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 hot young flesh. (Often the gyrating and air-pawing of these hot 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). 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 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 a variety of Aboriginal cultures. The final trip to Broome is less effective. I'm guessing everyone's favourite is the "magic mechanic" Jupurrula. Fun.
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.
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 solves 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".
