peteg's blog

That Day, on the Beach (1983)

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Christopher Doyle's first feature-length cinematographic effort. Inevitable after watching the recent bio/doco/interview. He did earn his award albeit not for the innovation he spruiked: there are plenty of (standard, Western) progressions from wide/setup shots to closeups, and I doubt they were operating under any pressure from the Taiwanese authorities. Co-written and directed Edward Yang.

This is a lengthy (2 hours 46 minutes!) intricately-structured soap opera. The shallowness of the story — at times I could hope for the depths of the later The Remains of the Day and Once Upon a Time in America — is such a let down given this prolixity, masterful shifting of chronology and the evident commitment of all participants.

In brief it documents some of the breakdown of traditional family structures in Taiwanese society, specifically the passing of a medical clinic and profession from father to son and women being tasked with unifying dynasties causing restive unhappiness in the younger generation. The son (Ming Hsiang-Tso) caves, suffers and inflicts suffering on his one-true-love girlfriend (Terry Hu) who flees to Germany to study piano. His sister (Sylvia Chang) flees to Taipei to take up with her sort-of boyfriend (David Mao). She ultimately finds some kind of liberation but the framing story of the two women meeting again 13 years after the pianist fled is strange: so much of the story is irrelevant to her, especially as she has a big concert on that evening.

The wheels totally fell off for me when Chang asks Mao's mistress/office wife (a foxy on-the-make Yan Feng-chiao) if she loves him. At this point we're pretty sure Chang doesn't: an early scene has a wilful school friend (Lee Lieh) advising her that Mao is a sure thing that will never leave her, and he proves to be her ticket out of the family strictures. Soon enough they argue in that way married couples do and she wants him to spend more time with her but his diagnosis seems about right: she's under occupied and should've acquired more skills. (It's unclear how competent she is in her foreign language as the one boss she has is unimpressed with her work. The flower arranging is presented as nothing more than a housewife hobby.) And perhaps he does force her to take responsibility for her freedom after the mysterious happening on the beach.

I found it hard to be sympathetic to these characters with such vacuous lives. I didn't and don't know what would have made them function better; this pursuit of happiness farrago proved too amorphous despite all the layering. Speaking of which, all the ladies sport Princess Di's signature feathered hairdo except for Chang when she decides she might need to find a new man. Also they tend to start smoking when things aren't going well.

Cinema Omnivore: I too felt that Terry Hu was squandered. We hardly hear about her time abroad. And what was with the frosty Germanic personal assistant? Nick Kouhi. Pat Graham: familiar from countless Barbara Stanwyck sagas of the 50s (!). And so on.

Dashiell Hammett: The Thin Man. (1934)

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Kindle. Private dick Nick Charles retires to San Francisco upon marrying sassy west-coast lumber heiress Nora but returns to NYC to dodge Christmas social obligations. There, of course, old entanglements suck him into a murder mystery and you've got to wonder if these people are any better than those the couple were avoiding. Hammett uses very effective first person narration and gets in some cracking lines. Nora is a fun interlocutor but I felt her character could've been rounded out some more. I'd say it's the best written of his novels but that might be sacrilegious as it's not in his signature hard-boiled style. It struck me as wildly inventive at times and then I remembered The Maltese Falcon.

Having completed his novels I took a look at his biographical details at Wikipedia. I'd just say I didn't see a lot of politics in these books.

Goodreads. I saw the contemporaneous film a decade ago but don't remember a thing. Roger Ebert gave it four stars as a "great movie". Apparently it has five successors.

Like the Wind (2021)

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I've been meaning to watch this since I read that it was featured in the Sydney Film Festival in 2021. It's mostly an interview with cinematographer Christopher Doyle intercut with some other talking heads and grabs of his work. The Doyle aspects powerfully reminded me of why I watch his movies: so much improbable ethereal beauty, too much of it no longer found in reality.

Director Ted McDonnell does a decent job of assembling a cross section of Doyle's work. The interview itself was a riveting but inexhaustive ramble and left me wanting more biographical details. Digging into the pointers provided to other encounters it seems that he cannot be steered; see, for instance, this chat with Nick Newman (2019-12-06) or another back in 2014 or yet another from 2014. (In contrast he seemed to be on-message with the BFI in 2019.) After getting busted for thieving too many books from a Glebe bookstore (he claims to prefer reading to watching movies) he departed Australia on a boat at age 19 and ended up in late 1970s Hong Kong in his late 20s. Four months of Chinese language study at the Chinese University of Hong Kong was all he could afford (it was for ambassadors he says) so he headed to Taipei. Soon enough he shot That Day, on the Beach and won a best-cinematography award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in 1983 and we're off to the races. They shot shot Chungking Express in his apartment! "Biggest mistake!" he says, but he still lives there.

For a variety of reasons I wonder who the equivalent is in Korean cinema and what Doyle thinks of that scene — strange this movie doesn't go there given how the locus of Asian cinema has shifted over the past two decades. There is no discussion of technique or technology. It's unclear there's any baton passing though he is working with young directors. Everyone wants to know why he split with Wong Kar-Wai.

Robert Moran at the Smage: COVID delayed Sydney's turn to bask in the twenty-year anniversary of In the Mood for Love. He's from the Shire! (Cronulla) Some dry humour about his cataract removal operation. 2020 was 2046. I can't tell if he's joking about an Oscar but there's no doubt he has a healthy self regard. Filmink (2021-10-28). His attitude towards film school is the same as Herzog's as is his advice: go forth and make films. A joint interview with director McDonnell. Anne Rutherford: did Doyle's optimism about Hong Kong's cultural scene survive COVID?

Twitter says Doyle married director Hei Wen in Australia three weeks ago. And it turns out there's no shortage of interviews with him on YouTube: In the Mood for Doyle (2007) suggests he's a Leonard Cohen fan (specifically Anthem) and still has the same apartment. There's a visit to Chungking Mansions! And so on.

Dashiell Hammett: The Glass Key. (1931)

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Kindle. Again Hammett adopts and is more successful with third-person narration. This time around the main character, always addressed by his creator using his full moniker "Ned Beaumont", is a political svengali / consigliere who outsources the private dickery. His boss Paul Madvig runs a city somewhere not too far from NYC. There's some extreme violence in and around the speakeasies of the day. The central thread — the killing of a Senator's son — seems tepid in comparison to the other events, and its resolution is icy cold. He gets off the odd cracker of a line but I wish he'd found room for an interlocutor as he did in The Dain Curse; we get a bit too much mouthing off by drongos.

Goodreads. Wikipedia tells me the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing drew on it.

A Bronx Tale (1993)

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Sonny: Alright, listen to me. You pull up right where she lives, right? Before you get outta the car, you lock both doors. Then, get outta the car, you walk over to her. You bring her over to the car. Dig out the key, put it in the lock and open the door for her. Then you let her get in. Then you close the door. Then you walk around the back of the car and look through the rear window. If she doesn't reach over and lift up that button so that you can get in: dump her.
Calogero 'C' Anello: Just like that?
Sonny: Listen to me, kid. If she doesn't reach over and lift up that button so that you can get in, that means she's a selfish broad and all you're seeing is the tip of the iceberg. You dump her and you dump her fast.
— If only I'd known about the door test before now.

Robert De Niro's first directing effort; he had another go with The Good Shepherd a decade later but that's been it so far. I think he was fine as the actual bus-driving father of a kid growing up Italian in the Bronx but really the star and lead is Chazz Palminteri (soon enough huge in The Usual Suspects) who adapted the thing from his one-man play (!) — which would've been something to see.

Growing up in the hood... remind me where I've seen that before. The east coast may have a totally different vibe (here there's baseball but no basketball which might just be saying that Italians aren't big on the latter) but is just as lethal (not just on the colour line but also from the organised crime). There are many good bits but it's also a very familiar coming-of-age story; perhaps the twinned fathers complement each other just a bit too perfectly, each giving solid life lessons that leach the danger from the scenario. (Contrast it with the boy's excursion into the black neighbourhood where things get a bit Spike Lee.) The late cameo by Joe Pesci is somehow gold. I was disappointed to see that the younger cast, handled so well by De Niro, did not go on to bigger things. There wasn't much for the women to do.

Now that I think about it, the door test doesn't seem too well conceived as he was driving a convertible. And how about for a motorcycle?

Roger Ebert: four stars. It would've been great if they'd fleshed out Palminteri's neighbourhood mafioso some more. There's a scene of charred bodies that put me in mind of Once Upon a Time in America. Janet Maslin. The a cappella Doo Wop singers on the street. Mean Streets.

Nowhere to Hide (1999)

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What is it with Koreans and their trains! There's Snowpiercer and Train to Busan of course, but before those there was this exercise in all-style-no-substance from Lee Myung-se. I have no problem with that in principle — I'd be happy to get with the program — but here the most stylish bit is the intro.

Notionally a police-procedural noir, it's really a series of set pieces lifted from other movies and wildly reworked. There's a huge debt owed to Sergio Leone (soundtrack, negative space, outdoor spaces, intertitles, ...) and the hard workers in Hong Kong (such as John Woo who the lead is named for). The spirit of Tarantino haunts some of it though he'd never go with such a weak script. I watched it in about four sittings so I can't remember what the motivation was for the epic police search for some criminal mastermind. Lead Joong-Hoon Park ultimately takes an epic beating from him (Ahn Sung-ki) in the rain, in a train yard, in a scene that may've been lifted shot-for-shot in a Matrix sequel. I found the Trainspotting-esque legging-it scenes to be the most amusing.

Prompted by Mike Hale in the New York Times in 2019. Peter Bradshaw in 2001: a bit John Woo, some Ridley Scott. Elvis Mitchell. Stephanie Zacharek: Wong Kar-Wai. The second half is more conventional than the first. City on Fire.

Kuolleet lehdet (Fallen Leaves) (2023)

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Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with lead actress Alma Pöysti and thumbs-up review. Jury Prize winner at Cannes 2023. Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki is widely feted but I don't know why.

This is about being single and unskilled in middle age and getting an unexpected shot at joining the (axiomatically) happily coupled up. Pöysti and candidate bloke Jussi Vatanen are not exactly in the precariat — the scenario is more old school in there always being industrial work and social support in a Nordic monoculture. There are no families, no Ken Loach social activism or commentary, no politics apart from the war on the Ukraine on the radio; this pair are just lonely in the timeworn way. As Leonard Cohen used to say, there ain't no cure for the lovelorn except perhaps by going to these sorts of movies.

The style is arch like Hal Hartley; I suggest his closest is The Unbelievable Truth with Adrienne Shelly and Robert John Burke. The humour is amusing but very very dry and the whole show continually teeters on the brink of cliche. Their first date is Jarmusch's Bill Murray / Adam Driver zombie flick, at the Ritz of course. The posters out front must be Kaurismäki's faves: Fat City (!), some Brigid Bardot classic. The punchline is that she dug it.

There are many scenes of the bloke and his mate bantering. There are fewer scenes of the women talking, but when they do they express the stale "all men are rotten" tropes. (The men are not as unsubtle; they do not slag the women off as a class. Or is it that the Finnish ladies share no common flaw? I ascribe this unevenness to Kaurismäki and felt it marred the scenario beyond repair.) She wants him to be different in some way (from the other men in Helsinki?) but it's unclear that he is or can be. Apparently smoking is still OK but drinking is not. She cuts her losses by rescuing a dog.

Di Rosso observed that this gets a bit David Lynch by embedding musical performance in the film. I'm pretty sure Jarmusch did this too somewhere. It reminded me a bit of Lukas Moodysson (Bara prata lite? — nothing brutal) or von Trier (nobody gets anything but don't give up just yet!). There's a dash of Amelie: the romantic lost, the relentless search, serendipity. It's OK but slight, mostly gentle, pointless. The cinematography functions but doesn't wow; Helsinki does not receive her close up.

Glenn Kenny: four stars. Manohla Dargis made it a Critic's Pick. Lives of quiet desperation. Brief Encounter. Peter Bradshaw: four stars of five. An Affair to Remember. Absurd and cartoony.

Dashiell Hammett: The Dain Curse. (1929)

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Kindle. The second and last of the "Continental Op" series, inevitable after Red Harvest.

Our private-dick first-person narrator stays local to San Francisco for the first two thirds and then relocates to Quesada which Google Maps suggests is a long way south. It's a bit more Holmes and Watson with an interlocutor who presents as smarter than our main man. He gets off some snappy lines. There's also the Doyle-ish (and unconvincing) theme of a family or blood curse that centres on a young lady of odd appearance; I didn't know what to make of her pointed lobeless ears, small teeth and pastiness. Was this some image of a demon? One might expect that to make her less effective as a femme fatale but Hammett has it otherwise.

There's a bit of everything here: the lethal cults of California, the drugs, the guns, the vapid lifestyles, the Mexicans — it feels so modern! There's even a Trainspotting-esque relinquishing junk (morphine) sequence. Hammett must've felt the plot got away from him as he spends a final chapter explaining it all back to us. Be that as it may he didn't obfuscate the perp too well as I picked them out by about the halfway point without much effort.

Goodreads.

Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest. (1929)

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Kindle. I found it a bit strange. Having been hired out of San Francisco to investigate a murder, our unnamed first-person narrator decides for reasons unknown to clean up Personville (or in a Looney Tunes accent, Poisonville) which is apparently not too far from Ogden and Salt Lake City in Utah. It has all the tropes: the busted police department, the mob, the godfather, the gamblers, boxers, a solitary femme fatale, many shootups/outs, love triangles and so on. There are a few elements of Basic Instinct. Despite terminal issues with their operation the mob doesn't send help. As far as I remember Hammett doesn't develop a few of his named, notionally central characters: Lew Yard for instance.

The narrator always seems to know more than he's told us and that gets annoying. The episodic resolutions reflect its serialized form and suggest that Hammett made it up as he went along; the ultimate ending is nothing very special. I think his use of the third person and tighter control of the overall narrative arc in The Maltese Falcon was more successful.

Goodreads. The source of many a movie.

Creation Stories (2021)

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It's like they got some of the old Trainspotting team together (again) for another go-round of the good old early days of eckies and house music. In some ways it's an obvious complement to 24 Hour Party People — gestured at here via a slagging off of Joy Division who weren't signed with Creation Records.

Ewen Bremner plays Alan McGee and does what he can with what a script that is bereft of fun. You can see Irvine Welsh's and Danny Boyle's fingerprints on some of the stock scenes, especially the toilet fixation and sombre family moments. Thomas Thurgoose gives the numpty performance that you'd expect from his mien, which is a massive step down from what Shane Meadows got out of him. Suki Waterhouse's performance as an American journalist goes against the grain of the whole project. So many scenes just don't work. And who said failure was an orphan? — the list of producers and people in producer-adjacent roles in the opening credits is endless. But most devastating to the whole thing: I'm guessing you could count the number of people who want to revisit Britpop, Oasis, New Labour, Tony Blair (etc) on one hand.

Glenn Kenny: reverb set to high. Simran Hans: two stars of five.

Un Flic (A Cop) (1972)

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More Melville completism. This one is notionally about Alain Delon's Parisian policeman but of course more screen time is spent on the heists. The demimonde is cursorily drawn and essentially embodied by Catherine Deneuve. She appears to share herself with Delon and arch crim Richard Crenna but the whole thing is entirely sexless despite the acres of flesh on show at her nightclub. In colour.

Both heists are more pedestrian than those Melville has showed us before (e.g., Le Cercle Rouge). Initially we're on the Atlantic Coast at some deserted condo with just one thing open: a bank. (It put me in mind of Louis Malle's Atlantic City, perhaps also because Deneuve has some of the aspect of Susan Sarandon.) Notionally they're after the mountain of payroll cash but how can that be when there's nobody around? The special effects for the second heist (on a train entered via a helicopter) were not very convincing. Crenna spends most of his time in that sequence getting dressed... who would bother now? Nothing is made of the mountain of white powder he recovers; perhaps it stands for the changing of the times.

Delon did OK as the dissolute cop. There's a beaut interlude where he serenades Deneuve on the piano at her club, where the movie gestures at what could've been. The ending is a bust, much like Le deuxième souffle: everyone was too smart to be that dumb.

Le deuxième souffle (Second Wind) (1966)

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And yet more Melville completism. This one was highly rated at IMDB, but then again most of his films are. In black and white. "Souffle" is apparently also a word in English for something breath related and not about the dessert.

This one is lengthy and not as sharp as the others of his I've seen. It's a heist flick (surprise) where the main character (played by Lino Ventura) is a prison escapee (surprise). Notionally it's about police brutality (Parisian Commissaire Paul Meurisse is a bit above it all but Marseilles Inspector Paul Frankeur knows the value of a good phone book) and a man wanting to restore his honour whatever the cost. "Manouche" Christine Fabréga runs a night club (surprise) and seems more enamoured of her brother than any other man. But the character portraits are not so strong here and I couldn't bring myself to care.

Strangely the crims now drive a large Mercedes and not a yank tank.

Mo' Better Blues (1990)

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More Spike Lee completism, prompted by Wesley Snipes. He's solid in a minor role and takes it to Denzel Washington every chance he gets. The rest of the cast is also very good excepting perhaps Lee himself as always. In an early scene he's acted off the screen by a passive Washington but the whole thing is redeemed by Lee's inability to hide his smirk or grin: he's so stoked to have pulled these stars. And soon enough he gets to indulge his love of a good pile-on (which he soon expanded to feature length in Jungle Fever).

The story centres on Washington's jazz/blues trumpeter making a living at a Jewish-operated nightclub run by John and Nicholas John Turturro. Snipes plays the saxophones, Giancarlo Esposito is on the piano. The musical interludes cut things up like School Daze. When not at the club he somehow manages to satisfy two ladies for a while until they get sick of being in the way of his trumpeting. Cynda Williams wants her singing career and she wants it now and isn't too bothered if Snipes proves the better vector. After some violence provoked by Lee's gambling compulsions Lee regular Joie Lee resists the damaged Washington's hard word but in a 25th Hour-ish outro it all comes full circle. That ending is lame, too much like a cast party.

I struggled to understand the point of it beyond what's on the tin: this is black music but the crowd is white. Fair enough but in 1990 I suspect the crowds were at R'n'B and hip hop gigs someplace else. There's also the time-honoured observation that the souffle doesn't rise twice, and it seems, contra Leonard Cohen, that you can get a girl back by begging ... though perhaps not on your knees?

Roger Ebert: three stars. Uninspired. Vincent Canby in meta-review mode: a response to Clint Eastwood's Bird. Not in the same league as Do the Right Thing. Washington is a professional, a working man, just like the boys in White Men Can't Jump. Lee felt the need to defend his Jewish characters. And so on.

Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon. (1930)

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Gutman smiled benignly at him and said: "Well, Wilmer, I'm sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but — well, by Gad! — if you lose a son it's possible to get another — and there’s only one Maltese falcon."

Kindle. Prompted by the Bogart adaptation and the lack of promise in anything newer on the stack. First time around with Hammett. It's mostly a novel-length character study of Sam Spade which is more show than tell; I guess these were the days before things got so psychological. He doesn't do much more than show up, cogitate (we don't get to hear his thoughts) and provoke other people to tell him more than they want to — in other words it's essentially a script for a talkie. There's a lot of detail in the descriptions and apart from the incessant smoking all of it points away from casting Bogart. Set in San Francisco.

Immediately afterwards I read Hammett's Spade shorts A Man Called Spade, Too Many Have Lived and They Can Only Hang You Once. None are as good as the novel but all passed the time. Hammett is addictive but perhaps not that satisfying.

Goodreads.

Punch Drunk Love (2002)

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Third time around with this P.T. Anderson misfire. I've softened on Adam Sandler after Uncut Gems but even so there's not enough going on here. Things are perhaps oversimplified by Emily Watson's lack of a character: she's keen on him and that's that. More Philip Seymour Hoffman might've helped, or Luis Guzmán. Still too many pratfalls?

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars, probably because this was Sandler's most modulated performance to then. IMDB trivia: Anderson got the best director award at Cannes 2002 but missed out on the Palme d'Or. A. O. Scott: a Critic's Pick. Peter Bradshaw gave it just three stars of five: a strange, insubstantial little film with so many problems. A love story made from neon candyfloss.

Bob le flambeur (1956)

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The first of Melville's features and of course inevitable after Le Doulos. It's another black-and-white noir set amongst the contemporary gambling dens of Montmartre. The heist this time involves the Casino Barrière in Deauville which Google suggests is about 200km away.

Roger Duschesne has the classic dial, presence and gambling compulsion to lead. He drives a massive yank tank convertible (a Packard I read) and keeps the police at a comfortable distance while notionally schooling his protege Daniel Cauchy with help from friends and enemies in the demimonde. One of Bob's opsec axioms is that women are never to be trusted (excepting Simone Paris's barmaid) but street walking Isabelle Corey's foxy nonchalance puts the lie to that. The bulk of it is agreeable and somewhat workmanlike until things unwind in a satisfying final movement.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2003. The scene where the high-tech safe cracking is intercut with a panting German Shepherd was endearingly weird. Vincent Canby made it a Critic's Pick in 1981.

David and Lisa (1962)

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Yet another pointer from Matthew Spektor. Directed by Frank Perry and adapted by his wife Eleanor from raw material provided by Theodore Isaac Rubin. Both got Oscar noms for their efforts. Black and white. On the pile for quite a while.

Keir Dullea plays a teenager who thinks that being touched by another human causes death. He's otherwise quite rational so I wondered why he couldn't cure himself by observing that he always survives contact at least as far as we're shown. His parents park him in a home for psychological movie making not too dissimilar from the one where Hitchcock squandered Ingrid Bergman. There he has the incredible fortune to meet Janet Margolin who conspires with him, chastely, in mutual cures.

I enjoyed the bit players the most despite all the inmates being far too old for their roles. Blonde Coni Hudak rolls her eyes at pants man Jaime Sánchez (a prototype for the Fondz or John Travolta who went on to big things) while hoping for more from Dullea. As for Dullea this is essentially a dry run for his canonical performance in 2001; you can see why Stanley Kubrick picked him as he turns on a dime from detached earnest inertness to fiery contemptuous aggression and back again. He looks a bit like the classic photo of Alan Turing too, which doesn't hurt. Margolin works hard to show us the girl lost in her head. The sculpture scene at a museum is a bit heartbreaking.

Bosley Crowther: "crudely but courageously played".

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms. (1929)

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Kindle. Not as good as For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the tin says Hemingway takes us autofictionally to the Italy v. Austria front of World War I. The first-person narrator is an Italian-American ambulance driver/organiser who doesn't get much driving in. He's keen on the ladies and gets an English rose interested; initially he puts up a fight emotionally (let's just get physical) but the nurse's self-deluding/abnegating chatter and submissive willingness wears him down. (She regrets not having got it on with the now-dead love-of-her-life.) After Hemingway exhausts us with lengthy and recurring bouts of the idleness and boredom of war, they end up in Switzerland, eventually Montreux. This isn't something I'd usually wish on anyone but the parts adjacent to Italy and France do sound civilised. It's readily affordable if you have a family that keeps sending you money to feed your alcoholism and obliviousness. There's a touch of Samuel Beckett in his self talk.

Goodreads. Yep, the girlfriend was a doormat, which made me expect more parallels to be drawn with Twilight. Not a love story. The connection the narrator has with Doctor Rinaldi is well drawn.

White Men Can't Jump (1992)

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And yet more Wesley Snipes completism. I've previously ignored him as I had no interest in his later-1990s action-Jackson work that I had heard about. Apparently this put him and Woody Harrelson on the A-list. Tyra Ferrell is solid as Snipes's wife, as is Rosie Perez as Harrelson's too-smart squeeze. It's mostly an amusing take on the pickup basketball scene at and near Venice Beach in L.A. — played mostly for money, sometimes for hustles, entirely for the amusing trash talk. The beach itself does not feature. The plot is little more than fortune-made, fortune-/girl-lost and is not that successful at finding relevance for its strong women.

Ron Shelton wrote and directed in a similar way to how John Singleton handled Boyz N The Hood. I guess the equivalent of Ice Cube there are the NBA stars here. Drugs and guns are present but downplayed, just there in the background.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Men at work. Janet Maslin: a benign atmosphere. The folk wisdom is hokum. IMDB trivia: must've been a fun shoot.

Jungle Fever (1991)

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A bit of Spike Lee completism which I'd avoided previously due to the low IMDB rating. A Wesley Snipes jag from Witness. He's got a lot more to work with here and is a lot better for it. Tyra Ferrell from Boyz n the Hood flirts with an otherwise unlucky-in-love John Turturro who is the subject of many pile-ons. She had a big 1991. Also same-old Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Robbins, Brad Dourif, Frank Vincent, Michael Imperioli, a very young and histrionic/druggy Halle Berry, an antique Anthony Quinn (who I'll watch do anything). The theme song is by Stevie Wonder. Spike Lee's squeeze Veronica Webb has a Shar Pei!

The excess of ingredients cannot make up for the lack of ideas. The central conceit is in the title: for unspecified reasons happily-married-with-young-daughter architect Snipes decides to bonk temp Annabella Sciorra on his drafting table late one night. The remainder deals with the fallout with a variety of hot takes and underbaked explorations of the support networks and sexual politics. What would I know but I got the impression it was more Southern (Ossie Davis as the preacher-father, the stories of Italians getting lynched for dealing with Blacks in Louisiana, ...) than 1980s NYC.

So yeah, not a patch on Lee's sharper work on similar topics from the same period (e.g. Do the Right Thing).

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. The central romance doesn't work but the surrounding stuff does. The Taj Mahal ("It's like the Trump Towers for crackheads around here") sequence is pretty good. Samuel G. Freedman at the New York Times.