peteg's blog

In 1999 Kevin Smith had the same idea as everyone else, to make a millenarianist flick based on some dodgy observations about Catholicism. He must've been happy with his ensemble — a happy-ish looking Ben Affleck and his up-for-it mate Matt Damon, game abortionist Linda Fiorentino, eye-rolling Chris Rock, stripper Salma Hayek and of course his over- or under-sexed bestie Jason Mewes. Alan Rickman plays the voice of God who is in turn played by Alanis Morissette. The plot moves everyone from the Midwest (Wisconsin, Illinois) to New Jersey for reasons I didn't quite catch. It's so scattershot it's hard to engage with and only likely to trigger those with a deeply literal take on things. I felt I was more laughing at than with, and not that often.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Being a Catholic probably helped; the excess exposition does not. Janet Maslin.

Once again looking for entertainment in all the wrong places. I've never seen Firefly and was insufficiently invested in the characters and scenario to get into it. (I guess that holds for all of Joss Whedon's output, leaving aside the outlier Toy Story. He wrote and directed this.) Things go all Blake's 7 (from the 1970s!) at the end but it seems like most of the cast got their contracts renewed. The dialogue and geeky awkwardness is trying. Notionally for Chiwetel Ejiofor who did what he could with not a lot.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Fan service. Manohla Dargis. Superior to the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Right, OK.

A Josh Hartnett jag from Black Hawk Down and to be fair this is the best effort I can remember from him. The remainder of the cast (Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci) are so-so. Directed by Paul McGuigan (The Acid House from 1996!) off a script by Jason Smilovic.

I did not get this movie. It thinks it's so clever, sorting out the horse-racing fixers and bookmakers of NYC, but even I had it figured by the two-thirds mark; by then there just weren't enough moving parts and time remaining for it to go any other way. The only thing left open was just how good Lucy Liu was in bed, and the filmmakers would have us believe she was or is the best ever. I so hoped she was from a rival outfit and in a position to make us a better offer.

Roger Ebert: two stars. An exercise in chain yanking. Stephen Holden: "a shallow, dandified grandson of Pulp Fiction." The explicit and the obfuscated in those introductory flashback scenes tell you exactly how things are going to go. It was indeed difficult to see the point of Tucci and Robert Forster's police officers; I can only think that they were needed to make the numbers add up in that initial story.

Continuing the Saturday afternoon matinee fare. Directed by John Boorman and witlessly adapted by him and Rospo Pallenberg from Thomas Malory's epic. The cast (mostly British) has many big names (Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Ciarán Hinds) and nary a decent performance from any of them. It's hard to believe this was made so soon after Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Nicol Williamson's Merlin would not have been out of place in that movie.

The pacing is very poor and after some initial continuity we're just shown set piece after set piece. Nothing much is motivated beyond that initial movement: the land needs a King, and the sword knows that King. So often a character cries "X!" which is immediately followed by a scene showing X. Helen Mirren's sex scene must have been the only one in her career where she kept her clothes on.

I expected it to be a little fun, like Boorman's earlier Zardoz, but no.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. "Maddeningly arbitrary" — but is that Boorman's fault? Vincent Canby. Pretentious. Both preferred Star Wars.

Clint Eastwood's directorial debut and therefore inevitable. Written by (ideas person) Jo Heims and Dean Riesner (Dirty Harry, also 1971). Clint produced, directed and starred. Perhaps the goal was for him to diversify away from ultraviolent roles.

This is a psychological and a bit late to that party. Somehow smoothy radio DJ Clint can afford a very swank abode in or near Carmel-By-The-Sea, California where Clint himself deigns to reside. We're given a grand tour of the urban areas, the cliffs and cliff-top drives, the beaches and redwood forests. I wonder how much is left now. Jessica Walter, sporting a haircut almost as fatal as Clint's, stalks him to Don Siegel's Sardine Factory bar after he finishes one night and the rest, as they say, is Psycho. Or perhaps Single White Female (I don't remember). Obviously it paved the way for Basic Instinct.

There's a strange loss of momentum at the two-thirds mark with some very spurious love scenes and a visit to the Monterey Jazz Festival. Clint's preferred partner in those scenes, Donna Mills, is the same shape as Sondra Locke (short and blonde) so I guess that was his type. He probably should have done something more linear as a first go.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Suspense? What suspense? The "Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude" works! Geez. I felt that Eastwood's passivity/reactivity got annoying. Roger Greenspun. Recalls "other, better movies": Vertigo, maybe Laura. Fails to make sense. Siegel's character is named Murphy but Siegel is no Murphy. IMDB trivia: a precursor to Fatal Attraction.

I got suckered by the location (the Orkneys!) and Saoirse Ronan. She's done some great work with Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women) and Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel) but that's less true of her more recent stuff (Foe, and by all accounts, Blitz). It would've helped to know that this movie was based on a memoir by Amy Liptrot of her hard-days'-nights in London: it would've explained why the interstitial voice overs were so pretentiously literary, so incongruous with the gritty scenes of lamb birthing, partying in nightclub toilets and grim ferries. The title is mentioned by the character's father as a location in the vicinity of his farm but is mostly leant into as a motif for addiction.

The direction by Nora Fingscheidt is generally poor. The cinematography often aims for realism with the odd burst of impressionism but is mostly drab. The hand-held stuff made me feel like David Stratton. The closeups drove me nuts. The chronology is so scattershot (which I usually take to mean the story is too weak to be told straight) that I couldn't track how it fitted together despite carefully noting Ronan's hair colour in each scene; by about halfway I realised there was no payoff in the details, and that we're far from the gentle, quixotic, closely-observed and forgiving humanity of Andrina and Greenvoe. I did not enjoy the music (mostly EDM, some incidental chamber stuff, the odd bout of industrial).

The story has Ronan's character hit the booze hard in London while she studies for a PhD in some kind of biology. Why she does this is hard to discern, as is the character of her boyfriend and fellow lab rats. (We learn so much more about a self-identified crackhead father she shares a brief scene with at the drying out facility. This reinforced my sense of poor filmmaking.) After her life comes apart we're shown that her father has severe brain chemistry issues as a limp-wristed explanation alongside a mildly anachronistic and daft community life in the Orkneys.

Things proceed as they must. She spends a lot of time alone; this did not strike me as being what she needed. Her expressed sentiment "I'll never be happy when sober" shows what she's up against, and we know that her rehab is complete when she starts to smile at the closing Gyro festival, making eyes at and having a one nighter with a new young man, white this time.

This movie adds nothing to the addiction canon. The arc is almost purely solipsistic; compare with the communitarianism of My Name is Joe. It's far too earnest, too completely humourless, to go up against the big boys like Trainspotting and Michael Clune's White Out. (There's barely a sniff of a sex scene here and it is very solemn. The fact that the AA program worked for her but not always for everyone goes unacknowledged.) I guess those who dug Requiem for a Dream might endorse it.

Richard Brody was unimpressed. Entirely without risk. The source material is far superior. Dana Stevens on recent leading-lady performances. Ronan is fine but that only makes it worse.

Kindle. I was hoping to get some understanding of Penrose's big ideas but the vast bulk of this biography is about his personal life. It is annoyingly repetitive at all scales. I found it hard to track where we were in time; often a few decades slid past, content-free apart from a change of wife/muse. Apparently Penrose slid into crankdom from the late 1980s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". This work was done by 1964.

Barss was obviously the wrong person for this job as he has very little grip on most of the concepts he throws around. This is disappointing as there are a few that he provides very helpful intuition for, and there is a vast literature of engagement with Penrose's ideas from all angles. (See, for instance, John McCarthy on The Emperor's New Mind.) I was bewildered by why anyone who grasps Gödel's theorem would think that it implies machines are incapable of human-level insight and reasoning; as Alan Turing observed in 1950 we are so obviously inconsistent and so often unwilling to extend the benefits of inconsistency to machines. McCarthy also argues for non-monotonicity. This book is no help on those or any other front. I expected more imagery in a biography of a geometer.

The overly brief coverage of Penrose tiles is poor for something published this recently. Barss overstates their merits:

Two simple shapes cracked and divided the infinite plane, exploding ever outwards in unending variety. No tile set could approach their extraordinary, unexpected simplicity.

How could any science journalist/writer be oblivious to the hat and the sceptre of 2023?

Prompted by Jennifer Szalai's review in the New York Times. Their book reviews have been more miss than hit for so long now. She made it seem that there is a lot more science in it than there is. Goodreads is divided into those looking for the ideas and those who like pop psychoanalytic takes on geniuses. Peter Woit: exploitative of an elderly man with failing eyesight. Just read the Wikipedia page on Penrose.

A pointer from Roger Ebert's review of The Man Who Would Be King. Apparently based on some things by Kipling. Stock Saturday matinee fare made towards the end of the Raj when Gandhi et al were already on the march. Directed by George Stevens. Filmed in California. Not Cary Grant's finest piece of acting; Victor McLaglen does a bit better and Douglas Fairbanks Jr strikes poses just like Errol Flynn. They squandered millions of extras in a brief closing battle melee. Those poor elephants.

Bertolt Brecht at the time! B. R. Crisler (I think) for the New York Times: more violence less romance thanks. He doesn't notice that McLaglen is even more in love with his elephant than the army.

Clint Eastwood's latest and perhaps last, and what a way to go; things have generally not been great since Gran Torino back in 2008 and this continues the downward slide. He directed and co-produced a script by Jonathan A. Abrams. The vibe was that he's too sapient a filmmaker to have merely remade 12 Angry Men, and for the most part he didn't. Unfortunately it's a fair bit lamer than that.

We start with reformed alcoholic, soon-to-be-Juror #2 Nicholas Hoult homemaking with heavily-pregnant Zoey Deutch. (She doesn't move like a pregnant woman, and this lack of attention to detail is pervasive.) Soon enough we meet Toni Collette's prosecutor running for District Attorney and her bar buddy/public defender Chris Messina. Kiefer Sutherland slots in as Hoult's AA sponsor and lawyer. The plot has a bloke (Gabriel Basso) up for offing his unstable and needy girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood) on what is never very convincing evidence. The rest is in the title.

By the middle things are seriously awry. Collette is out doing police detective's work (why would she ever want to know?) and, unlike its famous predecessor, few of the twelve jurors receive any character development. There are repeated and flagrant rule violations. The motivation for the hasty let-him-hang verdict is that almost everyone wants to get it done and go home, but a few days later half are sceptical until all are not. This most interesting aspect — how opinions change — is almost entirely elided and deeply implausible. Things generally do not fit together.

I did not like the cast at all with the mild exceptions of Collette and Messina who are both far better elsewhere. Hoult is struggling to bust out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; he is no better here than he was in The Menu.

At this point it's probably more interesting to see how Eastwood engages with Trump's manifest lack of essential Eastwood qualities.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis.

Kindle. Prompted by David Trotter's review in the London Review of Books. Indeed the review is superior to the book. I've already exhausted its movie suggestions; Bitter Victory was a bust and Black Hawk Down left little impression. Thomson expresses much childish glee in pointing to obscure things like Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition but he's very late to that and all other parties. I could reasonably have have expected more of him as he ably juiced Spektor's book at the same venue.

What is this? The label on the tin suggests we're going to be told about the mutualism of the various war machines and cinema. That might involve recruiting flicks (The Last Detail), spycraft and exoticism in occupied cities (Zwartboek yes, Lust, Caution no), exploring command-and-control (Dr. Strangelove, Failsafe, Wargames, Sneakers), intelligence (The Imitation Game), colonial activities (The Man Who Would Be King, Three Kings), revolutionaries (Doctor Zhivago no, The Leopard no, Reds yes, Che no, Braveheart yes), post war (Le Samouraï yes?!?, On the Beach no) and relitigating past battles (The Deer Hunter, Rambo), the militarisation of police (Sicario) or even satire (Team America, Army of Darkness, Mars Attacks!). None of these topics gets much if any attention. Some indispensable films (Das Boot, Downfall) — some of which refute the canard that only the winners make (most of the) movies of the conflict! — go entirely unmentioned. (Note to future authors: that proposition is impossible to endorse when your book has an entire chapter titled 'Nam.) How about docos like Hearts and Minds? Ah yes, "proper credit" should accrue to those.

Thomson makes it abundantly clear that he's into war movies for graphic battle scenes and considers this a moral defect in himself and all of us. Perhaps he should watch more scifi (Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Edge of Tomorrow, Ender's Game) with its often bloodless, victimless violence. Aliens is all he's got as Thomson is of the old school that considers scifi a lesser genre.

This means we get lengthy explorations of Saving Private Ryan, Fury and Mel Gibson with a fixation on the World Wars and (of course) Việt Nam. Thomson's Eurocentrism (and often parochial Englishness) blinkers the coverage and his repetitive hand wringing sours the deal when he could be digging into the military-cinema complex and analysing how the concerns of this genre have shifted over the period. There are too many dodgy assertions. I did not notice much discussion of the motivations, causes and objectives of war.

For all that I heartily agree with him (Chapter 30, 'Nam) that someone should make a movie based on David Marr's 1945, about the OSS, Hồ Chí Minh and everything else. It would have it all. I wonder why it hasn't happened.

Goodreads was generally unimpressed and picked it to death.

Again prompted by David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, and also the cast: Eric Bana's Hollywood debut, Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner, Tom Sizemore (less psycho than usual) and not Josh Hartnett. Sam Shepard does OK too. And so on and on. Directed by Ridley Scott.

The Americans decide to remove a warlord from Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 (notionally as part of a humanitarian operation to reduce starvation in the greater population) but don't bother informing the United Nations mission before doing so. Things go as it says on the tin. There is something of the second half of Full Metal Jacket — the detailed and graphic reconstruction of ultraviolence in an urban warzone — but it is too often too difficult to follow who's where and why. (Scott misses a trick by not having more detailed maps in the interstitial command scenes back at base.) The dialogue often tends to pure American hokum. And like most Việt Nam flicks, a fair neutral would have to say that the makers of this movie were on the side that lost.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Elvis Mitchell: G. I. Jane but all boys. "As in Pearl Harbor, the battle [...] is an eye-catching misfire, color-coordinated down to the tracer rounds." "Top Gun on an all-protein diet." Groundhog Day. Ouch. So characterless and racially segregated it plays like a zombie movie.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/animator Adam Elliot. Over a few nights due to a failure to grip, much like his earlier Mary and Max (2009) and Harvie Krumpet (2003). Again the claymation is great, as is the voice cast. On the other hand there are too many cliches (who hasn't heard the one about the bus driver who dies on the job?) and the frames are so often overstuffed and briefly held that I did not know what to look at; I paused it often to read the titles of books and so forth. The story itself is mostly a bummer with an undertow of unearnt redemption: life as one damn thing after another. The explicit invocation of norms and stereotypes felt lazy to me. What's with the religious nutters in W.A. anyway? And swingers in Canberra...

Peter Bradshaw: four stars of five. Yes, The Two Ronnies was huge in Australia.

A pointer from David Trotter's review in the London Review of Books of David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film. I'm about two-thirds the way through the book and so far the review is far superior. Directed by Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place) who co-adapted René Hardy's novel with him and Gavin Lambert. In black-and-white.

Thomson positions this film as a forerunner to The Bridge on the River Kwai of the same year. Richard Burton lead, almost dissolutely with his signature baritone blunted, perhaps not yet developed. I guess Liz was still a ways off. His delivery was fully realised however. He's some sort of archeologist drafted into the British war machine in colonial Cairo (as an officer, showing he has class standing despite being Welsh) where he chances to encounter his pre-war squeeze Ruth Roman (Strangers on a Train) who he abandoned for an archeological dig (I think). The plot has her taking improbable revenge by getting hitched to the much older and miscast Curd Jürgens.

Soon enough the men are off to Benghazi to fetch some McGuffin papers from the ever-inept Germans. Things go awry and the all-sorts soldiers are in for a long walk home. (Christopher Lee plays a sergeant.) Stuff happens involving bravery and cowardice, doing one's job and another's duty, using a camel as a medicine cabinet. It reeks of the perfidy of the brass, a minor Paths of Glory (from the same year) but is actually a lot smaller than that.

IMDB trivia: a toxic shoot. Excess details at Wikipedia.

I enjoyed Chief Dan George's schtick with Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales and wondered what he did in his Oscar-nominated role. It turned out to be a jag from many recent things: in the lead is Dustin Hoffman (Megalopolis) with Faye Dunaway billed second (Faye, The Thomas Crown Affair). Thayer David is somewhere down the list (he played Dragon in The Eiger Sanction). Directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) from a script adapted by Calder Willingham (Paths of Glory, Spartacus, One Eyed Jacks, The Graduate, Thieves Like Us) from the novel by Thomas Berger.

This is a take on relations between Native Americans and the white man around the period of the U.S. Civil War. In a framing story Hoffman is about 121 years old and is the last person to have direct experience of General George Armstrong Custer. He proceeds to tell us a tale in flashback that reminded me most of Forrest Gump's take on a good chunk of the twentieth-century U.S. experience. I guess it also inspired Dances with Wolves and provided a runway for the far more ambitious Blazing Saddles. How much you enjoy this depends on how much you're prepared to indulge Hoffman; I felt he was nowhere as comedic as Gene Wilder or Cleavon Little and my general allergy to him was not abated. Dunaway plays the wayward wife of Reverend David who tries so hard to be good. Chief is a chief and is good when given the chance.

Roger Ebert: four stars. "Endlessly entertaining." Vincent Canby: sometimes "the effect [...] is that of borrowed Yiddish humor."

Prompted by Faye which had some promising grabs from this movie. I'm not a fan of Steve McQueen so it was entirely up to Dunaway to make it worthwhile. This was her second feature after Bonnie and Clyde. Directed by Norman Jewison. Won an Oscar for the original song The Windmills of Your Mind.

The scenario has Trump-esque McQueen organise the robbery of a bank in Boston, mostly for the lolz. That part reminded me of Reservoir Dogs with its mildly baroque setup and partial unwinding. The bank gets a payout from their insurers who then send Dunaway to assist the police (Paul Burke) in recovering the funds for a 10% fee which I calculate to be about $260k. She maintains her record of "always getting her man" — honeypots are her speciality, obviously — but McQueen eventually comes out on top. Tears all round.

This is nonsense of many levels. If she was anywhere as smart and immoral as she claimed she'd have married McQueen (we know he's the marrying kind as he just got divorced) and taken him to the cleaners for some significant chunk of his $4M when the lust ran out. Her tenuous inferences are all ridiculously correct. The suggestiveness is lame.

And so we're left with the fashion and the photography. Maybe it works as a time capsule of the Boston of the day. Dunaway is a committed clothes horse with a new outfit in every scene which often makes no sense as it destroys continuity. (Consider one of her afternoon/evening dates with McQueen.) But perhaps, in combination with the disjointed editing, we're supposed to notice that time has slid on by. Overall the movie makes the case for liquidating these idle rich who engage only in antisocial trivialities. In that way it speaks loudly to our present moment.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Renata Adler at the New York Times. Yes, McQueen's castling ruined the entire picture. Dunaway's inspector's monomania may mirror Dunaway's.

A so-so biopic of Faye Dunaway. It seems like her career got very derailed by Mommie Dearest (1981), a Joan Crawford biopic directed by Frank Perry. I learnt about a few of her earliest projects and there's a chance she did something worthwhile in the 2000s. She doesn't share a lot of herself here; the director basically owns to the current-day interview being overly thin by including many older ones, and she's never very eloquent. She expressed a wider emotional range in Puzzle of a Downfall Child. The time would have been better spent with one of her movies; I rewatched Chinatown.

More Clint Eastwood completism. He starred and directed. This is something of a dry run for Unforgiven. The first of his efforts with Sondra Locke who is all doe-eyed desirability. Chief Dan George has the most fun.

The plot has Southerner Eastwood refusing to come in from the cold at the end of the Civil War. This is a wise move in the moment as his militia mates who surrender their arms are immediately slaughtered by calculating, faithless Yankees. On this account (a similar one to Gone with the Wind) the war was fought to keep interfering government out of free men's lives. (Eastwood lays this out in a lengthy dialogue with Chief Will Sampson of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Otherwise he's his usual laconic, taciturn self. There are no Black people in this film.) His refusal results in him being hunted from Missouri to Texas where he aims to hole up in the Indian territories. (It is not specified why this might insulate him from the Yankees.) Along the way he loses protege Sam Bottoms (who is a long way from Apocalypse Now), picks up George and much-abused "Little Moonlight" Geraldine Keams, well-educated-in-all-that-matters Locke and the remnants of her family and finally some good-timers as he repeatedly enters towns for supplies, is recognised and therefore contractually obligated to shoot quite a few people before exiting in haste. That got boring.

The cinematography is a mixed bag. The opening credits overflow with grabs of pitched battles then yield to some murky over-saturated shots of crowds of fatigued soldiers. It is difficult to make faces out. The compositions are often those that made Sergio Leone famous. The battle scenes are poorly choreographed. Eastwood does a lot of spitting.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Richard Eder at the New York Times. Hatchets out!

The funniest Clint Eastwood directorial effort I've seen yet. He stars with squeeze-of-that-moment Sondra Locke in an inversion-of-sorts of his Dirty Harry persona. His mediocre but straight and incorruptible policeman drops lots of f-bombs, some non-P.C. cliches about women and (obviously) still comes out the winner. Locke does what she can in a hooker-in-distress role who cannot help falling in love with Clint. Notionally he's there to get her from Las Vegas to Phoenix to testify in some case but really it's about moving from set piece to set piece. There's a nod to Easy Rider, a cop car shot to hell, a helicopter that randomly explodes when the pilot expertly fails to avoid some powerlines. The climactic scenes have the pair go all Ned Kelly in an armoured bus on a kamikaze mission to stick it to City Hall. They keep telling us that the mob wants to kill them but the actual objective is to assassinate property: apart from the vehicles there's a house that really cops it. Most of the shooting scenes drag on and on. Written by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "a movie without a single thought in its head."

What a mess. I wouldn't've minded so much if it was more original and well paced. The opening scenes are rushed (Babylon did the nightclubbing better) and there's too much exposition (much as I enjoy Larry Fishburne's sonorous delivery). The philosophical musings are incoherent, pretentious, recycled, inaccurate. Uninsightful! Gladiatorial Rome! Shakespeare! Adam Driver's Robert Moses-alike has an Emersonian mind! — and Coppola somehow has all the time in the world for these momentum-destroying languors but little for the action he considered necessary to include. A plot of some kind does progress but connective tissue is often lacking. The conclusion of it all is a baby! — but not a star baby.

The cast was intriguing. Mayor Giancarlo Esposito was very poorly used, ditto his fixer Dustin Hoffman. Shia LaBeouf got the Dennis Hopper role. Nathalie Emmanuel as the mayor's daughter was mostly tasked with standing around looking attentive and available. Connie Corleone (Talia Shire, Coppola's sister) was Driver's mum, Jon Voigt his bank-owning uncle, Fishburne his factotum. Jason Schwartzman performed like he's in a Will Anderson. Balthazar Getty I did not see.

For all that Aubrey Plaza (stealing scenes like a criminal) is a lot of fun as "Wow Platinum", a foxy TV/stock market floor reporter on the make. She has her own conception of integrity and uses what she has (sex) in pursuit of becoming part of a power couple. Somehow city-planning superman/creative Driver isn't interested but Voigt knows a rejuvenator when he sees one. Her sex scene with LaBeouf made me laugh so hard. She copped it late in the day in an unsuccessful Cleopatra getup, and not to slight her hard vamping but surely Coppola must've realised his movie was in trouble when she's the hottest thing going despite the acres of bare young flesh. (Often the gyrating and air-pawing of these barely-there young things are at total odds with the rest of the scene, such as when we and Esposito have to suffer Driver's Hamlet pretensions at a building site.)

Perhaps most fatal to the whole project is Coppola's dated conception of everything from cities to information dissemination (newspapers! just like Citizen Kane). His objective often seems to be to remake bits of famous movies like Ben Hur, Gladiator, the unbounded lurv of Interstellar ... 1980s wrestling (and not The Wrestler). Driver gets rebuilt just like Sharlto Copley. The odd scene or sequence gropes for something fantastic like Gilliam's Brazil or a Malick (The Tree of Life). Perhaps he had in mind Kubrick's outro Eyes Wide Shut but all along I couldn't get Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) out of mine.

It's difficult to say what this movie has and hasn't; for all I know the multiverse is in there somewhere. Coppola needs to crank out a director's cut that adds coherence. Is scifi really the only genre sufficiently capacious to address our times?

Very widely covered in the media. The coverage is bipolar (pump or dump) and mostly unnuanced. I didn't read the reviews before seeing it and have no appetite for them now.

And yet more Clint Eastwood completism. I'm deep into the dregs with this Cold War military advertisement (for both sides!). He produced, directed and starred — showing true commitment to the cause. The screenplay is an adaptation by Alex Lasker and Wendel Wellman of a novel by Craig Thomas.

The opening scene is a direct ripoff of Apocalypse Now: the Military Police come to pin the assignment on the golden boy while the golden boy is having a breakdown. With the prone-to-psychedelic-PTSD trope bedded down (partly through some vintage exploitation Việt Nam bombing footage) we spend about half the running time watching Clint get into disguise and into position, much like The Eiger Sanction. (This is mostly tedious and never as fun as Lancaster's dress ups in Scorpio.) The position this time is a Russian airbase where the MiG31 is being readied for a maiden flight. Mach-whatever, here we come.

The next hour has Clint fly this thing back from Russia to somewhere undetermined. (I found it weird that the U.S. apparently needed to steal Soviet military technology in the early 1980s.) We're shown the Russian response using a Day of the Jackal two-track structure, and I'd say the Russians marginally have it if only because they get a variety of sets. The other novelty this aircraft is supposed to have is a neuralink weapons system which requires thinking in Russian. Little is made of this opportunity for inadvertent comedy.

Overall it's super boring. I was a bit shocked to see Nigel Hawthorne (!) as a Russian scientist/engineer. The mix of English and Russian is taxing; perhaps there were supposed to be subtitles. I haven't seen Top Gun but I can say The Hunt for Red October is far superior.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. It even has a ("logically impossible") homage to Star Wars (original movie). Vincent Canby: "It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor."

A Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton jag from One False Move. Directed by Sam Raimi from a screenplay and novel by Scott B. Smith. We're a long way from Evil Dead here; far closer to Shallow Grave and Breaking Bad with a dash of wintry Fargo.

Three dumb characters (Thornton, Paxton and Brent Briscoe) discover a plane buried under a snow drift while out seeking vengeance on a fox that has (further) wrecked Thornton's ute. In the plane is a vast pile of cash that provides the nemesis the production code used to require. Paxton's been to college and married the most eligible girl in town (Bridget Fonda as a Lady Macbeth) and convinces the others of a semi-plausible plot to keep the loot. Almost immediately Billy Bob's shtick wears thin, Briscoe's thinner and we're stuck with Paxton's limited range of facial expressions. I was much relieved when Thorton called time.

The ensuing plot is overly contrived. There are an excess of guns. There are unexplained happenings, like the arrival of an FBI agent. I think the goal was to provoke what-would-you-do post-movie chatter, a sort of 1990s trolley experiment.

Roger Ebert: four stars. He is ready to accept these are "the consequences of criminal action" whereas we now know that the actual result is more likely to be a presidency. He feels the performances were flawless; I could only shudder at the dinner table scene where Paxton and Fonda work their way up to getting shouty and histrionic. Janet Maslin. She paired it with Affliction.

A much referenced classic I missed two decades ago. Shown on the ABC. Produced by the Warlpiri out of Yuendumu. Written and directed by David Batty and Francis Jupurrula Kelly. Just four short episodes. The best bits are brief vignettes, a sort of zen and the art of cars in remote Central Australia alloyed with various Aboriginal cultures. The final trip to Broome is less effective. I'm guessing everyone's favourite is the "magic mechanic" Jupurrula. Fun.

Details at Wikipedia.

More Denzel Washington completism. He produced, directed, and starred. The script is an autobiography by Antwone Fisher. Some parts work very well, such as eliding much of the relationship between leads Derek Luke and Joy Bryant. On the other hand Denzel's shrink is a bit too saintly. Fisher himself seems to get into less trouble than his story required. I enjoyed the tour of San Diego. Viola Davis works hard as Antwone's mother in an almost non-speaking role.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He loved the concluding movement; I found it trying. A Critic's Pick by Stephen Holden.

Kindle. Tim Winton's latest. He seems to be slowing down; it's been six years since The Shepherd's Hut.

Winton takes on all the themes of the moment. Apparently the only genre sufficiently capacious is scifi. I felt I'd read or seen every ingredient before but not in this particular mix, making me wonder if this was what John Birmingham has been doing since He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. I was concerned that the fixation on externalities would come at the cost of Winton's deft handling of relationships, character and dialogue; I was less bothered about the plot as I can't remember him ever being great at it.

We're taken immediately to a familiar Mad Max post-apocalyptic setting, lightly exoticised with salt pans and littoral zones. Our first person narrator, a man with no name, starts in the present time but the bulk is recounted in overly detailed flashback to a mostly passive interlocutor/incarcerator, just like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This structure has little impact on the tale beyond enabling ample foreshadowing.

In this world the people survive by homesteading and barter (money is implicitly absent) while the billionaires (who implicitly did not succeed in relocating to Mars) and Exxon-related parties hole up in remote, underdeveloped luxe fortresses. There's no zany or delicious ethical exploration ala Ned Beauman (here the Hermit Kingdom appears to be, well, the Hermit Kingdom) — just straight out rage and revenge against the dynastic wealth that caused the underspecified apocalypse. Everyone everywhere always wants to kill their bin Laden at any cost. I didn't understand what difference this could ever make and it didn't strike me as particularly Christian or in dialogue with a sins-of-the-father doctrine. Elements of Dune I guess.

The vector for this rectification is a covert society (the Service) that rapidly trains SAS-like operators. There's a a cell structure that is underexplored and I got wondering how these organisations correct themselves, especially in a world without mechanisms for broadcasting ideology and propaganda. How do they know they're killing the right people? Why is killing with gas (a contravention of an early Geneva protocol) so much less contentious than fire? Why is there no artillery or bombing? Whatever happened to drones and AUKUS? The Service provides material favours in return for service, and while his mother knows better than to ask the provenance of the providence, we're left to wonder if this is so very different to the dynastic patronage networks they’re removing or merely displacing. (For all we know the Service could be how the Musk clan takes out the Tillerson clan in a world bereft of Wintermute.) These rugged Australian revolutionaries (or reactionaries?) are a dead serious version of McGahan's "Oz Underground" mob of misfits.

Against John Brunner, infotech as we know it is broadly inaccessible and not directly responsible for the immiseration; it looks instead that we were done in by old-school rapacious fossil fuel capitalists. I guess that's one way to solve the mobile phone plot problem while allowing the persistence of night vision goggles and solar power. Very late in the day we get a glimpse of some "sims" which are pretty much those of Bladerunner; the (cinematographic) gas platforms on fire off the west coast of Australia (approximately Exmouth) are also appropriated.

Winton seems to have a shallow faith in artificially-intelligent robots being morally superior to men which perhaps reflects his shaky grasp (or wise avoidance?) of technology and innate optimism. He should have considered what happens when a sim needs parts and there's a shortage though. At all times he keeps the view small and tight, that of a person carried along by history who cannot learn from it no matter how much they see. We also get a woman who departs (shades of The Riders, shades of Dirt Music) and absent children. (I didn't understand why the narrator went looking for his wife, given she fled him under her own volition.)

There's the odd arresting sentence ("the dead stand on us too"), a bit of homage ("It went the way of every cataclysm. Slowly. Imperceptibly. Then all of a sudden.") and some overdressed cliche (“perform a role until you inhabit it naturally” is just fake-it-till-you-make-it) in the punchy prose. The vocabulary is overdone as it's a random jumble and not the specialised argot of a vocation (consider roofing or how farmers talk). For instance, Winton's tic of calling a sky "nacreous" only has a sniff of a chance of making sense if his narrator was a pearl diver rather than a plainsman. Overall the writing aims for Hemingway: long on the assertion, a bit short on the thought. I would have preferred less outrage and more conceptual outrageousness. He should've consulted with fellow Westralian Greg Egan.

Widely anticipated and reviewed in the Australian press. James Ley at the Smage. Overly familiar to long-time Winton readers. I haven't read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the movie left no impression. Scheherazade. Cli-fi! — like McGahan's The Rich Man's House. He doesn't clock that the collectivism here is seriously flawed. "Staunch", 500 times. He avoids appraisal. Goodreads. The ending just happens. Most MSM reviews read like their livelihoods depend on saying positive things; Winton, at least, paid attention to UniKitty.

On the basis of the leader for Dana Stevens's review. Slick animation directed by Chris Sanders from raw material by Peter Brown. Lupita Nyong'o voices the main robot, Pedro Pascal the friendless fox.

For reasons withheld a humanoid-ish robot awakens on a remote island with an all-consuming need for purpose, dressed up here as being assigned a task. (Later we see an army of these droids doing plantation work; if they weren't white the director may've left himself open to charges of political commentary.) Shebot "Roz" somehow "breaks her programming" and engages learning mode, which I guess means she's an advance on Arnie's T800 of Terminator 2 who could consent to the same change but needed human assistance to effect it. This enables her to communicate with the anthropomorphic animals. Antics ensue after a task is assigned with the customary sidekicks and now finely-tuned emotional manipulation. There's some great subtle physical humour. The island is a Noah's Ark, an Eden with no sign of ecological collapse where the animals apparently reproduce asexually. The final movement is generic and quietly ignores the problem of who's for lunch after making fun of it earlier. As always the trees suffer the most.

The animation moves amongst styles to serve the narrative. The wholesale thievery from other movies puts everyone at ease: Roz has a Tron aesthetic while the unsighted humans (there are always humans) live in WALL-E-style compounds. This is as far as the movie goes in acknowledging our current predicament. The island has a Bambi, some context is provided by a Star Wars (original movie) hologram, hearts are apparently TARDISes, the evil robot is a bit too much like GLaDOS. And so on.

Stevens found the island "a new and alien world." Wow. "The slow integration of the robot into the animal community is itself a kind of organic process; anyone expecting an antitechnology parable will be surprised to find an almost utopian tale about the coexistence of machines and the natural world." — but what about the conflict between man (who at least encoded the intentions of the robots) and machine? A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. "Leans into its derivative elements" — The Iron Giant, of course, and therefore E.T.

Via Roger Ebert's review of A Perfect World. Directed by Dominic Sena (Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Swordfish (2001)) from a script by Stephen Levy and Tim Metcalfe. (The latter has form for this kind of murder-fixated exploitation.) A strong cast. Brad Pitt as a psychopathic "oakie" drags empty-headed and very talkative Juliette Lewis in his wake. They both seem to deliver what they were tasked with, but she's a lot better a year later in Natural Born Killers and he was more fun in True Romance. On the other hand, normies writer David Duchovny and photographer Michelle Forbes are bland, credulous and ineffective. She sports a haircut that reminded me of Elina Löwensohn's in every Hal Hartley I can remember seeing her in. Perhaps it was the haircut to get in the early 1990s.

Like so many movies before and since, this is essentially a road trip from somewhere east to California. Notionally the normies are scouting the locations of serial/mass/whatever murders for the sake of writing a coffee table book. The inevitable ensues with graphic but uninspired blood sprays. I did not understand what the point was; there was nothing new here. At times it reminded me of U Turn, others The Killer Inside Me (Pitt is generally inscrutable), and never The Silence of the Lambs.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Janet Maslin: "desperately stylish", "unfolding in a mode that might be called baby noir". Her take on Dominic Sena makes it sound like he was a forerunner of David Fincher; IMDB's biography for Fincher says they formed a company together.

The Clint Eastwood completism is starting to hurt. Here he directed and starred. The script is by John Lee Hancock. Kevin Costner leads.

After a pro-forma jailbreak from somewhere in Texas circa 1962, Costner and cellmate Keith Szarabajka load up on food and hostages at a nearby town before embarking on a road trip across Texas. The destination is withheld for reasons unknown, and when revealed the motivation is weak. The crowd in the car thins to Costner and child T.J. Lowther, neither of whom puts in the best performance ever committed to celluloid. Clint follows behind in a commandeered caravan/remote command post with Laura Dern doing what she can in a stereotypically blokey environment. There's the odd interesting bit along the way and some stuff that didn't make sense, like Costner threatening a helpful black family; he makes for a tepid psychopath. Throughout we know we're going to end up in the grass beside Costner, all of us hoping the end would come sooner than it does. The concluding 30 minutes is the purest American hokum.

Roger Ebert: four stars. I don't remember Costner ever being all that silent. I somehow missed "Dottie’s Squat and Gobble". Janet Maslin.

Kindle. I got suckered by a skim read of Adam Sternbergh's indulgent review at the New York Times. Ascribing the infirmity of the age to "the postindustrial air we breathe" on the first page helped me commit. Soon enough the funny bits fell away and the author showed he had no idea what to do with his genetically-determined plot. Baxter tried to make it topical by referring to technology he clearly has no experience or knowledge of, and retreated to talking about the Midwest in general terms (table manners!) while sinking the boot into the ever kickable Confederate South. The final 20% went completely off the rails with our narrator indulging his ex-wife and her paramour in a rustic duel. Reasons, who needs them.

The writing is fine, the grammatical nitpicking boring, and there is the odd funny thing amongst the repetition and unoriginal, inadequate character development. The denouement reminded me of Ann Patchett: the author was so invested in his people that he needed to give them a decent sendoff.

Goodreads. Aiming for absurd and missing. He got scammed! — and so did we. Courageless.

Directed by Carl Franklin. Written by Dave Collard. Again starring Denzel Washington, this time as a police chief in a small town in Florida. Notionally he's split with wife Eva Mendes, implausibly a detective in Miami with an excess of forgiveness, and is back with his irresistible high school sweetheart Sanaa Lathan who's married to ex-footballer beefcake Dean Cain. Things get all scammy and Denzel is forced to react to each twist as it comes along until he can unravel the whole show on a boat (echoing Franklin's earlier One False Move). After that Mendes knows she'll never find a better man and life is reset to the halcyon days before the movie started. John Billingsley's Chae is sometimes effective comic relief but too often just plain annoying. It does not cohere. It's not Miami Vice, not even when Denzel is dangling from a rusted-out seventh-storey hotel balcony railing.

Roger Ebert: three stars. The screenplay was inspired by The Big Clock. Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times: "shallow — but empty".

Well the time did come to read Marr's magnum opus. I scored a brand new hardcover for the bargain price of 33.98 AUD from Amazon U.S. via their AU store. Their pricing algorithm put up a fight but I feel like I came out on top.

This is the first piece of serious history I've tried to read. The effort, skill and care involved in its assembly is obvious even to a non-specialist. The writing is excellent; my only beef was that I felt the footnotes often contained substantive information that could've been inlined in the main text. It would've helped if I'd known more about the specifics of World War II and pre-revolutionary China. I was perplexed that the Vietnamese phrases and titles were translated but not the French; perhaps it's the case that anyone serious about Vietnamese history knows enough to get by, but surely they'd be fluent in Vietnamese. The separate appendix of words with diacritics attached is so archaic now. (The text has apparently been updated for the ebook.) The worst part is the section on French metropole politics which was dull and obscure — as French party politics so often is — and somewhat irrelevant as all sides (Vichy included) agreed on the need to recover their imperial jewel after the war. Overall the book was as good as promised.

The causes of the major famine in 1945 are laid out early on. As I understand it now, and coarsely put, the French ran the colony in a sustainable way (or at least weren't so heavy-handed as to starve the peasantry) but the extraction of resources by the Japanese war machine from 1940 to 1945 put more strain on supply than could be borne. News to me was the narrow avoidance of a second major famine later in 1945 after the Red River dikes failed mid-year; as Marr puts it so well, restoring the dikes was a test of legitimacy that the new revolutionary regime passed, though the river didn't get that high again until 1970.

The latter situation obviously pushed any remaining fence sitters in the North to stand against all occupying powers. The British in the South, there to take the surrender of the Japanese troops and repatriate them, compounded the situation by stifling the flow of rice northward and releasing and arming the French colonists incarcerated by the Japanese after their coup on March 9. (This coup was pivotal — it precipitated the revolution — but undertaken somewhat reluctantly by the Japanese after the liberation of Paris/installation of the de Gaulle regime/imminent cessation of the Japan-France alliance meant they lost trust in the Vichy colonial administrators.) Marr provides some clues as to why things didn't stick in Sài Gòn: the poor communication channels with the North, the competition amongst "Viet Minh" groups that refused to resolve their differences, the attitude of the Japanese governor (Fujio Minoda) after the coup. Inaugural Independence Day (September 2) was a total fiasco in Sài Gòn.

I wish I had known more about the China of the day as the détente between the Nationalist and Communist forces, facilitated by the U.S., as faced by the Vietnamese was complex and fascinating. Marr had good access to senior O.S.S. operatives and provides ample context for the U.S.'s schizophrenic policy toward Indochina. (Roughly Roosevelt was ambiguously keen to move past empires but Truman was more concerned about Cold War imperatives and keeping a deeply wounded France sweet.)

Against this Marr is a bit light on for structural analysis. I wanted to know how the Viet Minh (eventually) got organised over such vast distances — did Hồ Chí Minh learn anything from the Irish? — and why they were so strong so early in (remote) Quảng Ngãi. Similarly the competing (and enduring) power bases of the Hòa Hảo (what a flag) and Cao Đài are inadequately explored, perhaps because they are so far from the epochal events in Hà Nội. The Catholic Church's support of the nascent DRV is not justified beyond an appeal to the broad shoulders of Hồ Chí Minh's charisma. It's still unclear to me how Ngô Đình Diệm and brothers came to power in the South, and Marr leaves us hanging about Bảo Đại (last seen in closeup meeting Hồ Chí Minh in Hà Nội). The role of the party (the Indochinese Communist Party) is sometimes brought to the fore and sometimes omitted; often I was wondering what General Secretary Trường Chinh was up to as events unwound, especially after the big ICP meeting at Tân Trào in August. This may've helped clarify whether the Viet Minh intended to be a broad tent in the longer term (incorporating other independence-seeking political organisations) or was just flushing out the competition. And so on and on.

Marr was fortunate to interview many of the players between 1967 and 1992 and his love for archival work shines through. The colour is sometimes epic, leaving me wondering what happened to this person or that who earnt a sentence or two in one of his footnotes. At various points Marr seemed to be steering me to Stein Tønnesson's The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (1991) and I felt he stopped short on delivering on his promise to cover 1945: the text fades into a zoomed-out Epilogue after Hồ Chí Minh reads the declaration of independence on September 2. I guess Marr knew the best writers and best works always leave the reader wanting more.

Goodreads. Greg Lockhart reviewed it for JSEAS (1996), Mark W. McLeod for the American Historical Review (1997).

Every few years Hollywood tries to recreate a noir classic. This effort by Carl Franklin (directing his own adaptation of Walter Mosley's raw material) was not successful. Denzel Washington does what he can in the lead and is often as bemused as the audience is, especially when Tom Sizemore lets his Natural Born Killers loose down at post-war Malibu. Don Cheadle has the most straightforward fun as a gun-toting Texan version of his character from Boogie Nights. It is a mystery to me why the woman in the blue dress, Jennifer Beals, would be considered at all devilish.

Roger Ebert: three stars, Chinatown overtones, an arbitrary resolution. Janet Maslin: has "parallels with the world-class Chinatown."

Directed by Carl Franklin from a script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson which is the strongest of anything I've seen recently. There's a kind of inexorability to how things go while leaving room for enough random events to avoid inescapability; it's a character study masquerading as a thriller. Something of a Cynda Williams jag from Mo' Better Blues and she's marginally less lethal here. She co-stars with Thornton, somewhat annoying Arkansas police chief "Hurricane" Bill Paxton and an effective but underused Michael Beach. Jim Metzler and Earl Bingings play the relevant part of the LAPD.

The plot is of the era: an L.A. drug larceny proves lethal to those holding. The odd sock perps hit the track to Star City, Arkansas via Texas. They mostly hold up their end of the plot while Paxton smothers us in puppy-dog enthusiasm. The conclusion is annoyingly neat.

Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. The opening scenes evoke classic Californian cold-blooded mass murder (think Manson). As lastliberal observes at IMDB, why genius Beach puts up with clown Thornton for so long is a deep gaol-cell mystery.

A heavily marketed and unsuccessful Stan TV miniseries co-created by Dylan River (from Alice Springs, "son of Warwick Thornton and producer Penelope McDonald") who also co-wrote and directed. The other co-creator was Tanith Glynn-Maloney. Notionally for Miranda Otto and Noah Taylor who both do what they can with a tiresome pile of cliches. Noah's a long way from his days of suave urban comedic cool in He Died with a Felafel in his Hand; blame the writing. In eight brief (less than 30 minute) episodes that could've been squashed into a single movie.

With heavy thievery from Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Welcome To Woop Woop) and much of the ozploitation canon, Sherry-Lee Watson slips out of juvie to visit her (let's say) spiritual father in hospital who wants her to return a cup to her biological father but is really angling to make good on an imagined slight before carking it on country. After thieving prostitute/madam Otto's taxi to get to the distant camp she encounters preacher/comedic relief Taylor and son/patent love interest Will McDonald. And as everyone knows by now, all roads in Central Australia lead to Coober Pedy and/or away from Alice Springs.

The remaining seven episodes parade a familiar and predictable gallery of grotesques as the three couples (Otto commandeering Taylor's caravan and tow vehicle and a pair of police detectives) proceed with their respective McGuffin hunts. There's a sweet but unimaginative scene where some bush mechanics unbog the young couple that would've almost have been at home in The Turning if it wasn't ruined by the black magic immediately preceding it. The climactic episode is set in urban Adelaide and thereabouts. A highly dubious thoroughbred breeding family is used to take pot shots at the landed gentry/bunyip aristocracy. Each scenario is very tidily resolved within its episode. The cinematography is good but does not innovate.

The production aims for a prelapsarian 1983 or so, which is about a decade before Dylan River was born. The presence of unleaded fuel implies it is set in the later 1980s and the absence of leaded fuel makes it nowhen. (Similarly the Stuart Highway never looked like that.) If the point was to exhibit some classic Australian cars I'd suggest the filmmakers spend more time in South Australia; just come to Whyalla! The dialogue is fatally anachronistic with lead Watson acting out just like the Millennial she is. (The words of wisdom she voices at either end of each bout are shockingly unoriginal.) It's all too shallow-sophisticated, too pale an imitation of Tarantino or the Coen brothers, for the era. Though of course the wholesale appropriation is bang on.

Luke Buckmaster: five stars, instant classic. I wish I saw what he was watching. I have yet to listen to Jason Di Rosso's take.

And yet more Clint Eastwood completism. Again he produced, directed and starred. The script by William Goldman, adapting the book by David Baldacci, is the weakest I can remember for any of his productions. Clint plays a jewellery thief in Washington D.C. — a subtle cat burglar to James Caan's sweaty industrial bank robber of the previous decade — with no love interests! Laura Linney is his prosecutor/daughter, Ed Harris an investigating cop, and Gene Hackman the absolutely-empowered President. Judy Davis is his chief-of-staff in one of her weaker performances. The plot is mostly nonsensical but Americans do like exploring the what-ifs of their political system. Once again the 1990s overrated the political impact of sex scandals.

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

Apparently filmed at the same time as Risky Business in Chicago and complementing it with a dank, dark and humourless grittiness. Directed by Rick Rosenthal from a script by Richard Di Lello. Sean Penn leads as a mostly nonspeaking underage crim sent to juvie. Ally Sheedy has the thankless task of being his girlfriend. Adversary Esai Morales gets implausibly sent to the same dormitory and the inevitable occurs, right down to some unlikely and singular character and/or moral growth. Clancy Brown's feature-film debut (!) and he does not take enough care with his head. Eric Gurry's underage geek has the most fun, albeit of a sociopathic, us-or-them amoral kind that is difficult to enjoy.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Janet Maslin: brutal. Both agree the first half is somewhat promising and the second half squanders that promise.

More minor Clint Eastwood completism. He produced, directed and starred. Also a jag from Risky Business via co-writer Paul Brickman. Perhaps because of these two there is some slick dialogue (OK, one liners) but otherwise the script is crap. This is very annoying as the cast is generally decent and Eastwood's talents for building movies are clearly wasted.

Eastwood puts himself in San Francisco, so recently the land of Dirty Harry, as a soak/pantsman/newspaperman hunted out of NYC due to dodgy reporting and life choices. Go west old man! He has an age-inappropriate wife (Diane Venora, reprising her scorned-wife role from Heat (1995)), a daughter about a tenth of his age (his own, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood) with a hippo fascination and yet still chases the young ladies (specifically Mary McCormack in an early bar scene and Lucy Liu in a coda). Notionally he finds a vector for providing justice to a man (Isaiah Washington) on death row, wrongly convicted, but this is obvious from the start.

Given the premise — the man is getting executed at San Quentin just after midnight — there is a strict order of operations on a timer so every scene without free-agent Eastwood is pure filler. There's a kooky subplot involving Catholic priest Michael McKean that goes nowhere. The resolution of the murder mystery is too neat and unsatisfying. The most fun is watching boss James Wood (and others, but mostly Wood) taking it to Eastwood. Denis Leary is too flat as a very dour cuckold.

Roger Ebert somehow found three stars. Janet Maslin. Both declare it an effective thriller, perhaps because they were also working in print.

An idle bit of Clint Eastwood completism. He directed and starred. The script has three cowriters and is a bit of a dog. But stay for the cinematography and classic 1970s exploitation.

Before Indiana Jones but after James Bond, super-assassin art professor Eastwood is asked to perform a couple of last jobs in exotic Europe. Bloodless Thayer David is his handler at the mysterious C2 agency. Before this he turns down student Candice Rialson's offer of doing anything for a B, showing he has standards. (That's her alongside John Huston in the golf buggy in Winter Kills, showing that she too has standards.) This initial setup (about half the movie) is pretty boring, at least until Vonetta McGee arrives to convince him to take the second gig. The next part involves mountain climbing training at George Kennedy's ranch in Utah with foxy Brenda Venus. There's no montage. The final half-hour has Eastwood and frenemies climbing the Eiger (somewhere in Switzerland) which is mostly worthwhile because it's so clearly Eastwood himself up there. Except that reading the IMDB trivia later made me wonder where "there" was.

Along the way Eastwood expresses many amusing, non-PC sentiments. There's a repeat of someone being left in a scenic American West desert; a homage to Sergio Leone perhaps, and prefiguring Breaking Bad.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby.

I wondered what else Tom Cruise did in the early 1980s beyond The Outsiders. Here he is in suburban Chicago, his affluent parents absent for a week, in wish fulfilment mode. Hooker with a heart Rebecca De Mornay helps him out on a lonely Saturday night and he returns the favour by hosting a bordello party to pay everyone's bills. There's some fun and jabs at the establishment, specifically entrepreneurship and Princeton, and also some priceless scenes of an off-brand and uninhibited Cruise; "Looks like it's the University of Illinois!" must be amongst the finest in his career.

Written and directed by Paul Brickman.

Roger Ebert: four stars. A sex commedy (not farce!) like The Graduate. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin (?) — the review is not positive.

Second time around with this Abel Ferrara/Christ Zois adaptation of a William Gibson short. Directed by Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant) and prompted by seeing his other collaboration with Christopher Walken (King of New York) about a year ago. Incidentally also an Annabella Sciorra segue from Romeo is Bleeding and Jungle Fever. She plays a procuress here. And, to a far lesser extent, Gretchen Moll from Boardwalk Empire in a non-speaking German putatively cold-hearted bitch wife role. And also Willem Dafoe and Ryuichi Sakamoto from everywhere.

Things fall apart almost from the start. The nightclub scenes grope for David Lynch's Twin Peaks with prostitute Asia Argento, nepo baby before it was cool, doing her best with a character that has no interiority. Her scenes in general and specifically with Dafoe aim for sexy but come across as exploitative, perhaps because they were improvised and the actors aren't comfortable with each other. The idea of pilfernating biotech genius Yoshitaka Amano for one zaibatsu from another with a honey trap was stale in the 1980s. Walken is tasked with explaining it all to us until he takes a Scarface swan dive.

The whole thing is spliced up footage from different technologies. The video feels dated and the lengthy final movement, which attempts to retell what we've seen from an insufficiently-distinct perspective, is weakly impressionistic and lacks the visual innovation of Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle.

Janet Maslin at the time. Lurid. Also David Stratton. I'm sure Roger Ebert saw it but it seems he didn't bother writing it up.

A jag via Roger Ebert's review from Romeo is Bleeding. Directed by Stephen Frears. Source novelist Jim Thompson had great form providing Kubrick with raw material (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and some less tasty stuff (The Killer Inside Me). Adapted by Donald E. Westlake.

Notionally this is a noir-adjacent small-scale con movie of a kind done so many times before and since (e.g., Matchstick Men). Boyish and not-too-smart John Cusack somehow makes bank by playing tricks on the unwary in L.A. (The ones we're shown are of the at-most-once variety and cannot yield the fat stacks he hides behind his clown pictures.) He somehow keeps Annette Bening interested, at least until his book-fixing mother Anjelica Huston arrives from the east coast and the long con(s) unwind. A lot of the plot makes little sense and amounts to little more than shuffling the characters around. I was waiting for a twist that just doesn't come.

Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. How much you enjoy this is probably determined by how much you enjoy an all-in Annette Bening.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with "British-Irish" director/co-writer Rich Peppiat. The other co-writers are the out-front rappers for the band: Naoise Ó Cairealláin aka Móglaí Bap and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh aka Mo Chara. The basic idea was to make a biopic of the gangsta rap band Kneecap out of Belfast in the style of Trainspotting.

Apparently by accident these two young blokes meet up with unfulfilled school teacher JJ Ó Dochartaigh (soon enough Dj Próvai, looking a bit like a younger Eddie Marsan) who has dreams of musical stardom and a garage studio to prove it. He's impressed by Naoise's notebook, stuffed with gangsta lyrics in Gaelic/Irish, and takes a liking to their drugs. (The recreational use of pharmaceuticals is portrayed as mostly wholesome or at least not permanently damaging; there is no needlework or disease.) There is a dash of history, including a brief exploration of Michael Collins's loyalties, that establishes the incompleteness of the Irish revolution without dwelling on religious schisms. The remainder patchily sketches familial and social relations: patriarch Michael Fassbender starts well but becomes too stiff and the humour around him being in the same state as Schrodinger's cat is overplayed. Naoise himself generally presents as a blank-faced cypher.

Despite the regular losses of momentum things chug along OK with the odd bout of extreme humour up to the last 20-30 minutes when it becomes several different movies and loses coherency. The stagey trial of Ó Dochartaigh for lifestyle crimes and using the school facilities to master a track after his garage studio is murdered falls entirely flat. Fassbender and son in the alley is beyond ridiculous. The joke of Ó Hannaidh's sex life is initially amusing but is worn out by the end. I didn't enjoy the music very much and the lyrics themselves are mostly the same-old stuff that got stale a long time ago: drugs, sex, violence, poverty, expropriation. The political angle is unsophisticated; I guess we're to conclude that U2's pop-rock, Enya's Celtic and Sinéad O'Connor no longer (didn't ever?) cut it as protest music.

Sheila O'Malley provides an American view for Roger Ebert: three stars. Simone Kirby as an IRA widow is indeed fine. Beatrice Loayza. Gonzo. Wildly uneven.

They don't make them like this any more. Directed by Peter Medak (The Ruling Class). Written by Hilary Henkin (Wag The Dog).

Like many of Tarantino's efforts I rewatch this looking for more than is there and, finding not much, promptly forget that there's nothing there. The cast is fantastic but poorly used: Gary Oldman does what he can, giving the time of day to anyone who asks as a bent NYPD officer. Lena Olin goes Russian, above and beyond. Michael Wincott doesn't need to get out of first gear. James Cromwell is wasted in an almost non-speaking role. Annabella Sciorra works her smile even harder than she did in Jungle Fever. Roy Scheider as a mob boss! The script just falls apart at some point, roughly when a poorly handled twist involving Juliette Lewis shows just how deft Se7en was. The concluding wish-fulfilment arc (in a court building, in an Arizona drive-past diner) is painfully meaningless. Mark Isham's soundtrack is often effective as it slides from classic (but unoriginal) trumpet-driven noir-jazz to electronic horror.

Roger Ebert: two stars. Janet Maslin.

Kindle. Billed as a spy thriller but really it's a discursive research dump. Quite often I wanted to throw the Kindle across the room as I waited for it to get good. It didn't; the final 10% or so does get moving but by then it's too late, and the concluding farce can't make up for what came before.

Our Californian narrator "Sadie Smith" bills herself as a spy. She's more of an agent provocateur though. The task which she chose to accept was to infiltrate a pseudo-kibbutz in the Guyenne region in southwestern France via the pants of a minor Parisian film auteur in ballpark 2010. Her actual job is to bore us witless at length with trivial observations about early hominids and excessive but inconsequential drinking. Does she (or Kushner?) really think that archeologists and anthropologists are so stupid that they do not understand survivorship bias? Everyone knows that left-wing French politics has been dead boring since 1968, and there's a lot of glory but not much substance in theory; I mean, it's just free association.

The early flashback structure demonstrates that Kushner put more value in finding homes for her research/notes from a holiday in France than in telling a good story; I tend to feel that if the narrative and characters have any strength then they can be presented linearly, from start to finish. If they don't, no amount of faux intellectualism is going to save things.

While chugging through this (in lengthier bouts as I realised there was nothing memorable in the offing) it struck me as mostly derivative of other works. Fundamentally there's Adam Johnson's Parasites Like Us but without its humour or actual erudition, and the entrapment of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. The tendentious and shallow concept of a person's "salt" struck me as a pale imitation of Persig's grappling with quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Perhaps, like in Gone Girl, someone found the sex sexy, maybe even including the repugnant bits. Ultimately I couldn't tell if Kushner was patronising her readers or actually intended her narrator to present as patronising and stupid. Or was it all an accident?

Widely reviewed. Like me, Brandon Taylor was completely unimpressed. Reading his article now, after the book, I see my beefs are a subset of his. The vacuity is laid bare by how "Sadie Smith" chooses to spend her retirement, by doing nothing much of anything. Dwight Garner gushed and also liked the bit about cave-dwelling Bruno getting head lice from a dead German soldier during the occupation of France. And so on. Hats off to the marketing team once again.

At Middleback Arts Centre. I booked last week as I remembered that I was too preoccupied to go to anything at this time last year and just happened to get lucky. I hadn't been to a Bangarra performance before. Moderately full.

I read the brochure before going and so expected a strong narrative or at least an iconography that I could recognise. Notionally we're told a story of a soak in western South Australia that gets consumed by the steam locomotives transiting the Trans-Australian Railway in the 1920s or so. The final part takes us in a tacked-on way to the horrors of Maralinga.

As it was I struggled to find things to focus on with all the high-energy movement and I started to wonder what it looked like from different angles; I was in the middle perhaps 15 metres back from the front edge of the stage and felt I was looking down when I should have been looking across. There was a sense of the athleticism but not the danger that comes with circus. Many in the crowd dug it with a broad standing ovation.

Geraldine Higginson's review is somewhat tepid.

Pure fan service. The story makes little sense. The characters are weak. Loads of cameos (Wesley Snipes!) but not a thing is memorable.

Over several nights as it is somehow engrossing and often toes the line of being too much. Written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang. This was his debut feature after a career in TV.

Taipei, Taiwan, feeling like the late 1980s. The traditional society that was breaking down in That Day on the Beach (1983) has broken down. The rain provides cover for the bad boys on motorcycles (dominant Chen Chao-jung, adjunct Jen Chang-bin) who are cracking everything coin operated (phones, vending machines) to pay for the night's entertainment at the video game parlour and endless cigarettes. Soon enough anithero Kang-sheng Lee has quit his crammer and burnt his bridges with his middle class parents, taxi driving Miao Tien and expositor-of-tradition Yi-ching Lu. There's a vibe that things are going to go all Taxi Driver but Lee is mostly mute. Along the way we learn that roller-rink attendant Wang Yu-wen is the only available girl in the whole city; in fact things are so bad for her that she keeps buying the boys dinner. I guess nobody gets what they want.

Pen-Jung Liao's realist cinematography is very effective. The morning-after early on is captured with some great tracking shots on the city streets as the boys go their separate ways. The flooded apartment is quite something. I don't think there's that much neon; the glare of the CRTs dominate in the arcade and the love hotels. Far less is made of the flouros at the restaurant than Christopher Doyle managed to in Chungking Express. The score by Shu-Jun Huang is often insistent.

#58 on the Golden Horse list of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films, on par with The Way of the Dragon. A. O. Scott in 2015 upon its U.S. release. Richard Brody, also in 2015. The phone dating is so weird.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Ariane Louis-Seize. Québécois, mostly in French with some English and Spanish.

It's almost entirely right there in the title; the only variable in the genre is what demographic these vampires are playing to. Unlike El Conde this is politically vacuous and in dank colour but shares its attitude that the world is as the creators say it is, carcass disposal and murder investigations be damned. Perhaps this couple eventually grows up and moves upriver to Detroit. The tepid humour cannot compete with What We Do in the Shadows; these guys aren't as fastidious about the provenance of the blood they consume as Jemaine Clement. Perhaps this is the next generation of Buffy.

More broadly there's a dash of quirky-/awkward-girl Amelie in a bland suburban aesthetic that isn't wild like a Tim Burton or fussy like a Wes Anderson. Lead teen Sara Montpetit is done up like 1990s P.J. Harvey. Her love interest Félix-Antoine Bénard is a bit walleyed like Marty Feldman's Igor. He wants to avoid a meaningless death (but apparently not a meaningless movie). The kids carry on like the young Americans they are. There is much object fetishism: vinyl records and egg chairs. Her first kill stands in for a loss of virginity. The fantasy fulfilment is uninventive. Things generally move along but do get bogged every so often. I guess you could say these guys are in favour of voluntary assisted dying.

More screwball from Frank Capra, again prompted by that book review. Also adapted by Robert Riskin from a short/magazine story by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Oscars all round, including Best Picture. #247 in the IMDB top-250.

Impulsive scion Colbert jumps off her father Walter Connolly's boat near Florida after he puts up a fight about her continuing to be (chastely) married to flying Jameson Thomas (not Oscared). Needing to get back to her man in NYC while avoiding the private dicks etc. of the era, she opts for a bus where she encounters Gable. The rest is inevitable, including the need to beggar these rich beautiful people to garner audience sympathy during the Depression. Larceny is OK if its in the service of love. It's not that screwy and again the last 30 minutes gets far too serious. I'm not sure which night it happened on.

Mourdaunt Hall at the time.

Kindle. George Mackay Brown's first novel. He certainly wrote about what he knew. Set in a fictional town (Greenvoe) on a fictional island (Hellya) in the Orkneys, he ably documents a dying way of life in an isolated community. The characters and their proclivities are closely and sympathetically observed. I got the feeling he split his own into a few people here. He does not shy away from the ugly things in life but greets them with gentleness. The nested and shifting story frames are smoothly and deftly handled. The writing is quite fine and the specialised vocabulary is a necessary part of the requiem. Far more engaging than you'd expect from what is structurally a soap opera.

As with Fankle-the-cat the outro here rails against the destruction of nature and deep history, the displacement of the locals, for expedient and withheld reasons. (Just what was Black Star?) It comes with a rush and a change of style and voice, a simplification of language, like he's explaining himself to a bureaucrat from London.

Goodreads. Calm, entertaining, thoughtful. Mystical. Robert Crawford on Mackay Brown.

Prompted by Andrew Katzenstein's review of Grégoire Halbout's book Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals in the New York Review of Books. A very young James Stewart, scion of a NYC banking dynasty, romances his secretary Jean Arthur while his father Edward Arnold looks to close the biggest deal ever, hinging, of course, on buying her grandfather Lionel Barrymore's sprawling abode. Directed by Frank Capra who won the best director Oscar. The film got best picture. Spring Byington was nominated for her very amusing diverted mother/wife. Adapted by Robert Riskin from a play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart.

It's clear the actors are having a ball. There are some great scenes — Jimmy Stewart dancing with a young girl half his height, the crow and the cones, the crazy inventiveness in the basement (evoking 1960s Doctor Who), ecumenical grace at the dinner table, some farcical court proceedings. There's a bit too much speechifying and out-of-character listening, and things start to drag in the last 20 minutes or so as the gears shift from screwball fantasy to moral fable. It's at its best when it's just having a laugh.

Thematically it foreshadows The Godfather — grandpa is beloved by the community — and the epic destruction of neighbourhoods by Robert Moses. I doubt many businessmen quit when they realise they're not having enough fun.

Frank S. Nugent at the time.

Excess Alain Delon completism. Prompted by Glenn Kenny's review in 2021 — a Critic's Pick! It took me several goes to make it past the first half hour.

The scenario has Delon holidaying with hot stuff Romy Schneider at a friends' villa in the south of France. She's a writer of some kind, as was he before he failed into advertising. They're still heavily into each other despite it being about two years since they met and both being powerfully inert apart from the scenes of staged friskiness. A friend/erstwhile lover in the tunes business arrives with his previously undiscovered nubile daughter causing the usual complications. Things then grind on as they must.

It's sexy in a camera-objectifying-female-bodies way; the male gaze is all we get as the women are too busy looking at the men. I found it boring as not much effort is put into developing the characters; for instance it's clear that Delon isn't drinking but we are never given a reason why. Another scene has Schneider getting annoyed at her chopsticks. The attempt to turn it into a detective flick in the last movement is lighter than air.

It's tagged at IMDB as a psychological drama and I guess you could bracket it with minor Hitchcock like Spellbound. At times I wondered if it was taking on more of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than it could swallow.

Richard Brody was unimpressed in 2021.

Bill Forsyth's first Hollywood feature. Inevitable after Breaking In. Adapted by him from a widely feted book by Marilynne Robinson. Over many nights due to a failure to grip.

Two young ladies (soon enough and mostly Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) are dumped by their mother Margot Pinvidic (looking a bit too much like Susan Sarandon) on their grandmother in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho. Her passing brings their free-spirited aunt Christine Lahti (...And Justice For All, Running of Empty) back to town and she is entrusted with their care. Her opinions on child rearing are not so much relaxed as entirely absent. Adventures ensure, some growing up occurs but none of the typical coming-of-age stuff.

It's billed as a comedy-drama but I found little of either. There are some of Forsyth's signature moves (repeated motifs, significant gestures). The initial scenes and themes of female freedom/wild abandonment/Pinvidic/road trip evoke Thelma and Louise and not Little Women. The described-but-not-shown epic train derailment points toward Magnolia and there's just a dash (maybe) of Welcome to the Dollhouse in Ruth's exclusion from Lucille's social life. Of course Forsyth is too gentle a filmmaker to take any of it to the limit.

Roger Ebert: four stars and much effusion. Lahti's Sylvia "seemed closer to a mystic, or a saint" than a mad woman. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Lahti plays "a siren of the open road". IMDB trivia: Diane Keaton was originally cast in the lead. Takes place in 1955. Further details at Wikipedia. Unlike Forsyth's other efforts there's not much of a soundtrack.

More Alain Delon completism. He passed recently. Directed and co-written by Luchino Visconti. Inevitable after The Leopard. Claudia Cardinale has a minor role as the oldest-brother's wife. In glorious black-and-white. Over two nights due to length.

After the passing of their patriarch, four of five brothers and their mother from feudal farmland in southern Italy join the eldest brother in frigid industrial Milan. Each brother gets named in a title card but really it's always about Delon's Rocco and Renato Salvatori's Simone. Both end up boxing and falling for the same woman, Annie Girardot's Nadia, a prostitute. The story maps the disintegration of the family as society's traditions crumble. It's not very subtle and things generally go as you'd expect, but despite this it is somehow engaging throughout. There's a great scene where an old bloke explains how housing works for those of meagre means.

Roger Ebert in 2008: a "great movie" for an instant four stars. Obviously points the way to The Godfather, Mean Streets. Operatic and exhausting. Bosley Crowther in 1961. The Grapes of Wrath. Vincent Canby in 1991. Rocco recalls Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. More details at Wikipedia.

Originally titled Bastarden (The Bastard). Directed and co-written by Nikolaj Arcel who was also responsible for the similarly fictional-historical A Royal Affair (2012) which also starred Mads Mikkelsen. He also co-wrote Riders of Justice with co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen. In two sittings as it neatly segments.

Pensioned soldier Mikkelsen gets sick of the poor house in the 1750s and decides to petition the Danish King. He offers to have a crack at farming the moorland/wasteland of Jutland in return for a peerage on success. Advisor Søren Malling (A Hijacking) is against it but comes around when he sees there is little chance of a payout and some political benefit in the meantime. Labour is sourced initially from some escapees (housekeeper Amanda Collin, Morten Hee Andersen) of the house of the local feudal lord (a hammy Simon Bennebjerg) and later a band of gypsies. As the cultivation is a tedious process the focus is more on a romantic opportunity with Norwegian heiress Kristine Kujath Thorp, the construction of a family with the housekeeper and a dark-skinned castaway ragamuffin (Melina Hagberg), and the power struggle with the provincial landowners.

The point, I guess, is that Mikkelsen learns that the noble title isn't worth it. The conclusion is very similar to Viggo's: people on a horse looking at the sea. There are some loose ends: where did he get that essential white clay from? how did Ms Norway fend off the laird for all that time? why is the king so powerless? Some scenes are over the top. Mikkelsen is back to being powerfully inert — his performance is all details, not dancing, and still the ladies cannot resist. Rasmus Videbæk's cinematography is often intentionally murky and effective.

Jason Di Rosso interviewed Arcel. Manohla Dargis: enjoyably serious. Sheila O'Malley. Peter Bradshaw: three stars of five. Generally compared with Barry Lyndon.

The things that Guy Pearce and Jacqueline McKenzie make me watch. Directed and co-written by Lee Tamahori. He looks to have struggled within the Hollywood vortex since Once Were Warriors (1994). Apparently this is the third entry of a trilogy with that and Mahana (2016). The other writers are Australian Shane Danielsen, who reviews movies for the Schwartz media, and Kiwi Michael Bennett. Based on a novel by Hamish Clayton.

Pearce leads as a minister of religion who has been mail-ordered by the upstanding settler folk of 1830s Epworth in New Zealand. En route, taking a transparently ill-advised break from Captain Dean O'Gorman's boat, he and his majestic white horse encounter Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) whose husband is soon executed by warlord Lawrence Makoare. The horse purchases her life for reasons of plot and it looks like we're in for a retread of the fish-out-of-water frontierism of The Last of the Mohicans and The Piano.

At the town Pearce (with Ngatai-Melbourne in tow) encounters outcast McKenzie whose Māori husband has also been killed in inter-tribal warfare. The locals are initially enthusiastic that their Christian needs will now be addressed but for reasons of plot Pearce goes another way, leading to an excess of talky history lessons and a graphically-violent L.A. Confidential climax.

There are some good bits in the small, such as when gun-running O'Gorman argues for self-regulating (musket) markets on the basis of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). The didactic opportunity is squandered however as Pearce does not rebut with the now-ignored moral bits of the famous tome. The cinematography by Gin Loane is fine but we've seen so much of the scenery before that we expect a horde of CGI orcs to burst forth at any moment. Or perhaps Sam Neill, once more unto the breach. The dialogue is occasionally rubbish.

Ben Kenigsberg. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Lee Tamahori. Tamahori asserts that without Christianity the Māori would have used the white man's muskets to wipe each other out. He has consistently taken women's points of view in these movies. Three stars of five from Luke Buckmaster: who exactly was the convert?

Bill Forsyth's second Hollywood feature. I have yet to see his first.

Late-career Burt Reynolds (in a dry run for Boogie Nights?) leads as an everyman/playboy burglar who meets-cute tyre mechanic Casey Siemaszko on a job in suburban Portland, Oregon and takes him on as an apprentice. It's a heist movie! — just like it says on the tin. There are some funny bits in the small and it does not try to be clever. There is no twist but instead lots of forgiveness with stakes more in line with That Sinking Feeling than Thief. The narrative arc somewhat inverts Knox Goes Away.

Reynolds was almost unrecognisable (to me) when he eventually shed his iconic moustache. Sheila Kelley was vaguely familiar from Matchstick Men. The soundtrack is obtrusive.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Character not caper. Vincent Canby. The dog is indeed very amusing.

Minor Burt Lancaster completism prompted by David Trotter's article on David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film in the London Review of Books. Based on Daniel Ford's story Incident at Muc Wa (1967) which is a rough contemporary of Halberstam's memoir and novel.

It's 1964 and a small group of American military advisers, led by Lancaster's Korean-War vet Major Asa Barker, find themselves in a locale called Penang somewhere in the south of Việt Nam. A mystifying expansion of the group is explained when General Harnitz (Dolph Sweet) helicopters in: they're to establish a garrison at the old French settlement of Muc Wa. The result, of course, is their own private Điện Biên Phủ.

Lancaster delivers all the funny lines quite flatly (some are quite amusing) but the attendant flatness of the other performances leaves it unclear if this is failing to be a comedy in the style of Altman's M.A.S.H. (about the Korean War, with the same racial slurs) or failing to be something more substantial. Amongst the stereotypes is an intelligence officer who is nothing like Daniel Ellsberg.

IMDB tells me it was shot in California with Vietnamese refugees. This makes me wonder if it wasn't one of the ingredients for that episode of The Sympathizer.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. The cliches did their duty. All the details at Wikipedia and more at IMDB trivia.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Jub Clerc a year ago. Steve Rodgers was the other writer.

The core of the story is about a group of at-risk youth from Port Hedland or thereabouts who are taken on a photography road trip out to Karijini. Shantae Barnes-Cowan leads. Her mum likes to party hard so it falls to her uncle Mark Coles Smith to provide some stability. Carlos Sanson Jr. and Tasma Walton (far better here than in Mystery Road) are the adults supervising the trip.

The Pilbara is as gorgeous as ever but it's as it's been shot to death it's difficult to get excited by the gasps of awe from the (notional) locals. Things go gently with some implied but toothless menace and a bit too aimlessly: there are a few attempts to lift the stakes by cliched (soap operatic?) means. The use of film cameras struck me as just as disruptive as phones; how often were 1980s holidays interrupted by the artifice of needing to shoot? The limited number of photos and expense involved is not exploited here, and in general there are no stakes, quixotic frame or timelessness of a Walkabout or Rabbit Proof Fence. On the plus side it's great to see a script that shunts the well-worn issues of the white/black interface to the edges of a self-contained mostly-indigenous universe. This is helped along by a cracker soundtrack.

Look Goodsell: sincerity is so uncool in a teen. I dissent, the camera lies: only someone who hasn't been to Port Hedland could deem it "eerily pretty". Based on Clerc's experiences on a "photo safari" with National Geographic in the 1980s. She also did a segment of The Turning. Played at Cannes Écrans Juniors 2024. Sandra Hall, blandly. Elsewhere: it invites comparison with The Breakfast Club.

#100 on David Stratton's list of marvellous movies. Mostly for Pamela Rabe who I saw in Ibsen's Ghosts a long while back. She's not great here. Directed by Samantha Lang from a script adapted by Laura Jones from Elizabeth Jolley's novel. I'm not in the target demographic and perhaps nobody is.

In a haircut that is almost fatal Mirando Otto appears at only child/spinster/Germanic Rabe's family farm somewhere near frigid Cooma/Nimmitabel as domestic help after a stretch in juvie. Patriarch Frank Wilson (Frank Wilson!) is almost dead and the only person with Rabe's interests in mind is relentlessly unromantic stock-and-station agent Paul Chubb. Things go as the themes force them to: a culture/music clash between 1940s isolated Europhile settler frugality and 1990s expansive hedonistic modernity, ease via capital gains and subdivision replacing honest toil, parental and male expectations from beyond the grave versus living orphanhood and sisterhood, obligation and responsibility against expediency, an unsound employer/employee relationship, mental unwellness. Too much misdirecting dead weight — much of it carried by single lines of dialogue, an expression on Rabe's face, a shared bed, a clean break in Otto's character, a repeated scene — robs the movie of its arthouse horror potential.

Mandy Walker's cinematography was generally terrible; the palette was too washed out though that may have been due to the format I saw it in. It is not an aesthetic triumph.

The Movie Show: David on the boost (satisfying, selected to compete at Cannes 1997 (!), The Servant, 4.5 stars of 5), Margaret more realistic (cheated (!), just a yarn, 3.5 stars of 5). Stratton at Variety at the time. A. O. Scott: The Blair Witch Project, Picnic at Hanging Rock. But it isn't at all scary; I think he and Stratton took more to the movie than the movie brought to its audience. Ozmovies claims they'll be back after a few weeks of renovation (here's hoping) and in the meantime they suggest we use archive.org for all the details. "[S]old at the time as a psychological thriller, but it’s short on psychology and definitely short on thrills." Theatrical. Rabe's character is a city person's idea of a farm woman. Perhaps I am insufficiently steeped in Freudianism.

Kindle. Inevitable after Andrina. Billed as stories for kids, and indeed the writing is direct and fine but the vocabulary requires an adult. The cat of the title is black (of course) and comes to live with a young school girl on an island in Orkney. The stories are in the vein of Oscar Wilde: gentle moral fables garbed in fantasy and magic realism. We visit ancient Egypt, imperial China, a pirate ship and the island itself in the present time. Fankle hates the snow. The coda is an acerbic take on man's relationship with creation.

Goodreads.

Viggo Mortensen wrote, directed and (apparently unintentionally) starred in this. The poster at IMDB is in the classic style of an old Western and in many ways so is the movie.

Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) leads as a Francophile woman who's after a good time on her own terms in a place we're supposed to recognise as San Francisco in the 1860s. She's sick of her hectoring establishment lover Colin Morgan and meeting laconic carpenter Viggo on the docks seals the deal: off she heads to Nevada (I read later) with him to live an isolated quiet life in a wooden cabin redolent of her childhood. Being of independent mind she gets a job at a saloon in a nearby town. Viggo, also of independent mind, feels the need to see the nascent Civil War for himself (in New Mexico) and leaves her to the local heavily-drawn predators (Garret Dillahunt, Solly McLeod, Danny Huston) and our perplexity.

The themes of fatherhood and an unwell mother run throughout and are something of a compliment to Captain Fantastic. Both leads radiate quiet inner strength. Viggo is more restrained — have we seen him play a Dane before? (A quick google suggests yes.) The multilingual dialogue is a nice touch as it dodges (or at least complexifies) much that is problematic in this genre. I found the (mild) violence unwelcome; while it's not glorified it detracts from what is otherwise a gentle love story between two strong people where nothing particularly complicated goes on. I wish Viggo could have found some other way to raise the stakes than by compromising Krieps.

Ben Kenigsberg made it a New York Times Critic's Pick. The film has "a nested, at times unnecessarily complicated structure." Marcel Zyskind's cinematography is fine. Four stars of five from Peter Bradshaw and Wendy Ide (it flags whenever Krieps is off screen). San Francisco is "the end of the world" — tell that to the Chinese immigrants. Michael Wood: the trio of opening scenes (knight in forest, shootout in town, woman dying in bed) are disjointed, the juxtaposition awkward ... but has interesting effects. He proceeds to lay it all out for us. Eastern Promises. "This film is about class and money rather than who shot Liberty Valance." The middle section drags. Brian Tallerico at TIFF 2023. Three-and-a-half stars and many references from Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert's site. Loads of details at Wikipedia. I read later that Viggo also composed the music and produced. Nobody compared Krieps to Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Written and directed by Bill Forsyth. Bill Paterson leads as an early-morning radio host who wakes Glasgow up with his good-spirited, G-rated japes. While driving his red BMW 313i coupé through the city, fantastically-permed Clare Grogan gives him an irresistible smile from an ice cream truck and we're off to the races. Forsyth's treatment of his mediation in their turf war is mostly gentle (like Andrina) though the seedy warehouses and low-level violence (mostly just property damage) gives it a harder edge (like That Sinking Feeling). It's a bit Glasgow Underbelly, sweetly, reflecting the changing ethnic composition and concerns. The conclusion is a homage to all the wily Scots in history.

The jokes are quite amusing: his dentist really does look like George C Scott, and how is it that everyone knows what Paterson looks like? Mark Knopfler provides a soundtrack less memorable than Local Hero's; much is lifted from Dire Straits's 1982 album Love Over Gold. Afterwards I learnt that Knopfler is actually Glaswegian and Clare Grogan also had a pop music career.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Forsyth "has made a specialty out of characters who are as real as you and me, and nicer than me." Vincent Canby replays the opening scenes where Paterson is summarily dumped by his klepto girlfriend Eleanor David and we think we're in for something quite different to what follows. A disappointment after Gregory's Girl and Local Hero (!). Jonathon Coe in 2009. The cinematography by Chris Menges is indeed great.

Tancredi Falconeri: If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

More Alan Delon and Burt Lancaster completism. They were also paired in Scorpio a decade later. In three sittings due to inordinate length (3h5m), the realisation that much of it repays a close watch, the indirection of the dialogue/incompleteness of the subtitles, and that there's not a lot of plot. In glorious Technicolor and (dubbed) Italian. Directed by Luchino Visconti.

My knowledge of Italian history is very weak and this movie does not hold hands. Early on it's clear we're in Sicily at a historical moment and much later we're told it's the mid-nineteenth century, which would have already been clear to people familiar with Garibaldi's exploits. Patriarch/Prince Lancaster seeks to preserve his family's social position while accomodating the emerging political arrangements. Knowing the limitations of his own children and means he encourages nephew/war rake/man of flexible allegiance Delon to get organised with daughter-of-a-crass-bourgeois Claudia Cardinale in a fusion of aristocracy, money and beauty. Like much of Shakespeare, knowing how things have got to go does not spoil it at all.

There are many great scenes, many of which have large casts where the expressions and movements of the individuals diffuse the focus and broaden the presentation of character and relationship. For this reason it would help to see it on it a big screen. One instance is the initial scene, where Lancaster's family are at prayer, and a later one where he's reading from a book while the ladies engage in craftwork. And of course the dinner where Delon and Cardinale meet, and the climactic ball of the final forty plus minutes. And so on. Against these are some two-handers that work well in tight: somewhat secular Lancaster jousting with priest Romolo Valli (familiar from A Fistful of Dynamite; God is always nearby) and later Leslie French about becoming a senator for the new regime. Delon and Cardinale regularly escape the crowds to further their romance. Throughout Lancaster's princess Rina Morelli knows the score but cannot hide her jealousy at his mistress, the ball and her irrelevancy since producing a next generation that will not inherit.

The tone is more upbeat than elegiac; it's more about surviving and even thriving than mourning what is being lost. It's somewhat adjacent to The Godfather — that palazzo could be the same one as Pacino resides in during his exile in Sicily — with politics brought to the forefront. The themes are also threads in Sergio Leone's movies: the big set piece in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly where Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach encounter the Union and Confederacy at a stalemate over a bridge. I guess how nationalism is forged and peace established after a revolution is still a live concern.

Roger Ebert: a "great movie" in 2003 for an instant four stars. Bosley Crowther saw a bowdlerised version cut to 2h40m and dubbed into English. The horror. "I just wonder how much Americans will know or care about what's going on, how much we will yield to a nostalgia very similar to that in Gone With the Wind." Vincent Canby got to see it in its full glory in 1983. "This may or may not be [Lancaster's] greatest performance — there's no way of telling without the voice — but it's a visually arresting one, and one that points the way to the great performances later in his career." Philip French in 2010. Five stars from Peter Bradshaw in 2003. IMDB trivia: Scorcese's favourite movie? No wonder it reminded me of The Age of Innocence. Many great lines.

Kindle. It's been more than a decade since Pham released A Theory of Flight and even longer since he has had a book traditionally published (Catfish and Mandala, The Eaves of Heaven). This is pitched as his first novel ("... a work of fiction inspired by some events in the life of the author's maternal grandmother") but of course he has been spinning yarns all the way along.

The story is set in paradisaical Phan Thiết, one of Việt Nam's fish sauce capitals, a common place for post-war refugees to depart from (in fact, fiction and memoir) and Pham's birthplace. The Japanese have displaced colonial power France in 1942 which allows for social mobility amongst the Vietnamese before the occupiers cause famine and chaos as their war machine becomes chaotically rapacious. Main character Thuyet therefore oscillates between wearing silk gowns to supper clubs in Sài Gòn and poverty and ultraviolence by being married first to a football star and then Japanese Major Takeshi who is often unaccountably absent, especially at critical moments. The latter pairing leads, perhaps inevitably, to a shallow take on the blood and soil trope.

There's some effective foreshadowing through dreams but things are a bit overdetermined, and some plot moves needed more development; for instance, why does Tuyet's Aunt Coi want Tuyet's daughter Anh to return when she's (presumably) safe and thriving in the rebel (genericised as "Viet Minh") camp? There are also some loose threads: Tuyet's palm implies she'll have another two children but her trauma and the abrupt ending makes that seem unlikely. More bemusing is the incorrect geography: tourist mecca Chợ Bến Thành (market) is nowhere close Ga Sài Gòn (railway station), southeast of Phan Thiet is sea, and so on.

It's a page turner, a rollicking romance in the mode of Doctor Zhivago. The punchy Hemingway prose with lots of action begs for a movie deal. It does not try to be clever like The Sympathizer or get bogged in analysis like The Moon of Hoa Binh but instead flounders in the rapid exposition of actual events that provide temporal anchors. My grasp of history was not up to it — while I knew the Japanese in the south surrendered to the British after World War II I did not know about the Japanese-induced famine that killed a million people (Pham asserts) in 1944/1945. Perhaps it is time I read David G. Marr.

Violet Kupersmith at the New York Times. Briefly noted at the New Yorker. Goodreads. Pham in Sihanoukville recently.

A gentle ghost story set in Orkney. Directed and adapted from George MacKay Brown's short story by Bill Forsyth (That Sinking Feeling, Gregory's Girl, Local Hero, ...). Pensioned Captain Cyril Cusack is helped home from a night on the whisky by young lady Wendy Morgan who is unknown to the islanders. She takes care of him, vanishing daily, and presses him for his life stories. They don't make them like this any more.

Burt Lancaster completism. In black and white. Directed by John Frankenheimer (Seven Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds). Fanatical art-loving Nazi Paul Scofield loads the cultural heritage of France (a bunch of paintings by mostly foreign masters "held in trust" for the rest of the world) on a train as the Allies approach the open city of Paris towards the end of World War II. He has a story for everyone of their intrinsic and pecuniary value, especially to a post-war France. Many stratagems ensue and much sabotage results.

Lancaster was later paired again with Scofeld in Scorpio. The minor characters are played by French and German actors. I enjoyed the performances here: some inscrutable but all recognisably human. Lancaster clearly does his own stunts, making great use of his acrobat/circus training. It's engrossing like The Wages of Fear. I didn't understand what lead Lancaster's character to change his mind about the relative values of lives and art as no convincing argument is provided. To some extent it complements Mr Klein.

Bosley Crowther: evokes the train shenanigans of the silent era. The "lack of strong involvement of the emotions in the cause itself [art versus life] is a weakness of the film." IMDB trivia makes the production sound a bit Apocalypse Now.

Inevitable despite my general disinterest in Eddie Murphy. For the record it is Vanessa Bell Calloway as Imani Izzi who utters the magic lines within the first twenty minutes. They have no impact on what follows.

The setup was tired in the 1980s: Prince Murphy of Zamunda is unhappy with the bride (Calloway) organised by his father King James Earl Jones. Mother Queen Madge Sinclair seems content with her setup but encourages her son to be modern and find a bride in (where else but) the U.S.A. We are moved to Queens, New York for many japes, filler and scenes that are cliched and often do not work. Father John Amos of the eventual lucky lady Shari Headley runs a McClone. Her character and dialogue are so obviously constructed by men. Samuel L. Jackson holds up their restaurant in his idiosyncratic (and now well-known) way. Factotum Arsenio Hall often eclipses Murphy.

Siskel and Ebert: Gene says funny, charming, etc. Roger says hackneyed, old-fashioned, "the script is a lethargic retread", the treatment of women is shallow. Both agree the leads deliver fine performances. Vincent Canby: the "screenplay [...] seems to have escaped its doctors before it was entirely well." It is lame that there's no followup to Calloway's disobedient response to Murphy's injunction to disobey him. Apparently this was Murphy's attempt to branch out.

Kindle. I've had a soft spot for Theroux since reading his Dark Star Safari a long time ago and more recently about his gaggle on Hawaii. I was wondering what he would do with George Orwell's early life after Dennis Glover's take on the other end. I haven't read Burmese Days and have long forgotten the famous essays about shooting an elephant and hanging a man.

Theroux does a decent and unsentimental job of showing how Blair may have survived and passed his time in Burma as a policeman but there are many loose threads. What motivated him to join the imperial police service in the first place? Did he have a choice of destination? How did he get into Eton and how did that affect his social relations? Most perplexing to me was how his Uncle Frank could spend a lifetime in Burma and not realise how socially unacceptable (Theroux asserts) his Eurasian daughter is.

As you'd expect it's mostly well written but there are a few bits that needed another round of editing and tightening up. It's mostly engrossing; the repetition and sense of going nowhere evokes tedium quite effectively. Some themes — the half-castes, the commercial morality of the British Raj, a loneliness assuaged only by sex (and later writing) — are overdone. It's not entirely clear why Blair needed to experience the pointy end of colonialism to understand its essential bankruptcy or what exactly caused him to pivot from complicit servant to critic. The concluding segue into the slums of Paris and London made far more immediate sense. I struggled with Blair's mortification at not participating in the Great War: surely he was too young.

William Boyd at the New York Times. Darcy Moore, more critically, nails down what's fact, what's fiction and what's erroneous. Lara Feigel: let's hear from the minor/marginalised players. Goodreads. Orwell has roared back into the cultural consciousness since (at least) 2016 and there's no sign of a let up yet.

The things Michael Shannon makes me watch. He plays a ruffled, dented and essentially bemused biker who belongs to the original cohort of Tom Hardy's Vandals motorcycle club out of Chicago once upon a 1960s. Things go to hell when the blokes returning from Việt Nam bring the horse back with them, but unobserved by the reviewers, "The Kid" (Toby Wallace, similarly dead eyed and creepy in The Royal Hotel) who eventually does Hardy in is not a vet. This suggests the culture of the day was already rotting on vectors not explored here.

Along for the ride is Damon Herriman who can bash out these roughened characters all day, any day with any accent you wish, and laconic Austin Butler who was apparently Elvis recently. Notionally Jodie Comer narrates but is too self-absorbed in her affected, annoying performance (that accent/voice that wanders, that vapid character, those calculating eyes that don't match the facial expression) that put me in mind of Meryl Streep. (I grant that she is less inert than she was in The Last Duel.) And that's Norman Reedus from The Boondock Saints, channelling Dennis Hopper by gibbering on a chopper. Hardy shuffles along as the same old mumbling hood.

There are absolutely no stakes and everyone dies! — or should have died but just got injured or disappeared for a bit or whatever. Too many scenes fall flat. And have we not seen all of this before in classic American cinema: The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause and (not) Easy Rider? Or Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels of 1967? Was the world also gagging for a reheat of this genre? The insatiable thirst for retro has consumed everything forward looking.

I haven't seen anything by writer/director Jeff Nichols before this. The reviews are so universally fawning they must be about some other movie. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. "For the most part, the main performers have the highly polished sheen of most contemporary American actors, Michael Shannon's Vandal, Zipco, and some artfully gnarly teeth notwithstanding; like the movie itself, they're designed to please and do." OK ... Luke Goodsell: tragic masculinity, Butler as James Dean or Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish came to my mind, The Outsiders to his). "In a supporting performance that might be the movie's best, longtime Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon captures the conflict as an old-school burnout adrift in a new world." Mean Streets. Ambition and execution are far apart. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Austin Butler during the Australian promo tour. Violent? I think not; there's not even a menacing atmosphere. Butler and Comer do not have any romantic scenes. Comer aimed to clone original source Kathy Bauer. It's a bit Scorsese. It's a hetero/homo love triangle. And so on and on. Most concur that it's a bright shiny dog but endorse it anyway.

Very early Wim Wenders. Based on a short novel by Peter Handke which I felt was a long way from his best work. We follow an intemperate goalie (Arthur Brauss, Cross of Iron) of German extraction (?) on tour in Austria. He gets sent off for venting at the ref (offside!) and heads into Vienna to catch a few flicks. Idly he picks up and murders a cinema cashier (Erika Pluhar) after she plays at choking him with her necklace (in a forewarning to today's kids perhaps). After that he escapes into some kind of previous life with a country innkeeper (Kai Fischer) who now has a young child. He displays no disconcertion whatsoever. Are we to infer that all goalies are cold-blooded calculating sociopaths?

So much of what we're shown is banal. The much-remarked influence of American culture on post-war West German culture (see also Paul Beatty) is closely observed. He drinks a lot of what struck me as room-temperature beer in long necks, cranks all the jukeboxes and flirts with every woman he meets. Not one of the series of disjointed scenes amounts to a vignette.

As in other works of the era all the women are beautiful, single and willing, even if they have kids. The Passenger gave its women more agency and did a far better job at evoking an atmosphere. It's difficult for me to credit this work as much of an achievement given Paul Verhoeven's efforts soon after, and in another direction, Werner Herzog's.

Peter Bradshaw in 2018: five stars and a lengthy summary. Goodreads tried to read the book.

Second time around with this Michelangelo Antonioni-directed/co-written flick. Jack Nicholson leads as a British/American war correspondent. He's looking for a war in the deserts of northern Africa in his classic Land Rover Defender but only turns up a mysterious European man with a heart condition at their hotel. The man's death prompts him to adopt the man's identity and undertake a grand tour of mid-1970s Europe (mostly in Spain) with Maria Schneider (of Last Tango in Paris) in tow. This, of course, proves fatal.

Antonioni's camerawork is often interesting though I didn't always understand what he was showing me. The flashbacks are very smoothly executed. Bras seem to be in short supply. The plot is a bit gnarly at times as it is unclear how Nicholson's pursuers (including wife Jenny Runacre) could have such specific knowledge. Overall it does reward a close watch.

Roger Ebert: retrospectively three-and-a-half stars in 2005 with much pointing to Blow Up. Once again those huge yank tanks on ancient European streets. The lack of plot means it's all in that intriguingly complex final shot. He claims he wrote a negative review at the time. Vincent Canby.

Written and directed by Tobias Lindholm who has made more hay as a scriptwriter for Thomas Vinterberg (Submarino, The Hunt, Another Round). He was also involved in Mindhunter.

Things go as it says on the tin: in the mode of realism we're shown a boat somewhat close to Mumbai in the Indian Ocean. The cook (Pilou Asbæk) unloads a series of Chekhovian devices — he'll be a few days late home, they're low on drinking water, he misses his wife and daughter — before the titular hijacking occurs off-screen. The whole show is intercut with scenes in wintry Denmark where the CEO of the shipping company (Søren Malling) is shown to be a master negotiator.

This initial framing is promising enough but not cashed very well. The Englishman hijacking expert (Gary Skjoldmose Porter) does not explain to us how these things typically go and so we have no way of assessing the progress of the negotiation or the CEO's performance except by watching the movie's runtime expire. His piratical counterpart Omar (Abdihakin Asgar) has a few good scenes but a limited strategy (give the-pirates-not-me more money or they'll start the killing). Therefore and despite the odd bit of threatening-with-a-gun and epistemic gaps — what happens to the rest of the crew? — the whole thing is insufficiently tension-inducing. The concluding scene on the boat is ridiculous but perhaps clarifies Omar's relationship to the pirates.

The acting is solid. The jittery cinematography is tired.

A. O. Scott. Paul Byrnes.

Kindle. Prompted by Francine Prose's review in the New York Review of Books.

Briefly Iranian-American poet Cyrus Shams goes from his squalid bedroom in an Indiana college town to NYC in the hope of drawing artistic inspiration from a terminally-ill Iranian-American woman's dying-in-public installation. Unfortunately there's just too much repetition, too much unnecessary fleshing out and recycling of well-known-from-the-internet tropes (e.g. the Overton window, Marina Abramović's performance art). It's very much of the U.S. East Coast: art galleries, openings, pan sexuality, addiction, everyone everywhere pining for NYC. We're shown a woman on a plane that is shot down by the USA but we later realise that this was only for the purpose of actively misleading us. The pivotal loss of cabin pressure is ineffective when it comes; the critical moment is blown by excessive preceding dithering and would've been better left ambiguous. Too many assertions are tendentious and weak: "a meaningless life meant a meaningless death" is feebly proffered and immediately retracted. I guess it sounded too good to be killed.

I did enjoy this one specific observation (leaving aside its crass inaccuracy):

The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not.

The other two involve keeping the sabbath and honouring one's forebears. Arguably only the latter has a liveness aspect and the rest are safety properties.

Prose was far more forgiving of Akbar's structure and writing, positing "we have probably not been reading Martyr! for its mysteries and its plot [...] but rather for the immersion in his enjoyably hyperactive sensibility." Goodreads. I'm still waiting to extend the addiction lit canon beyond Trainspotting and White Out. Humour is key.

Eventually inevitable after Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Notionally for Liz Debicki who did have some fun in her brief time onscreen. It's a lengthy derivative dog that consists of entirely stock pose-and-expound, talk-while-walking, putatively comedic group infighting and action set pieces that are visual spaghetti. The plot is Wolverine-adjacent: origin, (willed) amnesia, finding-a-family, destruction of nemesis. Chris Pratt reminds us it's an overdetermined McGuffin hunt every half hour, reliably. Zoe Saldaña's character is histrionic and incoherent after playing it so cool in previous outings. Chukwudi Iwuji often hints at what could have been. I was surprised at the conspicuously specious swearing given that it's a Marvel feature rated PG-13. The putative animal abuse is pure, worthless exploitation.

Jason Di Rosso talked to Chris Pratt and director/co-writer James Gunn. Peter Bradshaw was sad to see GotG go. Shane Danielsen loved it and outs himself as a comic book fan. This is multiverse blowback. Douglas Adams! I think not. Maya Philips: not a movie for comic book fans; in fact "may only be for completionist fans." Trauma bait. Knockoff Dr. Frankenstein (a theme of 2023).

For all that it is highly rated on IMDB; perhaps only the fans went.

nth time around with this early Disney CGI classic. As always I wish they'd made it hang together a bit better than it does but who can complain with an aesthetic this good? — and it's great to see Jeff Bridges enjoying himself so much in those days when computers were amusing.

It seems that director/co-writer Steven Lisberger has blessed another instalment (Tron: Ares) due in 2025. Can it be worse than Tron: Legacy?

Roger Ebert: four stars but not a great movie! "[A] technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun." Excellent special effects. "[T]he overkill of Dolby stereo (justified, for once)." — oh my. Janet Maslin. Not so brainy, "a gloriously puerile movie" but also "very promising in its way." "Beautiful [...] but dumb."

nth time around with David Lynch's fairly linear riff on The Wizard of Oz. IMDB tells me it won him the Palm d'Or at Cannes 1990. Nicolas Cage as an Elvis wannabe (and yet claiming individuality via that snakeskin jacket) opposite a very hardworking Laura Dern. I wish Isabella Rosellini had a bigger role; it's like she was just getting started in those few scenes.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. "Understand that it's not the violence I mind. It's the sneaky excuses." Ebert from Cannes. "Underneath the flash, it was simply too sad; to applaud it would be like cheering a drunken clown while knowing he really was an alcoholic." Essentially Russ Meyer (!). Vincent Canby. Rossellini "[had] yet to get a good part in a respectable American movie."

The latest co-written/directed thing from Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused). This is as close to his Before romances as I've ventured. Prompted by Brian Tallerico's TIFF take; he was spot on about Knox Goes Away but not this one.

Dorky University of New Orleans liberal arts prof Glen Powell, teaching the Nietzschean furnish-your-interior classics, moonlights with the local police department as some kind of surveillance guy. No, it does not clone The Conversation but instead morphs Powell into a fake hit man for stinging purposes, sort of like how things go for the uncannily similar but far superior Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3. The obvious next move is to pair this hotted-up persona with some characterless hot-stuff-with-a-dodgy-ex (Adria Arjona) in what is presented as a contractually all-sex relationship. He's clearly into her for her mind. After that things go as formula says they must. It's ridiculous and a little fun but too thin at feature length.

Having an actor play multiple roles appears to be having a moment after the multiverse proved sterile and/or unprofitable. The recurring Greek chorus of coworkers got tedious fast, telling us what to think, keeping us on track, insinuating we're stupid but actually saying the material is weak.

Widely reviewed; is there really so much pent up demand for crappy romcoms? Dana Stevens. A con-artist thriller. That repeated montage of sting-arrest photo-courtroom got stale fast. Minor... but high-calibre? Four stars of five from Wendy Ide. "[The] pairing [...] matches George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez locked in the boot of a stolen car in Out of Sight for incendiary sexual chemistry." Also four-of-five from Peter Bradshaw. Coen brothers! I think not.

It didn't bother the female reviewers that Arjona is so vapid. Hats off to the marketing team.

Kindle. Inevitable after listening to Pendulum's Coma too many times. One day I'll get around to watching Coming to America.

Not what I expected. It seemed to echo Swift by satirising utopianism in the style of early earnest scifi (e.g. H. G. Wells). I thought it'd be more incisive. Defending the production of high art by pointing to Shakespeare as the English zenith made no sense as it implies nothing of significant value was created between 1616 and 1932, and if that's the case it cannot motivate getting off the happy-masses path. Huxley's take on man's relationship with God is crap, mere reductive teleology. Most of the scenarios are so shallowly drawn I couldn't think of it as a dystopia. The characters' emotional infantility is appropriate but also a cop out.

The book sits strangely high on many best-novels-of-the-twentieth-century lists and is more interesting to read about. Wikipedia: there were many charges of plagiarism, the moving-picture adaptations all suck, it got censored (obviously for the sex; the call-to-arms as such is inoffensive pap), how it compares to George Orwell's timeless 1984.

Prompted by Shane Danielsen putting it on his best-of-2023 list. Second time around with co-writer/director Nuri Bilge Ceylan after Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. In two sittings due to length, ruining the minor characters in the process.

The scenario has an art teacher (Samet, Deniz Celiloglu) in what he expects to be his final year of mandatory teaching service at a remote village in Anatolia, Turkey. Istanbul beckons, he thinks, but before then he has to navigate a claim of inappropriate contact by two female students (age 13 or so, insinuating Lolita) and, more perilously, a love triangle involving his flatmate (Kenan, Musab Ekici) and a woman (Nuray, Merve Dizdar) from the nearby town, both also teachers. The other thing everyone says about this film is that Samet has lost hope and Nuray revives it but Samet has the vibe of a character that can cynically, selfishly mope anywhere, that he was and will be just as exploitative, unstable and unhappy wherever he goes. Ceylan leaves a vacuum where Samet's interiority should have been, and so much is left vague and unresolved that close attention to details of plot and characterisation goes unrewarded; better to look for the changing facial expressions and count the falling snowflakes.

There's some beautiful photography of white-topped mountains and so forth that made me feel so cold for the vast (3h 17m) runtime. The love triangle goes predictably and there is far too much talking in too many overlong scenes and not enough showing; the big climactic session on the couch where life philosophies are unpacked and dissected is rife with cliche and lacks the punch and insight of (even) the door test. But I guess when conditions are so brutal outside you've got to make do with what you've got.

The "weariness of hope" punchline is so trite and far less poetic than Milan Kundera's "the unbearable lightness of being" from further west, decades ago, under an even more repressive regime. It's a strange marketing slogan to revive so soon after Obama left office (taking all hope with him?) and during these doldrums of Biden. I found it impossible to invest in any of the characters or analysis.

Danielsen's review from Cannes 2023. I wasn't as riveted. Carlos Aguilar: four stars at Roger Ebert. "Neither hope nor despair should be fully believed." The bombastic scenes were ridiculous. "In reality, nothing is as glorious or as terrible as it seems, not even the landscape itself." — I beg to differ. Justin Chang: "languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but [...] also nimble, alert, and alive" — I guess this is philosophy for movie reviewers. The Chekhovian device does not go off! James Quandt surveys Ceylan's works and provides a more circumspect review. The intrusion of reality/movie making with about 44 minutes to go is indeed a clanger.

Prompted by a four stars of five review by Wendy Ide and sign language.

In present-day Lithuania a dance instructor (Elena, Greta Grinevičiūtė) and sign-language interpreter (Dovydas, Kęstutis Cicėnas) meet cute at her class for deaf students. We're shown this after a provocative opening scene where Elena demonstrates her lustiness with a random man; perhaps we meet him more fully later. There's also a song by a Lithuanian pop group that put me in mind of Fallen Leaves. Soon enough they go to his brother's wedding but from there the deaf parts fall away and the focus is on the hearing people, much like CODA. It doesn't even try for an interesting sound design ala Sound of Metal.

The other novelty dominates as the couple couples up: he claims to be asexual but still desirous of the other aspects of a relationship. I don't think this concept was handled very well. Compared with Emma Watson's "self partnering" (which I take to be essentially a happy, unabashed and knowing singledom) they seem deluded from the start: she's so obviously sexy and while he claims to not be physically into her the mechanics are not an issue and yet she cannot accept his attempts at pleasing her. She's not that into it because she thinks he isn't; perhaps the straightforwardness of Dovydas prevented a more interesting exploration. Instead it seemed like he wanted mateship (would he have partnered up with a man?) and they both seem a bit emotionally immature (or learning how to love if you prefer). The normativity makes things a bit boring, especially when he drunkenly proposes that she take lovers. That put me in mind of Breaking the Waves and its far higher stakes.

Elena does have some funny lines. Her mum is a real bitch and given to some nasty body shaming. (Elena is a ballerina with the wrong shape, making me wonder if the whole thing took Leonard Cohen's Heart with No Companion too seriously.) She is self-aware but presents as a closed book beyond her obvious physicality and often seems to be a blank canvas for Dovydas to project himself onto. (He sweetly says "we’re going to Maccas" after meeting her mum but that's his comfort and we don't learn about hers.) He's often shameless.

I didn't enjoy the cinematography very much. Too often it's in tight when I wanted to see what the groups are doing, or some other thing just off screen.

Beatrice Loayza at the New York Times wanted his sign language and her dancing to communicate more passion. Rebecca Liu. Peter Sobczynski: three-and-a-half stars at Roger Ebert. He elides the actual beginning of the movie which suggested something broader than is supplied. Hollywood would've done it so much worse.

The things Eric Bana and Jacqueline McKenzie make me watch. The dire IMDB rating and the original instalment should've warned me off but I did want to see how much help Bana has been to Hugo Weaving in reviving local film industry. I suspect the answer is not a lot: Weaving seems to be more involved in larger international projects (with international distribution) whereas Bana's appear to be utterly provincial and involve co-writer/director Robert Connolly who seems to suffer from T.V. productionism.

The plot is simple: a group of corporate women (and separately men) go for a team-building exercise in the Dandenong Ranges (presented as the Victorian Alpine but really a suburb of Melbourne) and one of them doesn't come back with the others. Anna Torv, last seen by me in Mindhunter, was tasked with riling everyone up while also being everyone's victim. Deborra-Lee Furness (recently separated from Hugh Jackman) played her boss and Richard Roxburgh tried to find his inner David Wenham as the boss's domineering husband. Bana's job was to untangle the stories while McKenzie looked on; her character is quite superfluous and that's no way to treat an actor of her calibre.

The dialogue was really bad and the plot really sketchy. Which is a shame as the ingredients are decent enough.

Three stars of five from Luke Buckmaster. Two stars of four from Sheila O'Malley. The three-track was a real drag.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with Kiều Chinh (that probably basked in the afterglow of Alice Rohrwacher's) and being reminded that Park Chan-wook was a major contributor to the production (while quietly ignoring the recent evidence that he is far better at movies than TV). Also for Melburnian lead Hoa Xuande (who I found out later was in Careless Love). My low expectations from the novel were reinforced by the dire IMDB rating (about 7/10 and dropping rapidly).

Briefly: it goes mostly as I remember from the book. We're in the final days of a never-been-cleaner Sài Gòn before heading to mid-1970s Los Angeles with some erstwhile members of the ARVN and associated entities. Our narrator-hero "The Captain" is a spook with divided loyalties. It never settles into any particular genre, swerving amongst sitcom, parody/satire, (b)romance, heavy serious drama, spy thriller, social commentary and so on while never being as clever as it needed to be. Was the point to be excruciated?

The general failure to grip is no fault of the cast, for the most part. Xuande is fine in the lead and I was pleasantly surprised by Sandra Oh's performance as an Oriental Studies secretary (lame though her character is). Fred Nguyen Khan was great as Bon, perhaps because his was the most bullshit free of the main roles. David Duchovny! Oh my. And then we get to Robert Downey Jr, who is always about the same. I imagine he watched Alec Guinness's antics in Kind Hearts and Coronets and figured he too could handle the multi-role thing. Well, news flash! He can't. By episode four Park has ceased to direct and RDJr has slipped his leash; what is essentially a clone of Hearts of Darkness could just possibly have functioned as a homage to the recently-passed Eleanor Coppola if it was in any way funny or inventive. Further souring the deal is the faint whiff of Tropic Thunder where everyone was younger and better at high science.

Wikipedia suggests that Park was not the first Korean filmmaker to go to Việt Nam. I was a little surprised to find that John Woo wasn't the first from Hong Kong; his Bullet to the Head is structurally very similar (too similar) to this. But of course the creators of The Sympathizer mostly drew on Sergio Leone's immortal Once Upon a Time in America. They passed up more opportunities than they took to play with identities ala David Lynch despite this setting being a very natural home for that conceit.

While it's great that so much of the dialogue in this mainstream American (HBO) production is in Vietnamese it didn't occur to the creators that the Vietnamese themselves may have wanted to talk about something other than the war (or that we too might want to hear them talk about things other than the war). The following graph from Harvard's Growth Lab illustrates the rise in complexity of Việt Nam's economy alongside the (relative) decline in Australia's for context:

The Sympathizer is so safe, so conservative, so far from the crass but raw danger of (Australian, don't mention the war) Romper Stomper of 1992. It says so much less about Vietnamese culture and the immigrant experience than Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala from 1999 and Nam Le's The Boat of 2008. It disallows the nuance of foreigners' accounts of living in Việt Nam and engaging with the locals such as Dana Sachs's memoir from 2000. Viet Thanh Nguyen, writing in 2015 and executive-producing now, is still just riffing on those (Western) exploitation flicks of the 1970s and 1980s that we all enjoy so much. It completely fails to grapple with the country and its people's development, aspirations, achievements and, of course, complex, opaque and troubling-to-the-West politics. (Coincidentally I was in the country when those lines crossed.)

Can we expect a sequel? Perhaps Nugyen is still occupied with figuring out how to follow up The Committed.

Reviews seem to be uniformly positive. I rest my case.

Written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Never Let Me Go). For Kirsten Dunst. It's dire.

Notionally California and Texas have gotten organised against the East Coast with Florida going its own way. War photographer Dunst and three other old-school journalists take a road trip from NYC to Washington D.C. to interview the President who is not expected to survive the month. All this must be intentionally improbable — in contrast to more serious works like, for instance, Omar El Akkad's — and the set pieces so derivative that I couldn't figure out what Garland was trying to say. There's certainly no novelty in it.

On the source materials: the episodic nature of the trip upstream is so obviously Heart of Darkness and therefore Apocalypse Now. Many of the set pieces are direct lifts of either actual Việt Nam War footage or movies (man set on fire, summary execution, etc.). To some extent Stephen McKinley Henderson's infirm adrenaline addict reminded me of Matthew Modine's Joker from Full Metal Jacket. (The summary execution of the soldier/sniper at the top of the stairs here is a sanitised echo.) Things got a bit Team America (humourlessly) when they fragged the Lincoln Memorial. (I don't know who "they" were. It really doesn't matter.) And so on.

There are plenty of dumb bits. Dunst is the last character to be killed by the numbers (c.f. The Order of Death) and her lack of self preservation — crash tackling but not going down with young on-the-make Cailee Spaeny — was ridiculous. Her real-life squeeze Jesse Plemons is effective in bloodless Breaking Bad mode which is to say he didn't get out of first gear.

Garland may've been chasing a concept (that I couldn't discern) but shooting photojournalists shooting the war is redundant: they were and are already platformed and many wrote memoirs (e.g. Tim Page). It's all been done before and done far better.

The American reviewers somehow took this dross seriously. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Wow. "Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable." "A happy ending is impossible." — but isn't that the nature of all wars? Dana Stevens. "The point is less plausibility than viscerality." A Year of Living Dangerously. "But the fact that the carnage these reporters are documenting is homegrown shifts the inflection significantly. Suddenly it's impossible to exoticize or otherwise alienate ourselves from the bloodshed onscreen, which makes us ask ourselves what we were doing exoticizing it in the first place. This effect of moral immediacy is Civil War's greatest strength, and the reason it feels like an important movie of its moment even if it isn’t a wholly coherent or consistently insightful one." — somehow the actual everyday violence in the U.S.A. just isn't real enough.

More Nicolas Cage completism. Apparently this was a return-to-form after some dire pay-the-bills action movie roles. The title and subject — a volatile hard-drinking man who by helping a vulnerable boy so obviously puts himself on the path to destruction — suggested My Name is Joe to me.

This is a mostly-humourless piece of Southern realism. (There is some humour in the fine details of Cage's performance: "make a pain face ... then smile" for instance.) Cage's character is so selfless he'll give away his last cigarette, his lighter and engage in ultraviolence to no particular end. He just has so much to give. He organises a crowd of (possibly ex-con) Black men to (illegally?) poison trees which are to be replaced by a plantation. This might be a metaphor for the state of the culture. Indeed the whole thing is so unmodulated we know things are going to end in a burst of morally indubitable brutality from the get-go. How else could it be when the only sane man in Austin, Texas is insane?

We never find out why that German Shepherd at the brothel is such an arsehole. Gary Poulter, playing the boy's father, looks and sounds like some of the men in Twin Peaks.

A critic's pick by Stephen Holden. A punishing exercise in Southern miserablism. Quasi biblical. Four stars of five from Peter Bradshaw. Director David Gordon Green once was "the heir [apparent] to Terrence Malick".

Inevitable after its heavy marketing over the awards season. In two sittings in the hope the plot wasn't as mono dimensional and determined as it is. Not for me.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos who also directed Emma Stone in The Favourite which was also co-written by Victorian Tony McNamara. Based on a novel by Alasdair Gray. The bulk of it is recycled. The sets have an artificial aesthetic like older Jean-Pierre Jeunet (e.g. The City of Lost Children) but do not achieve his or Wes Anderson's coherency. Perhaps this is a rip off of Barbie (unseen by me). The mixed creatures reminded me of Mars Attacks! — if only there was anything as priceless as Sarah Jessica Parker's chihuahua. The cinematography is a mix of black-and-white and colour in the style of The Wizard of Oz (also used by David Lynch in his Season 3 of Twin Peaks) with various distorting lenses.

There is so much unsexy sex. The essence of Emma Stone's role is a woman who has never been a girl. This apparently licences her to play a Candide who constructs the best of all possible worlds. We're told time and again that she's curious and desirous of experience and yet all she appears to learn is related to sexual matters; she's as monomaniacal as your average billionaire. The placement of books by the American pragmatists (Emerson) in her hands is mere gesture and affect. I guess it's a take on identity too, palely imitating David Lynch and not Face/Off. Her creator Willem Dafoe plays a solemn, simplistic Scots surgeon/experimenter/Frankenstein with far less imagination than Gene Wilder's neurotic effort in Young Frankenstein. Mark Ruffalo is disappointingly stagey and not great as a plummy English playboy. Ramy Youssef's character was rubbish. Yes, it was probably all intentional; I know the clearly signposted this-is-funny-laugh-now elements were. The entirety left me cold.

Very widely reviewed. Dana Stevens. A nature-v-nurture experiment. Sex brings colour to this world. Refreshing and revolutionary ... really? Ruffalo's ham starts to grate when he starts to whine. Manohla Dargis. Gleefully clever with sour laughs. Breaking the Waves. Michael Wood. Five stars from Peter Bradshaw. Vivisectional! — but not in a way Patrick White would recognise. A steampunk-retrofuturist Victorian freakout, more referents; more briefly, a recycling. Shane Danielsen. A neat reversal on Shelley, making Dafoe visibly the monster — but really just externalising Frankenstein's moral deformity in the original. Symbolic sex. She's into socialism because it's more honest. The cityscapes look like they were assembled by A.I. And so on. All seem to agree that it is a very derivative, very synthetic production.

Co-writer/director Pablo Larraín and co-writer Guillermo Calderón make Augusto Pinochet into a literal vampire (Jaime Vadell) and shot him in fabulous black-and-white. While potentially quite fertile they don't seem to know where to go so they introduce a nun (Paula Luchsinger) who, with a dispensation from the Church, has designs on both The Count and his loot. Notionally she's there to help The Count's five grasping children obtain their inheritance. Things burn slowly until a flurry of biting and backbiting, somewhat hastened by an underdeveloped Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet and in flashback Sofía Maluk), hurries the conclusion. It's heavy on symbolic references — I'm sure I missed most of them — but few have telling consequences.

Edward Lachman's cinematography is gorgeous. (He also assembled The Velvet Underground and shot Mildred Pierce and Howl and so on.)

A New York Times Critic's Pick by Amy Nicholson. Cheeky. The Count is hiding out in Patagonia. Doesn't have a satisfying resolution. Shane Danielsen. Alfredo Castro is indeed good as the loyal White Russian manservant. A saggy middle and a slightly-out-of-control end. Carlos Aguilar.

Kindle. Towles's followup to The Lincoln Highway. The writing is often as elegant as his earlier efforts but none of these shorts are fantastic. In order:

• The Line. Queuing was a big part of life in Moscow after the revolution and looking at how people queue can tell us a lot about a society. (Similarly for toilets and therefore for toilet queues.) Things get confusing as the bloke eventually waits multiple days for an exit visa interview and somehow communicates with the bloke he's in the queue for which presumably calls for another placeholding queuer. (Initially Towles takes care of these kinds of details but steadily loses resolution as Manhattan approaches.)
• The Ballad of Timothy Touchett. Poor behaviour in the NYC rare books market. The resolution involves Paul Auster who died recently.
• Hasta Luego. Community-supported alcoholism in NYC.
• I Will Survive. A prolix domestic drama with a very minor payoff; at 20% of the length it would've been punchy. This is perhaps Towles expressing some permissible doubt about the totalitarianism of human centricity (in cities).
• The Bootlegger. Social mores come unstuck and a moralising/OCD Wall St money man gets some comeuppance at a concert series in Carnegie Hall. Bach's Cello suites star; these had a moment a few years back.
• The DiDomenico Fragment. An American dynasty has been parting out a DiDeminico masterpiece (of the Annunciation) for generations until one member decides it's time for a heist.

The hard-boiled novella Eve in Hollywood (a mild reworking of what I read previously) is superior to the shorts. I conclude Towles is better at length and just maybe his new stuff is not as good as his old stuff.

Hamilton Cain at the New York Times. Goodreads.

Prompted by Peter Sobczynski giving it a four-star review in 2023. J. Hoberman reviewed it at the same time; apparently its rerelease was sponsored by Tarantino. Based on a novel by Richard Condon (Prizzi's Honor, The Manchurian Candidate), directed and co-written by William Richert. The project pulled a stellar cast but squandered them by being overly difficult to follow.

The framing story is straightforward: more than a decade after his brother, the President, is assassinated, straight man Jeff Bridges (RFK, sort of) gets dragged into a series of set-piece conspiracy theory expositions. Initially the tone is dead serious but by the time we meet John Huston, playing Pa Kegan (Joe Kennedy), things are definitely screwy. (He has most of the good lines here. He gets his blood changed six-monthly with the kids from Amherst. He spent 11M USD to install his son in the White House — what a bargain!) This prepares us for Sterling Hayden hunting Bridges off his property with tanks and other World War II surplus vehicles and munitions. Eli Wallach played a handsy small-time fall-guy hood straight and deadpan. Anthony Perkins didn't get out of first gear as a psychotic expositor in a panopticon. Belinda Bauer had a When Harry Met Sally scene with Bridges. Liz Taylor in a severe cameo. It's never clear why anyone would help Bridges, why he's investigating, if this is a spoof, a satire or something else, if there's a point to it at all.

I can only wonder what it could've been if Huston had directed it; we get the odd whiff of his far more coherent The Man Who Would Be King.

Janet Maslin. Vincent Canby at length at the time. Roger Ebert (half everything) and Gene Siskel (very confusing, unfairly harsh on the Kennedy family). Wikipedia has all the details.

Writer/director Felix Chong hit the big time when he wrote Infernal Affairs. Twenty years later here he is, repaying Scorcese's cloning of his masterwork by cloning Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street with the two leads of his earlier hit. Over a few sittings.

Tony Leung leads as an engineer turned property speculator in late 1970s to mid 1990s Hong Kong. He falls into a pot of money and becomes more crooked as time goes on, staying ahead of the law and keeping them away from his shady backers while attracting a bunch of amoral operators who love money. Andy Lau heads an ICAC taskforce that spends a decade or more trying to fry Leung. Things move dutifully from set piece to set piece with little to no explanation of anything. I found it difficult to follow the financial shenanigans. Much is made of sticking it to the Brits who (confusingly) do not seem particularly unhappy about it. There's a massive loss of momentum once we get to the courtroom scenes.

Leung has almost no lines (just punchlines) and spends most of his time pulling a variety of faces, most of which are variants of smirks. Andy Lau is mostly inert and is saddled with too many completely thankless cliched scenes with the wife and children. Anthony Pun's fancy cinematography is all smooth surfaces and soulless CGI.

Two stars of five from Wendy Ide. Cath Clarke: also Goodfellas. Two stars of four from Peter Sobczynski at Roger Ebert's website: also Goodfellas. (The smooth editing got me thinking of Casino.) Incidents don't amount to a story.

Some days you're just looking for a competently-executed escapist popcorn flick. This isn't one. It makes no sense — merely moving from one CGI set piece to the next — and the dialogue is excruciatingly bad. Much of it is impossible to follow if you're not steeped in recent Marvel lore. This might be forgivable if the imagery was any chop.

On the plus side, with half an hour to go, director Sam Raimi went all Evil Dead silly with a zombie Benedict Cumberbatch. (There's also a Bruce Campbell cameo.) But we've seen all that before.

A. O. Scott: dutiful fan service. This multiverse is so much less witty and imaginative than Everything Everywhere All at Once's. The best bits are the 1980s Raimi bits. Elizabeth Olsen is scary because she is so sad. Wikipedia: 294.5M USD of hot mess.

And yet more Alain Delon completism. He leads here and also produced. The clear frame — an indifferent Frenchman buys art cheaply from Jews fleeing German-occupied Paris in 1942 — opens a mystifying tale of fatal stolen identity. Is it revenge or merely opportunism? The ladies don't even pretend to put up a fight with Delon but he barely notices them coming or going. Michael Lonsdale plays his lawyer.

I felt I missed some key scenes or wasn't parsing things quite right. It probably needs two goes to pin down all the details.

Vincent Canby. A metaphorical mystery melodrama. Less about the plot, more about identity and obsession; shades of David Lynch perhaps. "Mr. Delon is not aging especially well. Other actors with careers as long as his acquire, over the years, a lot of useful baggage in the form of associations to earlier performances. Mr. Delon has traveled a lot but his baggage is empty." Ouch.

Kindle. Some days you just want to read a competently-executed airport novel and instead you pick up a sequel significantly worse than its predecessor. Ackerman is deep into negative rewards now.

I've forgotten the specifics of what happened in 2034 but that turned out not to matter. What's at stake in 2054 is more-or-less what's at stake in 2024: a presidential assassination sets off January 6 militia activity and the military fragments along ideological lines. Kurzweil and his one-man creation of "The Singularity" are mentioned regularly but not analysed. Its use as a plot device is woefully underbaked. A major character from 2034 presents as Wintermute and these authors have all the problems William Gibson faced in the early 1980s: cyberspace can be accessed from everywhere but these guys only understand zooming around in meatspace. Just go read Permutation City already.

Perhaps it's supposed to be more about the themes or what isn't explicitly spelt out; they make and repeat many assertions unsupported by argument. The "blood and soil" trope is deployed to explain the recruiting of an ethnic Chinese/American citizen corporate woman by the Chinese Communist regime via a redundant Nigerian cutout and yet the same essentialism does not apply to the American or Indian characters. This isn't plausible for people whose parents were killed or bullied by the state — just look at the huge Chinese diaspora, especially the departure of so many from Hong Kong over the last 30 years, the Irish, the Russian emigres, the Poles and Nordics. Consider the name Hendrickson! In any case there's a far more sophisticated take on national and political loyalties in The Sympathizer. Are the authors demonstrating the inability of America to understand Asia or learn from history?

Their history is all key man, that there are a few choke points that can control the application of knowledge. At scale this may be so (developing nuclear technology for instance) but as the army of digital nomads and the hackers working for nation-states well know, much can be done remotely with widely distributed teams and hardware. The future may have no locus to nuke, no individual or tractable group to assassinate, no Assange to serve as a warning to the others. Perhaps that's what happens in 2074.

Their solution to America's problems is to install a wise military man (an Eisenhower?) for a limited-duration reset and (literally) marry China and move to Vermont. (The whole process is undemocratic but somehow placates the various mobs.) The Supreme Court is totally absent and they don't explain how the power-mad institution was tamed between now and then. The veteran in a wheelchair is an obvious nod to Oliver Stone (a plea to direct the movie version?) and Ron Kovic. The rising country of India (so important in 2034) does not feature. There's some Herzogian madness on the Amazon ... and a touch of The Boys from Brazil as they approach their heart of darkness/enlightenment. The gambling is tiresome.

Hari Kunzru at the New York Times did say it wasn't much chop. Goodreads was generally disappointed.

Domestic (t)errorism in Melbourne, July 2021 — which Wikipedia suggests was a time of lockdowns. The whole thing is so bad, so completely flawed. It's exactly what Brophy meant by Australian movies having TV production values. Hugo Weaving continues his heroic one-man project of reviving Australian cinema (c.f. The Royal Hotel etc.); I just wish he'd be more discerning in his choice of vehicles.

Righto, the framing conceit is that this is found footage which of course the makers cannot sustain for more than a few minutes. It's notionally based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (which I started and didn't get far into). The story is set in the tawdry, archaic fringes of sex shops, anarchists and huge, cheap Melbourne flats. The idea is to co-opt the local malcontents into committing a "victimless atrocity" that will improve the reelection prospects of the minister (Weaving). (The most inventive thing here is the choice of target, putting me in mind of Jarett Kobek's far superior Atta.) The first act is a self-admitted humdrum domestic drama while the second slides into a pure mess. Were they aiming for The Interview?

The central flaw was a mediocre script with poor dialogue that elicited poor performances from everyone. There's a dumbness to the main characters which made it hard to care what happened; it's a crass dumbness, not a comedic one like in Chris Morris's Four Lions or a knowing one like in The Castle. One has to feel for Stephen Curry whose best (or even decent) roles are long gone now. And the concluding scenes, well, they show a Tennant Creek you've never seen before.

Wendy Ide must've watched something else. None of the characters are sympathetic! I got the pointer from Chris Abrahams and Melanie Oxley who did some soundtrack work. It was funded by Screen Australia and the MIFF Premiere Fund. One can only hope that Albo's industry policy picks better winners.

After a promising retro intro we're served up a homage to generic horror tropes and 1970s late night talk shows. There's an excess of derivative style and nothing to suspend disbelief. The sales pitch is The Blair Witch Project realism but Australian writer/directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes don't have the guts (or is it brains?) to run with it. This causes a fatal loss of momentum in the final twenty minutes or so and incongruities from about the halfway mark. The central concept, that this is found footage, is unsound: they cannot show us the fake and the real if the camera never lies, and too often things are shot from an angle that can have nothing to do with the TV production or a putative behind-the-scenes operator. It's a view of nothing new from nowhere.

The cast all don American accents but appear to be Australian apart from lead David Dastmalchian. It's a slick production in the mode of TV; exactly what Philip Brophy trashed in a discussion with Jason Di Rosso recently. (I did not rate Brophy's derision while listening but watching this was a rueful corrective.) The framing suggested it'd be closer to The Ring, with some fallout in the exurbs... like Brophy's Body Melt.

Alissa Wilkinson observed the flaws and references but still found a way to hammer the marketing. Jared Richards, similarly. Christos Tsiolkas, similarly, but how on Earth did he find this "genuinely frightening"? Anxiety and fear but no terror. At least Matt Zoller Seitz remains as skeptical as Roger Ebert. Many critics decry the use of AI-generated imagery.

Grave robbing in 1980s Tuscany. The lead (Josh O'Connor) is, of course, English and has the critical skill of divining the location of tombs containing valuable artefacts. We meet him on a train returning from a bout of incarceration where he proves as irresistible to the ladies as Richard Burton's defrocked priest in The Night of the Iguana despite lacking the presence and voice. Like Orpheus he's lost and bereaved in the waking/above ground world.

The rest of the gang is a bit rag-tag and sometimes amusing. There's some fun made of gender roles. The romantic aspects left me cold: notionally he's still in love with a dead girl (who we see in flashbacks but whose character is not developed) which explains his dour mien but not his willingness to jump into bed with an uptight "broomstick" (Carol Duarte). Isabella Rossellini does a great job as a matriarch in a decaying mansion. She's fantastic in the scene where we meet her daughters but things are too cliched after the wild inventiveness of the tomb robbing.

Overall things were a bit too loose, too vague. I enjoyed the diversity of languages, including sign language which struck me as almost universal. There are quite a few pile ons / overlapping dialogues (the Englishman's gang and the daughters) which was effective ala Robert Altman. The magic realism has a dash of Guillermo del Toro without the violence and graphic imagery. The aesthetic is lightly artificial like a Hal Hartley but less so.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Alice Rohrwacher. She's great but his attempts to help her out by rephrasing her responses were unnecessary and a bit annoying. She knew what she was trying to do! Luke Goodsell: Indiana Jones! James Bond! I think not. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Peter Bradshaw: five stars! An interview with Rossellini. Later Michael Wood summarised it for us.

Another idle bit of Ealing-comedy completism. Basically materialistic American businessman Paul Douglas is trying to furnish a surprise love nest for his wife and needs to move a pile of expensive stuff up the coast from Glasgow. No ships are available so his inept English agent Hubert Gregg ends up hiring a coal-carting "puffer" that only usually plies the calmer waters. The wily old captain Alex Mackenzie knows his trade very well and stuffs the job up completely. It takes a young lady at a 100th birthday celebration and "the wee boy" Tommy Kearins to wise the American up to the merits of unaspirationalism.

There are a very few funny bits but they aren't that funny. Engineer Abe Barker has some fun sticking it to the captain. Early on much is made about the captain's sister owning the boat, and that the law is out for him, but these are underused and left unresolved.

Bosley Crowther dug it from across the Atlantic.

Some very late Wong Kar-Wai completism prompted by the Christopher Doyle biopic. This has some of their classic cinematography made famous by Chungking Express but is disjointed and opts for the thematic, making it seem like offcuts from something more coherent. Over two widely-spaced nights due to a failure to grip.

The more developed thread has Leon Lai as an assassin whose agent Michelle Reis is in love with him. Somehow he's more interested in Karen Mok's Blondie. Mostly separately elfin Takeshi Kaneshiro breaks into various food vendor premises including an ice cream truck to zany effect. He's mute (but narrates for us) so potential squeeze Charlie Yeung has to do all the talking. There's the odd semi-decent grounding scene with his father Man-Lei Chan in Chungking Mansions.

Roger Ebert found three stars. Pure cinema? Stephen Holden: weightless. Excess details at Wikipedia. I prefer Wong Kar-Wai's lover movies to these fighter ones.

Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster completism, prompted by the Delon retrospective in NYC presently. Aging but not yet decrepit secret-agent lion Lancaster tasks young Turk (and cat fancier!) Delon with one more assassination in photogenic Paris. Afterwards the CIA decides it's time Lancaster retired and who else for the job but his protege Delon? The ladies get pro forma bit parts — there are some sweet but inconsequential scenes between Delon and his sister Mary Maude, and Gayle Hunnicutt and Joanne Linville are asked to do a little bit more — as things generally go as Cold War spy game movies do.

On the plus side it works fine as a time capsule of Washington, Vienna and Paris at the time, and Delon's feline affinity surely cannot be fake. (There are some great cats including a street cat that he chooses as a gift from his girlfriend.) Some of the dialogue is amusingly sharp and the ambiguity of Lancaster's loyalties works to some extent. (Clearly he is loyal to individuals and that is reciprocated.) Paul Scofield has the presence to play a Soviet spymaster and makes the most of his limited screentime. The CIA as embodied by John Colicos is implausibly inept.

Delon and Lancaster were paired in The Leopard ten years previously, in 1963. I'd say this continued Lancaster's late-career renaissance which I think we can date to The Swimmer in 1968.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars: dissipated, tried to do too much. But the screenwriters David Rintels and Gerald Wilson wrote some good dialogue! Too similar to director Michael Winner's earlier The Mechanic. Roger Greenspun: Lancaster and Scofield are buddies from the antifascist days. I didn't think it was so bad. IMDB trivia: at the time of filming the production company stayed at the Watergate coincidentally with the famous break in. Lancaster performed his own stunts — I'm sceptical though Delon obviously does. I found Lancaster's blackface/Afro priest hilarious.

Kindle. Having read all his novels it was time to plough through the shorts and these proved as addictive as I expected. The Continental Op ones did get a bit shallow at times but you have to admire his stamina. The final The First Thin Man ends on a cliffhanger which makes complete sense when you read at Wikipedia that's it an early draft of The Thin Man.

Most anomalous is the short Tulip apparently first published in 1966. Hammett put all his styles into it and something new; the scattered autobiographical elements, the sharp observations and lack of sleuths suggest an attempt at renewal that didn't eventuate.

Dick Locthe in 2000. A lengthy biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont in 2002: beyond the well-known stuff much is disappointing.

I needed a refresher on the first part as it's been about two-and-a-half years since I saw it. It strikes me now as mostly pose and expound but even so is an improvement on its successor. Notionally I was watching the second part for Florence Pugh but she has an inert, almost nonspeaking role. Christopher Walken does too and yet somehow out acts Chalamet despite being powerfully, frailly immovable at 80 or so. I felt Flo was as poor a choice for princess material as Rebecca Ferguson was as a concubine but at least Ferguson got to move a bit.

Again the cast is vast and sometimes well used. However the whole show is very derivative of the last few decades of mega movies (I'll spare you an enumeration). It's lengthy and squanders that length with excess repetition; the dream/forecast sequences could've been trimmed down which would've left more room for general story/character/whatever development or a toilet break/intermission. Javier Bardem repeatedly entreating Chalamet to slay him really resonated with me: let's get this over with! Josh Brolin again did what he could with a numpty character; how did they make his smuggler so much less than Han Solo? Austin Butler may yet grow up to be Ryan Reynolds. Dave Bautista is so completely unmodulated it must have been the fault of director Denis Villeneuve. Stellan Skarsgård phoned it in; if they'd got Tom Cruise back into a fat suit instead it would've been worth every penny.

Leaving so many loose threads dangling only make sense if there's going to be a third part. (The scowl on Zendaya's face at the end says there obviously must be a third part.) Introducing mega actresses Léa Seydoux and Anya Taylor-Joy in brief almost-cameos would only be worthwhile if they have larger roles in a third part. There's going to be a third part.

At this point I'd say David Lynch's effort was superior. The main failing here is with casting Chalamet as the lead: the producers needed a Paul who was a bit fruity like Peter O'Toole or Kyle MacLachlan (or Sting without his shirt) or a man who doesn't look so childish next to Brolin and Jason Momoa. Jostling with that for first place is the mythology of the spice which we're shown none of: Bardem, despite having partaken of it all his life, is now a broken-down man, while the Jedi mind tricks of the female cult are acquired by training not (just) drugs. The visions (including those of Paul's sister) are a long way from the spectacle of 2001 or The Tree of Life. And so on and on.

Widely reviewed of course. A critic's pick by Manohla Dargis. Dana Stevens: "each really constituting one-half of a full story arc" — I don't think so! She mistakes gesture for foundation. If the book is from 1965 it is obviously drawing heavily from Lawrence of Arabia. "Like Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars saga..." — please, let's keep it polite. Jake Wilson: "Neither a zippy adventure nor a metaphysical mind-bender, this Dune has the heaviness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic." And a partial enumeration of lifted materials. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Melbourne-born cinematographer Greig Fraser (and I don't remember a thing). And so on. Overall it's just that it's new.

#5 on a random Guardian list of Ealing comedies. The fictional island Todday in the Outer Hebrides runs out of whisky in 1943. This is relieved by the running aground of a ship carrying 50,000 cases of the stuff. The local home guard is lead by uptight Englishman Basil Radford who wants to prevent the wily (Scots) locals from recovering the goods. He is easily evaded. Somehow Joan Greenwood is deemed the co-lead with Radford despite being only involved in some minor romantic stuff with sergeant Bruce Seton. It's well constructed but pedestrian with a lot of filler between a few genuinely funny bits.

Wikipedia. Somehow it got remade in 2016.

The name is Lee, Bruce Lee, and this was the last of his leading-role features for me to catch up on. I hadn't realised just how much Brad Pitt ripped off his persona in Fight Club and similarly how literally Tarantino lifted much of this for Kill Bill.

The plot is a train wreck. Notionally Bruce and other martial artists are drawn to an island off the coast of Hong Kong for a tournament. Everyone has their reasons for being there, told in dissolved flashback, but the premise doesn't survive Bond-adjacency. John Saxon co-leads as a suave Sean Connery-esque American gambler with debts and scruples who happens to know Jim Kelly from the American activities in Việt Nam from six years prior. Kelly gets all the ladies because Bruce is too busy taking care of business as instructed by his Shaolin-descended master.

The climax is unsatisfying perhaps because it is unclear master villain Kien Shih can take it to Lee; there's a lot of in-close shots and choppy editing in all the fight scenes. What's with the missing hand? — things got pure Wolverine at the end. The Brits turn up too late to do anything useful. I had to wonder who'd be dumb enough to be a stunt man in a Bruce Lee flick in 1973. There's some great cinematography especially of Hong Kong harbour; it's a bit of a time capsule like Melville's take on roughly contemporaneous Paris.

Everything is at Wikipedia. An early blaxploitation! Once again Jackie Chan is apparently in there somewhere.

Bruce Lee's third time leading a feature and far better than the first two, probably because he also wrote and directed. Famous for its climatic fight with Chuck Norris in the Colosseum in Rome.

As always the plot doesn't make a tonne of sense. Bruce gets sent by Nora Miao's uncle to help her out in Rome where the restaurant she just inherited is under pressure from the local hoods (mafia). She wanted a lawyer but for flimsy reasons everything is settled with martial arts and so Bruce is her man. He once again disappoints her in the love business. There seems to be a rule that you only get one go per murder method (why not try again with guns?) and that the Chinese form(s) dominate Karate. Secretary Ping-Ou Wei is very camp, very weird.

Roger Ebert: two stars. The version I saw apparently cut all the translation crap that stuck in his craw. #58 on the Golden Horse list of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films. Excess details at Wikipedia.

Bruce Lee's second feature where he's in the lead. Learning from the first one there is some attempt at creating a mythos: we're taken to 1900s Shanghai, to the international settlement which is under strict Japanese influence, where someone has the great idea of killing Bruce's teacher. The inevitable ensues.

The version I saw was dubbed with terribly plummy English accents. Bruce just doesn't sound like that! Perhaps the idea was that this major flaw would hide all the other major (or even bigger?) flaws. The plot is overwrought and illogical. There's way too much exposition and too many scenes that progress nothing. Things sagged every time Bruce is off the screen, which was far too often. On the plus side he's a bit of a clothes horse: I liked the white suit he turns up in.

An excess of information at Wikipedia. Jackie Chan is supposedly in there somewhere. Dubbed into Noongar in 2021! Wow. Chairman Mao watched it three times!

Bruce Lee's first major movie in a lead role. All the details and more at Wikipedia. Briefly he leaves Hebei to go work at an ice factory in Thailand and soon enough the local Big Boss is disappearing his coworkers (some of them cousins?) after they discover opiates in the ice. (I read recently that the Afghan Taliban has figured out that there's more money in ice than opiates.) All the ladies make distracting eyes at him and he wakes up in a henhouse. But the ladies do help him out, which is more than he gets from most of his male cohort. His mum sent him along with an amulet to keep him from fighting but of course it doesn't last long. On the other hand not a lot happens for most of the movie.

The scenery is occasionally gorgeous and some of the cinematography is decent. The editing is clunky and there are distracting continuity issues. It's somewhat fun on its own terms but lacks the exotic mythos that the more recent Kung Fu movies go in for; there's nothing to think about here. The titles and credits, the negative space portraits owe something to Sergio Leone.

Boomer Memento. Michael Keaton directed, produced, starred. It's not Birdman but I'll grudgingly admit that it has a few moments. The plot has Keaton's aging assassin suspect his once-prime dual-PhD'd brain of degeneracy but he needs to do one last job before he can retire. (It is briefly and dutifully suggested he's actually cleaning the gene pool on Al Pacino's commissions but the morality is unnuanced and irrelevant.) Whatever those plans were are immediately derailed by family issues embodied in son James Marsden and grandsprog Morgan Bastin. Perhaps Keaton was trying to suggest a path to redemption for his demographic cohort.

I did not enjoy Suzy Nakamura's performance as a police detective or any of the police procedural stuff; it is entirely pro forma, very cliched, and she just ejaculates her lines, pretending to be clueful or clueless as the plot requires while the boys junior to her steal her thunder. Pacino has some fun in his minor and mostly inert role; there's a cute scene at the end where he slow dances with his entirely age-inappropriate squeeze Sasha Neboga in what might be a homage to Scent of a Woman. She's a ballet teacher. I wish they'd fleshed her character out — she's shown as solid and it is implied she has her reasons for doing what she does — but this is a sausagefest where all the men take solace in generic Eastern European women having rejected or been rejected by the local ones.

Jeannette Catsoulis's Critic's Pick sold it to me. Robert Daniels was far less impressed. Brian Tallerico at TIFF 2023: frustrating. "Keaton is such a stoic performer, a phenomenal actor whose low-key energy can sometimes be deployed to great impact by the right filmmakers. Interestingly, I don't think Keaton the Director knows how to direct Keaton the Actor."

The highest rated of Jackie Chan's own movies at IMDB. He co-wrote/starred/directed but IMDB trivia claims there was at least one stunt he didn't do himself! It seems clear that secondary-squeeze/moll Brigitte Lin did at least some of hers but I have to wonder about the commitment of main squeeze Maggie Cheung: she's ridiculously young and one-dimensional here. I'd say her acting fell short of the exemplary standard set by Doyle in Comrades: Almost a Love Story.

The plot doesn't really hold together too well: everyone seems to know where to find the bad boys, Brigitte seems to know nothing, know too much and is too willing to return to her much older sugar daddy (Yuen Chor) despite him trying to bump her off after Chan's efforts to protect her. The computer printouts could, you know, be printed out again ... but then Chan would've needed to find some other excuse for his batshit climactic stunts. The early set piece at the shanty town on a hill was also just too much.

There's a lot to enjoy here. The best bits were the small touches like when the police mass to go take down the rogue Chan over many seconds of screen time and begin to depart ... only to scream to a halt, as if someone turned their electricity off, when he turns up at headquarters. His clowning is first rate. The making-of footage during the closing credits is excellent.

Vincent Canby in 1987, patronisingly.

Directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan and by far the highest rated of his efforts at IMDB. He was one of the talking heads in the Christopher Doyle biopic Like the Wind. Doyle appears as an English teacher who draws massive smiles from all his students, perhaps due to his use of inappropriate teaching materials or the eternal presence of a drink in his hand. Not much is asked of his or his Thai prostitute girlfriend Michelle Gabriel's acting skills. Jingle Ma did the cinematography and it's great in tight but I wanted to see more of the rooms more often.

Maggie Cheung is luminous in the lead. She's fetching even in her 1980s Maccas garb and two coats for a cold Lunar New Year's Eve. Notionally she and her fellow mainland-escapee Leon Lai are fated lovers but it takes the whole movie for things to work out. He's a bit too inert with a shy smile that sort-of works but he generally lacks her expressiveness. I guess this reflects the tentativeness of his character but it never stopped me from wondering why Maggie couldn't do better. Irene Tsu is great as Aunt Rosie: she has a fixation on William Holden who I only know as an older bloke in Network. Eric Tsang rounds out the leads as the avuncular, accommodating Triad (?) boss. He doesn't need to get out of first gear.

The plot is basically the romantic parts of Doctor Zhivago: both move to Hong Kong in the mid-1980s and eventually become friends in a commercial/transactional way at a then-novel Maccas. He lives with his aunt in a brothel and nobody seems to bat an eyelid about that. There are quite a few nice touches along the way and a few clangers too. The final movement is a love letter to mid-1990s NYC.

I watched it over many sittings as it's pretty shallow and quite enjoyable. I wish the subtitles had been clearer about which language the characters were speaking (Cantonese or Mandarin) as it would've added some depth. There's no violence (c.f. City on Fire).

Lawrence van Gelder for the New York Times. Unbanned on the mainland in 2015. Maggie deservedly cleaned up at the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse.

A gentle and mildly comedic critique of modernity from Bhutan. The country's claims to fame are that it is the happiest in Asia (or the world, or wherever, depending) and that it underwent a (unique?) bloodless transition to parliamentary democracy in 2008 at the instigation of the King. The rural people are mostly happy with the existing arrangements but the monk of the title knows that change is inevitable. The bureaucrats and their hirelings are just cogs in the machine.

The cinematography makes a lot of the landscapes in that way of tourist commercials. (Did it make me want to go to Bhutan? No, too hilly.) This style of storytelling put me in mind of Hal Hartley: a touch rueful and so out of step with these increasingly brutal times. Then again the whole thing is a bit of a backhander to the USA: you can keep your revolutions, violence and democracy but we're always open to more phallic stuff.

Manohla Dargis also picked up on the pokes at the West.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-write Ethan Coen and wife/co-writer Tricia Cooke. It's a bust but I can't say I wasn't warned: they did mention it was a 1990s retro thing and the rating at IMDB is dire. Cooke made it clear she was revisiting her coming-of-dykedom on the east coast of the USA during the 90s; the scene where the younger version of the repressed half of the couple (Geraldine Viswanathan, Australian) pervs on her nude (female) neighbour is purportedly autobiographical. Margaret Qualley plays the mouthier side, notionally a free-and-easy Texan. (I don't remember her from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.) The story lifts some tropes from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, spelling out things that were more effective when left implicit in the original material. This fantasy insistence that what the auteur says goes for these ancient pop-culture provocations is tiresome, but I guess it's little different to the increasingly common expropriation of imagination by cinematic adaptations (cf the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Lord of the Rings, etc.). Or one woman's referentialism is another man's appropriation. There's a bland cameo by Matt Damon as a family-man senator, a slightly more interesting one from Miley Cyrus and too much of the politics of the day — Ralph Nader, Chelsea Clinton — that nobody cares about now.

The humour left me cold, as did the music. (Diana Krall? Please, Bob Dylan put a permanent kink in You Belong To Me for Natural Born Killers in those very same 1990s.) The politics of agency ain't great either: the girls try to make a go of their escapist road trip but the boys get on top and it is only chance, ego, intemperance — the essence of the male? — that allows them to take their ill-gotten funds and get hitched in Victoria-of-the USA Massachusetts. No spoiler: things are so strait there's never a chance of won't-they.

Another reason for watching this was that to find out if the Cohen brothers can function separately. It doesn't look good for Ethan: Joel went off and made Macbeth with wife Frances McDormand as I suggested someone do. It can't be any lamer than this.

Manohla Dargis: a leaden romp. Colman Domingo lights things up as a gangland boss. Other reviewers seem to have watched something else or succumbed to the marketing. As Dana Stevens said of about another movie, this ain't Thelma and Louise.

Christopher Doyle's first feature-length cinematographic effort. Inevitable after watching the recent bio/doco/interview. He did earn his award albeit not for the innovation he spruiked: there are plenty of (standard, Western) progressions from wide/setup shots to closeups, and I doubt they were operating under any pressure from the Taiwanese authorities. Co-written and directed by Edward Yang.

This is a lengthy (2 hours 46 minutes!) intricately-structured soap opera. The shallowness of the story — at times I could hope for the depths of the later The Remains of the Day and Once Upon a Time in America — is such a let down given this prolixity, masterful shifting of chronology and the evident commitment of all participants.

In brief it documents some of the breakdown of traditional family structures in Taiwanese society, specifically the passing of a medical clinic and profession from father to son and women being tasked with unifying dynasties, causing restive unhappiness in the younger generation. The son (Ming Hsiang-Tso) caves, suffers and inflicts suffering on his one-true-love girlfriend (Terry Hu) who flees to Germany to study piano. His sister (Sylvia Chang) flees to Taipei to take up with her sort-of boyfriend (David Mao). She ultimately finds some kind of liberation but the framing story of the two women meeting again 13 years after the pianist fled is strange: so much of the story is irrelevant to her, especially as she has a big concert that evening.

The wheels totally fell off for me when Chang asks Mao's mistress/office wife (a foxy on-the-make Yan Feng-chiao) if she loves him. At this point we're pretty sure Chang doesn't: an early scene has a wilful school friend (Lee Lieh) advising her that Mao is a sure thing that will never leave her, and he proves to be her ticket out of the family strictures. Soon enough they argue in that way married couples do and she wants him to spend more time with her but his diagnosis seems about right: she's under occupied and should've acquired more skills. (It's unclear how competent she is in her foreign language as the one boss she has is unimpressed with her work. The flower arranging is presented as nothing more than a housewife hobby.) And perhaps he does force her to take responsibility for her freedom after the mysterious happening on the beach.

I found it hard to be sympathetic to these characters with such vacuous lives. I didn't and don't know what would have made them function better; this pursuit of happiness farrago proved too amorphous despite all the layering. Speaking of which, all the ladies sport Princess Di's signature feathered hairdo except for Chang when she decides she might need to find a new man. Also they tend to start smoking when things aren't going well.

Cinema Omnivore: I too felt that Terry Hu was squandered. We hardly hear about her time abroad. And what was with the frosty Germanic personal assistant? Nick Kouhi. Pat Graham: familiar from countless Barbara Stanwyck sagas of the 50s (!). And so on.

Kindle. Private dick Nick Charles retires to San Francisco upon marrying sassy west-coast lumber heiress Nora but returns to NYC to dodge Christmas social obligations. There, of course, old entanglements suck him into a murder mystery and you've got to wonder if these people are any better than those the couple were avoiding. Hammett uses very effective first person narration and gets in some cracking lines. Nora is a fun interlocutor but I felt her character could've been rounded out some more. I'd say it's the best written of his novels but that might be sacrilegious as it's not in his signature hard-boiled style. It struck me as wildly inventive at times and then I remembered The Maltese Falcon.

Having completed his novels I took a look at his biographical details at Wikipedia. I'd just say I didn't see a lot of politics in these books.

Goodreads. I saw the contemporaneous film a decade ago but don't remember a thing. Roger Ebert gave it four stars as a "great movie". Apparently it has five successors.

I've been meaning to watch this since I read that it was featured in the Sydney Film Festival in 2021. It's mostly an interview with cinematographer Christopher Doyle intercut with some other talking heads and grabs of his work. The Doyle aspects powerfully reminded me of why I watch his movies: so much improbable ethereal beauty, too much of it no longer found in reality.

Director Ted McDonnell does a decent job of assembling a cross section of Doyle's work. The interview itself was a riveting but inexhaustive ramble and left me wanting more biographical details. Digging into the pointers provided to other encounters it seems that he cannot be steered; see, for instance, this chat with Nick Newman (2019-12-06) or another back in 2014 or yet another from 2014. (In contrast he seemed to be on-message with the BFI in 2019.) After getting busted for thieving too many books from a Glebe bookstore (he claims to prefer reading to watching movies) he departed Australia on a boat at age 19 and ended up in late 1970s Hong Kong in his late 20s. Four months of Chinese language study at the Chinese University of Hong Kong was all he could afford (it was for ambassadors he says) so he headed to Taipei. Soon enough he shot That Day, on the Beach and won a best-cinematography award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in 1983 and we're off to the races. They shot Chungking Express in his apartment! "Biggest mistake!" he says, but he still lives there.

For a variety of reasons I wonder who the equivalent is in Korean cinema and what Doyle thinks of that scene — and it's a bit strange this movie doesn't go there given how the locus of Asian cinema has shifted over the past two decades. There is no discussion of technique or technology. It's unclear there's any baton passing though he is working with young directors. Everyone wants to know why he split with Wong Kar-Wai.

Robert Moran at the Smage: COVID delayed Sydney's turn to bask in the twenty-year anniversary of In the Mood for Love. He's from the Shire! (Cronulla) Some dry humour about his cataract removal operation. 2020 was 2046. I can't tell if he's joking about an Oscar but there's no doubt he has a healthy self regard. Filmink (2021-10-28). His attitude towards film school is the same as Herzog's as is his advice: go forth and make films. A joint interview with director McDonnell. An interview with David Hay: the Norwegian Merchant Marine got him out of Sydney, to Amsterdam and a stint at the University of Maryland to study Chinese Art (!). Anne Rutherford: did Doyle's optimism about Hong Kong's cultural scene survive COVID?

Twitter says Doyle married director Hei Wen in Australia three weeks ago. And it turns out there's no shortage of interviews with him on YouTube: In the Mood for Doyle (2007) suggests he's a Leonard Cohen fan (specifically Anthem) and still has the same apartment. There's a visit to Chungking Mansions! And so on.

What is it with Koreans and their trains! There's Snowpiercer and Train to Busan of course, but before those there was this exercise in all-style-no-substance from Lee Myung-se. I have no problem with that in principle — I'd be happy to get with the program — but here the most stylish bit is the intro.

Notionally a police-procedural noir, it's really a series of set pieces lifted from other movies and wildly reworked. There's a huge debt owed to Sergio Leone (soundtrack, negative space, outdoor spaces, intertitles, ...) and the hard workers in Hong Kong (such as John Woo who the lead is named for). The spirit of Tarantino haunts some of it though he'd never go with such a weak script. I watched it in about four sittings so I can't remember what the motivation was for the epic police search for some criminal mastermind. Lead Joong-Hoon Park ultimately takes an epic beating from him (Ahn Sung-ki) in the rain, in a train yard, in a scene that may've been lifted shot-for-shot in a Matrix sequel. I found the Trainspotting-esque legging-it scenes to be the most amusing.

Prompted by Mike Hale in the New York Times in 2019. Peter Bradshaw in 2001: a bit John Woo, some Ridley Scott. Elvis Mitchell. Stephanie Zacharek: Wong Kar-Wai. The second half is more conventional than the first. City on Fire.

Kindle. Again Hammett adopts and is more successful with third-person narration. This time around the main character, always addressed by his creator using his full moniker "Ned Beaumont", is a political svengali / consigliere who outsources the private dickery. His boss Paul Madvig runs a city somewhere not too far from NYC. There's some extreme violence in and around the speakeasies of the day. The central thread — the killing of a Senator's son — seems tepid in comparison to the other events and its resolution is icy cold. He gets off the odd cracker of a line but I wish he'd found room for an interlocutor as he did in The Dain Curse; we get a bit too much mouthing off by drongos.

Goodreads. Wikipedia tells me the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing drew on it.

Sonny: Alright, listen to me. You pull up right where she lives, right? Before you get outta the car, you lock both doors. Then, get outta the car, you walk over to her. You bring her over to the car. Dig out the key, put it in the lock and open the door for her. Then you let her get in. Then you close the door. Then you walk around the back of the car and look through the rear window. If she doesn't reach over and lift up that button so that you can get in: dump her.
Calogero 'C' Anello: Just like that?
Sonny: Listen to me, kid. If she doesn't reach over and lift up that button so that you can get in, that means she's a selfish broad and all you're seeing is the tip of the iceberg. You dump her and you dump her fast.
— If only I'd known about the door test before now.

Robert De Niro's first directing effort; he had another go with The Good Shepherd a decade later but that's been it so far. I think he was fine as the actual bus-driving father of a kid growing up Italian in the Bronx but really the star and lead is Chazz Palminteri (soon enough huge in The Usual Suspects) who adapted the thing from his one-man play (!) — which would've been something to see.

Growing up in the hood... remind me where I've seen that before. The east coast may have a totally different vibe (here there's baseball but no basketball which might just be saying that Italians aren't big on the latter) but is just as lethal (not just on the colour line but also from the organised crime). There are many good bits but it's also a very familiar coming-of-age story; perhaps the twinned fathers complement each other just a bit too perfectly, each giving solid life lessons that leach the danger from the scenario. (Contrast it with the boy's excursion into the black neighbourhood where things get a bit Spike Lee.) The late cameo by Joe Pesci is somehow gold. I was disappointed to see that the younger cast, handled so well by De Niro, did not go on to bigger things. There wasn't much for the women to do.

Now that I think about it, the door test doesn't seem too well conceived as he was driving a convertible. And how about for a motorcycle?

Roger Ebert: four stars. It would've been great if they'd fleshed out Palminteri's neighbourhood mafioso some more. There's a scene of charred bodies that put me in mind of Once Upon a Time in America. Janet Maslin. The a cappella Doo Wop singers on the street. Mean Streets.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with lead actress Alma Pöysti and thumbs-up review. Jury Prize winner at Cannes 2023. Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki is widely feted but I don't know why.

This is about being single and unskilled in middle age and getting an unexpected shot at joining the (axiomatically) happily coupled up. Pöysti and candidate bloke Jussi Vatanen are not exactly in the precariat — the scenario is more old school in there always being industrial work and social support in a Nordic monoculture. There are no families, no Ken Loach social activism or commentary, no politics apart from the war on the Ukraine on the radio; this pair are just lonely in the timeworn way. As Leonard Cohen used to say, there ain't no cure for the lovelorn except perhaps by going to these sorts of movies.

The style is arch like Hal Hartley; I suggest his closest is The Unbelievable Truth with Adrienne Shelly and Robert John Burke. The humour is amusing but very very dry and the whole show continually teeters on the brink of cliche. Their first date is Jarmusch's Bill Murray / Adam Driver zombie flick, at the Ritz of course. The posters out front must be Kaurismäki's faves: Fat City (!), some Brigid Bardot classic. The punchline is that she dug it.

There are many scenes of the bloke and his mate bantering. There are fewer scenes of the women talking, but when they do they express the stale "all men are rotten" tropes. (The men are not as unsubtle; they do not slag the women off as a class. Or is it that the Finnish ladies share no common flaw? I ascribe this unevenness to Kaurismäki and felt it marred the scenario beyond repair.) She wants him to be different in some way (from the other men in Helsinki?) but it's unclear that he is or can be. Apparently smoking is still OK but drinking is not. She cuts her losses by rescuing a dog.

Di Rosso observed that this gets a bit David Lynch by embedding musical performance in the film. I'm pretty sure Jarmusch did this too somewhere. It reminded me a bit of Lukas Moodysson (Bara prata lite? — nothing brutal) or von Trier (nobody gets anything but don't give up just yet!). There's a dash of Amelie: the romantic lost, the relentless search, serendipity. It's OK but slight, mostly gentle, pointless. The cinematography functions but doesn't wow; Helsinki does not receive her close up.

Glenn Kenny: four stars. Manohla Dargis made it a Critic's Pick. Lives of quiet desperation. Brief Encounter. Peter Bradshaw: four stars of five. An Affair to Remember. Absurd and cartoony.

Kindle. The second and last of the "Continental Op" series, inevitable after Red Harvest.

Our private-dick first-person narrator stays local to San Francisco for the first two thirds and then relocates to Quesada which Google Maps suggests is a long way south. It's a bit more Holmes and Watson with an interlocutor who presents as smarter than our main man. He gets off some snappy lines. There's also the Doyle-ish (and unconvincing) theme of a family or blood curse that centres on a young lady of odd appearance; I didn't know what to make of her pointed lobeless ears, small teeth and pastiness. Was this some image of a demon? One might expect that to make her less effective as a femme fatale but Hammett has it otherwise.

There's a bit of everything here: the lethal cults of California, the drugs, the guns, the vapid lifestyles, the Mexicans — it feels so modern! There's even a Trainspotting-esque relinquishing junk (morphine) sequence. Hammett must've felt the plot got away from him as he spends a final chapter explaining it all back to us. Be that as it may he didn't obfuscate the perp too well as I picked them out by about the halfway point without much effort.

Goodreads.

Kindle. I found it a bit strange. Having been hired out of San Francisco to investigate a murder, our unnamed first-person narrator decides for reasons unknown to clean up Personville (or in a Looney Tunes accent, Poisonville) which is apparently not too far from Ogden and Salt Lake City in Utah. It has all the tropes: the busted police department, the mob, the godfather, the gamblers, boxers, a solitary femme fatale, many shootups/outs, love triangles and so on. There are a few elements of Basic Instinct. Despite terminal issues with their operation the mob doesn't send help. As far as I remember Hammett doesn't develop a few of his named, notionally central characters: Lew Yard for instance.

The narrator always seems to know more than he's told us and that gets annoying. The episodic resolutions reflect its serialized form and suggest that Hammett made it up as he went along; the ultimate ending is nothing very special. I think his use of the third person and tighter control of the overall narrative arc in The Maltese Falcon was more successful.

Goodreads. The source of many a movie.

It's like they got some of the old Trainspotting team together (again) for another go-round of the good old early days of eckies and house music. In some ways it's an obvious complement to 24 Hour Party People — gestured at here via a slagging off of Joy Division who weren't signed with Creation Records.

Ewen Bremner plays Alan McGee and does what he can with what a script that is bereft of fun. You can see Irvine Welsh's and Danny Boyle's fingerprints on some of the stock scenes, especially the toilet fixation and sombre family moments. Thomas Thurgoose gives the numpty performance that you'd expect from his mien, which is a massive step down from what Shane Meadows got out of him. Suki Waterhouse's performance as an American journalist goes against the grain of the whole project. So many scenes just don't work. And who said failure was an orphan? — the list of producers and people in producer-adjacent roles in the opening credits is endless. But most devastating to the whole thing: I'm guessing you could count the number of people who want to revisit Britpop, Oasis, New Labour, Tony Blair (etc) on one hand.

Glenn Kenny: reverb set to high. Simran Hans: two stars of five.

More Melville completism. This one is notionally about Alain Delon's Parisian policeman but of course more screen time is spent on the heists. The demimonde is cursorily drawn and essentially embodied by Catherine Deneuve. She appears to share herself with Delon and arch crim Richard Crenna but the whole thing is entirely sexless despite the acres of flesh on show at her nightclub. In colour.

Both heists are more pedestrian than those Melville has showed us before (e.g., Le Cercle Rouge). Initially we're on the Atlantic Coast at some deserted condo with just one thing open: a bank. (It put me in mind of Louis Malle's Atlantic City, perhaps also because Deneuve has some of the aspect of Susan Sarandon.) Notionally they're after the mountain of payroll cash but how can that be when there's nobody around? The special effects for the second heist (on a train entered via a helicopter) were not very convincing. Crenna spends most of his time in that sequence getting dressed... who would bother now? Nothing is made of the mountain of white powder he recovers; perhaps it stands for the changing of the times.

Delon did OK as the dissolute cop. There's a beaut interlude where he serenades Deneuve on the piano at her club, where the movie gestures at what could've been. The ending is a bust, much like Le deuxième souffle: everyone was too smart to be that dumb.

And yet more Melville completism. This one was highly rated at IMDB, but then again most of his films are. In black and white. "Souffle" is apparently also a word in English for something breath related and not about the dessert.

This one is lengthy and not as sharp as the others of his I've seen. It's a heist flick (surprise) where the main character (played by Lino Ventura) is a prison escapee (surprise). Notionally it's about police brutality (Parisian Commissaire Paul Meurisse is a bit above it all but Marseilles Inspector Paul Frankeur knows the value of a good phone book) and a man wanting to restore his honour whatever the cost. "Manouche" Christine Fabréga runs a night club (surprise) and seems more enamoured of her brother than any other man. But the character portraits are not so strong here and I couldn't bring myself to care.

Strangely the crims now drive a large Mercedes and not a yank tank.

More Spike Lee completism, prompted by Wesley Snipes. He's solid in a minor role and takes it to Denzel Washington every chance he gets. The rest of the cast is also very good excepting perhaps Lee himself as always. In an early scene he's acted off the screen by a passive Washington but the whole thing is redeemed by Lee's inability to hide his smirk or grin: he's so stoked to have pulled these stars. And soon enough he gets to indulge his love of a good pile-on (which he soon expanded to feature length in Jungle Fever).

The story centres on Washington's jazz/blues trumpeter making a living at a Jewish-operated nightclub run by John and Nicholas John Turturro. Snipes plays the saxophones, Giancarlo Esposito is on the piano. The musical interludes cut things up like School Daze. When not at the club he somehow manages to satisfy two ladies for a while until they get sick of being in the way of his trumpeting. Cynda Williams wants her singing career and she wants it now and isn't too bothered if Snipes proves the better vector. After some violence provoked by Lee's gambling compulsions Lee regular Joie Lee resists the damaged Washington's hard word but in a 25th Hour-ish outro it all comes full circle. That ending is lame, too much like a cast party.

I struggled to understand the point of it beyond what's on the tin: this is black music but the crowd is white. Fair enough but in 1990 I suspect the crowds were at R'n'B and hip hop gigs someplace else. There's also the time-honoured observation that the souffle doesn't rise twice, and it seems, contra Leonard Cohen, that you can get a girl back by begging ... though perhaps not on your knees?

Roger Ebert: three stars. Uninspired. Vincent Canby in meta-review mode: a response to Clint Eastwood's Bird. Not in the same league as Do the Right Thing. Washington is a professional, a working man, just like the boys in White Men Can't Jump. Lee felt the need to defend his Jewish characters. And so on.

Gutman smiled benignly at him and said: "Well, Wilmer, I'm sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but — well, by Gad! — if you lose a son it's possible to get another — and there’s only one Maltese falcon."

Kindle. Prompted by the Bogart adaptation and the lack of promise in anything newer on the stack. First time around with Hammett. It's mostly a novel-length character study of Sam Spade which is more show than tell; I guess these were the days before things got so psychological. He doesn't do much more than show up, cogitate (we don't get to hear his thoughts) and provoke other people to tell him more than they want to — in other words it's essentially a script for a talkie. There's a lot of detail in the descriptions and apart from the incessant smoking all of it points away from casting Bogart. Set in San Francisco.

Immediately afterwards I read Hammett's Spade shorts A Man Called Spade, Too Many Have Lived and They Can Only Hang You Once. None are as good as the novel but all passed the time. Hammett is addictive but perhaps not that satisfying.

Goodreads.

Third time around with this P.T. Anderson misfire. I've softened on Adam Sandler after Uncut Gems but even so there's not enough going on here. Things are perhaps oversimplified by Emily Watson's lack of a character: she's keen on him and that's that. More Philip Seymour Hoffman might've helped, or Luis Guzmán. Still too many pratfalls?

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars, probably because this was Sandler's most modulated performance to then. IMDB trivia: Anderson got the best director award at Cannes 2002 but missed out on the Palme d'Or. A. O. Scott: a Critic's Pick. Peter Bradshaw gave it just three stars of five: a strange, insubstantial little film with so many problems. A love story made from neon candyfloss.

The first of Melville's features and of course inevitable after Le Doulos. It's another black-and-white noir set amongst the contemporary gambling dens of Montmartre. The heist this time involves the Casino Barrière in Deauville which Google suggests is about 200km away.

Roger Duschesne has the classic dial, presence and gambling compulsion to lead. He drives a massive yank tank convertible (a Packard I read) and keeps the police at a comfortable distance while notionally schooling his protege Daniel Cauchy with help from friends and enemies in the demimonde. One of Bob's opsec axioms is that women are never to be trusted (excepting Simone Paris's barmaid) but street walking Isabelle Corey's foxy nonchalance puts the lie to that. The bulk of it is agreeable and somewhat workmanlike until things unwind in a satisfying final movement.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2003. The scene where the high-tech safe cracking is intercut with a panting German Shepherd was endearingly weird. Vincent Canby made it a Critic's Pick in 1981.

Yet another pointer from Matthew Spektor. Directed by Frank Perry and adapted by his wife Eleanor from raw material provided by Theodore Isaac Rubin. Both got Oscar noms for their efforts. Black and white. On the pile for quite a while.

Keir Dullea plays a teenager who thinks that being touched by another human causes death. He's otherwise quite rational so I wondered why he couldn't cure himself by observing that he always survives contact at least as far as we're shown. His parents park him in a home for psychological movie making not too dissimilar from the one where Hitchcock squandered Ingrid Bergman. There he has the incredible fortune to meet Janet Margolin who conspires with him, chastely, in mutual cures.

I enjoyed the bit players the most despite all the inmates being far too old for their roles. Blonde Coni Hudak rolls her eyes at pants man Jaime Sánchez (a prototype for the Fondz or John Travolta who went on to big things) while hoping for more from Dullea. As for Dullea this is essentially a dry run for his canonical performance in 2001; you can see why Stanley Kubrick picked him as he turns on a dime from detached earnest inertness to fiery contemptuous aggression and back again. He looks a bit like the classic photo of Alan Turing too, which doesn't hurt. Margolin works hard to show us the girl lost in her head. The sculpture scene at a museum is a bit heartbreaking.

Bosley Crowther: "crudely but courageously played".

Kindle. Not as good as For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the tin says Hemingway takes us autofictionally to the Italy v. Austria front of World War I. The first-person narrator is an Italian-American ambulance driver/organiser who doesn't get much driving in. He's keen on the ladies and gets an English rose interested; initially he puts up a fight emotionally (let's just get physical) but the nurse's self-deluding/abnegating chatter and submissive willingness wears him down. (She regrets not having got it on with the now-dead love-of-her-life.) After Hemingway exhausts us with lengthy and recurring bouts of the idleness and boredom of war, they end up in Switzerland, eventually Montreux. This isn't something I'd usually wish on anyone but the parts adjacent to Italy and France do sound civilised. It's readily affordable if you have a family that keeps sending you money to feed your alcoholism and obliviousness. There's a touch of Samuel Beckett in his self talk.

Goodreads. Yep, the girlfriend was a doormat, which made me expect more parallels to be drawn with Twilight. Not a love story. The connection the narrator has with Doctor Rinaldi is well drawn.

And yet more Wesley Snipes completism. I've previously ignored him as I had no interest in his later-1990s action-Jackson work that I had heard about. Apparently this put him and Woody Harrelson on the A-list. Tyra Ferrell is solid as Snipes's wife, as is Rosie Perez as Harrelson's too-smart squeeze. It's mostly an amusing take on the pickup basketball scene at and near Venice Beach in L.A. — played mostly for money, sometimes for hustles, entirely for the amusing trash talk. The beach itself does not feature. The plot is little more than fortune-made, fortune-/girl-lost and is not that successful at finding relevance for its strong women.

Ron Shelton wrote and directed in a similar way to how John Singleton handled Boyz N The Hood. I guess the equivalent of Ice Cube there are the NBA stars here. Drugs and guns are present but downplayed, just there in the background.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Men at work. Janet Maslin: a benign atmosphere. The folk wisdom is hokum. IMDB trivia: must've been a fun shoot.

A bit of Spike Lee completism which I'd avoided previously due to the low IMDB rating. A Wesley Snipes jag from Witness. He's got a lot more to work with here and is a lot better for it. Tyra Ferrell from Boyz n the Hood flirts with an otherwise unlucky-in-love John Turturro who is the subject of many pile-ons. She had a big 1991. Also same-old Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Robbins, Brad Dourif, Frank Vincent, Michael Imperioli, a very young and histrionic/druggy Halle Berry, an antique Anthony Quinn (who I'll watch do anything). The theme song is by Stevie Wonder. Spike Lee's squeeze Veronica Webb has a Shar Pei!

The excess of ingredients cannot make up for the lack of ideas. The central conceit is in the title: for unspecified reasons happily-married-with-young-daughter architect Snipes decides to bonk temp Annabella Sciorra on his drafting table late one night. The remainder deals with the fallout with a variety of hot takes and underbaked explorations of the support networks and sexual politics. What would I know but I got the impression it was more Southern (Ossie Davis as the preacher-father, the stories of Italians getting lynched for dealing with Blacks in Louisiana, ...) than 1980s NYC.

So yeah, not a patch on Lee's sharper work on similar topics from the same period (e.g. Do the Right Thing).

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. The central romance doesn't work but the surrounding stuff does. The Taj Mahal ("It's like the Trump Towers for crackheads around here") sequence is pretty good. Samuel G. Freedman at the New York Times.

Kindle. Notionally an autobiography / bibliography by New York Times books man Garner with a side of food. I remain thankful for his pointers to Paul Beatty, Atticus Lish and especially Francis Spufford but since 2015 he's given me mostly bum steers, and so it goes here: after an amusing introduction things rapidly bog down in gobbets engineered for short attention spans.

Perhaps the central flaw for me is that a lot of it falls into the uncanny valley of having been almost read before: much of the material (quotes and opinions) appeared in his New York Times reviews. He tends to return to the same authors a bit too often, specifically on the topic of Asian cooking where he leans heavily on Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer, The Committed — where's that final entry in the trilogy?). I guess Garner's project here is very similar to Andrew X. Pham's A Culinary Odyssey: My Cookbook Diary of Travels, Flavors, and Memories of Southeast Asia which (at least) has healthier aspects. As far as I remember African cooking isn't mentioned. Australia is represented by Les Murray.

He is similarly limited in his account of coffee: too many words are spilt on Starbucks. I saw no mention of the best of the South: the soups (I have fond memories of jambalaya and gumbo). I wanted to hear more about growing up in West Virginia and Florida. There's no posturing with typewriters or fountain pens — it appears his book duties are hard sedentary labour. He remains an unabashed fan of Chistopher Hitchens. There's a bit too much social and dinner party chaff, characterization-by-product.

Jennifer Reese had the thankless task of reviewing it for the New York Times. Goodreads.

Michael Mann's latest and a fair way from his best. I felt the topic — a bunch of events in a tumultuous year of motor racing/manufacturer Enzo Ferrari's life — falls into the uncanny valley for me: either you're a fan and know all about it or you're not in which case nothing seems all that significant. It doesn't function as a biopic.

Adam Driver leads in his second effort at playing a famous Italian (his first being in House of Gucci, unseen by me). It was very weird to pair him with decade-older Penélope Cruz whose vastly more capacious emotional range unbalanced more than one climactic scene. Mistress Shailene Woodley's accent wobbled all over the globe. It is hinted that the drivers have personalities. Most of the movie is mere filler in between Cruz's scenes, especially the well shot but strangely airless car race. The ending is abrupt.

I had to wonder why Mann didn't try to find more Italians for the main roles; I guess he needed American stars to secure funding.

Widely reviewed of course. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Mann last year and, while being very chuffed to do so, concluded Mann didn't land this one. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She dug the racing scenes. Sandra Hall: "[Driver's is a] performance which effectively answers all those who have criticised Mann for not casting an Italian actor." I don't agree! "And in the end, Ferrari himself is not as fascinating as Mann thinks he is." Luke Goodsell. Wendy Ide: Driver is "curiously muted and bloodless." Dead right. And so on.

Apparently I saw this about twenty years ago. Prompted by the realisation that Larry Fishburne was in it (and didn't he get fat soon enough!). His role is Cuba Gooding Jr's dad and their thread is pure father/son how-to-be-a-man, putting me in mind of Moonlight though things are more violent here but not graphically so. All the neighbourhood mothers find the pair irresistible. Angela Bassett does fine in very little screen time as his mum. There's something powerfully inert in Ice Cube: he wasn't going anywhere and nobody is touching his brother. The cast is generally well used and excellent.

The story is getting out of the South Central L.A. ghetto (adjacent to or coincident with Compton) with a side of getting into your girl's pants (Nia Long's in this case, who puts up a Catholic fight as she was taught to do). Things move fluidly from event to event with some great details: a postman arrives with the mail after a mother breaks up her brawling boys, played be writer/director John Singleton. He constantly injects these jarring normalities into the gangland. And also things that just jar, like helicopter search lights.

I enjoyed it immensely up to the last 30 minutes or so when the logic of character and male friendship gave way to the needs of plot.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Janet Maslin: a critic's pick (!). It inevitably invited comparisons with Spike Lee's east-coast Do The Right Thing.

Prompted by a mediocre article on "ethical espionage" by Tamsin Shaw, which was about state-based intelligence agencies and did not mention the role of whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange, or journalists in general. Also some idle Hitchcock completism.

In black-and-white, of course, and as well made as you'd expect from the master. Given the date I figured it for one of his first but actually it's about a third the way through his feature film career. (IMDB trivia says twenty-second of 69.) Unfortunately the story was weak: a MacGuffin (spoiler: it is immaterial what the MacGuffin is) took lead Robert Donat from a raucous entertainment hall in London to the Highlands of Scotland on the Flying Scotsman ... or was it the Highland Express? ... and back again in a motorcar. Notionally Canadian, he snogged every woman he encountered though his costar Madeleine Carroll needed to be handcuffed to him for most of their encounter. She got into it towards the end, despite being married (?). Hotelier Helen Haye was chuffed to indulge a young couple so much in love.

Much of it could've been sponsored by the tourism board of Scotland except for the handling of some Scottish tropes. Crofter John Laurie humorlessly and faithlessly demanded money in return for protecting Donat from the police; I had expected some finesse or reliability there. His unhappy wife Peggy Ashcroft pined for the streets of Glasgow. I did not understand the origins of Godfrey Tearle's Professor or why he ended up in such a remote locale, trusted by the cream of the local society — so much for the canniness of the Scots.

Based on a book by John Buchan. Widely loved at the Guardian. Thomas Dawson: five stars, "arguably director Alfred Hitchcock's finest British film." There have been a few stage productions of it this century.

I picked this one by mistake, thinking it was by the ABC journos who made "Larrimah" synonymous with "missing man Paddy Moriarty" via news stories, books, podcasts, miniseries, whatever. Nope, this was American director Thomas Tancred looking for the next Crocodile Dundee or Gates of Heaven. I'll bet he hasn't even watched the cane toad docos.

I haven't been following the story closely but I don't think there's anything substantially new here. Perhaps the archival footage dredged from the vaults of the ABC? Tancred presents the town essentially as a freak show and then tries to add poignancy as individuals succumb to cancer and old age. Ultimately it's just sad — there's no redemption, just a good old hate from each of the players and a dash of bewilderment from the newcomer mechanics. And the people are not that interesting. I have to wonder what the Czech couple now running the pub were fleeing.

Steve Vivian at the ABC, always happy to help with the flogging of a dead horse. Nicolas Rapold: poorly structured, gamed the presentation of crucial evidence. The town is dead guys, the story done, just let it be.

This one has been on the pile since it got released, partly because the reviews were dire. I watched it in two sittings but not for any particular reason.

Writer/director Jim Jarmusch brings us to Spain. Mysterious lead Isaach De Bankolé (dial strikingly familiar but I'm not sure from what) then takes us from Madrid to Seville and on to Almería, stopping off for coffee (two espressos in separate cups) and cigarettes (other people smoke) vignettes initiated with an instantly irritating "habla español" refrain and featuring an exchange of old school matchboxes, some containing diamonds. We don't actually see him ever finish the two espressos, and as he's mute for almost the entire running time it's unclear what we're supposed to learn from these scenes. Given that his interlocutors are named actors (Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Bill Murray) things fall into an uncanny valley of too much talk, not enough character, no overarching narrative and no action. Bankolé echoes Forest Whitaker in Jarmusch's earlier and far more successful Ghost Dog by having a creed, albeit one so minimally sketched it may as well not exist. This is all very annoying as there is plenty to make something out of excepting the fundamental conceit.

Otherwise there are some good shots of airports, trains, plantations, mountains — as you'd hope for from cinematographer Christopher Doyle. There's the odd burst of sonic excellence to go with his moving images. Overall I did enjoy it, albeit idly as Jarmusch completism.

Roger Ebert: half a star. Even Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name had more to say. Dana Stevens. Pretentious! Manohla Dargis. Everyone was so bored.

Kindle. Standard Ebook edition. Perhas the third time around with this classic. The ambiguities, inspecifities and vagueness bothered me less though I still got stuck on such basics as whether Marlow was specifically commissioned to remove Kurtz — we're not exactly told but that's all he does. I was a bit more prepared to accept Conrad's game of personifying extractive European colonisation in the Congo and therefore was less put out by all the claims made about Kurtz that are not substantiated, such as his oratory powers.

There's also the question of locations and routes. Obviously we start on the Thames and Marlow proceeded down the west coast of Africa, past the erstwhile French colonies, and up the Congo River to the Belgian outposts that were accumulating ivory. I expect the sepulchral city was and is Brussels. I was at a loss as to where his boat left from, it being French: Brussels, or perhaps Marseilles? It struck me that the company he worked for was overly dependent on other organisations and people for getting dirty work done.

The Orson Welles broadcast from 1938 is available at the Internet Archive. I'd forgotten that Patchett's State of Wonder is a reimagining.

Kindle. Second time around. I couldn't help noticing how much William Gibson cloned for the last two-thirds of the Neuromancer trilogy. Apparently this belongs to the genre of social science fiction.

Directed by Les Blank, who appears to be Werner Herzog's documentarian of choice. The story is that Herzog promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever made Gates of Heaven. Well Morris did, and at this strangely Morris-free event somehow connected to its premiere (in L.A. at least), Herzog did eat the upper part of one of his own shoes. This film is 20 entirely inessential minutes about that.

Second time around. Michael Cimino's writer/director feature film debut. The cast is strong: Clint Eastwood leads as a genile and self-effacing Korean vet who likes to use heavy ordnance to break bank vaults. He has a rapidly-established bromance with a very young Jeff Bridges who got an Oscar nom. Burton Gilliam had a big 1974. George Kennedy has some fun as the foil but his character is a bit too stupid. A replay of their earlier bank heist in Montana comes to mind after the school house where the loot was stashed goes missing. Strangely Eastwood is allowed to keep his winnings. It's more of a road movie.

Not reviewed by Roger Ebert as far as I can tell. Wikipedia: Bridges upstaged Eastwood? Maybe.

More Jean-Pierre Melville. Black-and-white. This one has a similar structure to Le Cercle Rouge: a professional thief (Serge Reggiani) is released from prison with a few scores to settle and a job to do. The focus is actually on his mate (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who is tasked almost single-handedly with furthering the plot. A few ladies are involved around the edges and are ill-used. I enjoyed police inspector Jean Desailly's acting the most, all hand gestures and switchbacks. The twist is not very convincing but the Checkhovian device in the climax does work, allowing that everyone has to get theirs. The cinematography is often engrossing.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars in 2008. Everything so American: those massive yank tanks on the streets of Paris. Bosley Crowther in 1964: talky and tiresome. Did he walk out before the twist?

More Ringo Lam. Inevitable after City on Fire. (I find out now that heaps of ... on Fire flicks were made.) Again Chow Yun-Fat leads. There's some tedious horsing around initially before he settles into yet another bromance, this time with Tony Ka Fai Leung who plays a character pretty much the exact opposite of Big D in Election: mousy but brittle, head down until he just can't take it any more. Roy Cheung is once again an authoritarian heel. I think Chow chews his ear off at the climax in his most animalistic performance I've yet seen. The big set piece early on, a riot in the exercise yard, promises more than the rest delivers.

Reviews at City on Fire: Cool Hand Luke?

More Jean-Pierre Melville was inevitable after (re)watching Le Samouraï. This one is a heist flick with a side of mystery — just why do they need a sharpshooter to rob a jewellery store? — but the meat is in the engrossing portrayal of the characters of a variety of French men. Inspector Andre Bourvil has three beautiful cats for children, and while he makes an error early on there's little doubt that he will get his man. Alain Delon leads as a recently-released felon who organises the theft with crim-on-the-lam Gian Maria Volontè and dipso-sniper Yves Montand. Melville takes his time to show what he wants to; for instance we learn a fair bit about fence Paul Crauchet even in the bare minute or so he has onscreen. It's long but it doesn't drag. The ending is a bit of a let down. Brad Pitt for the remake.

Vincent Canby saw a severely cut version, dubbed into English (!) in 1993. Women have no place in these men's lives, not even the cigarette girl with the roses. Its release in the USA in 2003 provoked a slew of reviews. Roger Ebert: four stars. Melville's output got strip mined by Hollywood. He points to Manohla Dargis at the L.A. Times (!) opining about the reclamation of French honour. A. O. Scott. Peter Bradshaw: five stars (!).

Another Hong Kong classic. This one was co-written/directed by Ringo Lam. IMDB trivia alleges it "inspired" Reservoir Dogs; more bluntly there are a few scenes that Tarantino lifted directly, and the bromance (again between leads Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee). And other things I'm sure, though this one is at the lower end of the ultraviolence scale — it's more of an old-school noir.

Chow is notionally an undercover policeman though it's never clear what his target initially is or his scope of operations; we don't get to see him whoring or gambling, just drinking solo, forlornly, due to his inability to satisfy his girlfriend Carrie Ng (I'd say successful in her role) outside of the bathroom. Their scenes together brought a non-violent levity that made me wonder what the Hong Kong movie machine made for families and women, especially given all the humour in the margins. His boss Yueh Sun is waning in influence, won't let him resign and can't keep him safe but Chow persists anyway.

On the other side is the usual gang of thugs of varying personalities and propensity for violence. Their initial jewellery heist is almost bloodless (of course it goes pear shaped) but the second is a transparent fiasco even before they leave the mattresses.

It's a bit of a time capsule as far as the streets of the city go. There is some great cinematography and the odd inspired set piece. There's a bit too much character development towards the end, when all we're looking for is a satisfactory tying-up of loose ends.

Reviews at City on Fire from 2011: shot like a doco, like the French New Wave, like ... Le Samouraï?

Kindle. Two years on from Light Perpetual: he's speeding up!

Spufford tries his hand at holistic world building, taking us to a 1920s America which is essentially the same noir as everyone else's (prohibition, racial divisions, the Klan, ... jazz ...) but bent in one specific way: Cahokia is a large Native American city on the Mississippi. (He explains the counterfactual fracture in an afterword which really should have been an introduction or, more Spufford-ly, stuffed into a character's mouth in the main text.) This and actual Utah are not-quite republican states: here there's a hereditary monarchy of the Sun and the Moon, of Aztec undercurrents fused with Catholicism by the actions of farsighted men and women. This functions just fine as mythmaking if only because it is so far beyond what is possible in the actual here and now.

The plot (murder, what else) moves slowly and sometimes unsatisfyingly, often finding excuses to explore his construction; the tone is didactic (Spufford can't help himself): this is how you do a recap! — but we needed a few more recaps. That's how you introduce an invented language! — just like Tolkien. Drop your clues like this! What, you think that coincidence was too much? That's just how it goes for this character, it's fate. Did I just lift a bit too much from The Godfather? Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain!

Spufford's bursts of Christianity feel less forced here (c.f. Unapologetic) but stinking things up are the transactional relationships (which is most of them; the ladies all want leading man Burrows but never on his terms), the cold calculational utilitarian vibe, the forced symmetries. Sometimes he can't keep his characters in character: their speech patterns become too playful.

It's lengthy and cinematic which invites the question of when he's going to get a film deal. (I'm now trying not to think of it as Spufford's Wakanda.) I felt it was well-researched — his hinge of history was as plausible to me as any story he told in Red Plenty — but could've stood more analysis. Clearly much of it is inspired by the topical breakages in present-day society though it is not reassuring that he has the idiocy of the Klan save the city at a critical juncture. As always I'll take what I can get.

Widely reviewed. Most are summaries. Much thoughtful criticism at Goodreads. Could've used an edit. It bears the scars of a sprawling pandemic project.