peteg's blog - noise

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! 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.

Second time around with this Altman after a sneaky rewatch of The Long Goodbye (1973). This was ill advised as Elliot Gould's running at the mouth is so much better in the other movie, perhaps because he's on a shorter leash. Written by Joseph Walsh; IMDB says this is his only writing credit.

Gould's a winner even though he's second on the bill after George Segal who somehow becomes a winner. Who ever said gambling could be problematic! There are scams, including a proforma basketball scam that was better cooked in White Men Can't Jump (1992); indeed the latter movie has a more expansive take on the world than mere gambling debts and sad ladies who can't get no satisfaction.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Vincent Canby.

Kindle. Prompted by the many positive reviews.

Szalay goes about it with clear intent: this is a portrait of a bloke, just like Small Things Like These, whose interiority is inaccessible to us. Life mostly just happens to him and he is mostly not disappointed, perhaps because it's mostly about sex and he rarely has to ask. He starts out in spartan post-Communist Hungary, living with his mother, where the cracking (and much remarked upon) first chapter reveals his irresistibility and easy facility with violence. (All descriptions are specific, sparing and not especially lurid.) After a bit more scene-setting but no foreshadowing or forethought we're taken to London for what I expect are Szalay's favourite topics: extreme wealth, luxe consumption, brand names, high-end real estate/development deals, art of the kind that is hung on walls, inheritance, shamelessness, blameless rise and fall. He doesn't hold the hands of those of us who don't live this stuff.

Szalay's prose is fine but never achieves the necessity of Atticus Lish's. It is often amusingly reductive. Presenting István purely as a surface works well but less so for the secondary characters such as Helen, the socialite married to a plutocrat; we see her reflected in her son's surprise that she's gone for such a protozoac man and wonder what her besties think. Nobody has a real job or career which means Szalay skips the most time consuming part of life that just maybe undergirds and circumscribes the substance. Despite its relevance to a bloke from Europe BREXIT goes unmentioned. The semi-solitary drinking "parties" ameliorate the COVID lockdowns for Helen. Almost all of it could have happened in the 1980s or, excepting the helicopter commutes between London and country piles and other inessential technological things, the nineteenth century.

But to what end? Is this supposed to be a Martin Amis sort of thing, a social commentary, a time capsule? (It's been too long for me but perhaps Money?)

Dwight Garner. Peter Craven: "No finer novel will be published this year." Keiran Goddard: "Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat." (Not much?) All bone. Sean O'Beirne: "not one of Szalay’s best books; the best, by far, is All That Man Is." Too much plot (and I concur). Goodreads.

Kindle. The greatest hits of wartime Sài Gòn from the 1930s to the 1970s. Specifically we follow the titular Chinese headmaster Percival Chen as he does little more than whore and gamble in Chợ Lớn while his brotherly lieutenant, fellow Chinese Mak, runs his English school. For whose benefit, we are supposed to ask, but it is always clear that Mak has deep roots in the Vietnamese independence movement that transcend the partition of the country.

As a semi-authentic, sentimental dynastic tale it's fairly engaging. The prose is flabby and needed a good edit; the repetition-in-the-small (paragraphs that repeat the previous paragraph but with a tad more colour) recurs so often, too often. Regularly stuffed in the middle is a tendentious sentence that asserts this is how things went, how things must go, as if the author lacks faith in the persuasiveness of his narrative structures. And of course so much could go other ways and did. The characterisation is generally weak; Percival is a muppet and Mak is underdrawn. The women are just sex objects or madams, all creatures of the demimonde, mostly victims. The dialogue is highly suspect: there's no chance that Chen would identify as Viet Cong to the occupying forces of Sài Gòn. It seems unlikely "Việt Minh" is the right term for Mak's network. Such inaccuracies are just laziness this late in history.

In a broader context, Andrew X. Pham provided a lot more colour and historicity in his recent Twilight Territory. The Chinese perspective is far more valuable than that of the Western journos of, for instance, Koch's Highways to a War (and see also Neil Sheehan's memoir) and I'd be keen to read a better treatment. I vaguely recall Violet Kupersmith mining a similar vein.

Goodreads.

The second adaptation of a Claire Keegan short I've seen, the first being The Quiet Girl (2022). Directed by Belgian Tim Mielants.

The story runs adjacent to the Magdalene asylums scandal that apparently came to a head in the 1990s; here it looks like it's the 1970s or perhaps early 1980s when Irish omertà was experiencing its first cracks. Cillian Murphy works hard in the lead as a father of five girls in New Ross (southeast Ireland) whose softheartedness seems to be beyond the understanding of wife Eileen Walsh. She and publican Helen Behan operate on the basis of there but for the grace of God and cannot fathom why they would ever sacrifice their prosperity. Murphy counts his blessings a different way and we know he's a gonna when he discovers a young woman (Zara Devlin) locked in the convent's coal shed that he's being paid to refill, especially after an encounter with sinister Mother Superior Emily Watson.

One of the pleasures of this movie is that there's a lot of showing and not much telling, as if its makers trust their audience in a way that is entirely out of fashion now. The focus is always on the kids; the brokenness of Murphy's character is explored mostly in flashback, though his deep reservoirs of strength go unexplained. It is suggested that he is falling apart now after an extended period of robustness.

On the other hand I didn't enjoy much of the camerawork (by Frank van den Eeden) as I often struggled to understand if one character was looking at another, challenging or evading, and the layout of the buildings. The editing (by Alain Dessauvage) is often overly abrupt. The story itself is told with much fine detail but is not subtle; it is mostly a portrait of the man.

Luke Goodsell. He got the press pack: it's Christmas 1985. Murphy's "performance is a study in compassion and survival, in the ways one's own traumatic experience might lead to empathy instead of cyclical abuse." A Critic's Pick by Alissa Wilkinson. Both observe it's a gangster/mafia flick. Xan Brooks. Philippa Hawker.

Kindle. Thin Brunner is always a risk, as are any of his late-career works; apparently this was his final novel. Here he attempts a zany quest in the mode of Douglas Adams. There's a bit of lightweight social commentary that may've been insightful in the early 1980s. It was hard work to get through.

Goodreads.

Bong Joon-Ho's latest, and first feature since Parasite (2019). Adapted by Bong from a novel by Edward Ashton.

Near as I could tell Bong watched Moon (2009) and figured he could do it better, or at least more existentially, than Duncan Jones. Or perhaps he wanted to one-up Neill Blomkamp. To that end he mixed his CGI-creature fascination from Okja (2017) with a significant number of A-list American actors and a few British ones. And Toni Collette, cast to what now seems to be her type: an upper class wife, transparently repulsive.

The first thirty minutes was pretty amusing as we get to know Robert Pattinson's character, an expendable in a self-knowing emo mode. (He's great. There's an undertow of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in his narration.) Squeeze Naomi Ackie is an enduring mystery to him and us. Mate Steven Yeun is stuck with thinly drawn venality; he had a lot more to work with in Minari (2020). They and many others are on a settler spacecraft more-or-less run as a personal fief by Mark Ruffalo and Collette, headed for the white purity of the planet Niflheim. After arrival things devolve to some pro forma conflict and species-ism that put me in mind of Peter Singer.

Ruffalo is more-or-less a hammy Trump and is as disappointing as he was in Poor Things (2023); it's beyond him to be as farcically presidential as Bill Pullman was in Independence Day. Thomas Turgoose has a disposable auxiliary role; he's making a habit of mediocrity. Anamaria Vartolomei ultimately does no more than bat her eyelashes at Pattinson.

The cinematography is generally OK, the CGI not too annoying.

Very widely anticipated and reviewed to wide disappointment. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. No 17 "has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler)." Dana Stevens: harks back to Snowpiercer (2013). Feels foreshortened.

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. Koch apparently drew inspiration from 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 which makes the diarist conceit completely implausible.) 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.