Meryl Streep – Blood and Porridge

July 23, 2026July 23, 2026

Uncle Sam (Part 2)

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

Continuing my tribute to the great New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who died on July 13^th…

Sam Neill got top billing alongside Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the highest-grossing movie of all time until James Cameron’s Titanic was released four years later. While it was gratifying that Neill’s career get a boost from his involvement in such a blockbuster, I have to say I’m not a great fan of it. That’s probably because prior to seeing the film, I read the book it’s based upon, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), wherein the story and characters are darker, more complex and more interesting than Spielberg’s interpretation of them.

As Alan Grant, a palaeontologist asked to assess the titular theme park where, it’s planned, visitors will pay good money to gawk at dinosaurs that’ve been cloned back into life using bits of ancient DNA, Neill is inevitably – and literally – dwarfed by his co-stars, the dinosaurs that Spielberg’s special-effects team, headed Stan Winston, created using then-cutting-edge animatronics and computer-generated imagery. Still, he invests Grant with enough quirks to make him memorable.

He’s sometimes curmudgeonly and not fond of children, even ones who like dinosaurs – see how he spooks one youngster with an account of how velociraptors killed their prey, or how he freaks out the grandchildren of park-owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) by pretending to get fried by an electric fence. Paradoxically, he can be child-like himself. When he first sees one of Hammond’s dinosaurs, his wonderment leaves him struggling for words and he almost faints. And he shows juvenile delight when he encounters a triceratops, which he hails as “my favourite when I was a kid… the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” (When I was a kid, the triceratops was my favourite dinosaur too.)

When Jurassic Park received a royal premiere in London, Neill found himself sitting between his 10-year-old son and Princess Diana. According to Neill, his son got so worked up at the film’s scary bits that he started farting uncontrollably, and Neill became paranoid about what his royal neighbour would think when she smelled the fumes: “Princess Di is being exposed to the horrors of a little boy’s fart, but she’s going to think it’s me. I am going to be subliminally blamed for my son’s crimes, and I don’t think she’ll talk to me afterwards.” However, gallantly, the princess did speak to him later and ‘never mentioned’ the flatulence. Jeff Goldlum commented drolly on Neill’s anecdote: “I’ve heard him tell that a couple of times and it’s just amazing the lengths that he will go to still blame the boy.”

Neill played Grant twice more, in the second sequel Jurassic Park III (2003), which I saw on TV and found pretty inconsequential; and the fifth one, Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which got lousy reviews and which I’m in no rush to see.

© Miramax / Buena Vista international / Jan Chapman Productions

As well as being in 1993’s biggest blockbuster, Neill was in the same year’s biggest arthouse movie, Jane Campion’s The Piano. He plays Alisdair Stewart, a settler in 19^th century New Zealand who, via an arranged marriage, suddenly acquires a wife, the mute Ada (Holly Hunter). He also acquires a piano, the playing of which is Ada’s only opportunity to express herself. Predictably, Alister and Ada don’t enjoy a happy marriage and the piano is the catalyst for trouble. It becomes the means by which Ada, unable to tolerate Alisdair’s sexual advances, instead discovers sensuality with a neighbouring settler, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), under the pretext of giving him piano lessons.

While Keitel’s character first seems weird and brutish, but gradually shows himself capable of tenderness and decency, Neill’s goes the other way – we initially have some sympathy for Alisdair, but he becomes a villain who propels the plot towards its climax of mutilation and attempted suicide (though, ultimately, it ends happily). In his 2023 autobiography, Did I Ever Tell You This: A Memoir, Neill wrote of the film, “I don’t think I can overestimate how important The Piano is for me in hindsight. It sits in my funny old CV like a medal on my chest. It wasn’t my film. It was Jane Campion’s. I wasn’t the star of the film. That was Holly Hunter. But there is honour to be found in the second fiddle. Or fourth. No one notices you much, you don’t get nominated for things. But you served. I was there in an important feminist film. I was there in the front line in an important New Zealand film.”

As many have noted, The Piano is an example of how Neill used his screen presence to generous effect. He didn’t hog the limelight but gave his co-stars space to perform to their full potential. This was especially so with his female co-stars. While Neill reined himself in a little, they got the chance to bloom in their roles – not only Holly Hunter in The Piano, but Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989), and reportedly – I’ve unfortunately never seen it – Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career (1979).

In 1995, Neill worked with cult American director John Carpenter and made the horror movie In the Mouth of Madness, which critics greeted unenthusiastically at the time but which, gradually, has been re-evaluated and is seen now as a misunderstood classic. It features Neill as an insurance investigator called John Trent, who’s hired by a publishing company to track down its missing star author (Jurgen Prochnow). The author’s name is Sutter Kane and though his initials, and massive sales, suggest he was inspired by Stephen King, his tales of cosmic horror and fearsome ancient beings called the ‘Old Ones’ indicate he’s based on the legendary Providence writer H.P. Lovecraft. Trent’s investigations bring him into ever-stranger situations where he encounters characters and settings from Kane’s fiction. It’s as if the writer is controlling what happens in reality – which is worrying, since his new novel concerns the end of the world.

© New Line Cinema

While I’m glad a movie involving Sam Neill, John Carpenter and H.P. Lovecraft has received some retrospective love, I’m afraid I agree with those unenthusiastic critics in 1995. Like many of Carpenter’s later movies, there’s just too much going on in In the Mouth of Madness and you get the impression the director’s throwing everything at the wall in the hope some of it sticks. That said, the movie has some memorable moments, such as a scene where Trent and a client discuss business in a restaurant, not noticing a mad axeman creating mayhem in the street outside their window. Carpenter also stages a spooky sequence wherein a night-time cyclist keeps inexplicably reappearing in front of a cruising car – and keeps changing.

I prefer an earlier Neill-Carpenter collaboration, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), an adaptation of H.F. Saint’s 1987 novel of the same name, itself inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man (1897). It’s a somewhat awkward film – the tension between the studio, Warner Bros, who wanted an out-and-out comedy, and the star, Chevy Chase, who wanted to show he could do ‘serious acting’, is palpable – but nonetheless I think it’s underrated. I certainly enjoyed Memoirs of an Invisible Man more than director Carpenter did, who once said of it: “I really wanted to quit the business after that movie… I don’t want to talk about why, but let’s just say there were personalities on that film. He shall not be named who needs to be killed. No, no, no, that’s terrible. He needs to be set on fire… No, no, no. Anyway, it’s all fine. I survived it.” Presumably Carpenter was referring to Chase, who has a reputation for being, shall we say, difficult. Even an invisible Chevy Chase was too much for him.

Carpenter certainly didn’t mean Neill, who played the film’s slightly James Mason-like villain. “I love working with him,” the director said of Neill. “He comes prepared. He knows what he’s going to do. He reacts to other actors who are there. I mean, he’s just a dream come true.”

© Paramount Pictures / Golar Productions / Impact Pictures

Another horror movie Neill made in the 1990s, which initially got savaged by the critics but was retrospectively reassessed and lauded as a classic, is Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997). Set in 2047, it’s about an experimental spaceship that’d disappeared during its maiden voyage inexplicably reappearing years later with no sign of its crew. When a rescue mission, whose members include Neill, investigate, it becomes clear the ship’s hyperdrive system accidentally sent it into another dimension – a dimension known to religious folk as ‘hell’ – and back. And it’s returned with something nasty on board.

Well, I’m sorry to be a misery-guts again, but I also agree with the 1997 reviews of Event Horizon and don’t see it as an unappreciated masterpiece. It strikes me as a muddled mixture of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), with that old chestnut of ‘characters being tormented by their innermost fears brought to life’ thrown in. To be fair to Paul W. S. Anderson, the studio, Paramount Pictures, removed much footage from his original edit, believing it was too gory and horrific, and the finished product was not what he and scriptwriter Philip Eisner had envisioned. Incidentally, as Neill’s character is Australian, he had him wear a uniform with an Australian flag-patch – but one where the Union-Jack part of it has been replaced by the Aboriginal flag. Neill hoped that by 2047 a more tolerant, Pauline Hanson-free Australia would better honour its indigenous inhabitants.

By the start of the 21^st century, and his sixth decade, Neill had become something of an institution and seemed the personification of the word ‘avuncular’. A good example of this is in the Australian movie The Dish (2000), a gentle comedy in which he plays the boss of an Australian radio telescope that, in 1969, is landed with the job of relaying film-footage from the Apollo 11 moon-mission to the eagerly-awaiting world’s TV screens. This isn’t easy for Neill and his team as, first, they suffer a crippling power cut and then, on July 20^th, the day of the landing, a violent storm threatens to blow their dish over. Neill is reassuringly calm and reasonable throughout. Thinking about the film now, I can’t recall any moment in it where he didn’t seem to be wearing a cardigan or puffing at a pipe.

© Madman Films / Piki Films / Defender Films

He’s somewhat less avuncular, but still loveable, in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). He plays Hector, a grumpy old misfit who takes to the New Zealand mountains with his chubby, juvenile-delinquent foster-kid Ricky (Julian Dennison) when the latter panics about being returned to state care. They soon have police, social services, vigilantes and the media after them. Along the way they encounter hardship, killer wild boars and a literally tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic called Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby) but also form a genuine, father-son bond. Director Taiki Waititi creates an affecting and funny movie but avoids easy laughs and cloying sentimentality. Neill and Dennison’s characters take some hard knocks and their happy ending is hard won.

During the 21^st century Neill also became a fixture on television – appearing in shows like The Tudors (2007), Crusoe (2008-9), Happy Town (2010), Alcatraz (2012), Peaky Blinders (2013-14), Old School (2014), Tutankhamun (2016), The Twelve (2022-25) and Apples Never Fall (2024) – and on social media, where he regularly posted updates about Two Paddocks, his beloved farm and vineyard in New Zealand’s Central Otago wine region. Famously, Neill named the animals on his farm after celebrities he knew in showbusiness, supposedly because it made him less inclined to eat them: “Well, you can’t eat a friend… I’m not a vegetarian, but I have a ram called Jeff Goldblum. You wouldn’t want to eat Jeff, would you?”

This led to some memorable moments as, for example, Neill posted, “MICHAEL FASSBENDER ASSAULTED!” – his rooster, named after Michael Fassbender, had had his tail-feathers torn out by a rogue dog. Or a comment he made about Helena Bonham-Carter, one of his cows: “She’s had 16 calves now. She’s up for it, if nothing else.” Or a sad disclosure that Meryl Streep, a chicken, had been “…killed by a ferret recently.” During Covid-19, his gentle and good-humoured updates about his farm and its whimsically-named inhabitants was an antidote to the stress and boredom of lockdown. They certainly cheered me up more than, say , Gal Gadot and a bunch of her thespian pals crooning John Lennon’s Imagine on Instagram.

In a 2023 interview in the Guardian, Neill opined, “I’m not afraid to die but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big… But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.” A lot of people would have loved to have got another decade or two of Sam Neill, and his acting talents, and his sense of fun. But we should be grateful for what we did get.

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

January 8, 2022January 9, 2022

Don’t Look Up is worth looking up

© Netflix / Hyperobject Industries

Before I start, a warning – many spoilers ahead!

Appropriately for a year that was fairly grim, the final movie I watched in 2021 was the recently released, apocalyptic sci-fi satire Don’t Look Up, which tells the story of how two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling on a course that in six months’ time will bring it smashing into the earth and wiping out all life here. But their warnings about what’s coming are muffled by a trivia-obsessed media, chiefly represented by fatuous talk show hosts Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry, which refuses to take them seriously. They’re also thwarted by duplicitous politicians, most notably Meryl Streep as the American president, who are reluctant to take decisive action and blow the damned comet out of the sky because, it transpires, it’s loaded with priceless minerals.

Don’t Look Up is interesting in that while it enjoys a healthy 7.3 / 10 approval rating from users of the online film database IMDb, and an even healthier ’82% liked this film’ rating among Google users, the reviews by film critics have been less enthusiastic – approval ratings of 54% and 50% on the critical aggregates Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic respectively. Among those unimpressed critics were the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who called it ‘laboured, self-conscious and unrelaxed’, and Rolling Stone’s David Fear, who described it as ‘a righteous two-hour lecture masquerading as a satire’. Meanwhile, in the Independent, Louis Chilton went the whole hog and penned an article entitled WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWN: WHY IT’S OKAY TO HATE ‘DON’T LOOK UP’. In this, he opined, “the execution is too broad and condescending… And for a comedy, perhaps its greatest offence is that there are almost no laughs.”

So Don’t Look Up has received contrasting levels of appreciation from ordinary viewers and from the critics. Interestingly, one faction that’s whole-heartedly praised the film has been environmental journalists and scientists. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote in the Guardian that as someone “doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.” Meanwhile, in the Guardian too, environmental journalist George Monbiot declared, “The movie is, in my view, a powerful demolition of the grotesque failures of public life. And the sector whose failures are most brutally exposed is the media… it seemed all too real. I felt as if I were watching my adult life flash past me. As the scientists in the film, trying to draw attention to the approach of a planet-killing comet, bashed their heads against the Great Wall of Denial erected by the media and sought to reach politicians with 10-second attention spans, all the anger and frustration and desperation I’ve felt over the years boiled over.”

Well, I have to say I come down on the side of Joe Public (and the environmentalists) and not on the side of the critics who, as part of the mainstream media, were perhaps not best pleased by how the film portrayed that media. I liked Don’t Look Up and, despite what Louis Chilton claimed in the Independent, enjoyed several hearty laughs during its running time. There are a few problems, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but generally I’m happy to give the movie the thumbs up.

Much of what works in the movie is due to its impeccable cast. DiCaprio and Lawrence make a good double-act as the astronomers. DiCaprio is a timid character, at times a bundle of nerves, cerebral but inarticulate when he comes under pressure. Lawrence is the opposite, ready to forcibly speak her mind when she sees others obfuscating. As events unfurl, it’s the bumbling DiCaprio who unwittingly becomes a media star, probably because he matches public perceptions of what scientists should be like – cuddly, eccentric Albert Einstein types. Meanwhile, the abrasive Lawrence is banished from the limelight. DiCaprio plays along with this and ingratiates himself with the media and political establishments, believing he can exert a positive influence over the people in power who are dealing with the comet. He can’t, as it turns out, and while he compromises his principles his private life up-ends and he becomes estranged from his wife and children.

Perry and Blanchett are simultaneously amusing and chilling as the shallow talk-show hosts, though Blanchett is allowed a sliver of character development later when we learn she has three master’s degrees, meaning that her lack of acumen onscreen is merely an audience-pleasing act. The sequence where DiCaprio and Lawrence go on their show, The Daily Rip, to break the bad news about the comet to the world, and find the hosts more interested in interviewing a pop-poppet (played by Ariane Grande, no less) about her split with her pop-poppet boyfriend, is a masterclass in cringe comedy worthy of Ricky Gervais or Armando Iannucci.

Meryl Streep, meanwhile, is majestically horrible as the president. It would have been easy to portray her as a female Trump, but she’s smarter and smoother than the blustering, orange-skinned, cunning-without-being-smart property tycoon. “I say we sit tight and assess,” is her initial reaction to DiCaprio and Lawrence’s warnings, which she justifies with the observation, “You cannot go around saying to people that there’s 100% chance that they’re going to die. You know? It’s just nuts!” When she’s faced with a potentially explosive scandal and needs something to divert the media’s attention, however, she changes her tune. She suddenly plays up the comet and amid much patriotic hoopla marshals the US’s nuclear firepower in an effort to annihilate it before it reaches the earth. Her tune changes again when a major donor to her party persuades her to cancel the plan to destroy the comet, because it’s a goldmine of precious metals, and proposes a different way of handling it.

The donor is a Silicon Valley billionaire played by Mark Rylance, who believes his company has the capability to send a fleet of rocket-powered robots to the comet and seed it with explosives. These will break it into small, non-cataclysmic fragments that can be retrieved and put to lucrative use when they fall to earth. Stiff, eternally smiling, generally weird, Rylance comes across as a creepy mixture of Elon Musk, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson. Incidentally, the character’s fondness for having children onstage with him when he’s unveiling his company’s latest high-tech gadgets reminded me faintly of Jackson’s disastrous performance of The Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards in London, when he had a crowd of child actors in tow. Rylance leaves you wondering if the character is a genius or just some arrested-development man-child who’s been extraordinarily lucky. Due to his wealth, of course, the establishment believe he is a genius and happily go along with his comet-breaking scheme. You can guess how it ends.

The best performance, though, comes from Jonah Hill as the White House Chief of Staff, who also happens to be President Streep’s son. If writer-director-producer Adam McKay doesn’t satirise Donald Trump directly with Streep, he certainly skewers the Trump White House with Hill’s character, a smug, obnoxious, entitled arse with all the characteristics of the promoted-beyond-their-abilities Trump kids (and Jared Kushner). Hill makes a meal of the role. “You’re breathing weird. It’s making me uncomfortable,” he whines at DiCaprio when the latter gets worked up describing the mile-high tsunamis that’ll crash across the planet when the comet hits. And when DiCaprio tells him the chance of this happening is ’99.78 percent’, he reacts, “Oh, great! So it’s not 100 percent.” McKay also uses the character to take a swipe at Trumpism’s biggest coup, that of convincing masses of ordinary, often hard-up people to support a wealthy, right-wing elite by demonising another part of America, the part that’s liberal, urban and educated. We hear Hill declare at a rally: “There’s three types of American people. There are you, the working class. Us, the cool rich. And then them!”

On the minus side, I’d say Don’t Look Up is about half-an-hour too long. Its unnecessary length means the satire gets a bit samey and the jokes get stretched a bit thin towards the end. Also, late on, there are jarring tonal shifts. We have solemn moments where DiCaprio tries to make peace with his loved ones and enjoy some final, life-affirming time with them, even while the gigantic tsunamis surge out from the comet’s strike-point. This put me in mind of another movie about a collision of celestial bodies, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), even though for the most part it’s a million miles removed from Don’t Look Up in mood. However, intercut with the DiCaprio scenes are ones where the satire continues, with Streep, Rylance and a super-rich select few escaping from the earth, in suspended animation, on board a specially-prepared spaceship, which’ll take them to another earth-type planet 23,000 years from now. While I enjoyed both sub-plots, having them unwind side-by-side made me feel I was watching two different films.

Also, for a movie that’s about the disparagement of science, Don’t Look Up could have been more scientifically accurate in places. The initial operation to completely destroy the comet involves sending an astronaut (Ron Perlman) up into space on a suicide mission. He’s in a recommissioned space shuttle and shepherding a flock of rockets carrying nuclear bombs, all on a collision course with the comet. But the real space shuttle could never get beyond a low-earth orbit because it couldn’t carry enough propellant to go further. How is Perlman going to reach the comet, which is still a few months away at this point? Couldn’t they just launch the rockets, without the shuttle, and guide them from the ground? The ‘sleeper’ spaceship that appears at the end and transports a lucky few to a planet in a faraway solar system sets up a good final gag, but it troubled me too. If the elite, which includes Rylance’s character, have the technology at their disposal to create a spaceship like that – officially, manned interstellar space travel and suspended animation are beyond human know-how at the moment – couldn’t Rylance have put that fabulous technology to more immediate use and made a better job of his comet-breaking operation?

Although people have interpreted Don’t Look Up’s comet as a metaphor for climate change and society’s hopeless attempts, or non-attempts, to address it, I think the film is making broader comments about the scientific community, the media, politicians and their responses to crises generally. It’s not as if the politicians spend the whole film denying the existence of the comet, as some real-life ones still deny that climate change is happening. Fairly early on, it’s established that, yes, the comet is heading our way (although we see instances of ‘comet-deniers’ among the general public later on). It’s more about how self-interest and opportunism get in the way of necessary and meaningful action.

When Streep gives Rylance’s daft plan to harvest the comet the go-ahead, I found myself thinking of a real-life, down-to-earth and non-American parallel. During the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government frequently handed out lucrative contracts for making personal protective equipment (PPE), establishing tracing programmes, setting up testing centres and so on to private companies that lacked medical experience, but were sympathetic to or connected with the Conservative party. Often, the results were disastrous. But hey, if you have access to power and can make a fast buck during a catastrophe, why not?

So actually, you don’t have to look up. Just look around you instead. It’s happening everywhere, this moment.