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 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.
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.
#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.
