Another bout of Jack Nicholson completism. He is very muted here; Bruce Dern gets all the flamboyance. Much like the later Atlantic City (1980), Nicholson leaves Philadelphia (where he spins melancholic tales on his graveyard-shift radio show) to join his brother in Atlantic City for reasons filial and pecuniary. Dern has two ladies lined up in a "package deal" (histrionic Ellen Burstyn and her stepdaughter Julia Anne Robinson) to keep him company while he talks about developing a Hawaiian island with financing from associates of Scatman Crothers. We spend a lot of time on the boardwalk in places since made familiar by Boardwalk Empire. I found it disjointed and soporific, and had much difficulty finding a point in anything. Directed by Bob Rafelson but not written by Carole Eastman (cf Five Easy Pieces).
Roger Ebert: three stars at the time. Roger Greenspun was less impressed. John Patterson in 2013. Peter Bradshaw on Rafelson at the time of his death in 2022: it's a classic.
Prompted by a list of twenty of Jack Nicholson's acting efforts. (I concur that he was fantastic in Five Easy Pieces.) He got an Oscar nom here alongside the always-fabulous Kathy Bates (Misery, Richard Jewell) who plays the divorcee mother of the bloke (Dermot Mulroney, doing what he needed to) engaged to his daughter (Hope Davis, solid). Their brief scenes together are magic.
Briefly Nicholson retires from Woodmen Life Assurance (an actual company) in Omaha, Nebraska just before his daughter's wedding. We get his inner monologue in letters to a boy in Tanzania he sponsors. Soon enough he's on the road in his wife's Winnebago to his daughter in Denver, Colorado. Various enlightening experiences ensue. I was amused throughout, mostly because of Nicholson's extremely caged performance. I'm glad I didn't see it at the time as it's all in the detail, and takes some patience to enjoy.
Alexander Payne directed and co-wrote Election (1999) and later the feted Bruce Dern vehicle Nebraska (2013), neither of which I've seen.
Widely reviewed at the time. Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Similarly, Peter Travers. Five-of-five from Peter Bradshaw. Stephen Holden: Easy Rider, 33 years later. I'm not at all sure Nicholson's character is "a decent, well-meaning individual" — everything's a lot more ambiguous and capacious than that.
Kindle. Burdick's first novel, and clunky it is. The whole conceit is summarised by the aphorism hate plus fear equals power and exemplified by surfing, politics and getting mugged in California. Main character Michael Freesmith (it's right there in the name) is repellent, and at times I wondered if Burdick had embedded his thoughts on manufacturing election wins into the structure of the book itself. It's not that clever though: Mike really is just vacuously repellent.
Perhaps what dates this the most are its claims about the American middle class (merely a myth to many now) and how it might manipulated by shame (an obvious fallacy in the privacy of the polling booth). Putting aside the obsolete technology (trained ladies reading punch cards!) his sketch of data-driven electioneering was a decent foretelling. I tend to feel that the impact individuals (politicians) have on history is diminishing, at least in the U.S.A. where general political gridlock has provoked a retreat to lawfare. The conclusion — effectively an assassination or coup d'état — is therefore fanciful.
Goodreads. Orville Prescott for the New York Times at the time: artless but don't let that stop you from reading it. Oh yes, there's a poker scene and shade is thrown late on the strongly-presented convictions. Also John Nerber reviewed it through a teleological lens: so dated! While Burdick was right to be worried, his later efforts with Lederer (The Ugly American and Sarkhan) are far sharper.
Kindle. This one got Carey the Miles Franklin in 1989 and also a Booker. It's a crooked romance leaning heavily on the novelists of the preceding century: Dickens on unearnt wealth and unsound expectations, I expect Austen on many things, lightly larded with some social criticism of the Thomas Hardy kind.
It takes Carey about half of the book to manoeuvre Oscar from the clutches of his "evangelical" naturalist father in the western country of mid-19th century England through theology school at Oriel, Oxford and onto a boat where he briefly meets Lucinda. It's all colour and digression, directions to a (cinema) director, some occasionally very funny description (but only in the small, it's not a comedy), and some dodgy rehearsed knowledge (glass is a liquid because old windows are not flat) that brings into question the originality — the truthiness! — of all the arcana about the Anglicans and the Plymouth Brethren, the Sydney of the day, even the geography. I did learn about Prince Rupert's drops which the internet tells me are still a thing (to buy in bulk from China).
Obviously Carey was reaching for the great Australian novel: Lucinda is a bit Wuthering Heights-Cathy, a bit My Brilliant Career-Sybylla, and the whole expedition is entirely Voss (but without a Voss, i.e., a bit vacuous). The whole show is underpinned by gambling, with Oscar (frocked and unfrocked) often finding God's will revealed by coin flips and dog and horse races; i.e., what we might recognise now as prosperity theology, though Carey is careful to repeatedly observe that he only keeps of his winnings what he immediately needs. (Carey also owns to his debt to Pascal and the Parable of Talents aka "the Matthew effect".) Lucinda similarly enjoys a flutter but received her wealth in the canonical Australian way: by subdividing land appropriated from the indigenous. She's an innocent undeserving of the class envy (give us some shelter) that dominates the present day as her mum did all that for her. She uses half of her inheritance to buy a glass factory, on something of a whimsy. The ending is unsatisfactory.
Overall it's an infantile arrested love affair, a year of Neighbours afterwhich Lucinda aged out and Oscar left through boredom for the bright lights of Hollywood. The writing is often good and in these ways it was the converse of Alexis Wright's Carpentaria: I prefer her characters and setting but his writing.
Widely reviewed of course. Goodreads: briefly, Carey is not for many people.
Roger Ebert gave three stars to the 1997 movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. He draws a parallel with Werner Herzog's obsession with obsessions, and I definitely had Judy Davis more in mind than Blanchette as Lucinda. Janet Maslin also. All the details at Ozmovies (similarly "Herzogian"). There is no need for me to see it now.
The followup by director/co-writer Barry Jenkins to his feted Moonlight. James Baldwin provided the raw material. From the little I know about Baldwin I thought this would be something autobiographical, not fictional.
The story, set in the early 1970s, has KiKi Layne (forgettable in Don't Worry Darling, quite good here) nesting with lifelong friend Stephan James (also good) until the racist white NYC cop (unsubtle Ed Skrein) intercedes. The best scenes are their moments together: happy alone or mediated by a prison visitor screen, a dinner in a Spanish restaurant or with mate Brian Tyree Henry, and when they get a conditional approval from Dave Franco's Jewish landlord to rent a warehouse/loft. There's a great bitchkrieg early on; very funny elder sister Teyonah Parris (Chiraq) steals every scene she's in. The first two movements are masterfully interwoven with consequences preceding causes, beautifully shot with tight framing, mostly indoors or in the magic hour. I didn't enjoy the third movement so much, when Regina King (Oscared here, last seen in the Watchmen remake) moved to the centre.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's latest feature. Prompted by Shane Danielsen. Visually it's essentially The Jetsons where the people live in (grounded) 1950s Art Deco suburbia while adbots float through the sky. The domestic robots have human envy while the robocops just want to liquidate everyone. Inevitably some centralised (financialised) system goes wrong and the house goes into lockdown; in this and other ways it's a COVID movie and who wants to go there? Previously Jeunet's incorporation of visual flourishes and kooky automata have redeemed his lack of analytical depth but those tricks do not yield more than a snoozefest this time around.
Jeannette Catsoulis: "is an android with a soul any scarier than a human without one?" Charles Bramesco: French comedy is no laughing matter, and Danielsen concurs.
In the hopes of some decent shots of Central Australia, and more proof that I'll watch Jacqueline MacKenzie do just about anything. Prompted by Peter Lewis's interpretation of some AUKUS polling back in March. A six hour-long episode Screentime production jointly funded by Netflix and the ABC.
It has its moments. There are indeed some gorgeous shots of the Macdonnell Ranges, and even of Alice Springs. The most interesting plot involved the secret negotiation of a treaty of neutrality between Australia and China, with the possibility that it might be the sweetener that closes a gas deal. (The spying enters in an East-Timor-like way with the surveillance of China/Qatar negotiations, and a related terror attack on the Myanmar border while the US President is nearby.) When push comes to shove the writers have Australia side with its biggest customer, which we now know was and is never going to happen. The implications are finessed into a season-ending cliffhanger. There was no second season.
Otherwise we get a lot of generic domestic drama, focussing mostly on American analyst Parker Sawyers (looking like a young Obama, also in Operation Fortune) and the only available local girl Tess Haubrich. MacKenzie herds cats with Steve Toussaint (Small Axe episode 3) and Lewis Fitz-Gerald, and later Stephen Curry (aka Dale Kerrigan from The Castle and Sam Pickles from Cloudstreet and ...). The remainder of the cast are essentially stereotypes auxiliary to the central concerns. (Perhaps the Chinese mining and Aboriginal land rights threads would've bloomed later in the series.) The main abiding plot is essentially Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (a game of Cluedo) leavened with the odd well-observed clash in cultures between the Australians and the Americans, and to a lesser extent, the Chinese and Aboriginal, the gay and the straight, and so on. Some of it was dumb, like base-commander's wife Simone Kessell's expectations of Canberra, and things generally fell away as the plot moved almost entirely inside.
Reviews are either ahead-of-time boostery (Karl Quinn, Steve Dow) or dismissive. Luke Buckmaster: one star out of five, "None of the cast look like stressed-out vitamin D deprived analysts; they look like they've recently hit the beach." Helen Razer (harsh, this is dreck, deeper characters please). IMDB says they shot the interiors at the old Holden factory in Elizabeth.
A Ben Mendohlson-in-1990 jag from The Big Steal. Here he is a minor banana to big cheese sharpshooter Tom Selleck, tasked with putting the colonials in their place, and generic bad dude quick-draw-McGraw Alan Rickman. Kids starting out today, don't do the red hair thing. Notionally Rickman runs a cattle station in some mythical red-dirt place not too far from Fremantle and Chambers Pillar whose main business seems to be eradicating Aborigines as he and his men otherwise sit around doing nothing. The Aborigines are peace-loving mystics. Selleck (Quigley) brings Laura San Giacomo ("Crazy Cora" who suffers from PTSD) as the matinée format requires. They jointly rescue/steal an Aboriginal baby from a massacre who she then saves from the dingoes. Everything works out in the end.
In two sittings as it's just too stale. The shoot was probably more fun than the resultant movie, which is annoying as they had all the ingredients to make something less boring.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. If only it wasn't so dumb (see IMDB goofs). Janet Maslin: anachronistic. Ozmovies: apparently the station homestead etc. was built out at Ross River.
Pointed to in some secondary material on Koch's Highways to a War. Also Ben Gazzara completism. The list of contributors is intriguing: based on a Paul Theroux novel, co-written/directed/acted by Peter Bogdanovich, an executive producer credit for Hugh Hefner (see IMDB). There's not much here though: stranded in Singapore by age and appetites, genial Gazzara amiably goes about the business of evolving from street pimp to brothel proprietor. He wears the tattoos inflicted on him by a Chinese triad with pride. Bogdanovich of the CIA funnels some business his way with a busload or two of GIs on R&R from the Việt Nam war. Nixon is heading to China, says a newspaper headline, dating the first year of the story to 1972. Accountant Denholm Elliott, visiting annually from Hong Kong, irrelevantly has a heart attack. George Lazenby turns up late as a Democrat Senator with a taste for the boys; kompromat ensues, but Gazzara is too nice a guy to do what he needed to do. I had so much difficulty following the secondary characters; what exactly did Gazzara do for the two inscrutables who employed Denholm? Much offhand dialogue was lost in a poor sound mix.
It reminded me of Cassavetes's more successful The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and less of Bogdanovich's similarly backward-looking The Last Picture Show. The typical draw for pieces like these — a vivid record of a place or era — is mostly absent, or perhaps too occluded by the English and American grotesques in the foreground.
The internet says that Roger Ebert gave it four stars but I cannot find the review. Vincent Canby: the white man's burden, "One wishes it were more outrageous and less knowing", "I find it impossible to be moved or even much interested in this last vestige of a discredited colonialism. Jack Flowers is not only dead. He also represents a kind of fiction that wasn't all that great when he was alive."
Some misguided John Hargreaves completism; I've come to realise his efforts in Don's Party were anomalous. Here he and wife Briony Behets (their marriage going sour due to a botched wife swapping) drive a Nissan Patrol 60 (which looks a lot like a classic Land Rover Defender) from their Western Sydney home to Bournda National Park (then a remote and much more relaxed state reserve) for some casual destruction of nature. Nature takes its revenge in classic Ozploitation / Wake in Fright-by-the-beach style. All this is a metaphor for the moral shoals of abortion. It's mostly snoozefest with the odd bit of gore.
Luke Buckmaster in 2014. He completely misses the abortion angle. All the details at Ozmovies: this is apparently now a strong entry in the eco-horror subgenre. (I think Ned Beauman's take is far more inventive.) Written by Everett De Roche (Road Games amongst other genre flicks). Remade by Victorians in 2008; what were Jim Caviezel and Claudia Karvan thinking?
Kindle. Australian (actually Tasmanian) AFL-playing war photographer Mike Langford goes missing in Cambodia in 1976 and his boyhood mate, now a lawyer, goes looking for him. The novel has a clever structure — exposition via taped diaries, lightly fictionalised by the lawyer, leading up to present-day events — that avoids omniscient narration, yielding a neat-and-tidy novel where all the classically hard questions are avoided.
My main problem with this book was that it had nothing new to say about the Indochina of the war years, even when it was written. Daniel Ellsberg was out reconnoitring the Mekong Delta in the mid-1960s, and David Halberstam wrote up a day in the field with the ARVN back in 1967. Of course Graham Greene was all over the spook stuff in The Quiet American back in the mid-1950s; see also Burdick and Lederer's The Ugly American, and Neil Sheehan and Tim Page's work. Moreover the multitude of Vietnamese accounts that were translated into English circa 1990 (e.g. Dương Thu Hương's Novel without a Name, Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War amongst many others) had far more local colour. And let's quietly ignore the contemporaneous The Moon of Hoa Binh.
This book seemed so inessential, so late to the party, that it took me a while to realise that it's really a homage to colonial Asia, a time (mid-1960s to mid-1970s) and place (cities: Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Sài Gòn, Singapore) where sufficiently brave and ravenous white men could live like kings while the latest version of the Great Game played out around them as some form of entertainment. This becomes inescapably obvious when paradisal, prelapsarian Cambodia was embodied in characterless Ly Keang, a derivative of Greene's Phuong without even the minimal agency that comes from being one corner of a love triangle. Things got a bit excruciating when Koch talks crudely about Cambodia returning to freedom.
Overall Langford is simpler than Koch claims him to be: he's a bleeding-heart humanist as well as a Quiet Australian who enjoys what that time and place had to offer. By the fall of Sài Gòn he seemed to be more like a Johnny-on-the-spot Forrest Gump than the Christ figure glimpsed in longshot at the end.
The text got Koch the Miles Franklin Award in 1996. Wikipedia (and Koch in his introduction) tells me it drew heavily on the life of Neil Davis, but Robin Gerster reckoned Sean Flynn is a better match, i.e., Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now (1979). A common complaint is the assumption of too much historical knowledge. Koch asserts this to be the mate of his later Out of Ireland (1999). I expect his The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) was more valuable.