More Errol Flynn completism, and for Ava Gardner too. This adapts Hemingway's take (1926) on the Americans who stayed behind in Europe, specifically Paris, after World War I, and while I did somewhat enjoy the later A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) I won't be seeking out the source material for this one.
There are many problems with this movie. The largest by far is that Flynn steals every scene he's in; his Scottish-gentry dipso is magnetic and graceful where leading man Tyrone Powell is leaden, declamatory, wooden. Gardner is clearly rusted on to the wrong man but that's her prerogative as the only American girl-woman in Paris and Pamplona. (She's a lot younger here than, for instance, The Night of the Iguana (1964), where she shows more determination to get what she wants.) Too many ancillary characters don't contribute to what we're shown though are perhaps necessary to illustrate the multitudes Papa Hemingway thought he contained. But his notions of manliness are variations on a very narrow theme.
The cinematography is often quite good but was just as often ruined by the editing. The street fete/carnival scenes are chopped up so poorly; Coppola did far better in The Godfather Part II (1974).
Bosley Crowther gave it the thumbs up. "[Gardner] simply doesn't, or can't, convey the lady's innate, poignant air of breeding, for all [her] promiscuity. Sorry, Miss Gardner." Details at Wikipedia. Hemingway himself: "I guess the best thing about the film was Errol Flynn." Too many bistros.
More slow cinema from director Kelly Reichardt and writer Jonathan Raymond (also jointly responsible for First Cow (2019)). Once again on the Oregon Trail. In a couple of sittings due to a lack of grip.
The script is a bit weak with the usual tropes: an encounter with a native American divides the settlers in the obvious way, disaster strikes but even before that hunger and thirst are close. The men and women are divided along gender and every other line. And then it just evaporates.
This leaves the stellar cast with not enough to do. Bruce Greenwood (Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997)) plays a coarse outdoorsman who is charged with leading the group to the promised land. Will Patton, in his least creepy role ever, has Michelle Williams as his second wife. She's the actual lead, or at least the most interesting. Shirley Henderson forms half of another couple, and similarly Paul Dano.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "More an experience than a story." A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Reichardt had already spent a lot of cinematic time in Oregon. Dana Stevens: "there's something about [Williams's] character that doesn't sit quite right." I agree: she never seems to bear the risks she runs.
A sequel to Gettin' Square (2003) that nobody asked for, much like T2 Trainspotting (2017). David Wenham starred (of course) and produced. He's hard to hate. Chris Nyst wrote and Jonathan Teplitzky directed both. Timothy Spall, Freya Stafford, Sam Worthington and Richard Carter do not return; Carter's character got recast (Bob Franklin).
It's a nostalgia kick. The plot is very woolly, the jokes very stale, the confected slang trying. The retroconned backstory moved things from the zany subtropical crime scene toward Australiana soap-and-away. The reheating of scenes from the original, specifically that court scene, are cringe. Redemption! They try to reflect multiculturalism via asylum seekers, Syrians and Maori (hey that's Indira!). Sombre, elegiac: so much death. Mere TV.
Luke Buckmaster. Sandra Hall. Both indulge the local product.
Maggie Cheung completism. Released the same year as Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996).
Mainly this critiques the sad state of French and American filmmaking both directly and via the reductive meta navel gazing mechanism of freshening up a French classic of the silent era (Les Vampires (1915)) with a foreign actress (Maggie). Auteur Olivier Assayas loved the conceit so much he remade this very movie with Alicia Vikander in 2022.
Some of it is amusing (I did enjoy Nathalie Richard’s efforts as the costumer) but there's a tad too much of the French self-referential tradition that I lacked the background for. That made it mostly about Maggie for me: she cops some stick for starring in Police Story (1985) with Jackie Chan. An interviewer lays it on thick by championing Bullet to the Head (1990) and John Woo's masculinity. Does she think Alain Delon is much chop? Even his repetition and inarticulate slagging-off of arthouse cinema is of a piece with the rest of it: heavy-handed and stale.
The best parts were Maggie notionally playing herself, unaffectedly out of her element in Paris but speaking enough French to bring into question her ignorance of the other proceedings. She made a great catwoman and perhaps Hong Kong should have paid tribute to Hollywood with a Batman remake.
Janet Maslin: sardonic. Stephanie Zacharek let her youthful exuberance run away with her.
At Alice Springs Cinema, cinema #2, front row, 18.30, almost just me. Directed and co-written by Justin Kurzel (The Order (2024), etc.). Nick Fenton is credited as the other co-writer. It seemed to take an age to get a release (on 2025-07-12?) after its premiere at MIFF 2024 last August.
There are three interleaved storylines. One has Warren Ellis engineering the soundtrack for this movie in Paris and is essentially padding. I guess it's sorta fun hearing him speak French and wondering what the sound engineer makes of his Australianisms. And hear him layering sounds, some of which reminded me of Ben Frost. Another lays out the purpose of the Ellis Park home for trafficked animals, perhaps too briefly. (The park of that name in Adelaide (where the best speed in Australia may or may not be sold) and the famous rugby field in Johannesburg do not feature. Kurzel shows that he is no David Attenborough, or Errol Morris for that matter.) The main thread tracks Ellis on a visit to Victoria, presumably in 2023 as he was recording Love Changes Everything (2024) with the Dirty Three, released after their Australian tour in 2024, through to a visit to the titular park in Sumatra and the passing of his father in December 2023.
The early camerawork during the return to Ballarat was not promising but at some point things settled down enough for me to enjoy Ellis's unaccompanied violin in spaces that had meant something to him as a young man. I'd forgotten that he'd released a memoir (Nina Simone's Chewing Gum (2021)) and therefore lacked the context that may have made that motif more significant than twee.
The homepage for Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary suggests that Nick Cave is also putting in some cash (personally and via their Goliath Enterprises vehicle). Cave himself appears but only in archival footage. No other musician speaks except Ellis's father; Ellis tells us that his father wrote songs by opening a book of poetry and singing it to whatever chords he was playing, a process that is clearly inapplicable to Ellis's wordless music. At some point Ellis says to the prime motive force for the Park, Femke den Haas, that he doesn't want to be "that person" (elsewhere: Bono) but it struck me that throughout the whole movie, he is that person. This indulgence is smothered by worthiness and redeemed by Ellis's ability and willingness to trust and muddle forward, and be increasingly open about himself. Even so I was looking at my watch after the first hour.
I avoided the coverage before I saw it. Luke Buckmaster saw it at MIFF 2024. He seems to get (but doesn't spell out) the Heart of Darkness aspect of the journey to Sumatra. Indigo Bailey talked with Ellis recently. He might be right that cynicism doesn't get you anywhere. Andy Hazel was on the shoot (?) and I'd've preferred to have seen what he wrote about. Andrew Dominik on Ellis: "He appears to be letting it all hang out, but he’s not really telling you anything about himself." Kirsten Krauth: the through line is trauma. It could've should've been Fitzcarraldo (1982) but Kurzel is not Herzog either. The filmmaking process was somewhat therapeutic for Ellis but did not prevent a year-long breakdown between initial shooting and completion. An incomplete portrait. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Kurzel as did many others. And so on.
Kindle. Unlike Clune's earlier non-academic output (Whiteout (2013), Gamelife (2015)) I didn't get this one, his first novel. Once again we're in the suburbs of Chicago, it's high school, and fifteen-year-old Nick-our-narrator is starting to have panic attacks after the separation of his parents. He readily falls in with a bunch of cool kids via his underdrawn best mate and new girlfriend. The putatively helpful high-culture artefacts (authored or proximate to Oscar Wilde, Giotto, Bach, etc.) aren't described in a way that helped this reader understand how they helped Nick; things are not exactly real but they're not very magical either.
Clune's technique of repeating things in the small is not so effective here; I think it was intended to evoke the process of thinking and perhaps I was spoilt by his and Catherine Lacey's mastery of a decade ago... or maybe it only works a few times. He's far better at the things between people such as the hilarious encounter Nick has with a shrink who only offers proforma treatments. Things get a bit cult-ish (Ian is transparently unhinged and dangerous). The foreshadowing made Nick's character somewhat incoherent; he often wants to just exit (a desire even more dominant these days) but sticks around for reasons unknown. The social circle falls apart for reasons unspecified.
Unsatisfying.
Goodreads. Kaveh Akbar (Martyr! (2024)). Much later, Christian Lorentzen summarised it for the London Review of Books.
I always enjoy listening to George Miller chatting about his life philosophy (he's regularly on the ABC) but am generally less enthused by his movies (Mad Max (1979), the premise of Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), etc). Apparently I saw this one before but I don't remember.
This time around I felt like Roger Ebert must have felt when he finally understood David Lynch via Mulholland Drive (2001): the relentless action of the first movement is all too much and yet when things slowed down I felt that every moment spent on the plot was wasted. The reason is that Miller does a huge amount of character development through interaction and not dialogue. And fashion, let's not forget that. This must be Nicholas Hoult's finest performance. Shot by John Seale. #182 on the IMDB top-250 list. What a blast.
The dreck that Florence Pugh makes me watch. The main problem here is that she's so much better than everything else on the screen; perhaps it is time she took a leaf from Clint Eastwood's playbook and sunk her MCU winnings into her own production company.
This movie's purpose is to get a team together, much like earlier MCU instalments, Suicide Squad (2016), Justice League (2017), etc. Getting in the way is the need to acknowledge general eye-rolling exhaustion with this stale property. The writing room's solution was to smoodge Pixar's Inside Out (2015) with a Cube (1997) multiverse into something very emo. The superman thing initially put me in mind of Matthew Goode's Ozymandias in Watchmen (2009) but really it's a humourless reheat of Iron Man 3 (2013) or Age of Ultron (2015) with a dash of that Guardians (2014) zaniness. So, not entirely fan service, just mostly fan service.
On the civilian side we get Geraldine Viswanathan (same-same as she was in Drive Away Dolls (2024): a relatable Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha everywoman type?) playing baddie Julia Louis-Dreyfus's personal assistant. The Kierkegaard regurgitation is cringey, and there's way too much "exposition" with "finger quotes". Were these scenes from an aborted Seinfeld reboot?
It took me a while to recognise Lewis Pullman; he has the same eyes and sheepish grin as his dad Bill. Perhaps he'll be President one day! (Later I found out he was in Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)). The homage to The Matrix was lame. Settling his personal (brain chemical) issues with violence was lame. Not being asked to factor huge numbers was lame. So much lame.
Manohla Dargis. I did not enjoy David Harbour's showboating. Flo's doing her own stunts, just like Tom Cruise ... therefore Mission Impossible beckons? Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue. Hannah John-Kamen really did get a numpty of a character.
I've seen a few of Miyazaki's movies (Howl's Moving Castle (2004), The Wind Rises (2013)) but somehow not this, his masterwork. The art is gorgeous. I can't say I grasped the whole mythos; I think it's a Japan-ified Wizard of Oz. There's a small homage to it and to Pixar as the young girl makes her way up a path. The humour is fantastic. #31 in the IMDB top-250.
Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2012. Alice in Wonderland. Kamaji is a great invention. (It was the hopping light pole that I took as a homage to Pixar.) This "ma", the emptiness between actions, is exactly what George Miller omitted. Elvis Mitchell made it a Critic's Pick. Apparently now a stage production.
