peteg's blog

David Veloz directed his own adaptation of Jerry Stahl's memoir of writing scripts in TV in L.A. Veloz doctored the script for Natural Born Killers. Notionally deemed a Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin but I'm losing faith in that list.

We meet the sexually-irresistible Ben Stiller (as Stahl) working in a fast food joint somewhere far from the prime time. There Mario Bello is the first (or latest) lady to decide she's gotta have that ("You're too darn sad-looking to just be another retard in a pink visor") and we're off to a motel room for tales of T.V. production, drugs and other ladies who we similarly learn almost nothing about. Owen Wilson plays his bestie, pretty much as Owen Wilson must present in real life to his real life besties. Peter Greene has fun dealing to the recovering. Jerry Stahl plays his own doctor, sardonically. The women include, with varying levels of involvement and commitment, Connie Nielsen (Dagmar from Deutschland with the best gear), Elizabeth Hurley (in need of a green card), Liz Torres (in need of a junk buddy), Janeane Garofalo (in need of a man, any man), Cheryl Ladd (in need of a scriptwriter). And probably others. He's shooting up on anything and tomorrow's never there.

The vibe is Trainspotting-adjacent, comedic but not very funny, definitely not fun, funny or philosophical about drug use, milking a 1990s soundtrack. Stiller appears to be all-in, at one point shooting into his neck. Many scenes are way too long and the last movement really drags. Was there a point?

Roger Ebert: three stars. He knew that addiction is heavy stuff but I don't see why that makes it sacred. The Man With the Golden Arm. Janet Maslin: a cautionary tale!

Kindle. A pointer from Kate back in 2016 or so.

We're in Southern California, a suburb of Los Angeles, with a bloke with a reconstructed face. Using an iterative deepening strategy and interspersed with excess discursion he tells us how it came to be destroyed, what he used to do for fun (read Conan stories) and what he does now (tell a choose your own adventure story to subscribers via snail mail). He spends a lot of time ruminating on school and his failed transition to post-school life. The author mostly steers clear of gross outs.

Well what can I say, I hate the use of brand names, especially when used to enumerate the pharmacopeia. The first-person narrator made it abundantly clear that there's no point to his stories, that he never went anywhere and isn't about to start now. Somehow it reminded me of Catcher in the Rye and David Ireland's The Chantic Bird — just maybe someone got something out of it? The review of game-adjacent fantasy/scifi trash culture was better done by Michael Clune and Jarett Kobek. And of course, for 1990s slacker/futureless/developmentally-stalled culture one can't go much past Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs).

Goodreads. Ethan Gilsdorf summarised it at the New York Times. "Accident" is thrown around a lot but everything sounded intentional to me.

Second or third time around. Peter Weir directed a script originally by Christopher Koch that was bent out of shape by Weir and David Williamson; they elided too many of the meaningful bits while retaining all the obscurity. Maurice Jarre did the soundtrack to which Vangelis contributed the somewhat incongruous theme song L'Enfant.

The movie flits from event to event and feels rushed after the languor of the book; Koch did pace that right. Mel Gibson's Guy Hamilton is not the giant counterpart to Billy Kwan as played by Lind Hunt (Dune (1984)). (She's excellent in a mediocre movie.) Casting the tall Sigourney Weaver as an English rose only served to emphasise that. Neither are particularly effective as romantic leads — she giggling like a schoolgirl, he staring like he's been poleaxed. Did either ever try again? Bill Kerr's Colonel Henderson is undignified. Paul Sonkkila's dial is very familiar from Australian cinema.

The increased emphasis on the romance made it even more difficult to fathom the stakes; things get asserted from time-to-time but no reasons are ever given. (Koch provided at least some background in prose: what taking a bungalow signified, what Billy means by saying "Anglo-Saxons are better in the tropics", and so on.) At times the goal seemed to be to remake Mad Max.

Again I'd say Weir's direction is unsuccessful.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Saint Jack. Vincent Canby: "This film should be some kind of epic." Ozmovies (snapshot): retrospectively perhaps Weir's best! Wikipedia. IMDB trivia: shot in Sydney and the Philippines. The non-English dialogue is in Tagalog, not Bahasa. Oops.

Somewhat prompted by Manohla Dargis making it a Critic's Pick, and otherwise slim pickings amongst the new movies. Directed by Gia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter, new to me. Written by Kate Gersten who has done a lot of TV.

To me this is obviously a female counterpart to Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008): take a 1980s/1990s star (here Pamela Anderson) and show them now glammed up and down, still in a job that they've aged well out of. It's a genre that I suspect Diane Keaton of milking, perhaps right back to The Godfather: Part III, but I wouldn't know.

The scenario has Anderson showgirling in Le Razzle Dazzle, purportedly the last show of its kind in Las Vegas. Its 30 year run is coming to an end and she needs to find a new gig. The first half has enough fun bits to suggest a black comedy but by halfway, as Jamie Lee Curtis's cocktail waitress is eclipsed by cliche, things are deadly serious. There's a daughter plot involving miscast Billie Lourd and a fair slab of generic confected conflict. By the credits nothing has been resolved but we're still shown scenes of redemption/empathy/reconnection.

Pamela Anderson has her moments. Her best acting here is when she reaches for the extremely synthetic but her efforts are never matched by the rest of the cast, excepting her rapport with Curtis. (Curtis is far better here than in Everything Everywhere All At Once — a career-best performance even?) Stage manager/erstwhile lover Dave Bautista delivers some drecky dialogue during his big dinner scene in the mode of the emotionally incompetent character he's spent too long playing. I feel he's been better than that but perhaps I'm wrong. Jason Schwartzman is flat and brutal, just doing a favour for a cousin (?).

I did not enjoy the cinematography much.

Sheila O'Malley. I think she forgets just how artificial Anderson's beauty always was. Sandra Hall: a family production. Luke Goodsell. The commentariat generally holds that Anderson is good in a bad movie. But Jason Di Rosso really dug it.

Kindle. Koch's breakthrough novel and easily the best I've read by him so far. Famously made into a movie by Peter Weir that I saw about 15 years ago.

As with Highways to a War (1995), Koch expects his readers to be far more familiar with history and culture than is reasonable. This gambit somewhat works by highlighting the memory hole that Australia-Indonesian relations regularly falls into but frustratingly flattens the players and stakes to a colourful backdrop for a pedestrian romance between an Anglo-Australian journalist and an English secretary at the British Embassy. (Once again she's the only available European woman in the whole town.) The elegiac tone emphasises a fondness for the Indonesia of the day that the events do not, but actually it's a fondness just for the comfortable parts of Java and the hills south of it. (Lombok has too much unpleasant poverty.) Some ethnicities are sketched; the Chinese are mercantilist. Islam is mentioned but nothing is made of it. (Booze is omnipresent for instance, and there are no muezzins.) Koch takes it as obvious that they would oppose the communist PKI which left me wondering who'd support the PKI. Bali, Borneo, Papua and Timor (etc.) do not feature. Something's brewing in Việt Nam but that need not concern us here.

The action starts media res. The Indonesian revolution (the expulsion of the Dutch colonialists) is going sour due to increasing poverty, inappropriate spending and a distancing from Western aid. The men of the international press, generally lacking language and culture skills, wait for the big one (presumably the fall of Sukarno) in the Wayang Bar in the Hotel Indonesia. New Chum Hamilton has been sent by the ABS (ABC) to cover the instabilities. We quickly meet Koch's most interesting character, cinematographer Billy Kwan, a dwarf with a Chinese father and Australian mother who has big plans for Hamilton. He symbolises much, not the least humanism and utopianism, and moves mysteriously through Jakarta and the plot. Against him Hamilton and squeeze Jill are woefully bland and underdrawn and it's all downhill from there.

The structure is the same as Highways to a War (1995) but far better executed. There's a masterful and somewhat jarring movement between the first and third person omniscient narration as well as some complex tenses that are very satisfying. Nevertheless it always felt like the more fascinating things lay just beyond Koch's frame.

The heavy emphasis on motif and metaphor is wearing after a while. Again we get the "doubled" concept (c.f. The Doubleman (1985)) but more literally; apparently mirroring Hindu myth, Kwan is the dwarf variant of Hamilton's giant. There's the Left and Right of the Wayang, along Western political lines, but what does that mean to the locals? And for all we learn here the Konfrontasi may've been between man and woman, East and West or some struggle within Jakarta. Hamilton's loss of an eye at the end, a halving or echo of Odin, suggests he has gained something of value (wisdom, love) but we're left guessing at its content and sceptical of its worth. I guess Koch was railing against charismatic dictators who lose sight of the starving masses, and perhaps revolutions in general.

Goodreads: some truly brutal reviews. The threads of intrigue throughout are all so heavily foreshadowed you're always asking when and never what-if. There's a fair bit of unresolved ambiguity about who is screwing who and why. Esoteric. Essentialist. Again it seems probable that a decent history would be superior to these fictional accounts.

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 or individuals have mechanisms for taking notes. 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.

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.

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.