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