Life in the Limelight

LIFE ITSELF (B) - They laughed, they cried.

It's a shame that Roger Ebert isn't around to write about this documentary based on his elegant memoirs.Would he have cut the filmmaker some slack? And how would Gene Siskel have picked this apart on the air?

The Roger Ebert story always feels personal to me, a deep Chicago connection welling up, and I tried not to raise expectations too high for this homage from Steve James, the "Hoop Dreams" director who owes a good deal of his success to the famous critic's championing of that indie doc. And while this pushes some emotional buttons and can be greatly entertaining at times, it doesn't quite cohere as a story.

James was permitted intimate access to Ebert in his final months, during late 2012 and early 2013 (he died of cancer that April), most of which was spent in the hospital or in rehab. James seems compelled to make that ordeal the focus of the movie, as if he both was obligated to use the footage to full effect and was perhaps even bullied by Ebert, who serves as somewhat of a co-director (at times the subject literally gives orders to the filmmaker, demanding a certain camera angle). What ends up on the screen isn't so much fawning as it is a bit ill-fitting.

As moving and as revealing of some of Ebert's cancer treatments are -- not to mention the devotion of his wife, Chaz, and her family -- the film sags under the weight of the medical scenes, which dominate the first and last half hours. (James would have been well-served to trim at least 15 minutes from the full two-hour running time; he needed a co-editor, too.)

By contrast, the middle of the movie is a blockbuster. You could feel the energy of the audience immediately swell when Siskel first appears on the screen. As much as I admire Roger Ebert and consider him one of the great essayists of his time, there's no denying that, visually, not much can compete with the phenomenon that was Siskel and Ebert. Their appeal is irresistible. Even in clips that you've seen before on YouTube, including acid-tongued outtakes from show promos, the static between the two men crackles. Observers -- mainly their TV producers (all women) and Siskel's widow, Marlene Iglitzen -- peel back the celebrity veneer and show us the true relationship, including the competitiveness, the insecurities, the pettiness and the passion. Iglitzen in particular seems to  have the keenest insights into what made the two men tick. In one powerful scene, she reads a letter from Ebert, penned more than 10 years after the death of Siskel, in which the elderly film critic, sensing his own imminent mortality, finally expresses his love for his former partner.

During this fine middle hour -- amid the debate of whether Siskel and Ebert were the dumbed-down version of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, served up by corporate America to cater to the masses -- James gets at the heart of the story. Younger filmmakers -- including the hugely talented Ramin Bahrani ("Man Push Cart," "Goodbye Solo") and the young black woman Ava DuVernay ("I Will Follow") -- express their gratitude for the newsprint and air time granted to them by Ebert. In that way, the critic was a voice for the common man, inspired by his labor-proud father and his own humble roots in central Illinois. Bahrani and DuVernay tug at the heart, as you realize how compassionate Ebert was and how that resource is sorely missed.

James also builds momentum in the first half by parading on screen some of Ebert's old pals and colleagues, including a particularly glib Roger Simon, the columnist. The guys tell tall tales about the epic nights of drinking in the 1970s. They boast of his skills as a pre-eminent newspaperman. Favored directors Martin Scorsese, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog take good measure of the man. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott is particularly sharp in his observations. James, however, loses touch with most of them in the second half, abandoning a key perspective. He also fumbles a one-off interview with more recent Sun-Times colleagues.

Another interesting trick involves narration throughout by an Ebert sound-alike (Stephen Stanton). It's a little distracting (especially when "Roger" is telling us about how he can no longer speak), but it's an inspired strategy. It brings to mind Ebert's memorable turns of DVD commentary on "Citizen Kane" and other classics.)

Maybe it's gauche to suggest that we should be fed more TV banter and less real-life-and-death drama in a documentary about a pop culture figure who was a serious thinker and who put a public face on suffering; but this is a film on the big screen. The overwhelming image you take away here is of a decrepit old man, his lower jaw (what's left of it) hanging sadly from his disfigured face. It's not as if James is aiming to make some larger point about the skin-deep shallowness of the culture of TV and film; rather, he's cobbling together a disproportionate picture of a man and what his life was truly about. Don't ignore those final years and months, but don't wallow in it.

Roger Ebert was a legend of journalism and of 20th century cinema and letters. As an individual, his exploits translate perfectly to the page. On the screen (big and small), he was fully animated as part of a team. (One of his solo reporting projects featured here, which he filmed at Cannes, makes clear that the magic disappears when he and Siskel were split up.) This attempt to capture his life only fully comes to life when we are witnessing the story of two movie critics who managed to sell indie gems like "Hoop Dreams" and "Gates of Heaven" to the general public in a bygone era. Like the old days of newspapers, it was a heady time.

James' mix is just a tad off here. He's made an entertaining yet bittersweet film. But it's not above criticism.

Holy Crap!* "A Late Quartet"

I can't remember if I've ever watched a movie that took itself so seriously yet was virtually indistinguishable from a parody. "A Late Quartet" (2012), boasting a dream cast, plays like a goof on an earnest chamber drama.

A string quartet has been together 25 years, but they are endangered by a health scare -- their elder member, Peter (Cello, Christopher Walken), is exhibiting signs of early Parkinson's disease. This brings out the tension between the others. Robert (Violin II, Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Juliette (Viola, Catherine Keener) have a shaky marriage, not helped by the presence of their first violinist, Daniel (Mark Ivanir, mostly bouncing around since "Schindler's List" 20 years ago), with whom Juliette had a relationship before her marriage.

Robert likes to go jogging (perhaps Hoffman's toughest role ever) with lithe younger woman who likes to stretch a lot in front of him during their breaks from running. You know immediately that she'll somehow find Robert irresistible; maybe it's all the whining he does about how he should be first violin. (Or maybe he secretly confided to her just how puffy poor Keener looks in this role.) The movie uses the younger woman as nothing more than a plot device, immediately discarding her when she has served her purpose.

It's painful to watch Hoffman and Walken give it their all in the service of such horrible writing. The dialogue is beyond histrionic. (Newcomer Yaron Zilberman directs his own story, which he co-wrote with "reality-TV producer" Seth Grossman.) You get the sense that Hoffman and Walken got too deep into this project before it was possible to get out, so they just do their iconic shtick and hope they're not embarrassed in the end. But they're in the hands of a couple of hacks, and the result would make you cringe if it weren't so amusing in a secretly satisfying way. And I shuddered watching the actors valiantly pretend to play their instruments, ill-served by clunky cutaways to their musically skilled doubles.

Keener just doesn't bother to try here. She seems as weary here as she was in "Enough Said." I don't recall seeing Ivanir before, but it was fun to squint a bit and pretend that he was Eddie, the proprietor of the Las Vegas wedding chapel in "The Hangover." We get endless scenes of him lovingly hand-crafting bows. He also gives private lessons to Robert and Juliette's young adult daughter, Alexandra (Imogen Poots), and if you can't predict some naughtiness happening between them, then you've never seen a drama before. Alexandra also takes group lessons from poor old Peter, who is given numerous opportunities to spill pearls of wisdom about music and life.

Much of the early dialogue requires excessive exposition about string quartets and the classical music that they play. Whole swaths of the script seem lifted from Wikipedia entries. At other times, this plays like a collection of dramatic cliches from old made-for-television movies. We get a couple bickering in a cab before one of them orders the cabbie to pull over so he can get out. Poor old Peter is mourning his beloved wife, a soprano who died a year or so ago, and would you believe he sees a vision of her, in full voice, in his drawing room? Various characters watch video clips from a documentary about the quartet to help goose the back story, the epitome of lazy storytelling.

Why isn't this a total loss? First, I fast-forwarded a bunch of times, making it zip by quicker than its 106 minutes. Second, Poots brings genuine energy to the proceedings, providing a refreshing break from the overwrought bleatings of the A-listers; she actually seems like a real person rather than a narrative construct. And finally, the last 20 minutes aren't half bad. You know from the start that the whole film is building toward a final showdown onstage, and Walken finally pulls out of his tailspin and makes it at least plausible.

Most folks won't make it that far, though. This could have been another "Life Is short," but instead, I soldiered on and was rewarded with another "Holy Crap!" 

GRADE: C-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here and here and here and here.

One-Liners

Three that are just OK:

OMAR (B) - Hany Aub-Assad, the man behind the edgy "Paradise Now," serves up a surprisingly quaint and corny tale of terrorism and true love in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Omar (Adam Bakri) is a baker and freedom fighter who regularly scales a separation wall at great risk in order to visit his girlfriend, Nadia (Leem Lubany). He is constantly harassed by Israeli security, and for good reason -- he's plotting an insurrection with pals Amjad (who harbors a major crush on Nadia) and the ringleader, Tarek. Omar is captured on one of his jaunts, and he's tortured and apparently turned by Agent Rami, who sends him back home to undermine the resistance.

The performances here are strong, including many of the supporting cast. Bakri is particularly compelling. However, the story devolves into a mix of soap opera and police procedural. I lost count of the number of times he was beaten or tortured (and healed perfectly). We also get too many similar scenes of Omar, like a parkour master, outfoxing and outrunning his pursuers. Lubany, with her puppy-dog eyes, recalls a young Phoebe Cates, but the depiction of young love could be borrowed from a Lifetime movie. A twist in the story that ratchets up the love triangle is rather strained. The tension among the conspirators (who's really in and who might be a rat?) never unnerves.

The ending is powerful, but by the time we get there, we're a bit exasperated.

BASTARDS (B) - A weak link in the oeuvre of Claire Denis. Our favorite, Vincent Lindon, stars as Marco, a tanker captain, who returns to Paris after news of the suicide of his sister Sandra's husband. Sandra suspects a business associate, Edouard Laporte, of having had a hand in her husband's demise, so Marco rents an apartment above Laporte and his younger wife, Raphaelle (a wonderfully melancholy Chiara Mastroianni), and young boy.

Meantime, Marco's niece, Justine (the amazing Lola Creton from "Something in the Air" and "Goodbye First Love"), the daughter of the dead man, has been traumatized by sexual assault. The film opens with her wandering the dark streets naked and in high heels.

It's evident fairly early on that Laporte and the dead man had something to do with Justine's trauma. Sandra gets nowhere with the police. Marco investigates. He also seduces the wife. (Unfortunately, any chemistry between Lindon and Mastroianni is often wasted.)

Much of this is sluggish, and Denis revisits the same seemingly innocuous scenes over and over (including Raphaelle dropping her son off at school) and throws us off with some misdirection. Too often, it's just hard to get a handle on where this is all headed. After 100 minutes, we get a compelling twist at the end. But it doesn't feel satisfying. This one is way too much mood and not enough story. But it's Denis ("Beau Travail," "Friday Night"), so at times it is riveting.

WELCOME TO PINE HILL (2012) (C-minus) - I haven't been annoyed by an indie darling's non-story since Matthew Porterfield's "Hamilton" in 2006.

A reformed drug dealer, Shannon (Shannon Harper), now toils away numbingly as an insurance claims adjuster, and writer/director Keith Miller proves emphatically here that claims adjusting isn't exactly Jason Bourne work. He's also a lackadaisical bouncer at a dive bar. None of this is interesting. Eventually, Shannon gets bad news from a doctor and he reacts to the grim prognosis by wandering off to reconcile with the past (hanging with his drug buddies) and commune with nature.

This is surely intended as a meditation on death and how we sort out our affairs and come to terms with our ghosts. Harper, a soft-spoken hulk of a man, gives off little charisma in his debut performance. He does convey menace in the fascinating opening scene, in which he confronts a meek older man on the street one night and insists that the dog the man's walking is his own runaway. The tension is unsettling. Apparently, Miller filmed that confrontation, based on a real run-in with Harper, as a short and then expanded the story into this.

Unfortunately, nothing that follows justifies the feature length (even at a slim 81 minutes). This wants to be "Old Joy," but it's little more than just another indie ramble.

The Cult of Personality

A disappointing double feature:

JODOROWSKY'S DUNE (B) -  A fun but ultimately disappointing look back at what might have been: Cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky was recruited in the mid-'70s to film the cult classic book "Dune."

The Chilean progenitor of the midnight movie seemed like the perfect candidate to step to the Hollywood big leagues and translate Frank Herbert's story of an alternative world. Working with a French consortium in 1974, Jodorowsky began planning the adaptation, recruiting big names in the graphics world, such as Jean Giraud (Moebius), Chris Foss and H.R. Giger (who went on to create the look of "Alien"). Here was a chance to realize "Star Wars" two years before George Lucas hit the big screen and made cinema history.

Director Jack Pavich never truly captures the excitement of the times and the bittersweet nature of the missed opportunity. We're not fully transported to the era, never immersed in that moment.

We see snippets from the huge book of storyboard images that Jodorowsky and Giraud created. We get stories of how Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali were signed up to star. How Jodorowsky thought Pink Floyd would be perfect to create the soundtrack -- until he met the band. It would have starred David Carradine, who's hit show "Kung Fu" was said to be based on Jodorowsky's breakthrough film "El Topo."

Things fell apart. Jodorowsky claims, straight-faced that his script would have resulted in a 14-hour film, and you believe him. The project was shelved. The rights lapsed in the early '80s, and history took a fateful turn as David Lynch eventually took the help and created one of the great bombs of film history.

This is a movie about what might have been. Maybe too much time has passed, but the old talking heads have trouble conveying the magic they were poised to make. 

THE DANCE OF REALITY (C) - The first film from Jodorowsky in more than 20 years was pretty much lost on me. The director looks back at his childhood, a time, presumably, before he started dropping acid on a regular basis (but maybe not).

This has been a heralded return, and there are those out there who would hail it as a delirious masterpiece. I didn't get it. It's one thing to trip out on the amber glow of "El Topo" or "Holy Mountain" 40 years later at a late-night screening, reveling in the hippie-dippie kitsch. It's another thing to watch an 80-year-old man try to recapture some former glory when time seems to mostly have passed him by.

Here, Jodorowsky's son portrays Jodorowsky's dad, a communist in Depression-era Chile under a dictatorship. The father, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, rocks a Stalin look, with the mustache and jacket. The 10-year-old Jodorowsky prances about in girlish locks, a true mama's boy. The mama has a bounteous bosom and expresses all of her lines operatically. It seems like quirk for quirk's sake. (At one point, in a silly but affecting scene, she covers the boy in black shoe polish and they dance around naked together, somehow raising the specter of blackface and incest in one fell swoop.) Meantime, the father subjects the son to ritualistic humiliation, in an over-the-top effort to butch the kid up.

In many ways, this is a typical mind-bending circus funhouse (literally at times) from the expanded consciousness of Jodorowsky. Like in "Santa Sangre" we get amputees, and not just a few here and there; in this film we get a streetful of them, including a couple of guys missing all four limbs.

The politics here come off as facile and clunky. The father sets out on a long, boring journey to assassinate Chile's leader. His odyssey veers off into an extended scene revolving around the tending of horses. The film meanders more than it entrances. And it sags under the weight of its 130 minutes.

I'm not the best guide to Jodorowsky's film. They are curious little oddities to me. It felt like more of a trifle than a great work of cinema. It makes you wonder just how much worse "Dune" could have been, after all.

Hot Summer Nights

We're trying to catch as many of the Guild Cinema's 10 classic noir films in its 10-day annual July fest as we can:

NORA PRENTISS (1947) (B) - Ann Sheridan smolders in this slow-building potboiler about a married doctor who falls for a love-sick lounge singer. Kent Smith is fairly wooden throughout as the model family man who walks away from his punctual, dignified existence and gets swept up in a quaint affair.

Journeyman director Vincent Sherman (who ended his career in television overseeing episodes of "Baretta" and "Trapper John, M.D.") takes his time setting the table here, giving us a good glimpse of Dr. Talbot's homelife and letting a friendly, innocent relationship with Nora gradually morph into a full-blown affair. (They meet when she has a street accident outside his office and he brings her up to treat a bruise on her (gasp!) upper leg. This film shows "Mad Men" what's what when the doctor not only lights her cigarette while she's still on the examining table but also fixes her a stiff drink to calm her nerves.) At 111 minutes, this clocks in long for the genre, but the groundwork done in the first reel pays off with a key turn halfway through that propels the story into deep noir territory.

Sheridan sparkles throughout. Nora has nuance to her. She's not a cliched femme fatale; nor is she a standard loose woman ruing another busted romance. (Although you do wonder what she sees in the buttoned-up doc.) Nora comes alive in her interactions with lounge owner Phil Dinardo (a subtle Robert Alda). Both San Francisco and New York get equal billing in authentic street scenes.

The climax is dark and depressing, unrelenting in its punishment of those who sinned. (First, of course, we have to trot out the corny plot twist of the man who's face gets burned beyond recognition and the big reveal of removing the bandages.) In the end, this is a satisfying classic. 

STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940) (D+) - Beyond cartoonish, this one doesn't even amount to mindless campy retro fun in this early example of the genre.

A newspaper reporter (remember those?) is the star witness in the trial of a vagabond caught at the scene of the murder of the owner of a New York diner. The evidence is circumstantial, but the poor clod is convicted. Soon the reporter himself finds himself at the murder scene of a neighbor.

In a nod to the simplicity of the times, the reporter notes to police that both dead men had their throats cut in the same way -- why, it must be the same killer! Could that killer be the creepy homeless guy -- sorry, "bum" -- (over)played by, zoiks, Peter Lorre?

There is no intrigue. The writing is atrocious. You can figure everything out in the first five minutes. The actors (led by the vanilla pairing of the forgettable John McGuire and Margaret Tallichet) are mediocre. For much of the movie McGuire gives us hilarious narration of his character's thoughts, including such pointless observations as "I couldn't hear a thing" while standing outside an apartment door -- no kidding, we can't hear anything either.

The shadows and light are far too exaggerated, as if this were a failed prototype for real noir movies to come. There's nothing interesting to see here, and it feels long even at a paltry 65 minutes.

Life Is Short: "Nymphomaniac: Part I"

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, here, here and here.

There will be no "Nymphomaniac: Part II" for me. One-third of the first one was enough. I can't recall a more clunky, ridiculously written film in recent memory.

Lars von Trier's treatise on fly fishing and casual sex (he may really think they are the same thing) is difficult to watch, not so much for Charlotte Gainsbourg's bruised face as she recalls her rascally youth but for von Trier's hilarious intercutting of discussions of sex and fishing. And for his exploitation of young flesh.

I started fast-forwarding fairly early and pulled the plug after a ham-handed montage of sex scenes featuring skinny little Stacy Martin as young Joe. Would you believe the viewer must endure Christian Slater mumbling in a British accent (an extreme fast-forward reveals him thrashing about in a hospital bed)? Shia LeBeouf mopes around as the love of Joe's life.

This isn't daring or controversial; it's a joke.

Title: NYMPHOMANIAC: PART I
Running Time: 118 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 43 MIN
Portion Watched: 36%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 51 YRS, 7 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 81.2 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: The New York Times crossword puzzle.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 25-1. 
 

R.I.P., Elaine Stritch

We ruminated on her twilight, as depicted in the moving documentary about her from earlier this year. Here's our April post: O, Death.  Here's the NY Times obit: Elaine Stritch, Tart-Tongued Broadway Actress and Singer, Is Dead at 89.

Here she is introducing and singing "I'm Still Here":

Gotcha

With trepidation, we checked in on what the irascible Neil LaBute has been doing. And he's still up to his borderline misogynist tricks, but he's having a little fun. Here are his two most recent efforts:

SOME VELVET MORNING (B) - LaBute writes and directs a two-actor stage play, in which Fred (Stanley Tucci) drops in (luggage and all) on a much younger woman, Velvet (Alice Eve), sparking an extended argument between them for about 84 minutes.

You know that LaBute is up to something here, because he gradually peels back truths about the couple's relationship. She has a gorgeous British accent and looks smashing in a red dress. (Eve was about 30 when this was made.) Fred is old enough to be her father, and in fact, we learn early on that Velvet has shared some intimate moments with Fred's married son.

We assume early on that this is (or was) some sort of regular cash transaction between Fred and Velvet, and LaBute doesn't really try to hide the fact for very long. What transpires shows hints of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?" except much more sedate, more flippantly presented, and bathed in daylight and primary colors.

This is essentially an acting exercise, and if it didn't have the eminently watchable Stanley Tucci in it, it might be torture to sit through. Eve gains momentum as the drama intensifies, and she holds her own with the veteran showman. They find a connection amid the trite coupling of the pathetic older man and the dynamic younger woman. LaBute jerks everyone around -- his actors and his audience -- with his typical emotional sleights of hand.

At the end, LaBute throws in a doozy of a twist. Some will feel hoodwinked and let down by the writer's trick; others will nod and grin, applauding the master dramatist for a well-played turn of the screw. This doesn't amount to great art, but it has its moments, and it's fun to watch two fine actors sink their teeth into a script without chewing any of the spare scenery.

SOME GIRL(S) (2013) (C+) - Here, LaBute (writing only) leans on Adam Brody, 33, no longer just the cute boy from "The O.C." and "Gilmore Girls," to play the alpha male -- on a tour of his exes as he prepares to settle down in marriage. And Brody makes this work somehow, at least for most of the second half of this rattletrap of a scenario.

Brody is the nameless hero, an English professor and writer of barely disguised, mostly autobiographic fiction that recently landed in the New Yorker, so he's on a roll. He hopscotches the country -- Seattle, Boston, L.A. -- tracking down these ex-girlfriends, starting with his high school sweetheart. The first half of the film, however, presents three sluggish episodes with bland ex-girlfriends who all, bizarrely, improbably agree to meet him in his hotel room. (Not that much actually happens; but still, who would agree to meet a former slam at anything more intimate than a coffee shop? Another annoying quirk of the movie: All the women have gender-neutral names, such as Tyler, Alex, Sam, Lindsay and Reggie(!). What is LaBute working out there? It's distracting.)

The first two women are dramatic duds. Then the wonderful Emily Watson shows up as the older lady from a college fling, in an excrutiatingly bad set-up that drowns both actors on the spot. Their scene ends with the tiredest of old sitcom gags -- one actor asking the other to close their eyes and start talking, only to have the first actor sneak out of the room. Oy.

Next up, thankfully, is Zoe Kazan ("Ruby Sparks" and TV's "Bored to Death"), who is delicious as the younger sister of Brody's childhood pal. Her energy rescues the film after the tedium of the first 40 minutes or so. She presents Brody with a challenge, calling him out on his questionable high school behavior (when he was 16 and she was 12), and finally (if you've made it that far), the film gains dimension. She is coy and flirty and vulnerable, and she and Brody just pop off the screen.

Finally, Brody calls on Bobbi (a feisty Kristen Bell from "Veronica Mars"). She lands the most punches of any of his exes, but these are kid gloves everyone's wearing, so we're not too worried about any knockouts. Brody (to extend this metaphor) shows the wear of these long rounds but regains his legs and finally convinces you that he's up to this task.

Regrettably, LaBute comes up with another cheap twist, and this one falls with a thud. We end up bloated with empty calories, taken in by a script that's mostly icing and frosting. Only a clever coda between Brody (he's all grown up!) and a flight attendant patches up the ending. The direction, by TV veteran Daisy von Scherler Mayer, is uninspired, but in her defense, she doesn't have much to work with here.

New to the Queue

Summer heats up:

Coming to the Guild Cinema later this month, Steve James' documentary about Roger Ebert, "Life Itself."

Richard Linklater's epic real-time dramatization of kids growing up over the course of 12 years, "Boyhood."

A road trip in Iceland for a couple of aging American boomers, "Land Ho!"

Joe Swanberg is back, as quick as ever, with a strong cast (including Melanie Lynskey, Anna Kendrick and Lena Dunham) in a brooding holiday film being released in summer, "Happy Christmas."

If only for a glimpse of his wife, Lisa Bonet, the hulking Jason Momoa's Native American drama set in the West, "Road to Paloma."

A thoughtful drama about a teenager running his uncle's Mexican no-tell motel, "The Empty Hours."

A documentary about the minor league Portland Mavericks of the 1970s, "The Battered Bastards of Baseball."

Banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi follows up "This Is Not a Film" with "Closed Curtain."

Conceive Cute

OBVIOUS CHILD (B) - A movie with this many fart and shit jokes could never aspire to a higher grade, so kudos to comedian Jenny Slate for this solid B for her portrayal of a struggling standup comic facing a nagging choice after getting impregnated during a one-night stand.

This understated piece is the feature debut of Gillian Robespierre, fleshing out her 2009 short. In the style of recent vulgar female comedies, this one is mostly just potty-mouthed (much of it in Slate's act), although one woman threatens to take a crap in front of her best pal, and another character literally steps in dog shit on the sidewalk, which is supposed to be hilarious and precious.

That out of the way, Robespierre and Slate have crafted a slyly observed slice of life that yet again explores the day-to-day travails of our favorite granular demographic, 28-year-old white girls from Brooklyn, self-loathing Jew subdivision. And Slate is up to the challenge; she plays well at being messed up and chuckling through the pitfalls of the life of a poor single girl in the big city.

After being dumped (in a bathroom, get it?) by her boyfriend, Donna embarks on the cliched binge drinking and drunk dialing that filmmakers love. She follows that up with a drunken weekend hookup with Max (Jake Lacy), a preppie business-school grad who's totally not her type. It turns out that she's pregnant, and so she schedules an abortion on a date that happens to fall on Valentine's Day.

Slate succeeds in providing nuance to her character, and she seems to gain confidence as the movie progresses, flashing a range of emotions. She has a nervous laugh that helps get her through the day. That reflexive giggle brings to mind Pee-Wee Herman, who could be a distant uncle. She's a sad-sack little sister that you root for. And her humor, as rough as it is, charms.

Weeks after the hook-up, she runs into Max, and she can't bring herself to spill the beans about the potency of his sperm. After a few tries he loses interest, and Donna spirals into depression. You can probably guess the anti-rom-com rest. Slate and Lacy have surprisingly good chemistry, comedically if not romantically, which is sort of the point. The film likely would fall apart without their quality performances.

The supporting cast is strong. We get the requisite sassy gay best pal, fellow stand-up Joey, but at least he's genuinely funny as played by Gabe Liedman (a writer for "Inside Amy Schumer"). Her other pal is the level-headed Nellie (a reversal of roles for the wonderful Gaby Hoffmann, who was an airheaded screw-up in "Crystal Fairy" and TV's "Girls"). Richard Kind is always welcome, and here he finds the right tone as the loving father. David Cross, however, is flat as the club manager who makes the moves on Donna; Robespierre's script lets him down.

Robespierre has a voice, and Slate has talent. Let's see where they go next.

BONUS TRACKS
The cross is in the ballpark, the obvious theme song (with the pure joy of life captured between 3:30 and 4:00):



And this one, which I mistook for P.J. Harvey early in the film. It's Scout Niblett with "Nevada":

Whaddya Know

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN (B+) - Adjust your expectations. You'd think Errol Morris has us set up for a sequel to "The Fog of War," his haunting psychological examination of '60s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, from 2003. But his one-on-one with last decade's secretary of war, Donald Rumsfeld, has less depth and more deft.

Even Rumsfeld's biggest detractors will have to acknowledge that the man has charm, if not much else personality-wise. You get the sense that Morris, the pre-eminent art-house documentarian of his time, set out to make "Fog of War II," but changed game plans when he encountered the ultimate technocrat who makes the former head of Ford and architect of Vietnam look like a flower child. Did Morris actually fall a bit for his subject -- and that impish smile?

Morris has a solid hook: the tens of thousands of casual memos that Rumsfeld issued during a career stretching back to the '60s as a congressman, through the Nixon and Ford administrations (and his first tour of duty as military secretary) and his reign during the second Bush presidency overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They were known as snowflakes (because they were ubiquitous and dispatched on white paper), giving Morris a lazy visual metaphor that he overuses. The director gets his subject to read the memos on camera, providing a revealing running commentary.

Rumsfeld was a congenital rule-follower. One memo verbally slaps Condoleezza Rice for violating the chain of command and the Chinese wall between National Security and Defense. He obsesses over the definitions of words ("terrorism," "victory," "several" (!)) although he insists on using the "Pentagon dictionary," whatever that is. The disorganization of the Ford White House irritated him. Even his marriage proposal, which he says was executed "imperfectly," had a rational basis in simply not wanting another man to beat him to the hand of a good woman. Only once does Rumsfeld show emotion (relating the story of a miraculous recovery by a wounded fighter at Walter Reed), and you get the undeniable impression that it's a manufactured moment.

Morris digs out fascinating little nuggets, like a tape of Nixon telling Haldeman and Kissinger to "dump" the smug opportunist. He uses a Tennessee Ernie Ford Christmas song to quaintly mark the fall of Saigon, while the 9/11 attacks are conveyed through an image amid the clouds while we hear the recording of air-traffic control vainly requesting a reply from the cockpit of American 11. (Compare that with the devastating images of the firebombing of Japan from "Fog of War." Are we pulling punches here?)

Rumsfeld, ever the good soldier, rarely flinches or breaks format. He refuses to acknowledge that any American would ever have gotten the impression from the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to 9/11. He believes in the power of reason and intellectual rigor to solve problems, though he acknowledges the folly of trying to account for every potential move the enemy can make. (He's partial to the idea of "failure of imagination.") Whereas McNamara practically melted into a puddle of guilt before the camera, Rumsfeld is emboldened by the verbal jousting match here (certain that he'll emerge victorious, if only on points). Self-described as "cool, measured," there is not a jot of remorse on display; he has the cockiness of the privileged, the confidence of an Ivy League coxswain -- an arrogant man who knows that history is an imperfect social science and will never trip him up.

A healthy competition develops between the two men. Rumsfeld gloats over his own perceived debating victory when rebutting Morris' characterization of the Department of Justice's terror memos. (And for extra credit, he claims he "never read them. I'm not a lawyer; what would I know?") Morris gets his own jab in, after Rumsfeld slanders Hussein as a vainglorious dictator surrounded by his own image in pictures and statues, the mad man believing his own PR and becoming a caricature. "He was living his image of himself, which was pretend," Rumsfeld scolds. Morris then silently holds the camera on Rumsfeld, refusing to cut away as the words echo in our ears. The suggestion is that Morris is reflecting that comment back on Rumsfeld himself. It's a juvenile staring contest. Eventually Rumsfeld blinks. Finally: Cut!

But Morris saves his best shot for last. After allowing Rumsfeld to make his own case for autocratic infallibility, Morris picks apart one of the greatest hits from Rummy's wartime burlesque show before the media -- the famous "known knowns / unknown unknowns" shtick. After hearing it echo a few times throughout the film, you'll probably notice that Rumsfeld's interpretation of the phrase "unknown knowns" is flawed. How does Rumsfeld handle his apparent miscue when confronted? Probably as you'd expect him to.

Evenin', all!

ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA (B+) - I toyed with giving this a higher grade, but as personally satisfying as this Steve Coogan farce is, I realize that it's not a great comedy. If this low-key movie doesn't hit a nerve, you might not make it past the first reel.

Coogan is one of the funniest men on the planet, and he's been doing his buffoonish TV/radio character for a long time, mainly on British television. I've watched maybe one season of the turn-of -the-millennium hit "I'm Alan Partridge," so I'm certainly not a superfan. I'm more attuned to Coogan's film output, including "The Trip," "Tristram Shandy," "24-Hour Party People," "The Look of Love" and "Philomena." He is the master of understatement, which will lead many to dismiss this as a harmless trifle, not realizing that it is a quietly hilarious example of classic British humor.

From the material and the delivery, I was able to draw a line backward from Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright ("Shaun of the Dead"), Ricky Gervais (the original "Office"), Jennifer Saunders ("Absolutely Fabulous" with Joanna Lumley) and back all the way to Benny Hill. That's a separate, parallel track from the one that runs from the more manic Goonies, through Monty Python and the Young Ones, etal. And that's certainly a whole different beast than the state of American movie comedy of the trash-talking Apatow school.

Here, Alan Partridge is doing a morning show with a wacky sidekick, and it comes off as corny and anachronistic as that format we're familiar with. (His middle-of-the-road caller-baiting banter involves topics such as "Have you ever met a genuinely clever bus driver?" coming out of ancient songs by the likes of "soft-rock cocaine enthusiasts Fleetwood Mac." For those who grew up in Chicago, it brings to mind WGN's Wally Phillips, the hero to housewives of the '60s and '70s.) The plot is simple: The radio station is being bought by some nasty new owners and Alan fears for his job. In a totally selfish move, he serves up his friend Pat, an even hokier late-night host who flips out upon being fired and takes his colleagues at the station hostage. The police conscript Alan to infiltrate the scene and establish a communications link with Pat.

What ensues involves more hijinks than danger.  Alan gets by with an anachronistic mop of hair and a slightly above average wit. That's the appeal here. Alan Partridge is not a superstar, he's not hilarious, he's not even a raging egomaniac. He's a mildly successful, humorous chap who fancies himself a bit of a player. As a result, he's rarely laugh-out-loud funny; he gets by on some wordplay, a good deal of awkward interaction with others and impeccable back-of-the-beat timing.

It's the difference between the broader slapstick that Benny Hill traded in vs. Hill's more quietly cerebral stuff -- him misinterpreting someone's use of the words "warlocks" or "Balkans" as mild oaths, or his adding a simple comma to a sentence that allows a lovely airhead to get a laugh with the line, "What's this thing called, love?" Here, I could try to repeat some of the best lines from the film, but they'll thud on the printed page (or screen).  Here's one from his radio banter: "Never, ever criticize Muslims. Christians only. (long beat) And sometimes Jews."

Eh, you have to be there. You have to sit and appreciate the sly long-game being played by Coogan and crew. I did, and I had a larf.

R.I.P., Paul Mazursky

When I think of Paul Mazursky, who died yesterday at 84, I first call to mind one of the wonderful lost films of the 1980s, "Tempest," his cynical take on Shakespeare with a magical cast. John Cassavetes is at the top of his game as Phillip Dimitrius, a businessman who shucks it all for a Greek island where he wields fantastical Marlin-like powers and battles a serious mid-life crisis.

Mazursky wrote and/or directed some of the more thoughtful films of the past generation: "Harry and Tonto," "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" and "An Unmarried Woman." He started with lighter TV fare, penning the pilot to "The Monkees" with his writing partner. His heyday ran from the late '60s to the mid-'80s. Richard Corliss said that Mazursky was:

likely to be remembered as the filmmaker of the seventies. . . . No screenwriter has probed so deep under the pampered skin of this fascinating, maligned decade; no director has so successfully mined it for home-truth humor and quirky revelations.

Here is a short TV ad for "Tempest" (I couldn't find a full trailer):



Here's a short clip with wife Gena Rowlands and his daughter in the movie, Molly Ringwald in her debut role (and a small part for Mazursky himself):



I like the scene's generational bookends of Guy Lombardo and John Travolta. One of my favorite movie scenes ever is of Ringwald and a relatively young Susan Sarandon (as Phillip's utopian mistress) frolicking in the water while singing "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" And Mazursky wields his soundtrack skills in a scene featuring Kalibanos and his goats -- Raul Julia, who often threatens to steal the movie:



"Tempest" was a secret highlight of a fine movie career.