Excess Alain Delon completism. Prompted by Glenn Kenny's review in 2021 — a Critic's Pick! It took me several goes to make it past the first half hour.
The scenario has Delon holidaying with hot stuff Romy Schneider at a friends' villa in the south of France. She's a writer of some kind, as was he before he failed into advertising. They're still heavily into each other despite it being about two years since they met and both being powerfully inert apart from the scenes of staged friskiness. A friend/erstwhile lover in the tunes business arrives with his previously undiscovered nubile daughter causing the usual complications. Things then grind on as they must.
It's sexy in a camera-objectifying-female-bodies way; it's entirely the male gaze as the women are too busy looking at the men. I found it boring as there is not much of an attempt at developing the characters; for instance it's clear that Delon isn't drinking but we are never given a reason why. Another scene has Schneider getting annoyed at her chopsticks. The attempt to turn it into a detective flick in the last movement is lighter than air.
It's tagged at IMDB as a psychological drama and I guess you could bracket it with minor Hitchcock like Spellbound. At times I wondered if it was taking on more of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than it could swallow.
Bill Forsyth's first Hollywood feature. Inevitable after Breaking In. Adapted by him from a widely feted book by Marilynne Robinson. Over many nights due to a failure to grip.
Two young ladies (soon enough and mostly Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) are dumped by their mother Margot Pinvidic (looking a bit too much like Susan Sarandon) on their grandmother in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho. Her passing brings their free-spirited aunt Christine Lahti (...And Justice For All, Running of Empty) back to town and she is entrusted with their care. Her opinions on child rearing are not so much relaxed as entirely absent. Adventures ensure, some growing up occurs but none of the typical coming-of-age stuff.
It's billed as a comedy-drama but I found little of either. There are some of Forsyth's signature moves (repeated motifs, significant gestures). The initial scenes and themes of female freedom/wild abandonment/Pinvidic evoke Thelma and Louise. The described-but-not-shown epic train derailment points toward Magnolia and there's just a dash (maybe) of Welcome to the Dollhouse in Ruth's exclusion from Lucille's social life. Of course Forsyth is too gentle a filmmaker to take any of it to the limit.
Roger Ebert: four stars and much effusion. Sylvia "seemed closer to a mystic, or a saint" than a mad woman. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Lahti plays "a siren of the open road". IMDB trivia: Diane Keaton was originally cast in the lead. Takes place in 1955. Further details at Wikipedia. Unlike Forsyth's other efforts there's not much of a soundtrack.
More Alain Delon completism. He passed recently. Directed and co-written by Luchino Visconti. Inevitable after The Leopard. Claudia Cardinale has a minor role as the oldest-brother's wife. In glorious black-and-white. Over two nights due to length.
After the passing of their patriarch, four of five brothers and their mother from feudal farmland in southern Italy join the eldest brother in frigid industrial Milan. Each brother gets named in a title card but really it's always about Delon's Rocco and Renato Salvatori's Simone. Both end up boxing and falling for the same woman, Annie Girardot's Nadia, a prostitute. The story maps the disintegration of the family as society's traditions crumble. It's not very subtle and things generally go as you'd expect, but despite this it is somehow engaging throughout. There's a great scene where an old bloke explains how housing works for those of meagre means.
Roger Ebert in 2008: a "great movie" for an instant four stars. Obviously points the way to The Godfather, Mean Streets. Operatic and exhausting. Bosley Crowther in 1961. The Grapes of Wrath. Vincent Canby in 1991. Rocco recalls Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. More details at Wikipedia.
Originally titled Bastarden (The Bastard). Directed and co-written by Nikolaj Arcel who was also responsible for the similarly fictional-historical A Royal Affair (2012) which also starred Mads Mikkelsen. He also co-wrote Riders of Justice with co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen. In two sittings as it neatly segments.
Pensioned soldier Mikkelsen gets sick of the poor house in the 1750s and decides to petition the Danish King. He offers to have a crack at farming the moorland/wasteland of Jutland in return for a peerage on success. Advisor Søren Malling (A Hijacking) is against it but comes around when he sees there is little chance of a payout and some political benefit in the meantime. Labour is sourced initially from some escapees (housekeeper Amanda Collin, Morten Hee Andersen) of the house of the local feudal lord (a hammy Simon Bennebjerg) and later a band of gypsies. As the cultivation is a tedious process the focus is more on a romantic opportunity with Norwegian heiress Kristine Kujath Thorp, the construction of a family with the housekeeper and a dark-skinned castaway ragamuffin (Melina Hagberg), and the power struggle with the provincial landowners.
The point, I guess, is that Mikkelsen learns that the noble title isn't worth it. The conclusion is very similar to Viggo's: people on a horse looking at the sea. There are some loose ends: where did he get that essential white clay from? how did Ms Norway fend off the laird for all that time? why is the king so powerless? Some scenes are over the top. Mikkelsen is back to being powerfully inert — his performance is all details, not dancing, and the ladies cannot resist. Rasmus Videbæk's cinematography is often intentionally murky and effective.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed Arcel. Manohla Dargis: enjoyably serious. Sheila O'Malley. Peter Bradshaw: three stars of five. Generally compared with Barry Lyndon.
The things that Guy Pearce and Jacqueline McKenzie make me watch. Directed and co-written by Lee Tamahori. He looks to have struggled within the Hollywood vortex since Once Were Warriors (1994). Apparently this is the third entry of a trilogy with that and Mahana (2016). The other writers are Australian Shane Danielsen, who reviews movies for the Schwartz media, and Kiwi Michael Bennett. Based on a novel by Hamish Clayton.
Pearce leads as a minister of religion who has been mail-ordered by the upstanding settler folk of 1830s Epworth in New Zealand. En route, taking a transparently ill-advised break from Captain Dean O'Gorman's boat, he and his majestic white horse encounter Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) whose husband is soon executed by warlord Lawrence Makoare. The horse purchases her life for reasons of plot and it looks like we're in for a retread of the fish-out-of-water frontierism of The Last of the Mohicans and The Piano.
At the town Pearce (with Ngatai-Melbourne in tow) encounters outcast McKenzie whose Māori husband has also been killed in inter-tribal warfare. The locals are initially enthusiastic that their Christian needs will now be addressed but for reasons of plot Pearce goes another way, leading to an excess of talky history lessons and a graphically-violent L.A. Confidential climax.
There are some good bits in the small, such as when gun-running O'Gorman argues for self-regulating (musket) markets on the basis of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). The didactic opportunity is squandered however as Pearce does not rebut with the now-ignored moral bits of the famous tome. The cinematography by Gin Loane is fine but we've seen so much of the scenery before that we expect a horde of CGI orcs to burst forth at any moment. Or perhaps Sam Neill, once more unto the breach. The dialogue is occasionally rubbish.
Ben Kenigsberg. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Lee Tamahori. Tamahori asserts that without Christianity the Māori would have used the white man's muskets to wipe each other out. He has consistently taken women's points of view in these movies. Three stars of five from Luke Buckmaster: who exactly was the convert?
Bill Forsyth's second Hollywood feature. I have yet to see his first.
Late-career Burt Reynolds (in a dry run for Boogie Nights?) leads as an everyman/playboy burglar who meets-cute tyre mechanic Casey Siemaszko on a job in suburban Portland, Oregon and takes him on as an apprentice. It's a heist movie! — just like it says on the tin. There are some funny bits in the small and it does not try to be clever. There is no twist but instead lots of forgiveness with stakes more in line with That Sinking Feeling than Thief. The narrative arc somewhat inverts Knox Goes Away.
Reynolds was almost unrecognisable (to me) when he eventually shed his iconic moustache. Sheila Kelley was vaguely familiar from Matchstick Men. The soundtrack is obtrusive.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Character not caper. Vincent Canby. The dog is indeed very amusing.
Minor Burt Lancaster completism prompted by David Trotter's article on David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film in the London Review of Books. Based on Daniel Ford's story Incident at Muc Wa (1967) which is a rough contemporary of Halberstam's memoir and novel.
It's 1964 and a small group of American military advisers, led by Lancaster's Korean-War vet Major Asa Barker, find themselves in a locale called Penang somewhere in the south of Việt Nam. A mystifying expansion of the group is explained when General Harnitz (Dolph Sweet) helicopters in: they're to establish a garrison at the old French settlement of Muc Wa. The result, of course, is their own private Điện Biên Phủ.
Lancaster delivers all the funny lines quite flatly (some are quite amusing) but the attendant flatness of the other performances leaves it unclear if this is failing to be a comedy in the style of Altman's M.A.S.H. (about the Korean War, with the same racial slurs) or failing to be something more substantial. Amongst the stereotypes is an intelligence officer who is nothing like Daniel Ellsberg.
IMDB tells me it was shot in California with Vietnamese refugees. This makes me wonder if it wasn't one of the ingredients for that episode of The Sympathizer.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. The cliches did their duty. All the details at Wikipedia and more at IMDB trivia.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Jub Clerc a year ago. Steve Rodgers was the other writer.
The core of the story is about a group of at-risk youth from Port Hedland or thereabouts who are taken on a photography road trip out to Karijini. Shantae Barnes-Cowan leads. Her mum likes to party hard so it falls to her uncle Mark Coles Smith to provide some stability. Carlos Sanson Jr. and Tasma Walton (far better here than in Mystery Road) are the adults supervising the trip.
The Pilbara is as gorgeous as ever but it's as it's been shot to death it's difficult to get excited by the gasps of awe from the (notional) locals. Things go gently with some implied but toothless menace and a bit too aimlessly: there are a few attempts to lift the stakes by cliched (soap operatic?) means. The use of film cameras struck me as just as disruptive as phones; how often were 1980s holidays interrupted by the artifice of needing to shoot? The limited number of photos and expense involved is not exploited here, and in general there are no stakes, quixotic frame or timelessness of a Walkabout or Rabbit Proof Fence. On the plus side it's great to see a script that shunts the well-worn issues of the white/black interface to the edges of a self-contained mostly-indigenous universe. This is helped along by a cracker soundtrack.
Look Goodsell: sincerity is so uncool in a teen. I dissent, the camera lies: only someone who hasn't been to Port Hedland could deem it "eerily pretty". Based on Clerc's experiences on a "photo safari" with National Geographic in the 1980s. She also did a segment of The Turning. Played at Cannes Écrans Juniors 2024. Sandra Hall, blandly. Elsewhere: it invites comparison with The Breakfast Club.
Kindle. Inevitable after Andrina. Billed as stories for kids, and indeed the writing is direct and fine but the vocabulary requires an adult. The cat of the title is black (of course) and comes to live with a young school girl on an island in Orkney. The stories are in the vein of Oscar Wilde: gentle moral fables garbed in fantasy and magic realism. We visit ancient Egypt, imperial China, a pirate ship and the island itself in the present time. Fankle hates the snow. The coda is an acerbic take on man's relationship with creation.
#100 on David Stratton's list of marvellous movies. Mostly for Pamela Rabe who I saw in Ibsen's Ghosts a long while back. She's not great here. Directed by Samantha Lang from a script adapted by Laura Jones from Elizabeth Jolley's novel. I'm not in the target demographic and perhaps nobody is.
In a haircut that is almost fatal Mirando Otto appears at only child/spinster/Germanic Rabe's family farm somewhere near frigid Cooma/Nimmitabel as domestic help after a stretch in juvie. Patriarch Frank Wilson (Frank Wilson!) is almost dead and the only person with Rabe's interests in mind is stock-and-station agent Paul Chubb. Things go as the themes force them to: a culture/music clash between 1940s isolated Europhile settler frugality and 1990s expansive hedonistic modernity, ease via capital gains and subdivision replacing honest toil, parental and male expectations from beyond the grave versus living orphanhood and sisterhood, obligation and responsibility against expediency, an unsound employer/employee relationship, mental unwellness. Too much misdirecting dead weight — much of it carried by single lines of dialogue, an expression on Rabe's face, a shared bed, a clean break in Otto's character, a repeated scene — robs the movie of its arthouse horror potential.
Mandy Walker's cinematography was generally terrible; the palette was too washed out though that may have been due to the format I saw it in. It is not an aesthetic triumph.
The Movie Show: David on the boost (satisfying, selected to compete at Cannes 1997 (!), The Servant, 4.5 stars of 5), Margaret more realistic (cheated (!), just a yarn, 3.5 stars of 5). Stratton at Variety at the time. A. O. Scott: The Blair Witch Project, Picnic at Hanging Rock. But it isn't at all scary; I think he and Stratton took more to the movie than the movie brought to its audience. Ozmovies claims they'll be back after a few weeks of renovation (here's hoping) and in the meantime they suggest we use archive.org for all the details. "[S]old at the time as a psychological thriller, but it’s short on psychology and definitely short on thrills." Theatrical. Rabe's character is a city person's idea of a farm woman. Perhaps I am insufficiently steeped in Freudianism.
Viggo Mortensen wrote, directed and (apparently unintentionally) starred in this. The poster at IMDB is in the classic style of an old Western and in many ways so is the movie.
Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) leads as a Francophile woman who's after a good time on her own terms in a place we're supposed to recognise as San Francisco in the 1860s. She's sick of her hectoring establishment lover Colin Morgan and meeting laconic carpenter Viggo on the docks seals the deal: off she heads to Nevada (I read later) with him to live an isolated quiet life in a wooden cabin redolent of her childhood. Being of independent mind she gets a job at a saloon in a nearby town. Viggo, also of independent mind, feels the need to see the nascent Civil War for himself (in New Mexico) and leaves her to the local heavily-drawn predators (Garret Dillahunt, Solly McLeod, Danny Huston) and our perplexity.
The themes of fatherhood and an unwell mother run throughout and are something of a compliment to Captain Fantastic. Both leads radiate quiet inner strength. Viggo is more restrained — have we seen him play a Dane before? (A quick google suggests yes.) The multilingual dialogue is a nice touch as it dodges (or at least complexifies) much that is problematic in this genre. I found the (mild) violence unwelcome; while it's not glorified it detracts from what is otherwise a gentle love story between two strong people where nothing particularly complicated goes on. I wish Viggo could have found some other way to raise the stakes than by compromising Krieps.
Ben Kenigsberg made it a New York Times Critic's Pick. The film has "a nested, at times unnecessarily complicated structure." Marcel Zyskind's cinematography is fine. Four stars of five from Peter Bradshaw and Wendy Ide (it flags whenever Krieps is off screen). San Francisco is "the end of the world" — tell that to the Chinese immigrants. Michael Wood: the trio of opening scenes (knight in forest, shootout in town, woman dying in bed) are disjointed, the juxtaposition awkward ... but has interesting effects. He proceeds to lay it all out for us. Eastern Promises. "This film is about class and money rather than who shot Liberty Valance." The middle section drags. Brian Tallerico at TIFF 2023. Three-and-a-half stars and many references from Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert's site. Loads of details at Wikipedia. I read later that Viggo also composed the music and produced. Nobody compared Krieps to Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West.
Written and directed by Bill Forsyth. Bill Paterson leads as an early-morning radio host who wakes Glasgow up with his good-spirited, G-rated japes. While driving his red BMW 313i coupé through the city, fantastically-permed Clare Grogan gives him an irresistible smile from an ice cream truck and we're off to the races. Forsyth's treatment of his mediation in their turf war is mostly gentle (like Andrina) though the seedy warehouses and low-level violence (mostly just property damage) gives it a harder edge (like That Sinking Feeling). It's a bit Glasgow Underbelly, sweetly, reflecting the changing ethnic composition and concerns. The conclusion is a homage to all the wily Scots in history.
The jokes are quite amusing: his dentist really does look like George C Scott, and how is it that everyone knows what Paterson looks like? Mark Knopfler provides a soundtrack less memorable than Local Hero's; much is lifted from Dire Straits's 1982 album Love Over Gold. Afterwards I learnt that Knopfler is actually Glaswegian and Clare Grogan also had a pop music career.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Forsyth "has made a specialty out of characters who are as real as you and me, and nicer than me." Vincent Canby replays the opening scenes where Paterson is summarily dumped by his klepto girlfriend Eleanor David and we think we're in for something quite different to what follows. A disappointment after Gregory's Girl and Local Hero (!). Jonathon Coe in 2009. The cinematography by Chris Menges is indeed great.
Tancredi Falconeri: If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
More Alan Delon and Burt Lancaster completism. They were also paired in Scorpio a decade later. In three sittings due to inordinate length (3h5m), the realisation that much of it repays a close watch, the indirection of the dialogue/incompleteness of the subtitles, and that there's not a lot of plot. In glorious Technicolor and (dubbed) Italian. Directed by Luchino Visconti.
My knowledge of Italian history is very weak and this movie does not hold hands. Early on it's clear we're in Sicily at a historical moment and much later we're told it's the mid-nineteenth century, which would have already been clear to people familiar with Garibaldi's exploits. Patriarch/Prince Lancaster seeks to preserve his family's social position while accomodating the emerging political arrangements. Knowing the limitations of his own children and means he encourages nephew/war rake/man of flexible allegiance Delon to get organised with daughter-of-a-crass-bourgeois Claudia Cardinale in a fusion of aristocracy, money and beauty. Like much of Shakespeare, knowing how things have got to go does not spoil it at all.
There are many great scenes, many of which have large casts where the expressions and movements of the individuals diffuse the focus and broaden the presentation of character and relationship. For this reason it would help to see it on it a big screen. One instance is the initial scene, where Lancaster's family are at prayer, and a later one where he's reading from a book while the ladies engage in craftwork. And of course the dinner where Delon and Cardinale meet, and the climactic ball of the final forty plus minutes. And so on. Against these are some two-handers that work well in tight: somewhat secular Lancaster jousting with priest Romolo Valli (familiar from A Fistful of Dynamite; God is always nearby) and later Leslie French about becoming a senator for the new regime. Delon and Cardinale regularly escape the crowds to further their romance. Throughout Lancaster's princess Rina Morelli knows the score but cannot hide her jealousy at his mistress, the ball and her irrelevancy since producing a next generation that will not inherit.
The tone is more upbeat than elegiac; it's more about surviving and even thriving than mourning what is being lost. It's somewhat adjacent to The Godfather — that palazzo could be the same one as Pacino resides in during his exile in Sicily — with politics brought to the forefront. The themes are also threads in Sergio Leone's movies: the big set piece in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly where Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach encounter the Union and Confederacy at a stalemate over a bridge. I guess how nationalism is forged and peace established after a revolution is still a live concern.
Roger Ebert: a "great movie" in 2003 for an instant four stars. Bosley Crowther saw a bowdlerised version cut to 2h40m and dubbed into English. The horror. "I just wonder how much Americans will know or care about what's going on, how much we will yield to a nostalgia very similar to that in Gone With the Wind." Vincent Canby got to see it in its full glory in 1983. "This may or may not be [Lancaster's] greatest performance — there's no way of telling without the voice — but it's a visually arresting one, and one that points the way to the great performances later in his career." Philip French in 2010. Five stars from Peter Bradshaw in 2003. IMDB trivia: Scorcese's favourite movie? No wonder it reminded me of The Age of Innocence. Many great lines.
Kindle. It's been more than a decade since Pham released A Theory of Flight and even longer since he has had a book traditionally published (Catfish and Mandala, The Eaves of Heaven). This is pitched as his first novel ("... a work of fiction inspired by some events in the life of the author's maternal grandmother") but of course he has been spinning yarns all the way along.
The story is set in paradisaical Phan Thiết, one of Việt Nam's fish sauce capitals, a common place for post-war refugees to depart from (in fact, fiction and memoir) and Pham's birthplace. The Japanese have displaced colonial power France in 1942 which allows for social mobility amongst the Vietnamese before the occupiers cause famine and chaos as their war machine becomes chaotically rapacious. Main character Thuyet therefore oscillates between wearing silk gowns to supper clubs in Sài Gòn and poverty and ultraviolence by being married first to a football star and then Japanese Major Takeshi who is often unaccountably absent, especially at critical moments. The latter pairing leads, perhaps inevitably, to a shallow take on the blood and soil trope.
There's some effective foreshadowing through dreams but things are a bit overdetermined, and some plot moves needed more development; for instance, why does Tuyet's Aunt Coi want Tuyet's daughter Anh to return when she's (presumably) safe and thriving in the rebel (genericised as "Viet Minh") camp? There are also some loose threads: Tuyet's palm implies she'll have another two children but her trauma and the abrupt ending makes that seem unlikely. More bemusing is the incorrect geography: tourist mecca Chợ Bến Thành (market) is nowhere close Ga Sài Gòn (railway station), southeast of Phan Thiet is sea, and so on.
It's a page turner, a rollicking romance in the mode of Doctor Zhivago. The punchy Hemingway prose with lots of action begs for a movie deal. It does not try to be clever like The Sympathizer or get bogged in analysis like The Moon of Hoa Binh but instead flounders in the rapid exposition of actual events that provide temporal anchors. My grasp of history was not up to it — while I knew the Japanese in the south surrendered to the British after World War II I did not know about the Japanese-induced famine that killed a million people (Pham asserts) in 1944/1945. Perhaps it is time I read David Marr.
Violet Kupersmith at the New York Times. Briefly noted at the New Yorker. Goodreads. Pham in Sihanoukville recently.
A gentle ghost story set in Orkney. Directed and adapted from George MacKay Brown's short story by Bill Forsyth (That Sinking Feeling, Gregory's Girl, Local Hero, ...). Pensioned Captain Cyril Cusack is helped home from a night on the whisky by young lady Wendy Morgan who is unknown to the islanders. She takes care of him, vanishing daily, and presses him for his life stories. They don't make them like this any more.
Burt Lancaster completism. In black and white. Directed by John Frankenheimer (Seven Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds). Fanatical art-loving Nazi Paul Scofield loads the cultural heritage of France (a bunch of paintings by mostly foreign masters "held in trust" for the rest of the world) on a train as the Allies approach the open city of Paris towards the end of World War II. He has a story for everyone of their intrinsic and pecuniary value, especially to a post-war France. Many stratagems ensue and much sabotage results.
Lancaster was later paired again with Scofeld in Scorpio. The minor characters are played by French and German actors. I enjoyed the performances here: some inscrutable but all recognisably human. Lancaster clearly does his own stunts, making great use of his acrobat/circus training. It's engrossing like The Wages of Fear. I didn't understand what lead Lancaster's character to change his mind about the relative values of lives and art as no convincing argument is provided. To some extent it complements Mr Klein.
Bosley Crowther: evokes the train shenanigans of the silent era. The "lack of strong involvement of the emotions in the cause itself [art versus life] is a weakness of the film." IMDB trivia makes the production sound a bit Apocalypse Now.
Kindle. I've had a soft spot for Theroux since reading his Dark Star Safari a long time ago and more recently about his gaggle on Hawaii. I was wondering what he would do with George Orwell's early life after Dennis Glover's take on the other end. I haven't read Burmese Days and have long forgotten the famous essays about shooting an elephant and hanging a man.
Theroux does a decent and unsentimental job of showing how Blair may have survived and passed his time in Burma as a policeman but there are many loose threads. What motivated him to join the imperial police service in the first place? Did he have a choice of destination? How did he get into Eton and how did that affect his social relations? Most perplexing to me was how his Uncle Frank could spend a lifetime in Burma and not realise how socially unacceptable (Theroux asserts) his Eurasian daughter is.
As you'd expect it's mostly well written but there are a few bits that needed another round of editing and tightening up. It's mostly engrossing; the repetition and sense of going nowhere evokes tedium quite effectively. Some themes — the half-castes, the commercial morality of the British Raj, a loneliness assuaged only by sex (and later writing) — are overdone. It's not entirely clear why Blair needed to experience the pointy end of colonialism to understand its essential bankruptcy or what exactly caused him to pivot from complicit servant to critic. The concluding segue into the slums of Paris and London made far more immediate sense. I struggled with Blair's mortification at not participating in the Great War: surely he was too young.
William Boyd at the New York Times. Darcy Moore, more critically, nails down what's fact, what's fiction and what's erroneous. Lara Feigel: let's hear from the minor/marginalised players. Goodreads. Orwell has roared back into the cultural consciousness since (at least) 2016 and there's no sign of a let up yet.
Inevitable despite my general disinterest in Eddie Murphy. For the record it is Vanessa Bell Calloway as Imani Izzi who utters the magic lines within the first twenty minutes. They have no impact on what follows.
The setup was tired in the 1980s: Prince Murphy of Zamunda is unhappy with the bride (Calloway) organised by his father King James Earl Jones. Mother Queen Madge Sinclair seems content with her setup but encourages her son to be modern and find a bride in (where else but) the U.S.A. We are moved to Queens, New York for many japes, filler and scenes that are cliched and often do not work. Father John Amos of the eventual lucky lady Shari Headley runs a McClone. Her character and dialogue are so obviously constructed by men. Samuel L. Jackson holds up their restaurant in his idiosyncratic (and now well-known) way. Factotum Arsenio Hall often eclipses Murphy.
Siskel and Ebert: Gene says funny, charming, etc. Roger says hackneyed, old-fashioned, "the script is a lethargic retread", the treatment of women is shallow. Both agree the leads deliver fine performances. Vincent Canby: the "screenplay [...] seems to have escaped its doctors before it was entirely well." It is lame that there's no followup to Calloway's disobedient response to Murphy's injunction to disobey him. Apparently this was Murphy's attempt to branch out.
The things Michael Shannon makes me watch. He plays a ruffled, dented and essentially bemused biker who belongs to the original cohort of Tom Hardy's Vandals motorcycle club out of Chicago once upon a 1960s. Things go to hell when the blokes returning from Việt Nam bring the horse back with them, but unobserved by the reviewers, "The Kid" (Toby Wallace, similarly dead eyed and creepy in The Royal Hotel) who eventually does Hardy in is not a vet. This suggests the culture of the day was already rotting on vectors not explored here.
Along for the ride is Damon Herriman who can bash out these roughened characters all day, any day with any accent you wish, and laconic Austin Butler who was apparently Elvis recently. Notionally Jodie Comer narrates but is too self-absorbed in her affected, annoying performance (that accent/voice that wanders, that vapid character, those calculating eyes that don't match the facial expression) that put me in mind of Meryl Streep. (I grant that she is less inert than she was in The Last Duel.) And that's Norman Reedus from The Boondock Saints, channelling Dennis Hopper by gibbering on a chopper. Hardy shuffles along as the same old mumbling hood.
There are absolutely no stakes and everyone dies! — or should have died but just got injured or disappeared for a bit or whatever. Too many scenes fall flat. And have we not seen all of this before in classic American cinema: The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause and (not) Easy Rider? Or Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels of 1967? Was the world also gagging for a reheat of this genre? The insatiable thirst for retro has consumed everything forward looking.
I haven't seen anything by writer/director Jeff Nichols before this. The reviews are so universally fawning they must be about some other movie. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. "For the most part, the main performers have the highly polished sheen of most contemporary American actors, Michael Shannon's Vandal, Zipco, and some artfully gnarly teeth notwithstanding; like the movie itself, they're designed to please and do." OK ... Luke Goodsell: tragic masculinity, Butler as James Dean or Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish came to my mind, The Outsiders to his). "In a supporting performance that might be the movie's best, longtime Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon captures the conflict as an old-school burnout adrift in a new world." Mean Streets. Ambition and execution are far apart. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Austin Butler during the Australian promo tour. Violent? I think not; there's not even a menacing atmosphere. Butler and Comer do not have any romantic scenes. Comer aimed to clone original source Kathy Bauer. It's a bit Scorsese. It's a hetero/homo love triangle. And so on and on. Most concur that it's a bright shiny dog but endorse it anyway.
Very early Wim Wenders. Based on a short novel by Peter Handke which I felt was a long way from his best work. We follow an intemperate goalie (Arthur Brauss, Cross of Iron) of German extraction (?) on tour in Austria. He gets sent off for venting at the ref (offside!) and heads into Vienna to catch a few flicks. Idly he picks up and murders a cinema cashier (Erika Pluhar) after she plays at choking him with her necklace (in a forewarning to today's kids perhaps). After that he escapes into some kind of previous life with a country innkeeper (Kai Fischer) who now has a young child. He displays no disconcertion whatsoever. Are we to infer that all goalies are cold-blooded calculating sociopaths?
So much of what we're shown is banal. The much-remarked influence of American culture on post-war West German culture (see also Paul Beatty) is closely observed. He drinks a lot of what struck me as room-temperature beer in long necks, cranks all the jukeboxes and flirts with every woman he meets. Not one of the series of disjointed scenes amounts to a vignette.
As in other works of the era all the women are beautiful, single and willing, even if they have kids. The Passenger gave its women more agency and did a far better job at evoking an atmosphere. It's difficult for me to credit this work as much of an achievement given Paul Verhoeven's efforts soon after, and in another direction, Werner Herzog's.
Peter Bradshaw in 2018: five stars and a lengthy summary. Goodreads tried to read the book.
