peteg's blog

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's great interview with Ed Norton. Norton somehow always exceeds my expectations. I was less impressed by the preceding one with co-writer/director James Mangold. Jay Cocks helped him adapt a book by Elijah Wald. The eight Oscar noms received zero gongs.

As someone whose curiosity about Bob Dylan has never evolved into fandom I felt the story, tracking his arrival in NYC to famously going electric at a folk festival (Newport in 1965), was tepid accompaniment to those cracker songs of his early years. (I've always been partial to Roy Harper's take on Girl from the North Country which gets a few goes-around here.) Many events were meaningless in the provided context; I don't care what style he's playing or how the anonymous crowds of the day felt about it, and Mangold couldn't make me. Dylan is presented as magnetic but unreachably enigmatic.

The movie itself is as well-made as any of the industrial blockbusters Mangold has rolled out before. Timothée Chalamet does a solid Dylan impersonation, good enough to not bother me. Norton is fine as Pete Seeger. Monica Barbaro glowers as Joan Baez, simmering as she's entranced and eclipsed by the new kid. Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, better than he was in The Bikeriders. I can't imagine why anyone wants to see Elle Fanning so sad.

Manohla Dargis. Gets a bit Forrest Gump with its facts.

Kindle. I thought El Akkad's last novel What Strange Paradise (2021) was a solid improvement on his first and was hoping for another delta. This is instead a memoir of El Akkad's (remote but nonetheless) heartrending experience of the (ongoing, perpetual) conflict in Gaza, salted with the odd life event. The title is bang on and a sentiment for all times. Unfortunately many of the ensuing, similarly syntactically-tortured sentences with convoluted tenses are not as sound. It struck me that once again he was a couple of steps behind Mohsin Hamid (Exit West, The Last White Man).

I struggled with El Akkad's motivations. Why does he doomscroll the horrors of this conflict? Why did he become a U.S. citizen? He shows no awareness that all of what is troubling him troubled others not so long ago — the iconic photography of the Việt Nam war (presently being relitigated), the drive to bear witness, liberal hypocrisy. The age of anger may've started with the economically disenfranchised but is now thoroughly democratised.

In brief, it struck me that El Akkad had no awareness of Asia. His hopelessness, expressed in sentiments not too distant from George W. Bush's with-us-or-against-us, yields a just-walk-away nihilism that precludes consideration of alternatives — live-and-let-live! — which just might lead to paths out of this mess. If he truly felt that, why write this book? Yes, the abiding humanistic optimism that another generation could always be squeezed in before things went completely tits up has unravelled, but give us an argument for why you still had your child. I wanted to know why he remains in the U.S.A.; Hamid made for unruly Pakistan a while back.

Someone with more awareness of Asia may've made common cause with the concept of tang ping. Another more analytically-minded or less despairing may have dug into the will to ignorance and America's sense of its own morality. Still another would mourn for lessons unlearned and (self-reflectingly) the role of the press in the unwinding ("is it still possible to enlarge cognitive capacity within the dwindling kingdom of Western journalism?"). It felt like reading computer science literature, a blinkered, write-only medium that fills me with dismay.

Fintan O'Toole at the New York Times mostly refers back to El Akkad's American War (2017). A "polemoir, a fusion of polemic and memoir." — please no. Goodreads dug it with spades.

The things Guy Pearce makes me watch. Before this I would've said I'd be up for anything, even a Matt Damon or Brad Pitt impression. Now I'm not so sure.

Co-written and directed by Brady Corbet. He acted in Melancholia but there's no sign he learnt much from Lars von Trier. Mona Fastvold shared responsibility for the script. I was happy to recognise Isaach De Bankolé from The Limits of Control. Adrien Brody (Oscared) lead as (fictional) Jewish Hungarian Bauhaus-educated architect László Tóth transplanted by way of a concentration camp to Pennsylvania. (I wonder if the Hungarian-born Australian geologist of the same name is enjoying his new fame.) There he meets industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Pearce) while waiting for his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) to join him. When great talent met vast piles of American money in the post-WWII years, brutalism was apparently inevitable.

I didn't understand what the point of it all was, and at 3hr 30min it had plenty of opportunity to make a case. (Some of it reached for There Will Be Blood but neither of leads got anywhere close to what Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano achieved.) Brody is very good and quite amusing at times. There's far too much talking and not enough showing. Heroin is used without glamour or judgement. I did not like any of the characters. I did not enjoy Lol Crawley's cinematography (Oscared).

Why this guy? Why architecture? They could've gone for any number of other Hungarian geniuses; von Neumann for instance.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She just summarised the plot. Dana Stevens sounded bereft, at length. The ending somewhat fits with the interstitial advertisements for the great state of Pennsylvania but does not add to what came before. Glenn Kenny at Venice: "the most exciting consideration of non-atomic American mutation and madness since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master". Stephanie Zacharek. And so on.

And still more Gene Hackman completism. Directed by Ronald Neame from a script by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes that adapted Paul Gallico's novel. Ben Stiller recently named it as his favourite of Hackman's performances — was the simple truth "money job"? — making it something of a jag from Permanent Midnight.

The scenario is very simple: some passengers are taking the final voyage of the passenger ship Poseidon from NYC to Athens. Something happens near Crete to generate a large wave that capsizes the vessel. The rest of the movie is about escaping the sinking ship, and that mostly boils down to traversing set-piece obstacles, somewhat like The Rock (1996). Things go as they have to. There's a dash of Terminator 2: Judgement Day at the end.

The cast is stellar. Ernest Borgnine is less effective than he was in Marty (1955) as his staginess clashes with the realism of the others, leaving aside wife Stella Stevens I guess. Their histrionics are entirely cliched. Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter, Oscar nom'd here) plays a saintly Jewish grandmother. Carol Lynley does a special kind of hippy vacancy. Leslie Nielsen as the captain! But Hackman owns it as a reverend with distinctly American ideas of how God helps those who help themselves. He nevertheless often selflessly helps others.

The (practical) special effects are good. It's not terrible.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars and the harshest review I've read by him. Formulaic. Where was the token Black person? He's right that the motivation for heading for the stern is weak. A. H. Weiler.

For Gene Hackman, who passed recently. Written and directed by David Mamet. The cast had potential — Hackman is joined by Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito, Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, and of course Mamet's squeeze-muse Rebecca Pigeon. There's more realism here than in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), perhaps reflecting the shift to summery but sombre Boston. (Pigeon is the only woman in Boston, in contrast with The Town.) The mechanics of the heist were rapidly obsoleted by 9/11. (I did not try to track all the details; I took it for granted that we were getting drip fed only some of the salients.) The dialogue is tame and relatively sparse. Many scenes do not work; take the shootout on the dock for instance. Rockwell is ill-used. The ending is quite poor. The dire IMDB rating is well-deserved.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "Close attention may reveal a couple of loopholes in the plot." — say it ain't so. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Mamet is erratic.