peteg's blog - noise

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

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 Spufford considers the period as a sort of interregnum when the vocabulary of black magic is obsolete but science isn't far enough along for the real stories.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vale, David Malouf. ABC obit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some idle Clint Eastwood completism. Also a Carrie Snodgress jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). An anachronistic venture for the time: Eastwood directed a script by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack — the same trio who made The Gauntlet (1977). Here Clint demonstrates what he did and did not learn or recall about Westerns from his work with Sergio Leone. His own performance is not great but the rest of the cast does OK.

It's Idaho in the latter half of the nineteenth century and everyone's mining alluvial gold in the snowy Sierra. An encampment gets overrun by some local ferals on the orders of town founder Richard Dysart. Clint turns up after the fact and proves his chops by bashing the bashers as a favour to bashee Michael Moriarty. All (that is, both of) the ladies go ga ga for Clint, especially when he pulls out the dog collar and adopts the persona of "preacher". We never see him preach except when he tells the people to stick together but goes alone himself (of course). There's some fancy shooting and an anticlimax.

The characters are annoyingly underdeveloped. For instance giant Richard Kiel seems to learn the moral aspects of violence from Clint but his main opportunity to demonstrate this is interrupted (by Clint). The negative space portraits, the dynamite, the awesome shooting are all twenty years stale; the best cinematography is of the distant mountains. There is no soundtrack. At best it's a dry run for Unforgiven (1992).

Roger Ebert: four stars. "One of the subtlest things in the movie is the way it plays with the possibility that Eastwood’s character may be a ghost, or at least something other than an ordinary mortal." Vincent Canby.

Kindle. After the obscurity of the contemporary Red Birds (2018), Hanif revisited the more fertile ground (decades-ago Pakistani politics) of his first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) by way of a strong but more acted-against-than-acting female character ala Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011). This one is set at the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's execution in 1979 and covers the fallout on a failed revolutionary/successful English teacher, an Imam, a Field Intelligence Unit captain, the fallen angel and a few secondary characters at the pointier end of operations.

Unfortunately it's not great. We start with a bang, with a series of semi-random happenings that promise effective black humour in caper mode. But the themes are too weighty (sexual abuse, women as property/burdens, political/religious burdens/schisms, torture, so on) that soon enough we're in some kind of holding pattern, wading in treacle, as Hanif staves off anything too consequential. The ending therefore comes in an abrupt rush. It seems that women cannot be funny; the voice in her "homeworks" got flattened into the abiding third-person omniscient as the story proceeded.

The herb dealer who invents "Iron Syrup" links the book to Karan Mahajan's Complex (2026), and the haram stuff at a mosque to DJ Ahmet (2025).

Michael Gorra at the New York Times. "Often, too often, seem[s] to echo [Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983)], albeit without the fantasy." Yagnishsing Dawoor applies the Booker kiss-of-death at the Guardian. Goodreads.

Romeo and Juliet in present-day North Macedonia, facilitated by the universal solvent of EDM. It doesn't get as bogged in the scene as Sirât (2025): this is more adolescent, sweet rather than rueful. Both also involve a young woman fleeing the leash of tradition and familial binds. Written and directed by Georgi M. Unkovski. Alen Sinkauz and Nenad Sinkauz do some interesting soundtrack work.

Ahmet (Arif Jakup) gets yanked out of school by his irascible father and can see a lifetime of shepherding open up in front of him. His younger brother Naim (Agush Agushev) is mute. Gorgeous, sophisticated Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova) returns from Germany for an arranged marriage but her temperament and/or time away has rendered her unwilling and even incapable. For further reasons underexplained the leads have a tenuous encounter at an open-air rave not too far from their parents' farms. We learn some but not enough of their backstories during other events, including a festival where some American-style dancing causes a moral panic, before things are driven off a cliff by the local villagers, I think Christian, taking out their frustrations on a mosque. The ending is unsatisfying. There's some funny stuff with a technologically inept Muezzin.

The cinematography is often beautiful. I wish they'd shown us the clothing better. It put me in mind of The Monk and the Gun (2023): a hilly, exotic location with some ethnography. If I understood the dialogue right the events took place in and near the town of Radoviš. Reference is also made to Konche and the big smoke of Strumica.

A Critic's Pick by Chris Azzopardi at the New York Times. Cath Clarke was less impressed. More details at Wikipedia.

An idle bit of James Caan completism. IMDB trivia: his first project after The Godfather (1972) and so clearly a money job. "Hot Lips" Sally Kellerman went without a bra throughout; her brand of zany clashed with Caan's unimaginative, car-thieving football hero fresh out of gaol. Notionally he's tracking down a big pile of dosh with some assistance from Swing-loving Peter Boyle (more in tune with Kellerman) and his wife/Caan fangirl Louise Lasser but that was as irrelevant as everything else. Directed by Howard Zieff from a script by W.D. Richter.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Goofy. Vincent Canby. Mountains of illogic. Caan as Candide in "a comedy-melodrama about America going to the madhouse in mobile homes."

A jag from Rabbit, Run (1970) via director Jack Smight who showed here what that could have been there: it's pretty well shot (by Jack Priestley) and assembled (by Archie Marshek). The tone wobbles (some of that is misdirection) which I put down to the adaptation by John Gay of William Goldman's dodgy source material.

The premise is not so far from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with Rod Steiger as a strangler of women and George Segal the cop who is foisted with a relationship with him. Giving this the farcical treatment is intrinsically busted; the heavy stuff detracts from the fine domestic comedy work of Segal's mother Eileen Heckart who is by far the best thing on the screen. He hooks up with improbably single Lee Remick, a Marlboro-smoking clothes horse who is obviously going to be the last girl despite not being Steiger's type. She does OK. Murray Hamilton (Brubaker (1980)) has a minor role as a police inspector. Michael Dunn is fine in a random scene. The ending is neat and tidy and lame. Once again we visit the Pan Am building in NYC as well as the Lincoln Centre and under-construction Julliard.

I don't doubt Steiger enjoyed his performance, hamming it up to the max, but it's not so great for us. I came away thinking that Mel Brooks struck a better balance in Young Frankenstein (1974).

Vincen Canby. Oedipean. "Mr. Gay has written an exposition-free, gag-filled cartoon, which is the manner in which Jack Smight directs it."

The rapidly diminishing returns of Clint Eastwood completism. He plays a cowboy cop from Arizona. Also a Melodie Johnson jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). She's married but home alone in some dusty ranch in the middle of nowhere. Her task (in short-and-blonde mode) is to keep him entertained for an hour or two before he heads off to NYC for some more hunting and tracking. Directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay by Herman Miller, Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman. It's something of a Cro-Magnon Dirty Harry (1971). Lee J. Cobb, squandered as a proforma police lieutenant. Seymour Cassel got some fondling in. Don Stroud (Django Unchained (2012)) brought some genuine menace.

The plot is very dodgy but sort-of works as a time capsule for the sybaritic demimonde of NYC with some semi-decent footage of a big open-air party/discotheque that our man has to traverse to locate double-crossing tramp Tisha Sterling who knows where their man is. Clint's methods offend his ostensible brand-new lady-love, social worker/shrink Susan Clark but she gets over his lack of exclusivity before he gets back into that helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building. All the women are savvy in their own ways but go weak-kneed at the mere prospect of being treated as sex objects.

Given a choice Eastwood himself went with filming the far more genteel jazz concert in Monterey, California (retaining the crazy women) in Play Misty for Me (1971).

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "The screenplay is so predictable in situation and so arch in its supposedly tough, blunt, wise talk that it turns into a joke told by someone with no sense of humour."

An Anjanette Comer jag from The Loved One (1965). I hadn't seen her in anything else. Also some James Caan completism. An embarrassment for all involved.

I haven't read anything by John Updike and having seen this have even less interest. Some of the dialogue sounded like it was lifted directly from the source book he got published in 1960, and similarly for many of the scenes. The entirety is very clunky: poorly edited for sure but the raw material is rubbish too, so blame all of director Jack Smight, adaptor Howard B. Kreitsek, cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop and editor Archie Marshek.

Briefly Updike wrote about the chafing of the American husband at his domestication, which was possibly transgressive or at least a bit naughty at the time. On screen it is overly reductive soap opera: Carrie Snodgress (Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)), in her first outing, plays a dipso, pregnant housewife who just sits around smoking, drinking and watching Looney Tunes cartoons all day. Caan, who peaked in high school, wants to feel his oats again and so heads out into what passes as the demimonde of Reading, Pennsylvania with his old basketball coach who brings along part-time call girl Comer. The characters are so poorly drawn it is not clear why she's hard up for a man or what it is she sees in Caan. There's also golf-mad Christian minister Arthur Hill, sticking his oar in, married to foxy and dissatisfied Melodie Johnson. Things proceed as you'd expect with a putatively shocking accidental infanticide thrown in just for the frisson. Nobody asks what the women might want except a husband.

Apparently it did not get much of a release at the time and hence was not reviewed by the usual venues. I guess nobody got what they wanted.

Third time around with this thing adapted by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood from Evelyn Waugh's novel. Directed by Tony Richardson (Look Back in Anger (1959)).

The cast is top shelf. Southern does bring some of the Dr. Strangelove (1964) out of the source material and I found it often hilarious. Unsubtle yes, but at this remove how could anyone be offended? It is let down by some clunky editing.

Bosley Crowther. "It is when Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood move this absurd conceit beyond the morbid adventures of their hero in the land of Whispering Glades and go in for a lot of raucous kidding of real estate development, senior homes, junior geniuses in the space age and a plan to launch bodies into space that the whole thing goes into an orbit of witless inanity."

A Dylan O'Brien jag from Send Help (2026). He's a bit more lively here but still not great. Directed by Graham Moore (his first time) from a script he co-wrote with Johnathan McClain. Apparently Moore got an Oscar for his adaptation for The Imitation Game (2015).

Actually the draw was Mark Rylance who I remember was quite good in Bridge of Spies (2015), a performance for which he won an Oscar. As a snooty English tailor in gangland Chicago in 1956 he puts the rest of the cast firmly in the shade, excepting perhaps Irish mob boss Simon Russell Beale (The Death of Stalin (2017)). The plot is quite trashy: Rylance and receptionist/gamine Zoey Deutch ostensibly get on with their bespoke-clothes business while the gangsters get on with theirs but of course things veer off course in a way that would be unimaginable in the Phantom Thread (2017) universe.

It mostly goes agreeably but every so often drops its pseudo-realism with unlikely exposition dumps; Hitchcock did a far better job with that aspect in Rope (1948) and as with Jimmy Stewart it is inconceivable that Rylance is harmless. Conversely his main interlocutor, scarface Johnny Flynn (who wants to be James Wood when he grows up), may plausibly have thought so, partly because England does snobbery like no other culture. The holes in the plot — just why do they not even start torturing Deutch? — ruined it for me, as did the self-congratulatory conclusion that slid towards a zombie flick. Given the very limited sets I wondered if it may have worked better as a stage show. Dick Pope did the cinematography.

Manohla Dargis: "a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense." It is a relief when glamour puss Nikki Amuka-Bird enters the story. Stephanie Zacharek. Calling Rylance's tailor "humble" illustrates the culture gap.

Inevitable once I realised Lukas Moodysson was still active. This is apparently the first thing he's done since the TV series Gösta (2019) and his first feature after Vi är bäst! (2013). The latest in a long line of uncalled-for sequels. It seems he managed to convince almost all of the original cast to reunite; notably missing are Michael Nyqvist who passed in 2017 and Ola Norell/Rapace; the latter's Lasse was recast. In a few sittings due to a failure to grip.

It doesn't function as a standalone film but if you've just rewatched the original it also mostly just doesn't work as you can see everything coming a long way off. Some of it is just plain sad, not poignant or effective, and other bits are outright boring. There's a sense of gutlessness, of punching down. Moodysson should have just left things be.

Thinly reviewed. Cath Clarke at the Guardian. Moodysson is becoming misanthropic. Henric Brandt: stagnancy.

Kindle. I remember (perhaps faultily) enjoying his previous novels: Family Planning (2008) and The Association of Small Bombs (2016). This one is perhaps a lengthy and not great expansion on the first.

After a first-person intro that sketches how things are going to go we get a series of character studies intermingled with some minor-note action. It's set mostly in the airless Delhi complex that appears to be the sole legacy of nation-builder SP Chopra to his children with a completely vanilla take on Desi in London and nowhereland Michigan, from (ballpark) the 1970s to mid-1990s. I didn't feel any of the characters popped and none did anything particularly interesting or novel; stuff just happens. The politics is mostly described and not explained, excepting one incident where the BJP needed to manufacture a distraction. At times he seems to be drawing a line from the Nehru regime to Modi via the naysayers, Hindutva, Indira and Sonia Gandhi. Humourless.

Jonathan Dee at the New York Times. Goodreads.

Third time around with this Lukas Moodysson classic. Prompted by the realisation that he made Tillsammans 99 (2023) while I wasn't watching. Also Ola Norell (later Ola Rapace) was in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), and Michael Nyqvist in A Hidden Life (2019).

As cringe comedy it felt like Moodysson crested the Dogme 95 wave with steadier camerawork and a soundtrack drawn entirely from the scenario. That early kitchen scene is still the best. The ending felt unearnt.

Roger Ebert: three stars and a very dodgy lagom-for-me-tack review. Stephanie Zacharek at length. Dave Kehr at the New York Times. Wikipedia has all the details. Nobody compared it with Mike Leigh's English realism.

Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. She promised it'd be a trashy and fun return-to-form for director Sam Raimi. In two sittings.

It's a workplace comedy! — which means it's got a lot of #metoo and everyone is everyone else's frenemy. We spend the first hour and a bit with a dorkified "strategy and planning" Survivor fan Rachel McAdams and her vacuous scion-boss-bro Dylan O'Brien and others getting things set up, culminating in the lead pair being stranded on an island in the Bay of Thailand. As a two-hander it gets a bit Misery (1990) and as trash it fares maybe a little better than The Housemaid (2025) despite the clunkiness. But I can't say I enjoyed his performance much — he's too bro and uninventive. As for McAdams, she has a bit of fun and does OK within her limited range. Her character did not make a tonne of sense as she unstably alternates between knowing survivalism and getting suckered by the man-boy; is she all tactics and no strategy? Is she incapable of learning? Raimi does not stick the ending. Cracked but not cracked enough.

Bill Pope's cinematography is quite fine.

Peter Sobczynski. I did not know where to look for Bruce Campbell.