peteg's blog

Inevitable after John Dahl's The Last Seduction. He co-wrote/directed this Western noir with his brother Rick.

Righteous Nicolas Cage escapes from something somewhere with expectations of a job on an oil rig in Wyoming. The opening scene has him getting tidied up on the side of a dusty road, shaving with what I took to be water from the radiator of his Texas-plated yank tank. A dodgy leg (a result of the Beirut bombings) costs him that opportunity but of course there's a more interesting one going at the bar in Red Rock run by J.T. Walsh. This leads him to an encounter with Lara Flynn Boyle and soon enough Dennis Hopper. The plot twists are fun as is the odd bit of dialogue and repeated genre tropes.

Some scenes are a bit clunky, making me think that either the main players were miscast — Flynn Boyle needed to be unrelentingly foxy and more subtly calculating, and Hopper less psycho, more dead eyed — or that the director lacked sufficient control over them. It doesn't pay to overthink the scenario.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. The themes are David Lynch's, the entirety like the Coen's Blood Simple. Caryn James. Cage channelled some of that Wild at Heart Elvis and added some bemusement.

I had low expectations after last year's effort from Aardman Animations. This one is a coproduction of the BBC and Netflix. Thematically the film has the same allergic reaction to (computer, logical) technology as 1960s Doctor Who, and this sits uncomfortably against the rueful endorsement of the British boffin that is a long-standing pillar of this comfortingly-retro universe. I don't recall Gromit doing anything very clever here. The police stuff was tedious. The japes mostly distract from the thinness of the material but not often enough this time. More shorts please!

Jamie Tran at the ABC: "Sometimes, more of the same is more than enough." Peter Bradshaw misses the point that "fowl" in the title refers to Feathers McGraw's chicken disguise that the humans can't see through. You know, the famous "have you seen this chicken?" poster. His assumption that Wallace programmed that "evil" setting into his Norbots reflects a likely-common misconception about how things are now.

Written and directed by actor Mark Leonard Winter (Pine Gap). Another entry in Hugo Weaving's one-man effort to revive the Australian movie industry; is anyone else even trying at this point?

The answer is yes! — this shares some DNA with Eric Bana's police-procedural Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024). We're taken to a dank, dark forest in Victoria with policeman Phoenix Raei whose sole responsibility appears to be minding his brain-damaged childhood friend Rhys Mitchell (one of the final Neighbours alumni?). The inevitable occurs and in place of Skippy we get Boss the red cattle dog bringing the news. (That we never see the dog again is a major flaw in the story.) For reasons unknown Raei camps near where he found his mate's body and there encounters hermit Hugo. After a saggy and indulgent middle there's a twist with 20 minutes to go with nothing to it.

We've seen Hugo do hermit before, in The Turning. Here he fully commits with much arse baring and alienation from Catholic Christianity. The rooster crowing scene at the campfire with Raei was a poor rejoinder to Brad Pitt's "sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!" The author has no clue about hermits, preferring the normative take that solitude equals loneliness and people redemption. Having Raei leave his campfire burning while visiting Weaving was mystifying. The poem Raei is keen on is revealed to be Cavafy's The God Abandons Antony which is eerily familiar as it was freely adapted by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson into Alexandra Leaving.

I did not enjoy Craig Barden's cinematography. The music is occasionally interesting but too fetishized.

Luke Buckmaster. There's not enough on the table for it to go any other way. Stephen Romei observes all the details including the poem.

Kindle. Pre-ordered for 12.99 AUD from Amazon way back in October. I see they've jacked the price to 16.99 AUD for the stragglers. I felt I owed Morton a read after One Hundred Years of Dirt and for avoiding his week-to-week coverage of this epic fiasco which I didn't have the stomach for; I still don't but Morton commands respect for busting his guts. I read elsewhere that the actual report is about 1k pages, barely twice the length of this book. I wonder how many people will actually read either.

There's a lot going on and it's difficult to summarise in a way that incorporates all the smelly bits, so instead of digging where angels have already trod I'll just focus on what I wanted from this text. Most egregiously absent is an easy-to-follow timeline of who knew what when (as Morton understood it) and an org chart, or at least a commitment to attach a position to every name. An evaluation of the plausibility of all dollar figures would've helped immensely. There's not enough (could never be enough) of what Morton does best: capsule bios of humans as humans, of how the public servants fitted with their positions in the machinery of government, the lives of the individuals who had debts raised and the leaf-node Centrelink operatives like Colleen Taylor. I wanted things situated in the greater context of an increasingly robotised-without-the-robots society. ("Robo" connotes the lack of human discretion and not the means of implementation, but note that scalability was a core requisite; this commodified debt scheme was inconceivable in the 1980s and even into the 1990s.)

I think I could reasonably ask that of Morton. Other things require a broader view and another book. Just how big a deal was robodebt within the Department of Human Services while it was chugging along on the sly? Why did people just let it go? (I suspect that the essence of some middle management positions, like the one occupied by "didn't even try" Serena Wilson, is to smooth things between the political and the operational; what else did she smooth?) What does accountability look like in the Australian Public Service? Has anyone, you know, ever been held accountable for anything?

Having dispensed with the human element I can focus on what I'm really interested in: the systemic issues. The manoeuvring recounted by Morton suggests these tactics have worked in the past; perhaps some enterprising journalist can dig into reports ordered by the APS but not delivered for instance. I see it as inevitable that people will not write things down given the risks of a litigious society: witness the entire purpose of using Snapchat in finance. It also helps to mitigate the risk of data theft, and is a common strategy for gaining competitive advantage over workplace frenemies, especially when knowledge (domain specific, useless outside the organisation) is all the power available. I think Morton is being too naive here by chaffing against something so thoroughly incentive compatible. Perhaps he didn't spend much time in the office when he was with The Australian and yet he shows awareness of this issue by recounting some advice he got from a mentor (a senior reporter) about saying little to his editors until an article was ready to go.

He's also asking too much of the great unwashed masses of bureaucrats. I doubt many chose to work at the DHS (leaving Centrelink aside) except for careerist reasons and I expect it would take many a blind eye to survive long enough to progress. This also means that few remained there long enough to get a sense of how things really work, with those who experienced moral repugnance likely to have bombed out or moved on ASAP. People have mortgages, fearfully large mortgages, and we all know what a great motivator that is. Institutional knowledge was therefore unlikely to thrive.

Returning to the book: it seems amazingly, improbably fortunate that some aspect of the scheme proved to be illegal. The mind boggles at how it may have gone otherwise. The included responses boil down to: don't blame me, I would have stopped it if I'd known it was illegal. Long live the great Australian incuriosity! Along related lines, I had to wonder why the Victorian coroner enquiring into a robdebt-related suicide did not simply request the entirety of his data from Centrelink. I guess one of the key features of robodebt was the enforced amnesia: throughout this book I kept thinking that if I was to receive a notification of such a debt then I would assume with high confidence that it was based on all the data I had ever provided to Centrelink. Anything else simply does not make sense. Similarly the fact that debts were raised but nobody got any moneys owing to them puts the lie to it being about the integrity of the system. What a farce.

Perhaps perversely I came away with some sympathy for John Howard's sack-them-all policy towards Commonwealth mandarins in 1996. Back when I read Quarterly Essays I only considered the subject matter experts in the public service (people like Glyn Fiveash in this instance) and not the crazy politicking that occurs at the top end. But without a culture of documentation this leads only to amnesia and more politicking and here we are.

Overall the book sits uncomfortably between journalism and a permanent record: a premature second cut at history? The ebook needed another round of proofing and editing to eradicate a few too many typos and inscrutable locutions. It is occasionally discursive and overly repetitive; at some points there is an almost fog-of-war muddying of the waters, a looseness of language that obscures meaning. Separating this from my usual serious fare is the lack of citations and references for further pursuit.

Morton is now digging into the reshaping of NDIS. I hope he left enough gas in the tank for that one. There is also the enduring scandal of the NACC that requires his continuing attention. Eventually he'll learn that good work is it's own punishment but hopefully not before time.

Widely reviewed in the local press. Goodreads has some less polished and therefore probably more valuable opinions.

A Linda Fiorentino jag from Dogma. She's even more game here. Directed by John Dahl from a script by Steve Barancik. Dahl has directed a lot of top-shelf TV.

Some-sort-of-medico Bill Pullman accelerates his Manhattan aspirations by augmenting his script selling with the trafficking of medical-grade cocaine. In a minor bout of euphoric frustration he strikes wife/sexpot Fiorentino who shows that getting married has not blunted her perfect timing for leaving her man with what he most values. Holing up in small-town Beston (near Buffalo, NY) she inveigles credulous Peter Berg in a plot to return to the big smoke. Along the way she has some great scenes with knowing city lawyer J.T. Walsh (The Grifters). Dean Norris from Breaking Bad plays a barfly. It's all very amusing.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Diabolical, evil, bad woman! A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Hard-boiled noir. Wicked woman! "Bridget will not be mistaken for a crusading feminist. Her outlook is much too selfishly pathological to have a political edge, and her glamour is too scarily seductive." I also enjoyed Pullman's attempt to keep up. It seems that Barancik was a one-hit wonder; his attempt to milk the cow with a sequel got smashed.

Written, directed and produced by Paul Clarke who IMDB suggests has form for vanilla valedictory hagiography. Warts-and-all this is not; I think many would have preferred to just see more of the concert footage excerpted here.

I had some awareness that they'd changed bassists over the years but not why; on this account they just wore out, a consumable component of a hard rocking outfit otherwise built to last (leaving aside the unmentioned Capricornia and other misdemeanours). I'd heard this was the reason for the radical simplification of their sound sometime in the early 1980s (compare Section 5 (Bus to Bondi), Back on the Bordlerine, Hercules, etc. to anything on Diesel and Dust) but it's suggested here that was due to a new, more commercial producer.

There is an excessive focus on Peter Garrett. His speaking voice seemed was initially unfamiliar, kicking into what I remember sometime after his run for the senate in 1985 on a platform of anti-nukism. How quaint now. The purported greatest hits of his time in the ALP is excruciating, amounting to some spoken-word contributions from Plibersek and Albo (those nights in Selina's!), footage of John Howard's finest moments and a frank assessment of Kevin Rudd 2.0. A merciful veil is drawn over the pink batts saga and also, more inexplicably, Garrett's signature gibberish/running at the mouth between songs which never left me in any doubt that the crowd was there for the tunes and the dancing. We're told he could get properly furious.

So I want to say that this great story of a self-made band is poorly told but the musical footage is impossible to wreck so you have to watch it anyway. I wanted to see them situated in the vibrant early-1980s scene against other activist musicians like Shane Howard and fellow sweaty pub rockers Cold Chisel. Chisel struck me as powerfully apolitical with lyrics at least as good; more working class for sure, perhaps more suburban and yet with a more authentic connection to the non-urban through Ian Moss and Don Walker. Nothing is said about Hunters and Collectors or their relation to other giants of the era like Michael Hutchence and Kylie Minogue. Did they drag anyone up after them? Were they just a bunch of clean-living surfers?

The ABC produced this biopic and has had a long entanglement with the Oils; they also released Oils on the Water on DVD during the 2003 to 2016 interregnum. I reckon there's every chance they'll be back.

Dan Condon: the latest in a lengthy series of biographies of the band.

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 played the voice of God who is in turn mutely mimed 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 and in love with its own brilliance that I struggled to engage; I felt I was more laughing at than with, and not that often. It is only likely to trigger those with a deeply literal take on things.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Being a Catholic probably helped; the excess exposition did 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.

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.

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 as that explains 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 generally 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.

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.