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.

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.

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?

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.