Rock Docs: As the Millennium Turned

 

DIG! (XX) (2004/2024) (A) - Pure diligence pays off. Early in her career, filmmaker Ondi Timoner committed to years of embedding with two bands who were relatively unknown and who may never have broken through. Her aim was to tell their story in depth, as it unfolded over time. 

Originally released (to great Sundance festival fanfare) in 2004 as "Dig!", Timoner celebrates the 20th anniversary with an update on the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, filling out about a half hour of extra footage, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. It remains a fascinating character study of divergent approaches to the rock 'n' roll ethos, flashing back to the heyday of alternative music at the turn of the millennium. It is granular in its study of each band's creative forces.

 

While Portland's Dandy Warhols achieved a decent level of commercial success on the Warner Bros. label, it is their self-defeating rivals, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who drive the narrative here. Led by their charismatic, drug-addled purist leader Anton Newcombe (above, left), psych revivalists BJM are an object lesson in shooting oneself in the foot, repeatedly. They refuse to make concessions to the music industry, and seem to pursue record deals merely to earn a big enough advance to fuel their drug and alcohol habits. (The TVT label took that sucker's bet during filming.) Still, there's no denying the trippy glee of their songs, like the heady "Mary, Please."

 

The band's secret weapon is tambourine player Joel Gion (above, right), the puppet-like court jester who shares narrating duties in the film, trading off with Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the suave lead man of the Dandy Warhols. (The narrative back-and-forth is an inspired choice.) At one point Taylor-Taylor tags along on tour with BJM, and the unspoken look on his face suggests eminent gratitude that his own band is not nearly as fucked up as Newcombe's.

Gion is the constant who holds the plot together, sticking by Newcombe's side when no one else would. (Co-founder Matt Hollywood eventually was driven out of the band, like the others. The drummer, though, stuck around a while -- not because of any great skills, which were questionable, but because his blond page-boy haircut closely resembled Brian Jones' mod coif.) 

Gion is like the Flavor Flav to Newcombe's Chuck D -- not to insult the mastermind behind Public Enemy. Newcombe comes off as obsessed about his art, to the detriment of everything else in his life, including, oddly enough, his music career. Most of the time he is a greasy slob with wild eyes, spouting philosophical musings in a style not unlike fellow musician Charles Manson.

The Dandy Warhols are the yang to Newcombe's yin. They are four relatively clean-cut young adults who write more hooky numbers than opaque, droning jams. Taylor-Taylor obsesses over image as much as the sound, curating a style for the band through elaborate videos. The Dandys' biggest break came when the European company Vodafone used the band's single, "Bohemian Like You" (below), in a 2000 commercial, and the band has cultivated a savvy cult status to this day. Cohorts Zia McCabe (keyboards and bass) and Peter Holmstrom (lead guitar) exude charm and style, as well, bringing essential energy and chops to their leader's songs. 

 

Timoner's camera -- which infiltrates every nook and cranny of each band's every facet of existence -- stalks both bands over the course of about seven years, from the mid-'90s to the early '00s. This was a leap of faith (or a wildly inadvisable career choice) at the time, never really guaranteed to show that either of the bands would make it big enough for an audience to care about the light-years of footage she shot over that particular life cycle. But her perseverance feels like a critical part of the overall narrative. This is a feat of endurance and devotion -- she edited the film in addition to writing and directing it -- and Timoner survives as an unseen and uncredited character tying everything together. It is partly her story.

If there is one nit to pick, it is that Timoner (who also directed 2009's "We Live in Public") never really does fair justice to any of Brian Jonestown Massacre's recordings. Everything here is snippets, and you wouldn't be blamed for wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to their appeal. Maybe that was a strategy. Perhaps she is illustrating just how self-destructive Newcombe's methods were, as exemplified by the trickles of album sales. (The updated footage includes the band members brawling onstage with each other in Melbourne in 2023, torpedoing that tour.)

Feel free to not overthink things, and just wallow in the minutiae of the budding careers of a bunch of music lifers who continue to record and tour to this day. Never heard of them before? Who cares. You need not sign up as a fan; just turn black the clock to a Beatles-vs.-Stones 2.0 romp. 

You might also quibble over the emphasis on the battle of the bands. Was there ever a true rivalry between the bands? Did one band's path prove more reliable than the other's? More people bought Dandy Warhols albums and saw their videos. But Newcombe is still slogging away. Both bands added Santa Fe stops to their fall tours this year. In late September, the Dandys drew a middling (but devoted) crowd. Brian Jonestown Massacre's show in November has been sold out for months. 

BONUS TRACKS

No one mines "Nuggets" like Brian Jonestown Massacre. Here's a typical retro workout, "Straight Up and Down" (the theme to HBO's "Boardwalk Empire"):

 

"Who?"

 

The Dandys burst on the scene with their sophomore album that included a howl at the end of the century, the gender-affirming romp "Boys Better":

 

POST-SCRIPT

As luck would have it, we caught the Dandy Warhols' Santa Fe show. They flashed their own psych-rock jam-band bona fides, in addition to serving up the hits during the second half of the show. (You know you are an aging music fan rocking out to a 30-year-old group when two of the band members call a time-out in the middle of the show for a pee break.) One peppy nugget that stood out was the 2018 single "Be Alright":

New to the Queue

 Multiples of seven ...

Auteur Kelly Reichardt ("First Cow," "Certain Women," "Night Moves") follows a low-energy art thief in "Mastermind."

Joachim Trier re-teams with Renate Reinsve ("The Worst Person in the World") for the family drama "Sentimental Value."

Raoul Peck ("I Am Not Your Negro," "The Young Karl Marx") undertakes a timely examination of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, "Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5."

A biography of Tura Satana, the vivacious star of classic exploitation films, "Tura."

Inmates with smuggled cell phones help expose a prison system in the Deep South, "The Alabama Solution."

Lucile Hadzihalilovic (reuniting with Marion Cotillard from "Innocence") spins a harrowing tale of a teen runaway obsessed with an actress, "The Ice Tower."

Ben Stiller combs through his family history for a documentary about his comedy-duo parents, "Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost."

BONUS TRACK

Flat Duo Jets with "Tura Satana":

Doc Watch: The Dark Future

DEMOCRACY NOIR (B) - This earnest documentary conveys the oppression in Hungary through three women's attempts to battle the authoritarian regime that Viktor Orban started to craft after his election in 2010 and which has curdled ominously since. Director Connie Field gets up-close and personal with her three subjects -- opposition politician Timea Szabo; reporter Babett Oroszi; and nurse/activist Niko Antal -- as they oppose the regime in their own ways.

The principal economic beneficiary of Orban's good graces is old pal Lorinc Meszaros, a former gas-industry pipe-fitter who expeditiously became the richest man in Hungary. The most cynical ploy has been Orban taking funds from the European Union -- a group he despises and demonizes as anti-Christian and pro-immigrant -- and plowing them into projects around the country and taking credit for them as he pummels the EU as his personal punching bag. 

Each woman is worthy of attention, though you can't help wondering how futile their efforts have been. That haunting thought is freighted with the context of living in America in 2025 and the ominous parallels that are obvious between Orban's rule and the current regime in Washington. But the women haven't given up, and perhaps their resistance will bear fruit or at least be recognized someday in a brighter future. 

Director Field does a workmanlike job personalizing the stories while conveying loads of information covering the past two decades and the dizzying descent into authoritarianism. Her visual bookends feel trite, though -- she begins and ends the film with arty glamour shots of Budapest that feel forced and vain rather than faithful to the project at hand. I understand, though, her inclination to counteract the ugliness that seems to surround the country.

THE DYNASTY (B+) - From an independent journalism operation, Direkt36 (one of the few remaining in Hungary), comes this years-in-the-making tick-tock about the rise of Fidesz, the corrupt political party that launched Viktor Orban's political career. This one-hour news piece on YouTube is rooted in a textbook ethos of reporting: Follow the money.

Once Orban took office in 2010, his son-in-law and key pals started winning government contracts, based on bidding processes rigged in their favor. This was the culmination of financial shenanigans that dated back to the 1990s, when the party learned how to play the money game, in part by converting public funding for the party into private gain.

The son-in-law's path to wealth started innocuously enough with winning the bid for street lighting in cities around the country, quickly dominating the market as competitors suspiciously stepped aside, unable to meet the unique requirements -- all of this overseen by a corrupt auditor, of course. The son-in-law soon built a real estate empire of stunning proportions in just a few years, including prestige properties all over Budapest. (Is this all sounding familiar?)

Direkt36 digs through decades of dirty deals for this one-hour expose. The facts unfold fast and furious from the talking-head journalists. It is a breath-taking analysis of a blatant kleptocracy. One journalist describes the overt corruption as the ruling party creating an Infrastructure Procurement Department and a Dynasty Building Department, flimsy excuses to shovel money to Orban's family and pals. 

The filmmakers do a good job of sorting through a ton of facts and keeping track of the journalists who serve as talking heads. Some viewers might be overwhelmed, whether it's the rapid fire of the screaming headlines or the onslaught of corruption that seems impossible to contain. 

Grace Notes

 

IT'S NEVER OVER, JEFF BUCKLEY (B) - If anyone would think to make a documentary about my life -- and don't worry, no one will -- I would hope that two of the main talking heads would not be my mom and an ex whom I treated like crap. Jeff Buckley -- the troubled troubadour who died young, like his father -- suffers that unfortunate indignity in an earnest but somewhat mawkish biography.

 

Director Amy Berg mixes talking heads exuding a noticeable preponderance of feminine energy with often-chaotic image montages that might force you to look away lest you go cross-eyed. The question we post here: Is the super-sensitive Buckley a subject worthy of a full-length documentary? He died at age 30, too young, like his deadbeat dad, the '70s folk singer Tim Buckley, who died a junkie at age 28.

Jeff Buckley had a lot of talent, pouring his heart out into deeply personal lyrics. The women in his life attest here to his earnest attempts to be a good person, but you can read between the lines and appreciate that he could sometimes be an asshole, especially after he became a music-industry darling, signed by Columbia Records and blessed by David Bowie. (Maybe the film could have poked a little deeper with the drummer who quit the band during the tour in support of the debut album, "Grace.") 

As a singer, Buckley could be hit and miss. With jazzy stylings, he aimed for Nina Simone but occasionally landed on Liza Minnelli. (To be fair, he had an admirer in Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, whose Qawwali style Buckley liked to imitate.) To his credit, Buckley honed his craft in small clubs, toiling away on more than just his name. In the end, though, he managed only one proper studio album, with a second pieced-together after his death. His version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is considered to be definitive.

Berg's hectic biography strives too hard to add depth to Buckley's resume. After reporting on his suspicious drowning (it is insisted that it was accidental, but why was he wearing his clothes, and why did he phone many of his loved ones in the days before that?), she wrings maximum emotion out of the final answering-machine message he left for his mother, a bit of a drama queen who cries on cue on camera. In the end, it is difficult to accept that all of this attention on Buckley is earned 28 years after his death. 

THELONIOUS MONK: STRAIGHT, NO CHASER (1989) (A-minus) - This is a fascinating curation of footage that took many years, and a late boost from executive producer Clint Eastwood, to bring to fruition, seeing the light only after the bebop piano pioneer had died. It is made up mainly of footage from a 1967 public TV documentary that never aired outside of Germany.

Monk certainly is a curious subject. The footage from the late '60s and early '70s delves, in fly-on-the-wall style, into quiet personal moments to go with generous clips of performances. Talking heads gathered in the '80s -- including his old colleagues and his son -- attest to his genius but they don't shy away from discussing his personal problems. (Monk was possibly an undiagnosed schizophrenic or suffering from bipolar disorder.) His mental health issues are clearly evident; we see examples of him randomly rise from his piano bench and wander the stage. Off-stage he is barely verbal, apparently heavily medicated. 

His talents -- on full display -- are sui generis. I'm no jazz aficionado, but I can appreciate his sophisticated compositions (beyond the standard "'Round Midnight") and his staccato keyboard technique. Some of his former collaborates reunite at times to reinterpret some of his well-known compositions. But it's the old footage -- worshiped by jazz fanatics -- that can be riveting at times. 

This is all assembled by Maysles veteran Charlotte Zwerin ("Gimme Shelter," "Salesman"). She is not shy about exploring Monk's complicated personal life -- he stayed married to his devoted wife Nellie, but he spent just as much time, in his later years, with Rothschild family scion Pannonica "Nica" de Koenigswarter, who often housed him at her New Jersey waterfront home. That place had a piano prominently displayed but rarely if ever played in Monk's final years.

BONUS TRACKS 

My favorite Buckley song landed on my radar courtesy of a younger ex who fell hard for his catalog in the '00s, the Leonard Cohen knockoff "Jewel Box":

 

We previously linked to Thelonious Monk's version of "Just a Gigolo." Here he is in a clip from Denmark, performing Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields' "Don't Blame Me":

 

The on-point "Monk's Mood":

Coping, Part 2: Trauma

 

SORRY, BABY (A) - Eva Victor announces her grand presence as writer, director and star of this bleak comedy about an academic working through the PTSD of a sexual assault, through deadpan humor and the simple passage of time.

 

Victor -- tall, gangly and droll -- is captivating in this story told slightly out of order such that the actual assault has maximum impact, even though it is passively rendered from a cold distance. What is important here is how Victor's character -- Agnes, a literature professor -- copes in her own way, on her own schedule. (Three years have passed since the incident.) She mainly leans on her friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who soldiered through the Ph.D program with Agnes, under the creepy mentorship of the predatory author/professor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi).

Lydie is patient with Agnes, even though Lydie is busy with her own partner and their plans to start a family. Agnes flails for emotional support, seeking a cure for the numbness that blankets her days -- she adopts a kitten; she starts sleeping with her nerdy neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges); and she is blessed with the kindness of a random stranger (John Carroll Lynch), who talks her through a panic attack, which is triggered by another former classmate (Kelly McCormack) who lets slip that she had sex with Decker back in the day, too. 

All of this might sound complicated or oppressive, but Victor makes sure that it is not. Her off-kilter dialogue and offbeat delivery makes this drily funny but not frivolous. It is moody but not glum. Agnes simply does not fit in with polite society, as exemplified by her awkward monologue in court explaining why she probably can't be unbiased as a potential juror. She is aimless but not hopeless. 

You might identify with her futility in the face of a world -- her personal one, our shared dystopia -- knocked off its axis at the moment. What is the proper response? 

This is assured storytelling. Victor hesitates a bit after the film's climax, fiddling with a couple of false endings, but you can't fault her for following the natural path of this unique character to whatever conclusion she sees fit. Victor and Agnes have earned that. 

Coping, Part 1: Sobriety

 

THE BALTIMORONS (A-minus) - Michael Strassner co-writes and co-stars as an out-of-work comedian experiencing, essentially, one long 24-hour meet-cute with an older woman.

 

Strassner, a Baltimore native, teamed up on the script with Jay Duplass, who directs here like a man smitten with the city, exploring its municipal beauty and its working-class neighborhoods. He follows Strassner as Cliff, who accidentally knocks out a tooth on Christmas Eve and must leave his fiance and her family for emergency intervention by an older dentist named Didi (Liz Larsen), whom he falls for.

Didi, old enough to be Cliff's mother, is charmed by the big goof and flattered on a day when she found out that her ex has married a younger woman. Strassner and Larsen thus dominate the movie with their overnight urban adventure that includes an urgent search for soft-shelled crabs.

Cliff is a controlled mess. In the opening scene, we see a comically unsuccessful suicide attempt. He is six months sober and still reeling from being kicked out of his improv group for criticizing a fellow member, though his best pal in the collective is begging him to return to perform his popular Baltimorons routine. It's not spelled out at first, but Cliff's relationship is on shaky ground as well.

Cliff and Didi are constantly coming to the rescue of the other. Even after the tooth gets a temporary fix, Cliff's car gets towed, and later Didi will get pulled over by a traffic cop. In between, they go to her ex's house, where Cliff helps ease the social awkwardness that involves not only the new wife (Mary Catherine Garrison from HBO's "Somebody Somewhere") but Didi's grown daughter and granddaughter. (The ex will be one of two grievance-addled middle-aged white men who get lightly singed with one-liners.)

Strassner is a natural comedian and Larsen (a journeyman with 17 "Law & Order" TV credits) has an Ellen Barkin buzz about her. This is in many ways a traditional romantic comedy, albeit with gloomy undertones. The Christmas milieu is more menacing than mirthful, and Duplass thankfully does not overdo the holiday shtick (he relies on muted decorations and inoffensive jazzy renditions of a few yule classics). The director -- continuing an older-woman fetishization we saw between him and Edie Falco in 2018's "Outside In") -- keeps the momentum going for 100 lively minutes. 

A viewer will have to tolerate Cliff's goofy demeanor for that length of time, as well as Didi's bashful parrying of Cliff's come-ons, but there is substance here to each character's personal growth that gets unpacked from their heavy baggage in a short time span. (For him, sobriety provides some clarity; for her, a few drinks loosen things up.) It's an impressive debut for Strassner and a welcome big-screen platform for his co-star. Score another one for the Duplass film factory.

BONUS TRACK

A tender moment between Cliff and Didi is choreographed to the Gershwin tune "Someone to Watch Over Me," by Jordan Seigel and Lia Booth:

Soundtrack of Your Life: A Step Beyond

 

The grocery stores are doubling down on the Gen X music loops these days. Madness was known mostly for their biggest hit, "Our House." But perhaps their most infectious hit was their cover of "One Step Beyond," the title track from their 1979 debut album. The punk-inflected ska sound is hard to resist.

 

Date: September 20, 2025, 12:30 p.m.

Place: Sprouts grocery store, Albuquerque

Song:  "One Step Beyond"

Artist: Madness

Irony Matrix: 5.6 out of 10

*** 

A week earlier, I let the radio dial settle on 92.9 FM in Rio Rancho, N.M., just outside Albuquerque, an oldies station that specializes in deep tracks and which doesn't try your patience with the same old classic rock and Motown hits. KDSK has a fondness for songs that barely cracked the top 20. I enjoyed a run on a recent Sunday afternoon. These are the kind of songs you probably haven't heard since they came and went from the airwaves about 50 years ago. The kind of tracks that make you say, "Wow. Remember that one?"

First up was "Pilot of the Airwaves," which peaked at No. 13 for a British woman called Charlie Dore, a sort of Stevie Nicks knockoff. It is driven by a corny church-choir vibe:

 

Next up was a band called Night with the propulsive pop of the derivative "Hot Summer Nights" -- No. 18, also in 1979. (Quarterflash would pull this style off much better a couple of years later.)

 

The biggest chart performer was the best song, "We're All Alone," which hit No. 7 in 1977 for Rita Coolidge, a longtime favorite. It's a Boz Scaggs song (from his blockbuster album "Silk Degrees") that Frankie Valli released as a single the year before. It's a lovely soaring ballad that neither man should have attempted, let alone released, which became clear in retrospect when Coolidge would go on to own it.

 

BONUS TRACK

The original "One Step Beyond" was by the Jamaican artist Prince Buster. His 1964 version was more lethargic but no less hypnotic:

Best of Ever, Vol. 13: Job Security

 Two classics for the price of one. Inspired to finally finish these reviews so that I can at least start a tribute to Robert Redford, who died this week at 89. Expect a fuller retrospective down the road.

UP IN THE AIR (2009) (A) - Everything comes together perfectly synchronized in this charming rumination on loneliness and loss and the hubris of flying solo through life.

 

George Clooney is classic Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a motivational speaker with a winning smile who flies around the country for an HR consulting firm, for the express purpose of firing people during layoffs. Remember, this landed during the depths of the Great Recession, and Jason Reitman recruits a few real laid-off people to play the victims of corporate downsizing.

Clooney is the middleman among a powerful trio of co-stars -- there is Jason Bateman as Ryan's wonderfully cynical boss; Anna Kendrick as Natalie, a whippersnapper who has come up with a plan to conduct the firings efficiently by video conferencing; and Vera Farmiga as Alex, a fellow random frequent flier, who trysts with Ryan whenever they can arrange to overlap at the same hotel in the same city on the same night. Clooney and Farmiga smolder as the hot middle-aged friends with benefits, and Kendrick is manic as the ball of neuroses who, before implementing her video scheme, must first travel with Ryan in order to get a firsthand feel for the in-person process.

This sets the table for the characters to confront their lingering demons: Ryan as the smug confirmed bachelor who thinks he's got life aced, and Natalie, the emotionally icy automaton who must deal with the breakup of her engagement while sitting face-to-face with the workers impacted by her careerist corporate manipulations. Their mentor-mentee banter is priceless -- Ryan deploys strategic stereotypes to guide her through airport security as efficiently as possible, and when he confronts Natalie about her aggressive keyboard flourishes, she responds curtly, "I type with purpose." 

Reitman's screenplay (with Sheldon Turner) does not miss a beat across 109 taut minutes, and he builds to a third-act dramatic arc that upends the hero's (literal) journey. Ryan's goal is to achieve 10 million air miles to join a ridiculously exclusive club; his home is as much in the sky as it is in the barren apartment he keeps in the middle of nowhere (Omaha, Neb.). Reitman sends Ryan and Alex to Wisconsin for the wedding of Ryan's sister. Ryan seems estranged from his two sisters and out-of-place in the heartland (because he's out of place everywhere, you see), and he falls victim to the oldest tradition in the book -- being around a wedding and family digs up a well of emotion that he foists onto Alex, endangering their no-strings arrangement. (The cast is so overstuffed that some viewers might not appreciate the nuanced work of Melanie Lynskey as the bride and Danny McBride as the groom who gets cold feet and must sit for a talking-to from Ryan, the worst person to advocate for marriage and commitment. Good thing he's a bull-shitting motivational speaker.)

Reitman has a couple more twists to reveal in the homestretch -- Natalie will be confronted with the real-world consequences of her chosen profession, and Alex and Ryan must resolve their situationship. The filmmaker draws his characters so finely and deeply that the various fallouts from their interactions feel like gut punches. Ryan's tutoring of Natalie feels real beneath the wisecracks. There is not a false move here; it's just exquisite storytelling with both a brain and a heart.

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) (B+) - Were there three prettier people in 1969 than Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross? Were they believable back then as scruffy outlaws from the Wild West circa 1899? Let's not overthink a classic.

Redford and Newman chew up and spit out a script by William Goldman ("All the President's Men," "The Princess Bride") as swaggering bandits bedeviling the railroads before going on the lam. Butch Cassidy (Newman) is the head of a gang -- in an early scene he cleverly fends off a coup by a rival member (played by Ted Cassidy, Lurch from "The Addams Family") -- and Sundance (Redford) is a famed gunslinger. When a train robbery goes awry, this becomes a western road movie, with Butch and Sundance barely keeping one step ahead of the law. 

 

It's a little difficult separating the former cultural phenomenon with the product on the screen as it stands 56 years later. There is the famous leapfrom a cliff into a raging river -- trapped on the cliff, Sundance is afraid to jump because he can't swim, to which Butch guffaws: "Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill ya!" And then there's the famous scene of a new contraption, the bicycle, with Butch and Etta Place (Ross) frolicking to the tune of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" sung by B.J. Thomas. (Ross too often is treated like a third wheel in the film, pardon the pun.)

The film was a breakthrough for George Roy Hill, who would reunite with his two main leads a few years later with another touchstone, "The Sting," an even bigger hit. He keeps things loose, letting the charm of his cast buoy the narrative, without turning this into a farce. Hill has a firm grasp of the conventions of the western genre, which at that point was undergoing a "Bonnie & Clyde"-style correction at the onset of the American New Wave. 

Redford and his feathered coif never quite come across as authentic, but the veteran Newman is all grit as the weathered bandit who knows he is running out of options. Ross rejoins the proceedings when Butch and Sundance decide to flee to Bolivia, believing that their scent will go cold while they knock off some easy prey, like the local banks. The culture clash is amusing without being condescending. The one-liners zing right up until the very end, when a hail of bullets and a freeze frame solidify our anti-heroes as Hollywood legends.

That '80s Grift: High on Molly

THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985) (A-minus) - This is an hour and a half of memorable moviemaking. Unfortunately, the film runs 95 minutes, and the gooey final five minutes are tough to swallow four decades after the film's debut.

 

John Hughes, fresh off his directorial debut a year earlier with "Sixteen Candles," brings back Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall to ground this group of five students with nothing in common -- Ringwald was the deb, Hall the nerd -- forced together at a Saturday detention. We also get Emilio Estevez as the jock, Judd Nelson as the juvenile delinquent, and Ally Sheedy as the beta emo chick. Hughes' task is to humanize these social caricatures and help them find some common ground.

Their eventual bonding unfolds over the course of the day and feels natural. Hughes has a couple of adults to serve as foils who get the students to rally together -- the great character actor Paul Gleason as the gruff vice principal and Second City alum John Kapelos as the sly janitor. The common denominator for each student: various levels of abuse from their parents. (Gleason's character stands in as the domineering father figure. Elsewhere, actual parents who appear briefly have a distanced "Peanuts" quality to them.)

It's a smart hook that allows each cast member to dig into an emotional monologue. Things can get pretty deep at times, and a viewer can be instantly transported back to those days of insecurity and self-discovery, which could rattle a teenager on a daily basis. But the real draw here is the humor, and the young cast is up to the task. 

Even the fairly wooden Estevez shows nuance and a flair for delivering a one-liner. He snaps at Nelson's John Bender after the punk pulls out a joint: "Yo, wastoid, you're not gonna blaze up in here." And when the vice principal seems skeptical of prissy Claire's demand to go get a drink of water, lest she suffer from dehydration, Estevez's Andrew soberly intones: "I've seen her dehydrate, sir. It's gross." Hall is quite funny as the brainy nerd who makes quick assessments of his colleagues, and Sheedy is mischievous as the bizarre loner. (One way that Hughes drops the ball at the end is by having Claire give Sheedy's emo Allison a princess makeover, which causes Andrew to go instantly ga-ga over her. Hughes often had a compelling need to pair off his characters neatly through pat endings.)

Despite the MGM finale, "The Breakfast Club" holds up as Hughes' masterpiece. He captures the essence of high school in a single day, balancing cliches with insight, mixing raw angst with silly antics. It lets you return to those days protected by the armor you've built up in adulthood. 

PRETTY IN PINK (1986) (B-minus) - John Hughes wrote this, but he handed off directing duties to Howard Deutch, who launched his career directing middling mainstream comedies. If only it didn't feel so dated.

Ringwald is Andie, the boho poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks (literally the opening camera shot), who becomes the object of affection for one of the "richies," Blane (pouty Andrew McCarthy). But Blane keeps getting drawn back to his privilege by his sniveling pal Steff (a hammy James Spader, below). And Andie is hounded by her puppy-dog pal, Duckie (Jon Cryer, making his bones), who pines for her but must settle for the wise counsel of the older hipster record-store owner Iona (Annie Potts). 

 

It's getting difficult to remember a time back in the day when there was such a distinction between the cool kids and the outcasts, the rich and the poor, and why the differences seemed to matter so much. Maybe that still plays out today, but I doubt it. (For one, schools seem more specialized these days.) Andie is mocked for sewing her own outfits rather than buying off the rack (Annie Hall 2.0). She doesn't want Blane to drop her off at home because she is embarrassed for him to see where she lives; yet the vintage Volkswagen Karmann Ghia in the photo above belongs to her, not Steff or Blane (albeit with dents and dings).

If I were Andie, I'd be more embarrassed about my father who mopes around the house all day missing Andie's mother. Veteran Harry Dean Stanton drops his typical thug persona to play the lachrymose dad who must be mothered by his daughter. He is a humiliated basket case, who is pummeled by Hughes' sappy dialogue at every turn. 

The film has its moments. Potts and Cryer are adorable as two generations of new-wave hipsters. Cryer lip-syncs and nerd-dances to Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness." Potts rocks the eyeliner and plastic dresses. Ringwald bites her lip and shoots glances at the corner of the ceiling, oozing an appealing innocence. McCarthy is as cute as anything on the screen. The narrative builds to a Hollywood ending, complete with an iconic wink to the camera at the very end. And the music is ice cool. But everything here comes across as an anachronism. (Even the DVD extras, of the cast reminiscing in 2006, seem like they were created a lifetime ago.)

The first time I remember ever feeling "old" was on opening night of this film. I was 23 and surrounded by teenage Ringwald fans. I felt like the creep leering after an 18-year-old movie phenom. Now I am old, and I can't help thinking that this quaint little movie is just lost to a bygone era. 

BONUS TRACKS

Simple Minds had the big hit with "Don't You (Forget About Me)," of course, which bookends "The Breakfast Club's" credits. Here, though, is the memorable dance/chase montage to Karla Devito's "We Are Not Alone":

 

 

The Psychedelic Furs with the classic earworm, "Pretty in Pink":

 

 

The anthemic new-wave synth symphony "If You Leave" by OMD is just perfect for the climax of "Pretty in Pink":

 

It's as  good an excuse as any to delve deeper into the "Pink" soundtrack and pluck out "Left of Center" by Suzanne Vega, who fits into the same era cubbyhole as Ringwald:

Out of Their League

 

SPLITSVILLE (B) - Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin team up again after their refreshing debut "The Climb" and return to the twinned concepts of infidelity and male friendship. This one starts out promising but gets pretty silly by the end.

 

The pair again co-wrote the script and star together. Covino directs and plays Paul, a rich jerk married to a beautiful woman, Julie (Dakota Johnson), with a precocious little genius son. Paul's best friend, Carey (Marvin), has just been dumped by his wife of one year after she is rattled by a brush with death on a car drive to see Paul and Julie. Distraught, Carey takes advantage of Paul and Julie's proclaimed open marriage and sleeps with Julie. Everyone proceeds to flip out.

Carey's wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), wants to be sexually adventurous, and Carey eventually returns home and keeps house with her various oddball boyfriends, most of whom quickly become her exes.  Carey claims to be embracing Ashley's opening up of their flailing marriage, but he can't shake his feelings for Julie in the wake of their one-off tryst. Meantime, Paul's financial empire threatens to come crashing down, turning their living situation upside down.

This is all played quite broadly, and Covino and Marvin have several plot twists up their sleeves. You cheer for them to pull it off while they stage some truly funny scenes. But the basic premise gnaws at you -- what are these gorgeous, thoughtful women doing with these weird shlubs in the first place and why can't the women quit them? (The excessive male nudity might offer a few hints.) Arjona is full of life, and the film can barely contain her. Johnson commits to the uber-indie project and gives a rounded performance as a wife and mother who yearns for more than just her cushy life. 

Covino and Marvin are inventive, and their script seems peppered with improvised moments full of sly observations about relationships, both romantic and platonic. And there is an epic fight between the two men that drags on as they smash through rooms in Paul's house and eventually through a plate-glass window. It is cleverly choreographed for maximum credibility and comedic ordinariness. 

It would give too much away to explain how the narrative gymnastics exhaust the capital that is banked in the first half of the movie. Covino and Marvin have a Duplass brothers aesthetic with a Jim Cummings edge, a devotion to a nerd bro code. They are clever and funny. This sophomore effort feels like a bit of a fork in the road. Let's see where they head next.  

BONUS TRACKS
The film opens, appropriately, on a '70s vibe, Kenny Loggins and Stevie Nicks' hit "Whenever I Call You Friend":

 

The closing credits return to the '70s with Steve Forbert's passionate Dylanesque ballad "Romeo's Tune":

 

Then there is this Polish disco-era curiosity from ORM, "Pasky Z Cívek Odvijim":

It's All Downhill From Here

 

DEVO (A-minus) - Everything you could want in a documentary about Devo -- if that's what you are looking for -- can be found in this energetic and comprehensive biography of the band, featuring its two leaders, Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale. The story might give you a new appreciation for the nerdy new-wavers.

 

Chris Smith -- the entertaining director behind "American Movie," "The Yes Men," "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond" and "Fyre" -- takes a zippy approach, starting out with a deep dive into the Akron, Ohio, band's origins, which grew out of the 1970 Kent State massacre by the National Guard. The group was deeply committed to the concept of "de-evolution," the idea that human culture has peaked, and now it is declining -- a theory that has only gained traction as the generations have devolved in the past 50 years. The members of Devo (who tend to put the emphasis on the second syllable) also were pioneers in not just electronic music but in video production; they considered themselves an art collective devoted first to film and second to music.

That visual sense probably led to their well-timed big break at the start of the '80s. "Whip It" was their only top-40 single (in 1980), and it not only got new life the next year when MTV debuted, but the band was ready with plenty of video content for the hungry new channel, which added to the rotation the band's films made for their early releases. The documentary does not shy away from the band's demise as the '80s trudged along and the new-wave pioneers struggled to write more great hooks, while their shtick wasn't so weird anymore.

Mothersbaugh would go on to score "Pee-wee's Playhouse" and many movies, for Wes Anderson and others, and Casale directed music videos. Their brothers from the band would participate in an audio/video project. All appear here either in new interviews or in clips (Bob Casale and drummer Alan Meyers have died). The music is strong; they were more than one-hit wonders. Smith recognizes the band's connection to the late-night show "Fridays," with a few clips, including "Through Being Cool" and "Jerkin' Back and Forth." Those and other earworms are fun to revisit while learning the backstory of some devoted, if rather silly, artists.

DIANE WARREN: RELENTLESS (A) - This is a friendly career retrospective of the songwriter behind oodles of mega hits on mainstream radio, going back to the 1970s.

 

Diane Warren is a classic punk who writes adult-contemporary songs. She is unleashed here in all her F-bomb glory -- admired, beloved and feared by some of the titans of pop music of the modern era. Here is a small random list of artists who have recorded her songs:  Cher, LeAnn Rimes, Brandy, Belinda Carlisle, Chicago, Aerosmith, Jennifer Hudson, the Pretenders, Cheap Trick, the Smithereens, DeBarge (her first hit), Starship (her worst song), Gloria Estevan and Milli Vanilli.

Cher, Rimes and Hudson enthusiastically join the parade of friends/collaborators who explain the pitbull attitude of the woman who has been obsessed with songwriting since she was a child in Van Nuys, Calif. Former "American Idol" judge Randy Jackson is an especially enthusiastic colleague, and we also hear from old pals, including actress Kathrine Narducci from "The Sopranos."

We hang out with Warren in her overstuffed office, where the magic happens. (She still records demos on cassette.) We tag along as she bops around town, always accompanied by an old friend whom Warren hired to rescue her from a bad financial situation. We watch as Warren works out her psychological issues with her parents -- her mother constantly hounded her to become a secretary, but her father (who bought her her first guitar and a backyard shed to hang out in) was more supportive. 

Your enthusiasm might flag once the milquetoast music starts flowing and the deluge of tunes, especially the formulaic hits of the '90s, begin to pelt your senses. But the star here is Warren and her truly relentless personality, which seems barely dimmed from her teen firepower, even as she now approaches 70. This is a fascinating character study by newcomer Bess Kargman, and you don't have to be a fan of the music to appreciate it.

BONUS TRACKS

Devo on "Fridays" with "Jerkin' Back and Forth":

  

 

More sick synth solos on "Through Being Cool":

 

 

Always a good excuse to spin "Girl U Want":

 

Diane Warren's list of hits seems endless. (Just those that start with the letter I go on and on. (I could go on.)) Here is Toni Braxton with "Un-Break My Heart":

 

 

To the battleships! Ending with the GOAT, Cher belting out "If I Could Turn Back Time":
 

Soundtrack of Your Life: Music for Airports

 Soundtrack of Your Life is an occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.

We were at the Albuquerque Sunport, waiting for our Alaska Air flight to Seattle, the start of a working vacation -- a long weekend in Seattle, followed by a midweek mediation in Vancouver, Wash., and an arbitration hearing near Eugene, Ore., before wrapping up with a weekend in Portland that culminated in a concert at McMenamins Edgefield. 

The airport playlist was doubling down on the '70s. There was my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song, "Sundown," which we featured five years ago when reviewing the documentary about the Canadian singer-songwriter. But the ringer was "Bad Time," an unabashedly syrupy pop confection by Grand Funk (Railroad), the flinty long-haired power-rock quartet from Flint, Mich., who were partial to covers of '60s lollipop songs. They had hits with Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion" and the Soul Brothers Six's "Some Kind of Wonderful." They put more muscle into their own compositions, such as "We're an American Band" (No. 1 in 1973) and the epic saga "Closer to Home (I'm Your Captain)" (their first Top 40 single, from 1970).

"Bad Time" was written by Mark Farner while he was going through a divorce. It peaked at No. 4 in spring 1975, and it was not out of place alongside similar throwback tunes of the era like "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (an ultimate guilty pleasure) or as a counter-balance to "Love Will Keep Us Together," which "Bad Time" was chasing up the charts. 

 

I'm sure all the burnouts who worshiped the band in grungier days were appalled at the band's mid-decade descent into sap. (Producer Jimmy Ienner had worked with the Raspberries and Bay City Rollers.) I have a vivid memory of spinning the song at an '80s party, when it would have been considered the height of hipster retro, and my friend Marcy, a connoisseur of all things bubblegum, positively swooning over it. 

(The song comes from the album "All the Girls in the World Beware," which is notable as the only record I ever won in a contest. I figured out a way to game the system for the giveaway by WLS-AM (the big 89). You had to be the first caller when you heard the WLS theme rendered in phone tones. I had a plan. When the station ran a string of commercials, I would get ready by dialing the first six numbers, poised to hit the seventh as soon as I heard the prompt. I still have the vinyl album, with a cut-out notch in the upper right-hand corner of the cover.)

 

At the tail end of the trip, we spent our last full day in Portland at Edgefield for another round with the Pixies. Opening were Spoon and Fazerdaze, whose show closer, "Bigger," reminds me of John Lennon's "No. 9 Dream":

 

Fazerdaze (New Zealander Amelia Murray with Dave Rowlands) did not play our favorite single, "Treading Lightly":

 

Spoon crunched through a set of about 14 power-pop tracks. Talk about '70s throwbacks, I'm partial lately to 2017's "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb":

 

A highlight was "Wild":

 

BONUS TRACKS

The Pixies opened with five or six newer songs before segueing into the classics, like "Wave of Mutilation" (both versions), "Gouge Away" and a meaty "Head On" (their Jesus & Mary Chain cover). Once "Planet of Sound" kicked in, the band was fully in their catatonic state of unrelenting noise rock. They built to the inevitable climax, "Where Is My Mind?," and then tossed in a bonus track. As the stage filled with white smoke, Black Francis ceded the microphone to bassist Emma Richardson for a haunting version of the trippy b-side "Into the White." Here is Kim Deal's original from 1991:

 

 

 

And, Brian Eno with our title track:

New to the Queue

 It's not so much the heat as it is the cupidity ...

 

Mark Duplass co-wrote a debut feature about a family whose home is invaded, "The Knife."

Our guys Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin (2020's "The Climb") wrestle again with relationship issues, with the help of Dakota Johnson, "Splitsville."

Netflix offers what looks like a paint-by-numbers -- yet satisfying -- biography of the avant-garde music rascals of the '70s and '80s, "Devo."

From the writer of "Junebug," a multi-generational drama captained by David Straithairn, "A Little Prayer." 

A documentary about the troubled '90s singer-songwriter, "It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley."

Michelangelo Frammartino ("Le Quattro Volte") has restored his 2003 documentary about a tiny village in Italy, "Il Dono (The gift)."

Identify Crises

 

A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (B-minus) - Rachel Elizabeth Seed goes in search of her mother, a noted photographer and journalist who died at 42 when Rachel was 18 months old, in this ruminative documentary of personal discovery.

 

Seed, a producer on "I Am Greta," threads the film with 1970s interviews conducted by her mother, Sheila Turner-Seed, with famous photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson (whose quote about capturing moments -- "Life is once, forever" -- is featured twice in the film). As a visual gimmick, Seed stages coy black-and-white re-creations, with obscured faces and obtuse angles. (It turns out she plays her mother in these and other scenes.)

This is textbook filmmaking as psychotherapy, and the daughter's yearning spills out on the screen like a dull primal wail. You ache for her, as she never got to know her mother, but Seed fails to elevate the subject here to anything beyond glum scrapbooking. Interviews with her father, a onetime stock photographer based in Chicago, feel rather antiseptic.

The movie feels much longer than 87 minutes as Seed grasps for insight that eludes her. The images and clips get repetitive as she fumbles among several false endings. It's all rather touching but oddly unsatisfying in the end. I hope it helped her fill that hole inside.

HORSE GIRL (2020) (B) - The penultimate film from on of our favorites, Jeff Baena, finds Allison Brie as a lost soul gradually having a mental breakdown. What could have been cringe scans more like bittersweet heartbreak.

She plays shy, awkward Sarah, prone to nosebleeds, and psychologically damaged, apparently by a horse-riding accident that injured a girl she had been training. Sarah is haunted by a recurring dream, in which she is abducted by aliens, lying prone in a sterile white room along with an older man and younger woman. When she spots the man in real life, she stalks him. 

Sarah's increasingly odd behavior aggravates her roommate, Nikki (Debby Ryan), and worries her colleague at the fabric store, Joan (Molly Shannon). When introduced to sweet, awkward Darren (John Reynolds, one of the alums from TV's "Search Party" seen here), her cuteness charms him, but her quirks start to unnerve him. She likes him mainly because he has the same name as the lead character from a fictional TV show she binge watches. (She also is obsessed with an image of her grandmother, who bears a striking likeness to her; to most people that's a common genetic result, but to Sarah it is proof of a nefarious secret cloning experiment.)

Writer-director Baena ("The Little Hours," "Joshy") is at his most somber here. He finds the funny in small situations, and he cleverly mixes serious drama with nervous humor. He has an obvious chemistry with his star, Brie. (He and Brie and Shannon would take things a little lighter, but still moody, in "Spin Me Round" two years later. Brie co-wrote "Horse Girl" and "Spin Me Round.") She is compelling here as the proverbial slow-motion car crash. The film can drag across 103 minutes, but Baena, who died in January, knew how to mine his own troubled soul for the kind of dark comedy that always kept you off balance. 

Radio Friendly

 

35,000 WATTS: THE STORY OF COLLEGE RADIO (B+) - One of my more reliable memories is of my first week of college, at the University of Illinois-Chicago, in September 1981, and learning that the radio station was being shuttered. I had considered pursuing a radio gig at WUIC someday. That dream died quickly. I ended up in print journalism. 

 

Like many people of my vintage, coming into adulthood in the 1980s, I was a fan of college radio. Another vivid memory jumps ahead a little over a decade. I'm driving to work at the Chicago Sun-Times, listening to the shaky signal from WNUR, Northwestern University's station at 89.3 FM, which sometimes seeped through from up north, surviving the skyscrapers. I'm hearing music that feels primeval, as if it were being transmitted while I was vibing in my mother's womb. I pull into the covered parking garage and find a spot, praying that the signal won't fade. I need to make it to the station break to find out the name of the artist. The signal cuts in and out and fades and swells. The DJ comes on. He identifies that block of music as being from the mysterious indie band Guided by Voices. The rest is history.

"35,000 Watts" (I add the comma gratis) is a valentine to the history of college radio, mostly its heyday back then. It was made by Michael Millard, who worked at KTXT at Texas Tech in Lubbock in the early '90s. He gathers some of his former colleagues, along with a bunch of alums from WUOG, in Athens, Ga. (U of G), which was ground zero for the defining modern era, the emergence of R.E.M., along with Pylon, Let's Active, Love Tractor and others circa 1981. (The B-52s had emerged from there a few years earlier.) 

Like those and other college stations, Millard's documentary is low-budget and seat-of-the-pants. He cobbles together archival photos and snippets of songs that transport you back to the pre-internet dark ages, when you could curate your own music only by making cassette mixes and had to rely instead on dope-smoking 19-year-olds to hip you up to the now sounds. At that time, indie meant independent and alternative was truly the alternative. 

 

Millard's DIY ethic fits the subject here. He gathers a decent collection of talking heads in addition to the DJ alums, including Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, and two R.E.M.-adjacent characters, Mitch Easter (their early producer and the frontman of Let's Active) and the band's lawyer/manager Bertis Downs. (The cassette of R.E.M.'s "Radio Free Europe" is widely considered to be Ground Zero of modern college radio as we know it.)

The true stars are the former DJs, from a smattering of stations scattered across the country, including one diehard veteran still toiling away at KSPC (Claremont Colleges in California). The alums have some specific memories -- the smell of vinyl in the station's library, legendary stories of the infamous ratty couch that saw far too much activity. 

Millard takes a detour to provide added context -- the origins of college radio going back into mid-20th century, including its role in covering sports. But it's that heyday which holds the most charm. Needles drop on the Pixies (repped here by Joey Santiago), Violent Femmes, Bratmobile, the rise of rap. It's a heady mix. We could go on and on ...

BONUS TRACKS

R.E.M. contemporaries Love Tractor could jangle with the best of them. Here is their self-titled 1982 album, kicked off by "Buy Me a Million Dollars":

 

Big-hair alert! It's Mitch Easter leading Let's Active, with Sara Romweber on drums, on their hit "Every Word Means No":

 

"35,000 Watts" celebrates the diversity of college radio and name checks this early rap entry, Sugarhill Gang's take on the surf standby "Apache (Jump On It)": 

"Radio Free Europe":