peteg's blog

An accidental rewatch; I saw this at a cinema in Chicago in 2014 and forgot almost all of it. Written and directed by David Michôd after a spitballing with Joel Edgerton. No greater love has a man for his dog. Colin Stetson on the soundtrack!

A. O. Scott: "much of what happens seems arbitrary."

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and therefore inevitable. Apparently a loose adaption of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990) which I'm even less likely to read now. As with its predecessor Licorice Pizza (2021) it is so nostalgic that maybe you had to have been there (or are there now). The appropriation of Gil Scott Heron made me wonder what he would have made of these revolutionaries being filmed. It leans into gynephilia with mouth-breathing gusto. There's nothing much on the logic or philosophy of revolution, or even history beyond a stray comment from Benicio Del Toro about Mexico and a mention of the Philippines. Some of it dragged, like "gringo Zapata" Leonardo DiCaprio's password fails that were played for stale laughs. Teyana Taylor (A Thousand and One (2023)) does the heavy lifting early on; she departs with all the cabin pressure. Sean Penn as a Terminator-ish soldier doing domestic immigration police work. I did not get much of a grip on Eric Schweig's (The Last of the Mohicans (1992)) character. Alana Haim has a small role. Overlong. Jonny Greenwood's score is obtrusive. The humour felt downhill from the Coen brothers.

Widely feted as more-or-less the movie of the year; the competition is so thin I doubt it will be challenged. Dana Stevens: long in the oven. So many subcultures get their closeups. Oodles of cinematic debt: Leonardo's "wake-and-bake weed smoker and bathrobe-clad layabout" is (obviously) a direct lift from The Big Lebowski (1998), Penn nods to Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove. What is Anderson actually saying here? Peter Sobczynski. Nashville! The firing of heavy machine guns by pregnant women/nuns ... I guess you just have to be American. Jonathan Lethem at the New York Review of Books: The Weather Underground (2002). Jason Di Rosso interviewed Anderson. And so on.

Directed and co-written by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), The Light Between Oceans (2016), Sound of Metal (2019)). For Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, Peter Dinklage — one could be forgiven for having expectations! Channing Tatum leads. Kirt Gunn was the other co-writer.

This is tabloid fare, more (based on) true crime from 2004. The story has many all-American trimmings, some cute: the mode of robbing a number of McDonald's (etc), living in a Toys'R'Us box store, meeting the love of a life at a Presbyterian church, being impoverished and at a loose end after military service, unable to keep up with the Joneses or wifely expectations of material plenitude, the Southern accents. The setup in the first half chugs along agreeably but after that things really drag. Dinklage probably does the best as a store manager; at least I found his acting (facial work) the funniest in an Office Space (1999) sort of way. I'm not sure what Mendelsohn was thinking as the church leader. Dunst does what she can as a woman who'd like to be saved in this world and the next.

There's a reality version over the credits which shows that about five minutes is enough to do the story justice.

Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. Marya E. Gates at Roger Ebert's venue: two stars, "a slick but incurious film". Jason Di Rosso interviewed Cianfrance. The latter two both remark on some very good acting from Tatum and Dunst.

Directed by Robert Wise (The Set-Up (1949)) from a script by Abraham Polonsky and Nelson Gidding adapting William P. McGivern's novel.

Harry Belafonte led and was successful in a series of set-piece scenes, especially the jazzy ones in a nightclub where he memorably played the vibraphone and sabotaged Mae Barnes's performance of All Men Are Evil. Robert Ryan's (also The Set-Up (1949)) hard boiled racist is boring. Home-alone housewife Gloria Grahame had just enough screentime to ask "what’s going on in there? an orgy?" at his door (while his regular squeeze Shelley Winters is out working) but I couldn't believe Grahame would ever have been that hard up. Mastermind Ed Begley rounded out the trio of desperadoes from NYC who tried it on upstate, much as Linda Fiorentino did a few decades later. Unfortunately the plot is pedestrian and went as the production code required. Notionally noir but the best bits are jazz.

Bosley Crowther.

Vale Lee Tamahori (The Convert (2023)). Perhaps my third time around with his classic take on what it meant to be Māori in the latter half of the twentieth century. Riwia Brown adapted Alan Duff's novel of the same name from 1990. The cast is perfect. It now also functions as a time capsule of Auckland and surrounds.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He didn't grasp any cultural specifities or comment on the cinematic aspects. Janet Maslin: she grasped more of the details but still produced some clangers. I guess international audiences latch onto the universals — the dispossession, the love and domestic violence, the alcoholism, the wayward children, etc. — and miss the carefully constructed nuances. For instance we're shown at least five versions of the overhang of traditional Māori cultural practice, of which one seems to endorse the removal of children from families and another the impossibility of social and economic mobility. Strangely absent were the All Blacks.

Greek director Costa-Gavras was unknown to me. He adapted Vassilis Vassilikos's novel of the same name with help from Jorge Semprún and Ben Barzman. It rates highly at IMDB on the paranoid/political thriller scoreboards, and indeed in general. Somewhat timely I guess, or perhaps it is always timely.

Yves Montand leads, at least for the setup, as a leftist politician who is in town to deliver a speech and rile up the masses. (Perhaps this is how George McGovern presented.) The local powers-that-be want to plausibly-deniably obstruct the gathering and just maybe put a stop to this socialist nonsense. But some go further than that, and then a magistrate ("Le juge d'instruction", an enjoyably ice-cold and chic Jean-Louis Trintignant) drives the whole show off a cliff.

It is incredibly well made and entirely engrossing. We're shown how everything goes down with scenes that are fluently sliced up in ways that exhibit the internal states and histories of the characters while leaving us solidly anchored in time and perspective. (Lone Star (1996) tried for a similar effect but was nowhere as ambitious.) The cast is solid, the pacing excellent, the telling well-humoured. It doubles as a post-war time capsule for Algiers. There's some good work on the soundtrack (by Mikis Theodorakis), especially in the scene where a bloke is cheating at pinball.

I was a bit mystified why this Greek director made this actual Greek story (from 1963) in French with French actors (excepting Irene Papas who mostly facially emotes) in Algeria. It got the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1970 (submitted by Algeria!). Françoise Bonnot also deservedly won for Best Film Editing. I see that Costa-Gavras and Montand established a partnership similar to that of Melville and Delon (Le Samouraï (1967), etc.) and now have a new vein to mine.

Roger Ebert at the time: four stars, universal, Chicago and Sài Gòn. Armond White in 2009: it's not about the ideology... I'm not sure I can buy that. IMDB trivia: "The three-wheeled delivery vehicle that is referred to as 'kamikaze' is a 1965 Innocenti Lambretta Lambro 450."

Kindle. The tin (and cultural identity of the second author) suggested this would be about the Western Desert, i.e., the beautiful land west of Alice Springs, out past the West MacDonnell Ranges to Docker River and Warakurna, Papunya and so forth. The first story is set there, starting off at "Frontier Well" somewhere off the Gunbarrel Highway in Western Australia, and the second from Kintore, Northern Territory. But the third is in the Gulf Country, Queensland and the final one more firmly in the Pilbara, even Kimberley, Western Australia. That beginning recounts a night in Berlin when the Wall fell in 1989 which lead me to expect more of a meeting of (explicable, comprehendible) European high culture and Desert mysticism than I got.

Like The Moon of Hoa Binh (1994) there are several annoying aspects. Perhaps the worst are the flattened voices engaging in extended dialogue (really authorial-voice monologue) that each claim some distinct, esoteric knowledge that cannot be shared or at best imperfectly transmitted for reasons unspecified. I guess I was relieved that there was no pretence to scientism. Shallow/touristic takes on Aboriginal mythology/ontology are rubbished and then indulged in. The discursive Arabian Nights structure often cuts away just as things get interesting. There's an evasiveness, a contention that there is something out there for some people but probably not you, a spooky danger that I'm yet to find except when other people are nearby. Don't even think of loosening those fast suburban chains!

Another flaw is that the authors drop the names of lots of places but abidingly fail to evoke the places themselves; the ones I've been to (or near to) are unfamiliar or cursorily sketched here. There's a somewhat touching scene involving some World War II veterans returning to Corunna Downs Airfield (near Marble Bar) with the parties reminiscing about the Jupiter Well and Gary Junction Road. I'd say it's more fun to read about the actual places and history or just head out there. Stories about Len Beadell, namechecked here as he so often is, are generally great so perhaps his books are too. Aboriginal Stonehenge! Aboriginal astronomy!

One minor novelty here was the idea that the Desert ancestral spirits are ephemerally (on) the wind, in contrast to tales from Arnhem land (cf Gulpilil) which talk of eternal recurrence via waterholes.

Goodreads. Stephen Romei. (The slab quoting is smelly. It's a book made up of words.) Declan Fry: Percival Lakes, H.P. Lovecraft! I blotted that piece of cultural cringe out. Fry confuses secrecy and obfuscation (acts of commission) with Wittgensteinian ineffability, and defends the authors' inability or unwillingness to describe things that are hard to describe. Paul Daley at length. Of the land in direct opposition to Bruce Chatwin's drive-by novel. Tim Rowse: deserts are death. Understand with your ears!

All reviews are summaries, perhaps proving that engagement is not possible.

More noir. Directed by Charles Vidor. Rita Hayworth (Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Lady from Shanghai (1947)) leads, mostly desperately trying to catch Glenn Ford's attention after something unexplained went direly wrong with their previous romance. Inexplicably she turns up married to George Macready (a steely, Germanic performance not far from his turn as the General in Paths of Glory (1957)) who is running an illicit casino in Buenos Aires and has hired Ford as his number-two man. Steven Geray (Spellbound (1945), In a Lonely Place (1950), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, etc. etc.)) as the bloke in the gents who does more than you want is somehow omniscient.

Schematically the plot is not terrible (it's not so far from Casablanca (1942)) but the script (IMDB says it was heavily doctored) was. The characters are generally inscrutable, the timeline doesn't really work, and who really cares about the international tungsten trade anyway? It's all a bit frustrating as there's enough there for it to have been something.

Bosley Crowther at the time: crude and nonsensical.

Something of the complement of Kubrick's Killer's Kiss (1955): a boxer (Robert Ryan) is expected to throw a fight but his manager got greedy and didn't tell him. His wife (Audrey Totter (Alias Nick Beal (1949)) wants him to retire and has a restless evening strolling the demimonde while he's in the ring.

Directed by Robert Wise (who went on to collect two Oscars each for West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965); he edited The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Citizen Kane (1942)!) from a script by Art Cohn. Brief, completely linear, very well constructed; the crowd shots are telling and often horrible-hilarious against the tension of what's happening in the ring. One of those things people did before T.V.

The reviews were generally dire but I was curious to see what Benny Safdie could do without his brother Josh (Uncut Gems (2019)). The obvious referent is Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) and, like Mickey Rourke there, you cannot fault Dwayne Johnson's commitment. Apparently some parts are shot-for-shot remakes of The Smashing Machine (2002) and it is never clear why anyone would want that. (That earlier doco about early MMA fighter Mark Kerr was directed by John Hyams, making this an improbable jag from Capricorn One (1978).)

Fatally none of the characters have any depth. Emily Blunt's is the most annoying as she never found the right register; I felt she was miscast as there are plenty of American actresses who know how. In mitigation they did equip her with a beautiful cat. Nala Sinephro (having a moment?) mangled The Star Spangled Banner, and there's a scene that proves that some things even Bruce Springsteen cannot elevate. Perhaps they should have cast Adam Sandler.

Dana Stevens: superficial. Peter Sobczynski: quite flawed. Both struggled to discern what the Safdie(s) are trying to say and why anyone should care. Jason Di Rosso interviewed the cinematographer Maceo Bishop.

They may or may not have faked the Moon landings but they definitely faked the Mars landings! — and the reasons were uninspired. Written and directed by Peter Hyams who seemed to want to make something encompassing all the genres; bits and pieces sorta work but the whole thing is busted, ending up like the dog that caught the car. There are some vintage 1970s touches like two helicopters chasing a biplane cop duster. Shades of Firefox (1982). Elliott Gould! Karen Black! O.J. Simpson! (As you might expect from this 1990s performances he was always a poor actor.) David Huddleston! In two sittings as it's pretty tedious.

Vincent Canby.

I'm always tempted to see what people make out of Henrik Ibsen's plays; a while ago I saw fantastic stage productions of A Doll's House and Ghosts, and even another bowdlerised version of Hedda at NIDA so long ago. This one took two nights to get through; it's airless and no fun. Directed by Nia DaCosta from her own adaptation of Hedda Gabler (~ 1891); she made the derided The Marvels (2023).

The scenario has Hedda (Tessa Thompson) swanning around a huge country mansion that she's convinced her new husband (Tom Bateman) is the prix d'amour. This night she hosts a party of academicians who will or won't grant him the role that could finance her lifestyle. (The house, the adults-behaving-as-kids, the psychologising, the substance abuse put me in mind of Steve (2025).) The whole edifice does not make a tonne of sense: so many scenes do not work, all of the characters are frenemies, and whyever would you bring your McGuffin to a party like that one? Imogen Poots, Nina Hoss, neither great. Hildur Guðnadóttir's score is often obtrusive.

A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times: sure, Hedda just wants to have fun but what's in it for us? — and I definitely miss my appendix. "They say that lying is the second most fun a girl can have." Marya E. Gates at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars and an even-handed diagnostic. Peter Bradshaw: literally Chekhovian, as if there was any doubt. Peter Sobczynski.

More Matthew McConaughey completism; he's so young here. Directed by Joel Schumacher from a script by Akiva Goldsman that adapted the book by John Grisham.

The premise is that Mississippi lawyer McConaughey is defending labourer Samuel L. Jackson on a couple of murder charges after the latter lays great vengeance and furious anger upon two rednecks who have raped his 10 year old daughter. The complete absence of greys in the racial, epistemic and moral setup means the whole edifice is mere emotive provocation, a chance for everyone to take to their soapboxes and spout the obvious catechisms about justice, vigilanteism, the death penalty, the optionality of underwear. Given Grisham's background as a lawyer it's surprisingly not very equal-opportunity about that. So much dodgy dialogue, so much dead air while we await the obvious outcome. It's not Mississippi Burning (1988), it's not 12 Angry Men (1957).

Some of the supporting cast had it a bit better than the leads: Sandra Bullock has some fun as a sultry northern scion as does Oliver Platt as a divorce lawyer. Kevin Spacey is a generically bland prosecutor in his signature smooth/slick/smirking mode. Kiefer Sutherland and Donald Sutherland phone it in. Not enough is asked of Chris Cooper. Brenda Fricker is solid but to no end.

Roger Ebert: three stars. McConaughey's climactic courtroom speech made me queasy too. Janet Maslin: there's more grey in there than I'm prepared to admit.