Oh, Pioneers

 

SUNDAY BEST (B) - "The Ed Sullivan Show," the Sunday night variety TV staple for more than two decades, is revisited mainly through the lens of race relations postwar and at the height of the Civil Rights movement. 

 

Sullivan was a sportswriter and columnist who often championed black athletes and entertainers. We watch as he fights to have Harry Belafonte -- suspected of having communist sympathies in the '50s -- appear on his show (and as Belafonte delivers a powerful performance). It was provocative at the time for Sullivan to be hands-on with his black guests, even kissing female performers, right there on CBS in front of his millions of viewers. 

Elvis Presley and the Beatles get their perfunctory moments, but they generally stand aside for the likes of James Brown, Pearl Bailey, the Supremes (above) and Gladys Knight & the Pips. The parade of performers is impressive. 

Director Sacha Jenkins -- whose previous subjects have included Rick James, Louis Armstrong, Wu-Tang Clan and the LA riots -- delves into Sullivan's personal life (living in a hotel, hobnobbing in New York as the "toast of the town") and digs through his early days in newspapers. (The movie is subtitled "The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan.") Jenkins leans on a gimmick that some might find annoying: He uses an AI-generated version of Sullivan's voice to narrate the film in the first person. It's a bit high-pitched, as you'd imagine a young Sullivan would sound like, but it is definitely obvious that the audio is not from archival recordings.

At 80 minutes, the Netflix release zips along, and the music clips are quite entertaining; if not deep cuts, at least they are not the obvious hits that we've seen over and over.  

OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING (2021) (B) - This jangled retrospective brings to light the career of Oscar Micheaux, the groundbreaking black filmmaker from the early days of the medium a century ago.

Writer-director Francesco Zippel, who specializes in profiling filmmakers, curates footage from the silent and talkie eras and gathers a bevy of talking heads to place Micheaux in the canon. That includes Chuck D from Public Enemy, Morgan Freeman, and disciples like John Singleton ("Boyz n the Hood"), Amma Asante ("Belle"), and Kevin Willmott (writer of "BlacKkKlansman"), all of whom provide a measured mix of insight and appreciation for the opened door. (A lot of them also wear or are surrounded by the color royal blue, which is either an obscure homage or just an aesthetic quirk of Zippel.) Learned analysts and historians (with the exception of one with not much to offer) provide key context about the wild-west days of early Hollywood.

It would be nice to have had fuller clips of the films of Micheaux, whose career spanned from 1919 ("Homesteader," based on his own novel) to 1948, a few years before he died in his late 60s. (Many of his reels are lost to history.) The film seems to gloss over his shortcomings -- he was a thieving train porter early on, and he apparently was quite the hustler in the movie business. But it provides a strong general overview of a trailblazer many of us have likely never heard of. 

BONUS TRACKS

Here are Ray Charles and Billy Preston from the Sullivan show in 1967 with "Double-O Soul":

 

And here is Bo Diddley jangling away with his eponymous earworm in 1955:

365 Days

 

Our favorite band, of recent vintage, Waxahatchee stopped by Santa Fe for an outdoor show with the western sunset as a backdrop. They were led by their heart and soul, the magnetic Katie Crutchfield. It had been 10 years since we saw her last in New Mexico. 

 

No one in the past 10 years has come close to her batting average, which is 1.000. I have never heard her record a bad song. She has six albums going back to 2012, the most recent last year's "Tigers Blood," which is still in heavy rotation.

Crutchfield, backed by a solid band, including Eliana Athayde on bass and harmonizing vocals, worked the stage like a superstar, like a Laurel Canyon Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She had a stool off to the side, where she would croon without the burden of her acoustic guitar and could play to the balcony.

There might be no finer song than "Burns Out at Midnight." She out-Prines Prine:

 

About half her songs were from "Tigers Blood," and most of the rest were from "St. Cloud, from 2020 (set list). That included "Lilacs," the most second-phase Bob Dylan song you can imagine, and it's better than anything on "New Morning."

 

Crutchfield crooned two country ditties from her side project Plains, and she and opening act, Brennan Wedl, belted out a fine cover of Kathleen Edwards' "Six O'Clock News." Here is Edwards' original:

 

And, finally, our title track:

The Male Ego

 

MOUNTAINHEAD (C+) - These two films were so forgettable I almost forgot to review them. "Mountainhead" -- a play on Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead" -- is a pitch-black comedy about four billionaire tech bros who gather at an isolated mansion while the world seems to be falling apart, the mayhem sparked by disinformation fed by their artificial-intelligence schemes. 

 

These four old friends quickly descend into backstabbing over business opportunities, until it gets to the point where three of them literally try to kill the fourth, in bumbling comic style. This is the directing debut of writer Jesse Armstrong ("In the Loop," "Four Lions"), and the script is maddeningly faithful to tech-speak, as if an AI program tried to write David Mamet dialogue. 

Jason Schwartzman is fun, as always, as the host at his Utah getaway. Steve Carrell, as the older mentor, does that mopey sad-sack thing that is rarely funny. Cory Michael Smith ("Carol," "Saturday Night") is fine as the alpha male Ven, and Ramy Youseff struggles to define his role as the one whose AI could save the planet from Ven's rampage. The four men never create a believable buzz, and we're always aware that this is a fictional exercise in what-if. Schwartzman is amusing, as the least wealthy of the bunch (only two commas) desperately pushing his meditation app Slowzo.

There is something to be had here about four rich jerks being so arrogant that they don't care about the destruction of the planet, but you also get the sense that Armstrong and his team might be just as thoughtless in how they go about the task at hand. Nothing gels here, and the self-aware over-written dialogue just consumes this whole thing by the end.

MICKEY 17 (C) - For us, "Parasite," was an outlier in the film canon of Bong Joon-ho. He is now back to his pulpy excess ("Snowpiercer," "Okja"), with an extraplanetary story here that, like its cloned main character, is insufferably repetitive and dour.

I admit, I mentally bailed on "Mickey 17" at some point and let it play out as background noise, for the most part. This is a relentless slog about the latest iteration of a kamikaze/suicide Expendable clone, Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson, looking miserable), who, through a glitch, has to deal with Mickey 18. (Each Mickey is supposed to die in the service of science before the next version is 3-D printed -- a cool special effect. And Multiples are verboten.) Meantime, the Mickeys will do battle with a pal from Earth (Steven Yeun) and fall for the lovely Nasha (Naomie Ackie), a security agent on the fictional icy planet of Niflheim. They also have to deal with the expedition leader, a smarmy politician named Marshall (a goofy Mark Ruffalo) and his unctuous wife (Toni Collette).

Just try to follow the convoluted plot, either by viewing the film or trudging through the Wikipedia entry. Pattinson always looks like he'd rather be somewhere (or someone) else. I was embarrassed for Ruffalo and his outlandish makeup. 

The storyline involving the native creatures battling the invading humans feels like a cheap video game. And would you believe there are the makings of a threesome involving both Mickeys? No one distinguishes themselves, especially Bong, who apparently gets to make any movie he wants, with final cut, even if it's a 137-minute intergalactic mess.

Noir Chronicles, Part 2: Dames in Distress

  Two decades and going strong, it's the Guild Cinema's annual July Film Noir Festival. Part one is here. Here are the rest of our samples:

BEWARE MY LOVELY (1952) (C) - It's Robert Ryan again, this time teaming up with the formidable Ida Lupino as a woman held captive in her home by a deranged handyman. But the movie is so lethargic that any tension it manages to conjure up dissipates rather quickly under the drab direction of Harry Horner.

 

Ryan plays Howard Wilton, who in the opening scene, flees a house he was working at after discovering a body in a closet, hopping a train in a panic. He shows up at the doorstop of Helen Gordon (Lupino), who runs a boarding house and puts on events for neighborhood kids. Wilton goes by an alias and exhibits mental lapses and delusions, as if fighting the urge to claim (another?) victim. 

Part of the problem here is that it probably would not take much for Helen to escape a house where the handyman has locked the front and back doors. You suspend disbelief hoping for more suspense. Lupino is appealing, but her character is one-dimensional. Ryan is more awkward than creepy. Seventy-seven minutes seem like two hours, and even a wry ending can't cover for the flimsy drama that even Lupino -- or Barbara Whiting as a bored teenager -- cannot rescue from the doldrums. 

SPOTTED: Brad Morrow would have a prolific career as a child actor, most notably in 1955's TV series "The Adventures of Spin and Marty." ... Blink and you'll miss William Talman, who would go on to play Hamilton Burger in TV's "Perry Mason."   

LADY IN A CAGE (1964) (B) - Here's another imprisoned woman -- Olivia de Havilland gets stuck in her home elevator (!) and is besieged by wild intruders who take advantage of her predicament. James Caan, in his first credited big-screen role, leads the gang of drifters who show little regard for human dignity.

 

Much of the terror is played for laughs -- the intruders are bumblers, inept at cleaning out a rich lady's house -- and this comes off as the Manson Family meets the Partridge Family. Caan's Randall is joined by ditzy blonde Elaine (a randy Jennifer Billingsley) and horny simpleton Essie (character actor Rafael Campos, memorable as Archie Bunker's Puerto Rican co-worker). The trio horn in on the discovery of the vulnerable house by a homeless drunk (Jeff Corey) and his hooker friend Sade (an unhinged Ann Sothern).

De Havilland's Cornelia Hilyard, whose son has gone off for the weekend, is limping from a broken hip, and she gets stuck in her caged lift when the power goes out on a sweaty Fourth of July weekend in Los Angeles. Her screams go for naught, drowned out my the constant thrum of holiday car traffic streaming past her house in both directions day and night. 

Caan, flaunting a thin but expansive carpet of poodle-tufted torso hair, is jarringly maniacal, both toward the trapped dilettante as well as his hapless cohorts. Writer Luther Davis ("Kismet") plants a seed in the opening scene -- Cornelia's son, Malcolm (William Swan), has left her a suicide note before hitting the road -- and the filial relationship has disturbing qualities to it. That "Psycho" twist adds layers to Cornelia's predicament, and De Havilland chews her cloistered scenery like the grand dame of cinema she was.

Director Walter Grauman, a TV journeyman, is partial to close-ups where his actors' faces fill the screen, and he has a sharp eye for exposing the seedy underbelly of the simmering city, portending a societal unraveling that would consume the 1960s. This anxiously shot black-and-white provocation certainly gets under your skin. 

SPOTTED: Hey, it's the inimitable Scatman Crothers, as a pawn shop assistant. His voluminous credits would include Louie the garbage man on TV's "Chico and the Man" ("Stick out your can!") and the scene-stealing janitor from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."   

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER (1946) (B+) - This piece from the classic era stars John Garfield as a con man who targets a recent widow who sits on a sizable inheritance that is there for the taking. Garfield has quite the chemistry with Geraldine Fitzgerald, who has an Anne Hathaway modern look about her.

Garfield plays Nick Blake, fresh from the war and back on the New York mob scene, who first must retrieve his nest egg from girlfriend Toni (Faye Emerson), who has blown the wad on a night-club venture. Nick eventually gets the money back from her slimy business partner and then agrees to a $2 million job out in Los Angeles hatched by mob boss Doc (George Coulouris). Nick has wise counsel from an old friend, the elderly Pop (Walter Brennan), and his loyal, wisecracking pal Al (George Tobias), but he can't help developing feelings for Fitzgerald's Gladys Halvorson.

How will he get out of this mess? Toni shows up in L.A. and tips off Doc, whose boys will eventually kidnap the rich widow, and it will be up to Nick and Pop to try to rescue her. (Emerson and Brennan are particularly good in juicy supporting roles. Pop, who is 65, warns Nick, who is 34, that "it's all downhill from here.") The final 20 minutes -- scripted by prolific novelist W.R. Burnett ("The Asphalt Jungle," "High Sierra," "Little Caesar") -- are taut and riveting, dimly shot in the wee hours along a Santa Monica pier by director Jean Negulesco ("Johnny Belinda"). It is a perfect slow build to a satisfying crescendo. 

SPOTTED: Robert Arthur, uncredited here as a bellhop, would have a memorable turn five years later as naive Herbie in the Billy Wilder classic "Ace in the Hole." ... George Tobias' claim to fame would be as Abner, the husband of the nosy neighbor Mrs. Kravitz on "Bewitched."

BONUS TRACK 

The art-deco opening credits to "Lady in a Cage," which, visually, are as good as anything in the movie:

 

The trailer for "Nobody Lives Forever":

Noir Chronicles, Part 1: Crooked Cons

 Two decades and going strong, it's the Guild Cinema's annual July Film Noir Festival. Here is our first batch of samples:

 

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959) (A-minus) - Racial tensions undergird this realist heist film from Robert Wise, starring Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and our favorite, Gloria Grahame. The glue holding it all together, though, is veteran character actor Ed Begley as the ex-cop who brings Belafonte's Johnny and Ryan's Earle together for a bank score.  

 

Johnny is divorced, settling for visitation with his 6-year-old daughter. A scene with the two of them attending a carnival is vividly rendered, as Johnny is distracted by the impending bill coming due for his $7,500 in gambling debts and by the logistical planning for the heist that he hopes will erase those debts. The miserable Earle lives in a cramped apartment with Lorry (Shelley Winters), who improbably puts up with his sour demeanor on every subject (most notably his ingrained prejudices sparked by the idea of working with a black partner). Begley figures his scheme can't miss, and cobbles together his team of misfits by promising them each $50,000 and keeping Earle's slurs in check. 

This is the film that Wise, an old RKO hand, made at the end of the '50s before he directed his calling card, "West Side Story." His black-and-white streets are bustling and a little grimy. He brings realism to upstate New York in towns along the Hudson River. The dialogue from a triumvirate of writers is facile and biting. They establish Earle's racism early on, but they don't let it consume the story.  

The supporting cast here is strong. Richard Bright (Michael Corleone's enforcer Al Neri in the "Godfather" trilogy) leers at Johnny lasciviously as the mob boss' henchman. Winters is saucy as Earle's wisecracking girlfriend who just can't quit him. And Grahame lights up the screen as their frisky neighbor lady. The heist doesn't kick in until the final 20 minutes, culminating in a shootout and foot chase that leads to a spectacular climax and a clever ending that exposes the folly of judging and hating another based solely on the color of their skin. 

SPOTTED: Wayne Rogers, who would populate the original cast of TV's "MASH," plays a soldier at a bar. ... Mel Stewart (Henry Jefferson on "All in the Family" and the boss on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King") is a chatty elevator operator. ... And don't miss a cameo by the stunning dancer Carmen De Lavallade as Johnny's estranged gal. (When he gives her a less-than-passionate kiss, she chirps, "That's good. But it was better when you wanted it.")

PEEPING TOM (1960) (C+) - This one goes nowhere fast. It's a creepy British offering that crawls out of the dregs of the noir era, focusing on a serial killer who gets off on filming women before he kills them. The glitch here is that Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), who was abused as a child and still lives in his parents' mansion that he partially lets out to boarders, is compelled to kill whichever women he trains his camera on.

He feels the need to reel in his mania when he meets mousy Helen (Anna Massey), who lives below him with her blind mother (a chilling Maxine Audley) and falls for the conventionally handsome Mark. She and her mom are curious about Mark's upstairs film-viewing activities. Meantime, a rather ineffective group of detectives belatedly follows the trail but gets nowhere close to nabbing Mark.

The journeyman production team -- from director (Michael Powell, "Black Narcissus") to writer to cast -- march through this limp horror procedural, which tends to grow tedious before it runs its 101-minute course. It has echoes of "Psycho," which came out the same year, but Boehm is just too stilted, and the would-be romance much too chaste, for any of this to gel into something resembling a thriller.  

SPOTTED: This is a British one, and so the C-listers don't really jog the memory. Nigel Davenport (as a detective here) would be a busy character actor who had a role in "Chariots of Fire." 

THE GLASS KEY (1942) (B-minus) - The oldest picture of the bunch mixes gangsters and politicians in a story based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. No one here has much of a grasp on Hammett's wise-guy dialogue, most notably Alan Ladd, a weak link here as Ed Beaumont, a crooked pol's fiercely loyal right-hand man who digs into a murder that is being pinned on his boss. 

Brian Donlevy is strong as that that slimy pol, Paul Madvig, who is trying to ride the coattails of a gubernatorial candidate, whose daughter Janet (Veronica Lake) juggles Paul and Ed. The governor hopeful's ne'er-do-well son ends up dead, and a mobster (Joseph Calleia) seeks to pin it on Madvig, who has been cracking down on the mobster's turf.

 

The plot is convoluted beyond words. There are so many characters that they keep having to call each other by their name to aid the viewer in tracking the players, and excessive exposition is needed to keep things straight, up until the twisty-turny final act. Donlevy gets Hammett's cadences, and William Bendix (TV's "Life of Riley") hams it up swell as the mobster's goon. But the whole 85 minutes can be dizzying and frustrating. The visuals are bland -- the director is journeyman Stuart Heisler -- except for an overhead shot of Ladd plunging through a roof and landing in the middle of a quartet's dinner table below. 

Lake has the anemic screen presence of a hemophiliac prince. She has a hushed gun-moll voice, and her acting chops consist mostly of coy side glances. Pretty-boy Ladd is a lightweight, too. The two stars -- who were quite the box-office Ken and Barbie in the '40s -- get in the way of a messy story.

SPOTTED: As a waiter serving beers, the rotund Vernon Dent, familiar to viewers as as the stuffy foil in countless Three Stooges shorts.

BONUS TRACK

Harry Belafonte slinging the blues in "Odds," with "My Baby's Not Around" (featuring the catty Richard Bright):

That '70s Drift: Texas Tornados

 

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974) (B) - Gosh, Goldie Hawn was fun back in the day. The "Laugh-In" star had a great run in the '70s, starting with this little gem, where she plays Texas trash running from the law as she seeks to reclaim custody of her toddler son. This is also Steven Spielberg's big-screen debut (his warmup for "Jaws"), and he has a gas cracking up cars as Hawn's Lou Jean and her husband, Clovis, kidnap a Texas officer and lead a convoy of squad cars on a slow-speed chase to the town of Sugarland.

 

It takes a while to get accustomed to Hawn and her Texas drawl. Lou Jean visits Clovis (William Atherton) in prison and quite easily springs him from the remarkably low-security facility. They bum a ride from a kindly old couple, steal the car, crash it, then commandeer the squad car of officer Slide (Michael Sacks), who develops sympathies for the couple and their plight along the journey, much to the frustration of Capt. Tanner (a perfectly sedate Ben Johnson), who has to wrangle scores of police responders who join in the procession, along with news vans and helicopters.

They are allowed to make pit stops along the way, allowing Spielberg to create a travelogue of small-town Texas in the era of fried-chicken shacks and collectible gold-stamps. Over the course of a few days, Lou Jean and Clovis become folk heroes, with crowds of well-wishers cheering them along and occasionally foiling the police pursuit. We know from the start that their plan to grab the toddler from the older, well-off foster parents is folly (the film is based on a true story).

The second half is much more entertaining, as the media circus grows and Hawn lets Lou Jean's quirky personality and even a hint of emotion blossom. Spielberg (who did a test-run road movie with his memorable TV film "Duel" in 1971) not only demolishes a load of vehicles on the road, but he goes ballistic at an RV lot, where a couple of vigilantes blow the place to smithereens trying to nab the outlaws. The mayhem gets a bit tedious, but a strong ending brings it all home in 110 minutes.

SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (1977) (B-minus) - Does this raunchy romp from the dawn of the "Dukes of Hazzard" era hold up five decades later? Yes and no. It's awfully dumb and about 20 minutes too long. But it maintains a good deal of Southern charm, mostly thanks to the chemistry between Burt Reynolds and Sally Field and the PG relationship that blooms between them on the road from Texarkana to Georgia.

Much of this might pivot on your tolerance for the broad humor of Jackie Gleason as the blowhard Sheriff Buford T. Justice, a buffoonish Ahab haplessly stalking his prey. I appreciate his broad comedic skills, even if his vocabulary rarely expands behind calling everyone in his path a "sumbitch." Some of the old tricks of the Great One can be glimpsed through the offensive caricature. It's amusing to watch the sheriff's car slowly break down and lose parts before it limps to the finish line.

Stuntman Hal Needham, in his directorial debut, not only has a hoot finding creative ways to destroy cars and trucks (except for Bandit's beloved Trans-Am), but he and his trio of screenwriters delight in the wordplay of the CB culture of the '70s. The jargon flies by fast and furious, including a reference to a cop with a radar gun as a "Kojak with a Kodak."

Jerry Reed doesn't add much more than the memorable soundtrack, and Reynolds chews the scenery as the swaggering Bandit. The real star here, though, is the car (Trigger), the symbol of freedom and rebellion. (It's hard not to notice the Confederate flag on the front license plate.) Field is charming as the runaway bride (she jilted the sheriff's dimwitted son) who just happens to end up in Bandit's car, and it's entertaining to watch her flirt with Reynolds (her real-life partner at the time) and stretch her comedic chops. It's not as outrageous as I remembered it originally, but it's still mindless fun.

BONUS TRACKS

The irresistible hit from "Smokey and the Bandit," Jerry Reed with "Eastbound and Down":

 

Our title track -- the Texas Tornados with "Who Were You Thinkin' Of":

New to the Queue

 Whatever ...

 

We were disappointed in Alex Ross Perry's adventurous "Pavements," but we'll brace ourselves for the nearly three-hour valentine to the VHS era, "Videoheaven." 

Jem Cohen ("Museum Hours") returns with another contemplative docu-style narrative film, "Little, Big, and Far."

Another thoughtful documentary from Brazil's Petra Costa ("The Edge of Democracy"), "Apocalypse in the Tropics."

A documentary about the long-running variety extravaganza "The Ed Sullivan Show," "Sunday Best."

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, from Husker Du:

Down and Inside Out

 

SUNLIGHT (A) - Sometimes low expectations can be your ally. And when a movie full of wit and charm comes along -- packaged in a road-trip buddy movie that pairs a suicidal man with a woman hiding from life in a monkey suit -- you go along for the ride and smile broadly at the result.

 

Brit Nina Conti, who has been dabbling in monkey-puppet antics for a decade now, directs and co-stars with Shenoah Allen, who co-wrote the loose-limbed, slyly funny script with her. The pair play a couple of emotionally wounded people on the edge of nihilism who eventually bring out the dormant humanity in each other. 

Their meet-cute is at a dingy motel in New Mexico, where Jane (Conti), wearing a cheap monkey suit, spots depressed radio journalist Ray (Allen), dangling from a ceiling fan in the motel where Jane works and where she is suffering through an emotionally abusive relationship with Wade, the proprietor. Cut to Jane -- who insists on going by Monkey, her alter-ego, and committing 100% to the character -- piloting Ray's Airstream trailer when Ray comes to in the passenger seat, startled.

Jane is trying to escape to Colorado, and Ray hatches a plan: Stop off first in Espanola, dig up his dead dad, grab a valuable watch and split the proceeds with Jane, providing them both the financial boost that will fund a fresh start for each of them. None of this, of course, will be easy. Ray has to confront his controlling mother (Melissa Chambers), who is a ball-busting sheriff's deputy. And maniacal Wade -- the amazing Bill Wise ("Krisha," "Thunder Road") -- has saddled up his racing bike and is hot on their trail through northern New Mexico.

All of this would go off the rails into silliness if it weren't for the two (well, technically three) very real characters created by Conti and Allen. He is cynical and wisecracking -- a sort of rich man's Jason Sudeikis -- and is perfectly at home in his hometown of Albuquerque and its desolate surrounding environs. He cut his teeth in Albuquerque and around the world as part of a comedy duo, the Pajama Men, with high school pal Mark Chavez.

Ray's past is not explored in detail, but just one visit to his mother and his old home conveys volumes of pent-up angst. Conti speaks in a stilted British accent under that monkey suit, and her passive-aggressive approach to Ray -- foul-mouthed, self-lacerating, overtly sexual (yes, while covered in fur) -- snaps her new friend out of his stupor, renewing his vigor and expiating her own. A brief moment where she sheds the costume and soaks up the high-desert sun on her face holds more character development than most whole movies do.

The banter between the two is sharp and unrelenting. It is pithy but not in a self-aware Tarantino manner. Some of it feels ad-libbed, and Conti has a natural feel for how to end a scene with a dour punchline. (Her familiar editor is Riaz Meer.) You can't help rooting for these two to make it out of the harsh world of bumfuck New Mexico and onto a fulfilling next chapter, whether it is together or on a fresh path all their own (Jane dreams of running a boat-ride business).

Of course, that won't be easy, with Wade and Ray's mom plotting against them. And it won't be easy to dig up a grave, though it's both exhilarating and repulsive to watch Ray try. May this be a lesson in the futility of trying to excavate the past. 

BONUS TRACK

"Sunlight," for some reason, takes place around the turn of the millennium, and it has a gritty desert-noir soundtrack, including prominent placement of the Pixies gem "Hey":

Sympathy for the Late Sixties

 Two featuring Mick Jagger:

 

PERFORMANCE (1970) (B) - Ah, London in the Swinging Sixties. Donald Cammell, who would go on to direct a few horror films and thrillers, teamed with a young Nicolas Roeg ("Walkabout," "The Man Who Fell to Earth") to tell the trippy tale of a London gangster who goes into hiding at the home of a reclusive and libidinous rock star, played by Mick Jagger.

 

Square-jawed James Fox stars as Chas, who shares a thick Cockney accent with his mob mates, and their rough street life dominates the first third of the film, a sort of grimy homage to classic British noir. But then Chas kills a rival and, losing the faith and protection of his underworld boss, goes on the lam, sweet-talking his way into the home of Turner (Jagger) by posing as a fellow performer. He convinces a woman named Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) to let him crash for a while, and eventually he gets seduced by the hedonism of the household, which includes Turner's three-way relationship with Pherber and another woman.

Pallenberg -- notable for dating Jagger (purportedly) and his Rolling Stones mates Brian Jones and Keith Richards -- is quite of-the-era here, with her casual confidence, blond shag haircut and gravity-defying breasts, as she romps with her freckled friend, Lucy (a boyish Michele Breton). The women are intoxicating, and Jagger has quite a screen presence himself, with those lips and that swagger. Fox is convincing as the normie who ventures into the counter-culture, all the while knowing that there are thugs tracking him down. He will eventually experiment with drugs and gender identity, and make his way into the bed of one of the women.

Turner himself is in a crisis of identity and career, and the filmmakers morph the story into a taut, dark psychological grind. The camera shots are inventive, and the depictions of psychedelic trips manage to avoid coming off as trite. That first third could be a slog, but once the story settles into the claustrophobic confines of the country estate, the cast is engaging, especially whenever Jagger or Pallenberg are present. 

GIMME SHELTER (1970) (A-minus) - From the "Right Place, Right Time" files, in association with "Had to Be There" productions, we give you Exhibit A in support of the case for the final and absolute curdling of the Sixties high in America: this documentary about the December 1969 Rolling Stones concert in San Francisco that unraveled into chaos and a fatal stabbing. 

 

Part concert film and part detective documentary, "Gimme Shelter" is an infamous notch in the belt of the celebrated Maysles brothers (Albert and David) and collaborator Charlotte Zwerin. It curates fly-on-the-wall footage from the Stones' 1969 tour and recordings of iconic tracks at Muscle Schoals in Alabama, before the band arrived in San Francisco for the doomed "festival" at Altamont Speedway, a slapped-together free event that turned into the photo-negative of the peace-and-love gathering at Woodstock four months earlier.

The first half of the film is dominated by standard concert footage at Madison Square Garden in late November (the band was touring behind the album "Let It Bleed"), interspersed with scenes of promoters scrambling in a matter of weeks to cobble together the event that seemed snakebit from the start. (The star of the negotiations is famed celebrity attorney Melvin Belli, working the phones like a big shot.) The Stones are a bit lethargic at MSG (Jagger, of course, excepted). 

Many drugs seem to be involved. The Maysles camera crew (including a young George Lucas of "Star Wars" fame) observes the Stones in the recording studio, mostly watching them listen to playbacks of tracks that would end up on 1971's "Sticky Fingers," such as "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar." The crew also sits by as Jagger and drummer Charlie Watts review footage from Altamont, studying their reactions of an event that could have, at the time, ended the band's career. That is because the security force at Altamont was led by the Hell's Angels -- one of whom boasted that they got paid $500 in beer to protect the stage -- who roughed up the fans (and Marty Balin from Jefferson Airplane) and eventually stabbed to death a man who was reported to have wielded a gun and been hopped up on methamphetamine. The fateful moment is captured by the camera crew and analyzed frame by frame in the documentary.

The fantastic footage -- shot from all angles in and around the stage -- immerses the viewer into the chaos and the repercussions of some profoundly poor decisions by the organizers (which included Michael Lang from Woodstock). It is crazy to watch fans, roadies and Hell's Angels crowd the stage while the opening acts and eventually the Stones try to play music. Things got out of hand from the start (there was little planning for parking or the influx of 300,000 people), and it's no surprise that the Grateful Dead show up and decline to perform. 

Jagger -- ever immortalized by his pleas from the stage of "Why are we fighting?" -- looks shaken by the mayhem surrounding him. He later called the experience "a cathartic end of the era." Thanks to Zwerin and the Maysles brothers, this indispensable artifact chronicles the death of hippie idealism and the myth of Peace and Love.

BONUS TRACKS
From "Performance," the Last Poets with "Wake Up, Niggers":

 

Jagger, demonstrating how music videos would go a decade later, "Memo From Turner" (with Ry Cooder on slide guitar):

 

From "Gimme Shelter," Tina Turner giving an NC-17 performance at Madison Square Garden, opening for the Stones. Jagger blithely comments while reviewing the footage, "It's nice to have a chick occasionally." I'll be in my bunk:

 

The Flying Burrito Brothers, along with the Jefferson Airplane, opened for the Stones at Altamont. Here are the Burritos with the song featured in the film, "Six Days on the Road":

 

Let's give the Stones the last word, with "You Gotta Move" from the 1969 tour:

On Her Own

 

THE OUTRUN (B) - Every generation gets the "Days of Wine and Roses" it deserves. This one is more "Days of Sea Lions and Seaweed," but it gets the job done.

 

Saiorse Ronan turns in an understated but powerful and believable performance as a 29-year-old woman struggling to stay sober by leaving her London party scene and returning to the Scottish isles near where she grew up (with a pair of challenging parents). She communes with nature as a way to smother the desire to drink, with mixed results but with a clearer mind -- not only about her sobriety but also her eventual path in life.

Nora Fingscheidt, who seems to specialize in films about wild-card females ("The Unforgivable"), helps adapt a novel by Amy Liptrot, unspooling the story of Rona, splintering the narrative with flashbacks that can be a little difficult to follow but help illustrate Rona's jangled brain (and explain how she destroyed a relationship with a sweet partner (Paapa Essiedu)). Her mom (Saskia Reeves) and a gang of Jesus freaks annoy Rona, but the daughter is particularly triggered by her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane), whose mood swings spiral her back to childhood traumas, especially when he cocoons in bed, unresponsive.

Rona not only assists on the family farm but also helps conduct a head-count of the rare corn crake. She learns to appreciate the small joys in life, like a peek-a-boo swim with sea lions and learning the healthful benefits of seaweed. You sense that she has gotten her life on track, even if she has a long scuffle ahead staying sober.

MARIANNE (C+) - It has come to this. The culmination of my cinematic viewing and reviewing existence. Ninety minutes of pure, uncut Isabelle Huppert -- just her, and only her, addressing the camera. With that mesmerizing mask of a face, she could have been, as they say, reading the phone book for an hour and a half, and I would have forked over $10 to see it.

 

It turns out she reads from a rambling script (apparently) from newcomer Michael Rozek, who trains his camera inertly on Huppert seated on a couch as she unspools a disjointed monologue with a meta theme that dares you to keep watching. Huppert mainly addresses the camera when not flipping pages in the script she relies on, and she has an unmatched ability to pierce the screen and the illusion of cinema and seem to teleport into the movie theater and communicate directly with you. 

She mocks the concept of a narrative and plays with the idea that she will be taken as an elitist for engaging in such a (mock) vanity project (featuring her self-aware high-brow references to jazz's Thelonious Monk and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky). It's a one-woman high-wire act that few others could attempt, let alone pull off. She is droll at times, and it's fun to study her at length. I enjoyed trying to figure out how she manages to convey volumes with her eyes, passing time as she fussed with her hair or struggled to pronounce the word forlorn in her thick French accent. You have to pay close attention in order to catch the sly changes in her blase mien.

Toward the end, Huppert finally gets off the couch but quickly ends up back in (her?) spacious home, this time in front of a mirror reciting an extended passage about love and the "noisy gong" from 1 Corinthians in the Bible. She is quite earnest throughout, and it's hard to tell whether she is truly trying to convey some philosophical ideas or merely engaging in an absurdist lark, winking along with Rozek. She brings it all around with a subtly effective conclusion, and by the end of the 87 minutes, you have either lusciously indulged in all things Isabelle Huppert, or you walked out an hour ago because it was all too flippant to bear. I enjoyed the experience but I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to; thus the grade that might seem lower than this review suggests.  

BONUS TRACK

Rona listens to a lot of electronic dance music in her headphones during "The Outrun." But from the end credits, the ever-hopeful and fresh-sounding "This Is the Day," from 1983, by The The:

Doc Watch: Fight the Power

 Two from PBS ...

UNION (A-minus) - With ultimate insider access, this granular documentary provides classic fly-on-the-wall observations of the rag-tag group that heroically organized thousands of workers at an Amazon plant on New York's Staten Island, the first ever bargaining unit sanctioned at a warehouse of the e-tail giant.

 

In the shadows of COVID in 2021, Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer formed the unaffiliated Amazon Labor Union, following a worker protest that had led to the firing of Smalls, who channeled his fury into an Ahab-like determination to topple a giant. Shunning an affiliation with a major national union, the ALU focused on grass-roots organizing, zeroing in on individual sign-ups in a short period of time at a facility whose workforce turns over roughly every six months. 

In all kinds of weather, a handful of diehards manned a tent at a bus stop outside the warehouse, offering food (and at one point weed) to win over the overworked crew members. We sit on on the leadership's Zoom meetings, where democracy gets messy (and prissy) at times (one of them will defect by the time the big vote arrives) but hope never dies. We trek with them to the offices of the National Labor Relations Board as they navigate the ancient bureaucracy, and hidden cameras take us inside the facility to lay bare the anti-union indoctrination sessions known as captive-audience meetings. 

Smalls, on balance, is a hero you can root for. He is a single father who displays an interesting mix of empathy for the workers and vengefulness toward the behemoth that tried to crush his spirit. Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story are dogged in their pursuit of the story, their cameras often rolling in predawn hours as the huddled masses spill out of buses, steeling themselves for another 10-hour shift on their feet, with too-few breaks. As if we needed another reminder of the reality behind our blithe online shopping addictions.

HANNAH ARENDT: FACING TYRANNY (B) - This is another matter-of-fact installment of Philosophy for Dummies, meaning a Philosophy 101 class for people like me. We get a tick-tock through the life and career of Hanna Arendt, the foe of totalitarianism who rose to prominence when she coined the term "the banality of evil" while covering the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 (reporting for the New Yorker magazine.

A German Jew, Arendt fled the rising Nazi regime in 1933 after briefly being incarcerated, settling in Paris, working toward a Jewish state in Palestine, before a brief pilgrimage to her postwar homeland and then becoming an American citizen in 1950, the year before she published The Origins of Totalitarianism." This "American Masters" production is a bit obsessed with her love life -- she famously dated the legendary Martin Heidegger (who would fall in with the Third Reich) and later had an open marriage. But it gives full berth to her words -- through archival interviews and her writings, voiced by actress Nina Hoss.  

The rise of the Nazis (later echoed in the Nixon-Vietnam era) should send chills down the spine of modern Americans, with a rhyme scheme readily apparent. We get this quote:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.  And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please.

The message from this surface-level analysis of one of the 20th century's big thinkers: Pay attention to the past; totalitarianism can take root anywhere and at any time.

Doc Watch: I Know You Are

 

PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF (A-minus) - I've watched this twice, and I don't have much to say. It's a powerful final reveal of Paul Reubens, who died two years ago, giving the man his due after decades cloistered behind his fictional alter-ego, Pee-wee Herman. It's also a fascinating, but sometimes frustrating, first-person account by Matt Wolf of his years-long odyssey in bringing this troubled production to fruition.

 

 

Reubens sat for 40 hours of interviews, wrangling with Wolf throughout for a degree of control over the direction of his life story. He makes passive-aggressive jokes about being co-director, which eventually grow a bit tiresome, but the charm of Reubens shines through from beginning to end, the glint in his eye ever-present despite Reubens secretly suffering from cancer throughout the production. (Few people knew until his death was announced, and it came as a shock to Wolf as well as the rest of us.)

The over-arching theme here is Reubens' lifelong struggle to just be himself. He found a great excuse to avoid coming to terms with his homosexuality by creating the character of Pee-wee Herman, the fey, mischievous man-child. I consider that creation the post-war equal of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, and if you don't, you probably won't have the patience for this 3.5-hour two-part HBO Max special.  

The curation of clips here is impressive -- Reubens went to Cal Arts and then toiled as a founding member of the Groundlings comedy troupe, so there is plenty of archival film of him going back to the early '70s. Reubens developed a bunch of characters but settled on Pee-wee as the breakthrough, soon taking it to a bigger stage, and then on the road, which became an HBO special. With memorable turns on David Letterman's "Late Night," Pee-wee would eventually break through with a hit movie in 1985 ("Pee-wee's Big Adventure"), and then his brilliant Saturday morning TV show, before his career unraveled in 1991 after an arrest in a porn theater in Florida (where he grew up in the circus town of Sarasota and where his parents still lived at the time).

A decade later, Reubens would be the victim of overzealous prosecution when his vintage erotica collection was seized as a pretext to accuse him of possessing child pornography, an allegation that turned out to be false. But it was this later accusation that seemed to haunt Reubens all the way to his grave. Wolf is blessed with an ending when Reubens, who had ghosted him for the last year, recorded a final monologue the day before he died, still ruing that ordeal. 

By the time that ending arrives, however, Wolf has spent nearly an hour belaboring those two scarlet letters stamped on Reubens' career. The film feels out of balance, with grim regret suffocating the joy that Reubens brought the world, both through Pee-wee and on his own during the last decades of his career. An aftertaste of oppressive gloom lingers long after viewing.

Maybe that's a sign of success. Reubens comes across as, if not self-loathing, then severely repressed, and the keen exploration of one man's psyche justifies the extended run time. His genius shines through, but he also was imprisoned by his stratospheric success -- resentful, even, that Pee-wee got all the credit and Paul Rubenfeld did not -- and when the Florida incident presented the chance to be freed from that Candyland image, Reubens still could not seize the opportunity and live an authentic life. 

On hand are insightful talking heads, including Debi Mazar, who was Reubens' companion for a few years after the Florida debacle; co-stars Lynne Marie Stewart, Lawrence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson; director Tim Burton; Groundlings cohorts Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson and Laraine Newman; and sister Abby Rubenfeld. We get a well-rounded portrait of brilliant comedian and an appreciation for how difficult it was, in the end, for both him and his biographer to simply tell his life story. Treasure the many clips, and wish Reubens' soul well.

MY MOM, JAYNE (B) - This is a rather pedantic family history of an actress, Mariska Hargitay (from "Law & Order: SVU"), as she explores the life of her mother, the blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield, who died in 1967 when Mariska was 3. Mariska gathers her brothers and half-sister (who was the oldest and knew their mother best) for weepy and not very insightful reminiscences of the woman who spoke several languages and played the violin, in addition to parading her assets all over the big screen.

 

Mom Jayne also had some secrets that she took to the grave after the car accident that spared Mariska and her two brothers but not their mother's latest boy toy. Hargitay peels away the mysteries, which were withheld from her as a child and which she then kept from others after she discovered them as an adult. It's a lesson in blowing up stupid family secrets, but it's an awfully ham-handed presentation. (How many times do we have to see middle-aged people break down emotionally on camera while trying to tell a story from 60 years ago?) Apparently the siblings hadn't really reconciled their shared childhood, and they mostly come off as victims of their own denial, rather than insightful observers of the human condition.

The first half of the film does an admirable job of conveying the spectacle that was Jayne Mansfield's career in the 1950s and '60s. It also, grudgingly, digs beneath the glamour to chronicle Mansfield's seemingly casual way of cycling through partners, her kids' interests be damned. The final third wrings a little intrigue from the film's big reveal, but Hargitay drags it out way too long, with several false endings, limping to the 1 hour 45-minute mark. (This easily could have been a 60-minute PBS special.) She does stumble on an endearing punchline -- courtesy of a cheeky step-sibling -- but then it's back to maudlin mode for a couple of corny codas.

BONUS TRACKS

From a key road-trip visual in "Pee-Wee," Brian Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye" from 1974:

 

And the iconic opening to "Pee-wee's Playhouse," courtesy of artist Gary Panter:

New to the Queue

 Set for life ...

 

A debut feature, written, directed and starring Eva Victor, the gloomy comedy "Sorry, Baby." 

Based on the trailer alone, we'll check out the absurdist road-trip love story, "Sunlight."

Lynne Ramsay ("Morvern Callar," "You Were Never Really Here") corrals Jennifer Lawrence to star in her latest, about feminine fulfillment, "Die, My Love."

A Syrian refugee living in France stalks the man he believes tortured him in prison, "Ghost Trail." 

We're up for the sequel to the pulpy guilty pleasure "M3GAN," the next gen, "M3GAN 2.0."

Best of Ever, Vol. 12: New Wave Classics

 

SHAMPOO (1975) (A) - With a dream cast of appealing actors, the king of the 1970s, Hal Ashby, sends up the vapidity of Beverly Hills at the height of 1960s tensions, through the playboy exploits of a heterosexual hairdresser tending to unfulfilled women.

 

Warren Beatty is flustered throughout as George, the sought-after star of a salon, though he wants to open his own; if only he had his act together to pull that off. He rapaciously sleeps his way through the clientele, past and present, showing zero emotional connection to any of them. His head is so fogged that he cannot have a civil conversation with a woman, even the one he calls his girlfriend, an actress, played by Goldie Hawn. In one memorable scene, George blow-dries the hair of a client by facing toward her and lowering her head into his crotch, swirling her hair maniacally. Often, he is personifying cool by tooling around the hills on a motorcycle.

Superstar screenwriter Robert Towne (coming off "Chinatown"), working with Beatty on the script, sets this against the backdrop of the November 1968 presidential election, eked out by Richard Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War. Jack Warden helms this Republican enclave as Lester, who also considers bankrolling George's own shop, though the fact that George has been sleeping with his wife (Lee Grant) likely spells doom on that front. And wait till Lester finds out how easy it was for his teenage daughter, Lorna (Carrie Fischer, in her debut), to seduce George on a lazy afternoon.

If you're keeping track, that's quite a lineup of smart, appealing women, and we haven't even mentioned Julie Christie, positively glow, as yet another spurned lover, who is Lester's mistress but just can't quit her George habit. (Don't worry; Lester assumes George is gay because he is a hairdresser.) Her outburst -- during a gala dinner that brings the principals together late in the film -- is worth the price of admission. 

With Ashby at the helm, the characterizations run deep. Somehow we empathize with the lothario in his mid-30s and realize how much of a sad sack he is, and how vacuous and selfish the women can seem at times. The sexual politics are cunning, and the political politics quietly unnerving. Beatty is at the top of his game, and his co-stars are all game for high-jinks.

ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) (A) - Like "Jaws" did with the summer blockbuster 50 years ago this month, "Rosemary's Baby" arrived in 1968 and launched the modern horror film. It attacks humanity's most basic instinct -- motherhood -- with a subtle (at times whimsical) adoption of the theory of the banality of evil.

 

Mia Farrow is mesmerizing as Rosemary, the waifish victim of a coven of witches who target their naive neighbor in Manhattan's Dakota Building, grooming her to bear Satan's child. That coven is led by the irrepressible Ruth Gordon as Minnie, and her creepy high-brow husband, Roman (Sidney Blackmer). They first seduce Rosemary's husband, Guy (a devilish John Cassavetes), by using witchcraft to help advance his flailing acting career.

The cast is full of juicy roles. Ralph Bellamy is devious as the coven's hand-picked obstetrician (mis)treating Rosemary, who turns gaunt and raccoon-eyed as the devil's spawn lurks in her uterus. Maurice Evans is sweet as Rosemary's snakebit mentor who pays the price for his nosiness. Charles Grodin makes the most of a glorified cameo as her regular doctor.

Roman Polanski, who also co-wrote with Ira Levin ("The Stepford Wives," "The Boys from Brazil"), revels in the gothic ghoulishness of the Dakota's grim apartments (recreated on a Hollywood soundstage). He takes his time (137 minutes) gradually building the tension; it takes nearly an hour for Rosemary to be impregnated (with the memorable line, "This is no dream; this is really happening!"). Polanski delights in exploring themes of paranoia and the cults of religion. All of the bad guys come off as playful and charming, but just slightly off. 

It's easy to look back nearly 60 years and dismiss this as a facile psychological thriller, trapped in the amber of the Swingin' Sixties. But the mixture of suspense and dark comedy is intoxicating, and it's an intelligent examination of an innocent woman entrapped by idol worship.

BONUS TRACK

The haunting lullaby from "Rosemary's Baby," titled "Sleep Safe and Warm" by Krzysztof  Komeda:

A Mandate

 

FRIENDSHIP (A-minus) - Sometimes all you need is a string of belly laughs and a plot that always go where you'd expect it to. The trailer quotes a magazine critic as saying "Friendship" is "the funniest thing I've seen in my entire life," and while I wouldn't go that far, there is something unique and refreshing about this tale of a social outcast fumbling the rules of befriending another adult male.

 

Tim Robinson (above, left) stars as that bizarre man, Craig, and it might be a challenge for a viewer to dive in unprepared for the hawk-nosed Robinson's skewed comedic sensibilities. He is most known for his bizarre Netflix sketch series "I Think You Should Leaves," or for his previous collaboration with Sam Richardson, "Detroiters." He specializes in startling, inappropriate emotional outbursts. This is his first big-screen starring role, and he carries the film ably, with the help of Paul Rudd, who plays Craig's new neighbor, Austin, a local TV weatherman who invites Craig into his nerdy bro circle, only to dump him after Craig exhibits some odd behavior. Rudd borrows not a little of Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy ("Anchorman") for his insecure, buffoonish character. Austin tracks as extra cool because he also fronts a dad punk band.

Craig works at a drab advertising agency and seems to wear the same bland suit every day. His wife, Tami (Kate Mara) is a year recovered from cancer and is more intimate with their teenage son than she is with Craig. The fragility of the marriage is outlined fully in the opening scene, where Craig and Tami speak awkwardly at her cancer-recovery group meeting. There's always something unsettling about the couple's interactions, as if they also exist in a parallel horror film.

Craig is excited to have finally made friends -- especially one as nurturing as the sensitive guys Austin has assembled -- and he is crushed like a spurned teenager when Austin abruptly cuts him loose. This leads to some stalkerish behavior from Craig, and when he tries to re-create a bonding episode with Austin -- a bad-boy trespassing through the tunnels under the city -- with Tami, things go horribly wrong.  

All of this springs from the mind of first-time feature writer-director Andrew DeYoung (who directed six episodes of the TV series "PEN15"), who shows a command of the story and a fine ear for offbeat supporting characters. At one point Craig strains to connect with a young man selling cell phones, eventually scoring a hallucinogenic from the clerk, who takes him to the back room to guide him gently through what promises to be a psychedelic trip. What Craig actually experiences is one of the funniest scenes I've seen in a movie in ages -- a clever twist on the movie trope of the life-altering, mind-expanding drug experience.

DeYoung's comedy aesthetic tracks seamlessly with Robinson's eccentric style. Rudd, the quintessential team player, finds the right tone to harmonize with Robinson. Mara channels Julie Haggerty's "Lost in America" spouse with deadpan skill. DeYoung's script never falters, and he guides several running jokes (a suburban speed hump, a certain glass door) into savory payoffs in the end. This has a kinship with another Rudd vehicle, "I Love You Man," as it explores the pitfalls of trying to find a pal as an adult. Making friends late in life will never not be at least a little awkward, and rarely is it this funny.

BONUS TRACK

The trailer:

The studio version of the song the men sing to comfort each other, "My Boo" by Ghost Town DJs, released in 1996 and revived in 2016 during the "Running Man Challenge" meme: