peteg's blog

Kindle. Is this satire or Kaplan's best dream life?

It's the present day (any time you like from about 1950 to 2025) in a Washington D.C. where all the ladies are powerful and foxy. A minor jape threatens to ignite World War 3 and it is up to the flawed decision makers to get it right for all the wrong reasons. We are fortunate that they receive so much competent help from the ladies and our leading man, especially in spite of his business model being to speak out of both sides of his mouth. Apparently it is not yet too late to find something to believe in, especially if you're the man the moment has called forth.

Kaplan knows from his deep, lengthy research that nuclear war cannot be limited; this precludes him from sharing the delusions of Ackerman and Stavridis (and others) about the coming apocalypse. He's less interested in the global view (India does not feature, of course China is America's foe, the Russians are abidingly relevant) but similarly emphasises that personal links dominate the institutional ones. (I expect all three would concur that today's institutions are incapable of meeting our actual historical moment.)

The characters mostly speak with flattened voices, excepting a New England Defence Secretary. The occasional genuinely funny bit is interspersed with some clunky exposition, but we're not here for high literature. The best bit of didacticism comes late in the form of a warning from the Chinese back channel: if the US backs down from a conventional war then the chances of later, worse conflict increase.

Lawrence D. Freedman at Foreign Affairs: it coulda been autofic. Bill Thompson: game theory gone bonkers. Goodreads: expectations not met?

Second time around with Mike Leigh's followup to Secrets and Lies (1996). The two-track structure follows besties Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman over their time at university and six years later as thirty year olds. I doubtlessly missed all the fine class markers but it's clear that getting educated has not lead to the employment or men of their dreams; Leigh wants to push the determinism of origins, particularly family. The prospective men are all caricatures or at best shorthands, such as Andy Serkis's futures trader who is all nerve endings. There's less pain here than usual and more ruefulness. Minor by Leigh's lofty standards.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Yep, Leigh missed a trick by not getting Ewan McGregor for the real estate agent role. Janet Maslin: Cartlidge adapted David Thewlis's performance from Naked (1993) in something of a role reversal. Every character is an island.

Kindle. Somewhat better than the last thing I read from Ackerman and kinda fun. Clearly he's aiming for a Bourne- or Jack Reacher-like franchise, a series of books and maybe a movie deal, something that might interest Tom Cruise while economising on the creative labour.

The game is that two impoverished special ops veterans take on the task of repossessing an aircraft from parties unknown for parties unknown. Things go OK in a mildly mysterious and vaguely realistic manner until the midsection lays it all out for us and we hurtle to what seems to be a satisfying conclusion for the Western participants. The plot is overly-convoluted and determined, at least if the outcome was in fact the intended one, and not so twisty; most events just serve to move the cast around the world (Uganda, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Marseilles, Kyiv) so that further character development (an Amish man! a dominatrix!) can occur alongside much colour. There's not a lot of action but many cinematic touches and far too many coincidences.

The vibe is a lightweight heist, perhaps like an Oceans instalment complete with the luxe trimmings and class signifiers. A dash of the Atticus Lish post-war blues and some reluctant fundamentalism is served up without conviction. Ackerman's Waiting for Eden (2018) seems as distant now as this is from that timeless tale of wartime graft, Catch-22 (1961).

Goodreads. Rav Grewal-Kök at the New York Times: some parts are (sanitised) autofic. An interview with Celia McGee: "The book is being developed as a streaming series by Tom Hanks’s production company, and Ackerman is at work on a sequel."

Inevitable after Fury Road (2015). I wasn't interested at the time as I'm not much of a fan of Anya Taylor-Joy; she leads here but is in at most two-thirds of it. (Alyla Browne is fine as the younger version of her character and I was happy she got so much screen time.) Things are once again batshit but less relentlessly so; I feel director/co-writer George Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris had too much plot to get through, too much to explain or retconn, which yielded an excess of dialogue and straitening. For instance we know from the start that Chris Hemsworth's Dementus (a vintage performance of principled (or at least philosophical) boganism right up there with David Wenham's) is not going to make it. That and the aimless riding around the Wasteland robs it of tension. The CGI did not do justice to the stunts.

Jason Di Rosso interviewed Miller and producer Doug Mitchell. Dana Stevens. Peter Bradshaw. Luke Goodsell had seen enough of it before. Andy Hazel on the making of. The budget was huge.

Apparently Jackie Chan's first serious dramatic role. The entirety is serious excepting a few brief comedic bits in the middle that made me wonder what could have been; perhaps those were directed by Chan rather than Kirk Wong (The Big Hit (1998)). The plot started out looking like a dry run for Infernal Affairs (2002) but shifted to something more vanilla. There's a trip to Taiwan that echoes A Better Tomorrow (1986). Some aspects dangle; police psychiatrist Ling Ling Pan has no influence over anything. Kent Cheng pays off his paramour (Christine Ng) with an abode on the Gold Coast. The cinematography and editing are mostly excellent.

Some details at Wikipedia. Claims to be derived from a real story. The (nuts) climactic scenes were shot in the soon-to-be-razed Kowloon Walled City. City on Fire.

Dreckier than the reviews suggested. Writer/director James Gunn more-or-less just leaned on recycled MCU tropes, an admission that the Superman character is now too boring to anchor an entire feature. David Corenswet led but was eclipsed in all his scenes by everyone else: Bradley Cooper as Jor-El, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Nathan Fillion from Firefly/Serenity. Rachel Brosnahan had more to work with than she did in The Amateur (2025) but her Lois Lane is still no more than a damsel not in distress. Parker Posey did far better as Luthor's girlfriend/sidekick in Superman Returns (2006) than model Sara Sampaio here.

There's far too much exposition, most of it delivered rapidly by walk-and-talk, much of it denying the possibility of deep fakery against a backdrop of generic CGI. Perhaps the dog swung it for the susceptible.

Dana Stevens: "What if, instead of forever grittily rebooting the same stories, we let ourselves hope for something different and good?" Peter Sobczynski: "yet another misfire"; cluttered with characters who will soon get their own reboots.