peteg's blog

Kindle. Somewhat inevitable after reading Sam Roggeveen's The Echidna Strategy (2023). White wrote in the lee of the ALP's election victory when just maybe it was possible to envisage a revision of AUKUS.

The essay mostly rehearses (what I take to be) White's standard position. The USA now has insufficient reason to dominate Asia as the emerging multipolar order will preclude a Eurasian hegemon. (He seems to lean on George Kennan to provide an argument for why this is critically important to the security of the USA.) China's economy has already eclipsed that of the USA on his preferred metric. Realpolitik therefore implies that the USA returns to the isolationism of the Nineteenth Century, entailing abandonment of Taiwan and treaty partners like Australia, Japan and South Korea to a regional order dominated by China. Australia may yet find it possible to live with that, given that there is no alternative. Corollary, AUKUS brings nothing Australia needs.

There's a far bit of repetition through the essay; I wish he had instead spilt a few words on why he thinks that from power comes the motivation (and not just possibility) to dominate. On some fronts the American Imperium is a counterexample to this, but perhaps schematically White means that if China can dominate the region or the world then it will, whether there's aspiration there or not. It may be an axiom of his type of analysis which smells of pessimism but is really an exploration of downside risk. (The responses to this essay in the succeeding issue clearly split between those who understand this and those who want or need a more optimistic or moral analysis or a prognosis of the most likely future.) I also wondered what his position on East Timor was as Australia's intervention did not appear to have any strategic upside to Australia (but we did it anyway) and it set back our engagement with inevitable superpower Indonesia.

On the nuclear war front, White sketches the "escalate to de-escalate" strategy that is apparently the USA's and Russia's. He suggests it might work sometimes. One instance of the idea would be to use a low-yield nuke in the expectation of calling the enemy's MAD bluff. This thinking may be fallacious between the major powers but I think this puts the lie to the nuclear umbrella in a kill-the-chicken-to-scare-the-monkey sort of way: Roggeveen's expectation that the substantial reputational damage to the aggressor will stay their hand probably doesn't apply to the regional or global hegemon, as has been demonstrated repeatedly by the USA. White therefore contends that Australia cannot just ignore nuclear threats.

Most of the responses in the succeeding Quarterly Essay did not get to grips with White's points. Emma Shortis observed that his analysis lacked historical nuance and local colour. Goodreads.

A Ha Jung-woo jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Handmaiden (2016), and also Oh Dal-su (No Other Choice (2025), etc.). They're fine as is the rest of the cast but all are working well within their abilities. Director/co-writer Choi Dong-hoon is new to me, as was the other co-writer Lee Ki-cheol. In two sittings due to length and a pro forma script.

The setting is occupied Korea/Manchuria in the early 1930s. Korean nationalists aim to kill some Japanese and collaborators in Shanghai and/or Seoul. The exact details do not matter too much as it's all about set pieces in a lush department store and upmarket Japanese-style house and so on. Thematically it's a shallow reheat of Lust, Caution (2007). There's too much implausible shooting. Somewhat annoyingly lead actress Jun Ji-hyun is far better in the sophisticated urban beauty role than the North Korean (?) peasant worker one that she spends most of her time as.

The cinematography is fine but nothing special given what we're accustomed to now.

Seongyong Cho: two-and-a-half stars. Paul Bramhall at City on Fire.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu completism. I remember enjoying Birdman (2014) but not so much 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006) or The Revenant (2015). This was his debut feature. It was on the pile for ages but only became inevitable after I recently saw the other Gael García Bernal vehicle of the day, Y tu mamá también (2001). Lengthy. In two sittings as I wasn't that engaged. I lost track of a few threads therefore.

Things are structured around a car crash in present-day Mexico City where three storylines intersect which are are otherwise causally independent. The timelines are somewhat chopped up but again inconsequentially so beyond some wasted screen time. The first has García Bernal involved with dog fighting and his sister-in-law. The second is about a supermodel, her dog and her man after the accident. The final part focuses on "El Chivo" ("the goat") who is supposed to have some form as an intellectual guerilla. He comports with a pack of mongrels and pines for his lost family while doing some dirty deeds, notionally with the wisdom of Solomon.

I felt much of it was witless and leant too heavily on Tarantino. None of the characters are more than a millimetre deep or deviate much from familiar stereotypes. All engage in predictable histrionics. Things generally go as you'd expect. The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is often too frenetic to enjoy. Written by Guillermo Arriaga.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. A Critic's Pick by Elvis Mitchell.

Woeful David Lean completism. Over three nights due to extreme tedium. Ann Todd (freshly minted as Mrs Lean at the time) leads as a young woman madly in love with an unsuitable Frenchman (Ivan Desny) in 1850s Glasgow. Stuff happens and he dies of arsenic poisoning. Did she or did she not do it?

Wikipedia with all the details.

Kindle. I thought I'd find out what the kids are reading these days. Billed by Amal El-Mohtar as "cyberpunk samurai in space" but actually tedious corporate sci-fi (says one of the more accurate reviews at Goodreads). The book is between 50% and 100% too long: so flabby, so much tendentious, concussive repetition in the small and the large, many chapters and excess colour that add nothing but show the author, so in love with her own voice, aims to stifle any independent thought about her constructions. Coercive reader control! The world building is dodgy and incoherent and everything is recycled and dumber than it needed to be. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to trust the omniscient narrator; the retconning in the third part showed the author didn't have a firm grasp of her project. I read the whole damn thing hoping there'd be something to it but no, it's a Sphinx without a secret. Hats off to the marketing team.

Kindle. I've been somewhat enjoying Sam Roggeveen's fortnightly sparring with Hugh White even though the latter always seems to come out on top. As with the recent Quarterly Essay by Michael Wesley (Roggeveen's sometime boss at the Lowy Institute) I'm sympathetic to the argument he wants to make: defend Australia, cut back on the expeditionary forces, get something workable going with Indonesia, develop resilience, all in the context of declining USA leadership/domination of Asia. But it's not clear how much of this is novel (see the Defence of Australia policy) or achievable, and the book would have been much stronger if it had presented and contested the cases for doing other things.

I did enjoy his take on nuclear weapons strategy in Chapter 6: one reasonable response for a "middle power" like Australia to a threat of that kind is to ignore it. This is because cracking the macadamia with that sledgehammer would invite epic blowback from others, and Australia developing its own deterrent would only attract aggression from major powers. I've never been sold on the nuclear umbrella concept, being born too late.

In any case Roggeveen is up against the dogma that it's better to fight elsewhere; in democracies the politicians would prefer the damage to be a long way away as we saw on 9/11 and the response to it. Those in power will spend an irrational amount of the nation's wealth to avoid being blamed. There's also a general absence of great-man glory in the book that is incongruent with the current era.

Goodreads. Much is absent, like climate change and the implications of dialing back Australia's integration with the US military; what happens to Pine Gap and North West Cape? Policing the Pacific requires some force projection. Joe Walker's notes contains some good points. Would future great-power Indonesia be interested in partnering with an echidna? Walker mostly comes down on Hugh White's side (How To Defend Australia (2019)).

Regrettable Al Pacino completism. Also for Holly Hunter who has the thankless task of going on a date with this self-absorbed geriatric misanthrope. She acquits herself just fine. Director David Gordon Green (Joe (2013)) seems to have since shifted into Halloween reboots. Written by Paul Logan. In two sittings due to the tedium.

Texan locksmith Pacino lives by himself with a cat and unfortunately the cat, while gorgeous, does not elevate proceedings. (There is a wantonly explicit scene of veterinary surgery.) He's somewhat estranged from his investment-making son in what's probably supposed to be a critique of honest toil versus fast money. He spends a lot of time pining for a lost love who we later learn found him as confusing as he is boring. Things go quirky-predictably right up to the magic of the mime at the end. The date with Hunter reaches for the classic cringe of Happiness (1998) but is so relentlessly brutal you only come away wondering what is wrong with people.

Nicolas Rapold.

A pointer from Sam Roggeveen (I think episode 11). A sketch of the Cuban missile crisis from the perspective of special assistant to JFK (and later LBJ!) Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner with a shocker of a Boston Irish accent). That link suggests it is not historically accurate: it points to McNamara's take in 2001. It's not great cinema either: the chronology is often unclear and motivations murky, especially as to why the USSR moved missiles into Cuba at that time. (They must have known the blowback would be epic.) Perhaps the best observation is how the upper reaches of the command-and-control structures of the US military work; JFK's experience was apparently not so different to Trump's (for better and worse). And the lack of direct or reliable communication between the USA and the USSR. But really it's just another love letter from the Boomers to their parents, the Greatest Generation.

The huge cast mostly does OK (Bruce Greenwood as JFK, Steven Culp as RFK, Dylan Baker as McNamara). Directed by Roger Donaldson (Cocktail (1988), No Way Out (1987), Species (1995), etc.) from a script written by David Self (Road to Perdition (2002)) who drew on the book The Kennedy Tapes - Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow.

Roger Ebert: three stars and a personal memoir. Elvis Mitchell, scathing at the New York Times.

And yet more Costa-Gavras completism. This was his followup to State of Siege (1972). Once again Jorge Semprún helped him the adaptation, this time of a book by Hervé Villeré.

A heavy-handed legal legal/courtroom farce. It's World War II (1941) yet again and Vichy needs some victims to placate the occupying Germans after some enterprising young French Communists assassinate a Wehrmacht naval officer. If they fail a hundred of Vichy's finest law operatives will be killed at the Place de la Concorde. People of substance! For reasons underexplained those operatives require a legal fig leaf to identify and impose capital sentences on these victims. They are most horrified when the best that could be done is a statute creating special courts with retroactive powers and framing up some petty criminals. This point gets hammered to death amongst other bits of padding.

Michael Lonsdale had the thankless task of playing "normalien" Pierre Pucheu, le ministre de l'Intérieur, apparently most responsible. His life story was probably more interesting than what Costa-Gavras showed us. Even so what he did got him the Best Director award at Cannes 1975. Pétain is heard but not seen.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Janet Maslin at the Boston Phoenix (!). The gymnasium is indeed a Meccano fan's paradise.

Costa-Gavras's second feature. He directed his own adaptation of a novel by Jean-Pierre Chabrol.

The film tracks a maquis (World War 2 French resistance rural guerilla group) as it frees some death-row inmates from a gaol, robs a bank of a million francs and is tasked with blowing up a pass in the hills which gets a bit The Wages of Fear (1953). Frisson is notionally added by them accidentally liberating a thirteenth man from the gaol (Michel Piccoli) who professes to be nonpartisan despite wearing German boots. The pace is frenetic, relentless, the opposite of The Confession (1970). We learn that Frenchman can only think and talk about war and sex, and only think about war when they have to. (What about food?)

The film concludes with a bravura shot of Piccoli hanging off a bridge that looks like a scaled-up Meccano set, Nazis overhead shooting down at him; a more eloquent expression of what Europa (1991) reached for.

The cinematography by Jean Tournier (The Train (1964), The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), The Day of the Jackal (1973)) is good.

Howard Thompson at the New York Times: frenzied vitality. Costa-Gavras "should have whittled his pacifist down to size."

More Robert Redford completism, and my first go around with Barbra Streisand. Directed by Sydney Pollack from a script credited to Arthur Laurents (author of the source novel) that IMDB tells me was bashed into shape by some heavy-duty doctors: Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola, Herb Gardner and Dalton Trumbo. In two sittings as I came to realise it didn't have a lot of shape.

This is something like American Doctor Zhivago (1965): a soap-operatic love letter from the Boomers to the Greatest Generation who were young once, before they were wearied by World War 2 and their kids. A difference may be that here the revolution fails, as does the romance, and there's not enough cinematic magic to distract us.

I enjoyed Barbra's performance for first half or so, up to some point when I realised that her character gets older but does not develop; she learns to swear, drink and smoke but continues to rant in cookie-cutter fashion all the way through. She's supposed to be a bit of a Jewish everywoman, strong willed, unforgiving, self absorbed, doing all the work (even rowing the boat!) while vanilla WASP demigod Redford just basks in her adulation that is rightfully his due. He has his moments, like when he realises what a prize she is, but is mostly not allowed to do much. They never seem to get married. The latter half fails to show us many of the critical events referred to. IMDB says this is James Woods's first feature and I can't remember him ever being so tame.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "looks like a 747 built around an elephant" — the latter being "the Streisand talent" which "is huge, eccentric and intractable." Redford in the thankless role as the weak-man foil to furiously-determined Streisand.

An extremely well-made French prison drama by co-writer/director Jacques Audiard. Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit also got writing credits. Lead Tahar Rahim as a new inmate is mesmerising, the camera often holding his bruised, scarred and often bleeding face in tight for agonisingly long periods. The plot is straightforward: a Corsican gang led by Niels Arestrup rules the gaol but is eclipsed by a Muslim collective as our man rises. Some scenes are very amusing amongst the heavy stuff. Somehow both very graphic and not especially violent. The surrealism is served up cold alongside everything else; there is no hand holding here.

The cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine (Captain Fantastic (2016)) is excellent. The connection between Rahim and Adel Bencherif (who teaches him to read) is superbly drawn. Rahim's performance won him Césars for Best Actor (Meilleur acteur) and Most Promising Actor (Meilleur espoir masculin) and the cast is uniformly great. It won Audiard the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes.

Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. All those little details make the movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Powerful, intentional.

Kindle. Again two-years-and-a-bit on from his previous novel. So many words have already been spilt on this London-during-the-Blitz fantasy. I ploughed through it, mostly enjoyably, hoping it'd get somewhere only to find it incomplete and to be continued. What a threat that is.

Spufford returns to peak Anglo (1939/1940) with a financier heroine from Watford who may grow into one of the grotesques in Light Perpetual (2021). She gets involved with an underdrawn boffin from the Backroom Boys (2003) and finds herself madly, unhappily, in love. (He's a bit of a human computer and eventually promises to be her Denis Thatcher.) There's some class warfare, generously if shallowly observed, and some supernatural machinery that drives the plot, as if the war itself was not enough. Spufford considers the period as a sort of interregnum when the vocabulary of black magic is obsolete but science isn't far enough along for the real stories. He goes lightly with the Christianity but endorses the great-man-of-history paradigm (via Churchill) as he presumably must. Sitzfleisch is what I've been lacking all my life.

Along with the main but mostly unseen antagonist, a foxy fascist toff whose perfection is clearly due to black magic, the cast put me in mind most of Amor Towles's Rules of Civility (2011) with its similarly triangular study of manners, class and aspiration in contemporaneous NYC. Spufford does not consider the colonial view; he's endorses Keynes's take on the plenty available to (some of) the residents of the metropole and the self-serving tosh that the City was self-policing and not rapacious, or at least not as rapacious as it became. The essentially-American leading lady's wish to profit from the war and get rich is presented without judgment, as is some thievery during the Blitz. It's a strange position to take in present-day England.

Spufford hits the limits of his imagination here. For instance a woman not into men is necessarily into women; he cannot envisage self-partnering or hermitude, or really think through the implications of selecting alternative possible worlds; I mean, at least some of them have to be Pareto improvements on the one we're in, right? It seems causality transcends time and monkeying with the past has limited, non-chaotic, effect; his take on what is and is not invariant was arbitrary. I did not understand how they put an upper bound on the nodes in the Bifröst; surely the door knocker was a tell if not the quotidian blessing bestowed on statuary itself. And so on.

As always Spufford writes cinematically but much is annoyingly derivative as he owns to in an afterword that is followed by a post-credits scene. There are trivial gestures to Schindler's Arc/List (1993), Watchmen (2009), and (gulp) the MCU with its consequence-free do-overs of franchise-destroying events. On a more British front it struck me that Spufford was leaning comfortably into Tom Baker-era Doctor Who: the episode that didn't get made (Shada) and Pyramids of Mars. And doubtlessly a lot more.

The problem with any cinematic adaptation is that Steve McQueen got there already; the images in my mind of the Underground refuges were McQueen's. But of course there is no race in this book. And von Trier's wartime Christmas-in-a-church was far more effective.

Louisa Hall contextualises for the New York Times: in conversation with The Chronicles of Narnia and other works. Tiresome. The "heroine ... has figured out how to travel in time, but somehow here we all are, face to face again with history." James Bradley was deeply affected. Goodreads. And so on until this branch of existence gets pruned.

Misconceived Riz Ahmed completism. Woeful TV. The writing is very poor which is a shame as the premise — Ahmed as the next James Bond — is solid and the cast is capable of much more than they're asked to do. Pure self absorption.

On the pile for a very long time. Written and directed by Australian-from-South Africa Dee McLachlan. Hard yakka.

The topic is human trafficking/coerced prostitution in Sydney-but-mostly-Melbourne in the mid-1990s, those dying days of neon and payphones and Kings Cross. This is shown from various angles, the most effective being some very short scenes with a variety of johns. The overarching plot has the mother (Amanda Ma) of one of the trafficked women (Sun Park) come to Melbourne from Shanghai to find her, involving an insurance something-or-other office worker (Veronica Sywak) who develops a saviour complex with presumptive and oversimplifying tendencies that have fatal consequences. Emma Lung (Peaches (2004)) got lumped with the heavier coercive events. Third-wheel Saskia Burmeister did what she could. The male characters were totally ancillary: essentially corrupt or impotently inert.

The film does function as something of a time capsule, as many Australian movies do, but suffered from relentless heaviness, genericity and an inability to take any of the plausible offramps when offered. It's not Lilja 4-Ever (2002) in craft, deftness or willingness to really go there.

It later struck me that the immigration detention/deportation process Lung undergoes looked a lot like the trafficking that opened proceedings.

More a movie to read about than see, I posit. Luke Buckmaster rewatched it in 2015. David Stratton reviewed it in his Australia at the Movies (2024): Crossfire (1947). His summary is erroneous: Sunee does know people in Melbourne. Four stars from each of Margaret and David.

Vale, David Malouf. Penguin (his publisher) announcement. ABC obit. New York Times obit.

Lars von Trier completism. He directed and co-wrote it with Niels Vørsel. Somewhat gripping due to the intriguing cinematography and Max von Sydow's narration. The use of the sets pointed the way to Dogville (2003). Over two nights.

We're told that post-war Germany is in need of a little comfort. This drew ingenue deserter Jean-Marc Barr from the USA into the orbit of a railway-owning family via irresistible heiress Barbara Sukowa and his train conductor-uncle Ernst-Hugo Järegård. For some the war did not end but really the whole show boils down to the idea that not choosing a side is the biggest crime of all, a position diametrically opposed to South-East Asian values.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Stephen Holden: "[P]erhaps the eeriest is a scene in which [Barr] attends a midnight Christmas Mass in the shell of a bombed-out cathedral in the falling snow. The atmosphere of the scene suggests a a Wagnerian ceremony of zombies."

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Hasan Hadi who won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2025 (for best first feature).

A young girl (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) is required by her school to make a cake for Saddam Hussein's birthday in 1990, a task that is beyond the means of her impoverished and unwell grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat). The often spectacular cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru shows us her lifestyle on the fabled Mesopotamian Marshes. The MacGuffin hunt for ingredients takes them and rooster Hindi to the nearby city. There they encounter some supportive people and some exploitation and a bit too much happens.

It's a well-made film. The acting is good. I found it effective in the way The Secret Agent (2025) wasn't.

Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times.

The costs of Australia's serial distraction from its own geopolitical imperatives have been masked by the fact that maritime Southeast Asia has been peaceful, focused on economic development and benignly disposed towards Australia since 1966.

I had to wonder what I was reading when this came at the 10% mark given that the ADF was active in Việt Nam at the time, and to my mind Việt Nam is very maritime. Eventually I was told that the "strategic core" of Southeast Asia is Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This hierarchical take is a category error even on the terms laid out in this essay. I surmise the date is probably when it became apparent that Suharto had bedded down his coup and the largest domino was not going to fall. But the war continued anyway. Upon its conclusion the American-sponsored SEATO folded and ASEAN's indigenous consensus-driven, unaligned, non-interference model rose and has proven durable. The latter has often been a venue for expressing negative sentiment about Australia by various post-colonial states. But you won't find that kind of framing here.

Wesley's essay is annoying like this all the way along, doubly so as I am very sympathetic to the point he is trying to make, that being Keating's from the early 1990s about Australia finding its security not from Asia but in Asia. He wants a return to the policies of the period from 1975 to 2005 (he does not appear to argue for those dates) that saw a deepening of expertise in this country about our neighbours and increasingly broad engagement with them. What's mostly absent is any account of why things are as they are; the diversity, tensions and even contradictions within ASEAN are not explored. On some fronts his proposals are already archaic (the rules-based international order is a dead letter) or just not going to happen (a revision of AUKUS). There's a lot of assertion, e.g. Australia is "difficult to invade, but relatively easy to coerce if hostile forces gain access to the islands to our north" but no grappling with how we may realistically, even unilaterally ameliorate those risks.

It's unclear to me just how vulnerable the Straits of Malacca are; unlike Hormuz there is the possibility of at least some cargo taking longer routes. Wesley does not dig into the connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and who might wish to sever it.

Google suggests the author toured widely and discussed his essay on a variety of podcasts but it appears to be thinly reviewed and discussed in prose. Mark Beeson found more novelty than I did. Huiyun Feng spilt many fewer words arguing along the same lines for the incorporation of ASEAN into the G2. This sounds great but contradicts the rising spheres-of-influence/great-man-of-history model that is surely the essence of the G2. More realism about ASEAN and Australia from Lindsay R. Dodd (2025).

Directed by François Ozon who adapted Albert Camus's absurdist novel with some help with the writing from Philippe Piazzo. In lush black-and-white with many an overstuffed frame.

Colonial Algiers, 1940s. A dissolute young Pied-noir moves through his days with vast ennui. Somehow he's still buff despite that and having a desk job which he appears to execute with efficiency; no tang ping here! His mother passes and he does the customary without a flicker of emotion. A former work colleague decides he is irresistible after all even as he weirdly insists on clinging to and expressing only his personal truth. Perhaps she mistook his ennui for aloof cool. There is swimming, cinema, shagging and coming to the aid of neighbours before the pivotal capricious event that cleaves the movie in two. The ensuing court scenes got tedious and the climactic monologue with a priest overdid it.

Lead Benjamin Voisin is mostly as facially inert as Alan Delon was in Le Samouraï (1967) but lacked Delon's physical grace and hat. That he might be neurodivergent was not considered; the religious and psychological stuff seems dated now, or at least takes aim at a more rigid society than presently exists. I met his ennui mostly with disinterest.

It reminded me most of Roma (2018) both in style and staleness.

Glenn Kenny: four stars at Roger Ebert's venue. A horror movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Many divergences from the source material. "Ozon shows that it is [the lead character's] martyrdom which is absurd." Jeannette Catsoulis was less impressed than the boys. "Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful." Later, Michael Wood also compared it with the novel.