peteg's blog

Prompted by the claim in the IMDB trivia for Giant that Ava Gardner was too busy filming this in Pakistan to star in that in Texas. Directed by George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story) from the adaptation of John Masters's novel by Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat.

It's so late in the British Raj (ballpark 1946) that even the whitest of Brits just want to leave; it's even getting too late to found a kingdom. But before departure the powers-that-still-be have to thwart terrorist plots that would have delayed the mail train and killed Gandhi while, of course, falling in love with Anglo-Indian Gardner. Notionally the focus is on the problems of her ethnicity — where will her kind fit after the quit? will they continue to be privileged employees in the Indian railway hierarchy? — but really it's about there being only one eligible woman in the whole of the fictional town. It's therefore a bit Doctor Zhivago. The story is framed as a recounting to a superior officer by Colonel Stewart Granger in the safety of a train carriage. There are vague echoes of the fair-superior The Train (1964). It could've been called A Passage to England.

I feel Gardner was miscast; she's a lot better in The Night of the Iguana (1964). She is clearly working hard to show the requisite interest in her three (serial) suitors but only really warms up when the locals draw her into an all-male dance (which that movie echoes). Most fatally her accent wanders from British-ish to east-coast U.S.A. when the script calls for histrionics. Many actors (e.g. Patrick Taylor, Freda Jackson, Peter Illing) appear in brownface.

Bosley Crowther: the ending is a bit childish for such an adult movie. IMDB trivia: needed the epic treatment that Cukor could not provide. More details at Wikipedia.

Kindle. The first of Koch's Miles Franklin winners and the second for me to read. The followup to his breakthrough The Year of Living Dangerously (1978).

A fair bit of this is autofiction, going by his Wikipedia bio, and perhaps a (further) revision of his debut The Boys in the Island (1958, revised in 1974). We start in 1940s schoolboy Tasmania with narrator, polio-affected Richard Miller, slogging it up the hill to the Catholic school in Hobart run by the (brutal) Christian Brothers. Soon enough he encounters a lusty married woman from Sydney, and then a pair of local musos and their mysterious teacher Clive Broderick. All proceed to the mainland in pursuit of predestined destinies. Melbourne is a barely-there way station. Sydney amounts to no more than its cliches; Kings Cross an eternal seedy Bohemia sliding into the abyss, though the affordable rents in subdivided Elizabeth Bay mansions caught my attention. The CBD itself went unnoticed as the skyscrapers closed in.

Miller's role is to get the band coverage on the ABS, where he has smoothly risen to his station in life. (I take that to mean the Australian Broadcasting Service; it's unclear why Koch doesn't just call it the ABC.) The girl next door turns out to be an Estonian beauty who happens to sing and is in desperate need of a husband. What do you know, the band badly needs a female vocalist. Similarly Mrs Lusty has a step-son who handily slots in as the drummer. There's a sense that TV is rapidly eclipsing radio plays for prestige and status. Alongside excess foreshadowing, shallow characterisations that fall away (Ms Estonia, Miller's mother) and some very convenient disappearances, this is to say that the plot mostly just moves the pieces into place.

The music these guys play is folk, as a deviation from the dominant rock music of the day. They're not allergic to electric instruments and they bring the folkies with them, unlike Bob Dylan. Pentangle is a named source but not Roy Harper. (The mandatory Have a Cigar scene occurs in North Sydney.) Much is made of their virtuosity. There's a certain wry nostalgia about the gigs but I'm not sure it is intended as a requiem for the Sydney music scene. The locale and mourning of the state of art and humanity reminded me a little of Patrick White's The Vivisector.

Despite the words spilt on all these other things, the main concern of the novel is occult Faery lore, which struck me as weird beyond all imagining. The years go by in sevens. The women are witchy and idealised. Nobody ever really grows up. There is some blurring of dreams with reality but it feels forced; Koch should probably have adopted magic realism wholesale. Also this mythology is old-world Celtic; what's it doing in Tasmania? And Christianity comes in for a flogging.

I did not understand the "doubled" concept; I think he really meant something more like duality or symmetry or mirrored or dialectics or parallels or something. An example of Koch's underbaking is his twee observation that "opposites did attract, but only when commonality was hidden underneath" — can two things be genuine opposites if they share much salient commonality? At other times he seems to be grasping for some kind of essentialism: stifled, frustrated Mrs Lusty as she is against the essence of (fertile) Irish woman, the prototype/stereotype versus the actual. Whatever it was, Koch lent into it heavily. My obtusity sucked all meaning from the ending.

Tasmania might yet host the last sighting of a literary male. Some themes overlap Dennis Glover's flight of fancy (those glorious 1940s). Richard Flanagan had a lot more to say about Tasmanian Aborigines and exotic Europeans (Slovenians). And of course Robbie Arnott is all-in on the magic.

I wonder if anyone reads Koch any more.

Goodreads. Veronica Sen at the time for The Canberra Times: Koch's characters are always searching for otherness. Perhaps "divided souls" are doubled. Is Koch's text itself a cut-price revelation? Perhaps I did not recognise the stakes.

Prompted by the noise associated with it winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, the heavy Oscar interest and Jason Di Rosso's interview with director Sean Baker. The last reminded me that I'd passed up on Baker's Red Rocket a few years ago. In short: childish and drecky.

The movie is in three distinct sections. The first establishes lead Ani/Anora (Mikey Madison) as a full-service stripper at a Manhattan club whose knowledge of Russian comes in handy with the really high rollers. She's from a Jewish part of NYC, somewhat like Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. She encounters and gets hitched to Russian scion Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn, a shoo-in for a Prince biopic?) in Las Vegas. The second part begins with him doing a runner from the local operatives of his absent parents who are all shitting bricks about the marriage. The grand tour of NYC really dragged. Coney Island is having a moment. The third has Ivan delivered to his parents who are obviously keen to disentangle him from Ani/Anora.

The whole show is not exactly zany or unfunny. Many scenes are overlong and do not progress character or plot. There's a fair bit of sex but it's not salacious; as Di Rosso and Baker observed it attempts to get away from the male gaze. (Actually none of it is sexy, especially not the commercial sex; in line with recent movies it tends to emphasise the accompanying issues (divergent libidos, selfishness, emotional investment, exclusivity, prophylaxis, transactionalism, ... everything) rather than go in for the titillation that used to get Roger Ebert excited. This is not an erotic thriller.) The central flaw is that I never got a grasp on what makes Ani/Anora tick beyond the obvious hedonism — and geez it looks like hard boring work. Is she in it just for the money? Does she have other prospects or ambitions? Throughout it's unclear if she's as credulous and vacuous as she presents: all posturing and underbaked threats, like the crass hiphop that floods the zone, spouting F-bombs, handy at lashing out with her feet but otherwise without leverage. Is this what passes for street smarts now? With thirty minutes to go Ivan, standing on the steps of his parents' plane, asks her the obvious question: is she stupid? I couldn't understand why she hung on so hard. The Assistant did a far more plausible treatment of aspirational girlish naivete.

The acting and cinematography are fine. The fault lies in the scenario and the impoverished characterisation.

Dana Stevens saw something different to me. Anora doesn't reassure her customers at the strip club, she just gives them the hard sell. (Many are clearly vulnerable which is not to say they're victims.) Ivan's "24 hour security guards" did not notice the day or two in Las Vegas though they were at the New Year's party. And so on. Stephanie Zacharek. Risky Business! "[Madison] plays Ani as a woman in charge" ... — but Ani/Anori is always so obviously deluded on that score. Both seemed to work the info pack hard, as hard as Baker milked that ending. Nobody points to Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (etc) and I can't because I haven't seen it.

Produced and directed by George Stevens (Gunga Din) from a script that Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat (nom'd) adapted from Edna Ferber's novel. Over many sittings as it is lengthy (3hr 21min), initially unpromising and regularly flags. It is often funny, perhaps unintentionally. Heavily nominated for Oscars but only Stevens came away with Best Director.

Circa 1920s, Texan cattleman Rock Hudson (nom'd) finds himself in Maryland, aiming to buy a horse off some Eastern gentry, but comes away with a wife in the form of Elizabeth Taylor (not nom'd) too. She's as strong willed as her horse which for the convenience of the plot soon improves her domestic situation by offing sister-in-law/fellow hard lady Mercedes McCambridge. Over two generations we're shown the horrors of Texas society and why these clans found it necessary to have so much land separating them. A second schism opens with the arrival of oil money, personified by enriched, aspirational white trash James Dean (nom'd).

Hudson is actually decent here, far better than he was in Written on the Wind (also 1956) and Seconds (1966), working mostly as raw material for Taylor to drag into modernity. She has some fun with every argument leading to frisky business; she gets up the morning after a spat all energised while he's totally shagged out. Son Dennis Hopper is restrained in his portrayal of his generation going its own way with more moral fibre than earlier members of the lineage. Carroll Baker pines for the old days of straightforward social climbing. Dean does well with what he's given but the final movement drags out the grindingly predictable. Those fatuous good old boys always know the score.

Bosley Crowther: aimed to be bigger than Texas... and succeeded! IMDB trivia: inspired Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind. And surely There Will Be Blood, which was also shot in Marfa, Texas. It's sort of like Gone with the Wind without the maudlin nostalgia for the Old South. Did anyone ever make an epic about the North?

Gordon is an eminent myrmecologist at Stanford. This book is the first in the Santa Fe Institute's Primers in Complex Systems series, and as such I was expecting more than just the usual pop-sci compilation of (fascinating) ant tales of the kind that, for instance, Hölldobler and Wilson and Moffett have recounted over the years. There are no photos, just some figures taken from research papers. There is no mathematical modelling. Genetics receives minor (but interesting) coverage.

The main focus of the book is the concept of an "interaction network" — roughly a model (familiar from social networks) of how ants communicate with each other and how that feeds into behaviour. Some experiments are described and proposed, chiefly constrained by an unwillingness to destroy ant nests. (One reason amongst many is that Gordon aimed to study colonies over decades.) The encounter rate is key! Some observations seem to miss the obvious. For example, we're told that if the rate at which first-mover patroller red harvester ants Pogonomyrmex barbatus return to the nest falls below some threshold then the foragers for the colony are inhibited from departing, but not what happens if the patrollers return more quickly. (One can imagine the latter is irrelevant, ignored or signals an avoidable catastrophe like a flood or predator.) Unlike honeybee researchers, Gordon does not appear to have a non-invasive way of determining how much food is stored in the nest, leaving me wondering how the colony's hunger is signalled and what effect that had on forager behaviour; again one could imagine sufficient hunger leads to a majority of ants foraging whatever the success of that foraging.

Most interesting to me was her refutation of W. D. Hamilton's explanation for why it is genetically beneficial for workers to raise sisters rather than their own progeny (in Chapter 6, section Evolution of Colony Organization). It's straightforward: queens typically mate with multiple males, and this means that sister-workers may share less than 50% of their genetics on average (rather than the 75% suggested by haplodiploidy with a singular father). This point is so obvious that I feel it must've occurred to Hamilton.

Despite the promise of networks we're only told about pairwise interactions between ants performing particular tasks. Much is made of their limited attention span — about ten seconds — which I guess precludes much path dependency (etc) unless they too have some kind of fast and slow neurology. There is a division of labour but the division is not static (i.e., not determined solely by caste). No connection is drawn to how cells in a multicellular organism specialise despite an early claim that this study and that are related. Another round of editing would've helped: often the explanation for a technical term or concern occurs well after its first use or is repeated in short order. Gordon seemed overly responsive to pop cultural representations of ants.

Generously summarised at length by Leon Vlieger. Data availability is the limiting factor. Hamilton is further demolished by Seirian Sumner in Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps (2022). Goodreads.

Prompted by the arrival of a director's cut reported by Jason Bailey in the New York Times. Directed and co-written by Richard Shepard. Tamar Brott was the other co-writer. Also notionally for David Bowie. Over many sittings as it is every bit as bad as the reviews say.

The scenario has waitress Rosanna Arquette working in some upscale restaurant in NYC while she explores her fixation with Madame Houdini. Her bestie Eszter Balint designs killer lingerie. Bowie plays a new bartender who has pressing reasons for obtaining a green card via the marriage route. The joint is owned (or at least operated) by Andre Gregory (My Dinner with Andre) and Buck Henry whose witless repartee is excruciating. The only actor who emerges with dignity preserved is cashier Marlee Matlin, working the door and cashbox under a pretzel hairpiece.

I hadn't realised Arquette had had such a big 1980s; to me she's just a minor player in Pulp Fiction. Bowie's acting is the worst I've seen by him, but the real problem is that too many other things are busted. So many scenes just do not work. The plot is absolutely standard NYC: some people have too much money, most not enough, everyone is on the grift and all the forced pretence looks so joyless. Winning looks so tedious.

Janet Maslin at the time, uncriticially shilling the local product.

A jag from a Roger Ebert retro-review of Alien. Also an idle bit of Howard Hawks completism. Charles Lederer (responsible with Hawks for His Girl Friday) adapted it from a book by John W. Campbell Jr. Directed by Christian Nyby (in his first outing?) but IMDB suggests (credited producer) Hawks had to do a lot of heavy lifting.

As you'd expect from the auteurs it's very talky, even talkier than a modern sci-fi/action flick. Some of the dialogue is racy for the times (captain Kenneth Tobey rags secretary Margaret Sheridan for departing his bed without saying goodbye, she likens him to an octopus) and attempts to draw attention away from the minimal amount of action. There are a few fun bits I guess. The creature is Frankenstein's without the bolts.

Bosley Crother.

Kindle. Heavily-marketed historical fiction, apparently expanding on a brief account by Plutarch of how the defeated Athenians survived a bit longer in the quarries of Syracuse, Sicily by reciting Euripides. The first-person narrator speaks in a contemporary Irish argot, laced with much profanity, often overcooked. (Some words and phrasing recur too often, as in Preston's The Borrowed Hills, which is how people speak but does not make for great prose.) The story itself is structured like an ancient Greek tragedy, focussing on an epic bromance. Along the way we get summaries of Euripides's Medea and The Trojan Women; this book is far more modest than All Our Tragic. There's often a whiff of The Remains of the Day, clarified at the end, though the narrator's reliability is never in question. The final movement is hurried while some earlier parts are torporific.

Less successful are the romance subplot involving an erudite slave girl and the mechanism by which two penniless unemployed potters can afford to stage their production. The narrator himself is a pile of cliches and rarely surprises. I think Lennon missed a trick by not inventing or completing a missing Euripidean play, perhaps about future history. That move worked well for Álvaro Enrigue but he could deploy psychedelics and not just oceans of wine.

Fintan O'Toole reviewed it in one of his better essays for the New York Review of Books. Annalisa Quinn for the New York Times: "affectionate and fun, but bloodless." AK Blakemore: Lennon could've done better than this. Goodreads dug it.

A Victor McLaglen jag from Gunga Din. He got his Oscar for leading this. A somewhat early John Ford directorial effort. He also got Oscared. Adapted by Dudley Nichols (who declined his Oscar) from a story by Liam O'Flaherty. The music also got Oscared.

The story is simple and told linearly in a tiresome, twistless manner. It's 1922 in Dublin. Poverty is rife, the revolution is incomplete, America beckons and all a bloke needs is 20 pounds to get there with the squeeze of his life. McLaglen plays Gypo Nolan as a bull of a man, absent any brains. Somehow forgiveness is not only possible but inevitable, even for a Judas but not for the Black-and-Tans.

Andre Sennwald at the New York Times.

Looking for entertainment in all the wrong places. I guess this was a platform for Samuel L. Jackson to show us what he could do as a dramatic lead in a realist mode without Tarantino. He really only succeeds with the high-energy running-at-the-mouth that he's famous for; his scenes with wife Regina Taylor are generally poor. Directed by F. Gary Gray from a proforma script by James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox.

Notionally Jackson is a police negotiator in Chicago. Through some flimsy plot moves and too many scenes that make no sense he holes up in a Federal building with internal affairs investigator J.T. Walsh who does what he can. He insists on fellow negotiator Kevin Spacey helping him untangle his situation. Getting that lined up takes about an hour of runtime. Spacey is flat and declamatory here, putting me in mind of Kevin Rudd at his most fatuous. David Morse works his villainous-Englishman features just so and does not miss an opportunity to take a shot. Ron Rifkin and/or John Spencer play dicey senior cops in stereotypical fashion. Also Paul Giamatti and Dean Norris as hostages. I don't think we ever learn who the informant was; the information dumps are arbitrary. And I didn't get why the scammers didn't just find a proper patsy and point Jackson at that person.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He got right into it until he stopped to think, so don't ever stop to think. A pile of genre tropes, "a triumph of style over story, and of acting over characters." Janet Maslin, blandly. Stephanie Zacharek: a 2hr 20min thrill-free, humourless slog. "Gray appears to know nothing about directing actors or clarifying characters' motives." Slightly too clever to be entertainingly dumb. Die Hard. IMDB trivia: J.T. Walsh died before this was released.

Still #87 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of the MCU.

Roger Ebert: four stars, some time after the full version was released on video. Vincent Canby savaged the 2hr 15min version released to American theatres but it's unclear he would have been any happier with the 3hr 47min Cannes edition.

I felt that this was the first of director Justin Kurzel's features I've seen but it's not; his Macbeth was solid, Assassin's Creed not so much. There was also a segment of The Turning. It's the first of his signature psychologicals for me though. The script is by Zach Baylin based loosely on a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt about the white supremacist group The Order which was active in 1983 and 1984 on the northwest coast of the USA.

The frame echoes Oliver Stone's version of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio: as in that movie Jewish talk back host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) cops blowback for his combative universalist views. From there we meet charismatic, dead-eyed leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult in his most effective non-MCU role yet) and his eventual opponents but not quite nemeses FBI agents Terry Husk (nominatively-determined Jude Law, bloated) and Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett). There are some bombings and robberies, the odd minor bout of ideology but nothing as challenging as some of its predecessors (e.g. The Believer, Ted K). The organisation has no interesting structure, no cells, no isolation. The movie is structurally similar to Wind River: a steady drip of arbitrarily withheld information.

Despite it being intrinsically worthless I'd say this movie is well-made except that some of the cinematography is very murky and that I got lost at times; for instance I had no idea why Tony Torres (Matias Lucas) got picked up by the cops. The climactic shootout is a mess — it's poorly shot but could’ve been awesome in its disorganisation. I did enjoy watching Law lose his shit over the incompetency of the local cops. Deputy Tye Sheridan has perhaps his best scene ever where he loses his at the FBI.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. He points to January 6. Glenn Kenny at Venice: a relief after Babygirl. John Sutherland summarised the actualities in 1997 during the trial of Timothy McVeigh.

Kindle. Prompted by Dwight Garner's review of the latter. Short shorts. Some fun, some twee. Very few memorable. I didn't have enough of a sense of Azrael to develop one from the last book; it's more about the increasing irrelevance of the Devil in any case. There's some God in the first, mostly imagined as if he incarnated as an American man. That doesn't take much imagining.

Justin Taylor on the first. Goodreads (first, second) didn't get that much into either.

A Jeremy Renner jag from The Hurt Locker. Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan who has form for these neo-Westerns (Sicario, Sicario 2, etc.).

It's eventually established that the Indian Reservation that Renner works on (as a hunter of wild predators) is in frosty Wyoming. We get this info after Elizabeth Olsen (not her best work) arrives from Las Vegas, representing the FBI in a pale and witless echo of Twin Peaks. The absolutely stock action sequences are cut up with excessive and predictable exposition dumps that come too late. You can see the Mexican standoff of a climax from the minute the leads discuss security blokes at a mine site; the whole thing is as unsubtle as Waco. The jittery cinematography is really trying. So many scenes just don't work. The deracination of indigenous Americans is observed, passively.

This solid endorsement of vigilantism is probably aimed at filling the hole vacated by Eastwood when he retired Dirty Harry so long ago.

A Critic's Pick by Glenn Kenny at the New York Times. The opening scene is mystifying, suggesting we in for a mystical, poetic experience. That standoff scene is nowhere close to Michael Mann's efforts.

I got it into my head that Steve Buscemi directed this but in fact he directs the movie within the movie. Tom DiCillo actually wrote and directed; apparently he worked with Jarmusch in his early days. A very NYC film shoot, a bit Season on the Line, a bit The Producers (with less overt begging), even a bit Opening Night. Buscemi's task of recording a few scenes for a low-budget feature involves every problem, from issues with his demential mother to the insecurities and backbiting of the actors and the technical staff. The structure is fun though the content of each bout/episode gets a bit too stale a bit too fast. Catherine Keener does well. Peter Dinklage is flat until he gets his dummy spit. Dermot Mulroney mostly poses. The stakes are so low except for those making this damn movie.

A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin (?). Siskel and Ebert: thumbs down from both. Wears out its conceit well before the movie ends.

Kathryn Bigelow's big directorial splash. She got Oscared for best picture and best director. Mark Boal wrote the script and also got Oscared. The other three Oscars were for the sound and editing. Notionally because I discovered Guy Pearce was in it.

Between the setting — Baghdad in 2004 — and the heavy Oscaring I wasn't expecting more than an exercise in flag waving. The jittery handheld camerawork of the first half hour or so was also a real turnoff, but as things settled down I did get mildly interested (but not invested) in Jeremy Renner's Oscar-nom'd bomb disposal expert. Against this was Anthony Mackie's inert performance as his support and Brian Geraghty's over-egged junior, and a general lack of context about what Renner is looking to achieve at any given incident. (In the first scene he removes detonators while in later ones he's looking for controllers.) There's a scene where these three Americans show Ralph Fiennes's British contractors how things are done, which was, just maybe, historically plausible. Being a name actor does not ensure longevity here.

At some point the switch is flicked from character development to plot and the decision making becomes stupid. The japes between gigs are humourless, the whole show leaden, even more so than Black Hawk Down. And overall there's nothing much novel here; the concluding movement goes as it must, right down to plenty being incarnated as a supermarket aisle, just like Oliver Stone/Le Ly Harslip's Heaven and Earth. Just too damn serious. I won't be rushing to see Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by A.O. Scott: Bigelow kept it tight, evading the wider (political, box-office bombing) issues of that war. Stephanie Zacharek: "feels unformed and somewhat unfinished." Paul Mazursky had the same supermarket scene in Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Loads of street cats, goats and a few donkeys.

Tim Robbins directed a script he adapted from Helen Prejean's book. He got an Oscar nom but no gong, riding his The Shawshank Redemption (1994) wave. Lead and his partner-at-the time Susan Sarandon plays a nun and got Oscared. She does work hard here. Second bean Sean Penn got a nom but no gong; does he do his best work in the penn? Fellow jailbird Clancy Brown puts in a effective cameo as a state trooper. Robert Prosky (Thief (1983), Broadcast News (1987)) does what he can as a talky lawyer. R. Lee Ermey! Jack Black! IMDB trivia suggests that the entire Robbins clan was in there somewhere.

Penn is on death row somewhere not too far from Slidell in Louisiana for the rape and murder of a young couple. For reasons I didn't perceive he writes to nun Sarandon and she responds in a witness/soul-saving sort of way. There are some auxiliary legal efforts to get his execution commuted that are shown to be ineffectual. She spends some time with the parents of the victims. It loses momentum in the final act as the redemption-in-Christ parts are interspersed with flashbacks of the crime.

Robbins is well-known to have liberal views and this made me feel that he was often trying to have it both ways; others may read this as even-handedness but his gestures at the Bible (essentially the New Testament against the Old) and the politics of capital punishment are shallow, manipulative cop outs. The music gets rough at times: Eddie Vedder over the opening credits, indecipherably, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and possibly Peter Gabriel in the middle, and an Oscar nom for Bruce Springsteen for the song over the closing credits.

For all that it is far better than Eastwood's later True Crime (1999).

Roger Ebert: four stars. Despite his denials option 3 (religious conversion) is roughly what we get. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Both were hugely impressed with Penn's performance.

A neo-noir starring William Hurt opposite Kathleen Turner on debut. She's wooden at times, perhaps intentionally, but the staginess makes for some creaky and unpersuasive moments when she's reeling him in and it's obvious any sane man would be calculating the odds. Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

The setup is simple: he's a mediocre lawyer somewhere in hot-and-sticky Florida, not too far from Miami, and she's in the market for a man more satisfying than her dodgy husband. (We never get shown how dangerous or dodgy he and his associates are, or are we supposed to infer that she's the associate?) After she puts up a proforma fight his ego gets the better of him and we're off to something adjacent to The Talented Mr Ripley. Mickey Rourke does OK as an arsonist with a sound life philosophy (mostly just don't do it). All there is to know is that you should never let your co-conspirator out of your sight.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie". Double Indemnity... but original. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin? — her review is scathing, especially of Turner's performance. "Skillfully, though slavishly, derived" from "1940's film noir classics". The Postman Always Rings Twice. Vincent Canby was far more impressed a few months later. Witness for the Prosecution.

Kindle. Prompted by Dennis Lehane's salesmanship in the New York Times. Less "a heartbreaker" than a defanged transplant of some aspects of Trainspotting to Mayo County in the west of Ireland. Much of the text gets lost in character studies and while it floats along in the mode of fun there's not much humour in it. (Much like Preston's The Borrowed Hills (2024) one of the central characters is a powerful but inert man.) I guess the schtick is to pick at the underbelly of outwardly wholesome country towns (here Ballina) but Barrett lacks the commitment of people like Irvine Welsh and David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) to go all the way or at least somewhere new or interesting. Everything suggests that you head for the exits.

Goodreads: the Booker long-listing oversold it.

Vale David Lynch. New York Times obit.

Directed by Vincent Sherman. A warning about glamorous post war consumption: go out and live, boys of San Francisco, but be wary of trading up to that nightclub singer! Ann Sheridan plays it amazingly straight to Kent Smith's incredibly square middle-aged doctor; who knew these hot-stuff types were looking for slow times with dull men! The first hour is entirely boring setup and the remainder hinges on nonsense and NYC. I thought I was getting a noir but the twist just didn't come. Something in the vein of Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956).

Bosley Crowther: dire.

Produced, co-written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. He takes us to mandate Palestine (circa 1938 to 1944) for a history lesson about one of Britain's more obviously less successful colonial projects. It seems that as the nation declines her filmmakers spend more effort burnishing those days of greatness, c.f. Steve McQueen's latest, even if they can't suppress their ruefulness.

The focus is on two colonial policemen. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) tries to support the non (or at least less) violent Jewish groups who are agitating for a state in collaboration with the (sympathetic) British forces. He does this by enforcing the arms ban only on Arabs and the Jewish groups engaged in direct action, and romancing journalist/kibbutznik Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum). Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling, looking like he'll be playing George Orwell some day soon) has more inflexibly universalist ideas which of course lead to monumental cockups, culminating in what might now be called the extrajudicial killing of all-methods-on-the-table Avraham Stern (Aury Alby).

As usual with Winterbottom this is fabulously shot (here by Giles Nuttgens). At some point I realised I was enjoying baby-faced Booth's performance mostly because he sounds like Richard Burton. There's the faintest of echoes of Graham Greene's A Quiet American — love and clandestine operations during wartime but without the contest for the woman — and more of Zwartboek but less sexy. The longer any scene goes on the more certain that something will explode; this terrorism stuff is not very functional film making. It could've been called many funerals and no wedding.

Peter Bradshaw: what David Lean would've done with the romance.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director David Vincent Smith a while back. Both are Perth locals. I guess this might be Greta Scacchi doing her bit to revive the Australian film industry.

There's not a lot (not enough) to it. Mother Scacchi's actual daughter Leila George leads as a strong sister who is sick of having her life ruined by brother Sam Corlett's illicit drug use. The show starts in suburban Perth with the killing of a car and moves to the main set on what I took to be her grandparent's bush block (in Gosnells according to IMDB) where she imprisons him and us. (The location somewhat resonates with Tim Winton's stories. The house is full of cheesy childhood tchotchkes.) Later on we learn that his desire for druggy oblivion is due to mental unwellness. Her lifelong bestie Alexandra Nell is never shown to be much of a friend. Things go entirely predictably at excessive length; at its heart is the fusing of the getting-off-the-junk Trainspotting scene with the coercive control/intervention of Alexandra's Project into a sweary episode of an Australian soap opera. Surely getting off the meth has never been so humourless.

The internet suggests this might be autofiction.

Steve McQueen's latest feature, his first since Widows (2018), leaving aside the doco Occupied City (2023). A day and a night in London, 1940, where the children are evacuated to the countryside and the bombs fall. We mostly follow the adventures of the young boy Elliott Heffernan, son of Saoirse Ronan and present-day absent CJ Beckford. He'll be a ladykiller soon enough. Grandfather Paul Weller drenches him in music while we get drowned by Hans Zimmer's heavy score.

The best parts are 1940s versions of Small Axe, the scenes of extreme self-abandonment in a high-energy jazz club in particular. There's a dash of Naked in how the city is traversed, and more obviously a direct lift from Dickens on the topic of child exploitation. I enjoyed Benjamin Clémentine's robust warden the most; he's even more striking here than he was as Herald of the Change in Dune (2021). The cinematography and editing are as good as you'd expect, and the jumping around in time is handled well enough.

On the less satisfying front McQueen spends less effort exploring the schisms in class exposed by the Blitz, just showing the working class against the constabulary and gatekeepers of the BBC, than he does on his preferred topic of racial tensions. On his account there were significant numbers of people from the West Indies in London in 1940, and that made me wish he'd spent more time with that community than the generic love-in-wartime woefulness involving Harris Dickinson he does show us. I was astonished that Weller's valve radio came up instantly; mine takes a good thirty seconds for any sound to emerge. Disappointing was Stephen Graham's unmodulated performance; we know he can do that but we're even more certain that he can do better. This was not Ronan's finest outing. The CGI was off-putting.

Afterwards I remembered Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual.

Dana Stevens: a dud. Luke Goodsell.

Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis's Critic's Pick. She's one of the few decent reviewers left at the New York Times.

People of a certain age learnt the essentials of Homer's Odyssey from the fabulous-in-memory French/Japanese space-age Ulysses 31 cartoon. Against this the opening scenes made me fear I was in for another witless, overly literal adaptation: those slow shots of the island, the boat wreckage, a heavily damaged naked man washed up on a beach, a trying realism. But after a while things settle down and the survivor's-guilt inertness of Ralph Fiennes's Odysseus is shown to be cunning circumspection and not world-weariness. Juliette Binoche lights up every scene, especially in a central one where she looses two decades of rage against the beggarly Fiennes. (She rides the ambiguity of her knowing right to the end.) Against that is the miscasting of Charlie Plummer as Telemachus which is almost fatal at times. Marwan Kenzari and Claudio Santamaria are able in support. Co-produced, co-adapted and directed by Uberto Pasolini.

The dire rating at IMDB reflects the unevenness of the production, and perhaps an expectation that this does or should treat more of the story than it does. See, for instance, Radheyan Simonpillai.

Kindle. Peasant/tenant sheep farming in the fells of Cumbria, better known as the Lake District. It starts circa 2001 during the foot-and-mouth outbreak that lead to huge animal culls and ends in the present day. Nearby village Bewrith in the Curdale Valley does not exist, but why not? Other mentioned locations like Kendal and Carlisle, the geographical limits of Cumberland Wrestling, do.

The sheep massacre leads to a depeopling and the hardy folk who remain are in need of new flocks. Our narrator abandons a promising career of lorry driving and abides on his frenemy-neighbour's property after being drafted into the slaughter when the paid help flees. They go a-rustling somewhere a bit south, liberating a large mob of purebreds from a tourist farm. The successive heists are wanton and the story degenerates into relations amongst violent men; we're shown that our boy is educated and isn't a victim but has never been one to make things happen. There's a bit of wish fulfilment in the form of a girl from school, now married to the neighbour but so obviously better than all that. The breaking point, when it comes, is both expected and completely arbitrary.

I enjoyed the writing, leaving aside an excess of 'owt' and 'nowt'. It reminded me a bit of Tim Winton: forceful and direct, capturing the place, people and patois, the occasional excess of metaphor and motif. It made me realise that Winton's done littoral zones, the outback and cities but not farming. Initially I thought I might be in for something as crystalline as Atticus Lish's first but things fall away with the seasons. Preston's handling of his characters is as brutal as anything Irvine Welsh has done. Leaving that aside there are parallels with Greenvoe: a similar sense of isolation, a place lost in and out of time, tourism a future that's killed the old human geography. I'm guessing the descriptions of animal treatment turn a lot of people off.

Colin Barrett for the New York Times. Christopher de Bellaigue: rewilding, cottages now holiday rental properties with all the modcons. A farmer not taking a government handout is unrealistic. Ah yes, there's a drove, just like there has to be. Goodreads seems to be warming to it. Clare Clark dug it for the Guardian.

More Wesley Snipes completism. He does what he can in the Tony Montana role of Mario Van Peebles's gangsta reheat of Scarface. Opposing him are NYC undercover coppers Ice-T and Judd Nelson with semi-reformed crackhead Chris Rock stuck in the middle. It's all set pieces and pitched battles in the ghetto. Nobody covers themselves in glory. The U.S. legal system is shown to be ineffective in dealing with drug kingpins; it takes a neighbourhood religious vigilante to dispense justice. Written by Thomas Lee Wright and Barry Michael Cooper.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. More original than it looks! I wasn't overly convinced by Ice-T's acting but that may've been due to the dubious dialogue and editing. Janet Maslin. Ah yes, the plot is about the cops trying to entrap Snipes and co via their computerised financial records. And there's a mafia subplot. How could I forget. IMDB trivia: Van Peebles was enabled by Clint Eastwood. Based on real life in Detroit. Boyz n the Hood. King of New York. Goodfellas.

Sting runs a jazz nightclub in cold and rainy neo-noir Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Apparently he's from up that way. He hires down-and-out-but-still-living-OK Sean Bean (making this a jag from Ronin) notionally to clean the place but really as a motor for the plot. Bean in turn meets-cute waitress and escort (?) Melanie Griffith. She's somehow attached to generic shady American businessman Tommy Lee Jones who is in town for America week. He proves incapable of making Sting an offer he cannot refuse but they come to terms anyway. Some comic and musical relief is provided by a Polish jazz band. There's an undertow of Irish-style violence; of course the Poles cop it in the neck when the US and UK go at it.

Mike Figgis wrote and directed. Apparently this was his first feature. The first half is a bit dreamy, a bit daft and somewhat fun. The second half gets serious and violent, retaining the style but souring the mood. Some wanton sexy filler destroys momentum as things move toward the inevitable. Everyone does OK and the cinematography is sound. I liked the editing. The music is often more interesting than the images. There's some vintage make-Britain-great-again rhetoric in the middle from the blonded mayor.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. It's OK but their praise is over the top.

Written and directed by David Mamet. A heist flick! I guess people were more gullible before 9/11 and omnipresent internet scams but really, come on, Campbell Scott plays a sap. This is difficult to accept as he's developed "The Process" to extract untold gazillions from somewhere for the generic office space company in NYC headed by Ben Gazarra, and any such money funnel that I've ever had awareness of requires at least some minimal rat cunning. But Mamet is surrounded by cupidity and that's all he can think about.

Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife) is tasked with capturing Scott's sexual interest with some vintage repetitive Mamet dialogue. I admired her commitment and wish she'd succeeded, and at something more worthwhile. Steve Martin plays a rich man, dramatically, humorlessly and ultimately ineffectually. P.T. Anderson regular Ricky Jay has all the weariness in the world. The ending left me hanging: was Gazzara in on it too? Was it turtles all the way down or did Takeo Matsushita really work for the FBI? If only Mamet had been as all-in as his wife.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. I guess he felt this was a rug honestly pulled whereas I felt the misdirection was clunky and dated. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Mametese indeed. Hitchcockian. It put me in mind of Hal Hartley's far more successful artificiality.

An idle bit of Robert Altman completism. Clyde Hayes adapted raw material provided by John Grisham. Kenneth Branagh leads as an invincible attorney/pants man in Georgia who has separated from Famke Janssen. His office factotum Daryl Hannah is still putting up a fight. Private dick Robert Downey Jr. just marks time in various bars, waiting for the MCU.

For prima facie spurious reasons (fishnets!) Embeth Davidtz drives Branagh into maximal lust which causes him to get stupid in having her father Robert Duvall committed. All of this is so dumb — I regularly wanted to throw the movie across the room — that I mostly just waited for the twist. Tom Berenger's minor role as Davidtz's husband provides some early hints, and if he'd made any use of his boat's Chekhovian device we could have all finished up sooner. I did not understand the climax at all: surely everybody has their trust issues by then and yet they're still credulous and playing some other game.

Overall it was as if Altman had forgotten how to make a movie. There is little to no overlapping dialogue and we just follow Branagh around in a very linear manner. The soundtrack by Mark Isham is very obtrusive and often more intense than the action. The juxtaposition with Hurricane Geraldo is farcical.

Roger Ebert: three stars. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Not based on a novel. "Describing himself as 'a little toasted,' the actor [Downey Jr] is seen drinking heavily and even nodding out from time to time, with art mirroring life all too noticeably."

Directed by John Frankenheimer from a story by J.D. Zeik that was bent into shape by David Mamet trading as Richard Weisz (says IMDB). And what a mess it is.

We're dropped into a meetup at a bar somewhere (Paris?) that gets the principals together. It is unclear what Robert De Niro is good for; initially he acts like a boss then later as a producer and even later the operator with all the skills. Jean Reno is similar but French. Stellan Skarsgård is the Russian computer genius, and we all know you can't trust those ex-KGB blokes so why do these people? Perhaps we're supposed to think that Natasha McElhone is torn between De Niro's manliness and her revolutionary Irish cause. (She's wide eyed and flat and looks too much like Meryl Streep but is of course irresistible). Sean Bean's role is perplexing: initially strong he's shown to be a faker of no consequence. Skipp Sudduth is their driver.

The setup is essentially a heist but the bulk of the runtime is in two car chases: one in Paris and the other in or near Nice. I had no idea what was supposed to be going on until things got somewhat retconned in the final minutes. That may have been due to not having subtitles for the French bits but I'm pretty sure those did not matter. There are just too many plot holes and general incoherencies along the way. I never gave a damn about what was in the case.

Roger Ebert: three stars. "The movie is essentially bereft of a plot." And more fatally: "'I never walk into a place I don't know how to walk out of,' says De Niro, who spends most of the rest of the movie walking into places he doesn’t know how to walk out of." A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. She seems to have forgotten about Mann's Heat of 1995.

Kindle. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. An imagining of the day Hernán Cortés encountered Moctezuma II. The characters serve mostly to explore the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the culture clash between the imperials/conquerors. Most of the book is setup, explaining how we got here and to an extent the prevailing politics. Most of the plot development occurs in the final pages where a drug reveals how (future) history actually went. It was hard to parse what impact Cortés's account of Christianity had on Moctezuma or its import to this story. Psychedelics feature prominently. There are two princesses who lack volition and much characterisation beyond their regality.

I enjoyed it on its own terms; more familiarity with the actual history may've yielded a richer experience but probably also an oversensitivity to Enrigue's infidelities and confabulations. It sort-of lays the groundwork for Francis Spufford's alt-history Cahokia Jazz (with some points of similarly like the emperor-of-the-sun and mayor-of-the-moon for instance). The horses here stand in for the variant strain of smallpox there.

Dwight Garner: quotidian. Quite. Anthony Cummins. Adam Mars-Jones summarises at vast length. (I don't think ant colonies are hierarchical.) Goodreads did not exactly love it.

And yet more Burt Lancaster completism. Directed by John Frankenheimer from an adaptation by Guy Trosper of Thomas E. Gaddis's bowderlized biography/hagiography of "Birdman of Alcatraz" Robert Stroud. Oscar noms but no gongs went to Lancaster, fellow jailbird Telly Savalas, mother Thelma Ritter and cinematographer Burnett Guffrey.

We meet Lancaster imprisoned in Leavenworth, Kansas for killing a man. Soon enough he kills a screw on the possibly that a small infraction would deny him a visit from his mother. The man did not like uncertainty! Ending up in solitary forevermore (on a technicality after a publicity campaign helped him evade execution) he gets into birding: sparrows and canaries. With plenty of time on his hands in a mind-bogglingly lax Federal Penitentiary, he does some apparently valuable research on avians and rattles off a few amusing lines ("You're all got, you little runt." to his new bestie sparrow) as he is caught in some semi-catch-22 prison regulations: the Bolshevik prison operators try to appropriate the profits of his bird remedies! The horror. But he's having none of that and his cell remains impeccably clean throughout.

While the first half is a bit amusing the second is solemn, almost humourless, and leans into far too much exposition. Lancaster's engagements with nemesis warden Karl Malden are all very humanistic and civil, at least until we get to a pitched (but entirely stock) battle against D block on Alcatraz.

Overall Lancaster needed to heighten the distinction between the young psycho and the aged, mellow intellectual; he's fine with the latter but couldn't locate an inner Dennis Hopper. So while he is better here than in the first part of his career I don't bracket this with the vastly better works that started with The Leopard (1963).

A. H. Weiler at the New York Times. All the details at Wikipedia.