All in a Day's Work

Three movie-going experiences in one day; a snapshot:

OUT OF THE FURNACE (B-minus) - Several fine performances in search of some cohesive direction and a decent script.

Writer/director Scott Cooper reels off more macho posturing in this follow-up to "Crazy Heart," which I skipped. His script (written with Brad Ingelsby) is a string of awkward cliches and derivative narrative hooks, playing out like a two-hour Bruce Springsteen song. Here, Christian Bale is Russell Baze, a Pennsylvania steel-mill worker doing penance (after doing time) for a fatal DWI wreck and pining for the woman who dumped him for a cop while he was in prison. (Poor Zoe Saldana gets the same thankless role as Eva Mendes did in "The Place Beyond the Pines," as the prop for a moody bad boy.)

Russell's brother Rodney (an intense Casey Affleck) is a four-tour Iraq Army vet who makes ends meet by street fighting but just ends up more in debt to club owner John Petty (Willem Dafoe). Petty, in turn, gets caught up with the street-fighting impresario and drug dealer Harlan DeGroat (a growling Woody Harrelson), a subhuman Appalachian menace. You've seen this all before, and for good measure, Cooper rips off a little bit of "The Deer Hunter" -- for a painfully trite sequence in which the hunting of a deer is intercut with the pummeling of a street fighter. (Would you believe that the hunter can't bring himself to pull the trigger once he's got Bambi in his sights?) In other scenes, Russell tries to convince Rodney to join him at the mill, because it was good enough for their dad, dammit, so it should be good enough for them. Yeah, that sort of thing. It borders on parody at times.

It's an impressive cast, but each actor is going off at his own pitch and no one is really connecting here. Dafoe looks like he can't believe he actually has to utter some of those stupid lines. Forest Whitaker shows up as the cop who wins Russell's gal, but Whitaker is all over the place with his character and adopts a bizarre growl that seems to come from channeling Broderick Crawford. Bale turns in his usual powerful performance (he really is a wonder in the quiet moments), Harrelson's shtick is getting stale, and Sam Shepard is around just to remind us that his is a Movie about Men, dammit. This is a curiosity that is tolerable with some strategic fast-forwarding. 

ALTERNATIVE FILM/VIDEO: BELGRADE 1982 (incomplete) - Bryan Konefsky and the students at UNM conspire with Basement Films each April in Albuquerque to produce Experiments in Cinema, a weeklong exploration of experimental filmmaking. I made it to one event this year, a sampling of five short films that were part of the 10-film slate at Belgrade's cine-club festival in 1982, hosted by the original founder, Miodrag "Misha" Milosevic.

My favorite of the works from the former Yugoslavia was the mesmerizing "Aura in Aurovision," hypnotic visual images that looked like Earth rolling and careering through the universe, to the accompaniment of a hooky, bluesy garage-riff workout. (Don't look for any of this on YouTube; this is obscure stuff.) I believe "Aura" was Slovenian.

Also featured: "Big Town (Velo Misto)," which used TV sounds and images to accompany dense images that occasionally looked like body parts; "The Passion of Joan of Arc," using images from a book and subtitles in a way that conjured up Ken Burns by way of Guy Maddin; "Kras 88," a stop-action film that used stones to great effect; and "Pression," another hypnotic mind-bender that, unfortunately, cut out before the end. One of the charms of an experimental film fest; you can't tell when there's a technical breakdown.

THE SECRET DISCO REVOLUTION (B-minus) - A totally cheesy look back at the dance craze of the 1970s, filled with needless distractions but buoyed by juicy archival footage and where-are-they-now talking heads.

Writer/director Jamie Kastner doesn't trust his material, apparently, so he concocts both a grand theory and a gimmick. The theory is that disco was just as political and culturally significant as the folk revival during the civil rights era or the punk movement. It's hard to tell, though, whether he really believes that or is just testing out a hypothesis that will be ridiculed late in the documentary by the likes of Harry Wayne Casey (KC & the Sunshine Band), Thelma Houston and the members of the Village People. His only "expert" is USC's Alice Echols, most of whose observations are either painfully obvious or logically suspect (she claims that Barry White was the first person to write love songs about women).

The gimmick is a running gag throughout in which he has three present-day actors -- done up as a disco Mod Squad -- running around with props (a disco ball, a published "manifesto") and acting out wacky mastermind scenarios as if this all had been some secret master plan to change the world. It's a distraction. Alas, as Robert "Kool" Bell and others acknowledge, disco was not an engagement with the world and the Oil Embargo '70s, but rather a distraction, an escape -- an excuse to get coked-up and dance until dawn.

And that's the part which makes the film worth watching. Clips showing Studio 54 DJ Nicky Siano, and hitmakers like Maxine Nightengale, Barry White, Anita Pointer, Martha Wash and Gloria Gaynor evoke the youth and joy and horrid fashions of an era that churned like one long night fever. And when the sun came up and the decade was ending with a love hangover, it all came crashing down in August 1979 with a resounding Knack, and just like that, new wave and nascent hair bands took back the airwaves and charts.

BONUS TRACKS

It's a cool chick in a mad 'fro lip-syncing in front of a green screen. Let's dance!



A Chicago flashback -- Steve Dahl's summer 1979 Disco Demolition, named-checked in the doc, blew things up real good: