Second time around with what IMDB says is Mike Leigh's second feature to get a cinematic release. Not so much class warfare, though there is some of that, but more class dislocation in Thatcher's London. Ruth Sheen is excellent as Phil Davis's squeeze; they are a working-class pair of the sort that was probably out of time in the 1970s. He rides a Honda CB 400 NC Superdream (twin). Lesley Manville has the most fun as the Princess Di half of a toff couple who have bought and renovated a council row house. She's far more sophisticated than her paramour David Bamber. Heather Tobias's artificial performance is a clanger in context: it's not credible that her histrionics would be so thoroughly ignored by husband Philip Jackson and family ... or is it? Everyone is childless now.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Hooray Henries! ... and I missed the markers that Jason Watkins's Wayne was mentally unwell (and not just thick). The passivity of the once-were revolutionaries. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin.
Second time around with this Altman after a sneaky rewatch of The Long Goodbye (1973). This was ill advised as Elliot Gould's running at the mouth is so much better in the other movie, perhaps because he's on a shorter leash. Written by Joseph Walsh; IMDB says this is his only writing credit.
Gould's a winner even though he's second on the bill after George Segal who somehow becomes a winner. Who ever said gambling could be problematic! There are scams, including a proforma basketball scam that was better cooked in White Men Can't Jump (1992); indeed the latter movie has a more expansive take on the world than mere gambling debts and sad ladies who can't get no satisfaction.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Vincent Canby.
Kindle. Prompted by the many positive reviews.
Szalay goes about it with clear intent: this is a portrait of a bloke, just like Small Things Like These, whose interiority is inaccessible to us. Life mostly just happens to him and he is mostly not disappointed, perhaps because it's mostly about sex and he rarely has to ask. He starts out in spartan post-Communist Hungary, living with his mother, where the cracking (and much remarked upon) first chapter reveals his irresistibility and easy facility with violence. (All descriptions are specific, sparing and not especially graphic.) After a bit more scene-setting but no foreshadowing or forethought we're taken to London for what I expect are Szalay's favourite topics: extreme wealth, luxe consumption, brand names, high-end real estate/development deals, art of the kind that is hung on walls, inheritance, shamelessness, blameless rise and fall. He doesn't hold the hands of those of us who don't live this stuff.
Szalay's prose is fine but never achieves the necessity of Atticus Lish's. It is often amusingly reductive. Presenting István purely as a surface works well but less so for the secondary characters such as Helen, the socialite married to a plutocrat; we see her reflected in her son's surprise that she's gone for such a protozoac man and wonder what her besties think. Nobody has a real job or career which means Szalay skips the most time consuming part of life that just maybe undergirds and circumscribes the substance. Despite its relevance to a bloke from Europe BREXIT goes unmentioned. The semi-solitary drinking "parties" ameliorate the COVID lockdowns for Helen. Almost all of it could have happened in the 1980s or, excepting the helicopter commutes between London and country piles and other inessential technological things, the nineteenth century.
But to what end? Is this supposed to be a Martin Amis sort of thing, a social commentary, a time capsule? (It's been too long for me but perhaps Money?)
Dwight Garner. Peter Craven: "No finer novel will be published this year." Keiran Goddard: "Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat." (Not much?) All bone. Sean O'Beirne: "not one of Szalay’s best books; the best, by far, is All That Man Is." Too much plot (and I concur). Goodreads.
The second adaptation of a Claire Keegan short I've seen, the first being The Quiet Girl (2022). Directed by Belgian Tim Mielants.
The story runs adjacent to the Magdalene asylums scandal that apparently came to a head in the 1990s; here it looks like it's the 1970s or perhaps early 1980s when Irish omertà was experiencing its first cracks. Cillian Murphy works hard in the lead as a father of five girls in New Ross (southeast Ireland) whose softheartedness seems to be beyond the understanding of wife Eileen Walsh. She and publican Helen Behan operate on the basis of there but for the grace of God and cannot fathom why they would ever sacrifice their prosperity. Murphy counts his blessings a different way and we know he's a gonna when he discovers a young woman (Zara Devlin) locked in the convent's coal shed that he's being paid to refill, especially after an encounter with sinister Mother Superior Emily Watson.
One of the pleasures of this movie is that there's a lot of showing and not much telling, as if its makers trust their audience in a way that is entirely out of fashion now. The focus is always on the kids; the brokenness of Murphy's character is explored mostly in flashback, though his deep reservoirs of strength go unexplained. It is suggested that he is falling apart now after an extended period of robustness.
On the other hand I didn't enjoy much of the camerawork (by Frank van den Eeden) as I often struggled to understand if one character was looking at another, challenging or evading, and the layout of the buildings. The editing (by Alain Dessauvage) is often overly abrupt. The story itself is told with much fine detail but is not subtle; it is mostly a portrait of the man.
Luke Goodsell. He got the press pack: it's Christmas 1985. Murphy's "performance is a study in compassion and survival, in the ways one's own traumatic experience might lead to empathy instead of cyclical abuse." A Critic's Pick by Alissa Wilkinson. Both observe it's a gangster/mafia flick. Xan Brooks. Philippa Hawker.
Kindle. The greatest hits of wartime Sài Gòn from the 1930s to the 1970s. Specifically we follow the titular Chinese headmaster Percival Chen as he does little more than whore and gamble in Chợ Lớn while his brotherly lieutenant, fellow Chinese Mak, runs his English school. For whose benefit, we are supposed to ask, but it is always clear that Mak has deep roots in the Vietnamese independence movement that transcend the partition of the country.
As a semi-authentic, sentimental dynastic tale it's fairly engaging. The prose is flabby and needed a good edit; the repetition-in-the-small (paragraphs that repeat the previous paragraph but with a tad more colour) recurs so often, too often. Regularly stuffed in the middle is a tendentious sentence that asserts this is how things went, how things must go, as if the author lacks faith in the persuasiveness of his narrative structures. And of course so much could go other ways and did. The characterisation is generally weak; Percival is a muppet and Mak is underdrawn. The women are just sex objects or madams, all creatures of the demimonde, mostly victims. The dialogue is highly suspect: there's no chance that Chen would identify as Viet Cong to the occupying forces of Sài Gòn. It seems unlikely "Việt Minh" is the right term for Mak's network. Such inaccuracies are just laziness this late in history.
In a broader context, Andrew X. Pham provided a lot more colour and historicity in his recent Twilight Territory. The Chinese perspective is far more valuable than that of the Western journos of, for instance, Koch's Highways to a War (and see also Neil Sheehan's memoir) and I'd be keen to read a better treatment. I vaguely recall Violet Kupersmith mining a similar vein.
Kindle. Thin Brunner is always a risk, as are any of his late-career works; apparently this was his final novel. Here he attempts a zany quest in the mode of Douglas Adams. There's a bit of lightweight social commentary that may've been insightful in the early 1980s. It was hard work to get through.
Bong Joon-Ho's latest, and first feature since Parasite (2019). Adapted by Bong from a novel by Edward Ashton.
Near as I could tell Bong watched Moon (2009) and figured he could do it better, or at least more existentially, than Duncan Jones. Or perhaps he wanted to one-up Neill Blomkamp. To that end he mixed his CGI-creature fascination from Okja (2017) with a significant number of A-list American actors and a few British ones. And Toni Collette, cast to what now seems to be her type: an upper class wife, transparently repulsive.
The first thirty minutes was pretty amusing as we get to know Robert Pattinson's character, an expendable in a self-knowing emo mode. (He's great. There's an undertow of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in his narration.) Squeeze Naomi Ackie is an enduring mystery to him and us. Mate Steven Yeun is stuck with thinly drawn venality; he had a lot more to work with in Minari (2020). They and many others are on a settler spacecraft more-or-less run as a personal fief by Mark Ruffalo and Collette, headed for the white purity of the planet Niflheim. After arrival things devolve to some pro forma conflict and species-ism that put me in mind of Peter Singer.
Ruffalo is more-or-less a hammy Trump and is as disappointing as he was in Poor Things (2023); it's beyond him to be as farcically presidential as Bill Pullman was in Independence Day. Thomas Turgoose has a disposable auxiliary role; he's making a habit of mediocrity. Anamaria Vartolomei ultimately does no more than bat her eyelashes at Pattinson.
The cinematography is generally OK, the CGI not too annoying.
Very widely anticipated and reviewed to wide disappointment. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. No 17 "has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler)." Dana Stevens: harks back to Snowpiercer (2013). Feels foreshortened.
Steven Soderbergh's latest. He directed a script by David Koepp (Carlito's Way, Jurassic Park, Panic Room, many blockbusters).
This is not a heist but an old-fashioned spy thriller. Robotic lead Michael Fassbender pays homage to Alec Guinness's George Smiley (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). His wife Cate Blanchett is also a spy who has her eyes on (Trump-tanned) Pierce Brosnan's job. The plot is notionally about stopping the use of a Stuxnet variant, engineered by these clowns, by a Russian. The whole thing is twentieth century: the McGuffin is a physical thing but everything else is computerised, though accessing anything requires being in the right room, having the right gizmo, shagging or having other leverage over the operator. (Everyone is suitably compatible on that score.) There's an experimental AI lipreader on a dongle. Naomie Harris, the in-house industrial shrink, has some truly terrible scenes.
The chief problem, more so than the risible dialogue, tedious and sterile high-end consumption, lack of motivation, suspense and stakes, general unsexyness and so on is that the first two-thirds give you no idea whatsoever how things will be resolved. The second dinner party is so purely revelatory that you're left wanting the butler to have done it.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. "It’s nonsense." Peter Bradshaw: three stars of five. Luke Goodsell.
At Middleback Arts Centre, at family-friendly 18.00. Fabulous circus. It was a lot easier to get into than Bangarra as I didn't need to puzzle out what anything meant; I could just go with the grain of the excellent acrobatics. The performers seemed to enjoy themselves immensely.
