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.
