More Clint Eastwood completism. He starred and directed. This is something of a dry run for Unforgiven. The first of his efforts with Sondra Locke who is all doe-eyed desirability. Chief Dan George has the most fun.
The plot has Southerner Eastwood refusing to come in from the cold at the end of the Civil War. This is a wise move in the moment as his militia mates who surrender their arms are immediately slaughtered by calculating, faithless Yankees. On this account (a similar one to Gone with the Wind) the war was fought to keep interfering government out of free men's lives. (Eastwood lays this out in a lengthy dialogue with Chief Will Sampson of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Otherwise he's his usual laconic, taciturn self. There are no Black people in this film.) His refusal results in him being hunted from Missouri to Texas where he aims to hole up in the Indian territories. (It is not specified why this might insulate him from the Yankees.) Along the way he loses protege Sam Bottoms (who is a long way from Apocalypse Now), picks up George and much-abused "Little Moonlight" Geraldine Keams, well-educated-in-all-that-matters Locke and the remnants of her family and finally some good-timers as he repeatedly enters towns for supplies, is recognised and therefore contractually obligated to shoot quite a few people before exiting in haste. That got boring.
The cinematography is a mixed bag. The opening credits overflow with grabs of pitched battles then yield to some murky over-saturated shots of crowds of fatigued soldiers. It is difficult to make faces out. The compositions are often those that made Sergio Leone famous. The battle scenes are poorly choreographed. Eastwood does a lot of spitting.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Richard Eder at the New York Times. Hatchets out!
The funniest Clint Eastwood directorial effort I've seen yet. He stars with squeeze-of-that-moment Sondra Locke in an inversion-of-sorts of his Dirty Harry persona. His mediocre but straight and incorruptible policeman drops lots of f-bombs, some non-P.C. cliches about women and (obviously) still comes out the winner. Locke does what she can in a hooker-in-distress role who cannot help falling in love with Clint. Notionally he's there to get her from Las Vegas to Phoenix to testify in some case but really it's about moving from set piece to set piece. There's a nod to Easy Rider, a cop car shot to hell, a helicopter that randomly explodes when the pilot expertly fails to avoid some powerlines. The climactic scenes have the pair go all Ned Kelly in an armoured bus on a kamikaze mission to stick it to City Hall. They keep telling us that the mob wants to kill them but the actual objective is to assassinate property: apart from the vehicles there's a house that really cops it. Most of the shooting scenes drag on and on. Written by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "a movie without a single thought in its head."
What a mess. I wouldn't've minded so much if it was more original and well paced. The opening scenes are rushed (Babylon did the nightclubbing better) and there's too much exposition (much as I enjoy Larry Fishburne's sonorous delivery). The philosophical musings are incoherent, pretentious, recycled, inaccurate. Uninsightful! Gladiatorial Rome! Shakespeare! Adam Driver's Robert Moses-alike has an Emersonian mind! — and Coppola somehow has all the time in the world for these momentum-destroying languors but little for the action he considered necessary to include. A plot of some kind does progress but connective tissue is often lacking. The conclusion of it all is a baby! — but not a star baby.
The cast was intriguing. Mayor Giancarlo Esposito was very poorly used, ditto his fixer Dustin Hoffman. Shia LaBeouf got the Dennis Hopper role. Nathalie Emmanuel as the mayor's daughter was mostly tasked with standing around looking attentive and available. Connie Corleone (Talia Shire, Coppola's sister) was Driver's mum, Jon Voigt his bank-owning uncle, Fishburne his factotum. Jason Schwartzman performed like he's in a Will Anderson. Balthazar Getty I did not see.
For all that Aubrey Plaza (stealing scenes like a criminal) is a lot of fun as "Wow Platinum", a foxy TV/stock market floor reporter on the make. She has her own conception of integrity and uses what she has (sex) in pursuit of becoming part of a power couple. Somehow city-planning superman/creative Driver isn't interested but Voigt knows a rejuvenator when he sees one. Her sex scene with LaBeouf made me laugh so hard. She copped it late in the day in an unsuccessful Cleopatra getup, and not to slight her hard vamping but surely Coppola must've realised his movie was in trouble when she's the hottest thing going despite the acres of hot young flesh. (Often the gyrating and air-pawing of these hot young things are at total odds with the rest of the scene, such as when we and Esposito have to suffer Driver's Hamlet pretensions at a building site.)
Perhaps most fatal to the whole project is Coppola's dated conception of everything from cities to information dissemination (newspapers! just like Citizen Kane). His objective often seems to be to remake bits of famous movies like Ben Hur, Gladiator, the unbounded lurv of Interstellar ... 1980s wrestling (and not The Wrestler). The odd scene or sequence gropes for something fantastic like Gilliam's Brazil or a Malick (The Tree of Life). Perhaps he had in mind Kubrick's outro Eyes Wide Shut but all along I couldn't get Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) out of mine.
It's difficult to say what this movie has and hasn't; for all I know the multiverse is in there somewhere. Coppola needs to crank out a director's cut that adds coherence. Is scifi really the only genre sufficiently capacious to address our times?
Very widely covered in the media. The coverage is bipolar (pump or dump) and mostly unnuanced. I didn't read the reviews before seeing it and have no appetite for them now.
And yet more Clint Eastwood completism. I'm deep into the dregs with this Cold War military advertisement (for both sides!). He produced, directed and starred — showing true commitment to the cause. The screenplay is an adaptation by Alex Lasker and Wendel Wellman of a novel by Craig Thomas.
The opening scene is a direct ripoff of Apocalypse Now: the Military Police come to pin the assignment on the golden boy while the golden boy is having a breakdown. With the prone-to-psychedelic-PTSD trope bedded down (partly through some vintage exploitation Việt Nam bombing footage) we spend about half the running time watching Clint get into disguise and into position, much like The Eiger Sanction. (This is mostly tedious and never as fun as Lancaster's dress ups in Scorpio.) The position this time is a Russian airbase where the MiG31 is being readied for a maiden flight. Mach-whatever, here we come.
The next hour has Clint fly this thing back from Russia to somewhere undetermined. (I found it weird that the U.S. apparently needed to steal Soviet military technology in the early 1980s.) We're shown the Russian response using a Day of the Jackal two-track structure, and I'd say the Russians marginally have it if only because they get a variety of sets. The other novelty this aircraft is supposed to have is a neuralink weapons system which requires thinking in Russian. Little is made of this opportunity for inadvertent comedy.
Overall it's super boring. I was a bit shocked to see Nigel Hawthorne (!) as a Russian scientist/engineer. The mix of English and Russian is taxing; perhaps there were supposed to be subtitles. I haven't seen Top Gun but I can say The Hunt for Red October is far superior.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. It even has a ("logically impossible") homage to Star Wars (original movie). Vincent Canby: "It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor."
A much referenced classic I missed two decades ago. Shown on the ABC. Produced by the Warlpiri out of Yuendumu. Written and directed by David Batty and Francis Jupurrula Kelly. Just four short episodes. The best bits are brief vignettes, a sort of zen and the art of cars in remote Central Australia alloyed with a variety of Aboriginal cultures. The final trip to Broome is less effective. I'm guessing everyone's favourite is the "magic mechanic" Jupurrula. Fun.
A Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton jag from One False Move. Directed by Sam Raimi from a screenplay and novel by Scott B. Smith. We're a long way from Evil Dead here; far closer to Shallow Grave and Breaking Bad with a dash of wintry Fargo.
Three dumb characters (Thornton, Paxton and Brent Briscoe) discover a plane buried under a snow drift while out seeking vengeance on a fox that has (further) wrecked Thornton's ute. In the plane is a vast pile of cash that provides the nemesis the production code used to require. Paxton's been to college and married the most eligible girl in town (Bridget Fonda as a Lady Macbeth) and convinces the others of a semi-plausible plot to keep the loot. Almost immediately Billy Bob's shtick wears thin, Briscoe's thinner and we're stuck with Paxton's limited range of facial expressions. I was much relieved when Thorton called time.
The ensuing plot is overly contrived. There are an excess of guns. There are unexplained happenings, like the arrival of an FBI agent. I think the goal was to provoke what-would-you-do post-movie chatter, a sort of 1990s trolley experiment.
Roger Ebert: four stars. He is ready to accept these are "the consequences of criminal action" whereas we now know that the actual result is more likely to be a presidency. He feels the performances were flawless; I could only shudder at the dinner table scene where Paxton and Fonda work their way up to getting shouty and histrionic. Janet Maslin. She paired it with Affliction.
More Denzel Washington completism. He produced, directed, and starred. The script is an autobiography by Antwone Fisher. Some parts work very well, such as eliding much of the relationship between leads Derek Luke and Joy Bryant. On the other hand Denzel's shrink is a bit too saintly. Fisher himself seems to get into less trouble than his story required. I enjoyed the tour of San Diego. Viola Davis works hard as Antwone's mother in an almost non-speaking role.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He loved the concluding movement; I found it trying. A Critic's Pick by Stephen Holden.
Kindle. Tim Winton's latest. He seems to be slowing down; it's been six years since The Shepherd's Hut.
Winton takes on all the themes of the moment. Apparently the only genre sufficiently capacious is scifi. I felt I'd read or seen every ingredient before but not in this particular mix, making me wonder if this was what John Birmingham has been doing since He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. I was concerned that the fixation on externalities would come at the cost of Winton's deft handling of relationships, character and dialogue; I was less bothered about the plot as I can't remember him ever being great at it.
We're taken immediately to a familiar Mad Max post-apocalyptic setting, lightly exoticised with salt pans and littoral zones. Our first person narrator, a man with no name, starts in the present time but the bulk is recounted in overly detailed flashback to a mostly passive interlocutor/incarcerator, just like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This structure has little impact on the tale beyond enabling ample foreshadowing.
In this world the people survive by homesteading and barter (money is implicitly absent) while the billionaires (who implicitly did not succeed in relocating to Mars) and Exxon-related parties hole up in remote, underdeveloped luxe fortresses. There's no zany or delicious ethical exploration ala Ned Beauman (here the Hermit Kingdom appears to be, well, the Hermit Kingdom) — just straight out rage and revenge against the dynastic wealth that caused the underspecified apocalypse. Everyone everywhere always wants to kill their bin Laden at any cost. I didn't understand what difference this could ever make and it didn't strike me as particularly Christian or in dialogue with a sins-of-the-father doctrine. Elements of Dune I guess.
The vector for this rectification is a covert society (the Service) that rapidly trains SAS-like operators. There's a a cell structure that is underexplored and I got wondering how these organisations correct themselves, especially in a world without mechanisms for broadcasting ideology and propaganda. How do they know they're killing the right people? Why is killing with gas (a contravention of an early Geneva protocol) so much less contentious than fire? Why is there no artillery or bombing? Whatever happened to drones and AUKUS? The Service provides material favours in return for service, and while his mother knows better than to ask the provenance of the providence, we're left to wonder if this is so very different to the dynastic patronage networks they’re removing or merely displacing. (For all we know the Service could be how the Musk clan takes out the Tillerson clan in a world bereft of Wintermute.) These rugged Australian revolutionaries (or reactionaries?) are a dead serious version of McGahan's "Oz Underground" mob of misfits.
Against John Brunner, infotech as we know it is broadly inaccessible and not directly responsible for the immiseration; it looks instead that we were done in by old-school rapacious fossil fuel capitalists. I guess that's one way to solves the mobile phone plot problem while allowing the persistence of night vision goggles and solar power. Very late in the day we get a glimpse of some "sims" which are pretty much those of Bladerunner; the (cinematographic) gas platforms on fire off the west coast of Australia (approximately Exmouth) are also appropriated.
Winton seems to have a shallow faith in artificially-intelligent robots being morally superior to men which perhaps reflects his shaky grasp (or wise avoidance?) of technology and innate optimism. He should have considered what happens when a sim needs parts and there's a shortage though. At all times he keeps the view small and tight, that of a person carried along by history who cannot learn from it no matter how much they see. We also get a woman who departs (shades of The Riders, shades of Dirt Music) and absent children. (I didn't understand why the narrator went looking for his wife, given she fled him under her own volition.)
There's the odd arresting sentence ("the dead stand on us too"), a bit of homage ("It went the way of every cataclysm. Slowly. Imperceptibly. Then all of a sudden.") and some overdressed cliche (“perform a role until you inhabit it naturally” is just fake-it-till-you-make-it) in the punchy prose. The vocabulary is overdone as it's a random jumble and not the specialised argot of a vocation (consider roofing or how farmers talk). For instance, Winton's tic of calling a sky "nacreous" only has a sniff of a chance of making sense if his narrator was a pearl diver rather than a plainsman. Overall the writing aims for Hemingway: long on the assertion, a bit short on the thought. I would have preferred less outrage and more conceptual outrageousness. He should've consulted with fellow Westralian Greg Egan.
Widely anticipated and reviewed in the Australian press. James Ley at the Smage. Overly familiar to long-time Winton readers. I haven't read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the movie left no impression. Scheherazade. Cli-fi! — like McGahan's The Rich Man's House. He doesn't clock that the collectivism here is seriously flawed. "Staunch", 500 times. He avoids appraisal. Goodreads. The ending just happens. Most MSM reviews read like their livelihoods depend on saying positive things; Winton, at least, paid attention to UniKitty.
On the basis of the leader for Dana Stevens's review. Slick animation directed by Chris Sanders from raw material by Peter Brown. Lupita Nyong'o voices the main robot, Pedro Pascal the friendless fox.
For reasons withheld a humanoid-ish robot awakens on a remote island with an all-consuming need for purpose, dressed up here as being assigned a task. (Later we see an army of these droids doing plantation work; if they weren't white the director may've left himself open to charges of political commentary.) Shebot "Roz" somehow "breaks her programming" and engages learning mode, which I guess means she's an advance on Arnie's T800 of Terminator 2 who could consent to the same change but needed human assistance to effect it. This enables her to communicate with the anthropomorphic animals. Antics ensue after a task is assigned with the customary sidekicks and now finely-tuned emotional manipulation. There's some great subtle physical humour. The island is a Noah's Ark, an Eden with no sign of ecological collapse where the animals apparently reproduce asexually. The final movement is generic and quietly ignores the problem of who's for lunch after making fun of it earlier. As always the trees suffer the most.
The animation moves amongst styles to serve the narrative. The wholesale thievery from other movies puts everyone at ease: Roz has a Tron aesthetic while the unsighted humans (there are always humans) live in WALL-E-style compounds. This is as far as the movie goes in acknowledging our current predicament. The island has a Bambi, some context is provided by a Star Wars (original movie) hologram, hearts are apparently TARDISes, the evil robot is a bit too much like GLaDOS. And so on.
Stevens found the island "a new and alien world." Wow. "The slow integration of the robot into the animal community is itself a kind of organic process; anyone expecting an antitechnology parable will be surprised to find an almost utopian tale about the coexistence of machines and the natural world." — but what about the conflict between man (who at least encoded the intentions of the robots) and machine? A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. "Leans into its derivative elements" — The Iron Giant, of course, and therefore E.T.
Via Roger Ebert's review of A Perfect World. Directed by Dominic Sena (Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Swordfish (2001)) from a script by Stephen Levy and Tim Metcalfe. (The latter has form for this kind of murder-fixated exploitation.) A strong cast. Brad Pitt as a psychopathic "oakie" drags empty-headed and very talkative Juliette Lewis in his wake. They both seem to deliver what they were tasked with, but she's a lot better a year later in Natural Born Killers and he was more fun in True Romance. On the other hand, normies writer David Duchovny and photographer Michelle Forbes are bland, credulous and ineffective. She sports a haircut that reminded me of Elina Löwensohn's in every Hal Hartley I can remember seeing her in. Perhaps it was the haircut to get in the early 1990s.
Like so many movies before and since, this is essentially a road trip from somewhere east to California. Notionally the normies are scouting the locations of serial/mass/whatever murders for the sake of writing a coffee table book. The inevitable ensues with graphic but uninspired blood sprays. I did not understand what the point was; there was nothing new here. At times it reminded me of U Turn, others The Killer Inside Me (Pitt is generally inscrutable), and never The Silence of the Lambs.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Janet Maslin: "desperately stylish", "unfolding in a mode that might be called baby noir". Her take on Dominic Sena makes it sound like he was a forerunner of David Fincher; IMDB's biography for Fincher says they formed a company together.
The Clint Eastwood completism is starting to hurt. Here he directed and starred. The script is by John Lee Hancock. Kevin Costner leads.
After a pro-forma jailbreak from somewhere in Texas circa 1962, Costner and cellmate Keith Szarabajka load up on food and hostages at a nearby town before embarking on a road trip across Texas. The destination is withheld for reasons unknown, and when revealed the motivation is weak. The crowd in the car thins to Costner and child T.J. Lowther, neither of whom puts in the best performance ever committed to celluloid. Clint follows behind in a commandeered caravan/remote command post with Laura Dern doing what she can in a stereotypically blokey environment. There's the odd interesting bit along the way and some stuff that didn't make sense, like Costner threatening a helpful black family; he makes for a tepid psychopath. Throughout we know we're going to end up in the grass beside Costner, all of us hoping the end would come sooner than it does. The concluding 30 minutes is the purest American hokum.
Roger Ebert: four stars. I don't remember Costner ever being all that silent. I somehow missed "Dottie’s Squat and Gobble". Janet Maslin.
Kindle. I got suckered by a skim read of Adam Sternbergh's indulgent review at the New York Times. Ascribing the infirmity of the age to "the postindustrial air we breathe" on the first page helped me commit. Soon enough the funny bits fell away and the author showed he had no idea what to do with his genetically-determined plot. Baxter tried to make it topical by referring to technology he clearly has no experience or knowledge of, and retreated to talking about the Midwest in general terms (table manners!) while sinking the boot into the ever kickable Confederate South. The final 20% went completely off the rails with our narrator indulging his ex-wife and her paramour in a rustic duel. Reasons, who needs them.
The writing is fine, the grammatical nitpicking boring, and there is the odd funny thing amongst the repetition and unoriginal, inadequate character development. The denouement reminded me of Ann Patchett: the author was so invested in his people that he needed to give them a decent sendoff.
Goodreads. Aiming for absurd and missing. He got scammed! — and so did we. Courageless.
Directed by Carl Franklin. Written by Dave Collard. Again starring Denzel Washington, this time as a police chief in a small town in Florida. Notionally he's split with wife Eva Mendes, implausibly a detective in Miami with an excess of forgiveness, and is back with his irresistible high school sweetheart Sanaa Lathan who's married to ex-footballer beefcake Dean Cain. Things get all scammy and Denzel is forced to react to each twist as it comes along until he can unravel the whole show on a boat (echoing Franklin's earlier One False Move). After that Mendes knows she'll never find a better man and life is reset to the halcyon days before the movie started. John Billingsley's Chae is sometimes effective comic relief but too often just plain annoying. It does not cohere. It's not Miami Vice, not even when Denzel is dangling from a rusted-out seventh-storey hotel balcony railing.
Roger Ebert: three stars. The screenplay was inspired by The Big Clock. Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times: "shallow — but empty".
Well the time did come to read Marr's magnum opus. I scored a brand new hardcover for the bargain price of 33.98 AUD from Amazon U.S. via their AU store. Their pricing algorithm put up a fight but I feel like I came out on top.
This is the first piece of serious history I've tried to read. The effort, skill and care involved in its assembly is obvious even to a non-specialist. The writing is excellent; my only beef was that I felt the footnotes often contained substantive information that could've been inlined in the main text. It would've helped if I'd known more about the specifics of World War II and pre-revolutionary China. I was perplexed that the Vietnamese phrases and titles were translated but not the French; perhaps it's the case that anyone serious about Vietnamese history knows enough to get by, but surely they'd be fluent in Vietnamese. The separate appendix of words with diacritics attached is so archaic now. (The text has apparently been updated for the ebook.) The worst part is the section on French metropole politics which was dull and obscure — as French party politics so often is — and somewhat irrelevant as all sides (Vichy included) agreed on the need to recover their imperial jewel after the war. Overall the book was as good as promised.
The causes of the major famine in 1945 are laid out early on. As I understand it now, and coarsely put, the French ran the colony in a sustainable way (or at least weren't so heavy-handed as to starve the peasantry) but the extraction of resources by the Japanese war machine from 1940 to 1945 put more strain on supply than could be borne. News to me was the narrow avoidance of a second major famine later in 1945 after the Red River dikes failed mid-year; as Marr puts it so well, restoring the dikes was a test of legitimacy that the new revolutionary regime passed, though the river didn't get that high again until 1970.
The latter situation obviously pushed any remaining fence sitters in the North to stand against all occupying powers. The British in the South, there to take the surrender of the Japanese troops and repatriate them, compounded the situation by stifling the flow of rice northward and releasing and arming the French colonists incarcerated by the Japanese after their coup on March 9. (This coup was pivotal — it precipitated the revolution — but undertaken somewhat reluctantly by the Japanese after the liberation of Paris/installation of the de Gaulle regime/imminent cessation of the Japan-France alliance meant they lost trust in the Vichy colonial administrators.) Marr provides some clues as to why things didn't stick in Sài Gòn: the poor communication channels with the North, the competition amongst "Viet Minh" groups that refused to resolve their differences, the attitude of the Japanese governor (Fujio Minoda) after the coup. Inaugural Independence Day (September 2) was a total fiasco in Sài Gòn.
I wish I had known more about the China of the day as the détente between the Nationalist and Communist forces, facilitated by the U.S., as faced by the Vietnamese was complex and fascinating. Marr had good access to senior O.S.S. operatives and provides ample context for the U.S.'s schizophrenic policy toward Indochina. (Roughly Roosevelt was ambiguously keen to move past empires but Truman was more concerned about Cold War imperatives and keeping a deeply wounded France sweet.)
Against this Marr is a bit light on for structural analysis. I wanted to know how the Viet Minh (eventually) got organised over such vast distances — did Hồ Chí Minh learn anything from the Irish? — and why they were so strong so early in (remote) Quảng Ngãi. Similarly the competing (and enduring) power bases of the Hòa Hảo (what a flag) and Cao Đài are inadequately explored, perhaps because they are so far from the epochal events in Hà Nội. The Catholic Church's support of the nascent DRV is not justified beyond an appeal to the broad shoulders of Hồ Chí Minh's charisma. It's still unclear to me how Ngô Đình Diệm and brothers came to power in the South, and Marr leaves us hanging about Bảo Đại (last seen in closeup meeting Hồ Chí Minh in Hà Nội). The role of the party (the Indochinese Communist Party) is sometimes brought to the fore and sometimes omitted; often I was wondering what General Secretary Trường Chinh was up to as events unwound, especially after the big ICP meeting at Tân Trào in August. This may've helped clarify whether the Viet Minh intended to be a broad tent in the longer term (incorporating other independence-seeking political organisations) or was just flushing out the competition. And so on and on.
Marr was fortunate to interview many of the players between 1967 and 1992 and his love for archival work shines through. The colour is sometimes epic, leaving me wondering what happened to this person or that who earnt a sentence or two in one of his footnotes. At various points Marr seemed to be steering me to Stein Tønnesson's The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (1991) and I felt he stopped short on delivering on his promise to cover 1945: the text fades into a zoomed-out Epilogue after Hồ Chí Minh reads the declaration of independence on September 2. I guess Marr knew the best writers and best works always leave the reader wanting more.
Goodreads. Greg Lockhart reviewed it for JSEAS (1996), Mark W. McLeod for the American Historical Review (1997).
Every few years Hollywood tries to recreate a noir classic. This effort by Carl Franklin (directing his own adaptation of Walter Mosley's raw material) was not successful. Denzel Washington does what he can in the lead and is often as bemused as the audience is, especially when Tom Sizemore lets his Natural Born Killers loose down at post-war Malibu. Don Cheadle has the most straightforward fun as a gun-toting Texan version of his character from Boogie Nights. It is a mystery to me why the woman in the blue dress, Jennifer Beals, would be considered at all devilish.
Roger Ebert: three stars, Chinatown overtones, an arbitrary resolution. Janet Maslin: has "parallels with the world-class Chinatown."
Directed by Carl Franklin from a script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson which is the strongest of anything I've seen recently. There's a kind of inexorability to how things go while leaving room for enough random events to avoid inescapability; it's a character study masquerading as a thriller. Something of a Cynda Williams jag from Mo' Better Blues and she's marginally less lethal here. She co-stars with Thornton, somewhat annoying Arkansas police chief "Hurricane" Bill Paxton and an effective but underused Michael Beach. Jim Metzler and Earl Bingings play the relevant part of the LAPD.
The plot is of the era: an L.A. drug larceny proves lethal to those holding. The odd sock perps hit the track to Star City, Arkansas via Texas. They mostly hold up their end of the plot while Paxton smothers us in puppy-dog enthusiasm. The conclusion is annoyingly neat.
Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. The opening scenes evoke classic Californian cold-blooded mass murder (think Manson). As lastliberal observes at IMDB, why genius Beach puts up with clown Thornton for so long is a deep gaol-cell mystery.
A heavily marketed and unsuccessful Stan TV miniseries co-created by Dylan River (from Alice Springs, "son of Warwick Thornton and producer Penelope McDonald") who also co-wrote and directed. The other co-creator was Tanith Glynn-Maloney. Notionally for Miranda Otto and Noah Taylor who both do what they can with a tiresome pile of cliches. Noah's a long way from his days of suave urban comedic cool in He Died with a Felafel in his Hand; blame the writing. In eight brief (less than 30 minute) episodes that could've been squashed into a single movie.
With heavy thievery from Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Welcome To Woop Woop) and much of the ozploitation canon, Sherry-Lee Watson slips out of juvie to visit her (let's say) spiritual father in hospital who wants her to return a cup to her biological father but is really angling to make good on an imagined slight before carking it on country. After thieving prostitute/madam Otto's taxi to get to the distant camp she encounters preacher/comedic relief Taylor and son/patent love interest Will McDonald. And as everyone knows by now, all roads in Central Australia lead to Coober Pedy and/or away from Alice Springs.
The remaining seven episodes parade a familiar and predictable gallery of grotesques as the three couples (Otto commandeering Taylor's caravan and tow vehicle and a pair of police detectives) proceed with their respective McGuffin hunts. There's a sweet but unimaginative scene where some bush mechanics unbog the young couple that would've almost have been at home in The Turning if it wasn't ruined by the black magic immediately preceding it. The climactic episode is set in urban Adelaide and thereabouts. A highly dubious thoroughbred breeding family is used to take pot shots at the landed gentry/bunyip aristocracy. Each scenario is very tidily resolved within its episode. The cinematography is good but does not innovate.
The production aims for a prelapsarian 1983 or so, which is about a decade before Dylan River was born. The presence of unleaded fuel implies it is set in the later 1980s and the absence of leaded fuel makes it nowhen. (Similarly the Stuart Highway never looked like that.) If the point was to exhibit some classic Australian cars I'd suggest the filmmakers spend more time in South Australia; just come to Whyalla! The dialogue is fatally anachronistic with lead Watson acting out just like the Millennial she is. (The words of wisdom she voices at either end of each bout are shockingly unoriginal.) It's all too shallow-sophisticated, too pale an imitation of Tarantino or the Coen brothers, for the era. Though of course the wholesale appropriation is bang on.
Luke Buckmaster: five stars, instant classic. I wish I saw what he was watching. I have yet to listen to Jason Di Rosso's take.
And yet more Clint Eastwood completism. Again he produced, directed and starred. The script by William Goldman, adapting the book by David Baldacci, is the weakest I can remember for any of his productions. Clint plays a jewellery thief in Washington D.C. — a subtle cat burglar to James Caan's sweaty industrial bank robber of the previous decade — with no love interests! Laura Linney is his prosecutor/daughter, Ed Harris an investigating cop, and Gene Hackman the absolutely-empowered President. Judy Davis is his chief-of-staff in one of her weaker performances. The plot is mostly nonsensical but Americans do like exploring the what-ifs of their political system. Once again the 1990s overrated the political impact of sex scandals.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Janet Maslin.
Apparently filmed at the same time as Risky Business in Chicago and complementing it with a dank, dark and humourless grittiness. Directed by Rick Rosenthal from a script by Richard Di Lello. Sean Penn leads as a mostly nonspeaking underage crim sent to juvie. Ally Sheedy has the thankless task of being his girlfriend. Adversary Esai Morales gets implausibly sent to the same dormitory and the inevitable occurs, right down to some unlikely and singular character and/or moral growth. Clancy Brown's feature-film debut (!) and he does not take enough care with his head. Eric Gurry's underage geek has the most fun, albeit of a sociopathic, us-or-them amoral kind that is difficult to enjoy.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Janet Maslin: brutal. Both agree the first half is somewhat promising and the second half squanders that promise.
More minor Clint Eastwood completism. He produced, directed and starred. Also a jag from Risky Business via co-writer Paul Brickman. Perhaps because of these two there is some slick dialogue (OK, one liners) but otherwise the script is crap. This is very annoying as the cast is generally decent and Eastwood's talents for building movies are clearly wasted.
Eastwood puts himself in San Francisco, so recently the land of Dirty Harry, as a soak/pantsman/newspaperman hunted out of NYC due to dodgy reporting and life choices. Go west old man! He has an age-inappropriate wife (Diane Venora, reprising her scorned-wife role from Heat (1995)), a daughter about a tenth of his age (his own, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood) with a hippo fascination and yet still chases the young ladies (specifically Mary McCormack in an early bar scene and Lucy Liu in a coda). Notionally he finds a vector for providing justice to a man (Isaiah Washington) on death row, wrongly convicted, but this is obvious from the start.
Given the premise — the man is getting executed at San Quentin just after midnight — there is a strict order of operations on a timer so every scene without free-agent Eastwood is pure filler. There's a kooky subplot involving Catholic priest Michael McKean that goes nowhere. The resolution of the murder mystery is too neat and unsatisfying. The most fun is watching boss James Wood (and others, but mostly Wood) taking it to Eastwood. Denis Leary is too flat as a very dour cuckold.
Roger Ebert somehow found three stars. Janet Maslin. Both declare it an effective thriller, perhaps because they were also working in print.
