peteg's blog

... and that'll about do me for Tarsem Singh movies. He kept me guessing all the way through: is this Robocop? Or perhaps Universal Soldier (1992)? I knew it wasn't Face/Off (1997) — he only hired one action star and there's nothing much in the way of effects. The mechanism is, once again, two minds in one body.

The plot has Trumpian NYC real estate developer Ben Kingsley realising that he has so much more to give when he receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. (His vocal performance is all Al Pacino.) His character notionally lives on in the body of Ryan Reynolds but there is no continuity in personality, mannerism, etc. Derek Luke climbed down from Antwone Fisher (2002) to play some basketball as a pseudo buddy. Matthew Goode deploys his trademark smooth psychopath to far less effect that in his signature efforts (Watchmen (2009), Stoker (2013)). Dean Norris! There's nothing of visual interest here, having been shot mostly in the realist mode.

Singh likes the high concept but has no faith in his audience; things are as telegraphed as advertisements. One of his ticks is the triple up (one up on Christopher Koch, one down on Christopher Nolan). The stakes are always a child's. He likes to cover faces with gauze or ornately framed masks.

A. O. Scott: "All of it unfolds in the atmosphere of gaudy, portentous vacuity that is Mr. Singh’s trademark." Ouch.

I was curious about what else Tarsem Singh made apart from his labour of love The Fall (2006). This seems to be his feature debut as well as for writer Mark Protosevich (partially responsible for the story for Thor (2011) and the script of the remake of Oldboy (2013)). The cast is a bit interesting: Dylan Baker (Happiness (1998)) and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets and Lies (1996)) got lumped with the scientific mumbo jumbo about the brain-sharing device that gives us excess access to the mind of dissociated serial killer Vincent D'Onofrio (Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket (1987)). Out front though are Jennifer Lopez as an implausible shrink / neuronaut who seems to fall for Vince Vaughn's FBI agent. But the movie ends first.

Obviously this is a riff on (or homage to, or ripoff of) The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (dolls not butterflies!) and, to a lesser extent, Twin Peaks: there's something fatal in the pipe and the only solution is for Lopez to visit D'Onofrio's brain. Things go wrong before they go right. That's it. The best bits are, once again, visual; Singh's lurid colours really deserved oversaturated, glorious Technicolor. Somehow it reminded me of The Well (1997).

Roger Ebert: four stars. How did he give this 4 stars and not appreciate David Lynch? Se7en. 2001. Not a cop out like Hollowman. Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times: Spellbound (1945), Manhunter (1986). Evokes a Nine Inch Nails music video. Quake. No there there, just too many antecedents.

After watching The Fall I wondered what Guillermo del Toro had done recently (apart from remaking Pinocchio in 2022). Also I'd totally forgotten about the original. del Toro re-adapted the novel by William Lindsay Gresham with help from Kim Morgan.

The vast cast looks great on paper but was given nothing to work with. What is it with Bradley Cooper and remakes? Against a backdrop of World War II he con(vince)s an inert Rooney Mara to join him in a dated-at-the-time mentalist routine only to be unmade in an entirely predictable and forewarned way by Cate Blanchett's shrink. (Mara's face is as blank as Kidman's, and Cooper's angsty performance only exacerbates her limitations.) Willem Dafoe tried to put some life into it, as did David Strathairn and Holt McCallany (memorable in Mindhunter and Fight Club, squandered here). Ron Perlman looked so worn out. Richard Jenkins, pro forma. Toni Colette did what she can. And so on. There's little of del Toro's signature, inventive grotesquery. Absolutely unnecessary.

Manohla Dargis: "[Blanchett's character] steps out of a different, less engaging movie." Stephanie Zacharek summarised it so you can give it a miss.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's insightful interview with director Minh Quý Trương and some curiosity about the state of Vietnamese film making. There's a huge slate of production company credits so I guess raising means is still a chore. Over two nights due to a failure to enthral.

The focus is on two gay coal miners in an industrial town somewhere Việt Nam in 2001. (I can't find the filming location but am guessing from the director's bio, jungle warfare, etc. that it's somewhere in the Central Highlands, not so far from his hometown of Buôn Ma Thuột. Upon reflection the industrialism, urban scenes and some themes echo parts of The Deer Hunter.) The topics are the traditional ones deployed in Vietnamese films looking for international audiences: war remnants, lingering superstitions, long held secrets and guilt, people smuggling, exotic forms of intimacy, generalised poignant inconsequence. The narrative and characterisation are thin with loads of gesture and little critique or analysis.

Some of the imagery is very striking: the coal seam is shot to look like the night sky, an erstwhile battleground covered with flags (marking UXO or bodies?) and soldiers in frozen poses. This is countervailed by so many distended scenes of percussive banality.

A Critic's Pick by Lisa Kennedy at the New York Times. Her brief review is right to focus on the visual.

Kindle. Inevitable after chewing through Dashiell Hammett's collected works and rewatching The Long Goodbye (1973). (I have yet to get to the novel for that; it's from 1953.)

Well, what can I say. He started strong with loads of similes and humour (c.f. Sarah Miles as a jazz weekend in The Big Sleep (1975)) but by the third book the rewards are diminished. All are structured like a collation of short stories; vast casts of characters with some overlaps, abundant scenic description, gnarly plots and not exactly satisfying conclusions. (I'm not here for the whodunit aspect; it feels like important details are withheld but perhaps he's fair by the standards of that genre.) Perhaps they function as a snapshot of the Los Angeles/Santa Monica region at the time. It's helped along by the odd bit of abstruse colour, e.g. a reference to Moral Re-Armament which is topical now. Fun.

Some fantastic visual composition from co-writer/director Tarsem Singh, who clearly learnt all the right things from directing music videos. (This is presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze.) The model is a two-track adult fairytale in the magical realism that Guillermo del Toro mines: somewhat romantic, like The Shape of Water, a little graphic like Pan's Labyrinth (also from 2006) and sharing the latter's juxtaposition of childish innocence and worldliness against learned hopelessness.

The main flaw is that neither story is particularly satisfying. Putting that aside the acting from lead Lee Pace and child/foil Catinca Untaru serves the movie well. Her grasp of English is shaky as one might expect of a child of Mexican migrants to California in the 1920s, and this mostly helps with her engagement with Lee's fatalistic silent-era stunt man as they both recuperate in hospital. His stories draw on the deep well of classic lore but it would seem that the visual imaginarium is hers, the scenes being populated with people he has not met. (She has no experience of Native Americans and so the "Indian" in the troupe is an actual Indian.) Both stories are uneven and neither has much of a moral; the stunt man survives it all and walks away, the child rejoins her kin in the orange groves. But the stakes weren't this low.

Roger Ebert: four stars. No CGI! (So that really was an elephant swimming? Amazing.) Dave Kehr on the making of. Less forgivingly, Nathan Lee at the New York Times: a remake of the Bulgarian Yo ho ho. Excess details at Wikipedia.

More Errol Flynn. I hadn't realised how funny and deft he was; his performance here as the heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett is timeless. The accent is pure Hobart throughout, and the hair is always on his mind. In glorious black-and-white. Directed by Raoul Walsh.

The story is about the rise of professional boxing in the last decades of the nineteenth century in San Francisco. There are some great scenes of the underground fights of the time and also the cultural strata. Later we even get a training montage! Overall there are a few moments but mostly it's formulaic hagiography, from the Irish fondness for spirits, the duffer of a Dad, the mother's concern, the biffing brothers, right on down to the bloke getting the girl (Alexis Smith) who puts up a fight as she was taught to do.

Thomas M. Pryor at the time.

Kindle. A pointer from Jennifer Szalai's review of Becker's More Everything Forever (2025) which I won't be reading now.

Notionally Becker aims to dispel any lingering belief that the Copenhagen interpretation is a viable account of how quantum mechanics relates to reality. The key difficulty, as Becker admits semi-regularly, is that this interpretation is too ill-defined to wrestle with. That Becker proceeds to do a poor job with the wrestling does not help us understand why so many big-brained physicists let it ride. (Sure, this is a matter for philosophy, not physics, but even so.) Alloyed with too much assertion and insufficient argumentation, the bulk of the text is an attack on strawmen and a championing of the multiverse and pilot waves. The prose often gets bogged in short-order repetition; a hefty edit was in order. I mostly didn't feel like I was thinking. It's never made clear what might count as real. The major historical figures were drawn more incisively by Labatut (2021).

I wasn't impressed with his take on the philosophy of science, especially his sinking the boot into the Vienna Circle; this is particularly tiresome when fecund philosophers like Rudolf Carnap are name-dropped without any discussion of their contributions. Yes, verificationism, logical positivism, whatever are long bankrupt but it's not so easy to dispense with conceptual analysis and Popperian falsification (to me a necessary but not sufficient quality of a scientific theory), especially on the basis that we can never figure out the specific parts of a theory that deserve revision; Ehud Shapiro showed how to operationalise falsificationalism back in the 1980s (see MIS) and of course this problem is most of what training an AI has always been about. Perhaps Becker needed to peruse Chalmers's classic.

Broadly reviewed. James Gleick for the New York Times. Goodreads. Yes, the appendix is the best part of the book. If I'd read Peter Woit's take ahead of time I would've read something else, or maybe put my big-boy pants on and dug into the SEP articles.

Perhaps prompted by Daniel Soar's retrospective on Jean Tinguely which lead to the rabbit hole of useless kinematic machines. Lovingly constructed by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. A brief, strangely fascinating and kinda fun assembly of things causing other things to move, burn, explode, amuse.

More Olivia de Havilland completism, lazily responding to Amor Towles's prompting. Classic matinee fare in glorious Technicolor. Once again Errol Flynn delivered a very enjoyable performance in the lead. Things get a bit epic at times but her entrancement by him is too abrupt. I never realised that Claude Rains was once young. Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2003 and a lengthy retrospective. de Havilland's enrapture is gradual! Frank S. Nugent at the time.

The things Tony Leung makes me watch. I'm not totally surprised to see him pop up the in MCU, rueful and bemused, especially in what is basically a smoodgery of things he's done before: obviously there's some In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster but co-writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton also needed to mash in Michelle Yeoh's back catalogue, specifically Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Everything Everywhere All At Once, squashing the lot into some distant realm of a Star Wars-adjacent universe. Oh, and lethal daughter Meng'er Zhang gets her own private Fight Club.

The plot goes in the traditional way: a bloke who has lived too long encounters a femme fatale (Fala Chen) and decides to become mortal. Things go well until they don't, and when they don't there's way too much CGI and pointless twirling from the big friendly dragon, much like the women in many of Terrence Malick's features. The mythos is more ridiculous than Highlander and so much less fun. Awkwafina has some moments driving a bus in San Francisco, reheating those classic SF street scenes. Things are sometimes a little entertaining but always entirely formulaic.

Maya Phillips: Simu Liu is totally squandered in the lead.