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 being 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.
