Every Mother's Son

AMERICAN PROMISE (B+) - This vanity project, in which two Brooklyn parents film their son and his pal from kindergarten to twelfth grade, is as good an indictment and celebration of the American education system as you get in documentaries on the subject.

Idris, is a cute, charming young man who cowers through adolescence under the tight supervision of his Type-A parents, filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson (the dad is a psychiatrist, major red flag). He tests well from the beginning, and his parents lay high expectations on him, hammering him with lessons even while running to catch the subway. (Dad suggests early on that he hasn't been controlling enough in pushing his son; he chastises him for being "lazy" on the basketball court. Mom laments, "I just wish he had half the drive I had at his age.") His buddy Seun comes from a more hard-scrabble background, more tested by tragedy, and he initially seems a little slower and thicker. His parents are stern, too, but they're more nurturing of his own sport, martial arts.

The boys hit a wall at the elite Dalton academy before middle school. Seun has learning issues. His mom certainly can't afford the $30,000 tutor his classmates' parents hire. Idris will eventually go on ADD meds. Both are made aware of their blackness, especially the dreadlocked Seun; it turns out that nearly every one of the handful of the African-American boys who go through Dalton fails to make it to graduation and transfers instead (not so much with the girls of color). Idris is also caught in the middle, because while white girls won't give him the time of day, others accuse him of "acting white." (He can't get a girl or a cab.)

I'm a sucker for "7-Up"-type films that show people aging and evolving over decades. It's fun to see these boys start out as innocent kindergartners and bloom into unique young men. But beyond that gimmick, these parents, who are open to accusations of exploiting their own son, provide a valuable service by helping the rest of us identify with the challenges of growing up in a world that doesn't welcome you with open arms. And it's refreshing to see Brewster and Stephenson lay bare their own parental mistakes for all to see.

"American Promise" is streaming for another week on PBS.org as part of its POV offerings.

MOTHER OF GEORGE (C+) - A lovely but disappointing drama about an old-world culture agonizing over a young couple's pressure to produce a son.

Ayodele and his bride, Adenike, celebrate a traditional Nigerian wedding in Brooklyn, and by traditional I mean mostly sexist. The pressure is on immediately to produce a son. But nothing's clicking biologically, and as time goes on Adenike's mother-in-law is beside herself. She eventually proposes a creative solution to her daughter-in-law, one that would keep the gene pool consistent.

Would such a secret be harmless? Or would it tear a couple apart?

Director Andrew Dosunmu, in his second feature, is more interested in imagery than drama and character development. He's enamored of framing scenes so that the people Adenike talks to are out of the shot. She and other female characters are leered at by the camera as if they were models or tchotchkes. The spectacular colors pop 3-D-like as if they were shot by Godard on mushrooms. The yellows, especially, are dazzling, even in the many food scenes. The traditional clothing gleams in near-neon. Even a snippet of Adenike hanging laundry is depicted as high art, with a vivid blue-and-gold towel flapping away to the strains of dour opera.

But neither these sensual images nor a beautiful ending can salvage the sludgy story that too often borders on melodrama. Dosunmu takes a great idea but can't elevate the screenplay beyond the mere two-dimensional. It's a gallant miss.

Modern Family: Part 1

The first of two solid recent releases, left over from late 2013:

THE PAST (A) - No one these days does family drama like Asghar Fahardi does. On the heels of "A Separation" two years ago, the Iranian filmmaker has once again crafted a masterful rendering of love and family dynamics.

The set-up is exquisite. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) has gone back to Iran, leaving behind his wife, Marie (Berenice Bejo from "The Artist"), and her two daughters from a previous marriage. About four years have passed, and Marie has called Ahmad back to France to finalize their divorce, because she plans to marry Samir (Tahar Rahim from "A Prophet"). Samir has his own son, Fouad (the compelling Elyes Aguis), a beautiful boy with some emotional problems in the wake of the suicide attempt of his mother, who lies in a coma that she's likely never to recover from.

OK. Got it? Let's go.

The suspicion early on is that Marie is not completely over her estranged husband, because instead of arranging a hotel for his visit, she invites him to crash at her crowded house, in fact having him share a room with Samir's son, Fouad, the first night. Samir stays on the margins for the first half of the movie and lets his anger or jealousy simmer.  (He sports a great pout.) Ahmad, in his passive-aggressive way, seems to genuinely want Marie to have a shot with Samir, but he wants her and the children to be happy. When we first see Marie and Ahmad, they are trying to communicate from afar at the airport, but they can't hear each other through a glass barrier -- a quick establishing metaphor for their relationship. She sports a bandage on her wrist; a slight wounded bird that needs tending to.

Marie's teenage daughter, Lucie (Pauline Burlet), is not thrilled to be welcoming a third father into the picture, and she seems to be manipulating the proceedings by trying to wedge Ahmad between Marie and Samir. What exactly is happening only grudgingly becomes clear.

The second half of the film -- like "A Separation," it's leisurely but masterfully plotted, with a 130-minute run -- blossoms into a sophisticated slow-burn mystery, as secrets are revealed and relationships shift. Lucie definitely has been exploiting the unaddressed question of the house -- what was the true reason Samir's wife burst into his dry-cleaning store and drank detergent?

At one point, one of Lucie's alleged dirty tricks is revealed to Marie. Ahmad brings Lucie to Marie. The mother slowly approaches her daughter. You expect (hope for?) a hug; you get an attack. (Bejo doesn't hit a false note from beginning to end; she's perfect for the role of a sometimes shaky woman trying to make yet another relationship work.) And that jolt is a metaphor for what the master Farhadi does to us. Just when we think we're figuring things out, he adds a twist; when we let our guard down, he strikes at our emotions.

The final reel feels more like a series of codas, churning the plot deeper as he goes, until a final scene between two characters we don't expect to find hand-in-hand. It's an indelible image that caps a powerful film.

One-Liners

COLD WEATHER (2010) (B) - A low-key but effective character study of a brother and sister living in Portland and searching for some direction in life. This moody example of Northwest Mumblecore from Aaron Katz pays attention to all the important details and creates an authentic world in which a bunch of 30-ish slackers flail around for purpose.

Doug (Cris Lankenau) has forsaken his study of forensics for a no-brain job slinging crates at an ice factory while crashing with his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn). Doug finds out his old girlfriend Rachel (Robyn Rikoon) is visiting Portland from Chicago, and he meets up with her, taking his new blue-collar pal Carlos (Raul Castillo) along. Carlos and Rachel hit it off (he's a club DJ, too), but then one night Rachel doesn't show up to watch Carlos' gig, and Carlos is convinced that foul play is involved.

This triggers Doug's Sherlock Holmes fascination, and soon he's combing through Rachel's abandoned hotel room and later shopping for pipes. Those two scenes typify the charming deadpan humor that carries "Cold Weather."  Soon, Gail is tagging along as a wheelman and helping Doug crack a code left behind in the hotel room. This all plays like a slacker satire of '70s private-eye adventures, and it works, because the dialogue is believable, and the characters are finely textured. (It's also a valentine to Oregon.)

A final caper leads to an understated ending, and if you stick with it, "Cold Weather" will reward you.

ADORE (D+) - A ridiculous story that barely holds up after repeated fast-forwarding. Two childhood pals, now 40-something moms (Robin Wright and Naomi Watts), start sleeping with each other's hunky college-age sons. Really.

The crime here is not that there is barely any decent MILF action (which is why many people would bother with this), but rather that there is no tension in what could have been a taut, quasi-oedipal psychodrama. The timeline continues in fits and starts. The young men are wooden. The cinematography capturing the Australian coast is ho-hum.

This one completely falls apart by the end, with a late confrontational climax that strains credulity.

THE CAMPAIGN (C+) - This is either a wasted opportunity or the emblematic death knell for the genre of silly, foul-mouthed man-child comedies. Will Ferrell slips in and out of his George W. Bush imitation to portray a southern Democrat who is profoundly inept and offensive but still keeps getting re-elected. He's on his way to another term, unopposed in the race, when at the last minute a challenger files for the ballot, in the person of Zach Galifianakis' swishy straight arrow.

It's hard not to manage a few solid guffaws with Ferrell and Galifianakis acting like idiots. But this is beyond cartoonish -- the filmmakers thought it was so funny that Ferrell accidentally punches an infant that they repeat the gag with a dog later on. One classic repeat bit that does work perfectly, though, is Galifianakis' struggle to work a doorknob (inherently comic in a "Sunshine Boys" vein); it is funny enough the first time, but then catches you off-guard the second time and becomes even funnier.

Feel free to skip around this one, too. By the time Ferrell's character puts out a pornographic ad to save his campaign, you should be ready to bail out. This is the kind of lazy movie that parodies the real world by conjuring up two evil financiers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, meh) and naming them the Motch brothers. What, "Krotch" was too libelous?

Today's Clickbate*

From Xfinity's home page today, we are offered this exclusive information, next to a picture of a generic-looking actress:

This 'Jessica' is a star on 90210.  Want to see other women named Jessica in Hollywood? Click below.

Click here to check out the list of most popular Jessicas in Tinsletown. [sic]

* - cq.

One-Liners

ALL IS LOST (C+) - This is an impressive feat of acting and directing, but it's not much of a movie. It's Robert Redford alone on a leaky boat for about 100 minutes. Or in a raft. He is stranded at "sea" and battles the "elements" in what looks like a Hollywood studio tricked out with CGI in most scenes.

I was a big fan of J.C. Chandor's debut, the brilliant "Margin Call" from 2011, and that's really the only reason I even bothered to sample this. I'll admit, I fast-forwarded through some parts, which made it much more bearable. I was eager to see how it all ended. The second half is much more effective; it's truly harrowing, and you see the big metaphor for how fragile our mortality is and how easily we are snuffed out. The ocean seems as big as the universe.

The ending is smart. It seems clear, but I'd say that it can go either way whether or not he survives the ordeal. But, for the most part, this is a hulking production of a vanity project. (The end credits alone drag on for seven minutes.) At times it's no more than a dramatic rendering of an oceanographic nature film.

HARLAN: IN THE SHADOWS OF 'JEW SUSS' (2008) (B-minus) - This could have been so much more, but instead it's a rather neutered examination of the lives of Veit Harlan, who is notorious for being the premier film director in World War II Nazi Germany and for appeasing Goebbels with such anti-semitic fare as the execrable "Jew Suss" in 1940.

Felix Moeller shoots his talking heads in washed-out digital, and the result drains the emotion from the proceedings. Harlan's children and grandchildren weigh in on his legacy, ranging from a comfortable remove to all-out antagonism to the patriarch. Son Thomas Harlan has devoted his life to countering his father's black record. Included is Harlan's niece Christiane Kubrick, who was married to film legend Stanley Kubrick. An ex-wife -- who starred in most of his films, including the title film -- appears in footage from the 1970s.

Unfortunately, the talking heads tend to ramble. Moeller shoots family members at a screening/lecture devoted to Harlan, but the opportunity for insight is wasted. The result is a somewhat interesting peek into a family's tortured history, but with little dramatic pop. That makes this a curiosity at best.

A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951) (C) - An overwrought yet dull tale of a ruggedly handsome man with a secret past who wants to live in the rarefied world of Elizabeth Taylor but is dragged down by Shelley Winters.

Montgomery Clift is a cipher in this pale noir based on Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy." He plays working class lug George Eastman who looks up a distant uncle, an industrialist who gives the young man an entry-level job at his factory. The film plods along as George defies workplace rules and starts dating a co-worker, Alice (Winters), and slowly starts climbing the corporate ladder. Eventually the uncle invites him to a posh society function where he falls for Angela (Taylor, making you wish this were in color so you could see those eyes in full glory).

Soon Alice starts piecing things together and threatens to expose George for the hick and cheat that he is. So George plots to get rid of Alice.

This all plays out way to sluggishly, leading toward a final reckoning for George, larded with globs of Hollywood sap by Oscar-winning director George Stevens ("Shane"). This is pre-Brando mush for the masses, but it fails as both film noir and grand storytelling.

Top Docs

LET THE FIRE BURN (A) - This is what documentaries aspire to. Assembled entirely from archival footage, this film unravels the compelling story of the police bombing of the compound of the controversial black-liberation group Move (along with an entire city block) in Philadelphia in 1985.

The drama is palpable from start to finish. Newcomer Jason Osder, more an editor than a director here (and in his career), takes a simple, mostly chronological approach to knitting together the footage, starting in the late 1970s when the manners of Move members, who advocated natural living and veganism among other lifestyle choices, started to concern neighbors and authorities. A shootout with police in 1978, killing an officer, led to the imprisonment of nine Move members.

Much of the footage is taken from a quasi truth-and-reconciliation commission that was convened in the months after the police dropped an explosive device on the roof of the compound, which was part of a larger apartment complex, and let it burn untended for at least an hour. About sixty dwellings were destroyed. Eleven Move members died, five of them children. Two survivors, one woman and one boy, are seen testifying about the events that took place. The mayor and police chief remained defiant.

TV news coverage fills in some of the blanks. Osder ratchets the tension throughout. The narrative is profoundly human and compelling. You can't script a story better than this.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS MAY APPLY (B) - Cullen Hoback has a blast with a serious subject -- the invasion of privacy that comes with a life lived via the Internet.

Zippy graphics and chirpy talking heads (including go-to futurist Raymond Kurzweil and the musician Moby) lend a spark to the production. Hoback wants to put a scare into us, but he doesn't want us fleeing from the theater screaming. He takes a measured approach to the concern about online security whenever you click "I Accept" before entering a website or downloading software. The film veers toward the strident near the end, especially when Hoback stalks Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

I met Hoback back in 2006 at that year's Santa Film Festival when he was hawking his charming little "Cuckoo's Nest" homage called "Freedom State." It's worth checking out as a rental; it's a bit slow, but it's only 56 minutes long and comes together nicely at the end.
 
PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE (B+) - This is a warts-and-all examination of the life of Phil Ochs, the protest singer who ran neck-and-neck with Bob Dylan for a while before stumbling into irrelevance and descending into alcoholism and depression. He took his own life at age 35 in the mid-'70s, a mostly forgotten relic by that time.

Here you can see both his genius and the limitations of his art. Ochs stayed true to his ideals and refused to sell out, but he never really shook up his act or varied his musical template. Whereas he burst on the scene in the early '60s and could hold his own against Dylan as a songwriter, his slide toward obscurity was quick.

Writer/director Kenneth Bowswer is sympathetic to his subject but doesn't shy away from exploring the dark side. Ochs was full of hope when he went to Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, but the shocking defeat of the student protesters seemed to break his heart. He never really recovered.  Talking heads -- including Joan Baez, Tom Hayden, Jello Biafra, and Christopher Hitchens -- do a workmanlike job of putting the performer in perspective.

BONUS TRACK
Billy Bragg, who wrote an eloquent essay for the liner notes to the 1990 release of Phil Ochs' 1968 Vancouver concert recording , rewrote the standard "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill" in tribute to Ochs for his EP "The Internationale":


  

Jolly Old France

SOMETHING IN THE AIR (A-minus) - Ah, to be in Paris in the wake of May 1968, when revolution seemed possible and the women looked like Charlotte Gainsbourg. I was pleasantly surprised by Olivier Assayas' tender tribute to his youth at the height of the student protest movement.

Sharing an ethos with David Chase's "Not Fade Away," this French take is more meandering and less in your face. It follows scruffy high school student Gilles (a charismatic Clement Metayer) in 1971 as he struggles to reconcile his love of art, film, the pursuit of girls and the appropriate level of devotion to the struggle against the system. Assayas establishes a dreamlike quality, more like a Bob Dylan song than a political polemic. He wields a seamless soundtrack here, with songs by Soft Machine (below), Phil Ochs, Nick Drake, Captain Beefheart and the trippy hippies Amazing Blondel. (I was confused by the timeline here, expecting to be in 1968 (I missed the opening marker), but Assayas signals the later era early on when a character drops a needle on Syd Barrett's "Terrapin," which was released in 1970.) An eight-minute party scene at the start of the second half of the film, with a haunting fire theme, is epically rendered to Soft Machine's "Why Are We Sleeping?"




Gilles loses the enigmatic Laure (a free spirit who offers post-coital critiques of his paintings and schools him in the poetry of Gregory Corso) but soon takes up with the more down to earth Christine (the brooding Lola Creton, "Goodbye First Love"), a fellow agitator. After causing their share of trouble, leaving one victim in a coma, the gang heads to Italy to let things cool down. The movie takes on an international flavor at this point, including the addition of cinnamon-haired American Leslie (the engaging India Menuez), among others. We follow a group of guerrilla filmmakers who strive for pure authenticity in documenting the workers' struggle in the third world. ("We don't do fiction," they declare.) Maoists clash with anarchists and socialists, and eventually real life and practical concerns catch up with these emerging adults.

Assayas is in touch with that heady time, and he shows a sure hand. (The New York Times said his "camera moves among young bodies like an invisible friend.")  He has produced less an exercise in nostalgia than an honest re-examination and exploration of how we come of age within the particular age we live in. 

POPULAIRE (B) - This debut feature is a harmless bit of fluff that finds clever ways to be appealing. Newcomer Regis Roinsard uses a light touch with this corny period piece in which a rural gal in France's bobby-soxer era strikes out from her stifling small town to make it in the big city as a ... secretary.

Deborah Francois is delightfully bubbly as Rose Pamphyle who catches they eye of insurance agent Louis (a cleaned-up Romain Duris) during his secretary search. He hires her despite her hunt-and-peck method and decides, Hollywood style, to turn her into a typing champion.

Louis trains Rose like a racehorse and teaches her how to touch type like a pro. In an adorable sequence, he gives a different color to each set of keys assigned to each finger, and Rose shades her fingernails accordingly; the primary colors are dazzling.

It's at this point that you are either all in or are thinking of bailing out. But if you give in to the silliness, it's quite a trip. Soon, Rose scorches the field in regionals and works her way up to the French nationals, hoping to go to the world championships in New York. Were there ever such typing competitions? Who cares. This is giddy bubblegum pop. Play along.

BONUS TRACK

From "Something in the Air's" trippy final shots and the credits, "Decadence" from Kevin Ayers, who died one year ago:

The Dark Side

I USED TO BE DARKER (B+) - This is a soundtrack in search of a script. And it finds a satisfying one.

Matthew Porterfield finally fulfills his promise in his third feature, after a rotten start with "Hamilton" (one of the original "Life Is Short" walkouts), finally sketching out fully formed characters and crafting a tight, compelling narrative.

Ostensibly a story about two teenage cousins, the film is overtaken by a squabbling couple, memorably rendered by a pair of musicians: Kim Taylor is the wife, Kim, who is moving out of the house as the movie begins, and Ned Oldham is Bill, her brooding, hurt husband. Taylor and Oldham get the squabbles and the zingers just right here. He's angry but also rather inert; she seems stifled, and she finds her own place -- as well as her own band and a new, younger lover.

Into this Baltimore mess walks Taryn (Deragh Campbell), Kim's niece who is on the lam from Ireland without her parents' knowledge. She struggles to connect with Bill and Kim's daughter, Abby (Hannah Gross), and the two have a pre-"Girls" angst about them. Taryn's running from a boy back in Europe, and Abby is quietly stewing at her parents. Abby's frustration over the split in households reaches a boil in a wonderful emotional explosion when she can't find the waffle iron that her mom absconded with.

Porterfield paces this all perfectly, and provides a magnificent mix of music, ranging from punk to freestyle jazz to the folkier tunes favored by Taylor and Oldham. (Here's the soundtrack list.) He shoots one of Taylor's performances from the perspective of a fan standing in the middle of the crowd in a small club, like the iPhone videos you see on YouTube. Here's a sample of one of Oldham's tunes:

This is all rather moving throughout. Where "Hamilton" was impossibly inert and pointless, here Porterfield has rich characters gliding through a very real story. This one leaves a mark.

PARADISE: HOPE (B-minus) - The third in the Paradise series, this one follows the daughter of the woman in the first installment ("Paradise: Love") as she attends a fat camp for kids and develops a crush on the camp's doctor, who is about 40 years older.

This would have worked better as a short film, or a one-hour episode in the trilogy. Writer/director Ulrich Seidl takes his time letting events unfold, and he's partial to long takes, letting the viewer feel like a voyeur privy to rather intimate interactions.

Melanie Lenz puts in a workmanlike effort as young Melanie, a chubby teen aching to experience love and sex. She pals around with the more experienced (or so she claims) Verena (Verena Lehbauer). Melanie hopes for the doctor to make a move on her, but their interactions are understandably fraught with anxiety, not to mention absurdities. Melanie and Verena also sneak out and get drunk at a club, risking assault by a couple of low-lifes. In their downtime, the girls and their pals lounge around a lot, often cuddling in that nonchalant ways girls that age do.

This whole exercise doesn't necessarily tie in to the other parts of the trilogy, though Melanie tries multiple times to reach her mom, who has gone off, interestingly, on a sex romp in Africa. As a coming-of-age film, this has its insights. But it does drag, and the payoff is less than overwhelming.


BONUS TRACK
And here's the ex-wife's side of the story. Kim Taylor sings this one over the closing credits in "I Used to Be Darker":

New to the Queue

Warming up to 2014 ...

I was neither hip enough nor stoned enough to appreciate Godfrey Reggio's "Qatsi" trilogy dating back to the '80s, but I'm game for his new collaboration with Phillip Glass, the examination of faces in "Visitors."

The latest from Hirokazu Kore-eda ("I Wish"), a tale of children switched at birth, "Like Father, Like Son."

The Chilean film about a 50-something woman out on the dating scene, "Gloria."

The U.S.-Irish family drama "Run & Jump."

A documentary about avant garde filmmaker/artist Carolee Schneemann, "Breaking the Frame."

Both Vera and Taissa Farmiga together in a passable indie love story? Register me for "At Middleton."

Improbably, I'm drawn to the animated film "The Lego Movie."

The Paraguayan crime caper "7 Boxes."

Another tale of young adults navigating relationships, this one set in Austin, "Love & Air Sex."

We didn't care for Denis Cote's "Bestiare," but we're intrigued by "Vic + Flo Saw a Bear."

Pre-mania

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The Los Angeles Times has a fine piece about the run-up to Beatlemania.

It inspired us to dig up some archival footage and news reports from 1963, before the onset of what the L.A. Times calls the pop culture Big Bang. The first is a report from a snarling Edwin Newman that closed out Chet & David's nightly NBC newscast in mid-November:



A few days later, a CBS fuddy-dud tried to make sense of the mop tops and their screaming fans. (He credits the boys with "saving the sagging British corduroy industry.") This report aired the morning of the JFK assassination and was supposed to air again that evening on Walter Cronkite's broadcast. It was pre-empted, of course, and aired again, instead, a few weeks later. It prompted Capitol Records to move up the release of the single "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from January to December 26, 1963.




And here's a BBC documentary from August 1963, which starts with the Beatles but then moves on to others as it explores "the Mersey sound."



You can feel an eruption building. On Feb. 9, 1964, the "youngsters from Liverpool" played to 78 million viewers. "Close your eyes ...."

That '70s Drift

We begin another occasional feature, this one an ongoing appreciation of our favorite decade of American filmmaking, the 1970s. Here, we found two unsung titles lurking on YouTube.

THE HEARTBREAK KID (1972) (A-minus) - This is the original film (I've seen only parts of the Farrelly Brothers' fiasco with Ben Stiller a few years ago), a surprisingly sober production created by Bruce Jay Friedman ("Stir Crazy," "Splash"), written by Neil Simon and directed by Elaine May.

Charles Grodin, in his big shot at leading-man status, plays Lenny Cantrow, a sporting-goods salesman who rushes into marriage with Lila (Jeannie Berlin, May's daughter), a virgin waiting for the ring before putting out. A mere few hours into their honeymoon road trip from New York to Miami, Lenny realizes that he can't stand Lila, a tone-deaf singer who chews food with her mouth open. When they finally do arrive at Miami beach, Lenny immediately falls for the flirty Kelly (a radiant 22-year-old Cybill Shepherd) and vows to end his nascent marriage and run off to Minneapolis to pursue Kelly despite the feral hatred of Lenny expressed by her banker father (a fun Eddie Albert).

It's obvious here that the crew here is exploring the idea of self-loathing among Jews. The crude, harshly lit Lila seems to have been born a nag, with a grating voice and lousy manners. In stark contrast, the Aryan Kelly is photographed like an angel, a savior, a soothing figure to be worshiped. And Lenny is a walking guilt trip.

Grodin is wonderful as Lenny, who takes advantage of his bride's bad sunburn on their first day at the beach to keep her tethered to the hotel room for a few days as he makes up elaborate excuses to go meet Kelly. His creative lie about a traffic accident is hilarious; the patter is classic Simon. The latter part of the film grows fairly serious, though (as May often did in her dark comedies), when it becomes clear that Lenny is not going to let go of this crush, undaunted by the repetitive weather reports of sub-zero chill that greet him upon his arrival in Minneapolis.

Simon, perhaps reined in by May, is a lot less broad than we remember him from touchstones like "The Odd Couple," "The Out of Towners" and "Biloxi Blues," and instead lets the proceedings simmer to a point that never reaches a full boil. The ending is understated; we realize that the movie all along was not about the appeal of the two women but rather about Lenny's neuroses. The stories he likes to spin about human nature start to weigh on him.

THE NICKEL RIDE (1974) (B) - This hard-boiled mob story struggles mightily for street cred but stumbles at times trying to ratchet up the menace. But we do get an honest tale from the time of quarter beers and rotary-dial phones.

Jason Miller (Father Damien in "The Exorcist") comes off as a finely handsome Charles Bronson figure playing Cooper, a mid-level mob lieutenant intent on cutting a major real estate deal in the middle of a rundown downtown area. (He runs warehouses where mob types stash stolen goods.) The debut script by Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump," "Munich") tones down the swagger and wallows in Cooper's slow slide into depression fueled by his growing irrelevance as a pawn in the bigger game.

Cooper has a pretty young southern belle as a girlfriend (Linda Haynes) and a sympathetic pal who runs a bar, Paddie (Victor French, "The Waltons," "Highway to Heaven"), but he sees his own hold under mob boss Carl (John Hillerman, "Magnum, P.I.") slipping away. And the handwriting seems to be on the wall when a mean-looking cowboy, Turner, shows up looking to stir up trouble in the ranks. (It's rarely a good thing when Bo Hopkins enters the picture.)

Cooper and his galpal, Sarah, whom he refers to lovingly as Georgia, hit the mattresses at a cabin in the woods, hoping to let subside the fallout from a fighter who refused to take a dive. It seems only a matter of time before Turner tries to track them down. This being the mid-'70s, the odds are long that there'll be a truly happy ending.

BONUS TRACK 
Jason Miller is an interesting figure. He has generated fun trivia -- he fathered Jason Patric with Jackie Gleason's daughter. This was his second movie role, which followed an Oscar nomination in his big-screen debut in the iconic "Exorcist." (Wikipedia also reports that he turned down the lead in "Taxi Driver" to take this role.) He had made a splash before that, though, by penning the Pulitzer-winning theater hit "That Championship Season" (which he eventually made into a film in 1982 and which he originally wrote, coincidentally, during down time while performing "The Odd Couple" in Fort Worth, Texas). His fame faded quickly, and he was reduced to mostly TV projects. In the mid-1980s he returned to his hometown to run the Scranton Public Theater. He died in 2001 at age 62. Paul Sorvino crafted a bust of Miller that sits as a memorial in a public square in Scranton.

Best of Ever

Freed from the titles of 2013, we recently revisited two films from our all-time Top 10:

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006) (A) - Quite simply, a perfect film, from beginning to flawless ending. The debut feature from writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck follows a cadre of writers and other artists in East Germany being watched by the Stasi in the mid-'80s. Specifically, the target here is playwright Georg Dreyman, long considered to be generally pro-regime but still suspected of subversion, mainly through guilt by association.

His apartment is wired and bugged by a mid-level apparatchik, Wiesler, who perches in the attic, alternating 12-hour shifts with a bumbling underling, listening to the minutiae of Georg's life with girlfriend Christa-Maria. (One of the many fine lines in the film comes when Wiesler dutifully reports the aftermath of a birthday party in the apartment by noting that, after the couple is alone and becoming intimate, "Presumably they have intercourse.")

The film, though, is not about the effects of a totalitarian regime on the victims of its spying operation. This is Wiesler's story, and his humanity rises to the surface, as he slowly begins omitting from his reports incriminating information about Georg. As the conflicted Wiesler, Ulrich Muhe is brilliant. Martina Gedeck is also heartbreaking as the tragic Christa, who is forced to sleep with Wiesler's boss in order to maintain her acting career.

To say anything more would be to ruin the enjoyment of what is a profoundly moving human story, expertly told. When the impeccable final line is spoken, von Donnersmarck ends in freeze frame. The first time I saw it I wanted to cheer. On this most recent (third) viewing, I burst into tears. This is storytelling at its most fundamental and profound. 

THE APARTMENT (1960) (A) - On the brink of the "Mad Men" era (and certainly an influence on the AMC show), Billy Wilder fashioned this clever and touching comedy about a working drone who climbs the corporate ladder by lending his apartment to sleazy executives for their extramarital dalliances. Wilder is blessed with the brilliant Jack Lemmon and the exquisitely appealing Shirley MacLaine. He also has the lumbering Fred MacMurray playing against type as the heavy here.

I'll leave it to other folks who have reviewed and analyzed what was one of Wilder's most celebrated films. To me, the movie captures an era and a mindset with grace and oodles of humor. Wilder and regular writing partner I.A.L. Diamond stretch the corporatized jazz/beatnik patois at the heart of the film almost to the breaking point, and they go to the brink of maudlin in portraying the heartbreak of Lemmon's CC ("si si"? the perfect yes man?) Baxter and MacLaine's Miss Kubelik, but the creators never cross those lines. This film is most like my other favorite of Wilder's, "Ace in the Hole," in that it captures a zeitgeist and moment in time yet still feels fresh and modern in its message. In both pictures, every scene crackles.

"The Apartment" is shot in luscious black-and-white, and it is carried effortlessly by its two emerging stars under the direction of a filmmaker at the top of his game. It's a masterpiece, movie-wise.