peteg's blog

Kindle. I remember (perhaps faultily) enjoying his previous novels: Family Planning (2008) and The Association of Small Bombs (2016). This one is perhaps a lengthy and not great expansion on the first.

After a first-person intro that sketches how things are going to go we get a series of character studies intermingled with some minor-note action. It's set mostly in the airless Delhi complex that appears to be the sole legacy of nation-builder SP Chopra to his children with a completely vanilla take on Desi in London and nowhereland Michigan, from (ballpark) the 1970s to mid-1990s. I didn't feel any of the characters popped and none did anything particularly interesting or novel; stuff just happens. The politics is mostly described and not explained, excepting one incident where the BJP needed to manufacture a distraction. At times he seems to be drawing a line from the Nehru regime to Modi via the naysayers, Hindutva, Indira and Sonia Gandhi. Humourless.

Jonathan Dee at the New York Times. Goodreads.

Inevitable once I realised Lukas Moodysson was still active. This is apparently the first thing he's done since the TV series Gösta (2019) and his first feature after Vi är bäst! (2013). The latest in a long line of uncalled-for sequels. It seems he managed to convince almost all of the original cast to reunite; notably missing are Michael Nyqvist who passed in 2017 and Ola Norell/Rapace; the latter's Lasse was recast. In a few sittings due to a failure to grip.

It doesn't function as a standalone film but if you've just rewatched the original it also mostly just doesn't work as you can see everything coming a long way off. Some of it is just plain sad, not poignant or effective, and other bits are outright boring. There's a sense of gutlessness, of punching down. Moodysson should have just left things be.

Thinly reviewed. Cath Clarke at the Guardian. Moodysson is becoming misanthropic. Henric Brandt: stagnancy.

Third time around with this Lukas Moodysson classic. Prompted by the realisation that he made Tillsammans 99 (2023) while I wasn't watching. Also Ola Norell (later Ola Rapace) was in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), and Michael Nyqvist in A Hidden Life (2019).

As cringe comedy it felt like Moodysson crested the Dogme 95 wave with steadier camerawork and a soundtrack drawn entirely from the scenario. That early kitchen scene is still the best. The ending felt unearnt.

Roger Ebert: three stars and a very dodgy lagom-for-me-tack review. Stephanie Zacharek at length. Dave Kehr at the New York Times. Wikipedia has all the details. Nobody compared it with Mike Leigh's English realism.

Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. She promised it'd be a trashy and fun return-to-form for director Sam Raimi. In two sittings.

It's a workplace comedy! — which means it's got a lot of #metoo and everyone is everyone else's frenemy. We spend the first hour and a bit with a dorkified "strategy and planning" Survivor fan Rachel McAdams and her vacuous scion-boss-bro Dylan O'Brien and others getting things set up, culminating in the lead pair being stranded on an island in the Bay of Thailand. As a two-hander it gets a bit Misery (1990) and as trash it fares maybe a little better than The Housemaid (2025) despite the clunkiness. But I can't say I enjoyed his performance much — he's too bro and uninventive. As for McAdams, she has a bit of fun and does OK within her limited range. Her character did not make a tonne of sense as she unstably alternates between knowing survivalism and getting suckered by the man-boy; is she all tactics and no strategy? Is she incapable of learning? Raimi does not stick the ending. Cracked but not cracked enough.

Bill Pope's cinematography is quite fine.

Peter Sobczynski. I did not know where to look for Bruce Campbell.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Jaydon Martin. Both were excited about the film receiving a prize at Rotterdam. More slow cinema.

I was hoping for another work that explained Queensland and Queenslanders to the rest of us. Canonically there are Chris Master's The moonlight state (1987), Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and Rick Morton's A Hundred Years of Dirt (2018), each of which digs deep from a distinct perspective. John Birmingham and Spiteri add essential colour. In contrast this "docufiction", funded by VicScreen and featuring, at a guess, zero Victorians, tries to mine a new-age spirituality whose time has passed. One suspects that Victoria's civilising mission has stalled out far south of Bundaberg where the film spends most of its time.

Notionally the lead is dying from some malady and is looking for some kind of redemption, or at least a spot in the Christian section of God's heaven. He had a lot of fun in Kings Cross as a young man and has suffered a lot since. We're shown him, second-bean fish-and-chipper Andrew Wong and some randoms in a variety of locations: at home, in the shower, in an MRI machine, at the takeaway shop, a ten-pin bowling alley, watching a biff in the carpark of a pub that is nowhere close to a Bruce Springsteen ballet. Bibles are bashed, the old codger gets baptised in a non-flooding river somewhere. Some blokes unload some guns, perhaps gratuitously killing some wildlife off screen. (Come on guys, we've seen Wake in Fright (1971), we know the score.) Toyotas! Living in caravans. Parents dying. The archaic, iconic burning of the cane fields is referenced. So much pain, so many quacks. All soaked in alcohol. I do not recall any mention of sport.

The black-and-white cinematography is lush, like Ivan Sen's, but lacks his sense of belonging to country. There are some great images — that decaying Queenslander was crying out for a proper horror movie treatment — but not enough propulsion. For all the craft we never find out where he buys his smokes.

Wikipedia has a roundup. Wendy Ide says it is "unvarnished" while Martin Kudlac says that it "exhibits a level of formal polish uncharacteristic of a straightforward documentary." Most reviewers do not distinguish (regional) Queensland from the rest of the country.

Second time around with the first two seasons of Lars von Trier's classic (or at least cult) TV series, prompted by him producing a third. Also an improbable Udo Kier jag from The Secret Agent (2025).

There's some inspired stuff up front: the Bondo arc is great, as is the playing up of the Danish and Swedish cultural conflicts and (sometimes) the juxtaposing of the spiritual and the scientific. The first two seasons also function as proto-Dogme 95 time capsules. The third season fails to cohere — perhaps because Ernst-Hugo Järegård's Helmer was so effectively stagey whereas Mikael Persbrandt's half-Helmer is so bland — and the steadier digital cinematography looks a lot more generic. I couldn't get excited about "Swedes Anonymous" or von Trier's take on sexual, etc. politics; the dumb stuff here is too often just dumb and not funny. That may be Willem Dafoe's most inert performance. In any case the whole thing owes a lot, too much, to David Lynch.

Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue on the third season: three-and-a-half stars and all the context.

I figured I should try more history since reading Dean Ashenden's view from the north, and having enjoyed David G. Marr's excellent work. I was hoping Reynolds would provide an overview of evolving conceptions of sovereignty and property across the Australian continent and lay out just what native title is and allows, but this is not that book. (This text suggests I consult Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) but surely that lacks reflection on the impact of the Wik decision of the same year and anything that has happened since.) Indeed Reynolds's (revisionary) focus is on the British/European settlement of the country and race relations; he does not discuss, for instance, the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in World War II, the Kokda Track, Cyclone Tracey or other natural disasters, anthropology, science, culture/arts (no Gulpilil!), why treaties weren't signed, etc. Perplexingly he takes the Northern Territory to be just the Top End (the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land), despite Alice Springs being just short of his Tropic of Capricorn demarcation and Ashenden's Tennant Creek well in scope.

Overall I didn't find it as good as his essays; a few chapters needed another round of editing and I often wished he'd expanded on the assertions and self-citations in this text. In brief his thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Australia's north generally remained on their lands while working for cockies/squatters on a mutually-beneficial or at least placatory basis, in contrast to the south where the connections were mostly severed. This was due to labour shortages, of the unwillingness of the young colonials to settle in the harsh northern climate, which of course led to misunderstandings in the faraway centres of power about how things actually worked in the north. There is also an account of nineteenth-century multiculturalism in the new tropical towns: Chinese merchants, tailors, miners, railway constructors, etc., Japanese pearlers, South-East Asians, Pacific Islanders working the cane fields; Australia is forever short of agricultural labour.

The final chapter is the best as it is succinct and clear like his essays. We're told the pastoral leases of the mid-nineteenth century already required that access be provided for cultural purposes but this provision was not enforced. (Reynolds asserts that plain-vanilla common-law leases would have extinguished native title which makes it all the more perplexing that the imperial regime (out of London) did not sort out their intent towards the indigenous peoples well before Federation brought White Australia in 1901.) He does not explain why the British colonial powers took three goes at claiming sovereignty over the continent. I also wanted to understand what the native title regime provides for; from the little I understand it is a very degraded notion of property, at least by the standard of freehold. This may be a reasonable or at least workable compromise in the context of pastoral leases, etc. (I don't know) but the legal regime in places where the people have never been dispossessed (cf the peoples of the Kimberley, the Yolŋu, the Torres Strait Islanders and elsewhere) needed more explication.

The north is now being occupied; where the romantic propaganda failed the military (specifically the U.S. military) is pulling people in and aiming to stay. At least until the next big one.

Broadly reviewed when it was released in November 2025. Glyn Davis. Mark McKenna sounds like he's read all Reynolds's books and can't separate this one from its predecessors. Judith Brett summarised it. Indeed it does add to the why-Queensland-is-different canon. And so on.

Written and directed by Bart Layton who based his script on a novella by Don Winslow. Widely billed as a derivative of Michael Mann's classics — I'd say it's Heat (1995) with a Collateral (2004) of Thief (1981) — but, perhaps because of a semi-recognisable Halle Berry, Australian slab of a lead Chris Hemsworth and a dodgy plot, it more often put me in mind of Swordfish (2001).

Basically Hemsworth (in the Robert De Niro role) is supposed to be a very competent high-class thief who abhors violence. That being the case, why doesn't he just get with the crypto or some other zero-contact sport? He gets sick of mentor Nick Nolte (think Jack Nicholson in The Departed (2006)) taking a cut and declines the next gig, leaving the floor to Barry Keoghan's psycho. Or perhaps it was because Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown (2024)) is so very distracting. (She finds the mystery man appealing but remains a mystery to us. Apparently she trained as a dancer; I can only wonder what a pairing with Mads Mikkelsen may have achieved.) Mark Ruffalo got the Al Pacino role, or on another vector, John Hamm's. Much is made of Berry's disgruntled high-end insurance agent being an age-appropriate 53 but nothing happens between her and Ruffalo, or Ruffalo and his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh for that matter. The last is quite fine in a very small role.

It's all exit scams and one-last-gigs. The opsec and logic are generally poor and there is no James Caan or Tom Cruise competency here: Thor does not properly settle with Nolte and the ending is very unsatisfying. I don't know how Storm expected to get her cut, but near as I could tell she showed Thor a photo of the bloke who was supposed to be carrying the diamonds and that certainly wasn't the Hulk. This left two options: either Thor aborts the whole show due to excess risk or recognises the silly buggers going on and realises he could still get the cash. Similarly the Hulk must suspect Keoghan is going to show which again raises the risk too high for him to go through with things, being a police officer and all. Neither take a considered option.

The cinematography is sometimes OK but does not make the city pop: no neon on car hoods, no harsh fluoros, just the head and tail lights of endless commuter traffic against glass-and-steel skyscrapers. The editing (by Jacob Secher Schulsinger and Julian Hart) is often very good. The acting is generally no more than adequate. Humourless.

Matt Zoller Seitz at length for Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Not cute. The "luxurious cinematography [..] transforms Los Angeles into a city of dark magic." Peter Bradshaw: four stars. Missing only two elements for it to be a full homage to Mann. Who knew there was this much pent-up demand for Mann-style capers? — but IMDB suggests the great unwashed masses were less into it than the paid reviewers. Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: the debt to Mann is "so immense that it’s hard not to come away feeling that the movie itself is stolen goods." Reheated. Barbaro got the Amy Brenneman role. Payman Maadi did not get the Adam Sandler role. Self help! Peter Sobczynski: achingly familiar. "Hemsworth [..] [never got] a chance to demonstrate the sense of sly humour found in his best performances."

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Sergey Loznitsa. Georgy Demidov provided the source material. In two sittings due to tedium.

Loznitsa is Ukrainian and had interesting things to say in that interview, making me think there was going to be more going on than there was. The first half is pure slow cinema: we spend a lot of time waiting with freshly-minted lawyer now prosecutor Alexander Kuznetsov to visit political prisoner Aleksandr Filippenko during Stalin's purges in the 1930s. He provides an expository dump that causes the credulous protagonist to travel to Moscow in search of the Attorney General who will doubtlessly make things right for Party members in good standing. More happens in the latter half but nothing surprising; the entire project is riven by a naivete that might be touching if only the world wasn't as it is. There is a little of that signature black Russian humour but none of it bites.

Ben Kenigsberg at Roger Ebert's venue: "There isn’t, in the final analysis, that much that happens in the movie [...]. The suspense is simply in waiting for the totalitarian machinery to grind into place." We have ample time to admire the care taken with the details. Nicolas Rapold made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. "It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny." — but surely everyone is familiar with weaponized slow walking these days.

A Dick Powell jag from Murder, My Sweet (1944). Apparently he directed despite the credit going to Robert Parrish. William Bowers based his screenplay on a story by Jerome Cady.

Powell returns to Los Angeles after a five year spell in gaol when ex-marine Richard Erdman (Stalag 17 (1953), good) claims he didn't do it. We soon find out that "it" was a theft of 100k USD and indeed Powell did not do it. Erdman gets distracted by "available! that's me" Jean Porter (spouse of Edward Dmytryk who directed Murder, My Sweet (1944)) while Powell puts up a fight with old flame Rhonda Fleming (Out of the Past (1947), Spellbound (1945)) who just happened to marry his best mate after being turned down a few too many times. That bloke is still in the can on a related rap. Things sort of circle the drain as Regis Toomey's cop hovers and inscrutable underworld boss William Conrad tries to err on the legitimate side of things.

Perhaps because he was distracted by his directorial duties, Powell is a bit wooden here, at least against the solid performances he got from the rest of the cast. As a noir it's not that twisty but sufficiently fun. Erdman gets all the good lines, somehow putting me in mind of Miguel Ferrer in Twin Peaks.

Bosley Crowther.

Third time around with this Pixar classic, perhaps prompted by co-writer/director Andrew Stanton having a new picture out just now (In the Blink of an Eye (2026)) that by all accounts is a bit dire.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. What more could he want? Dana Stevens. Stephanie Zacharek.

Ken Loach directed a script by Jim Allen; they did it again a few years later in Land and Freedom (1995). This won Loach the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1990.

Journo Frances McDormand (in one of her less convincing performances) and human rights laywer/boyfriend Brad Dourif are wrapping up their activities in Belfast when he receives an apparently vital lead that takes him into the Irish countryside in the early morning. They've just completed their collection of testimony about the British authorities' dirty business in Northern Ireland but it is this last piece that somehow tips someone over the edge. Brian Cox (fine) arrives to investigate. Things go along OK in a TV police-procedural mode until we get a few zoomed-out tail-end expository dumps. McDormand's character makes little sense: she has absolutely no op-sec and shows little awareness of the danger she may be in or the damage she causes others. Why did she return to Belfast? — and who would ever expect justice from the very regime she's just spent all that time documenting?

There is some good but insufficient footage of British troops occupying the streets of Belfast.

Roger Ebert: three stars after a not-too-careful watch. Caryn James at the New York Times. "Variety staff" reckon it was based on the Stalker Enquiry of a few years earlier. IMDB trivia: McDormand and Dourif were also coupled in Mississippi Burning (1988). Some pointed to Costa-Gavras but really, come on.

Jim Jarmusch's most-recent feature, his first (fictional) one since The Dead Don't Die (2019), and therefore inevitable. He wrote and directed, and pulled a few of his usual ensemble. In two sittings due to banality.

The film is comprised of three vignettes, all gentle, unfunny comedies of manners, involving familial obligations that seem so obsolescent in these days of low and no contact. Tom Waits leads in the first as Father. I did not enjoy Mayim Bialik or Adam Driver's performances as his kids and spent most of it thinking that Jarmusch missed a trick by not casting Lily Tomlin as his wife. The ending just emphasised that the whole thing was skew-whiff. Next up matriarch author Charlotte Rampling was Mother, hosting an afternoon tea. Cate Blanchett has a nothing role as one of her daughters; at least Vicky Krieps as the other seemed to have some fun. Finally Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat played Sister Brother. Nobody covered themselves in glory.

The entirety reeks of mortality. It sort-of wanted to go where Happiness (1998) and Festen (1998) awkwardly did but is mostly just boring; I was more bored by this than by The Limits of Control (2009). The nostalgia for skating seemed so quaint. The repeated/shared motifs were trite. Apparently Jarmusch did not do the soundtrack.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: four stars. I wish I'd seen what they did.

Inevitable having read Chandler's source novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940). Edward Dmytryk directed a screenplay streamlined by John Paxton; they later collaborated again on Crossfire (1947). Dick Powell struck me as too graceful and insufficiently battered and bulky for Marlowe but it mostly worked. Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley did what they needed to do as the femmes fatale. Mike Mazurki's 'Moose' Malloy slotted straight in; he lived entirely in his own world. The rest of the cast is fine too. Fun and I think they succeeded in making it make and not make sense as required.

Bosley Crowther: "a superior piece of tough melodrama".

A Jane Alexander jag from Brubaker (1980). Directed by Robert Benton who adapted a novel by Avery Corman. Heavily Oscared. Not being a fan of either of the leads did not help.

For reasons unexplained creative Meryl Streep found herself hitched to fellow creative Dustin Hoffman in NYC and after too many years discovered she didn't like that very much. The first half sets Hoffman up as a loving and increasingly capable single father to their six-year-old son. The last half has her return from California and demand custody. The ending is tidy and unsatisfactory, an unstable state to leave things in. Alexander played the ambiguous neighbour who also had singledom thrust upon her.

The whole thing is hard work. Despite her lengthy absence you know Streep is coming back but she has so little character that you can't realistically hope that she's developed in any interesting way. Indeed her therapied older-and-wiser woman presents as fragile, teary, grasping and still unaware of what she really wants or can make work until she's forced to. We never see how she functioned with Hoffman, what drew them together or how it's still possible for there to be tenderness between them. I had no interest in the advertising backdrop.

Roger Ebert: four stars. He claims it doesn't take sides but clearly it does: we spend most of the movie with Hoffman.

Gus Van Sant's latest. I'm not a big fan; I saw My Own Private Idaho (1991) a long time ago and (I think) nothing since. He directed a script by Austin Kolodney. There's not a lot to recommend it.

The poster and early scenes clearly signal Arnie-in-T2 shotgun (but no roses) retro-nostalgia. It's 1977 and in this inspired-by-real-life flick, despite being at most two years since Dog Day Afternoon (1975), no reference is made to that classic. Bill Skarsgård leads as the semi-hinged Tony Kiritsis who kidnaps mortgage company scion Dacre Montgomery (entirely personality free, a thankless role) in some fantasy vengeful scheme that will only lead to good things. Colman Domingo is the golden-tonsiled Black man on the radio, the voice of Indianapolis, just like Cleavon Little in Vanishing Point (1971), charged with intervening. Many scenes just drag on. The outcome was predictable — the only variable was whether our main man would get killed by the police, but of course those were more civilised times. I had no doubt at any point that he should have hijacked a plane instead.

This thing does not even function as a proof-of-life for Al Pacino.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: low energy, needed more crazy. Skarsgård impersonates an imagined Michael Shannon performance. Peter Bradshaw: gripping.