peteg's blog - noise

Steven Soderbergh's latest. He directed a script by David Koepp (Carlito's Way, Jurassic Park, Panic Room, many blockbusters).

This is not a heist but an old-fashioned spy thriller. Robotic lead Michael Fassbender pays homage to Alec Guinness's George Smiley (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). His wife Cate Blanchett is also a spy who has her eyes on (Trump-tanned) Pierce Brosnan's job. The plot is notionally about stopping the use of a Stuxnet variant, engineered by these clowns, by a Russian. The whole thing is twentieth century: the McGuffin is a physical thing but everything else is computerised, though accessing anything requires being in the right room, having the right gizmo, shagging or having other leverage over the operator. (Everyone is suitably compatible on that score.) There's an experimental AI lipreader on a dongle. Naomie Harris, the in-house industrial shrink, has some truly terrible scenes.

The chief problem, more so than the risible dialogue, tedious and sterile high-end consumption, lack of motivation, suspense and stakes, general unsexyness and so on is that the first two-thirds give you no idea whatsoever how things will be resolved. The second dinner party is so purely revelatory that you're left wanting the butler to have done it.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. "It’s nonsense." Peter Bradshaw: three stars of five. Luke Goodsell.

At Middleback Arts Centre, at family-friendly 18.00. Fabulous circus. It was a lot easier to get into than Bangarra as I didn't need to puzzle out what anything meant; I could just go with the grain of the excellent acrobatics. The performers seemed to enjoy themselves immensely.

Kindle. In an afterword Koch billed this as a "companion novel" to Highways to a War (1995), calling the "double novel" / "diptych" Beware of the Past.

The novel has it that the aristocratic Irish revolutionary Robert Devereux was transported to Bermuda then Van Diemen's Land in 1848. This is his journal through to 1851 when he escaped to the United States. He left behind a bastard son who was the grandfather of Michael Langford from that earlier novel. The inspiration was apparently the actual Young Ireland movement.

All this we learn in a brief "Editor's Introduction" — Koch again adopts a secret document gambit — and the ensuing journal entries just put somewhat flabby flesh on that skeleton. Somehow he managed to keep me engaged despite the excessive foreshadowing that robbed the events of suspense. (All devices are Chekhovian.) The repetition within each section, often within a paragraph or two, is a grind but I just moved on whenever my eyes glazed over.

Perhaps reflecting the limitations of the journal/diary format, the characterisation is generally weak and there's too much attention paid to the details of clothing and room furnishings, almost as if Koch is writing stage directions for a cinematic adaptation. Perplexingly for a revolutionary there's not much analysis of the colonial politics of the day though many words are spilt on gesturing at the French theorists and random parts of the canon of Western Civilisation; the Tasmania/Antipodes-as-Hades duality/doubling is overworked. This and the prolix prose made me doubt that Devereux was capable of inspiring the Irish people as Koch claims he did.

I couldn't tell if the occasional bout of nonsense was Devereux's or Koch's; for instance the claim that Tasmania was a "still-virginal island" in 1850 was unsustainable at the time given the (observed, diminishing) presence of the Aborigines and the immense suffering of the convicts, and even more so by 1999. Koch probably meant that it had yet to be despoiled wholesale by the (Anglo) profit motive, and he is keen to identify lands with women. (Devereux's violated Kathleen embodies Ireland, somewhat crassly, and only really comes alive in her Wuthering Heights scene.) Devereux is not an unreliable narrator so much as a tendentious one.

The usual Koch preoccupations appear in half-hearted form. Devereux is, of course, doubled ("I am a man of double nature") but to no end. Are fairies and faery lore Irish preoccupations that occlude the actual? Koch asks the same via his French-Jewish survivor/repository of wisdom Lenoir. Bushrangers! The essentialism, the contention that revolution is misguided, that democracy is a sham, a front for mob rule. Could it be that nothing is an improvement on ancient aristocracies, some kind of self-perpetuating ruling class? It would seem that Irish revolutionaries are not, in fact, better in the tropics. The sheer unmentionable irrelevance of science.

Goodreads dug it.

Mike Leigh's feature-film directorial debut. Pretty much what it says on the tin: late-20s accounting-firm secretary Anne Raitt (excellent) goes looking for connection with all the wrong people; the blokes are just too uptight to give her what she wants on a Saturday evening, especially notional boyfriend Eric Allan. One is left wondering how the English breed.

The vibe is a bit Pinter-ish — lots of stilted dialogue and pauses — which I guess was the mode of the day. There are some great visual compositions, especially the last scene where Raitt is presented as indistinguishable from the furniture. Leigh masterfully implies the culture, imperative but always just beyond the frame, a longing for the possible. Mike Bradwell embodies that as the bloke from Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire with a guitar, singing about drugs. It was so brave of him to write and perform. He rejects her offer of a binge (disappointing us as she lights up on the booze) because he's off to Les Cousins, placing this close to Pentangle and therefore Christopher Koch. Why didn't he invite her?

Leigh's treatment of mental disability (in the form of Raitt's older sister Sarah Stephenson) is excellent; she doesn't manifestly impair Raitt but instead illuminates her life and the lives of related characters (fellow secretary Joolia Cappleman and her mother Liz Smith).

Roger Ebert with amazing foresight: four stars and a lengthy review at the time. The emergence of realism. "This film is a masterpiece, plain and simple, and that is a statement I doubt I will ever have cause to revise." Janet Maslin was unimpressed in 1980. Bradwell "plays wretched renditions of American blues songs on his guitar." Leigh's self-review in 2013. Excess detail at Wikipedia.

Second time around with Mike Leigh's mid-1990s masterwork.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2009. Race might only flit through anyone's mind but class signifiers are forever. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. These reviews (by Americans) fail to observe much of the fine detail. Alan Riding's interview with Leigh was more considered.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah (2008)). It took me a few goes to get into.

Two young blokes from Senegal want to make it as pop stars in Europe and pay some people smugglers to make it happen. The journey is predictably rough initially but the latter half is somehow smoother, perhaps because it becomes more of a collective endeavour with manifestly real stakes and lead Seydou Sarr grows into it. The dashes of magic realism are welcome but insufficient. The final scene off the coast of Sicily is euphoric but surely what follows would be nasty. IMDB tells me that Casablanca stood in for Tripoli.

Katie Rife at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. Oscar bait. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis.

More Steve Buscemi completism. He co-wrote, directed and starred. Apparently this was about paying homage to Theo van Gogh by remaking his original.

The scenario has failing serious journalist Buscemi charged with interviewing soap star Sienna Miller (Live By Night (2016)), initially at a restaurant near her NYC loft but mostly at the loft for spurious reasons. A scandal is brewing in Washington, but isn't it always? The result is very uneven with an excess of unmotivated switchbacks; the structure is too rigid and the stakes too low for success.

I enjoyed Buscemi's directorial feature debut Trees Lounge (1996) but that was perhaps him at his most inspired. The best part of this was his clowning when he finally exited.

Roger Ebert: three stars. He hadn't seen the original. Peter Bradshaw: one star of five and the briefest review he's ever done (?). He did see the original. Manohla Dargis: "Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones."

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg. Two Jewish American cousins go to Poland to honour their grandmother who survived a concentration camp there. Kieran Culkin won an Oscar for his performance as the more unstable of the pair. Eisenberg himself plays a neurotic. Billed as comedic/cathartic. Not for me.

Lengthy at 3h 39min. Has some moments, mostly in the historical footage. I wasn't aware of Simon's foray into movies with One-Trick Pony in 1980; that was indeed Lou Reed. Accusing Graceland of "cultural slumming" seems so quaint; surely he'd be accused of cultural appropriation now. Simon is very, very NYC. It's not especially sympathetic to Art Garfunkel. Director Alex Gibney has form for these sort of retrospectives. Overall Simon is presented as an innocent songwriter-savant.

Robert Ito at the New York Times. Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert's venue: it's not much of a biopic. Peter Bradshaw. Shelley Duvall was there in a still.

Kindle. Mishra's first novel in twenty years! — and in many ways coextensive with The Romantics of 1999 and his explication of Buddhism of 2004.

Notionally Mishra uses the divergent paths of three low-born blokes who make it into the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi to explore the horrors of the New India and the changing fashions among high end cosmopolitan dynasties, some of whom share his literary aspirations. Much of it looks like hard work for risible returns.

The prose is mostly OK, leaving aside an excess of adjectives that often tip reasonable descriptions into overly-precise incorrectness. And a heavy, deadening referentialism. And the short-order repetition. And the hefty foreshadowing, the selective drip of information. The ambient context is assumed known: temporal anchors are mostly provided by real-world political events.

The main flaw is weak characterisation. The three undergo a shock-and-awe initiation at IIT. Dalit Virendra Das (the lonely computer science major to the two mechanical engineers) remains shallowly drawn as a generic, cultureless, deracinated Wall St billionaire. Aseem Thakur is marginally more real as an editor of a literary journal of some kind. He's a fan of V.S. Naipaul and an all-in predatory, hedonistic individualist who somehow still feels a duty to improve the country. The author/narrator Arun Dwivedi (with the highest entry rank of the three) retreats to literary translation in the Himalayas after not making it in the Delhi social scene. In shades of David Williamson the latter two are more influenced by an encounter with a literature professor than anything in their degree programs. Indeed Mishra completely avoids engaging with the content of the exact sciences in any form; technology is reduced to brands, finance to insider trading. (If he'd done his research he'd know that everything is securities fraud.)

But all this is just a precursor to a painfully adolescent romance between late-40s pseudo-Brahmin Arun and mid-30s dream girl, Muslim/scion/social media star-not-influencer Alia Omar who has sown her wild oats and is now in need of a serious man. The death of his mother is messier but as conveniently timed as Charlotte Haze's in Nabokov's Lolita. The male insecurities that (inevitably) bring things unstuck put me in mind of Julian Barnes's Before She Met Me. Arun's retreat to a remote Tibetan-Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas was a severe and under-explained overreaction, though I guess his usual stupefacient, fiction, was shown to be ineffective during their London bout.

Mishra wants to examine the beast as a perennial outsider, in contrast to Mohsin Hamid's How to get filthy rich in rising Asia (2013) where the inside view was shown to be more powerful. The ascetic Buddhism portrayed here is not critiqued. The Tibetan situation is sketched but not engaged with. There's nothing in the way of resolution. I wish he'd either stick to his essays and social diagnostics or move past autofiction.

Bharat Tandon. Jonathan Dee hides behind some hefty extracts. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty: "new India, old ideas" — damn straight and ouch-y. At some point the fake is itself the substance. The anxiety of the narrator may be that of an author anxious to be understood. Goodreads: reviews are generally positive, the ratings entirely dire. (krn gives it a good hard working over.) A general flaw of the commentary is that these three blokes are not mates so much as frenemies.

Written and directed by Barry Levinson. Did he see Glengarry Glen Ross (on stage, in 1983) and think he could do better?

Baltimore, 1963. Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito are selling aluminium siding (cladding obsolete for houses now but still used for caravans, Google suggests). It's a time of Cadillacs, high emotions and scams. Lots of scams, none particularly interesting. Barbara Hershey starts as DeVito's wife but he's not sorry to see her go. J.T. Walsh has a minor role, as does Seymour Cassel (Minnie and Moskowitz). The initial tepid comedy evaporates leaving a weak, misogynistic romance that yields to scenes of great insincerity between work buddies. The dialogue often malfunctions.

Fine Young Cannibals played live in one of the bars the salesmen frequent; the soundtrack is otherwise a period-appropriate collection of tunes. It was a bit jarring to recognise Insensatez by Antônio Carlos Jobim from Lost Highway.

Roger Ebert: three stars too many. Janet Maslin: nostalgic.

Prompted by some recent Oscar noise; it came away with Best International Feature Film. Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) directed a script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega from the memoir/book by son Marcelo Rubens Paiva. With a soundtrack by Warren Ellis! In two sittings.

The first half-hour or so is an advertisement for upper-middle class 1970s Rio de Janeiro, shot in the over-saturated colours of the day. The beach isn't that busy and one could just wander across the road to an abode sufficiently spacious for five children. It starts to lose momentum once the patriarch is arrested by the military regime, and the final third is a narrowly focused, dutiful and self-absorbed portrait of the matriarch (an all-in Fernanda Torres, Oscar nominated).

Clearly this is a worthy biopic that is an important story to many people; it's highly rated at IMDB and already sits at #146 in their top-250. This might all be a civilised facade on the anger now omnipresent. It was unclear to me why the patriarch was disappeared but not the other members of their small clandestine operation.

Five stars of five from Wendy Ide, but only three of five from colleague Xan Brooks and the same from Peter Bradshaw. Michael Wood.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's great interview with Ed Norton. Norton somehow always exceeds my expectations. I was less impressed by the preceding one with co-writer/director James Mangold. Jay Cocks helped him adapt a book by Elijah Wald. The eight Oscar noms received zero gongs.

As someone whose curiosity about Bob Dylan has never evolved into fandom I felt the story, tracking his arrival in NYC to famously going electric at a folk festival (Newport in 1965), was tepid accompaniment to those cracker songs of his early years. (I've always been partial to Roy Harper's take on Girl from the North Country which gets a few goes-around here.) Many events were meaningless in the provided context; I don't care what style he's playing or how the anonymous crowds of the day felt about it, and Mangold couldn't make me. Dylan is presented as magnetic but unreachably enigmatic.

The movie itself is as well-made as any of the industrial blockbusters Mangold has rolled out before. Timothée Chalamet does a solid Dylan impersonation, good enough to not bother me. Norton is fine as Pete Seeger. Monica Barbaro glowers as Joan Baez, simmering as she's entranced and eclipsed by the new kid. Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, better than he was in The Bikeriders. I can't imagine why anyone wants to see Elle Fanning so sad.

Manohla Dargis. Gets a bit Forrest Gump with its facts.

Kindle. I thought El Akkad's last novel What Strange Paradise (2021) was a solid improvement on his first and was hoping for another delta. This is instead a memoir of El Akkad's (remote but nonetheless) heartrending experience of the (ongoing, perpetual) conflict in Gaza, salted with the odd life event. The title is bang on and a sentiment for all times. Unfortunately many of the ensuing, similarly syntactically-tortured sentences with convoluted tenses are not as sound. It struck me that once again he was a couple of steps behind Mohsin Hamid (Exit West, The Last White Man, talks at Georgetown University in April 2024).

I struggled with El Akkad's motivations. Why does he doomscroll the horrors of this conflict? Why did he become a U.S. citizen? He shows no awareness that all of what is troubling him troubled others not so long ago — the iconic photography of the Việt Nam war (presently being relitigated), the drive to bear witness, liberal hypocrisy. The age of anger may've started with the economically disenfranchised but is now thoroughly democratised.

In brief, it struck me that El Akkad had no awareness of Asia. His hopelessness, expressed in sentiments not too distant from George W. Bush's with-us-or-against-us, yields a just-walk-away nihilism that precludes consideration of alternatives — live-and-let-live! — which just might lead to paths out of this mess. If he truly felt that, why write this book? Yes, the abiding humanistic optimism that another generation could always be squeezed in before things went completely tits up has unravelled, but give us an argument for why you still had your child. I wanted to know why he remains in the U.S.A.; Hamid made for unruly Pakistan a while back.

Someone with more awareness of Asia may've made common cause with the concept of tang ping. Another more analytically-minded or less despairing may have dug into the will to ignorance and America's sense of its own morality. Still another would mourn for lessons unlearned and (self-reflectingly) the role of the press in the unwinding ("is it still possible to enlarge cognitive capacity within the dwindling kingdom of Western journalism?"). It felt like reading computer science literature, a blinkered, write-only medium that fills me with dismay.

Fintan O'Toole at the New York Times mostly refers back to El Akkad's American War (2017). A "polemoir, a fusion of polemic and memoir." — please no. Goodreads dug it with spades.

The things Guy Pearce makes me watch. Before this I would've said I'd be up for anything, even a Matt Damon or Brad Pitt impression. Now I'm not so sure.

Co-written and directed by Brady Corbet. He acted in Melancholia but there's no sign he learnt much from Lars von Trier. Mona Fastvold shared responsibility for the script. I was happy to recognise Isaach De Bankolé from The Limits of Control. Adrien Brody (Oscared) lead as (fictional) Jewish Hungarian Bauhaus-educated architect László Tóth transplanted by way of a concentration camp to Pennsylvania. (I wonder if the Hungarian-born Australian geologist of the same name is enjoying his new fame.) There he meets industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Pearce) while waiting for his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) to join him. When great talent met vast piles of American money in the post-WWII years, brutalism was apparently inevitable.

I didn't understand what the point of it all was, and at 3hr 30min it had plenty of opportunity to make a case. (Some of it reached for There Will Be Blood but neither of leads got anywhere close to what Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano achieved.) Brody is very good and quite amusing at times. There's far too much talking and not enough showing. Heroin is used without glamour or judgement. I did not like any of the characters. I did not enjoy Lol Crawley's cinematography (Oscared).

Why this guy? Why architecture? They could've gone for any number of other Hungarian geniuses, for instance by rounding out Oppenheimer with a portrait of von Neumann.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She just summarised the plot. Dana Stevens sounded bereft, at length. The ending somewhat fits with the interstitial advertisements for the great state of Pennsylvania but does not add to what came before. Glenn Kenny at Venice: "the most exciting consideration of non-atomic American mutation and madness since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master". Stephanie Zacharek. And so on.

And still more Gene Hackman completism. Directed by Ronald Neame from a script by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes that adapted Paul Gallico's novel. Ben Stiller recently named it as his favourite of Hackman's performances — was the simple truth "money job"? — making it something of a jag from Permanent Midnight.

The scenario is very simple: some passengers are taking the final voyage of the passenger ship Poseidon from NYC to Athens. Something happens near Crete to generate a large wave that capsizes the vessel. The rest of the movie is about escaping the sinking ship, and that mostly boils down to traversing set-piece obstacles, somewhat like The Rock (1996). Things go as they have to. There's a dash of Terminator 2: Judgement Day at the end.

The cast is stellar. Ernest Borgnine is less effective than he was in Marty (1955) as his staginess clashes with the realism of the others, leaving aside wife Stella Stevens I guess. Their histrionics are entirely cliched. Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter, Oscar nom'd here) plays a saintly Jewish grandmother. Carol Lynley does a special kind of hippy vacancy. Leslie Nielsen as the captain! But Hackman owns it as a reverend with distinctly American ideas of how God helps those who help themselves. He nevertheless often selflessly helps others.

The (practical) special effects are good. It's not terrible.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars and the harshest review I've read by him. Formulaic. Where was the token Black person? He's right that the motivation for heading for the stern is weak. A. H. Weiler.

For Gene Hackman, who passed recently. Written and directed by David Mamet. The cast had potential — Hackman is joined by Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito, Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, and of course Mamet's squeeze-muse Rebecca Pigeon. There's more realism here than in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), perhaps reflecting the shift to summery but sombre Boston. (Pigeon is the only woman in Boston, in contrast with The Town.) The mechanics of the heist were rapidly obsoleted by 9/11. (I did not try to track all the details; I took it for granted that we were getting drip fed only some of the salients.) The dialogue is tame and relatively sparse. Many scenes do not work; take the shootout on the dock for instance. Rockwell is ill-used. The ending is quite poor. The dire IMDB rating is well-deserved.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "Close attention may reveal a couple of loopholes in the plot." — say it ain't so. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Mamet is erratic.

David Veloz directed his own adaptation of Jerry Stahl's memoir of writing scripts in TV in L.A. Veloz doctored the script for Natural Born Killers. Notionally deemed a Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin but I'm losing faith in that list.

We meet the sexually-irresistible Ben Stiller (as Stahl) working in a fast food joint somewhere far from the prime time. There Mario Bello is the first (or latest) lady to decide she's gotta have that ("You're too darn sad-looking to just be another retard in a pink visor") and we're off to a motel room for tales of T.V. production, drugs and other ladies who we similarly learn almost nothing about. Owen Wilson plays his bestie, pretty much as Owen Wilson must present in real life to his real life besties. Peter Greene has fun dealing to the recovering. Jerry Stahl plays his own doctor, sardonically. The women include, with varying levels of involvement and commitment, Connie Nielsen (Dagmar from Deutschland with the best gear), Elizabeth Hurley (in need of a green card), Liz Torres (in need of a junk buddy), Janeane Garofalo (in need of a man, any man), Cheryl Ladd (in need of a scriptwriter). And probably others. He's shooting up on anything and tomorrow's never there.

The vibe is Trainspotting-adjacent, comedic but not very funny, definitely not fun, funny or philosophical about drug use, milking a 1990s soundtrack. Stiller appears to be all-in, at one point shooting into his neck. Many scenes are way too long and the last movement really drags. Was there a point?

Roger Ebert: three stars. He knew that addiction is heavy stuff but I don't see why that makes it sacred. The Man With the Golden Arm. Janet Maslin: a cautionary tale!

Kindle. A pointer from Kate back in 2016 or so.

We're in Southern California, a suburb of Los Angeles, with a bloke with a reconstructed face. Using an iterative deepening strategy and interspersed with excess discursion he tells us how it came to be destroyed, what he used to do for fun (read Conan stories) and what he does now (tell a choose your own adventure story to subscribers via snail mail). He spends a lot of time ruminating on school and his failed transition to post-school life. The author mostly steers clear of gross outs.

Well what can I say, I hate the use of brand names, especially when used to enumerate the pharmacopeia. The first-person narrator made it abundantly clear that there's no point to his stories, that he never went anywhere and isn't about to start now. Somehow it reminded me of Catcher in the Rye and David Ireland's The Chantic Bird — just maybe someone got something out of it? The review of game-adjacent fantasy/scifi trash culture was better done by Michael Clune and Jarett Kobek. And of course, for 1990s slacker/futureless/developmentally-stalled culture one can't go much past Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs).

Goodreads. Ethan Gilsdorf summarised it at the New York Times. "Accident" is thrown around a lot but everything sounded intentional to me.

Second or third time around. Peter Weir directed a script originally by Christopher Koch that was bent out of shape by Weir and David Williamson; they elided too many of the meaningful bits while retaining all the obscurity. Maurice Jarre did the soundtrack to which Vangelis contributed the somewhat incongruous theme song L'Enfant.

The movie flits from event to event and feels rushed after the languor of the book; Koch did pace that right. Mel Gibson's Guy Hamilton is not the giant counterpart to Billy Kwan as played by Lind Hunt (Dune (1984)). (She's excellent in a mediocre movie.) Casting the tall Sigourney Weaver as an English rose only served to emphasise that. Neither are particularly effective as romantic leads — she giggling like a schoolgirl, he staring like he's been poleaxed. Did either ever try again? Bill Kerr's Colonel Henderson is undignified. Paul Sonkkila's dial is very familiar from Australian cinema.

The increased emphasis on the romance made it even more difficult to fathom the stakes; things get asserted from time-to-time but no reasons are ever given. (Koch provided at least some background in prose: what taking a bungalow signified, what Billy means by saying "Anglo-Saxons are better in the tropics", and so on.) At times the goal seemed to be to remake Mad Max.

Again I'd say Weir's direction is unsuccessful.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Saint Jack. Vincent Canby: "This film should be some kind of epic." Ozmovies (snapshot): retrospectively perhaps Weir's best! Wikipedia. IMDB trivia: shot in Sydney and the Philippines. The non-English dialogue is in Tagalog, not Bahasa. Oops.