Enhanced Models

 

COMPANION (C-minus) - What a lackluster attempt at a sci-fi AI thriller. A flat no-name cast sleepwalks through a cobbled together idiot plot and commits the ultimate sin here -- it's boring.

 

Sophie Thatcher plays Iris, a very lifelike sexbot, who accompanies Josh (a duller than dull nepo baby Jack Quaid) on a weekend at a rich man's mansion, where the crooked millionaire (Rupert Friend doing a bad Russian accent) will end up dead, thrusting a bunch of young adults into a tale of intrigue that will involve trying to steal his stash of cash. Iris, clad in old-fashioned girl-next-door clothes, will be manipulated into helping carry out the heist. Will she be sentient enough to fight back?

Iris reveals in the opening scene that she ends up killing Josh; it's a clever device, but it does give away the ending too much. (Though the choice of murder weapon is an inspired touch.) Things get very sloppy in the end, as another AI bot shows up to raise the stakes. But things get way too sloppy, and some plot twists just don't make sense. The debut filmmaker, Drew Hancock, seems to have a bunch of ideas, but few are original. (See, for example "M3GAN," which is due for a sequel this year, or go back to "The Stepford Wives.")

Thatcher has her moments, and the idea borders on thought-provoking in the way that it plays with the idea of how couples manufacture their origin story or use it as a weapon against each other. But it gets tiring to have to figure out why some bot reboots go back to the factory setting but others don't, solely for the convenience of the narrative. The supporting cast adds no oomph, and it all leads up to an exceptionally bloody ending, as you'd suspect. Some relationships are just not meant to work out.

CAROL DODA TOPLESS AT THE CONDOR (B) - This is a breezy nostalgia tour of the phenomenon of the 1960s when Carol Doda made a splash in San Francisco and ushered in the mainstream era of nude dancing and outlandish silicone breast injections. Throw in a bunch of goombah club owners and a mob-related slaying, and there is plenty of pulp here to justify 100 minutes of documentary time.

 

Credit to filmmakers Marlo McKenzie and Johnathan Parker for their deft weaving together of archival footage with contemporary interviews of colorful characters who are good at storytelling. Doda, who died in 2015, is seen through old interviews. 

The film captures the buzz of the early '60s North Beach scene, especially glitzy Broadway Street, just as X-rated movies and stage shows were coming out of the shadows. The timeline here is consistent, as the decadence morphs into the permissiveness of the hippie scene and San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967. Old club owners, bartenders and strippers are on hand to wax on about the era and fill us youngsters in on the phenomenon of Doda emerging from the ceiling, standing on top of a piano, being lowered to the ground and unveiling the famous fashion design of the day -- the breast-exposing monokini. 

Doda would go on to get a ridiculous number of silicone injections, eventually swelling her breasts from a B-cup to double D's. A fellow stripper tells the horrifying tale of doing the same and suffering a bout of post-natal gangrene that cost her both breasts. It was a wild time, and Doda gets some credit for trying to stand up for herself amid the exploitation -- she eventually got a stake in a club and could be seen as a pioneer by future generations of sex workers. 

The footage is fairly tame at first, but it doesn't take long for the nudity to go wall-to-wall for the final two-thirds of the film. It eventually becomes beside the point, and you're able to appreciate a bunch of old pals spinning war stories from a classic era.

New to the Queue

 Let the countdown begin ...

 

We have high hopes for the teaming of Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in a debut film about how men become pals, "Friendship."

From the team behind "Buzzard," two losers try to reconcile their pasts during a trip into the woods, "Vulcanizadora."

A light-hearted look at an old R&B singer-songwriter, "Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted."

A documentary about New York's 1975 financial crisis, with a title riffing on the famous New York Daily News headline, "Drop Dead City."

Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively are worth revisiting as they return to their 2018 tale of intrigue, from Paul Feig, "Another Simple Favor."

High Point of the Lo-Fi Movement

 

LOUDER THAN YOU THINK: A LO-FI HISTORY OF GARY YOUNG AND PAVEMENT (B+) - We'll eventually get to see Alex Ross Perry's experimental history of the '90s indie darlings Pavement, but until then, it's good to have this straightforward mainstream tick-tock of the Stockton, Calif., good guys, even if it's done here through the filter of the band's bonkers original drummer, Gary Young.

In the headline to Richard Brody's review of Perry's "Pavements," the group is referred to as "big in the nineties and bigger in memory." One of the joys of "Louder Than You Think" is seeing all the band members participate and placing into perspective (and the historical record) the brilliance of "Slanted and Enchanted," the band's buzzy 1992 debut album that helped put the boutique label Matador Records on the map. Sometimes with a documentary, like a good song, all you have to do is to hit all your spots and have a catchy hook. Young (below, center), an unrepentant alcoholic and drug abuser up until his 2023 death at 70, makes for a fascinating character study while we celebrate a truly innovative indie band.

Young was of a different generation than the youngsters who knocked on his door wanting to record their first songs -- Scott Kannberg (above left) and Stephen Malkmus (right). Young was a Boomer, born in the early '50s, while the band members were born in the mid-'60s. In fact, Malkmus, the laconic songwriter and lead singer, just might be the quintessential Gen X person. His interviews alternate between ironic detachment and exasperation in recalling how Young's antics -- insisting on doing headstands during song and sometimes showing up in no condition to perform -- earned the drummer a following of his own. 

Malkmus and Kannberg (along with Bob Nastanovich, who would arrive later and serve as Young's backup and baby-sitter) had a near-phobia about being popular rock stars, while Young wanted to be Buddy Rich, Ringo Starr and Ginger Baker rolled into one. One great story from the road highlights Young's showmanship -- he was partial to tossing a drumstick in the air and catching it (ta-da!) -- while the normie front men cringe with hipster embarrassment. As Malkmus put it, Young favored "prog-rock extravagance" while surrounded by "unconfident dudes who are worried about being cool or something." A classic generation gap.

That tension would lead to Young's exit after their first big tour opening for Sonic Youth. By the end of 1993, about a year into their popularity, Young made crazy financial demands and parted ways with the band. Young seems to have few regrets about flaming out -- though you certainly can detect a catch in the voice of his long-suffering wife, Geri, as she recounts those days with a sigh. Young made some solo recordings, which have an outsider-artist feel (to be charitable) and went back to relative obscurity as a recording engineer. Pavement would release a solid sophomore effort (1994's "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain") and a collection of their early recordings before the magic wore off; by 1996's "Wowee Zowee" (which I panned in the Chicago Sun-Times) Malkmus' lyrical well would run dry, and after two more tepid releases the band broke up in 1999, a perfect capstone to a decade. (An academic article could be considered comparing Pavement's drop-off in quality following the loss of Young to the Replacements' slide after firing alcoholic guitarist Bob Stinson. Discuss.)

Young, hunched over from scoliosis and slurring his words because of his booze-soaked brain, sits for hours of interviews, recounting the band's early days and never hiding his ongoing drinking problem (he boasts of ingesting "a quart of whiskey" a day). When asked about Young out-drinking the other band members, the band's tour engineer says, "He usually outdrank himself." Young apparently was hyperactive his whole life; his brother observes that it must have been "energetically demanding to be him," which helps explain the self-medicating. He claims to have dropped acid more than 300 times when he was 16 years old.

Debut director Jed Rosenberg, with co-writer Greg King, balances a light-hearted approach with a, er, sober analysis of the band's early years leading up to the "Slanted and Enchanted" success. They use jangly marionettes (in the style of "Team America: World Police" and "Pee-wee's Playhouse") to re-enact some of Young's antics. Talking heads include Young's brother, other band members, and Chris Lombardi, who founded Matador in his New York apartment in 1989.

It was around that time that Kannberg and Malkmus reconnected in their hometown of Stockton, found Young at his Louder Than You Think home studio and put out a series of raw EPs and singles (most on Chicago's Drag City label), culminating in 1991 with their signature tune "Summer Babe." The recordings were fairly crude, in the mode of the era, though Young here bristles at the labeling of "lo-fi" -- he insists he was making quality recordings. He became their drummer by default, in the recordings leading up to "Slanted" and on tour

There is a nostalgic rush in the telling of the band's emergence in 1992. Tapes of "Slanted" circulated, and Spin magazine, the mainstream taste-maker of the day, reviewed the album from a cassette copy, giving it a five-star rave and launching a phenomenon. I still remember spinning the CD for the first time and feeling like a new genre had opened up. It was obtuse and clever and fresh.

Kannberg is listed as an executive producer, and you can appreciate his input, which must have helped the filmmakers walk the line between presenting Young as a clown vs. as a serious influence on '90s independent music. It's an admirable study of art and addiction. And it's a valentine to the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, when possibilities seemed endless across many genres of music. Young was a key contributor, and he gets his due here.

BONUS TRACKS

From "Slanted," the propulsive anthem "Two States":

 

Here is the Wedding Present's more hi-fi cover of "Box Elder," from Pavement's first EP:

 

And Young's memorable drumming on the timeless pop masterpiece, "Summer Babe":

Hearts of Darkness

 

BRING THEM DOWN (C-minus) - This debut film leans hard on its two rough-hewn millennial stars -- Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott -- to tell the grinding revenge thriller revolving around feuding ranching families in rural Ireland. It suffers from a confusing time-shifting narrative structure that makes its unrelenting gore even more of a chore to sit through.

 

Ireland's version of the Hatfields and McCoys bicker endlessly about property access and the theft of rams, and this dimly lit snit of a movie rains carnage on their lives. One plot point centers on an attack that cuts off the legs of the rams, leaving them to die, because just the legs have value, or something like that, but mainly just because this is a cruel and unrelenting howl. Abbott ("On the Count of Three," "James White") is a strong actor, but he's allowed just one speed here, and it involves perpetual brooding. He plays Michael who must care for his bitter, ailing father, Ray (Colm Meaney) and pine from afar for his old girlfriend, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who married his rival and bore a son, Jack (Keoghan), who leads the attacks on Michael's flock.

Director and co-writer Chris Andrews outlines this tale with a soap opera plot, face-planting in the first scene, as a young Michael, in a car with Caroline and his mother, intentionally crashes the car immediately after the mother announces she's leaving the family. The mother dies and Caroline is scarred for life. And then we're supposed to sympathize with Michael, somehow. By the end, there will be a human head carried around in a bag and a dog will get stabbed and ears will get shot off.

There is just no explanation for taking such a grim tale and then jumbling the narrative, telling it from one perspective in the first half and another in the second half, neither of them particularly compelling. Andrews is trying to make a point about fathers and sons (with women and animals as mere collateral damage), but his movie is too dark, both literally and figuratively. There is just no opening here to identify with the story or empathize with the characters. It's an assault. For masochists only. 

ABOUT DRY GRASSES (B-minus) - Up until now, there had never been a mediocre film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylon, even the slow-burn character studies that ticked past three hours (which his past three films have now done). But this micro-narrative about two teachers falsely accused by female students of inappropriate behavior is even more glacially paced and it takes place at a school in wintry Anatolia that seems more like a Siberian gulag -- making the first two hours feel like a chore for the viewer, too.

The third hour -- if you can get there -- redeems Ceylon's granular character study, when he turns the focus on the two teachers' passive-aggressive pursuit of a woman. Deniz Celiloglu stars as Samet, a bitter art teacher who vows to escape Anatolia after the school year, and he is roommates with social studies teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici), who has been there longer and copes better with the mind-numbing ennui and body-numbing winters. The meet Nuray (Merve Dizdar), another teacher, who lost a leg in a bombing by anti-government radicals in Ankara. Nuray is more inclined toward the handsome Kenan, but Samet -- who at first passed on dating her and introduced her to Kenan -- decides to pursue her.

 

Meantime, Samet has developed a strong bond with a student protege Sevim (Ece Bagci), who turns on her teacher after a perceived slight and then gets a classmate to join her in accusing Samet and Kenan of inappropriate contact. The first hour ends with the administration basically sweeping it under the rug, and you are never sure if the accusation is unfounded or whether there will be consequences for the men. 

The middle third sags appreciably, though. Ceylon's dialogue (he wrote the screenplay with his wife, Ebru, and Akin Aksu, a previous collaborator on "The Wild Pear Tree") is uncharacteristically wooden; characters pontificate and give political speeches, and you can almost hear Ceylon's typewriter clacking as the actors speak the lines. At one point, Samet visits Nuray, expecting to get laid, and he is subjected to a long philosophical screed -- which actually serves as an apt metaphor for the frustrations of the viewer looking forward to Ceylon's usually suavity as a filmmaker. 

One character laments "the weariness of hope," and you want to say, "Amen." Interiors here are poorly lit to go with exteriors that what character calls this "forgotten remote corner of the Earth," as if to pass along the Seasonal Affective Disorder to the viewers. I can handle a downcast story; "Climates" (2006) was no walk in the park, but it spoke volumes about fractured relationships and recriminations, and it did so in 98 perfect minutes. (Maybe Ceylon should have let his co-editor do more of the cutting here.)

If you have the patience, there are scenes and moods that are worth exploring and which might stick with you a while. Ceylon truly captures that connection between a teacher and student, which on the surface might seems inappropriately flirty but which is haunting in its depth, especially when each person feels betrayed. And Samet's late attempt at wooing Nuray (in effect betraying Kenan) is sad and sweet and smart. Nuray has the wise world-weariness of a victim of terrorism, and Dizdar turns in a nuanced portrayal of a woman (unlike a middle-school girl) who has no illusions about potential mates.

I broke this up over three nights, and the third hour was certainly worth enduring the drudgery that everyone goes through on the forgotten fringes of civilization.

BONUS TRACK

Other reviews for Ceylon's movies:

• Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2013)
  
• Winter Sleep (2015)
• The Wild Pear Tree (2019) 
• The brilliant early trio: Distant (2002), Climates (2006) (still his best), Three Monkeys (2008).

Doc Watch: Rock Docs (Old Wankers)

 Spending back-to-back nights with perhaps the two pre-eminent Boomer bands from the 1970s, whose music I scorned in my youth but grew to appreciate a bit as an adult.

BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN (B+) - The first third of this life-spanning profile of the foundational heavy-metal quartet of the classic-rock era is quite joyful. The three survivors sit for interviews and share their memories of childhood, accompanied by archival photos, concert clips from influences, and newsreel-style footage, all of which puts the postwar era into perspective. We also are treated to a rare, unreleased audio interview with drummer John Bonham, whose 1980 death ended the band's decade-long run.

 

Music archivist Bernard MacMahon recounts the early training of bassist John Paul Jones (who made a name in the '60s as a pop arranger for Shirley Bassey, Lulu and others), guitarist Jimmy Page (who took over the Yardbirds, which became the basis for Led Zeppelin), and vocalist Robert Plant, who basically ripped off R&B artists to establish his footing (nonetheless dodging a career as a chartered accountant). It all makes for an engaging origin story of these formidable talents who defied predictions and knocked the rock scene for a loop with their first two iconic albums in 1969. There is no denying their artistry and commitment, no matter what you might think of the songs that are now hoary chestnuts still big-footing FM radio.

The main problem with "Becoming Led Zeppelin" is that ... they eventually become ... Led Zeppelin. Within a year they were indulging in vintage heavy-metal excess. It didn't take long for Page to break out the violin bow to scratch across his guitar strings during interminable solos. All the positive forces that brought them together quickly transform them into egomaniacal rock gods. The familiar hooks still have heft and sway; but they are also emblematic short-hand for some of the worst hard-rock noodling of the 1970s.

Props to MacMahon for allowing the songs here to breathe. He faithfully devotes time to full versions of multiple touchstone songs that poured out of Page, Plant and Jones on "Led Zeppelin" and "Led Zeppelin II," in both studio takes and live performances. (And the audio quality is stellar throughout.) The filmmaker narrows his focus to that first year -- including mainstays like "Whole Lotta Love" and "Dazed and Confused" -- mainly between the breakthrough January 1969 performance at the Fillmore in San Francisco and their conquering of London at the Royal Albert Hall one year later. (As the credits roll, you can sense fans already starting to clamor for a Part 2 that would romp through the '70s.)

The first half of the film definitely has broader mass appeal; I especially enjoyed Page's visit to the boathouse where the band first rehearsed. That contrasts with the second half, which starts to grind down and morph from '60s optimism into '70s sloppiness and grim hedonism. I'm not the target audience; Led Zeppelin, with its leaden sound and faux mystical musings, was my brother's music. After a decade or two passed, I was able to get a perspective on the band and to recover from that ugly phase of rock 'n' roll. I'm drawn to their later stuff, more of a "Physical Graffiti" or "In Through the Out Door" guy, albums that are more nuanced. (A year after that last studio effort, just as the band was selling tickets for what would have been a monster tour of America, Bonham infamously choked on his own vomit and died.)

"Becoming Led Zeppelin" certainly does justice to the band. It's an acid test for both fans and detractors. As that very first song said, "Good Times Bad Times." The rest was history.

PINK FLOYD AT POMPEII (1972) (B) - This is a live performance -- it's not a concert, because there's no crowd -- captured in late 1971 and re-imagined this year in IMAX glory. Pink Floyd, by then led by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, spent four days recording music in the Italian ruins of Pompeii, with only their sound and film crews enjoying the show.

The film is bookended by slow-moving crane shots, inching in at the beginning and creeping out at the end, with the band at the center of a decrepit coliseum. At other times they wander amid columns and obelisks, producing visuals that might have been the inspiration for the Stonehenge scene in "This Is Spinal Tap." Director Adrian Maben, with cinematographers Willy Kurant and Gabor Pogany, intercuts images from frescoes and natural sights, such as steam and bubbling lava pools produced by Mount Vesuvius nearby.

 

Most of the songs come from 1968's "A Saucerful of Secrets" and 1971's "Meddle," though you also see the band in the studio, via added 1972 footage, recording tracks for their breakthrough "Dark Side of the Moon." It is fascinating to watch a baby-faced Gilmour, with headphones feeding him backing tracks, suss out lead-guitar licks for "Brain Damage" (above). Back at Pompeii, the band jams with precision, and you get a particular appreciation for Richard Wright's inventive work on keyboards. 

The opening scenes chronicle the outdoor setup by the crew, and I was amused to see two people reverently carrying out a gong -- Chekhov's gong, if you will, because you know that it will be involved in an assault before the film ends. (Waters does the honors.) Much like the Zeppelin film, this one requires a certain level of familiarity with the band's mythos and their penchant for ethereal jamming. 

I let the IMAX images and quadrophonic ambient sounds wash over me, and while I ingested no mind-altering substances in preparation, I did experience the occasional hallucinatory dozing, and so the 90 minutes passed pleasantly. The pretension of it all wasn't a bother; I know that "jazz odyssey" would arrive to burst the bubble about a decade later.

BONUS TRACKS

Pink Floyd with "Echoes: Part 1" from Pompeii:

 

Over the closing credits of Led Zep, from the January 1970 Royal Albert Hall show, a cover of Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody":

 

Spinal Tap with "jazz odyssey":

New to the Queue

 A quarter of the way through a century ...

 

Amalia Ulman follows up her debut "El Planeta" with a romp about vain New York City content creators exploiting the odd locals of a rural town in Argentina, "Magic Farm."

Master storyteller Jia Zhangke ("The World," "Touch of Sin") spins a love story that spans 20 years, "Caught by the Tides."

Alex Ross Perry ("Listen Up Philip," "Queen of Earth") takes an avant-garde approach to the rock documentary, "Pavements."

We're approaching our limit of '60s/'70s nostalgia, and we just revisited the topic, but, for completists' sake, we'll check out "One to One: John & Yoko."

We'll go down memory lane with filmdom's original two stoner buds, "Cheech & Chong's Last Movie."

Double-Jointed

We stumbled on the book 25th Hour by David Benioff, who co-created HBO's "Game of Thrones," so we watched the movie version and then twinned it with Spike Lee's breakthrough.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) (A-minus) - The 1980s culminate in Spike Lee's cultural howl, a defiant poke at race relations in Brooklyn during one sweaty summer day. Lee has a lot to say, and he crafts a smart script and is blessed with a strong, deep cast.

 

All of the action takes place within about a square block in Bedford-Stuyvesant in a 24-hour period in the middle of summer as the temperatures and temperaments reach a boiling point. Lee stars as Mookie, who delivers pizza for Sal (Danny Aiello) and spars verbally with Sal's jamoke sons, the aggressive Pino (John Turturro) and the clueless Vito (Richard Edson alert!). Mookie also bickers with his sister Jade (Lee's sister Joie) and his fiery baby mama Tina (the appealing Rosie Perez). 

Lee populates the street with a kaleidoscope of characters, including the real-life couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as, respectively, the town drunk Da Mayor and the town elder Mother Sister, as well as the firebrand Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and the towering Radio Rahim (Bill Nunn), whose tricked-out boombox blasts Public Enemy 24/7. Lee sets all of these characters loose in his circumscribed tinder box and grows microagressions into macroagressions and into aggressions. Things will eventually go up in flames.

The racial tensions are unavoidable in this world. The local black residents resent not only Italian Sal but also the Korean couple who run a bodega across the street. Recriminations are already stacked high, and as Mookie and Pino keep pushing each other's buttons, Buggin Out has found a hill to die on -- the pictures on the walls of Sal's pizzeria are all Italians and none are black. That's all it takes for this to spill over into pointless violence.

Everyone here is at or near the top of their game, especially Aiello, Esposito and Perez. Lee is the connective tissue here, showing both strength and vulnerability (especially regarding his  responsibilities as a father and mate), and he has an appealing swagger, with his knock-kneed jock walk. The centerpiece of the film, around the midpoint, is the famous bigoted rants by the main characters, each going off on a different race/ethnicity, a profound expiation, a twisted cry of racial pride and hatred.

In the end, it is Mookie who is asked to "do the right thing," and whether he does so or not will depend on your perspective. It's a litmus test for the viewer, and it's a clever device that Lee slowly assembles during the two-hour run time. Not everything works smoothly here. The dialogue is occasionally stilted, especially in the way in which characters keep repeating each others' names when they interact. The one-person Greek chorus -- here a street-front DJ called Mister Senor Love Daddy (played by Samuel L. Jackson) -- can feel trite and played out. And the frequent references to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X wear out their welcome by the end. But there is no denying that Lee has a command of the story and his bustling cast, and he has created a funny and forceful polemic that is a joy to watch from beginning to end.

25th HOUR (2003) (C-minus) - There is something cheap and tinny about the production values in this leaden tale about a drug dealer spending his final 24 hours with his loved ones before heading off to serve a seven-year prison sentence. The lighting and sound are off, and crowd scenes come off as artificial.

And this is a reminder that Edward Norton was a thing back then but he never really became a bigger thing. Since "Fight Club" (1999) and this, he has to be grateful to Wes Anderson for helping him keep food on the table. (Most recently he's done voice work for a TV series called "Sausage Party: Foodtopia.") Norton doesn't have the heft to carry "25th Hour" as Montgomery Brogan, who suspects someone close to him squealed to the feds.

This would be an annoyingly myopic New York City film even without the added mawkishness of it being filmed in the aftermath of 9/11. Thus, we get super-Irish, overly proud first-responders and bartenders and constant visual nods to hallowed Ground Zero and the American flag. Lee just can't help himself as he leans hard into the patriotic pap, all of which is unnecessary when telling a mob tale. 

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is most effective among the cast as Monty's friend Jacob, a high school teacher who lusts after one of his students, coyly portrayed by Anna Paquin. Barry Pepper, though, is a cipher as big-shot trader Frank, who lusts after Monty's girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson). The book is full of clever dialogue and has a pretty zippy narrative at just over 200 pages; here, much of that banter is flattened by Lee (David Benioff adapted his own novel) or jettisoned for time, even if the movie drags on for two and a quarter hours.

Brian Cox is around to lend New York gravitas as Monty's father, whose bar might now be vulnerable to the thugs that Monty dealt with. It's all a reminder that this old-school Boston/New York hardscrabble working-class bullshit was tired back then, even before Martin Scorsese and Ben Affleck/Matt Damon beat it senseless. Not much works here. Even the corny, old-fashioned jazzy score by Terence Blanchard is cloying and intrusive -- leading up to a collaboration between Blanchard and Bruce Springsteen on an earnest late-career ballad playing over the end credits.

Lee has had quite the up-and-down career, and there were times when his style of filmmaking fell flat, like it did here. He would rebound a few years later with "Inside Man" and his monumental documentary about Hurricane Katrina, "When the Levees Broke," but his feature films since then have been underwhelming ("BlacKkKlansman," for example). There's a big difference between the Brooklyn-proud insurgency of "Do the Right Thing" and this limp offering 14 years later from a dewy-eyed 40-something storyteller trafficking in Homeland Security porn.

BONUS TRACKS

One saving grace for "25th Hour" is a club scene that is buoyed by better music. Here is Liquid Liquid with "Cavern":

 

And the starting and end point for all things rap, Public Enemy, "Fight the Power":

A Smaller Splash

 

THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND (A) - This perfect little film was years in the making. It's a feature-length version of a 28-minute short released in 2007. It is funny and full of heart; it's an earnest labor of love that tells a somber story without wallowing in any emotional muck.

 

Tom Basden co-wrote the screenplay, wrote all the songs and stars as Herb McGwyer, a mid-career folk-pop performer lured to a Welsh island by a rich eccentric aiming to reunite McGwyer with his former singing partner, Nell Mortimer. Back when McGwyer-Mortimer hit the scene, their songs were deep and heartfelt; since their split (musically and romantically), she has retired to a peaceful life in Portland, Ore., and he has tinkered with his sound, hopscotching among singing partners, and catching guff for chasing commercial acceptance.

Tim Key, who co-wrote the script, plays Charles Heath, who was enriched by winning the lottery -- twice. The first millions were spent traveling the world with his beloved Marie; widowed five years ago, he does what any obsessive fan with unlimited funds would do -- he recruits both McGwyer and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) to the remote island, without full disclosure to both of them about his plan for a reunion concert on the rocky beach for an audience of one. Tension is inevitable. Suitcases full of cash provide strong incentive to stick around and see things through.

Charles is a fount of clever wordplay, which comes off as effortlessly charming, even if we notice that his verbal diarrhea is, in part, a cover for his loneliness and lingering grief. Herb is gruff and annoyed much of the time, but he settles in once he and Nell sit down for a rehearsal (using one of his old guitars that Charles bought at auction). They easily find a musical groove, but they are personally on different planes; Nell's husband has come along for the trip, and she has no interest in rekindling any feelings with her former partner. There is a strong kinship here with the 2016 gem "A Bigger Splash," about a rock star chilling out on an island and resisting the come-ons of a former lover.

Writing those paragraphs makes it all sound so gloomy and inconsequential. But the script is smart, and it dodges all potential dramatic and comedic potholes. Even the B-story works -- Herb helps the shy Charles woo the woman in town who runs the general store (Sian Clifford, the sister from TV's "Fleabag," creating a folksy vibe that recalls shows like "Northern Exposure" and "Gilmore Girls"). Key is limber with his line deliveries; he comes across as a second-string combination of Zach Galifianakis and Ricky Gervais. 

Basden's songs meet the moment, even if they evoke the '70s more than the '00s. The music is naturally woven through the narrative, and it feels real when Mulligan leans in for some tender harmonies. But the star here is the British banter, full of puns and clever wordplay but never coming across as just words being read from a script. Events unfold organically. By the time the credits rolled, my eyes started to get a bit teary, and it took me a while to sort out how much of that was sadness and how much was joy.

BONUS TRACKS

The centerpiece song is "Our Love," which has an early-'70s singer-songwriter vibe:

 

"Give Your Love":

 

"Sky Child":

Comedy Minus One

 

THANK YOU VERY MUCH (A-minus) - He definitely was an acquired taste at a specific moment in time, and perhaps you had to be there. But Andy Kaufman was a foundational comedian -- albeit one who claims to have never told a joke -- and he remains a fascinating character study. He was a performance artist who took comedy to new levels of irony and discomfort, paving the way for the absurdism that followed, from David Letterman to Tim Robinson.

 

Alex Braverman (the Netflix series "Waffles + Mochi") takes a workmanlike spin through Kaufman's life and career, cut short by cancer at 35 (assuming he didn't fake his death and keep it a secret these past 40 years). The clips are generous, allowing Kaufman's bits to breathe and to be appreciated. Your mileage may vary, but I laughed out loud throughout at Kaufman's greatest hits. (I had totally forgotten about the bit where he reads "The Great Gatsby" word for word, threatening to go from beginning to end in one marathon session.)

Braverman assembles entertaining talking heads, including "Taxi" co-stars Marilu Henner and Danny DeVito; Melanie Chartoff (who relates the infamous "Fridays" feud); longtime friend and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda (who helped Kaufman pull off the Tony Clifton lounge-singer running gag); and some friends and companions. While most tributes are positive, the film does not try to sand down the rough edges of Kaufman's personality, such as his bizarre obsession with wrestling women and the harassment of his "Taxi" co-stars. (Nor does it ignore his box-office bomb "Heartbeeps.")

The film digs deep, going back to the '60s, when Kaufman became not only a follower of the Maharishi, but a leader in the transcendental-meditation movement (until his cutting-edge performances led to his removal as a TM teacher). It humanizes him throughout while giving wide berth to the wild swings of his life and career. It is also fitfully funny at times -- I mean, if you get it.

SATURDAY NIGHT (C-minus) - What a messy, tone-deaf misfire. Jason Reitman locks into a misguided format to tell the story of the debut of "Saturday Night Live" in October 1975. He assembles a fairly talented cast but allows them to do little more than offer impressions of the principals, including producer Lorne Michaels and his cast of Not Ready for Prime Time Players. He also messes with the time line and rewrites history unnecessarily. It comes off about as well as NBC's 2006 Aaron Sorkin clusterfuck "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which was almost universally mocked as self-important and painfully unfunny.

Reitman's fatal mistake is to restrict himself to the narrative conceit of showing the 90 minutes before the first live broadcast in real time. The structure is flawed in several respects; it not only makes everything seem hysterical like an episode of "I Love Lucy," but also forces him to shoehorn historical nuggets from outside that timeline and pretend that they all took place between 10 and 11:30 p.m. that night. And so we get cast members and writers pitching and name-checking classic bits that would not show up for months, if not years -- Chevy Chase's land-shark banter; Dan Aykroyd's Fred Garvin, male prostitute; Garrett Morris' "I'm Gonna Get Me a Great Big Shotgun and Kill Every Whitey That I See." The worst example is a quick sight-gag reference to a Colon Blow cereal box -- a sketch that would not air until 1989.

The list of things that make no sense seems endless: Why is the cast still rehearsing, even after dress-rehearsal? Why are writers pitching sketches to Lorne 20 minutes before air (such as the bloody Julia Child sketch that didn't materialize until 1978)? Would announcer Don Pardo really not know how to pronounce cast members' names until corrected just minutes before broadcast? Would the seating of the audience not start until 11:20? Why pretend that Michaels handed Weekend Update to Chase at the last minute? Or that Michaels left the building around 10:45 and met Alan Zweibel in a bar and hired him on the spot and had him scribble Weekend Update jokes on cue cards just moments before the show went live? (Zweibel was hired months before the October debut, though he did pen the funniest joke of the debut: "The post office is about to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a 10-cent stamp. But if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter.") Would the fuddy-duddy middle-aged censor be red-lining scripts at that late hour? I'm sure Johnny Carson did not call Michaels during those 90 minutes and bully him like a mob boss would. And Milton Berle certainly was nowhere to be found that night, let alone whipping out his legendary appendage to humiliate Chase in front of Chase's girlfriend. (Berle would host in 1979 and alienate the entire cast and crew -- and drop trou in his dressing room.)

The ridiculous premise and execution is a shame, because "Saturday Night" has some fine writing throughout (by Reitman and Gil Kenan), including Michael O'Donoghue's bitter witticisms, such as a Sorkin-like confrontation with that stuffy old censor. And Gabriel LaBelle knits everything together well as the chronically flustered Michaels, the prim Canadian ringmaster. Other performances are hit and miss -- you get the sense that some of these actors got hired merely for their resemblance to key cast members. Rachel Sennott is strong as writer (and mother hen) Rosie Shuster. Lamorne Morris (no relation) brings depth to Garrett Morris, who seems to be going through both an existential crisis and an early midlife one as the odd man out. Cory Michael Smith and Dylan O'Brien get the cadences right as Chase & Aykroyd, respectively, but Matt Wood whiffs completely as John Belushi (most actors would, I suppose). None of the female cast members stand out (and how could Gilda Radner not), and maybe that's a meta-commentary on how Radner, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman were considered second-class citizens early on. (George Coe is erased from the record completely.)

Cooper Hoffman ("Licorice Pizza") is off as the sycophantic producer Dick Ebersol, while Willem Dafoe steals scenes as the slimy network talent guru Dave Tebet. Veterans like Tracy Letts (writer Herb Sargent) and Robert Wuhl (director Dave Wilson) make the most of glorified cameos. For some reason, Nicholas Braun plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson and does neither well. Nicholas Podanay sounds just like Billy Crystal -- without being remotely funny. Matthew Rhys does a spot-on impression of George Carlin. Brad Garrett is great, also in a brief turn, as a Catskills comedian butchering Zweibel's jokes in a bar.

If my paragraphs here are bursting at the seams, that's because the film does too. Reitman overstuffs the script and the screen, gleefully placing Easter eggs everywhere, as if his only job was to make middle-aged fanboys point and nod knowingly. That might be enough to placate some diehards. But too often, Reitman is meticulously faithful to a fault when it comes to replicating this distorted moment in time. It is as if he over-studied for an exam and overwrote the essay portion after misunderstanding the question. He thought it would be clever to create a circus atmosphere and break the budget by making sure he included DNA-level replications of Paul Shaffer, Joe Disco and Franken & Davis. 

Some of this might have been solved by ditching that suffocating ticking-clock format and allowing the script to breathe a little, backward and forward in time. As it is, "Saturday Night" is a ridiculous attempt to recapture an era in which a bunch of counter-culture rebels changed the face of television overnight.

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, from Albert Brooks' album "Comedy Minus One," here is "New National Anthem":

The Silver Screen

 Inspired by our discovery of "Between the Lines," we go backward and forward in the timeline to delve into the catalog of director Joan Micklin Silver.

CROSSING DELANCEY (1988) (B+) - Sometimes all you need are the bones of a script and two endlessly charming lead actors to make a successful picture. In a quintessential New York picture, Amy Irving and Peter Riegert play two average people bungling their way toward possibly falling in love.

 

Irving is Isabelle, a smart, lonely woman idling away in a job at a bookstore and whose prospects are a married fuckbuddy and a pompous author who toys with her affections. Riegert is Sam, a straight arrow who runs a pickle stand on Delancey Street. The two are introduced by Isabelle's bubbe (the non-actor Reizl Bozyk) and her yenta friend Hanna Mandelbaum (Sylvia Miles), but Isabelle and Sam do not hit it off right away, and in fact, Isabelle tries to foist him off on a friend at a bar. 

To say anymore about the plot would be to ruin the joy of watching this simple tale unfold so naturally. The spare but incisive script is by one-timer Susan Sandler, and Silver takes her time unpacking the narrative, all the while providing dreamy street scenes and authentic interiors in bookstores, apartments, bars and delis. Irving is lowkey and elegant as a woman flustered about what she wants. Riegert is a cool customer as the man who has crushed on her for a long time and patiently waits to see whether she will come around, unwilling to compromise his own principles.

Bozyk nearly steals the show as the Yiddish-spouting grandmother, a call-back to the vaudeville era. She and Miles camp it up as the two old busybodies. At first -- 37 years later -- the depictions feel like huge stereotypes, but as the characters all settle in, things even out, and you can get nostalgic for that bygone era. In the end, this is a sweet minor-key character study, an almost treacly romantic comedy that is so relentlessly sincere you can't help falling for it.

HESTER STREET (1975) (B+) - In her debut as writer-director, Micklin Silver adapts a novella from Abraham Cahan about Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century jockeying for an inside track to the American dream. She has a luminous, wide-eyed Carol Kane to represent the immigrant arriving fresh off the boat.

 

Here, the director dives even deeper into Jewish culture, from the first big wave of immigration, when people like Jake (Steven Keats) strive to shed the old world and scan as American in every way. Jake is in New York, making time with a dancer, Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh) while his wife and son await back in Eastern Europe. Jake works a blue-collar job with the studious Bernstein (Mel Howard), both of them, like many immigrants, slumming way below their skill and education levels. 

When his wife's father dies, Gitl (Kane) and their son Yossele (Paul Freedman) arrive at Ellis Island, and Jake immediately chafes at Gitl's arcane ways and inability to speak English. She calls him by his Yiddish name and he sharply corrects her. He insists that the boy be called Joey. He often accuses her and others of being greenhorns, or "greenies." I can recall back in the 1970s the vestiges of the sons and daughters of immigrants shunning the backward ways of Old Europe and seeking the modern American amenities like microwave ovens and Velveeta cheese. Back around 1900, the United States was the New World, rife with possibilities for an ambitious man who knew how to assimilate. Jake is the epitome of the striving immigrant. But when he tries to have his cake and eat it, too -- juggling two women, with a foot in each world -- he is reminded, "With one tuchus you can't dance at two weddings."

Micklin Silver re-creates documentary-like footage of the bustling Hester Street, and she doesn't sugarcoat the friction between the callous Jake and his traditional wife. Keats ("Death Wish"), who would go on to a prolific career in TV (before dying at 49) is a dynamo. Kane, in her breakthrough role, is a wonder, who conveys volumes with few words. The love triangle plays out with harsh consequences, and a traditional Jewish ceremony during the film's climax is a clinic in subtle storytelling.

New to the Queue

 Which side are we on, boys ...

We've never gone wrong with Francois Ozon. Next up is a family potboiler, "When Fall Is Coming."

A documentary about Rhode Island teens who built a lair inside a shopping complex, "Secret Mall Apartment." 

Carey Mulligan perks up a dour comedy about an eccentric fan who reunites an estranged musical duo on his private island, "The Ballad of Wallis Island."

A biography of a ground-breaking folk singer from the 1960s and '70s, "Janis Ian: Breaking Silence."

A deep-dive think piece examines America's politics and its pop culture, "Henry Fonda for President."

Doc Watch: Appetite for Deconstruction

 

STRIPPED FOR PARTS: AMERICAN JOURNALISM ON THE BRINK (B) - There are multiple reasons for the decline of journalism in America -- specifically the ongoing demise of the metro daily newspaper -- but one recent bomb in the beehive involves hedge funds and the campaign to pillage individual newsrooms into extinction. This still-unreleased polemic focuses on one in particular -- Alden Global Capital, which has done its best in the past decade to destroy the Denver Post, along with the Chicago Tribune and its sister publications around the country.

 

The Media and Democracy Project -- and the director of the film, Rick Goldsmith, who was a producer on a documentary about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers -- gather veteran journalists in the trenches to chronicle their struggles and peel back some layers of mystery that surround the rapacious men behind Alden Global. The film could have gotten distracted -- by other bugaboos, like general corporate greed and the decision early on to give content away free on the burgeoning internet -- but Goldsmith is like a dog with a bone as he digs into the devious ways of Alden Global, led by investigative reporter Julie Reynolds, whose dogged investigative work has exposed the hedge funders to be the vultures that they are.

Goldsmith bookends his piece with Greg Moore, the editor who refused to gut the Denver Post. He leans on Dave Krieger, who rebelled at the Boulder Daily Camera, and whose Ted Talk is quoted from here. He visits with the staff of veteran-staffed online upstarts like the Colorado Sun and the Baltimore Banner. He profiles the next generation of journalists still giving mainstream publications a fighting chance (and dodging ubiquitous layoffs), like Elizabeth Hernandez at the Post.

Some of this can get quite dewy-eyed and nostalgic (we get the requisite reference to the lovable cliche, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out"), and a younger generation might wonder what the fuss is about. But this is a measured yet urgent warning that journalism as we used to know it may be gone forever.

STAND BY FOR FAILURE (Incomplete) - We made it through two-thirds of this 90-minute documentary chronicling the anti-capitalist experimental provocateurs from the Bay Area, who peaked in notoriety in the '90s when they named an album "U2" in huge type on the cover and got sued by Bono and the boys.

 

Negativland was known for its cutting-edge use of electronics, noise experiments, and subterfuge of the copyright system by pirating material from Disney and others. The problem with this documentary is that it often replicates the grating nature of the group's work -- and thus becomes difficult to watch. Most grating is David Wills, whom we see throughout his career and up to the present day, and his various noise wonkery. His presence can be a serious test of patience.

This is the work of Ryan Worsley, who previously collaborated with Negativland member Don Joyce, the alternative DJ at KPFA radio out of Berkeley, Calif., who conspired with the other members to pioneer "culture jamming" in the 1980s. The film is essentially a chronological home movie highlighting the greatest hits -- from the U2 incident to the audacious co-opting of the Little Mermaid and the airing of Casey Kasem's foul-mouthed outtakes.

Besides these familiar touchstones, we are treated to obscure archival material from a bunch of nerds who rarely passed up an opportunity to videotape their most mundane antics. An hour certainly was enough. It is unfortunate that Worsley felt the need to mirror the group's avant-garde style; there is no shame in using a conventional narrative structure to convince an audience to appreciate this unconventional gang.

Bringing It All Back Home

 We needed a reset after the disappointing biopic "A Complete Unknown," so we went back to the archives for the two definitive documentaries about Bob Dylan.

 

DON'T LOOK BACK (1967) (A) - In retrospect, it seems like D.A. Pennebaker, in following Bob Dylan on his London tour in 1965, was capturing a seismic pop culture moment in groundbreaking fly-on-the-wall fashion. The opening scene alone -- Dylan stands in the street shuffling through cheeky cue-cards while his current hit "Subterranean Homesick Blues" plays in full -- could be considered one of the first music videos.

 

Otherwise, a year after Beatlemania overwhelmed the United States, Dylan returns the favor as the pop-folk darling who is inscrutable to the stuffy, traditional British press. Dylan appears to be stoned or on speed (or both) most of the time as he toys with anyone who crosses his path, clearly chafing at the ideas that he was a folk savior or the voice of a generation of emerging war protesters. He is cocky, annoying and deliberately provocative, a chain-smoking egomaniacal punk. His verbal jujitsu with an older Time magazine reporter is particularly rude and vicious in its psychodelic Socratic faux philosophy. (When the reporter asks whether Dylan actually cares about what he's saying, Dylan takes high umbrage: "How could I answer that if you've got the nerve to ask me that?!" -- before absurdly comparing his singing talent to that of Enrico Caruso.) He is also whimsical and mischievous at times.

Dylan also is toweringly talented and bursting with ideas; Pennebaker's camera watches patiently as Dylan pounds away at his typewriter (while Joan Baez strums and sings in his hotel room), obsessed with corralling the words firehosing through and out of him at the time. He seems genuinely miffed that a new bloke on the scene, Donovan, is also getting ink in the local British papers during Dylan's visit. A bit like Muhammad Ali at the time, Dylan relishes the idea of toying with a foe, a pretender, and when they meet on Dylan's turf and Donovan plays a perfectly bland "To Sing for You," Dylan observes, oozing calculation and judgment. With unmasked condescension, Dylan says, "Hey, that's a good song, man" -- and then grabs the guitar and unleashes "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," leering knowingly at his audience, and if there had been a referee in the room he would have stepped in and escorted a bloodied Donovan back to his corner. You could half-expect the black-and-white footage to explode into color, such is the contrast.

Elsewhere, Pennebaker simply tags along, sitting in the back of cars with the pop idol as fans clamor for his attention. He sits in as manager Albert Grossman wheedles with an agent as they finagle a well-paying TV gig over the phone. The climax that Pennebaker builds to is Dylan performing -- solo, acoustic -- at Royal Albert Hall, a medley of iconic numbers that seem second-nature now but which were groundbreaking back then. (A reporter marvels at the moment when "a poet and not a pop singer fills a hall.") Every scene in the movie feels like essential footage documenting a tipping point in Sixties culture.

NO DIRECTION HOME (2005) (A-minus) - Martin Scorsese curates this extended "American Masters" master-class, which gets Dylan, then in his early 60s, to sit down for a straight interview without gimmicks or fictions. And so Scorsese assembles a vast amount of footage and curates a fascinating 3.5-hour deep dive into Dylan's formative years.

Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen, a producer here, conducted the interviews with Dylan and others, including Joan Baez, poet Allen Ginsberg, fellow Greenwich Village folkies Dave Van Ronk and Maria Muldaur (particularly insightful), and former girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Rosen and Scorsese dig out recordings from Minnesota, before Robert Zimmerman set out for New York City to conquer the world. 

It's all a fascinating collage. The through-line narratively is Dylan's epic 1966 appearance in England when he went electric (also shot, a year after "Don't Look Back," by D.A. Pennebaker), including restored footage (and audio) of the moment a fan called Dylan Judas for going electric and playing with The Band. Never-before-seen nuggets include Dylan's screen test for an Andy Warhol film.

Incredibly, Dylan, around age 60, is cogent and coherent during his interview and doesn't seem to be playing games -- unlike just about every other interview with him you've ever seen. It's a quaint contrast with the brash young provocateur from 40 years earlier. During the first five years of his career, the man was prolific, and his growth was exponential. There was a swirl of energy around him, and this retrospective captures that half decade and chips away at the enigma that took hold then.

BONUS TRACKS

Dylan and Baez jamming and harmonizing together in an outtake from "Don't Look Back":

 

A highlight of "Don't Look Back" is an urgent version of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." Here is the full studio version:

 

Dylan later used some of Pennebaker's footage as visual elements in the haunting 1991 bootleg release "A Series of Dreams":

Follow the Money

 

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (C) - I'm hard-pressed to come up with a more inconsequential movie than this whimsical curiosity, which tells an odd story about Iranians but sets the action in Winnipeg in winter. It's a series of mildly amusing vignettes stretched out to feature length.

 

I would recount the plot, but I couldn't figure it out -- or decipher whether there actually was a plot. Wikipedia describes it as a film that "blends the seemingly unrelated stories of Negin and Nazgol, two kids who find money frozen in ice and try to claim it; Massoud, a tour guide in Winnipeg who is leading a confused and disoriented tour group; and Matthew (director Matthew Rankin), who quits his unfulfilling job with the seceded federal government of Quebec and travels home to Winnipeg to visit his mother."

There are a lot of turkeys that show up throughout. Sight gags that are as light as air float by and dissipate; it's difficult to remember most of them just hours after having seen the movie. Matthew confronts a rival who has taken his place in his mother's favors. Everything here is deadpan and quaint. It's as effervescent as a Sprite, with about as many calories. It's Guy Maddin meets Jim Jarmusch, but drained of any special quirk and rendered in Persian (and French), for good measure. This one went over and around my head.

WIDOWS (2018) (B-minus) - This female revenge flick has both a ridiculous premise and trite screenwriting, but it is entertaining enough to get you to stick around and see if these gals can pull off a big heist.

Viola Davis leads an overstuffed cast as Veronica, who joins forces with the other widows who all lost their husbands in a robbery gone awry in order to pull off a $5 million job that Veronica's husband had been planning before the men died. A parallel story line involves Colin Farrell as Jack Mulligan, a Chicago-Irish ward pol running for election to the seat held for years by his machine-veteran father (a feisty Robert Duvall) against a black preacher, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning has a vicious brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya, truly menacing), who is tasked with collecting a multimillion-dollar debt owed by Veronica's husband (Liam Neeson). (Yeah, that's a lot of above-the-title names. Jacki Weaver has a cameo too.)

The improbable set-up is strained further by the paint-by-numbers script, the hack-work of Gillian Flynn ("Gone Girl") and director Steve McQueen ("20 Years a Slave," "Small Axe"). And you may never see a movie that is set in Chicago look and feel so unlike Chicago. The cinematography is antiseptic and the accents and phrasing are random. Farrell, especially, has a tin ear for next-gen Irish pol-speak.

The various story lines are trite -- toxic masculinity; women dependent on the ill-gotten gains of thugs; an average person instantly transforming into a fearless criminal mastermind; and a marriage strained by the tragic death of a son. I was able to predict the maddeningly unoriginal dialogue with uncanny accuracy. The stakes of a local election can't support a convincing narrative. A key plot twist at the end improbably relies on the trope of a pet dog sniffing out a surprise suspect hiding behind a door. 

Brit McQueen seems like the wrong choice to tell such a gritty, pulpy tale set in the American Midwest, imposing his auteur sensibilities on a dese-dem-and-dose tick-tock thriller. Somehow the cut-and-paste cast -- including Cynthia Erivo as a bad-ass hairdresser who joins the caper (though Michelle Rodriguez and Carrie Coon are wasted here) -- drag this over the finish line.

R.I.P., David Lynch, Part 2: Road Tripping

  We are doing a multi-part tribute to David Lynch, who died January 15 at 78. Our biggest debt to him, though, will always be non-cinematic: his alt-weekly comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, from the 1980s. Here is Part 1.

WILD AT HEART (1990) (B+) - When you take the David Lynch multiverse and inject into it Nicolas Cage, well, it's off to the races.

 

Cage and Laura Dern are off the wall but also sexually dynamic together in this story of a young couple on the run from goons hired by her mother to kill him. Cage's Sailor does time at the beginning of the movie for pummeling to death a would-be assailant hired by the mother of Lula (Dern), and upon his release, they go on the lam. Lynch plays with the myth of mid-century America, with nods to Elvis Presley (whom Sailor mimics throughout with his aphoristic pronouncements) and "The Wizard of Oz." Fire also plays a significant symbolic role, a common through line in Lynch's oeuvre. 

In the five years since her role as a naif in "Blue Velvet," Dern has come into her own as a sexual being, and she isn't shy during her romps with Cage. In one memorable scene, Sailor recounts an erotic experience with another woman, which gets Lulu going. "You better run me back to the hotel," she purrs. "You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt." 

Dern's mother, Diane Ladd, plays Lulu's lulu mom, Marietta Fortune. It's a bizarre, cartoonish role, and I felt sorry for Ladd, who just wasn't built for Lynch's brand of deadpan slaptstick. Grace Zabriskie, on the other hand, captures the essence of Lynchian eccentricity. But it's Willem Dafoe who takes honors for most outlandish performance as Bobby Peru, the creepy, dentally challenged gangster, who menacingly exploits Lulu's vulnerabilities as a childhood rape victim. He will rope Sailor into an ill-advised heist and meet a most unpleasant demise.

Pulp fiction at its finest, "Wild at Heart" always circles back to Sailor and Lulu as a snakebit couple (him in a snakeskin jacket) that you root for. Dern and Cage digest Lynch's outre dialogue as if they were born to play the roles. They find just the right pitch for Lynch's brand of kitsch, especially during a scene when Sailor grabs the microphone at a club and croons Presley's "Love Me" as Lulu and the other girls scream and cream like it's 1956. Toss in cameos and quirky turns by the likes of Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossellini and John Lurie, and it's a trip.

THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999) (A) - Was this just a goof? David Lynch playing it "straight" and directing someone else's mainstream narrative about an old man driving across the heartland on a lawn tractor to visit his ailing brother, presumably for the last time? Honest to goodness, it's rated G. (Open on: "Walt Disney Pictures presents ... a film by David Lynch.")

Lynch, working from a script by producer Mary Sweeney and John E. Roach, plays it mostly linear, blessed with journeyman actor Richard Farnsworth, in his final role, as Alvin Straight, who seizes an opportunity to make peace with his estranged brother. Physically broken down and unable to drive a car, he jerry-rigs a riding mower and a trailer and journeys 247 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin, camping on the side of the road along the way.

 

Alvin has heartfelt encounters with strangers along the way, which allows him to dispense pearls of wisdom, including to a pregnant teenage runaway. The fulcrum of the film comes in the second half when he meets a fellow World War II veteran at a bar and they trade quiet horror stories about their harrowing experiences. 

Lynch stays faithful to a traditional narrative, perhaps for the only time in his career. He patiently allows the journey to unfold at a snail's pace -- just like Alvin chugging along the highways at 5 mph, hugging the shoulder as vehicles whiz by. He employs a cast of mostly unknowns and non-actors to serve in various elderly Greek choruses. The astronomically high average age of the cast is virtually unheard of in a culture that worships youth.

Sissy Spacek just barely rises to the challenge of playing Rose, Alvin's daughter, who speaks with a stutter related to a horrific trauma in her life. Harry Dean Stanton tosses in a cameo as the brother, Lyle. The earnest depiction of rural life is tempered with occasional deadpan humor, such as when Alvin haggles with twin brothers straight out of "Green Acres" who bicker while repairing his John Deere.

Angelo Badalamenti's score is quintessentially 1990s, somehow both melancholy and uplifting at the same time. Farnsworth's eyes twinkle as the paragon of "Farm Aid"-era America (he even resembles Willie Nelson). Alvin is a wounded soul who has somehow managed to deal with his trauma, wrangle his alcoholism, and find peace of mind amid his physical and emotional struggles. This is a low-key tale (faithfully based on a true story) that sneaks up on you and wins over your jaded modern heart.

BONUS TRACKS

Elvis' "Love Me":

And from "The Straight Story," Angelo Badalamenti tries his hand at Americana, including the captivating "Laurens Walking":