One-Liners

SOUND CITY (B) -This is 70 minutes of a cool nostalgic paean to the scruffy Sound City recording studio in L.A., followed by a crappy half hour of a marketing gimmick in the form of mindless noodling.

Dave Grohl is just not that interesting as a personality or even as a performer since 1994. He oversees a fine curation of the recording studio's history, recruiting most of the big names from its past. It was the place where Mick Fleetwood met Buckingham-Nicks, putting Sound City on the map. Soon came Tom Petty and then the million-dollar babies, Rick Springfield and Pat Benatar.  The joint fell on hard times in the '80s, but then along came Nirvana to record "Nevermind"; cue the Rick Rubin years.

Alas, the playground finally went belly-up in the last decade, which would have been a fine place to end this film around the 70-minute mark -- a wistful look back at a scrappy little analog paradise for the nerds and cool kids. Instead, we get a tacked-on half hour featuring Grohl collaborating with alumni, including Trent Reznor and the paleolithic Queens of the Stone Age, to record new tunes on the old board, which now sits in Grohl's private studio. The new songs are pale attempts to recapture the magic; a song by Stevie Nicks is particularly painful to listen to.

Finally, old man McCartney, of all people, shows up to take Kurt Cobain's place in Nirvana (!) to breathe a little life into the proceedings and crank out the generic Grammy-friendly rocker "Cut Me Some Slack." It's a bit startling to see the ex-Beatle with so much energy and growl left in him; he also seems to be the quintessential studio rat and father figure.

As Pitchfork put it: "With its hit-and-miss deviations in tone and quality, Real to Reel feels less like a tribute to a studio that created some of the greatest albums of all time, and more like an approximation of a typical Active Rock Radio playlist."

A NEW LEAF (1971) (B-minus) - Another Elaine May classic from the early '70s, this one is her debut as a writer/director. It features Walter Matthau, feeling miscast as a trust-fund dandy who has burned through his entire inheritance and immediately embarks on a mission to find a rich woman to marry -- and kill. May herself stars as the new love interest, a bumbling, dorky botanist whose staff is robbing her blind.

Too often this one relies on mugging and slapstick (she's really clumsy, get it?), and it feels like a short story dragged out to 100 minutes. When the comedy clicks, it's magic. An extended deadpan scene features Matthau methodically trying to rearrange May's toga-style nightgown, so that her head and arms are in the right holes; it's like the Marx Brothers on quaaludes.

The ending is predictable. Along the way, some strong character actors check in, including James Coco, Jack Weston and Doris Roberts. They help detract from the fact that Matthau and May are struggling throughout to stretch the soup.


BONUS TRACK
If you've never seen Nirvana perform "Lithium" live in a room full of punks, well, that's a little sad: