peteg's blog

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).