peteg's blog - noise

Prompted by some curiosity about what Nicolas Cage could do for ozploitation, how-bad-can-it-be and Jason Di Rosso's interview with the director, Irishman Lorcan Finnegan. He worked off a script by fellow Irishman Thomas Martin.

The template is Wake in Fright (1971) but less motivated. Cage arrives at the beach/bay of his youth only to find it has become locals-only to a clutch of neo-pagan menchildren who appropriate his surfboard. They write "sanctuary" on it and hang it above the door to their redoubt then claim it has been there for at least seven summers. Julian McMahon (offspring of Billy and Sonia McMahon) tries to locate his inner hardarse as the leader-guru. He spouts random platitudes (selected unoriginal cliches of toxic masculinity) mixed with degraded Christian tropes into a witless literalism that is supposed to degrade Cage's heavily financialised character into acceptance/acceptability/geekdom. A hobo living in a car! A handgun! — uncommon in Australia so it must go off. Some cute wildlife shots. All the blokes are childish and asinine and none of the actors come out looking good. The major flaw, edging out many others, is that it is never adequately established why Cage returns to the beach/bay after dropping his son off somewhere. Why does he never leave, even just to get some food or clothes? I was also waiting for Cage to go psycho but he never properly does. For all that they got the stakes right: Cage does it all for a house.

I can't see this film being made anywhere else but Australia; obviously it riffs on the Bra Boys and the (illegal/semi-formal) enclosure of the commons. That doesn't explain why Screenwest would fund it: why make your awesome beaches look so unfriendly? Is the great state of Western Australia full now, like Sydney was back in 2000? I guess they did also fund Last Train to Freo (2006) — this one should've been called Last Lexus to Margaret River.

Peter Sobczynski: two stars at Roger Ebert's venue, "resembl[es] a feature-length meme." Jamie Tram: the sermons repackage those of Fight Club. Glenn Kenny avoids assessment/judgement.

Kindle. I fondly remember reading McCann's This Side of Brightness (1998) about twenty years ago. One big part of that was his excellent use of his research and empathy for the people he encountered in the tunnels of NYC; the result was (as I recall) a powerful mix of history, engineering and present-day precarity. This gave me reason to expect he'd do the same for those who repair the fibre optic cables that now bind the world together.

And he mostly does, excepting an unnecessary binding of his tale to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The style is first-person autofic and I guess (as with life) the author-narrator doesn't quite know what to do with his enigmatic free-diving lead character or even himself, a long-form journalist. I didn't feel he got to the heart of anything much but it was a pleasant read; the writing is great. I wish he had developed his thoughts on Samuel Beckett some more.

Goodreads. Marcel Theroux.

A week or two after a sneaky rewatch of The Accountant (2016) which proved unnecessary; there is no essential continuity with the first one. Once again directed by Gavin O'Connor from a script by Bill Dubuque. Once again Ben Affleck plays a man with autism who has the movie-trope mental gifts as well as being bulletproof and ultraviolent. There's no kink this time; it's a strictly linear buddy flick with Jon Bernthal once again playing the normie/less lethal/more vulnerable buddy-brother.

The opening scene has Affleck attending a dating meetup that he's hacked, and like most of the other comic relief it does not land. There's an extended sequence where Affleck's people (the children at this universe's equivalent of the X Mansion) engage in Bladerunner-ish enhancement of surveillance images that suggest the USA has cameras everywhere now, just like the U.K., but Hollywood has yet to move on from the Sneakers (1992) (etc) conception of or consistency in what computers can do.

After all the necessary buildup, where the law is found to be inadequately effectual (just like Dirty Harry did in 1971), things get Rambo-esque (or perhaps just generically action-McJackson) over some human trafficking from Mexico; the last 30 minutes is almost pure video game violence. Yes, having American men saving Latin American children with machine guns is served up straight. Alongside this we see Daniella Pineda discharge a few contracts (evoking the ultra capable femme of Logan (2017)). J.K. Simmons reprises his earlier role as an investigator and Cynthia Addai-Robinson is again the G-woman-in-distress, much like Emily Blunt in Sicario (2016/2018). There's very little to recommend it.

Manohla Dargis: don't think too hard, it works! Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: two circumspect stars.

Ryan Coogler's latest; apparently the only other thing I've seen from him is Black Panther (2018). He wrote and directed. Long-term collaborator Michael B. Jordan led as gangster twins, just like Tom Hardy in Legend (2015) and Robert De Niro just now in The Alto Knights (2025).

The template is essentially From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) transplanted from dangerous present-day Mexico to lethal Mississippi in 1932. There's a cracker soundtrack that fuels a virtuoso bridging scene in the middle, encompassing Black music culture in the USA, warming up the jukes of all times. More of this would've been very welcome (c.f. Small Axe (2020)). Beyond that it's just what was widely telegraphed/spoiled: tired vampire tropes leavened by symbolism and gestures to history that, if you don't recognise them, are meaningless. For instance there's a staging scene where master vampire/Irishman Jack O'Connell is hunted by members of a Choctaw tribe only to be rescued by some people we later understand to be Klanspeople. O'Connell later engages in some mad craic just like a gospel meeting, suggesting that it wasn't just the Blues (at least as played by Miles Caton) that was the devil's music. I didn't try to unpick the commentary on Christianity. I was very happy to see Delroy Lindo (as always). And there's nothing to complain about in Jordan's performance, excepting perhaps that it lacks the humour and vulnerability of a Jamie Foxx.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Coogler is feted at least partly because he survived/elevated the MCU and Rocky. That opening scene, of Caton bursting into his father's church, echoed Kill Bill (2003/2004). Romance yielding to violence, the vampire's promise of taking the pain away. Wendy Ide: the threads of story get messy. Dana Stevens: Caton's "true power as a performer [is] to bring together musical spirits from the past and future in a delirious alchemy that transcends time and space." — and having summoned them, what a waste not to put them to more use. Reminded her of Jordan Peele's Us (2019) and Nope (2022), which I found far more opaque.

Later the romance, doomerism and reliance on the soundtrack put me in mind of Crazy Heart (2009).

More ozploitation. Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith (The Man from Hong Kong (1975)) using a script Peter Smalley derived from Peter Carey's short Crabs (circa 1974). The concept is that the state (?) turned drive-in cinemas into concentration camps for the economically useless. Really it's an excuse to update Mad Max to the mid-1980s conception of the apocalypse, one now decidedly urban.

The set is mostly cars, mostly 1970s classic wrecks (Holden shaggers, humongous Ford utes) excepting lead Ned Manning's brother Ollie Hall's 1956 Cadillac which is ridiculously pristine. (Actually the entire camp is remarkably clean.) Manning uses it to take squeeze Natalie McCurry to the drive-in but fails to realise the consequences of buying an "unemployed" concession ticket from Peter Whitford. He's keen to bust out but she prefers the hairstyles available in sheltered community life.

The strong themes (a white nationalism meeting seemed to get a 99.9% turnout) and weak plot prefigure Ben Mendelsohn's breakouts The Big Steal (1990) and Return Home (1990). This film's central flaw is that it lacks a star of his or Gibson's calibre. The early scenes are quite funny and a little cute as Manning jogs around a recognisable Port Botany while people take outre angle grinders to all sorts of things. The drive-in itself was apparently in Matraville. It looks like it was a fun and good-natured shoot.

Loads of details at Ozmovies. Tarantino's favourite of Trenchard-Smith's efforts.

A pointer from Harry Windsor's take on recent ozploitation movies, which is more retrospective than prospective. Also some minor Bruce Beresford completism; he directed his own script from a (semi-auto-fic?) novel by Devon Minchin (father of erstwhile Senator for South Australia Nick Minchin).

A bunch of blokes who work for Darcy's security company, headed by Frank Wilson (the same as always), get it into their minds that it'd be better to rob the place. It's murky as to who's working with or for whom for most of the runtime; clearly lead Terence Donovan is in cahoots with brother Bryan Brown, and the Tony Bonner/ex-cop Ed Devereaux pairing soon firms up, but toff Charles 'Bud' Tingwell's role is murky, as is detective Alan Cassell's (the canonical Gerry in The Club (1980)). The women are auxiliary: Jeanie Drynan was lumped with a reprise of her shrewish housewife from Don's Party (1976), while Candy Raymond is again reduced to little more than a sex object and handed some very trite dialogue. Stuart Littlemore was credited as the TV presenter in the graveyard.

The film was financed by the South Australian Film Corporation which meant that Adelaide had to stand in for much of Sydney. Near as I could tell they only got some shots of the money trucks on the Cahill Expressway and the vertiginous drop of the Gladesville Bridge; A proper NSW production would never have passed up the opportunity to shoot in Waverley Cemetery (cf Noyce's Newsfront of the same year). The aesthetic evokes prisons by contrasting lots of concrete, steel, grime and harsh artificial light with the airiness of the great outdoors and Australian suburbia of the era. Overall the cinematography by John Seale (Witness (1985), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)) is not flash. A classic instance of the fundamental flaw in many Australian films: essentially just television.

All the details and more at Ozmovies. Stobie poles! Oops. "The sexual politics and the alleged flaws now have the patina of a quaint period glow." Paul Byrnes at some later date. Ahead of its time, or at least Blue Murder (1995), Wildside (1997-1999), etc.

... and that'll about do me for Tarsem Singh movies. He kept me guessing all the way through: is this Robocop? Or perhaps Universal Soldier (1992)? I knew it wasn't Face/Off (1997) — he only hired one action star and there's nothing much in the way of effects. The mechanism is, once again, two minds in one body.

The plot has Trumpian NYC real estate developer Ben Kingsley realising that he has so much more to give when he receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. (His vocal performance is all Al Pacino.) His character notionally lives on in the body of Ryan Reynolds but there is no continuity in personality, mannerism, etc. Derek Luke climbed down from Antwone Fisher (2002) to play some basketball as a pseudo buddy. Matthew Goode deploys his trademark smooth psychopath to far less effect that in his signature efforts (Watchmen (2009), Stoker (2013)). Dean Norris! There's nothing of visual interest here, having been shot mostly in the realist mode.

Singh likes the high concept but has no faith in his audience; things are as telegraphed as advertisements. One of his ticks is the triple up (one up on Christopher Koch, one down on Christopher Nolan). The stakes are always a child's. He likes to cover faces with gauze or ornately framed masks.

A. O. Scott: "All of it unfolds in the atmosphere of gaudy, portentous vacuity that is Mr. Singh’s trademark." Ouch.

I was curious about what else Tarsem Singh made apart from his labour of love The Fall (2006). This seems to be his feature debut as well as for writer Mark Protosevich (partially responsible for the story for Thor (2011) and the script of the remake of Oldboy (2013)). The cast is a bit interesting: Dylan Baker (Happiness (1998)) and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets and Lies (1996)) got lumped with the scientific mumbo jumbo about the brain-sharing device that gives us excess access to the mind of dissociated serial killer Vincent D'Onofrio (Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket (1987)). Out front though are Jennifer Lopez as an implausible shrink / neuronaut who seems to fall for Vince Vaughn's FBI agent. But the movie ends first.

Obviously this is a riff on (or homage to, or ripoff of) The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (dolls not butterflies!) and, to a lesser extent, Twin Peaks: there's something fatal in the pipe and the only solution is for Lopez to visit D'Onofrio's brain. Things go wrong before they go right. That's it. The best bits are, once again, visual; Singh's lurid colours really deserved oversaturated, glorious Technicolor. Somehow it reminded me of The Well (1997).

Roger Ebert: four stars. How did he give this 4 stars and not appreciate David Lynch? Se7en. 2001. Not a cop out like Hollowman. Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times: Spellbound (1945), Manhunter (1986). Evokes a Nine Inch Nails music video. Quake. No there there, just too many antecedents.

After watching The Fall I wondered what Guillermo del Toro had done recently (apart from remaking Pinocchio in 2022). Also I'd totally forgotten about the original. del Toro re-adapted the novel by William Lindsay Gresham with help from Kim Morgan.

The vast cast looks great on paper but was given nothing to work with. What is it with Bradley Cooper and remakes? Against a backdrop of World War II he con(vince)s an inert Rooney Mara to join him in a dated-at-the-time mentalist routine only to be unmade in an entirely predictable and forewarned way by Cate Blanchett's shrink. (Mara's face is as blank as Kidman's, and Cooper's angsty performance only exacerbates her limitations.) Willem Dafoe tried to put some life into it, as did David Strathairn and Holt McCallany (memorable in Mindhunter and Fight Club, squandered here). Ron Perlman looked so worn out. Richard Jenkins, pro forma. Toni Colette did what she can. And so on. There's little of del Toro's signature, inventive grotesquery. Absolutely unnecessary.

Manohla Dargis: "[Blanchett's character] steps out of a different, less engaging movie." Stephanie Zacharek summarised it so you can give it a miss.

Kindle. Inevitable after chewing through Dashiell Hammett's collected works and rewatching The Long Goodbye (1973). (I have yet to get to the novel for that; it's from 1953.)

Well, what can I say. He started strong with loads of similes and humour (c.f. Sarah Miles as a jazz weekend in The Big Sleep (1975)) but by the third book the rewards are diminished. All are structured like a collation of short stories; vast casts of characters with some overlaps, abundant scenic description, gnarly plots and not exactly satisfying conclusions. (I'm not here for the whodunit aspect; it feels like important details are withheld but perhaps he's fair by the standards of that genre.) Perhaps they function as a snapshot of the Los Angeles/Santa Monica region at the time. It's helped along by the odd bit of abstruse colour, e.g. a reference to Moral Re-Armament which is topical now. Fun.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's insightful interview with director Minh Quý Trương and some curiosity about the state of Vietnamese film making. There's a huge slate of production company credits so I guess raising means is still a chore. Over two nights due to a failure to enthral.

The focus is on two gay coal miners in an industrial town somewhere Việt Nam in 2001. (I can't find the filming location but am guessing from the director's bio, jungle warfare, etc. that it's somewhere in the Central Highlands, not so far from his hometown of Buôn Ma Thuột. Upon reflection the industrialism, urban scenes and some themes echo parts of The Deer Hunter.) The topics are the traditional ones deployed in Vietnamese films looking for international audiences: war remnants, lingering superstitions, long held secrets and guilt, people smuggling, exotic forms of intimacy, generalised poignant inconsequence. The narrative and characterisation are thin with loads of gesture and little critique or analysis.

Some of the imagery is very striking: the coal seam is shot to look like the night sky, an erstwhile battleground covered with flags (marking UXO or bodies?) and soldiers in frozen poses. This is countervailed by so many distended scenes of percussive banality.

A Critic's Pick by Lisa Kennedy at the New York Times. Her brief review is right to focus on the visual.

Some fantastic visual composition from co-writer/director Tarsem Singh, who clearly learnt all the right things from directing music videos. (This is presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze.) The model is a two-track adult fairytale in the magical realism that Guillermo del Toro mines: somewhat romantic, like The Shape of Water, a little graphic like Pan's Labyrinth (also from 2006) and sharing the latter's juxtaposition of childish innocence and worldliness against learned hopelessness.

The main flaw is that neither story is particularly satisfying. Putting that aside the acting from lead Lee Pace and child/foil Catinca Untaru serves the movie well. Her grasp of English is shaky as one might expect of a child of Mexican migrants to California in the 1920s, and this mostly helps with her engagement with Lee's fatalistic silent-era stunt man as they both recuperate in hospital. His stories draw on the deep well of classic lore but it would seem that the visual imaginarium is hers, the scenes being populated with people he has not met. (She has no experience of Native Americans and so the "Indian" in the troupe is an actual Indian.) Both stories are uneven and neither has much of a moral; the stunt man survives it all and walks away, the child rejoins her kin in the orange groves. But the stakes weren't this low.

Roger Ebert: four stars. No CGI! (So that really was an elephant swimming? Amazing.) Dave Kehr on the making of. Less forgivingly, Nathan Lee at the New York Times: a remake of the Bulgarian Yo ho ho. Excess details at Wikipedia.

More Errol Flynn. I hadn't realised how funny and deft he was; his performance here as the heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett is timeless. The accent is pure Hobart throughout, and the hair is always on his mind. In glorious black-and-white. Directed by Raoul Walsh.

The story is about the rise of professional boxing in the last decades of the nineteenth century in San Francisco. There are some great scenes of the underground fights of the time and also the cultural strata. Later we even get a training montage! Overall there are a few moments but mostly it's formulaic hagiography, from the Irish fondness for spirits, the duffer of a Dad, the mother's concern, the biffing brothers, right on down to the bloke getting the girl (Alexis Smith) who puts up a fight as she was taught to do.

Thomas M. Pryor at the time.

Kindle. A pointer from Jennifer Szalai's review of Becker's More Everything Forever (2025) which I won't be reading now.

Notionally Becker aims to dispel any lingering belief that the Copenhagen interpretation is a viable account of how quantum mechanics relates to reality. The key difficulty, as Becker admits semi-regularly, is that this interpretation is too ill-defined to wrestle with. That Becker proceeds to do a poor job with the wrestling does not help us understand why so many big-brained physicists let it ride. (Sure, this is a matter for philosophy, not physics, but even so.) Alloyed with too much assertion and insufficient argumentation, the bulk of the text is an attack on strawmen and a championing of the multiverse and pilot waves. The prose often gets bogged in short-order repetition; a hefty edit was in order. I mostly didn't feel like I was thinking. It's never made clear what might count as real. The major historical figures were drawn more incisively by Labatut (2021).

I wasn't impressed with his take on the philosophy of science, especially his sinking the boot into the Vienna Circle; this is particularly tiresome when fecund philosophers like Rudolf Carnap are name-dropped without any discussion of their contributions. Yes, verificationism, logical positivism, whatever are long bankrupt but it's not so easy to dispense with conceptual analysis and Popperian falsification (to me a necessary but not sufficient quality of a scientific theory), especially on the basis that we can never figure out the specific parts of a theory that deserve revision; Ehud Shapiro showed how to operationalise falsificationalism back in the 1980s (see MIS) and of course this problem is most of what training an AI has always been about. Perhaps Becker needed to peruse Chalmers's classic.

Broadly reviewed. James Gleick for the New York Times. Goodreads. Yes, the appendix is the best part of the book. If I'd read Peter Woit's take ahead of time I would've read something else, or maybe put my big-boy pants on and dug into the SEP articles.

Perhaps prompted by Daniel Soar's retrospective on Jean Tinguely which lead to the rabbit hole of useless kinematic machines. Lovingly constructed by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. A brief, strangely fascinating and kinda fun assembly of things causing other things to move, burn, explode, amuse.

More Olivia de Havilland completism, lazily responding to Amor Towles's prompting. Classic matinee fare in glorious Technicolor. Once again Errol Flynn delivered a very enjoyable performance in the lead. Things get a bit epic at times but her entrancement by him is too abrupt. I never realised that Claude Rains was once young. Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2003 and a lengthy retrospective. de Havilland's enrapture is gradual! Frank S. Nugent at the time.

The things Tony Leung makes me watch. I'm not totally surprised to see him pop up the in MCU, rueful and bemused, especially in what is basically a smoodgery of things he's done before: obviously there's some In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster but co-writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton also needed to mash in Michelle Yeoh's back catalogue, specifically Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Everything Everywhere All At Once, squashing the lot into some distant realm of a Star Wars-adjacent universe. Oh, and lethal daughter Meng'er Zhang gets her own private Fight Club.

The plot goes in the traditional way: a bloke who has lived too long encounters a femme fatale (Fala Chen) and decides to become mortal. Things go well until they don't, and when they don't there's way too much CGI and pointless twirling from the big friendly dragon, much like the women in many of Terrence Malick's features. The mythos is more ridiculous than Highlander and so much less fun. Awkwafina has some moments driving a bus in San Francisco, reheating those classic SF street scenes. Things are sometimes a little entertaining but always entirely formulaic.

Maya Phillips: Simu Liu is totally squandered in the lead.

Second time around with this third (cinematically-released) feature from Mike Leigh. The cast is again great. The story is diffuse, touching on a few too many aspects of late Thatcherite London for the runtime. Alison Steadman works hard in the lead, married to Jim Broadbent, mothering apprentice plumber Claire Skinner and off-the-rails Jane Horrocks. So weird to see David Thewlis so young as Horrocks's boy toy. Timothy Spall got the zany character (c.f. Heather Tobias in High Hopes (1988)), not the centred bloke (c.f. Secrets and Lies (1996)). Stephen Rea, generic drunken shyster.

Roger Ebert: four stars (and a few clangers!). A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby.

Kindle. Inevitable after reading his latest. This is a collection of nine short stories, mini-portraits, tenuously linked, of blokes in various states of unsuccess. None go anywhere spectacular or surprising; the devices are entirely Chekhovian, so you know the attractive and not the unattractive ladies are the bit players, the youth tend to vacuous hedonism, a delimited scope of action is just a space for the exhibition of cowardice, the luxe lifestyle models an absence of imagination and creativity, nasty is just an ineffectual stuffed-shirt pose, death nothing but inchoate terror and incomprehension. One focuses on muscle-bound security, prefiguring Anora (2024). The prose is effective and clearly Szalay knows his Europe. Again, all to what end? Man is more than this, even under ironic duress.

Dwight Garner at the time. Szalay is good on the status markers and food. Goodreads. And so on.

Second time around with what IMDB says is Mike Leigh's second feature to get a cinematic release. Not so much class warfare, though there is some of that, but more class dislocation in Thatcher's London. Ruth Sheen is excellent as Phil Davis's squeeze; they are a working-class pair of the sort that was probably out of time in the 1970s. He rides a Honda CB 400 NC Superdream (twin). Lesley Manville has the most fun as the Princess Di half of a toff couple who have bought and renovated a council row house. She's far more sophisticated than her paramour David Bamber. Heather Tobias's artificial performance is a clanger in context: it's not credible that her histrionics would be so thoroughly ignored by husband Philip Jackson and family ... or is it? Everyone is childless.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Hooray Henries! ... and I missed the markers that Jason Watkins's Wayne was mentally unwell (and not just thick). The passivity of the once-were revolutionaries. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin.