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.