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. 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 doesn'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: 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 late-1990s masterwork.
Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2009. Race might only flit through anyone's mind but class signifiers are forever. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. These reviews (by Americans) fail to observe much of the fine detail. Alan Riding's interview with Leigh was more considered.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah (2008)). It took me a few goes to get into.
Two young blokes from Senegal want to make it as pop stars in Europe and pay some people smugglers to make it happen. The journey is predictably rough initially but the latter half is somehow smoother, perhaps because it becomes more of a collective endeavour with manifestly real stakes and lead Seydou Sarr grows into it. The dashes of magic realism are welcome but insufficient. The final scene off the coast of Sicily is euphoric but surely what follows would be nasty. IMDB tells me that Casablanca stood in for Tripoli.
Katie Rife at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. Oscar bait. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis.
More Steve Buscemi completism. He co-wrote, directed and starred. Apparently this was about paying homage to Theo van Gogh by remaking his original.
The scenario has failing serious journalist Buscemi charged with interviewing soap star Sienna Miller (Live By Night (2016)), initially at a restaurant near her NYC loft but mostly at the loft for spurious reasons. A scandal is brewing in Washington, but isn't it always? The result is very uneven with an excess of unmotivated switchbacks; the structure is too rigid and the stakes too low for success.
I enjoyed Buscemi's directorial feature debut Trees Lounge (1996) but that was perhaps him at his most inspired. The best part of this was his clowning when he finally exited.
Roger Ebert: three stars. He hadn't seen the original. Peter Bradshaw: one star of five and the briefest review he's ever done (?). He did see the original. Manohla Dargis: "Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones."
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg. Two Jewish American cousins go to Poland to honour their grandmother who survived a concentration camp there. Kieran Culkin won an Oscar for his performance as the more unstable of the pair. Eisenberg himself plays a neurotic. Billed as comedic/cathartic. Not for me.
Lengthy at 3h 39min. Has some moments, mostly in the historical footage. I wasn't aware of Simon's foray into movies with One-Trick Pony in 1980; that was indeed Lou Reed. Accusing Graceland of "cultural slumming" seems so quaint; surely he'd be accused of cultural appropriation now. Simon is very, very NYC. It's not especially sympathetic to Art Garfunkel. Director Alex Gibney has form for these sort of retrospectives. Overall Simon is presented as an innocent songwriter-savant.
Robert Ito at the New York Times. Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert's venue: it's not much of a biopic. Peter Bradshaw. Shelley Duvall was there in a still.
Written and directed by Barry Levinson. Did he see Glengarry Glen Ross (on stage, in 1983) and think he could do better?
Baltimore, 1963. Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito are selling aluminium siding (cladding obsolete for houses now but still used for caravans, Google suggests). It's a time of Cadillacs, high emotions and scams. Lots of scams, none particularly interesting. Barbara Hershey starts as DeVito's wife but he's not sorry to see her go. J.T. Walsh has a minor role, as does Seymour Cassel (Minnie and Moskowitz). The initial tepid comedy evaporates leaving a weak, misogynistic romance that yields to scenes of great insincerity between work buddies. The dialogue often malfunctions.
Fine Young Cannibals played live in one of the bars the salesmen frequent; the soundtrack is otherwise a period-appropriate collection of tunes. It was a bit jarring to recognise Insensatez by Antônio Carlos Jobim from Lost Highway.
Roger Ebert: three stars too many. Janet Maslin: nostalgic.
Prompted by some recent Oscar noise; it came away with Best International Feature Film. Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) directed a script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega from the memoir/book by son Marcelo Rubens Paiva. With a soundtrack by Warren Ellis! In two sittings.
The first half-hour or so is an advertisement for upper-middle class 1970s Rio de Janeiro, shot in the over-saturated colours of the day. The beach isn't that busy and one could just wander across the road to an abode sufficiently spacious for five children. It starts to lose momentum once the patriarch is arrested by the military regime, and the final third is a narrowly focused, dutiful and self-absorbed portrait of the matriarch (an all-in Fernanda Torres, Oscar nominated).
Clearly this is a worthy biopic that is an important story to many people; it's highly rated at IMDB and already sits at #146 in their top-250. This might all be a civilised facade on the anger now omnipresent. It was unclear to me why the patriarch was disappeared but not the other members of their small clandestine operation.
Five stars of five from Wendy Ide, but only three of five from colleague Xan Brooks and the same from Peter Bradshaw. Michael Wood.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's great interview with Ed Norton. Norton somehow always exceeds my expectations. I was less impressed by the preceding one with co-writer/director James Mangold. Jay Cocks helped him adapt a book by Elijah Wald. The eight Oscar noms received zero gongs.
As someone whose curiosity about Bob Dylan has never evolved into fandom I felt the story, tracking his arrival in NYC to famously going electric at a folk festival (Newport in 1965), was tepid accompaniment to those cracker songs of his early years. (I've always been partial to Roy Harper's take on Girl from the North Country which gets a few goes-around here.) Many events were meaningless in the provided context; I don't care what style he's playing or how the anonymous crowds of the day felt about it, and Mangold couldn't make me. Dylan is presented as magnetic but unreachably enigmatic.
The movie itself is as well-made as any of the industrial blockbusters Mangold has rolled out before. Timothée Chalamet does a solid Dylan impersonation, good enough to not bother me. Norton is fine as Pete Seeger. Monica Barbaro glowers as Joan Baez, simmering as she's entranced and eclipsed by the new kid. Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, better than he was in The Bikeriders. I can't imagine why anyone wants to see Elle Fanning so sad.
Manohla Dargis. Gets a bit Forrest Gump with its facts.
The things Guy Pearce makes me watch. Before this I would've said I'd be up for anything, even a Matt Damon or Brad Pitt impression. Now I'm not so sure.
Co-written and directed by Brady Corbet. He acted in Melancholia but there's no sign he learnt much from Lars von Trier. Mona Fastvold shared responsibility for the script. I was happy to recognise Isaach De Bankolé from The Limits of Control. Adrien Brody (Oscared) lead as (fictional) Jewish Hungarian Bauhaus-educated architect László Tóth transplanted by way of a concentration camp to Pennsylvania. (I wonder if the Hungarian-born Australian geologist of the same name is enjoying his new fame.) There he meets industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Pearce) while waiting for his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) to join him. When great talent met vast piles of American money in the post-WWII years, brutalism was apparently inevitable.
I didn't understand what the point of it all was, and at 3hr 30min it had plenty of opportunity to make a case. (Some of it reached for There Will Be Blood but neither of leads got anywhere close to what Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano achieved.) Brody is very good and quite amusing at times. There's far too much talking and not enough showing. Heroin is used without glamour or judgement. I did not like any of the characters. I did not enjoy Lol Crawley's cinematography (Oscared).
Why this guy? Why architecture? They could've gone for any number of other Hungarian geniuses, for instance by rounding out Oppenheimer with a portrait of von Neumann.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She just summarised the plot. Dana Stevens sounded bereft, at length. The ending somewhat fits with the interstitial advertisements for the great state of Pennsylvania but does not add to what came before. Glenn Kenny at Venice: "the most exciting consideration of non-atomic American mutation and madness since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master". Stephanie Zacharek. And so on.
And still more Gene Hackman completism. Directed by Ronald Neame from a script by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes that adapted Paul Gallico's novel. Ben Stiller recently named it as his favourite of Hackman's performances — was the simple truth "money job"? — making it something of a jag from Permanent Midnight.
The scenario is very simple: some passengers are taking the final voyage of the passenger ship Poseidon from NYC to Athens. Something happens near Crete to generate a large wave that capsizes the vessel. The rest of the movie is about escaping the sinking ship, and that mostly boils down to traversing set-piece obstacles, somewhat like The Rock (1996). Things go as they have to. There's a dash of Terminator 2: Judgement Day at the end.
The cast is stellar. Ernest Borgnine is less effective than he was in Marty (1955) as his staginess clashes with the realism of the others, leaving aside wife Stella Stevens I guess. Their histrionics are entirely cliched. Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter, Oscar nom'd here) plays a saintly Jewish grandmother. Carol Lynley does a special kind of hippy vacancy. Leslie Nielsen as the captain! But Hackman owns it as a reverend with distinctly American ideas of how God helps those who help themselves. He nevertheless often selflessly helps others.
The (practical) special effects are good. It's not terrible.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars and the harshest review I've read by him. Formulaic. Where was the token Black person? He's right that the motivation for heading for the stern is weak. A. H. Weiler.
For Gene Hackman, who passed recently. Written and directed by David Mamet. The cast had potential — Hackman is joined by Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito, Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, and of course Mamet's squeeze-muse Rebecca Pigeon. There's more realism here than in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), perhaps reflecting the shift to summery but sombre Boston. (Pigeon is the only woman in Boston, in contrast with The Town.) The mechanics of the heist were rapidly obsoleted by 9/11. (I did not try to track all the details; I took it for granted that we were getting drip fed only some of the salients.) The dialogue is tame and relatively sparse. Many scenes do not work; take the shootout on the dock for instance. Rockwell is ill-used. The ending is quite poor. The dire IMDB rating is well-deserved.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "Close attention may reveal a couple of loopholes in the plot." — say it ain't so. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Mamet is erratic.
David Veloz directed his own adaptation of Jerry Stahl's memoir of writing scripts in TV in L.A. Veloz doctored the script for Natural Born Killers. Notionally deemed a Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin but I'm losing faith in that list.
We meet the sexually-irresistible Ben Stiller (as Stahl) working in a fast food joint somewhere far from the prime time. There Mario Bello is the first (or latest) lady to decide she's gotta have that ("You're too darn sad-looking to just be another retard in a pink visor") and we're off to a motel room for tales of T.V. production, drugs and other ladies who we similarly learn almost nothing about. Owen Wilson plays his bestie, pretty much as Owen Wilson must present in real life to his real life besties. Peter Greene has fun dealing to the recovering. Jerry Stahl plays his own doctor, sardonically. The women include, with varying levels of involvement and commitment, Connie Nielsen (Dagmar from Deutschland with the best gear), Elizabeth Hurley (in need of a green card), Liz Torres (in need of a junk buddy), Janeane Garofalo (in need of a man, any man), Cheryl Ladd (in need of a scriptwriter). And probably others. He's shooting up on anything and tomorrow's never there.
The vibe is Trainspotting-adjacent, comedic but not very funny, definitely not fun, funny or philosophical about drug use, milking a 1990s soundtrack. Stiller appears to be all-in, at one point shooting into his neck. Many scenes are way too long and the last movement really drags. Was there a point?
Roger Ebert: three stars. He knew that addiction is heavy stuff but I don't see why that makes it sacred. The Man With the Golden Arm. Janet Maslin: a cautionary tale!
Second or third time around. Peter Weir directed a script originally by Christopher Koch that was bent out of shape by Weir and David Williamson; they elided too many of the meaningful bits while retaining all the obscurity. Maurice Jarre did the soundtrack to which Vangelis contributed the somewhat incongruous theme song L'Enfant.
The movie flits from event to event and feels rushed after the languor of the book; Koch did pace that right. Mel Gibson's Guy Hamilton is not the giant counterpart to Billy Kwan as played by Lind Hunt (Dune (1984)). (She's excellent in a mediocre movie.) Casting the tall Sigourney Weaver as an English rose only served to emphasise that. Neither are particularly effective as romantic leads — she giggling like a schoolgirl, he staring like he's been poleaxed. Did either ever try again? Bill Kerr's Colonel Henderson is undignified. Paul Sonkkila's dial is very familiar from Australian cinema.
The increased emphasis on the romance made it even more difficult to fathom the stakes; things get asserted from time-to-time but no reasons are ever given. (Koch provided at least some background in prose: what taking a bungalow signified, what Billy means by saying "Anglo-Saxons are better in the tropics", and so on.) At times the goal seemed to be to remake Mad Max.
Again I'd say Weir's direction is unsuccessful.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Saint Jack. Vincent Canby: "This film should be some kind of epic." Ozmovies (snapshot): retrospectively perhaps Weir's best! Wikipedia. IMDB trivia: shot in Sydney and the Philippines. The non-English dialogue is in Tagalog, not Bahasa. Oops.
Somewhat prompted by Manohla Dargis making it a Critic's Pick, and otherwise slim pickings amongst the new movies. Directed by Gia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter, new to me. Written by Kate Gersten who has done a lot of TV.
To me this is obviously a female counterpart to Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008): take a 1980s/1990s star (here Pamela Anderson) and show them now glammed up and down, still in a job that they've aged well out of. It's a genre that I suspect Diane Keaton of milking, perhaps right back to The Godfather: Part III, but I wouldn't know.
The scenario has Anderson showgirling in Le Razzle Dazzle, purportedly the last of its kind in Las Vegas. Its 30 year run is coming to an end and she needs to find a new gig. The first half has enough fun bits to suggest a black comedy but by halfway, as Jamie Lee Curtis's cocktail waitress is eclipsed by cliche, things are deadly serious. There's a daughter plot involving miscast Billie Lourd and a fair slab of generic confected conflict. By the credits nothing has been resolved but we're still shown scenes of redemption/empathy/reconnection.
Pamela Anderson has her moments. Her best acting here is when she reaches for the extremely synthetic but her efforts are never matched by the rest of the cast, excepting her rapport with Curtis. (Curtis is far better here than in Everything Everywhere All At Once — a career-best performance even?) Stage manager/erstwhile lover Dave Bautista delivers some drecky dialogue during his big dinner scene in the mode of the emotionally incompetent character he's spent too long playing. I feel he's been better than that but perhaps I'm wrong. Jason Schwartzman is flat and brutal, just doing a favour for a cousin (?).
I did not enjoy the cinematography much.
Sheila O'Malley. I think she forgets just how artificial Anderson's beauty always was. Sandra Hall: a family production. Luke Goodsell. Peter Bradshaw: so much nepo, and so much more. The commentariat generally holds that Anderson is good in a bad movie. But Jason Di Rosso really dug it.
Prompted by the claim in the IMDB trivia for Giant that Ava Gardner was too busy filming this in Pakistan to star in that in Texas. Directed by George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story) from the adaptation of John Masters's novel by Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat.
It's so late in the British Raj (ballpark 1946) that even the whitest of Brits just want to leave; it's even getting too late to found a kingdom. But before departure the powers-that-still-be have to thwart terrorist plots that would have delayed the mail train and killed Gandhi while, of course, falling in love with Anglo-Indian Gardner. Notionally the focus is on the problems of her ethnicity — where will her kind fit after the quit? will they continue to be privileged employees in the Indian railway hierarchy? — but really it's about there being only one eligible woman in the whole of the fictional town. It's therefore a bit Doctor Zhivago. The story is framed as a recounting to a superior officer by Colonel Stewart Granger in the safety of a train carriage. There are vague echoes of the fair-superior The Train (1964). It could've been called A Passage to England.
I feel Gardner was miscast; she's a lot better in The Night of the Iguana (1964). She is clearly working hard to show the requisite interest in her three (serial) suitors but only really warms up when the locals draw her into an all-male dance (which that movie echoes). Most fatally her accent wanders from British-ish to east-coast U.S.A. when the script calls for histrionics. Many actors (e.g. Patrick Taylor, Freda Jackson, Peter Illing) appear in brownface.
Bosley Crowther: the ending is a bit childish for such an adult movie. IMDB trivia: needed the epic treatment that Cukor could not provide. More details at Wikipedia.
Prompted by the noise associated with it winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, the heavy Oscar interest and Jason Di Rosso's interview with director Sean Baker. The last reminded me that I'd passed up on Baker's Red Rocket a few years ago. In short: childish and drecky.
The movie is in three distinct sections. The first establishes lead Ani/Anora (Mikey Madison) as a full-service stripper at a Manhattan club whose knowledge of Russian comes in handy with the really high rollers. She's from a Jewish part of NYC, somewhat like Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. She encounters and gets hitched to Russian scion Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn, a shoo-in for a Prince biopic?) in Las Vegas. The second part begins with him doing a runner from the local operatives of his absent parents who are all shitting bricks about the marriage. The grand tour of NYC really dragged. Coney Island is having a moment. The third has Ivan delivered to his parents who are obviously keen to disentangle him from Ani/Anora.
The whole show is not exactly zany or unfunny. Many scenes are overlong and do not progress character or plot. There's a fair bit of sex but it's not salacious; as Di Rosso and Baker observed it attempts to get away from the male gaze. (Actually none of it is sexy, especially not the commercial sex; in line with recent movies it tends to emphasise the accompanying issues (divergent libidos, selfishness, emotional investment, exclusivity, prophylaxis, transactionalism, ... everything) rather than go in for the titillation that used to get Roger Ebert excited. This is not an erotic thriller.) The central flaw is that I never got a grasp on what makes Ani/Anora tick beyond the obvious hedonism — and geez it looks like hard boring work. Is she in it just for the money? Does she have other prospects or ambitions? Throughout it's unclear if she's as credulous and vacuous as she presents: all posturing and underbaked threats, like the crass hiphop that floods the zone, spouting F-bombs, handy at lashing out with her feet but otherwise without leverage. Is this what passes for street smarts now? With thirty minutes to go Ivan, standing on the steps of his parents' plane, asks her the obvious question: is she stupid? I couldn't understand why she hung on so hard. The Assistant did a far more plausible treatment of aspirational girlish naivete.
The acting and cinematography are fine. The fault lies in the scenario and the impoverished characterisation.
Dana Stevens saw something different to me. Anora doesn't reassure her customers at the strip club, she just gives them the hard sell. (Many are clearly vulnerable which is not to say they're victims.) Ivan's "24 hour security guards" did not notice the day or two in Las Vegas though they were at the New Year's party. And so on. Stephanie Zacharek. Risky Business! "[Madison] plays Ani as a woman in charge" ... — but Ani/Anori is always so obviously deluded on that score. Both seemed to work the info pack hard, as hard as Baker milked that ending. Nobody points to Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (etc) and I can't because I haven't seen it.
Produced and directed by George Stevens (Gunga Din) from a script that Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat (nom'd) adapted from Edna Ferber's novel. Over many sittings as it is lengthy (3hr 21min), initially unpromising and regularly flags. It is often funny, perhaps unintentionally. Heavily nominated for Oscars but only Stevens came away with Best Director.
Circa 1920s, Texan cattleman Rock Hudson (nom'd) finds himself in Maryland, aiming to buy a horse off some Eastern gentry, but comes away with a wife in the form of Elizabeth Taylor (not nom'd) too. She's as strong willed as her horse which for the convenience of the plot soon improves her domestic situation by offing sister-in-law/fellow hard lady Mercedes McCambridge. Over two generations we're shown the horrors of Texas society and why these clans found it necessary to have so much land separating them. A second schism opens with the arrival of oil money, personified by enriched, aspirational white trash James Dean (nom'd).
Hudson is actually decent here, far better than he was in Written on the Wind (also 1956) and Seconds (1966), working mostly as raw material for Taylor to drag into modernity. She has some fun with every argument leading to frisky business; she gets up the morning after a spat all energised while he's totally shagged out. Son Dennis Hopper is restrained in his portrayal of his generation going its own way with more moral fibre than earlier members of the lineage. Carroll Baker pines for the old days of straightforward social climbing. Dean does well with what he's given but the final movement drags out the grindingly predictable. Those fatuous good old boys always know the score.
Bosley Crowther: aimed to be bigger than Texas... and succeeded! IMDB trivia: inspired Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind. And surely There Will Be Blood, which was also shot in Marfa, Texas. It's sort of like Gone with the Wind without the maudlin nostalgia for the Old South. Did anyone ever make an epic about the North?
Prompted by the arrival of a director's cut reported by Jason Bailey in the New York Times. Directed and co-written by Richard Shepard. Tamar Brott was the other co-writer. Also notionally for David Bowie. Over many sittings as it is every bit as bad as the reviews say.
The scenario has waitress Rosanna Arquette working in some upscale restaurant in NYC while she explores her fixation with Madame Houdini. Her bestie Eszter Balint designs killer lingerie. Bowie plays a new bartender who has pressing reasons for obtaining a green card via the marriage route. The joint is owned (or at least operated) by Andre Gregory (My Dinner with Andre) and Buck Henry whose witless repartee is excruciating. The only actor who emerges with dignity preserved is cashier Marlee Matlin, working the door and cashbox under a pretzel hairpiece.
I hadn't realised Arquette had had such a big 1980s; to me she's just a minor player in Pulp Fiction. Bowie's acting is the worst I've seen by him, but the real problem is that too many other things are busted. So many scenes just do not work. The plot is absolutely standard NYC: some people have too much money, most not enough, everyone is on the grift and all the forced pretence looks so joyless. Winning looks so tedious.
Janet Maslin at the time, uncriticially shilling the local product.
A jag from a Roger Ebert retro-review of Alien. Also an idle bit of Howard Hawks completism. Charles Lederer (responsible with Hawks for His Girl Friday) adapted it from a book by John W. Campbell Jr. Directed by Christian Nyby (in his first outing?) but IMDB suggests (credited producer) Hawks had to do a lot of heavy lifting.
As you'd expect from the auteurs it's very talky, even talkier than a modern sci-fi/action flick. Some of the dialogue is racy for the times (captain Kenneth Tobey rags secretary Margaret Sheridan for departing his bed without saying goodbye, she likens him to an octopus) and attempts to draw attention away from the minimal amount of action. There are a few fun bits I guess. The creature is Frankenstein's without the bolts.
