." Jake Wilson: "But if even being married to Harry Styles could be a trap, there are definitely things to worry about." Michael Sun at the ABC: "a twist so contrived even M Night Shyamalan would disapprove." Dana Stevens: it's just The Stepford Wives from 1975. (Others made the same observation; those who didn't I suspect were not in the target demographic. Is this therefore intended to be some kind of comfort food?) I agree that Chris Pine was squandered. She took it far more seriously (earnestly) than anyone else.

Second time around with this Hitchcock classic. Prompted by Park Chan-wook's latest. I remain bemused by Hitchcock's relentlessly trivial psychology. The film's colour strikes me as weird: sometimes it's quite effective (such as in the lane way early on where the walls look flattened) and other times bogus (the bookshop where the sun abruptly sets, and what's in the rear view whenever James Stewart is driving with furrowed brow). No matter my misgivings, it remains lodged at #100 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 1996. Bosley Crowther at the time. Wikipedia.

For Sean Harris (excellent in Macbeth) and (of course) Joel Edgerton. Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with Edgerton and previously with director Thomas M. Wright. All try to talk up the psychological complexity of the characters, which I guess is there if you're prepared to take the cues. Otherwise it's another drab Aussie police-procedural noir. Apparently filmed in South Australia despite being set in Western Australia.

The parents of the child at the centre of this story felt it was a "cruel, callous, selfish cash grab" (and fair enough too). Luke Buckmaster dug it (in the Justin Kurzel mould). Wouldn't it be great if we had other stories to tell.

Again, second time around with this fat Brunner. Depressingly it became even more congruent with reality in the intervening decade.

I read it while waiting for the troopy to get serviced in Berri, South Australia. Don't believe the hype — there's very little to do here on the Riverland when the river is up and flowing rapidly. The rain (past and forecast) precludes escapist red dirt adventures to the north and east. Stay home, I suggest; even more so with the outbreak of Japanese Encephalitis along the river (see also the Guardian).

More context at Wikipedia: apparently prophetic for 2007.

Kindle. Second time around with this Brunner classic.

Kindle. Gatsby meets unreliable narrators. The roaring-then-cratering 1920s setting put me in mind of Amor Towles's Rules of Civility; clearly it's intended to be topical, with gestures at financial engineering, high-frequency trading exploits, the disconnection of labour from reward. My eyes started glazing after the first part (a novel that introduces us to the financier and his wife). The second part is hard to wade through (an incomplete ghostwritten beat up of the financier's putative achievements). The third part is quite repetitious and self-justifyingly tedious (the ghostwriter's account of those days and her Italian father's incoherent anarchism and typesetting). The fourth part is about meeting expectations: the financier's wife is the genius, not him, but we knew that already.

Diaz misses the crucial foundation of the strategy that Ishiguro made his own: I was never sympathetic to any of the characters. But now I wonder, even being as uninvested I was and am, if this wasn't an Ouroboros.

Nicole Rudick at the New York Review of Books: man looks at world/other man, woman looks at man/men. Yawn. Adam Mars-Jones at the London Review of Books: tea from a bag and warm water, not a patch on Spufford's Golden Hill. Michael Gorra at the New York Times. Goodreads. And so on. Hats off to the marketing team.

Hollywood has a Polish acting troupe take on the Gestapo after the occupation of Warsaw in 1939. Ernst Lubitsch co-wrote and directed. I found it often very funny — it's not often in bad taste — but the replaying of the same joke did eventually go stale. #228 in the IMDB top-250. IMDB tells me Carole Lombard (fantastic here) was in the Ben Hur of 1925.

Michael Wood in 2013. Geoffrey O'Brien at essay-length for the Criterion collection. Excess details at Wikipedia.

I hadn't seen this before, not being much of a fan of Charlton Heston or lengthy biblical movies. I'm a bit surprised that it was Oscars all round — Heston is hammy and the ladies are generally quite a bit worse — though I grant the huge sets and legions of extras make for some amazement. Many scenes drag followed by abrupt cuts to the next episode in the one-Jewish-man story set around the time of Christ's birth. Hugh Griffith got Oscared for playing an Arab horseman/Sheik in blackface. Still #183 in the IMDB top-250.

Bosley Crowther at the time. Excess details at Wikipedia.

Kindle. Some of these stories are ingeniously constructed, such as the first one with its video game that encodes the past in fractal detail, enabling a sort-of magic realism to rub up against sort-of omnipresent surveillance: it's a twenty-first century USA reconstruction of 1980s Soviet Afghanistan in the mode of a Charles Yu thought toy. There are tales of metamorphosis (it's having a moment), and some spy-stuff that reads like The Lives of Others. However this collection, while better, suffers from the same limitations as his debut novel: the few things he wants to tell us (typically about war zones) are repeatedly presented, spreading the point, if any, thin.

Wyatt Mason at the New York Review of Books. Elliot Ackerman. Goodreads. And a little related to the title of the book: The Hajj Trail simulator.

Apparently this is generally considered Cassavetes's masterwork; it is at least his highest rated at IMDB (8.1). Gena Rowlands leads as the mentally-unwell wife of the mentally-unwell Peter Falk. He's very shouty and unnuanced. She's sometimes good but it's all a bit too much, too unmotivated. It took me many sittings to get through; the opening movements are promising but by the time we're on our way to the hospital I was struggling to focus. Too many scenes from then on are excruciatingly, unnecessarily long: the point gets made and made again and yet we still don't move along. I enjoyed Katherine Cassavetes as Falk's mum the most: she's got a deadpan screech, poise and stare that I find hilarious (as in Minnie and Moskowitz). I'm sure she was amazing on stage. Rowlands and Cassavetes as director got Oscar noms.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 1988. Nora Sayre at the New York Times.

Kindle. On the strength of a promising excerpt in The Saturday Paper. That may've been the best bit: at book-length Rushkoff rambles, rants, riffs, self-aggrandises, self-contradicts and appears ignorant of history. There's not much about the promised billionaire survivalism and prepping, and the remainder is too generic. There are very few interesting or novel pointers; the only one I came away with was to John Rutt (ex Santa Fe institute) and his Game B (which presently seems moribund). These failures are especially vexing if you share any of his concerns. I think Rushkoff is mining the vein of similarly-unsatisfactory late-period Douglas Coupland.

I've never been much of a fan of this movie but for reasons unknown (Steve Buscemi?) figured it was worth a revisit. Still #92 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert, two-and-a-half stars at the time: "Now that we know Quentin Tarantino can make a movie like Reservoir Dogs, it's time for him to move on and make a better one." I also felt it was more a talky stage play than cinema. Also Vincent Canby.

Having read the sequel-book I now had to rewatch the original. Still #123 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars, and often in contradiction, Janet Maslin.

Kindle. Read mostly in the Flinders Ranges between bouts of bushwalking. I haven't picked up an airplane novel or thriller in ages. These are Heat scenarios, set in Chicago and L.A., apparently developed since the movie. Despite implausible coincidences, secondary characters in need of more development and its length, it's quite effective; cinematographic — which goes without saying — and effectively dated, like a cold war thriller, by forcing you to consider what tech existed at the time. But Mann missed a trick: he should've made a video game like Grand Theft Auto. The ending suggests there just might be a Heat 3.

Adrian McKinty at the Smage. A lengthy interview of Mann by Jonah Weiner.

A pointer from Alan Rickman's diaries: "Steve Buscemi’s beautiful film. Complete rethink on the being-in-it-and-directing question, although it has such a central quietness you forget anybody is acting or directing something. V inspiring."

Roughly Buscemi seems to have called up his mates to perform in his (written, directed, starred in) production, with a result that reminded me at times of Hal Hartley's Long Island movies (without the music). There's addiction, drinking, arrested development, a downward spiral. So nothing we haven't seen before, but well constructed. Chloë Sevigny steals a few scenes. Imagine losing your lady to Anthony LaPaglia!

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars at the time (based on direct experience I expect). Stephen Holden.

Safdie brothers completism. What passes for romance amongst NYC junkies, and various kinds of codependency. Based on Arielle Holmes's experiences; she also leads. Caleb Landry Jones plays her somewhat disinterested love interest. The music is sometimes intriguing but otherwise there's not a lot to it.

Wikipedia has some details. Nicolas Rapold (and others) dug it. Godfrey Cheshire points out its strengths and flaws.

Kindle. The premise is right there in the title, so I can't say I didn't know what I was getting. The plot, as it were, is that the great arc of life continues whatever metamorphoses occur, however tedious and shallow those might be. Mercifully short but it could've been shorter with less annoying waffle and repetition, if he walked back fewer assertions and just said what he meant in the first place. For mine it's the worst yet from Hamid, the second consecutive thumbs down from me. I do not know who he wrote this for.

Goodreads. Apparently it provoked thought in some readers, though these thoughts are generally unshared or unshareable. David Gates at the New York Times: flat-footed fabulism. And so on. The vibe is general bemusement. Much later, Karan Mahajan.

On the strength of Jason Di Rosso's interview with adaptor/director Colm Bairéad. From that it was pretty clear what this was going to be: a series of vignettes focused on a semi-abandoned girl and an older couple. The themes are of what is lost and found. In (Irish) Gaelic. Somehow I was reminded of Scandinavian realism ala Lukas Moodysson (Bara Parata Liten, specifically by the card game here and some brusque social interactions) and of course there's the wallpaper from Trainspotting. I very much enjoyed the acting and that there's never too much of anything. It's beautifully observed and shot. Claire Keegan provided the raw material. She's having a moment.

Harry Windsor. Peter Bradshaw.

On the strength of a taut review by Jeannette Catsoulis — I (always) wish she'd write at more length. It's only the second time I've seen Aubrey Plaza onscreen; the first was Ned Rifle a long time ago. It's a sort of Breaking Bad for the millennial student-indebted gig workers, showing how they can learn from the migrants who have already given up on mainstream success in present-day USA. Plaza's great as she finds her true vocation, as is Theo Rossi. Written and directed by John Patton Ford. It put me in mind a bit of Uncut Gems.

Benjamin Lee. K. Austin Collins. Most other reviews struck me as overly harsh. Perhaps Plaza is having a moment.

At the Ilparpa Swamp on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I'm not the biggest fan of George Miller's movies so I took some persuading. That came in the form of Jason Di Rosso's reverential interview, where Miller sounded like a thoughtful and sharp bloke. There's also the pull of the two stars, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. Well, as it turns out I prefer her in more fantastical/artificial/stylised roles (e.g. The Grand Budapest Hotel) and I'm still waiting for something worthwhile from him. (Likely he's always decent but has yet to find a worthy feature-film vehicle.) Shot by John Seale. The last movement, set back in the real world of London, is a riff on matching.

I read Dana Stevens's deconstruction before I saw it, inuring me to some but not all of the dodginess. Manohla Dargis points to more fatal flaws; Luke Goodsell found a few others. Lurv! IMDB tells me that the three ladies prior to Tilda are not credited, which I found weird. Sandra Hall dug it, as did Glenn Kenny. And so on.

The last directorial effort of John Cassavetes, and what a way to go out: it's a dog. Insurance salesman Alan Arkin (who somehow reports to the head of claims department Charles Durning) gets sucked into a transparent scam by the underclad Beverly D'Angelo and her husband Peter Falk. There's a terrorism kink for a climax that leads to happy endings all round. What's to know.

Vincent Canby at the time.

Park Chan-wook's latest. Tang Wei (Lust, Caution) leads. Go Kyung-Pyo has some gravitas but is often eclipsed in a way that Tony Leung could never be; he's too wan.

The subtitles I had were crap, but afterwards I had to wonder if mangled dialogue was more feature than bug. Roughly this police procedural gestures at Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love) and another Leung classic (Infernal Affairs), or is this a clothes-on Basic Instinct? Chinese-lady-in-Korea Weng appears to develop a taste for murdering her Korean husbands. Some of the cuts between scenes make things hard to follow. None of the cinematography reaches his previous standards. I wasn't enthralled.

Ben Kenigsberg at Cannes: Vertigo! Brian Tallerico. And later Manohla Dargis. Later, Luke Goodsell. Much later, Michael Wood.

I met Otis in February 2021 at the swimming pool in Wilcannia where he was acting as a lifesaver in between social events. He told me that he and his doco-making partner, both ex-Melbourne, had used their boosted JobSeeker to record some of what was happening on the Darling-Baaka river at the time. The two things of note here are the fish relocations of 2020 after the mass fish kills of previous years, and the protest about the general state of things.

Jordan Peele's latest. (I've seen Us but not Get Out.) Watched near Berry Springs on a very hot evening. I didn't understand a thing, a fact brought home to me time and again as the cast engaged in incomprehensible programmed action. There's no humour here. Daniel Kaluuya leads and has his moments, as does Steven Yeun from Minari. Michael Wincott was familiar from many things. The CGI is often lame.

Sandra Hall: two-and-a-half impatient stars. A. O. Scott dug it. Jason Di Rosso; he interviewed Brandon Perea on his Screen Show. Dana Stevens: I disagree that it "never feels long or belabored" — many scenes dragged. Later, Michael Wood.

In two sittings as it failed to grip. Suggested by Dana Stevens's review of the Criterion release in 2013. I didn't find the depths she did: thematically it's body horror turned into identity horror where things go as they must, entirely riven with buyer's remorse. Raw material for David Lynch perhaps. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Rock Hudson in the lead. Wesley Addy, playing a factotum, was somehow familiar.

A. H. Weiler at the time. Roger Ebert appears to have given it a miss.

Vale Peter Eckersley. In the words of another great Victorian: the University of Melbourne's finest. Widely feted at Hacker News.

I revisited the Kubrick classic out east of Alice Springs.

Roger Ebert: four stars in 1968 and another four stars as a "great movie" in 1997. Renata Adler for the New York Times: "Even the problem posed when identical twin computers, previously infallible, disagree is the kind of sentence-that-says-of-itself-I-lie paradox ... belong[s] to another age." How little she knew.

In three sittings as I found it a bit overwhelming — there's often a lot to take in. John Cale was the pick of the talking heads; I'm perhaps anomalous in not being overly interested in Andy Warhol, Lou Reed or the Factory. Many points are not elaborated: we learn little about the firing of Cale and Warhol, the Bowie connection, or their drug intake or health issues later in life. There are gestures late in the piece to suggest that Cale and Reed did work together after the firing. I enjoyed it and expect it'll be worth a rewatch. Directed by Todd Haynes (Mildred Pierce etc.).

Greil Marcus sold it to me with a lengthy review. A. O. Scott. Ben Kenigsberg at Cannes: Cale says the "60-cycle hum of the refrigerator" is the sound of Western civilisation. I wonder what he would've made of Australia's 50Hz.

And yet more Cassavetes/Rowlands completism. I kept a close eye on it for the first 40 minutes or so and then only half. The time did pass quickly throughout but nothing really stuck; all I saw was tough mob moll Rowlands moving through lowlife NYC and thereabouts, dragging child John Adames, with a revolver, endless cigarettes and an intent I could not grasp. She got an Oscar nom for this. Apparently there's some humour.

Roger Ebert: three stars in 1998. "Fun and engaging but slight." Vincent Canby.

It has its moments but isn't a patch on Breaking Bad. A superannuation vehicle for Bob Odenkirk.

More Cassavetes/Rowlands completism. Co-writer/director Paul Mazursky was notionally somewhat inspired by or recycled Shakespeare's play. (The other writer was Leon Capetanos.) In brief high-flying architect Cassavetes has a midlife crisis in NYC, leaving retired Broadway actress/wife Rowlands to his ominous casino-developer boss Vittorio Gassman so he can revisit his roots in Greece and ultimately a Greek island, taking their teenage daughter Molly Ringwald with him. By fantastical coincidence the eternally braless Susan Sarandon is walking her dog in some town there and finds him irresistible. As he's the centre of everyone's universe the others track him down, and the mandatory big sea storm leads to vacuous rapprochement. Billed as comedy but mostly snoozefest, it took me two sittings to get through. It was probably fun to make.

Vincent Canby at the time.

nth time around. Roger Ebert: four stars in 1989 and another four as a "great movie" in 2001. Bosley Crowther at the time.

Kindle. Prompted by Ireland's recent passing. Geordie Williamson's introduction for the text publishing edition summarises it well as "Australian Psycho" (referring to Bret Easton Ellis and not Hitchcock). He avoids endorsing what is ultimately an insufficiently anchored, excessively ambiguous, uninsightful, repetitious, tedious and boring bit of putatively teenage nihilism which took me an age to plough through. Some minor points. Williamson avoids digging into the references to the Brethren. It skips around like a Sydney crime paperback. The fairy story that gives the book its title is woeful.

Goodreads. I'd say that apart from The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, Ireland's output is not worth reading.

Some Cassavetes/Rowlands completism. We start with parking lot attendant Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel, sporting a Hulk Hogan handlebar moustache) in NYC but soon migrate with him to L.A. where Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) works as a museum curator when she's not the second woman (again), concerned about sex and ageing (again). They're both Bogart fans. She cops a lot of damage from a few blokes (and I guess, herself) and is constantly manhandled, possessively, even when sober (again). She's the only marriageable girl in L.A. There's too much yelling from Seymour. Katherine Cassavetes has the most fun as Seymour's clear-eyed mother.

Are these the preoccupations of John Cassavetes? (He's the infidel husband here.) Was he making the same movie again and again ala Michael Mann?

Roger Ebert: a romantic but not comedic four stars at the time. "Dreary 1972!" — there was plenty more where that came from. Vincent Canby was less impressed.

A bum steer from Luke Buckmaster, who must've been watching something else; IMDB's 7/10 rating is closer to the mark but still overly generous. Jamie Dornan (new to me) lead as an amnesiac drug something-or-other in the Australian Outback (here represented by the Flinders Ranges and, I think, Quorn). Shalom Brune-Franklin had the fruitiest role as an unreliably unreliable international woman of mystery. Danielle Macdonald got the rookie cop slot, Damon Herriman got the crusty quasi-corrupt one. Ólafur Darri Ólafsson to play Orson Welles in any eventual biopic! Or perhaps John Goodman's. I wouldn't've recognised Alex Dimitriades. The cinematography is good but it's so easy now (digital, drones) that it's also entirely shrug. There's a fake Morricone soundtrack. The plot is a dog. There's way too much (incoherent) exposition from episode 3 onwards. I was most put out when Dornan didn't return the toilet key. One for the Fifty Shades of Grey crowd?

Somehow very engrossing despite what would seem a very thin premise: an actress (Gena Rowlands) struggles with her role as a woman coming to terms with ageing in a stage play, and is haunted by the killing of a younger woman (Laura Johnson). Despite what that sounds like it's not the usual Hollywood self-servicing reductive stuff; it's an adult movie of the kind they don't make any more, not even for streaming services. Perhaps it helped to know that writer/director and lead heal/ex-lover/second husband John Cassavetes was married to Rowlands in real life, making for some multidimensionality. Rowlands is hypnotic and their final scenes together are a lot of fun. Ben Gazarra had the thankless task of directing the play. Wife Zohra Lampert was fantastic in all her scenes: "you’re so boring” she told him flatly at one point before acting out in the bedroom while he's romancing his leading lady. Another has her squashed into a window frame on a street as those more invested in this fiasco mill around in front of her, ignorant, pushy. Joan Blondell (Nightmare Alley) got to watch her script being butchered. The cinematography and editing are excellent.

Roger Ebert: three stars in 1991. The alcoholism may've cut a bit too close to the bone at the time. Peter Bradshaw in 2007.

Louis Malle completism. Released the year after Atlantic City. Watched at Dalhousie Springs on a lazy afternoon. Two blokes have dinner at an upmarket NYC restaurant and talk so much it's unclear they ate anything at all. I found it, for the most part, boring, but somehow kept watching. I guess it's one of those things where you expect there to be more to it, all the way along, right up to when the credits roll.

Roger Ebert: four stars in 1981 and another four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. Apparently what they say is not really the point. Vincent Canby was also entranced, apart from the times when his interest flagged. Some of his comments suggest it may've helped to know who these guys (Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory) are in real life.

On the pile since it got heavily Oscared at the start of the year. Deaf cinema is having a moment (cf Sound of Metal), though the eye here seemed more firmly on Academy glory than any sort of innovation; unsurprising perhaps as it's an American remake of a 2014 French-Belgian film. An Apple Original production.

Briefly: the almost-adult child of deaf adults (Brit Emilia Jones) helps her family fish in eternally sunny Massachusetts. Her singing voice is discovered when she joins the school choir. Beyond that it's just a matter of pandering to audience expectations: the outre over-concerned music teacher (Eugenio Derbez; presumably JK Simmons was unavailable), the nasty girls, the ignorant, vapid but irresistibly cute boy (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) she's required to duet with, the slutty best friend (Amy Forsyth), the nods to boomer culture. (Perhaps David Bowie is having a moment too, though citing his Song for Bob Dylan seems a bit irrelevant in a singing, not songwriting, class — Jones only ever sings other people's material.)

The movie is flawed in so many ways. It goes looking for problems that could have easily been managed with only marginally more awareness. This comes at the cost of more fruitful possibilities, such as the dynamic she has with brother (Daniel Durant) which shows early promise (he's the most sympathetic to her situation) before sliding into irrelevancy and cliche. The deaf bits are so much better than the rest (and for the usual reasons: they are physically expressive, fun, funny and inclusive) whereas the musical stuff was entirely dispensable, the ending sappy sentimental guff. Nevertheless I enjoyed almost all of the performances and was very happy to learn that father Troy Kotsur got an Oscar (for best supporting actor); his scene with Jones, on the tailgate of a ute at the fag end of things, was brilliant. Mother Marlee Matlin (Oscared for Children of a Lesser God) was also fine.

Being such conventional Oscar bait, I felt it was exploitative. Jeannette Catsoulis: drowned in formula. Amanda Morris for the deaf community: about us not of us. Peter Bradshaw: shallow. And so on.

John Duigan's last feature, so far. On the pile for a very long time as I had low expectations. These were met.

IMDB tells me star Nammi Le married Duigan soon after. Peter Galvin for SBS: three stars. He falls into similar traps as Duigan: this thing is entirely a male construction. And I've always felt that Sydney was mostly "spaces where moral certainty seems a long way away." Margaret (three stars) and David (three-and-a-half). David's review seems ignorant of all the Sydney class cues; for instance Jack is a law student (an amateur actor) and is connected to the old money parts of the town; that's how he knows entitled ex Anna (you can just imagine her saying "it's not over 'til I say it's over") and her mate Seb (also an entitled twat). The rugby league segment and the Sydney Uni components are Duigan's commentary on the culture of the old male-only colleges (which he would've experienced while at Ormond at the University of Melbourne). Bob Ellis: The Good Whore of Coogee. Some of his waffle contradicts Stratton. Peter O'Brien's unquiet American is an advertisement for the superior qualities of the mature man over the uni boys. Jake Wilson: four stars (of five). So, in summary, the reviewers tried to boost the local product but failed to get to grips with much of anything.

Vale David Ireland.

As bad as I was warned it would be. Netflix put up 200M USD to construct a new Bond-like franchise, hoping that the Russo brothers would work the commercial magic of their Marvel efforts. I guess they are the new Michael Bay (making this their Pearl Harbour?). Briefly Ryan Gosling is an invincible CIA dark agent who's charged with the custody of a MacGuffin by somewhat less invincible CIA dark agent Callan Mulvey (dial familiar from The Turning and possibly other things). Cue the darkly-lit spaghetti action scenes, poor CGI and fetishised closeups of torture! Good work guys. The stakes were so low that I was hoping all of them would get bumped off. I'd like to think that, in the days before scandal, Armie Hammer would’ve got the Chris Evans role of an an intermediately invincible CIA dark agent with psychotic tendencies who enthusiastically enjoys his work. Ana de Armas is the new Scarlett Johansson, albeit one who comes off worse more often. Overall it's a ludicrous, humourless, unironic antispoof of Team America. Even Arnie's worst action flicks were better than this. Everyone should've stayed home.

Somewhat prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with the Russo brothers. (He didn't endorse it but some of the exchange made me curious about where all the money went.) Dana Stevens apparently loved it. Amy Nicholson: I almost missed that clever bit on the tram.

Kindle. Ishiguro's first novel and unimpressive it is. A dry run for his particular thing that he perfected later: unreliable narrators, drawing on faulty, forgiving and yet telling memory, Japan's prewar culture as seen by the youth, upper class England. It is a bit soporific; knowing what I was going to get allowed me to plough through it but I can't imagine it set the world on fire in 1982.

Goodreads.

A Barbara Loden jag from her efforts in a couple of her husband Elia Kazan's films. She wrote, directed, starred in this attempt to capture a vacuous divorcee who finds her calling as an accomplice to a thief with big ideas. It has its moments but is a bit too slow; it may've worked as more than a time capsule (of Pennsylvania and Holy Land and other places) at half the length.

Roger Greenspun at the time.

Riz Ahmed completism. The IMDB summary almost says it all: "A British Pakistani rapper is on the cusp of his first world tour, but is struck down by an illness that threatens to derail his big break." The illness is something that causes muscular degeneration. The story is a generic clash between (the old) conservative Muslim traditions (cupping!) and (the new) kids who just want to succeed in a material world (and be treated by stem cell infusions). There's a "poetry" slam in the style of Bodied or 8 Mile where Ahmed gets canned for insufficiently sophisticated racism. Nabhaan Rizwan (as junior, less talented rapper RPG) got the thankless task of wearing the XXXTentacion doe eyes, facial tattoos and low rent lyrics. From my position on the couch I'd observe that 25 years ago (mid-1990s) this DIY mode (cassette recordings, rough and ready production, sampling of your parents' records, ...) gave us Tricky and Asian Dub Foundation, both of whom made all these points a long time ago. Ahmed's performance is solid, as usual, and he has some great raps, but it's not enough.

Ahmed got an Oscar this year for the short film The Long Goodbye, and I wasn't paying attention! (The outro there is the intro here?) A. O. Scott.

A Louis Malle jag from Atlantic City. It's Springtime 1954 in Dijon (so says the title card) with some young blokes collecting for the soldiers at Điện Biên Phủ. As this film was made about 17 years later, one might think that the French have had time to process that disaster and watch America slide into the quagmire. Sure enough some later commentary alludes to that but all the politics and much else is more gesture than argument, certainly not commitment.

Otherwise there's the Tour de France on the radio, the new novelty of the TV, and a coming-of-age in the style of Martin Amis for an almost-15 year old circumspect, precocious boy. He's helped along by his wastrel older brothers and not particularly impeded by his father, a gynaecologist, perhaps due to the jazz soundtrack of the era. He's slavered over by all the ladies, so the audience is not surprised when the Oedipal subtext comes to the fore. Much is made of his mother being a low-born Italian refugee who does not discriminate in her modes of knowing.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time. Roger Greenspun was less impressed. Malle got an Oscar nom for the script.

Another Matthew Spektor pointer to what I think he deemed to be the best of the director Frank Perry / writer Eleanor Perry partnership. It sort-of works, as a portrait of a social-climbing NYC marriage in the late 1960s, if you remember that it is entirely from the wife's point of view. Lead actress Carrie Snodgress, a bit Sarah Jessica Parker (the face, the accent, the preoccupation with sex at the expense of all else), got an Oscar nom for her efforts. Nevertheless the repetition and boorishness is hard to endure — her lawyer husband Richard Benjamin seemed to be a straitened Z-Man from the superior Beyond the Valley of the Dolls — and while that may be the point it doesn't make for a good movie. Maybe they needed a montage? Or some brutal edits, or more interiority.

The only saving grace is a young Frank Langella, with hair, playing a ladies man in the mode of Leonard Cohen. He put me in mind of a built out Cillian Murphy. The credits roll over a group therapy session that accuses the housewife of having merely first world problems.

Roger Ebert: three stars. More details at Wikipedia.

More Elia Kazan completism. An old biddy (Jo Van Fleet under heavy makeup) decides she's not going to leave her island home when the FDR Feds decide to flood the Tennessee Valley to reduce flooding circa 1931. That goes as you'd expect. There's some unreconstructed racial politics which also goes as you'd expect. I actually enjoyed Montgomery Clift's G-man performance; he's as wooden and inexpressive as ever but he delivered about three lines just perfectly. One of those was to lovelorn widow Lee Remick, who mostly hadn't got a lot of room to move:

just after both have had their lights punched out by the local heavy
Montgomery Clift: You were great up there. [pregnant pause] Marry me?
Lee Remick: [says nothing]
Clift: I know I'll probably regret it, and I'm sure you'll regret it... but... get your hat, and a coat, wash up. Alright?
Remick: [nods yes]

Barbara Loden played his secretary, hiding behind her specs. She later married Kazan.

A. H. Weiler at the time.

Kindle. I picked this up on the strength of Nardi's conversation with Richard Fidler that I listened to about a year ago. She's got a beautiful voice and wicked laugh. This is a multi-generational tale like Cloudstreet. It put me more in mind of Beresford's The Fringe Dwellers (shifted a few hundred kilometres southwest) than Ivan Sen's Toomelah (from a few hundred kilometres east). After a rough first chapter (too ornate!) it settles into the steady rhythm of the lives of Indigenous women on the edge of the fictional Darnmoor (which I took to be roughly Brewarrina) until these are disrupted by the loss of employment, death, and ultimately the destruction of their remnant homelands.

Plot-wise too many things happen too close together, breathlessly, and I was so lost by the end that I couldn't fathom how the song of the crocodile helped in any way; the horse appeared to have bolted. Some of the characters are more successful than others, and often in a less-is-more way; for instance I found Wil's uncle, who charts his path to manhood, more convincing than saintly Wil. (Wil's marriage to Mili put me in mind of Blue Valentine.) In any case it's brave and many of the observations (especially about the myths of the settlers and townsfolk) cut deeply. The magic realism is sometimes very effective. Like Francine Prose, every so often there's a sentence that totally nails it. I guess she expected just a bit too much from this reader.

Goodreads. Timmah Ball at the Sydney Review of Books was more interested in generic politics than a close or critical reading. (For instance Celie's skilful sister is Bess, not Emma. And Mili holds son Paddy at a distance while embracing the younger Yaramala.) I find her optimism ungrounded.

Some more Gloria Grahame completism. Here she had a minor role as a sassy Southern Belle in perhaps her most artificial performance, and wouldn't you know it, that's what got her her Oscar. Kirk Douglas lead as an unscrupulous producer with the magical touch but was given second-banana billing to Lana Turner's star being born. The whole thing is a bit of Hollywood navel gazing in the mode of Sunset Boulevard (from 1950). It has its moments but is in no way anything special.

Bosley Crowther: a mountain of clichés. He was as unimpressed by Lana Turner's efforts as I was. Highly rated at IMDB (7.8) and heavily Oscared. Douglas got a nom but not the gong.

Third time around, I think. I appreciated it even less than last time, when it was #14 in the IMDB top-250. It is now #13.

Roger Ebert: four stars of mind blown. Peter Travers: three-and-a-half, also mind blown. A. O. Scott: mind not so blown.

nth time around with this scatological lowbrow classic.

Roger Ebert: one nihilistic star. I wonder what he'd've made of the last four years or so. A. O. Scott was more indulgent. It may be that only foreigners can really get across the entirety of this movie.

More misguided Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson completism. Orson Welles joined them in a strange, indulgent and unsuccessful stasis in NYC as the City became unsafe. I only kept half an eye on the last third. I don't know what would it would've taken to make this watchable; it seems essentially misconceived.

Vincent Canby paid more attention than I did. "[...] Philip Proctor [...] plays [Weld]'s square suitor with the sort of puzzled eyes and half smile that I associate with Nicholson, who may be setting the acting style for the 1970's."

Again and again. Looper now strikes me as an application for a Star Wars directing gig.

Brick: Roger Ebert (three stars) and Stephen Holden (unimpressed). Looper: Roger Ebert (three-and-a-half stars), Peter Travers (ditto), Manohla Dargis.

James Caan completism, and incidentally Wes Anderson too. Not really my thing. Watched a few kilometres east of the Coolalinga Shopping Centre on what seemed to be the main flight path of the Darwin airport.

Roger Ebert: two stars for Anderson's debut feature and better luck next time (next time was Rushmore). Janet Maslin liked it a whole lot more.

Colour me surprised to find the latest Disneyfied Pixar effort to be every bit as dire as the IMDB rating (5.3) and reviews suggested. It is entirely soulless. The plot arc makes little sense. I watched it in the hope that the synthetic cat SOX might be something. It wasn't. Wisely avoided by all previous Toy Story voice actors, with Chris Evans replacing Tim Allen in the role of Buzz. Absolutely beyond redemption.

A. O. Scott. Whatever it was supposed to be, it was not much fun to watch. Dana Stevens: "But there’s a rueful irony to the fact that it's this supposedly human inspiration for the beloved toy who feels more like a plastic action figure."

Thomas Vinterberg completism. I think that'll do me. Briefly two brothers sometimes maybe try to overcome their mother's alcoholic neglect. One sublimates all that into time honoured violence, weight lifting and prison time while the other takes the more difficult option of becoming a junkie and later a dealer on the mean streets of wintry Copenhagen. (We know he's sensitive due to the Nick Cave poster on his wall.) Given this frame things are on a railroad to Trainspotting, so the running scene, when it comes, shows how uninspired the whole show is. Jakob Cedergren does what he can in the lead.

IMDb trivia. Otherwise light on for reviews in English; it probably didn't get a wide release. A long waffly piece in the Guardian.

Some misguided Gloria Grahame completism. She had some terrible dialogue that she delivered terribly. Fritz Lang directed. It's a bit of a strange clunker as it didn't innovate on the very stale plot of Eve being responsible for all the evil in the world. On the other hand man is simple: he (Glenn Ford) just wants to drive trains. Or, you know, murder anyone who looks at his wife sideways (Broderick Crawford). The whole thing makes no sense when normie Kathleen Case was right there the whole time, willing and able.

Bosley Crowther at the time. A remake of a Jean Renoir film.

Some more James Caan completism. He struck me as miscast, perhaps because he was capable of a lot more than Francis (Ford) Coppola asked of him here. Joining him were James Earl Jones (whose mirth we sometimes share) and Anjelica Houston (whose performance I enjoyed the most despite it being substantially just exposition). We get Coppola's usual big set pieces (specifically a wedding and several funerals) but there is nothing very interesting about this particular story, which I put down to "the boy" D.B. Sweeney's vapidity. Despite its length I felt there were continuity issues, several bridges too few. It was overshadowed by all the other contemporary pictures that ruefully reviewed the U.S. war in Việt Nam, such as Full Metal Jacket (compare the boot camp scenes for instance — the stroppy sergeants — and how the usually reliable Larry Fishburne brings nothing to those here). There is an element of self-parody when Jones replays Martin Sheen's big scene from the end of Apocalypse Now. I think Coppola was trying to show the shift in mood from the shock-and-awe of the 1970s to the knowing hindsight of the 1980s.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars too many. He was wrong to claim that Caan's and Jones's characters "believe the war in Vietnam is stupid because the politicians are hamstringing the professionals, preventing them from fighting to win" — they are centrally concerned with the survival of their "family", i.e., members of the U.S. Army ("us and those like us"). Vincent Canby, similarly but more accurately: Caan's character opposes the war "without a front, with nothing to win and no way to win it." And yeah, why did Coppola direct this?

James Caan completism. This one made many lists of his movies to check out. It's a dog. Everyone (probably including Sarah Jessica Parker) was better elsewhere; Nicolas Cage is always better in something else. Anne Bancroft plays his mother. Notionally a comedy but really about how Ms Parker learns that she is worth a lot more than $1 million. It's not funny.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Also a big thumbs up from Vincent Canby.

Vale James Caan.

More Elia Kazan completism. It's black-and-white in Czechoslovakia where the party apparatus, with Stalin looking on, attempts to subtly address a circus (ex-)owner's political incorrectness while the secret police know only more brutal methods. The mode shift in the middle is welcome. I enjoyed the smouldering, dripping contempt of Gloria Grahame: all the woman wanted was a little domestic violence from her husband-clown (lead and two-time Oscar winner Fredric March). Nowhere as tiresome as Nightmare Alley and at times a bit fun.

Bosley Crowther and A. W. at the time.

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched on the Hugh River maybe 4km north of Namatjira Drive. It's a directionless dog. A drought somewhere dusty in NSW forces a sheep-farming family to move to Sydney. That's about it. I did not appreciate the animal abuse. Geoff Morrell, Susan Lyons (familiar from somewhere). Harold Hopkins, Ray Barrett make it a little Don's Party reunion. Also John Hargreaves but I did not recognise him.

Ozmovies: a children's movie? Filmed in the Gilgandra Shire. David and Margaret: four stars each. Margaret reckoned life on the land is rarely shown on film. David said it was based on a play.

At the Tnorala (Gosse Bluff) meteorite crater, waiting out the interminable rain. A Karel Reisz jag from Who'll Stop the Rain. Albert Finney leads as a self aware, self destructive industrial prisoner of the English generation after World War II. Shackled to a lathe in Nottingham during the day, living with his parents still, he's eventually saved by the love of a good woman (Shirley Anne Field) but it is unclear the restlessness will ever leave him. Fun, both in itself and as a time capsule: it opens in a bar with a drinking contest backed by a proto-Beatles band doing its thing.

Bosley Crowther loved it at the time. Peter Bradshaw, briefly, in 2002.

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched at the Temple Bar Caravan Park at Alice Springs. I went into this cold, knowing little more than where the "Never Never" was (roughly Mataranka in the N.T., where there's a sign). Well, this thing claims to be based on a novel from 1908, about Elsey Station circa 1902, but denatures that story with more recent attitudes to feminism and the debasement of Aboriginal culture and removal of children. Everything feels half-hearted and inessential.

Many of the cast from The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith star here. Tommy Lewis was demoted from lead to a generic Aboriginal stockman ("Jackaroo") whereas his minor-role wife in that picture, Angela Punch McGregor, starred here as Jeannie Gunn (the author of the source material, the first white woman to live in the area). Similarly Arthur Dignam, who played her husband and station manager Aeneas, had a small part there as the nameless "Man in Butcher Shop" of strong opinions (and also as the "Old Man in Pub / Mercedes Driver" in Beneath Clouds). I enjoyed his performance though it was clearly too sensitive, quiet and reflective for a production that screamed out for a cruder instrument like Jack Thompson. Also John Jarrett.

After some promising beginnings things slow to a soporific, tiresome cadence of repeating events (fever, how many times; horse mustering, how many times). The cinematography (by Gary Hansen) is surprisingly feeble given the setting. The romantic stuff is sappy. The Chinese cooks are electric and criminally underused. There are no crocs, insects or sweat stains. Did the men of the day really carry handguns? One part made me wonder about influences: an Elder (Donald Blitner) asks "baccy Maluka?" of Aeneas, a pronoun I had only seen used by Xavier Herbert (in the 1930s). Jeannie does enquire after it and is given a poor explanation.

Paul Byrnes was unimpressed with the source material and the film. Excess details at Ozmovies: mostly it's an unloved punching bag (see Janet Maslin and Brian McFarlane amongst others). Also the DVD contains a 1974 smoogery of C.P. Mountford's Walkabout and Tjurunga ethnographic/anthropological films that has its moments and nothing to do with the feature.

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched at the Temple Bar Caravan Park at Alice Springs. A very early Ealing Studios-in-Australia production in black and white, shot in South Australia near the Flinders Ranges. The plot is very stock: frontier violence, the customary story of the dispossession of indigenous people. What makes it worthwhile is that there is some great footage of a very expressive Aboriginal tribe (actually two). I enjoyed how they captured the critical role that sign language plays in a hunting culture. So, for the most part, it was far better than I expected, right up to that bust of an ending (reconciliation in ten seconds) where the Aborigines are somehow convinced to shear sheep, presumably in return for continued access to their waterhole. To be fair shearing did become part of the culture in some areas, alongside rugby league.

Paul Byrnes. Ozmovies. Deb Verhoeven: yeah, I also enjoyed Michael Pate's efforts here.

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched over a couple of nights beside Ilparpa Road at Alice Springs. Beyond redemption in all regards: this release was almost unwatchably low-fi, while the feature itself goes through all the motions familiar from Westerns and later Ozploitation movies. Maureen O’Hara leads as the unfathomably single daughter of South Australia-station-owning Irishman Finlay Currie. (Despite the familiarity of her name, I can't recall seeing her before.) Plotwise it's tiresome. The bulk of the second half is a cattle muster/drove that is pretty much the same as all cattle musters/droves, including the one in Australia. IMDB tells me it was the first Technicolor Hollywood production in Australia. The accents are all over the map. Director Lewis Milestone did much better on many other projects.

Bosley Crowther was bored apart from "some interesting scenes of the fauna and flora" and the scenes featuring Aborigines — shades of Walkabout. Ozmovies: it's always been a dog.

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched over a couple of nights at the Temple Bar Caravan Park at Alice Springs. Despite the best intentions of writer/director Imogen Thomas it just isn't very good. The best parts are Brewarrina, gently and unoriginally photographed, and the emus. The acting and dialogue are not great, which didn't matter so much in Ivan Sen's Toomelah (filmed a bit further east at Moree) as he was careful to tell a story within a community he was connected to rather than at the whitefella/blackfella interface. The themes are of grieving and loss, of growing up in a small town, of the saving graces of an extended family and being connected to land. Some of the redemptive parts seem unearned.

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched a bit west of Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). It's a dog of a production. I have no idea why anyone would think that revisiting the Cronulla riots of 2005 in 2016 would be worthwhile. Initially I thought it was trying to update Romper Stomper but then I realised the failing humour made it a poor imitation of Chris Morris's Four Lions. I can't see how this shtick works for anyone. Damon Herriman is Hollywood's canonical Charlie Manson (cf Mindhunter). David Field has never been more unconvincing and doesn't even show us the ‘bra.

Amal Awad for SBS at the time. Yep, Four Lions.

And yet more Elia Kazan completism. Kazan career-fatally produced and directed this adaptation of his own novel. There's a dash of Office Space (a bloke waking up to the vacuity of his job and domestic arrangements) mixed in with some of the Dr. Strangelove of the day. Kirk Douglas leads as an advertising genius (for Zephyr cigarettes) married to Deborah Kerr's accommodating empty vessel who all the ambient professional men are in love with. Faye Dunaway shines as the office tramp. There's a Greek father/son thread that feels like a bit of a dry run for the more successful Pacino/Brando relationship in The Godfather.

IMDB trivia. The rating on IMDB is dire (6.4) but really it's a lot better than that; I'd like to think it'd win an Oscar if it was made in 2022. Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Vincent Canby: in the same genre as Written on the Wind. I think both reviewers took it too seriously, or perhaps expected more of Kazan. It is fun damnit.

Again.

Bosley Crowther and Roger Ebert (three stars) at the time. Ebert says he had yet to see A Fistful of Dollars and decries the lack of plot; on the contrary I felt there was still too much of one here.

Again.

For reasons unknown I am very entertained by Rod Steiger's performance here. Perhaps it is because he has straight man James Coburn to bounce off. The final scenes made me think of Heat.

Roger Ebert did not review it. Vincent Canby. Generally unloved it seems.

nth time around with this Sergio Leone classic.

Renata Adler at the time, during her brief tenure as a film critic for the New York Times: knives out. Roger Ebert at the time (three stars) and as a "great movie" in 2003 (for an instant four stars and a rueful reassessment of his 1968 review).

In two sittings. Eliza Kazan completism; I've got a ways to go yet. William Inge was Oscared for the screenplay, which is essentially Southern Gothic. The plot is right there in the title card: Kansas 1928. Soon enough we're introduced to there-will-be-blood oil tycoon Pat Hingle who is single-handedly making the town rich. Oscar-nommed Natalie Wood had the thankless task of playing a hysterical Ophelia (these things don't age well do they?) who repeats the name of Warren Beatty's character ("Bud", her high school sweetheart) thousands of times. It was his first feature and he's pretty wooden. There's a dash of Jack Nicholson in those eyebrows but more of James Dean in how he was shot. Barbara Loden had the most fun as Beatty's trampy sister.

Bosley Crowther at the time.

Kindle. Second time around with this Australian classic about Geraldton and Margaret River meeting in a duplexed mansion in Perth, at the Swan River, about twenty years after the first and more than thirty since it was published. Things were initially absorbingly taut but got flabby (schmaltzy) later on; lurv for Winton is an ungainly beast. The eventual multi-generational household seemed so unlike Australia to me, which was and is on a long-term trajectory to single-person abodes (as is the world). Perhaps Winton's answer to why-do-they-bother, the family, only ever satisfied some. And what to make of the Aboriginal elements.

Goodreads. Yes, many of the named lack characterisation. Marion Halligan at the time: a flawed piece of literature but a great yarn. Joseph Olshan showed how the international press missed the mark. And so on. But really it's beyond reviewing. Somehow I have little interest in watching the bowdlerised TV miniseries.

Kindle. Pre-pandemic travel writing about South Australia, the state which is often subject to a desultory shellacking and yet is recognised as one of the best places in the world to visit. Stubbs did what few seem willing to do: he took the place seriously.

He covered: Maralinga, the cave dwellers of Coober Pedy, freshwater snorkelling at Mount Gambier, Chinese landing in Adelaide and Robe and walking to the Victorian goldfields at Ballarat, shark cage diving off the coast of Port Lincoln, the coinage of "the crow eaters", maintaining the dog fence, Wilpena Pound, Goyder's Line, the drinking but not the races at Innamincka, the Murray River and Coorong, the RFDS, Kangaroo Island, the City of Elizabeth (cf Jimmy Barnes), some Australian Utopianism (Paraguay, William Lane) and finally Adelaide. He's near the edge of anthropology/archaeology, journalism and travel writing, sometimes with excessive colour (cf The Ghetto at the Centre of the World). There are some good bits but oftentimes things fall away before they really get cranking. He tries to engage with Aboriginal groups and issues.

Stubbs did not cover (in any depth): sport, vineyards, Torrens title (or who Torrens was) or politics in general, the cuttlefish at Whyalla, music (Paul Kelly, Redgum, Doc Neeson/The Angels), festivals, Emu Field, Speed Week, the RAAF, submarine construction and shipbuilding, etc. — which is to say that he didn't get that far off the beaten track. His writing needed a bit of an edit; there are a few too many dodgy non sequiturs. For instance Adelaide being billed as the "City of Churches" bears no relation to how religious people are now. And convict-freedom was more about forced transportation (being compelled to South Australia, coerced to labour or to change religion) and less about being convicted of a crime. Also Newsouth Books needed to employ a fact checker: the old Ghan (the Central Australia Railway) never made it much past Alice Springs, and certainly not to Darwin.

The chapter on Maralinga was excerpted at the New York Times and also Inside Story. Goodreads.

A Ridley Scott jag from Bladerunner, and incidentally starring Nicolas Cage. I enjoyed it on its own terms: a father (Cage) — daughter (Alison Lohman) con movie. Sam Rockwell does not escape his comfort zone. Everyone's OK, including Bruce McGill (a dial well familiar from many movies over many decades) and the uncredited Melora Walters from Magnolia. It's likely that if you're familiar with the genre you'll see everything coming, but from this distance and lack of buy-in I wondered if it wasn't riffing on other elements of Cage's career, like Raising Arizona, of which I remember nothing.

Roger Ebert: four stars. There is no downtime in this movie. David Edelstein was unimpressed, as were A. O. Scott and Stephanie Zacharek.

Kindle. Execrable; I kept waiting for it to get better and it just didn't. There were signs of satirical intention but it's not funny. The crappy dialogue and the spaghetti chapter order (that I was too disengaged to follow closely) made me feel that Coupland didn't have a story worth telling. Surely he knew that this area (child beauty pageants, L.A., fame, money, drugs, Lolita, etc. etc.) has been done to death and he had no new angle. The plot is entirely coincidence.

Goodreads.

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched out the back of the Nullarbor Roadhouse near the Murrawijinie Caves. I saw a production of the David Williamson play back in 2007 but didn't remember anything of it. This was weak. Rumpole Leo McKern retires from a life of communism and civil engineering in Melbourne to fishing in Port Douglas with Julia Blake, who is no more than a sex object for the (non-)superannuated men to slobber over. He is invariantly irascible; how they met and how their relationship functioned before the move is a mystery. Aggressively hospitable neighbour Graham Kennedy is a bit too wooden. GP Henri Szeps fidgets while he waits for his cue then ejaculates his lines. Overall it just mines the old warnings of moving away from friends and family, which really is no problem for Rumpole as he only has a tenuous connection with a daughter. The rampant egoism is tedious.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars at the time. Some colour from Paul Byrnes. Vincent Canby: dreary. Excess details at Ozmovies.

Vale Vangelis. Somehow I don't think I've seen the director's cut before: the actors' voices don't quite line up with the soundtrack, there's the odd extra bit of footage. I should try to watch the original (with narration) some time. Still #175 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert: original release in 1982 (three stars), director's cut in 1992 (three stars) and final cut in 2007 (also, finally, a great movie so an instant four stars). He never mentions the Vangelis soundtrack. Janet Maslin in 1982. She does.

Kindle. Do we need another account of growing up gay in violent and predatory early-1990s Glasgow? Early on I felt the answer might be yes but towards the end I was rushing through the repetitious and almost circular inevitabilities. The writing is good but not as taut in the small as it was in Shuggie Bain. The convergent two track plot is depressingly unsurprising. And come on, we've known for a long time that every family has a Begbie who's into sectarian violence because it's fun.

Molly Young. Cameron Woodhead. And so on. Could it be that reviewers today are (generationally) unaware of Trainspotting? Much later, Adam Mars-Jones, who spills half his words on other books, shows more of a clue.

Kindle. Mercifully brief. Coupland doesn't motivate why he writes about this company; it was in decline at the time (circa 2013) and was only ever famous (just maybe) for owning Bell Labs from 2006 until 2016. Wikipedia suggests that Coupland got in just before it was parted out, and you'd have to think that the purchasers are just as hopeless. The prospects for fundamental research (in the computer industry at least) have been grim for some time. There's very little in this text.

Goodreads.

Ivan Sen's debut feature; apparently an elaboration of his short Tears from 1998. It opens with some great cinematography (by Allan Collins) of the B-doubles and grain silos out past Moree. Two school girls seem to be waiting for the bus opposite the only shop for miles, where the boys loiter. One (Dannielle Hall) is clearly slated for an exit. Down the track she meets up with escapee Damian Pitt who had been working on the Christmas conifers at a prison farm near Lithgow. Neither went on with the acting. The story goes as it must with some predictably telling encounters. Sen leans heavily on motif and a late 1990s electronic soundtrack of his own devising. You can see why his next stop was Toomelah. I enjoyed it and would say this was his best effort thus far.

Loads of details and reviews at Ozmovies. Four-and-a-half stars from Margaret, four from David. Many reviews fend off claims of special pleading for Australian movies, and most do not grasp that Sen was reaching for a kind of affected, telling yet fake realism ala Hal Hartley through the cinematography and mannered dialogue of the untutored actors.

Kindle. Halberstam's take on the early-to-middle part of the USA's war in Việt Nam circa 1965 (when Robert S. McNamara was the Secretary of Defence and the USA had yet to commit more than CIA and military advisers to the conflict). The single thread, with discursive capsule biographies of the main characters, takes us along on a day in the field somewhere between Mỹ Tho and Sóc Trăng on the Mekong Delta. There's not a lot to recommend this specific take: the American elements are essentially drawn from Catch-22 where experience (even under the influence) beats youthful whizz-kiddery, while the Vietnamese emphasise patronage networks but do not provide much insight into the methods of the North (cf The Moon of Hòa Bình). It's tidily written and unsurprising.

Wilfrid Sheed (En Route to Nowhere) at the time: these are the bits that Halberstam couldn't get published in his dispatches. Eliot Fremont-Smith, also in the New York Times in January 1968. Goodreads was retrospectively unimpressed.

Random and misdirected Bruce Spence completism; he's merely in the brief framing story, whereas the meat is a putatively humorous (read scatological) redubbing of an old Italian muscleman movie.

Excess details at Wikipedia and Ozmovies.

More animation. Drawn by fond memories of author-of-the-books Aaron Blabey's efforts in Erskineville Kings a long time ago. I knew I was in for a derivative heist flick due to Calum Marsh's review for the New York Times but had hoped it wouldn't be quite so inane.

Sandra Hall: a generous 3.5 stars, out of 5 I think. She left the token female tarantula geek out of the gang. Luke Goodsell's interview with Blabey at the ABC made the books look like a lot more fun.

Second time around.

Third time around with this Pixar classic. Still #227 in the IMDB top-250 despite all the Marvel movies since.

Three-and-a-half stars from Roger Ebert.

Kindle. It seems I read Virtual Light back in 2009; the remainder of the series mustn't have been on mrak's shelf I guess. I didn't get much out of it — again I hurried to finish it, thinking there'd be something later on, past all the florid description. There wasn't. Near as I could tell Gibson merely synthesised a bunch of things that were well known in the 1990s. (He even found room for Chopper.) The plot boiled down to what happens when a disembodied pure spirit (obviously a femme fatale) meets a construction technology (here nanobots). Beyond the obvious, Gibson does not tell us. More annoyingly he does not follow his disembodied conceit beyond the first step; Egan's imaginings appear to be far beyond him. Overall too much object fetishism, too incoherent and too inconsequential.

Goodreads, Goodreads (come on people, Max Headroom was constructed in the 1980s), Goodreads.

Co-written and directed by Phillip Noyce. Based on some raw material from Bob Ellis and David Elfick. Despite the frame (the production of news reels after World War II) this is really about 1970s Australia looking back at its 1940s/1950s, in the same vein as American Graffiti, The Last Picture Show, etc. etc. Within this nostalgia both periods saw the great days of the ALP traduced by scare campaigns (Menzies's attempts at banning the Communist party and the Dismissal respectively.) Well before Vatican II and Brides of Christ the mores of the local Catholicism are shown to bend under the duress of imported culture. I don't recall seeing Bill Hunter snog a woman before; Wendy Hughes was the unlucky lady here. She embodied an era when even a free-spirited and able woman needed a man, and was otherwise squandered. Bryan Brown, especially wooden. Gerard Kennedy did OK as the grasping opportunist. Bruce Spence had a bit of fun hamming it up as the driver of a Beetle on the Redex Trail endurance race (see also Peter Carey). I doubt these guys were living down near the Waverley Cemetery. Overall there's a failure to generate the sympathy for the characters that this sort of thing demands; it's not as rueful or sophisticated as something like The Remains of the Day. Perhaps it just didn't have much to say, now or then.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. He got hung up on the economic impacts of technological change, which is fair enough. Janet Maslin found it rueful. Ozmovies: yes, "the seamless integration of actual newsreel footage with the drama" showed great compositional skill. I remain mystified as to why Noyce is deemed a great director.

The Lindy and Michael Chamberlain story. Meryl Streep got an Oscar nom for playing Lindy; I thought she did OK with the strayan accent but not so well with the body language or facial expressions: the latter struck me as too calculated. Sam Neil does OK too as Michael. Fred Schepisi co-adapted and directed the raw material by John Bryson. It's well constructed, putting enough of the nation's opinions and milieus on the table and exploring the dodgy forensics without tedium. It took me a while to place dodgy forensic scientist Sandy Gore: she played Mother Ambrose in Brides of Christ.

Ozflicks: 5 stars apiece from Margaret and David (video review). David: Picnic at Hanging Rock minus Weir's dreaminess. Ozmovies. Three stars from Roger Ebert. Vincent Canby loved Streep's work.

Odeon 5, 13.00 session, with Dave. I used the last of my NSW discover pork barrels (+ 18.18 AUD for some Maltesers and a ticket for Dave). Opening day. I went in cold and was not particularly surprised to find that this was one for the Nicolas Cage fans; the marketing made me hope it'd draw on more of his diverse roles. (I was expecting to see that snakeskin jacket from Wild at Heart at least.) So hats off to the publicity folks once again.

Manohla Dargis. Peter Bradshaw. Dana Stevens. Jake Wilson.

On a dodgy VHS rip. Written and directed by John Duigan. Shot in the old Sydney, long gone now: the Cross, Oxford Street, Balmain, the Harbour, uranium demos, back when you could live within sight of water on a teaching and bookshop salary, which was never. Judy Davis, junkie. Baz Luhrmann, junkie. Bryan Brown, wooden (in that stretch when he was in every Australian movie). A gorgeous black cat. Everyone so young.

There's not much here beyond Judy Davis's turn as a nervy streetwalker; she's got the same thing that Samantha Morton had in Under the Skin but not whatever got Jodie Foster through Taxi Driver. The homage to the city was later echoed in the blokier Erskineville Kings. The scenario is similar to Naked (and other Australian films like Angel Baby) in moving around the town, exploring different milieus, but lacked the spark of a David Thewlis or Jacqueline McKenzie that may've set the whole show on fire. I won't liken the inevitable cold turkey, getting clean, going straight scenes to anything else; those are forgettable.

Three stars from Roger Ebert with a synopsis way off the mark. Vincent Canby: too much like everything else out there. Excess details at Ozmovies.

On a dead tree printed on demand in Sydney by Amazon (52.87 AUD for the pair). More proof I'll read anything by Kobek. This was presumably his COVID project: an internet + library investigation into the venerable Zodiac killings from the late 1960s near San Francisco. I chugged them both in a couple of days (that's about 600 pages worth) and retained very little. It's a lot flatter and more earnest than his previous efforts — there's not a lot of culture crit. I think he meant it to be taken seriously.

Reddit does not appear to be interested. Kobek did an interview with Bret Easton Ellis that I'm not going to watch. Goodreads: #1 and #2. And later, Laura Miller and even later Aaron Gell, and after that Dani Anguiano.

A David Byrne co-written/directed paean to changing modes of consumption and fashion in imagined small-town Texas. There's a touch of Wes Anderson or the Prairie Home Companion and the gee-whiz of 1980s semiconductors. The highlight, apart from Byrne himself, is John Goodman as a lovelorn panda bear. Prompted by Byrne's recent and yet-to-be-seen-by-me American Utopia.

Roger Ebert: 3.5 stars at the time. Also Janet Maslin.

John Duigan's followup to The Year My Voice Broke. Noah Taylor is sent to a single-sex Catholic boarding school by his parents (Malcolm Robertson and in a thankless role Judi Farr) but is sidelined by the debut of Thandiwe Newton (making this a jag from All the Old Knives). She's great but her character is underdrawn; she is perpetually bemused by the Australians she encounters at her Catholic boarding school, and perhaps by a scenario that is kinda sweet but adds up to little more than a quirkless adolescent male fantasy. Nicole Kidman (Ursula Andress) is OK but characteristically bland (perhaps even extra bland) in one of her final efforts before she headed to Hollywood. Naomi Watts is far more human. All the boys and Kym Wilson must've wondered why their careers stalled while the previously-mentioned went celestial.

Four stars from Roger Ebert at the time: he was entranced. Vincent Canby was less impressed. The third part of the trilogy didn't happen. Excess details are available at Wikipedia (Newton has recently claimed that she was abused by Duigan) and Ozmovies. Some of it was filmed at Stannies in Bathurst.

Kindle. Arnott's debut. The style and ambit are similar to his more recent prize-winning effort, which is to say it's Tasmanian magic realism that imitates Richard Flanagan's more flighty fantasies. Here the heroines are drawn from comic books; these ladies can do anything because they are empowered with the essential characteristics of men, specifically a capacity for unanswerable violence. The plot leans unassuredly on vengeful elemental spirits, putatively inhuman but really subject to the kind of lurv that excuses all behaviours. Further motivation is generally lacking. The most successful parts cleave closely to genre tropes and things go in obvious directions. It's an amiable way to pass the time.

Goodreads: too much Gaiman's American Gods?

Misguided Tuesday Weld completism. Released juvenile detainee Anthony Perkins gets out-psychoed by schoolgirl Weld in a small town in Massachusetts. It's a snoozefest.

Vincent Canby: not one of her stronger performances.

Kindle. A pointer from Omar El Akkad at the New York Times. The main thread is set against the rise of Bhutto over General Ayub in late 1960s Pakistan. The titular character is charged with cleaning up an "accident" in the red-light district of Lahore by his distant and powerful father. On the multitrack is an account of that man and his acquaintances; one formative experience is in an Italian P.O.W. camp in north Africa during World War II. The son has a parallel but far emptier experience during the Bangladesh Liberation War (name taken from Wikipedia) that I guess does provoke some love in his wife.

Every so often Ahmad nails a sentiment perfectly: Ali, returned to his family from the Indian P.O.W. camp but not yet fully honest with his wife, pretend-drinks tea from empty cups in his daughter's tent. Sometimes the writing is eye-glazingly flabby.

Goodreads. Many were offended by the language.

Prompted by Sen's autobiography. Satyajit Ray's first feature from the early 1950s. Strangely gripping for what is a mostly straightforward portrait of rural village living in West Bengal, 1920s, perhaps because it has since been pumped up so much. There is some brilliant black-and-white cinematography, especially of the dial of the young boy playing Apu (Subir Banerjee), and the whole show is helped along by Ravi Shankar's soundtrack. Modernity arrives in the form of electrical transmission towers and steam trains.

Deemed a "great movie" by Roger Ebert in 2001 (for an instant four stars) alongside its two sequels, which I'll now have to watch. Bosley Crowther, when it opened in NYC in 1958.

Peter Bradshaw gave four stars (of five) to this slick Amazon-produced ode to high-class Californian consumption. The cast is strong (Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, and — why didn't they tell me — Larry Fishburne) but the cat-and-mouse game of erstwhile CIA operatives sorting out the blame for some terrorism involving a plane is weak; the plot is essentially how lurv solves the trolley problem. Go watch Sleuth instead.

Dana Stevens seems to be struggling to write full-length reviews these days. Ben Kenigsberg.

Kindle. Kobek completism triggered by his new books on the Zodiac killer. I wasn't familiar with the notional subject of this book or many of the references but as always the real topic is the rottenness of the (American/internet) culture. I found it less angry than his previous effort and also less essential: he's said much of this before. There are some good bits, but not as many as are in his masterworks.

Goodreads.

Kindle. I've been a fan of Sen's technical presentations for quite a while and was hoping his memoir would shed some light on how it all came about. This is mostly about his childhood and early adulthood — the economist as a young man — and there's not a lot after he got the chair at Delhi School of Economics. The bulk is on his very early days in Bengal. He rambles at times; for instance the glosses on social choice are a curious mix of the obvious and the narrow or technical. He is clearly very proud of his analysis of liberalism but does not really attempt to explain it.

Varun Ghosh summarised it for the Australian Book Review: "regular digressions into tangential (and often esoteric) subject matter will limit the readability of the book and leave the picture of Amartya Sen himself largely unfinished." Abhrajyoti Chakraborty adds some recent colour. Goodreads. Later Fara Dabhoiwala. And so forth.

On a DVD extracted from Orange City Library. Extraneous Eric Bana completism. He plays a Romanian father with a peripatetic German wife transplanted to rural Victoria after the war. The main theme is the democratised abundance of poverty and mental unwellness in the 1960s.

I don't know much about Raimond Gaita (and I don't have the patience to read his impressions of this movie) beyond him being a general fixture in the Australian (read Melbourne) literary scene a decade or two back. His book (the source material) clearly meant a lot to many people (see Goodreads) but this adaptation, directed by Richard Roxburgh, is inessential and lifeless. Bana does OK, as he always does, and a young Kodi Smit-McPhee (playing Raimond) leads and similarly does OK. Franka Potente (I remember Run Lola Run being marketed to death about a decade prior) and Marton Csokas are also OK. All the actors are OK but it's not enough.

Margaret and David at the time (with thanks to Ozflicks for doing what the ABC seemingly cannot).

A pointer from Christos Tsiolkas's prognosis for this year's Oscars:

Does anyone really care about the Oscars anymore? My own faith in their legitimacy was destroyed in 1982, in my final year in high school. I had watched all five films nominated for Best Picture over that summer, and when it was announced that Hugh Hudson's leaden historic drama Chariots of Fire had won over Warren Beatty's lushly romantic Reds and Louis Malle's exquisite chamber piece, Atlantic City, I turned off the television and muttered to myself, "They have no bloody idea!" And so, with the sanctimonious certainty of a 16-year-old, I dismissed every single voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I knew better: they were all wrong.

This is Burt Lancaster as a minor league mafioso, charged with taking care of his departed boss's wife (Kate Reid) for a stipend. The plot gets started with aspirational card dealer Susan Sarandon's husband (Robert Joy), who has impregnated her sister (Hollis McLaren), finding themselves in Philadelphia and soon in dire need of a coke distributor. They arrive in an Atlantic City that is being destroyed so it can be rebuilt as the Las Vegas of the east; this is somewhen before Trump got to it. All three are fleeing their tiny Canadian hometown. Things amble along genially in the mode of the times, culminating in a sort-of reverse Remains of the Day. It's as pure a piece of Americana as was ever built by a Frenchman.

Roger Ebert: four stars in 2005. Vincent Canby got right into it. IMDB trivia: Malle: "... [that] bizarre parking place with elevators — an absurd structure I have never seen anywhere else. It was so inconvenient, but it was typical of the place."

Out of sheer curiosity I dug up Adrian Lyne's previous feature (the last before his retirement). Diane Lane, married to a bland Richard Gere, goes all-in on an unmotivated affair with Olivier Martinez in 2002 in NYC. Once again there's a lot of repetitive repetition. Perhaps the highlight for me was when an ornament (a snow globe) witnesses common knowledge (!) — you can see the two leads falling into an unbounded epistemic abyss of dawning awareness. Otherwise it is far too often so dumb. The ending is amoral, unlike Lyne's earlier Lolita — there's an echo of it in a police siren in the closing scenes — and it is hard to see why things are left to dangle. That suburban living will get you every time.

Roger Ebert: three stars too many. Lane and Gere, serenely materialistic, yes. Stephen Holden. That scene where Lyne cuts from affair to train ride had me hoping he'd ride the ambiguity somewhere. Perhaps he, like Michael Mann, has just been remaking the same movie time and again.

Adrian Lyne un-retired to make this adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name. The cast looked solid (Tracy Letts has his moments, as does Ben Affleck and just maybe Ana de Armas) and I'd been warned it's farcical. But really, how many times can you replay the same scene? I tried to keep up while there was still some ambiguity but once the plot unkinked somewhere after halfway I couldn't figure out what the point was, what it was I might have been missing out on. Who are these people? I was too disengaged to follow the late twists, if there were any; the reviews suggest I was supposed to read more into what exactly gets Ana off.

Jeannette Catsoulis. Dana Stevens missed erotic thrillers but somehow made do with this one. She reminded me of how little is really made of Affleck's tech geek being mismarried to de Armas's squeaky party girl (yeah I know right bug eyes).

Ivan Sen's latest. Well I'm sure that many of us have wanted to remake Blade Runner at some time or other, even Ridley Scott. I'd expect most would tune the plot, retain the aesthetic and general post-everything Asian city (or Chinatown) vibe, soaking wet, but not slow things down to the pace of a sedated slug.

I couldn't figure out what Sen was reaching for. Is this a homage to Wong Kar Wai? Had he been watching too much Terrence Malick? I know he's unafraid to go deep into genre (cliché) but having a white man (Ryan Kwanten) roam an Asian city, stalking Jillian Nguyen's comfort-woman-with-wandering-accent, is pure #metoo bait. Life-extending Hugo Weaving is found whenever he's needed, but where's his Rutger Hauer? The editing did the story no favours. The mutually-intelligible multilinguality is an optimistic triviality.

Luke Buckmaster: two thankless stars. Elisabeth Vincentelli: don't expect much. The IMDB rating is steadily sinking; I get the impression not many people can be bothered to register an opinion.

Kindle. I don't usually read this sort of militaristic strategic imagineering. The draw was Elliot Ackerman despite the strong sense that the returns have been negligible for some time.

Briefly it's 2034 and China has decided that it's time to take Taiwan. (Putin, despite making a hash of many of their premises in the real world, is still in power.) The USA has tied itself up in technological knots and cannot do more than react. Contrary to Daniel Ellsberg there is a nuclear exchange that most humans survive. India has risen as the USA slid into third worldism.

Well, what can I say. The plot is derivative and holey; we begin with an almost scene-for-scene replay of the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek II, right down to having a woman in charge. Soon enough it's Dr. Strangelove with "Wedge" standing in for the far more entertaining Slim Pickens. It's probably intended more as a think piece, exploring their concerns through provocative situationalism, but even so their research is not good enough. (Just one example: severing internet cables running through the Arctic would have no effect on connectivity in the continental USA; I mean, just ask Google. I thought everyone knew it was designed to survive nuclear war.)

The authors have developments depend more on personal links than the institutions that the West claims to be comfortable with. (Some big moves depend on stale familial relations.) For all that and despite women being placed in positions of power, responsibility, and violence, when it comes to the substance of decision making men dominate.

Torn to shreds on Goodreads.

Third time around with this Michael Mann classic.

Kindle. Prompted by a glowing review by Dwight Garner.

In earlier times this may've been derided as autofiction or just perhaps on the edge of Tom Wolfe et al's New Journalism, whereas now it's billed as a fictionalised memoir. The view from the native-born son of educated Pakistanis who migrated to the USA is broad and shallow, treating topics done to death by others recently; while Garner (and Akhtar) point back to Scott F. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, I kept thinking of Mohsin Hamid's work from about a decade ago (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to get filthy rich in rising Asia) and Pankaj Mishra's capacious The Age of Anger. Performative mimesis, in short, and nowhere as punchy, transgressive or funny as Paul Beatty.

Topically we get Trump, a dash of Obama and bin Laden, racism in Pennsylvania, daddy issues (see, for instance, Lewis-Kraus), that economics (really financialisation) now dominates all other concerns and that this was observed by Emerson and Thoreau a long time ago, the limitations of a litigious society, black politics and how the white man's political machine is not going to solve anyone else's problems. A billionaire executes a slow-burning revenge fantasy, sending some racist municipalities broke with weaponized finance of mass and indiscriminate destruction. There's the odd self-contradiction, such as an affluent (self-described) black man thinking that spraying his money around ("maybe if we play our own game by their rules...") will make a difference. That's the general modus operandi I guess: the USA has snookered itself.

Akhtar is not a scientist; he operates entirely in the confirmation mode, constantly looking for validation and not the refutation that might prove his idea(s). (Consider the lengthy section on the predictive power of his dreams — I struggle to see it as something done for effect, a nod to the new age conspiracy theorists.) He is annoyingly patronising at times, talking to an imagined audience that he just knows is ignorant of Pakistan (and Afghanistan and ...), which doesn't work too well when he elides more telling episodes in history such as USA realpolitik in early 1970s East Pakistan. Performative amnesia? There's also a strange, irrelevant and wrong gesture at Gödel’s theorem. The originality or correctness of his claim that Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradox set the stage for the current-day megacorps (concomitant with loss of diversity and exacerbated fragility) is not clear to me. I did want to know more about the Muslim concept of corporation; that the absence of such precluded development in Islamic cultures is intriguing.

Goodreads. Hari Kunzru at length: the slab quote is a great way to avoid judgement.

Derek Cianfrance completism. Ryan Gosling leads as a never-do-well motorcycle stunt rider/robber with a wild oat until Bradley Cooper takes over as an ambitious cop. (The latter is essentially an underbaked, humourless retread of Guy Pearce's role in L.A. Confidential, and unfortunately the transition is not a David Lynch move.) Rounding out the excellent but underused cast are Rose Byrne as Cooper's wife, Eva Mendes and Mahershala Ali as parents, Ray Liotta at his blandest. Ben Mendelsohn's initial scenes are warm, friendly, funny with loads of energy. His character is too minor, too shallow for this to endure.

The ambition is for something like a crossbreed of a multi generational sprawling fable like Magnolia with the slickness of Michael Mann's Thief. (The opportunity to reheat the classic James Caan/Tuesday Weld scene is there but not taken; Gosling's character is not on that level.) It's just too flat, and by the time we get to the third act things are predictably tiresome; those boys are too young and cliched to hold our interest, and all the drugs and violence in the world aren't going to help with that. Mike Patton is credited with the tunes.

A. O. Scott. Dana Stevens: too soulfully self-serious.

I remember enjoying Michelle Williams's effort in Manchester by the Sea; this is something similar. Also Leon has softened me up to Ryan Gosling who is fine and quite fun here too.

Director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance (Oscar nominated for Sound of Metal) shows us the beginning and the end of their relationship in a smooth interleaved style that, after synchronising in the middle, slips into a relentless groove. I get the sense that, like me, Gosling's Dean reached peak adult around age 25 while Williams's Cindy is still studying, aspiring to become a medical doctor. We don't see the middle, where his schtick and her desire both wear out. She spends a lot of the movie saying "no" and thereabouts — these are modulated and aren't always in exasperation. The cracks in their situation are often skilfully exposed and complexified by their daughter.

For mine they could've omitted the psychologising, the parental dysfunction and the workplace predation, though I grant they wanted something to hang a plot from. (Further streamlining may well have yielded Manchester by the Sea a few years earlier.) I'd've preferred more of just what Dean thinks he's doing in rescuing Cindy; it struck me that even as he seems to shoulder responsibility early on he may simply have been taking advantage of Cindy in a vulnerable moment, and that he unreasonably expected her gratitude to last forever.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. I don't agree that Dean was looking for a witness in Cindy, but he definitely took what he could get. Dana Stevens: too many of these movies may bring the human race to extinction. A. O. Scott: she wants him to want things but he's satisfied with what he's got.

An adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's '—All You Zombies—' (1958) by the Spierig brothers who were new to me. Notionally an Australian production. For Noah Taylor. Ethan Hawke leads as some kind of time cop. The plot is essentially an unmotivated temporal ouroboros despite starting close to Minority Report. The period scifi elements (Space Corp, The Handmaid's Tale headwear) could've been omitted for some benefit; one can only imagine what John Duigan would've made of this in a bucolic setting. Sarah Snook mostly succeeds in a gender bending role. I remembered Freya Stafford batting her eyelashes in Gettin' Square.

Manohla Dargis. Yep, Snook looks a lot like Di Caprio at times.

On a DVD from Orange City Library. Written and directed by John Duigan. I don't know if he had any attachment to Braidwood, NSW where this was shot; Wikipedia suggests not. I feel like I saw this on VHS back in the 1990s.

Yet another coming of age set in the early 1960s. (Compare against a random sample: Praise, Peggy Sue Got Married, and to a lesser extent, The Fringe Dwellers from the year before.) Noah Taylor and Loene Carmen are childhood friends with great chemistry that is put to good use by Duigan's script. (She later played Sallie-Anne Huckstepp in Blue Murder.) There's something of Don Walker's Shots in their relationship. Later Ben Mendelsohn, so young, relegates Noah to a sexless third wheel; apart from being too weedy for a rugby league fullback (I'd've thought) he does a great job as a randy young larrikin with OCD and a vague sense of responsibility who just wants to set lap records on the local racetrack in someone else's Mercedes. Beautifully shot and the setting is used to brilliant effect.

Caryn James in the New York Times, at the time. Luke Buckmaster in 2015. Ah yes, barflies Harold Hopkins (also the footy coach) and Graham Blundell. Paul Byrnes, briefly: perhaps I am too inured to the hypocrisy of small country towns to have seen the savagery. More colour at Oz movies. Bruce Spence! Gold.

Kindle. Richard Flanagan's introduction to a recent reprinting prompted me to dig up this mid-century American classic.

Essentially a series of portraits of hard living in the South from 1930 to 1932 as the depression put the screws on many people. It struck me as a sourcebook for many movies. First up Algren has thirty-year-old Latina Terasina take pity on illiterate sixteen-year-old Dove Linkhorn in the Rio Grande Valley (shades of Licorice Pizza). By jumping the rails (ala Scarecrow) Dove makes his way to the red light district of New Orleans, where many of those insulated from the economic fallout burn their money, to morph into Dirk Diggler of Boogie Nights. The final movement has Dove learn to read and write before being incarcerated for public drunkenness; one of the characters has a touch of Cool Hand Luke. Ultimately he returns home after he is blinded by a wrestler who lost his legs to the rails.

Overall it's almost entirely colour drawn from Algren's direct experience. Unlike John Steinbeck there's less moralising and more direct memoir or reportage; perhaps Of Mice and Men was the inspiration for a jailbird who echoes what's said to him. I found it to be a slog at times.

Goodreads. Russell Banks's introduction to a 1990 edition: even more referentialism.

Jason Di Rosso interviewed director Radu Jude back in November. It took me two sittings to get through this as it's not very engrossing. The first part is an almost still-life of Bucharest, the middle section a series of mostly twee montages, and the final is the parent/teacher meeting/confrontation of substantial cliche. The motor for the plot is a homemade porn video (which we see a fair bit of) that the teacher claims was loosed on the internet by someone repairing her husband's computer. This movie aims to provoke but fails to even trigger. Hats off to the marketing people.

Loads of positive reviews. A. O. Scott. J. Hoberman. Exuberant?

Marginally less misguided Nicholson completism. Again a Carole Eastman script. It struck me as derivative even for 1966. The early dialogue was a bit impenetrable (for the effort I was prepared to expend) and the parts of the plot I grasped struck me as cliched and under motivated. There's a stranger with a beard and an inscrutable Indian. Horses, two donkeys. A small cast. Some of the scenery is interesting, bordering on beautiful.

Misguided Jack Nicholson completism. Carole Eastman wrote this drecky farce. Mike Nichols directed. Warren Beatty costarred, and never did more than babble. Stockard Channing was the heiress object. I was warned.

Vincent Canby must've been watching something else.

A Bruce Beresford concoction from 1986. Adapted by him and his wife-of-the-time Rhoisin from the book by Western Australian Nene Gare. (Here's Beresford at 80 in 2021.) Filmed in Cherbourg and Murgon, and as such a nicely made time capsule of mid-1980s regional Queensland. An Aboriginal family moves from the shantytown near the river to a Council house in town. Culture clashes ensue. All the leads are Aboriginal; the whites are teachers, snotty schoolgirl bitches, cops and curtain-twitching neighbours who rapidly exceed their well-meaning tolerance. The family consists of a final-year teenager (Kristina Nehm), the walls closing in on limited prospects, her amiable parents (Justine Saunders and Bob Maza), stuck between ways old and new, her sister (Kylie Belling), a trainee nurse who is subject to some effective positive discrimination, and her younger brother (Denis Walker) who draws at every opportunity. The rest of the mob is too large for me to enumerate; Beresford's achievement is that they do have distinct personalties.

The narrative arc is the usual it's-a-free-country aspirationalism with a dash of the downward spiral; you know from the start that whatever the outcome the old ways are cactus and everyone will (want to) be deracinated. Beresford leavens it all with some very funny dialogue, the odd antic down at the river, and a poignant song about the stolen generations. These days it'd be deplatformed as cultural appropriation, but I guess I hope it was a bridge to more people telling their own stories in their own ways.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars.

Ava Gardner and the title evoke The Night of the Iguana from 1963. Unfortunately she had little to work with as a lush love interest for Gregory Peck's nuclear submarine captain. (His Oscaring for To Kill a Mockingbird was also in 1963.) Fred Astaire played a suicidal scientist/engineer. A not-yet-Psycho Anthony Perkins and young wife Donna Anderson (hysterical as demanded by the times) rounded out the main cast. Amongst various maulings of Waltzing Matilda we obliquely learn that a nuclear exchange in 1964 has exterminated humanity in the northern hemisphere, leading this Hollywood cabal to set up shop in a back-to-the-future Melbourne (Point Lonsdale, Frankston, horses and carts, bicycles, far from the fallout) where alcohol, boat races, romance and endless cigarettes are all that's on offer in the end times.

Aboard the sub on a tour of the sterile Pacific, Astaire mouths off at vacuum tubes and transistors (not so far from Kaczynski), reflecting the fear and not the reality of the missile gap propaganda of the day. Soon enough that was supplanted by the Mutually Assured Destruction of the far superior Dr. Strangelove. I wonder if all the arse slapping is in Nevil Shute's novel.

Somewhat topical with the current Russian assault on the Ukraine. Bosley Crowther at the time. Trivia at IMDB.

And yet more proof that I'll watch Sharlto Copley do almost anything. Despite his efforts this pseudo biopic of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is lifeless. It could've been Into the Wild, a visceral exploration of neo-luddism, but the threadbare psychologizing precludes any substantial investigation of the motivations for his domestic terrorism. (Given how disconnected he is from the rest of humanity I didn't get much sense of why he bothered.) Similarly his intellect is trivialised, and it hard to believe he really did pine for a woman.

The quotes from Kaczynski's manifesto sounded like an intriguing diagnosis for the ills of modern society but it's hard to know if that's a swamp worth wading into. The central contention is that the capture of humanity by systems and technology is inevitable, self-reinforcing and deleterious to anything one might hold dear. It struck me as being in the vein of Thoreau. Janet Maslin quotes a book about all this: "The manifesto is neither brilliant nor a symptom of mental illness. It is a compendium of philosophical and environmental clichés that expresses concerns shared by millions of Americans." And so forth. Wikipedia points to its impacts.

Beatrice Loayza at the New York Times: "The script's emphasis on Kaczynski's relentless bachelorhood and his feelings of castration is too neat an explanation. More convincing is the film's expressionistic fixation on the technologies that torment Kaczynski — the ugly roar of dirt bikes, snowmobiles and tree-razing bulldozers. In one remarkable dream sequence, we see Kaczynski seemingly shooting through the space-time continuum, looking small and terrified and like the kind of man who would kill to feel a sense of control." You can only imagine how Montana-native David Lynch would've cooked this one. He might've made something of those big cats.

One of Francis Ford Coppola's 1980s misses that I'd been avoiding. Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) has a coronary (?) at her 25th high school reunion (~1986) and wakes up in her 17 year old body (~1960). Again a piece of California nostalgia: high school as the best time of a woman's life. The funniest bits are delivered quick and flat, whereas the schmaltz lingers excessively. The time travel issues are handled with shrugs. I struggle to see how Nicholas Cage (charmless here) made it to Wild at Heart in barely four more years. Jim Carrey, Joan Allen, etc. Non-spoiler: Peggy Sue does not, in fact, get married in this movie.

Four stars from Roger Ebert, mostly on relatability. Vincent Canby at a film festival (?) ("So much key information is missing or left uncertified or undramatized that the film appears to have been edited by termites") and after its general release (the world changed more between 1910 and 1950 than it did from 1950 to ~1986).

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest. Exactly what it says on the tin: fanciful coming-of-age in the Valley in 1973. Alana Haim (musician, notionally 25) leads with go-getting Cooper Hoffman (sprog of Philip Seymour Hoffman, notionally 15). Apparently filmed in that old school analog way that borrows a tinge from the American New Wave. It's sufficiently engaging that it doesn't drag but often enough there are scenes that don't progress things or don't really fit, such as all those featuring established actors (Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper). For all the possibilities the surface is barely scratched, let alone dinted or pierced. It's a nostalgic love letter to a long gone L.A.

Manohla Dargis. Entirely low stakes. Ah yes, those disastrously flat and tasteless scenes in the Japanese restaurant, that bloke playing Cooper's manservant. Dana Stevens. Benny Safdie does fine with the little he gets; this is no Uncut Gems. And so on.

Kindle. On the strength of David Thomson's scatty but intriguing review at the London Review of Books. In brief, a series of capsule bios of artistic L.A. people mixed in with the author’s personal life: the passing of an alcoholic mother, a relentlessly successful father, making it in NYC, getting divorced in California. Overall this mourns what was, melancholic rather than elegiac in its focus on what happens after success.

His notions of success and failure are very American but don't entirely own to the commercial forces at work. (Sure there are the studios but how about Madison Avenue? Would you still write or create for the screen without the economic imperatives?) The premise worked OK for Carole Eastman and the Perrys, largely due to their obscurity, enigma and self-effacement, but started to flag with the chapter on Tuesday Weld which leans heavily on a very few interviews (such as this one in 1971). By the time we get to Renata Adler the staleness is pervasive as Spektor critiques her criticism. (You may as well cut to the chase with that LRB review's extra layer of criticism.) He wants her famous takedown of Pauline Kael to have not killed her career, and sure enough it didn't, but that is to gloss over her persona non grata status amongst the NYC literati for telling tales out of school. That's obvious even from the antipodes as, for instance, the New York Review of Books never published her again. This general lack of nuance reads like the wishful thinking of third-shot boosterism.

So I'd say that the review was better than the book, though I was happy to get a few pointers to movies that just maybe are worth a look.

Another Matthew Spektor pointer to a Carole Eastman-written 1970 American New Wave piece. It's a portrait of the psychological disintegration of model Faye Dunaway. Very talky. Fashion ala Vogue. Rise and fall.

Roger Ebert didn't review it. Roger Greenspun for the New York Times. The arc has been a cliche since ancient times. He enjoyed his time with Ms Dunaway.

Second time around with this Jack Nicholson classic. Prompted by Matthew Spektor's Always Crashing in the Same Car which I'm midway through. He's fascinated by scriptwriter Carole Eastman. As before I enjoyed this as a time capsule but less so for the characters. Nicholson was, as always, very generous with the ladies playing opposite him: both he and squeeze Karen Black got Oscar noms, and his scenes with sister Lois Smith felt genuinely warm, something not so easy to achieve with all the womanising.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four in 2003. Roger Greenspun was more skeptical.

Rated #10 on Luke Buckmaster's list of Ozploitation films. Essentially a James Bond clone crossbred with Kung Fu (it was peak Kung Fu in 1975), hang gliding and a bit of everything else. Director Brian Trenchard-Smith is proud of his work (mostly stunt-focused schlock, most famously BMX Bandits) and instructs us to switch our brains off and enjoy. The initial scenes at Uluru, while clunky, promise more than the rest delivers, if only because they are unfilmable now. Those in Hong Kong and Sydney are far more generic.

Luke Buckmaster at length in 2016. Jimmy Wang Yu was eclipsed by Bruce Lee, and George Lazenby quit the Bond racket perhaps sooner than he should have. Overall more fun to read about than to watch.

A pointer from Luke Buckmaster who rates this #5 on his list of Ozploitation films. Tarantino is a fan. Stacy Keach plays a forty-ish man with a dog who drives a truckload of pig carcasses across the Nullarbor from Melbourne to Perth in 1981 to break a strike by the western meatworkers. (Strangely it's a single trailer, not a road train — it isn't going to feed even Fremantle.) Somehow out on the plains he picks up a couple of female hitchhikers, specifically Jamie Lee Curtis who he romances at the telegraph station at Eucla. Plotwise he's notionally trying to capture a bloke in a green van who has a taste for slaughtering young ladies, or at least evade being framed for such.

Overall I found it pretty funny, largely because of Keach's excess interiority and willingness to plough on no matter how ridiculous things got. The geography was way off (the IMDB page lists many errors) but the locations were put to good use. Director Richard Franklin mostly did B-grade stuff like David Williamson's Brilliant Lies; he had a peculiar talent for squandering his ingredients.

Herbert Mitgang at the time.

An Ivan Sen feature shown at Cannes in 2011. It seems he established his signature soporific plot pace early on. We're at an Aboriginal mission up near the Queensland border, north of Moree, south of Goondiwindi. Shot like a doco; the cinematography, not as good as his later efforts, can be excused by his desire to be unobtrusive. Some of the acting is great, such as by the lead (boy) Daniel Connors, and some is not. Thematically it's poverty, drugs and dealing, violence, limited horizons, deracination, Americanisation, clan relations, bloke culture. There's no way out, not even education. Told from the boy's perspective. In some ways it's nothing new, and in others it is invaluable.

Paul Byrnes. Fiona Williams. Bernard Hemingway.

Kindle. From a review by Tommy Orange in the New York Times. I've been a sucker for addiction lit since Trainspotting but I'm used to it being either heavily fictionalised or memoir (e.g. White Out). This falls somewhere in between, claiming to be fiction but written as humourless realism. Briefly we're in Tampa, Florida (home of the everhanging chad) with a restless young bloke born in 1991. His overactive brain leads to many behavioural issues, criminality, excess interiority. Eventually AA does the trick and he begins to think beyond himself. My eyes started glazing over a bit too often and I skimmed a good chunk of it.

Goodreads.

A George Axelrod jag from Lord Love A Duck: he bent Truman Capote's raw material into this very famous vehicle for Audrey Hepburn which I hadn't seen before now. Essentially she digs gold in classic NYC clotheshorse style. At least her feted romantic partner George Peppard looked roughly age-appropriate this time (unlike her (ex?-)husband Buddy Ebsen from the boonies who married her at 14, which I struggle to believe wasn't icky in 1961). The cat is gorgeous. Mancini's music (Moon River) got two Oscars.

Odeon 5, 18.00 session (one of only two, the other being on Wednesday coming). Hosted by the Orange Film Society. Perhaps 50 people in theatre 5, mostly of mature years. Once again a Service NSW "Discover" pork barrel got me a seat and a bag of Maltesers; I was allocated something in what I'd consider the middle but sat down in the front section. A pointer from Jason Di Rosso who interviewed the director Joachim Trier. I got the impression that it was going to be something sophisticated or novel as he talked about The Nest in a similar way.

The early part with a rapid-fire voiceover made me think "Norwegian Amelie!" but soon enough the cliches pile up and the last two-thirds drags. Mostly it advertises lux Scandinavian interiors shot through with the anxiety of millennials on the cusp of spawning and of those ten to fifteen years older who are settled in careers and creativity and serial relationships. There's a pregnancy that's just a plot point, a box to tick. Oftentimes we're told or shown the wonder of the leading lass who is generically wilful and impulsive but has less interiority than the housing. That a leading lady is perpetually in need of a man has always been axiomatic. There's not a lot going on here that Generation X didn't grapple with (e.g. McJobs, emotionally scarring hookups, being overeducated); sure, stuff is cheaper now and there's more connectivity, less privacy or expectations thereof, and every generation needs to learn for itself through ignorance, willed or otherwise, of what came before, but we can see the general lack of commitment by how far short everything falls of Trainspotting.

The fantastic Oslo-stopped-in-time scenes in the middle, where the lovelorn lass runs across town to be with her new man and back to break up with her old one, are cinematic magic but do less to rescue the whole thing than Mads Mikkelsen's dancing did for Another Round. Similarly the lass wrote a piece on (specific) sexual relations that struck me as obvious common knowledge but is treated as an insightful literary masterwork; the flaw is to show the thing rather than just allude to it, as Hal Hartley did so well in Henry Fool. Her passivity at her comic-artist boyfriend's dinner parties is clunky. The #metoo interview-with-the-artist in the middle pushes all the existing buttons and no new ones.

A. O. Scott. Main squeeze Aksel is 44; his cohort is too young to be properly Generation X. Julia's lack of female friends is one of many flaws that show this to be a work of man. Ben Kenigsberg doesn't want to complain. Hats off to the marketing guys. Much later, Michael Wood.

Directed by Hal Ashby in the mode of a vaseline-lensed Robert Altman. After Slap Shot (also written by Nancy Dowd, Oscared here), Who'll Stop the Rain (Vietnam vets) and Harold and Maude (Ashby) this was inevitable.

In brief Jane Fonda (Oscared for reasons unknown) is married (also for reasons unknown) to Captain Bruce Dern who is (for reasons of plot) imminently for Việt Nam in 1968, after Tết. Being the woman she is, soon enough there are schisms with her fellow officers' wives at the base in Los Angeles, solidarity with working-class Penelope Milford, and an inevitable (for all reasons) romance with paraplegic vet Jon Voight (also Oscared for reasons unknown). Things conclude as they must. This all happens after a promising scene in the vet hospital, where the maimed returnees shoot pool and discuss their experiences. Similarly the murderball scenes lift us briefly, transiently, out of the confected romantic morass. It's nostalgic, 1978 pining for 1968, a solid (familiar) soundtrack that made me realise the 1990s retro of my youth was a replay, likely a replay of a replay. Retro has since become a more permanent state of mind.

IMDB trivia. Voight's character is based on Ron Kovic? Say it ain't so. Vincent Canby was unimpressed. Four stars from Roger Ebert despite "the last twenty minutes don't really work".

Drawn by Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris, both of whom are squandered and never recover from their entirely cliched meet cute in the opening minutes. Apparently the future will be even more full of stuff than it is now, and if you have enough money and self importance you can get cloned when things head south for you. As this is an Apple Original, I guess that's iCloned; the plebs will get an ad-supported version that promises to respect your privacy in the morning. Was that Apple's new iCar on those empty motorways? Glenn Close's surgery looked to be where Oscar Isaac worked his dark magic in Ex Machina. The storyline is an inversion of Never Let Me Go, made bland and banal, soporific and PC. I had hoped (non spoiler) that the clone would decide to pull the pin or go rogue. It made me wonder how the machines will entertain themselves when the humans are gone.

Apparently writer/director Benjamin Cleary got an Oscar for a short film; this is his first feature.

Nicolas Rapold. Yep, Ali does some fine work here, no doubt, just a shame it was to no ultimate end. There's heaps more fun to be had with Joe Dunthorpe's identity thief.

Ill-advised Tuesday Weld completism. It seems she was very popular amongst some men of the day (1950s/1960s) as a "frisky teen-age sex kitten / childwoman", whereas my mental image of her is a mature actress working opposite James Caan or with Sergio Leone. This one is billed as a satirical comedy but there's nothing very funny there. Apparently George Axelrod had more form as a writer than as a director. Black and white.

A. H. Weiler: this is something like Lolita or The Loved One. Ah yes, the drive-in church.

Renata Adler refuted Pauline Kael's claim that "[George C.] Scott has to be dominating or he’s nothing" by citing this movie. Alongside Scott's divorcee surgeon Julie Christie plays the titular socialite kook who is a bit unhinged and tends to drive all the men mad. Her husband Richard Chamberlain (The Last Wave) does a serviceable psycho. Shirley Knight (Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rain People) doesn't want to get divorced. All are lambs in lions' dens. The vacuity of having it all in 1968. They don't make them like this any more.

Roger Ebert: four stars and a thoughtful review. Also an unqualified thumbs up from Renata Adler at the time in the New York Times. Director Richard Lester did a few things with The Beatles.

Kindle. I've been meaning to read more of Astley's work since I picked up a couple of her short stories about a decade ago. This one, her last, got her the Miles Franklin in 2000. It's essentially a collection of shorts and portraits organised around the small (fictional) town of Drylands which I think is supposed to not exist not too far west of Rockhampton. While the writing is sometimes fine the content is unfortunately too unoriginal to get excited about; what's here can only be news to someone who's never been on the receiving end of the boredom of people from small country towns. On the flip side it seems beyond her imagining that these little places may thrive again, for instance via online communities and people decamping en masse from the coast. Was she blinded by her dogma that culture means French, that screens have killed the written word? And yet I read her book on such.

Goodreads. Kerryn Goldsworthy on the strengths of Astley's (earlier) writing and her dogmas. Bill Holloway, bang on, says the book is based on Springsure, somewhat near Carnarvon Gorge, and "Red Plains" is Emerald. I quite enjoyed Emerald and its botanic garden and nearby lake. Strangely when I was there the area was flooded, not dry, which is why I didn't make it to Springsure.

A bit of Paul Newman completism via Renata Adler's 1980 attempt to bury the hatchet in Pauline Kael, and a step further back, that scatty but intriguing book review. Minor league ice hockey! Of the old-fashioned kind. What's not to like! After a hilarious opening things sag a bit as it tries to find a plot and pathos in what is more-or-less the type of mindless violence that crowds love so much. Written by Nancy Dowd who later got an Oscar for Coming Home. Loads of swearing, and more one-liners than your average Arnie flick. Everyone is awesome, especially Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Harry S. Truman in Twin Peaks) playing the straight man to Newman's aged, womanising pragmatist of a captain-coach. Relax and enjoy. There's almost no hockey in it.

Somehow Roger Ebert didn't review this one. Vincent Canby. George Roy Hill directed Newman in The Sting (for which he was Oscared) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

A bit of Tuesday Weld completism off the back of a scatty but intriguing book review. Based on Dog Soldiers of the mid-1970s Việt Nam war genre. In brief some blokes come back from Sài Gòn with one buddy thinking it a good idea to get the other to traffic 2kg of horse on his ship to Oakland, which is to say that from the start you know things aren't going to go too well.

It has its moments alongside the thick thread of melancholia running through the middle; the post war prospects amount to escapism in nudie bars that were better when they were just regular bars, and Mexico; also a wife you can't go home to. Perhaps the most shocking is that Nick Nolte was young once. He nails his lines, for instance these that he declaims straight into Weld's face as he finishes up repairing his 1958 Land Rover Series II (still looking great twenty years later):

Ray Hicks: When I left the Marines I made myself a promise. Never again am I going to be fucked around by morons. The next mother who tries to make me back off is going to have to live it out with me.

Yeah, maybe you have to hear it. Also I couldn't shake the vibe that it was a dry run for that fabulous final season of Breaking Bad, especially when we get to the hippy valley down in New Mexico.

Roger Ebert: three stars at the time. He says director Karel Reisz has some form; I've seen This Sporting Life, which he produced, and The Gambler. He's astonished that Nolte can act. I struggled with the vacuity of husband Michael Moriarty who does have some great lines too. Strangely it seems the New York Times did not review it beyond a few stray favourable comments from Janet Maslin: best movie of 1978?

Kindle. A French airport novel in translation. Briefly an Air France flight from Paris to NYC undergoes an anomaly. I had hoped this would lead to some structural fun, perhaps some symmetry. Told as a multitrack with way too many characters, some of whom cop it in the neck in what I took to be authorial vengeance. (Specifically man-magnet film-editing Parisien Lucie and her aging architect André are set up for slaughter.) Very referential. Loads of cliches, especially American tropes in the button-pushing mode, and my all-time favourite: dropping brand names of pharmaceuticals and hitman equipment. Despite the specific dates there is no mention of COVID. The confrontation of pairs made no sense and was not explained; I mean, the US government still runs Gitmo, right? And disappearing those inconvenient people would have been (and soon is) more in character. I laughed a bit, at not with. The Godfather, canonical in this market segment, has nothing to fear.

Goodreads: yeah, many more reasons to give this one a miss. Sarah Lyall at the New York Times thought it was high concept literature. She sells it as an exploration of all those deep questions when really it's just a stick looking for an eye.

Kindle. Shame, Peter Ho Davies asserts, is a lie someone told you about yourself. Colour me unconvinced. As always he has his moments but the excessive hand wringing over who can write what about whom is another instance of his annoying oversensitivity to the latest writerly fashions. (The book is about a man writing about abortion and fatherhood, drenched in Christian symbols, featuring not a few bouts of rage.) I struggled with his unreflective conformism, his inane, mimetic desire for a "normal" child. I think of him as culturally Welsh (with Chinese ancestry) but the way this is written suggests his transformation into an American is now complete. Overall he poses too many questions of the kind that go unanswered here and everywhere, often as little more than gestures, tics; he gets older but there is little sense of him getting wiser. Some of the wordplay is quite fun, and he evokes genuine pain, forlorn and lost, in the opening movements.

Goodreads.

Odeon 5, 17.30 session (the only one for the day this late in the run), cinema 2. I used one of my Service NSW "Discover" 25.00 AUD pork barrel vouchers. The way that worked was that they charged 18.50 AUD (despite their pricing page suggesting it should have been 13.50 AUD, this being a Tuesday), and did not offer but also did not begrudge me a bag of Maltesers for notionally 6.00 AUD. This made me suspect that businesses are getting the full 25.00 AUD of pork whatever they provide in return. The cinema was busier than I expected — perhaps 10 people in there with me. I asked to sit down the front and got given seat E5. I ended up in C5, with little leg room. The place was built for the crowds who no longer come.

Well, this is the latest from Wes Anderson. Notionally a love letter to mid-twentieth-century Francophilic long-form journalism (think the New Yorker). Most of the sprawling cast have worked with him before. There's a frame and three episodes. Vast tracks are tedious. As usual it visually overflows.

All reviews are wordy. A. O. Scott: the democratic, sophisticated, American-cosmopolitan thing to do is buy art and ship it to Kansas. Dana Stevens: we say fractal, they said mise en abyme. She'd've been happier watching it on something with a freeze-frame function. Sandra Hall: "The overall effect of all this is a particularly whimsical form of escapism — as if an excessive knowledge of reality has brought on a state of nostalgia for a world that never was." And so on.

Kindle. A 2011 collection of Flanagan's essays, including the famous Gunns: the Tragedy of Tasmania. Perhaps the best bits are the bread recipes, the love letters to the Tasmanian wilderness and those who get out amongst it. (The abortive kayak trip to the mainland sat somewhere between brown trousers and moronic to me.) In his defense of Australian fiction, he criticizes others for "the sorry retailing of facts as fiction", incidentally providing the perfect epitaph for his own Wanting. The stuff on Latham was hardly ever relevant. On Howard he has the odd zinger but otherwise tells you what you knew at the time and have mostly succeeded at forgetting. There's a touch of Hunter S. Thompson aspirationalism to the political stuff. Overall it has not aged well.

Goodreads. David Free got out the baseball bat: "For all his loathing of politicians as a class, Flanagan writes exactly the way politicians talk." Ouch. On the other hand I'm certain the arguments for Bush War II in Iraq were always bullshit. And on the third hand Free himself is apparently now reduced to writing dreck like this; perhaps they should have made common cause. I guess he took offense to Flanagan dissing Jonathan Franzen. Wow, this pond is so small.

A pointer from Jason Di Rosso. He sold it as a sophisticated take on adult relationships. Initially one is lead to believe that Jude Law will provide a nuanced portrayal of a 1980s trader-Englishman pining for the damp and grim skies of home, but this is soon enough blown away by excessive, transparent, cliched mendacity and grasping. I think we're supposed to be sympathetic to his American quasi-trophy wife Carrie Coon (from Chicago) but her neglect of her horse left me cold. Overall it's very heavy-handed and nowhere close to Wall Street or Lady Macbeth (to stake out the theme and the proximate genre). The soundtrack is pretty much left of the dial. Perhaps the lack of humour is its biggest failing.

Ben Kenigsberg. Yes, many scenes are paralleled (the breakfasts, Law waking Coon with a cup of coffee, Coon cutting loose at a nightclub while her daughter learns about speed, etc. etc.) but things are entirely stereotypical. Peter Bradshaw: there's no evidence the family was happy in the U.S.A.; he seems to have missed all the expository dialogue. On the other hand I entirely missed the supernatural interludes. Annabel Brady-Brown draws the obvious links with The Talented Mr Ripley.

Kindle. Scattershot recollections from Murray Bail. Some resonated. There's an Adelaide childhood and a young bloke who couldn't wait to get married, to leave. He evolves into a man who is a bit harsh about himself, about that search for experience that ultimately does not give enough shape to his life, but is generously rueful about others. The abiding self absorption slides into solipsism. Australian painting is just landscapes (presumably in the lee of Namatjira) as if Brett Whiteley never happened. Friends in quantity, immemorable. Lovers some; he suggests he was into Helen Garner for her work, that her feminism wasn't up to a separation. Detachment.

Gerard Windsor: reheated from the Bail notebooks from 2005. Much is absent. Peter Craven. Joseph Cummins.

Provoked by the remake (already rated on IMDB far lower than the original) and also Tyrone Power (not by way of Mataranka). In two sittings as it's a bit tiresome. Another of the psychologicals of the day. Carny wannabe Power charms and accidentally-on-purposes his way to the top using some "mentalist" tricks. Unsurprisingly he's undone by (spoiler) Helen Walker's saucy shrink. His marriage with ingenue Coleen Gray and professional attachment to Joan Blondell are maudlin. Watch out for the booze boys, that is the road to geekdom.

Thomas M. Pryor at the New York Times. I forgot I'd seen Power in The Razor's Edge. Recently, Ben Kenigsberg: yes, the women are often looking at the man while the man looks at the world.

More Rusty completism. Again execrable. Completely derivative; I guess Sharon Stone wanted to star in a Western (she's a co-producer) after seeing Once Upon a Time in the West. Gene Hackman, squandered. Leonardo DiCaprio gets oedipal. Directed by Sam Raimi, who has done far better. The excellent cinematography by Dante Spinotti leaves nowhere for anyone to hide.

Two stars from Roger Ebert. Janet Maslin.

A Rusty jag. Inexcusably execrable, especially with Denzel in the lead.

Roger Ebert: three ineffable stars. Janet Maslin: "Mr. Crowe, as a psychotic yuppie type bearing a disconcerting resemblance to the writer Bret Easton Ellis, does a memorable job of making himself frightening until the film becomes numbingly frantic, in the manner of many video games."

nth time around with this neo-noir instaclassic. Still #127 in the IMDB top-250. Rusty is so good here that it made me chase up his earlier (Hollywood) work.

Roger Ebert at the time (four stars) and another four stars as a great movie. He tells me it's set in the days after Christmas 1953. Peter Travers. Janet Maslin.

The sequel (The Barbarian Invasions) is superior to this very tendentious and waffly French-Canadian talkathon. It tries to provoke, but its central thesis — that people get more self-absorbed as empires decline, refusing to serve in the military and having fewer kids, etc. — is a bit timeless and is mostly occluded by sex sex sex. I think it would've worked better on the stage.

Roger Ebert: 3 stars. Wit? Smooth deliveries of verbiage, sure, but without much wit. He seemed to like it so why the mediocre score? Vincent Canby.

The sleepy sequel followed a sleepy original. This has a high-beam cast, again with Aaron Pedersen in the lead. He has quite a few more lines in this one. Hugo Weaving at his most affable, avuncular, threatening. They have a scene in a country Chinese restaurant that was so promising and so wasted. David Field. And here's Bruce Spence, playing a good-bloke coroner. Mrs Rove McManus Tasma Walton, so clunky in her scenes that she even brought Pedersen up short in an exchange near a pokie. I don't mind and even somewhat enjoy that this stuff is soporific, like a spaghetti western, but I can't say there's much novelty here. Then again I wasn't paying enough attention to understand who came to the shootout and why. The cinematography was again gorgeous.

Sandra Hall tries to be generous. Matthew Eeles: yep, there's a strange asymmetry at work on the plains of outback Queensland, where Pedersen can see everyone and no one can see him. Simon Foster.

Another Tommy Lewis jag. Written and directed by Ivan Sen. A slow-burning sleeper, the sequel to Mystery Road. Some decent cinematography of the area near Winton, Queensland. For the most part the cast is strong: Aaron Pedersen leads, Steve Rodgers and Ursula Yovich support ... but pity poor old Gulpilil, strung up from a tree (again!), involuntarily this time. Pedersen, in self-destruct mode, arrives at a remote mining camp, charged with investigating a missing Asian girl. Teaming up with the less-convincing local cop Alex Russell and impeded by Jacki Weaver's predatory mayor and David Wenham's camp boss (I missed Bruce Spence), they encounter some shenanigans about mining rights colliding with land rights and human trafficking. Ultimately the policemen save some Chinese ladies from mining/bikie white men in a climactic shootout lifted straight from Heat. Cheng Pei Pei's madam plays a straight bat and escapes scot free.

Anne Rutherford. Yep, Gulpilil does fine until he starts talking. She's prepared to ignore how cliched and heavy handed some of it is (that ceremony chaired by Wenham is so obviously a farce from the get go) as is Luke Buckmaster. (He also interviewed Sen.) Jeannette Catsoulis. Jason Di Rosso.