Soundtrack of Your Life: Squeeze Box

An occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems. 

Date: 27 March 2015, 11:35 a.m.
Place: Santa Fe Plaza
Song:  "World Without Love"
Artist: Local accordion player (original artist Peter and Gordon)
Irony Matrix: 8 out of 10
Comment: Random moment of bliss. One of my favorite songs emanating from the voice and accordion that usually entertain Santa Fe tourists with Tex-Mex, rancheras and Italian love songs. "I don't care what they say, I won't stay in a world without love."

Here's the original hit version of the Paul McCartney song from 1964:

Soundtrack of Your Life: Deep Cover

An occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems. 

Date: 26 March 2015, 2 to 3 p.m.
Place: 2013 Honda Civic driving from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, N.M.
Song:  Entire album: "Key Lime Pie"
Artist: Camper Van Beethoven
Irony Matrix: 0.6 out of 10
Comment: We admit that there's virtually nothing ironic about the hero of this story buffing up the 1989 CD release from alt-freaksters Camper Van Beethoven at the height of their accessibility. I had a random hankering for "Pictures of Matchstick Men," prompted, I think, by a channel flip past a PBS pledge-driving airing of yet another '60s nostalgia-fest. As soon as the laser dropped on the first track, the Middle Eastern-tinged "Opening Theme," the music sounded both familiar and fresh. Even on factory speakers the audio was unbelievably crisp and clear. Then came the litany of songs that had started to leak from my memory, reinstated just in time. This is the second full LP by David Lowery (Cracker) and his ragtag pals. It is produced by Dennis Herring and engineered by Csaba Petocz (they would team up again two years later for another near-masterpiece from the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, Throwing Muses' "The Real Ramona"). "Sweethearts" steals a riff and mood from Bob Dylan's "Slow Train" album. Morgan Fichter's violin recalls Dylan's "Desire"/Rolling Thunder era, and it is that violin that memorably kicks off the penultimate track, "Matchstick Men," indelibly recorded pristinely with the hollow sound of the violin's body high in the mix, as if the instrument were turned inside-out, before the guitars come crashing in. (Video # 1, below.) This is what digital was invented for. Trippy psychedelia crashes to Earth with a muscular thud. On the other end of the spectrum, the shambling lyrics of "When I Win the Lottery" (#2), seguing into the hypnotic drone of "(I Was Born in a) Laundromat," celebrating the Queen of the Trailer Park. Where was I in 1989? Staying up a little late on Sundays, before the big workday watching "120 Minutes" on MTV and swooning over that "Matchstick Men" video. Midpoint: "June," hinting at an echo of the drone of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." Then "All Her Favorite Fruit" planting the seeds for Cracker's alt-epic "Euro Trash Girl."  The suspense kept building. Is "Matchstick Men" next? No? How about next? And soon the slow-building Final Four: "Flowers" ("by the drunken river, flowers growing ... out of my bones," intoned through Lowry's sinuses). And the best Guided by Voices song that Bob Pollard didn't write, with "Revolver" guitar slashes: a compact 2:46, "The Human Press of Days." (#3) The stop and start. Fichter's weepy violin. The martial drumbeat. All "to resist the dull existence of [pause] gravity!" Fiddle, crash, bang, thump, "all I ever see is them and you." Coda. "Come On Darkness." It all returns. It clicks and snaps back into place.

BONUS TRACKS#1: The great cover song:



#2: Whatcha gonna do?



#3: What did it mean to fly?

One-Liners: Paranoia

KILL THE MESSENGER (B+) - Jeremy Renner is fantastic in this above-average journalistic thriller based on the true story of Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury-News reporter who broke the story in the 1990s about the CIA's connections to Nicaraguan drug dealers' crack trade in America's inner cities.

Director Michael Cuesta ("L.I.E.," TV's "Homeland") brings his sure hand and knack for efficient storytelling to the tragic story of a man's career and life unraveling. Webb's series, "Dark Alliance," created a stir and an almost immediate backlash, as his reporting of the CIA's role -- which probably could have used a few more solid sources -- got twisted into a horror story of government agents handing out crack on playgrounds.

The essential facts of Webb's reporting were borne out, but the immediate effect was a lethal combination: a secret government agency seeking retribution for being outed, and establishment newspapers (L.A. Times, New York Times, Washington Post) looking to tear down an upstart by trying to poke holes in the reporting.

The newsroom depictions are a bit shaky at times, but Oliver Platt is around to lend some Lou Grant gravitas to the proceedings. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Webb's younger editor, Rosemarie DeWitt flounders as the loyal wife, and Paz Vega is rather creepy as Coral Baca, the mystery woman who tips off Webb (or is she setting him up?).

But it's Renner who not only holds this together but lifts it up above movie-of-the-week fare. He brings nuance to the depiction of a man driven to commit pure journalism but getting in way over his head. The domino effect on his career (which never recovered), his family, his sanity and eventually his health makes for compelling drama and a pretty good newspaper thriller.

COHERENCE (B-minus) - This ironically titled film brings to mind "Primer" or "The One I Love" if it were directed by Joe Swanberg on the fly.

Instead, it was created by writer/director James Ward Byrkit (who wrote "Rango"), and he injects this with loads of style, with snappy, overlapping dialogue that suggests a strong ensemble performance. The story: Four couples gather for dinner on an ominous evening in which a comet is scheduled to pass overhead. When the celestial event occurs, the lights go out, and the dinner guests explore the neighborhood, finding that one house two blocks away is the only one still lit up. Two of their crew goes to explore. When they finally return, they report that a group of doppelgangers exists in the other house. They bring back a box full of clues, including pictures of all the guests.

Things get more convoluted from there. Soon we're not sure which version of each character we're seeing. Horror tropes abound, and the sci-fi physics tricks started to make my brain hurt. But I truly wanted to stick around to see how it turned out; I was hooked.

 The cast really tries to sell this. The familiar face is Nicholas Brendon (Xander from "Buffy"), and the star is TV regular Emily Baldoni as Em, whose ex is one of the guests, accompanied by his saucy new girlfriend (Lauren Maher). Baldoni's go-to move is to run her fingers through her dirty blond hair. Others show some chops and provide depth to their individual characters.

Some might pick apart the narrative as ridiculous. If you can resist that, you'll be rewarded with a slick trifle.

Too New for the Queue

Thanks to the New York Times and the New Yorker, we get a good rundown of the festival New Directors/New Films, running through March 29 in Manhattan. Here are the titles that caught our eye:

• DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL - Marielle Heller scrapes for something new in the coming-of-age genre, this one about a curious, adventurous 15-year-old. Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgard play mother and mom's boyfriend. 
• THE CREATION OF MEANING - A pensive story of a sheep herder in a remote area of Tuscany, on the former site of a WWII battle.
• K - From producer Jia Zhang-ke, a Mongolian version of Franz Kafka's "Castle." 
• TIRED MOONLIGHT - A debut from a Kalispell, Mont., woman, filmed in her hometown with mostly amateur actors and the reliable Alex Karpovsky. This promises to be visually arresting.
• WHITE GOD - This Cannes leftover is coming to Albuquerque in April. A 13-year-old Hungarian girl deals with a revolt by the town's dogs.
• DOG LADY - More dogs. A year in the life of a woman and her four pals in Buenos Aires.
• CHRISTMAS, AGAIN - A "comic portrait of urban loneliness," about a man selling Christmas trees on the streets of New York. Sounds like it might have a "Man Push Cart" feel.
• ENTERTAINMENT - We didn't care for Rick Alverson's "The Comedy," but this new one, about a bad comedian, looks entertainingly disturbing.

The Times will offer a second preview next week.
 

Experimental

We will miss this year's 10th Experiments in Cinema out of UNM in April, but this past week, the group curated a program of the "very best" of past experiments. Here are the best of the very best:

Taylor Lane's six-minute "Places Change" features his artwork and singing as he narrates the story of losing touch with his childhood home. It is wonderfully paced and quite touching. Good luck finding any record of it online.

This mashup from Jodie Mack, "Unsubscribe #4: The Saddest Song in the World," has pop music and visual pop:



Next is a mesmerizing meditation on memory, from an elder's perspective, "828 Millionen: Momente der Zeit," by Julia Tyrolt. It's presented visually in a Polaroid triptych. Alas, this version doesn't have subtitles:



Also worth keeping an eye out for: Hannah Hollander's polemic about being forced to cover up in the Arab world, "Making an Arab Girl." No luck tracking that one down online, either.

Experiments in Cinema runs April 15 to 19. Also brought to you by Basement Films.
 

Now & Then: Retro Euro Trash

We look at Brit auteur Peter Strickland's recent release and his previous effort:

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (C+) - Peter Strickland is a fussy little fetishist.

I love the IMDb one-line synopsis of this film: "A woman who studies butterflies and moths tests the limits of her relationship with her lover." Yep, that just about covers it.

Except it's not really clear who is driving the relationship between Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna); who's the submissive and who's the dominant one? Evelyn demands to be treated like a submissive, actually penning scripts for Cynthia to follow and expressing disappointment when Cynthia struggles to keep up the facade.

At times I wondered whether this was one big joke by Strickland. There are times when he's obviously going for dry, kitschy humor, and he succeeds. (He intersperses scenes of boring lectures by Cynthia and others, about bugs mostly, and among those in the all-female crowd is a mannequin.) But most folks will take this seriously. And if you approach it that way, here, too, Strickland is sometimes successful.

Stripped of its bygone-era setting and elaborate sets and costumes -- and its general homage to '70s European soft-core porn typified by "Emmanuelle" -- this is a love story, a familiar one in which the couple have been together so long that they struggle to find fresh ways to interact. Even the kinky ones get bored, apparently.

Like in his previous effort (below), repetition is some sort of theme here. For some reason, we see Cynthia drain a glass of water six times. To what end? Is she thirsting for something that Evelyn can't give her?

The film is painfully aware of its precious setting, but it's dragged down by its devotion to its euro-trash forebears. It all feels as suffocating as sleeping in a locked trunk each night.

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012) (C-minus) - This '70s period piece drones on for a little over an hour and then loses its marbles in the final 20 minutes. The trick is making it to those final 20 minutes.

Purportedly a psychological thriller, it stars Toby Jones as a Brit who arrives for work at a sound studio in Italy, assisting with voice-over dubs and foley work. But something's not right. The eccentric director is mostly absent, and when he is around he's abusive, especially to the sexy women who are hired mainly to scream at various pitches to replicate the visual horrors being inflicted on the witches featured in the movie-within-a-movie, "The Equestrian Vortex."

Strickland is all about style over substance. He essentially forgets to craft an actual story; the narrative here would fit comfortably in a film short. Whether to pad things out or because he's enamored of his own technical and aesthetic flourishes, he repeats images and dialogue over and over. I lost count of the number of times the studio's red "Silenzio" sign (the equivalent of the do-not-enter "On Air" sign) flashes ominously. Strickland's camera lovingly luxuriates over the knobs and dials throughout the studio.

Those final 20 minutes provide a classic horror-film twist. Jones's perplexed shlub snaps out of his stupor, finally, and gets sucked into the insanity. As payoffs go, it's too little too late.

Who is this movie for? Men who have a fetish for screaming Italian women? Silenzio, already!

Twice Upon a Time in Anatolia

WINTER SLEEP (B+) - Nobody chronicles the slow demise of relationships like Nuri Bilge Ceylan. And like his masterpiece, "Climates," this one is a slow slog toward a frigid winter prison for a husband and wife.

This talky drama clocks in at three and a quarter hours, which is parceled out in well-defined acts that make the challenge of watching it manageable. This may be an indulgence, but Ceylan knows how to pace a movie.

Haluk Bilginer stars as Aydin, a wealthy hotelier and landlord to other properties in a quaint historic town in the Anatolian steppes of Turkey.  Aydin, who is around 60, is a gruff, arrogant former actor now a local columnist and would-be theater historian. His wife, Nihal (Melisa Sozen), is half his age and fed up with his boorish behavior, including his harping and second-guessing over her role in charity work for local schools. Aydin's sarcastic sister, Necla (Demet Akbag), also lives at the hotel and hangs out with Aydin in his work studio, where she often second-guesses her divorce.

Ceylan begins his story with a protracted introduction: a sullen boy tosses a rock at the pickup truck carrying Aydin and his employee Hidayet, breaking the passenger-side window. The kid is upset because Aydin had sicced collection-agency goons on the kid and his parents, Aydin's tenants. Hidayet and Aydin grab the boy and bring him home, confronting the father, troubled Ismail (Nejat Isler). The father's brother, Hamdi (Serhat Mustafa Kilic), arrives to defuse the situation. Hamdi, a man of the cloth, will become a central figure in the narrative, a cheerful man hoping to keep a roof over the family's head.

Ceylan spends the second hour on three intense 20-minute conversations, the first between Aydin and his sister, and the second and third between Aydin and Nihal, who is reprimanded for having the temerity to invite members of her charity committee to Aydin's hotel for a meeting. The conversations peel back layers, revealing the various strengths and weaknesses of each character and the power dynamics to each relationship.

Aydin is an emotional bully, using his wealth to try to infantalize his wife and sister. He reminded me of Ian McShane's character on HBO's "Deadwood," both with a physical resemblance and a similar swagger. Nihal, the wife, has the faraway doe-eyed stare of Jane Adams ("Hung") and a slump-shouldered exhaustion. As the snow finally starts to fall and alcohol begins to flow, Aydin's bravado is rattled, as an emotional chill sets in.

The Dark Side

Exploring the genocidal side of humanity:

TIMBUKTU (A-minus) - So what is it like to live under Sharia rule? Abderrahmane Sissako (who also explored the theme of justice in 2006's "Bamako") takes a shot with this slow, affecting drama about the takeover of the famed city in Mali.

For convenience, here's an efficient plot summary from IMdB: "Not far from the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, proud cattle herder Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed aka Pino) lives peacefully in the dunes with his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), his daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and Issan (Mehdi Ag Mohamed), their twelve-year-old shepherd. In town, the people suffer, powerless, from the regime of terror imposed by the Jihadists determined to control their faith. Music, laughter, cigarettes, even soccer have been banned. The women have become shadows but resist with dignity. Every day, the new improvised courts issue tragic and absurd sentences. Kidane and his family are being spared the chaos that prevails in Timbuktu. But their destiny changes abruptly."

Rather than depict the new leaders as hooded radical monsters, Sassako portrays them as almost bumbling yokels who just happen to be in charge. Violence is not always apparent. Some of the leaders are -- no surprise -- revealed to be hypocrites when it comes to complying with Sharia law.

After a dispute with a fisherman, Kidane ends up in the arms of the Islamist justice system. He is consigned to his fate, but there is hope that he might be forgiven and spared a harsh penalty.

Sissako finds beauty both in nature and in some tender human interactions amid the crackdown by the extremists. A long shot of Kidane slowly crossing a shallow stream is breathtaking as it wordlessly unfolds.

This is not as relentlessly bleak as "Osama (2003)," which was unflinching in its portrayal of the misogynistic horrors inflicted in Afghanistan by the Taliban. "Timbuktu" veers more toward the banality of evil. And it is both lovely and compelling in its storytelling.

WATCHERS OF THE SKY (A-minus) - Director Edet Belzberg's primer on genocide is contemplative and beautifully told through profiles of the leading voices for international justice of the past century.

The main character is Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" after fleeing Poland during the Nazi invasion and who fought diligently during and just after the war to have the crime recognized by world leaders, succeeding before the United Nations in 1948. (He had previously failed to have the crime of barbarity recognized by the League of Nations.) Belzberg employs Lemkin's journals to haunting effect, though the constant stream of words on the screen (both in his handwriting and typed out) can be a burden on the viewer who also has to navigate a lot of subtitles. Lemkin throughout is both heroic and pathetic; he lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust, and he died neglected at age 59. His voice haunts throughout. A diary entry from Poland reads: "How strange that I was among the mourners and the dead. To feel the body alive while the soul was being carried to the grave." He explains his mission in simple terms: "I said to myself, being a lawyer I'm going to do something about it."

We also get to know Benjamin Ferencz, a prosecutor at Nuremburg. Ferencz is determined but amiable. His touching monologue at the end of the film explains the title. (The Hungarian is apparently still alive at age 95.) Belzberg also hangs with Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who fought against the deadly Argentine government in the 1970s and most recently was lead prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. The ostensible narrator for much of the film is Samantha Power, who was  a journalist in the former Yugoslavia, won a Pulitzer for her treatise on genocide and now serves as President Obama's ambassador to the United Nations at age 44.

Belzberg bookends her narrative with the story of Emmanuel Uwurukundo, a survivor of the incomprehensible slaughter in Rwanda in the 1990s. Uwurukundo watched family members get hacked to death. (Up to a million people, about a fifth of the nation's population, were killed in just a three-month period in 1994, as the Hutus sought to wipe out the Tutsis.)

Belzberg takes her time (a full two hours) depicting the absolute horrors of human civilization while quietly celebrating the dignity with which these journalists and lawyers and victims strive for a recognition of human dignity. She digs deep into the video archives; not only do we see Lemkin on a TV talk show in the '40s and Ferencz arguing to the court at Nuremburg, but there's Ratko Mladic, apparently captured by a friendly camcorder, waltzing into Srebrenica with his thugs, separating out the women and girls and then executing the men and boys.

There is no dearth of material for this topic, starting with the slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey during World War I, and continuing a century later with the present-day atrocities in Darfur (Sudan) and Syria, both of whose leaders remain in power. In the battle for human existence, the dark side still seems to be winning. This film is mournful and melancholy but not without a glimmer of light, which is one reason to look up to the sky for succor.

New to the Queue

Warming up to 2015 ...

Our gal Sophia Takal stars in a quirky retro murder mystery, "Wild Canaries."

A drama with echoes of "The Sweet Hereafter," the melancholy debut "Bluebird."

A documentary about Amazing Randi, the debunker, "An Honest Liar."

The quirky comedy about a low-rent con man, "Buzzard."

A Bulgarian melodrama about one woman's struggles with avoiding poverty, "The Lesson."

Surf's Down

Brian Carman was 17 when he co-wrote "Pipeline" with fellow Chantays member Bob Spickard. That's according to Carman's obit in the L.A. Times.

Carman was 69 when he died this week. Here's an excuse to show the fresh-faced young men making an odd appearance on "The Lawrence Welk Show," of all places, pantomiming to the (band's only) hit surf tune, to the consternation of the polka-heads in the house band. The iconic song was, Welk noted at the time (1962), "very, very popular with the young folks throughout the nation."

R.I.P, Albert Maysles

Albert Maysles, who along with his brother David not only created memorable documentaries but also helped pioneer the American brand of cinema verite, is dead at 88. Here is a fine obit from the Hollywood Reporter. He and his brother trained their focus on the Beatles, Vladimir Horowitz, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando and countless other less famous folks.

With their handheld camera and crude recording equipment, the Maysles brothers emerged in the 1960s as sharp observers of the human condition. They shunned the traditional interview format in favor of fly-on-the-wall realism. Albert once told the New York Times, "Making a film isn’t finding the answer to a question; it’s trying to capture life as it is.”

"Salesman" is a fascinating profile of the dying breed of door-to-door salesmen.



Two years later they achieved widespread recognition with "Gimme Shelter," the chronicle of the fateful Rolling Stones concert at Altamont. They reached their peak in 1975 with the searing portrait of a heartbreaking pair of eccentrics: elderly Edith Bouvier Beale and her middle-aged daughter, "Little Edie." Here is a trailer for "Grey Gardens":



Their 1974 footage of Ali and George Foreman was used in the memorable 1996 documentary "When We Were Kings."  David died in 1987 at age 55.

BONUS TRACK
Here is "Grey Gardens" in full:

Doc Watch

THE OVERNIGHTERS (A-minus) - This churning snapshot of a wayward ministry should be added to our list of top documentaries of 2014. It is a riveting morality tale and a minor tragedy.

Pastor Jay Reinke is on a mission in Williston, North Dakota -- with the explosion of men drawn to the booming oil fields (and the rise of fracking), many of them have checkered pasts and arrive without a place to stay. Reinke turns his church and its parking lot into a dormitory. Neighbors, parishioners and his board of directors keep their distance, and from the start Reinke can count on little support. Even his wife and kids seem to go through the motions of making the project a success. Reinke presses on through sheer force of will bordering on obsession

Williston -- the one town that survived the Great Recession unscathed -- attracts both honest laborers and ne'er-do-wells as if it were California in 1849. Men from all corners leave families behind to descend on Williston in search of a paycheck that could easily crack six figures. Reinke helps them polish their employment skills while infusing them with the holy spirit.

However, the town doesn't have the patience for the rehabilitation process, and it treats the influx of laborers like a rat infestation. The city council starts cracking down on perceived zoning infractions. And when Reinke goes a step too far in harboring a sex offender, the local newspaper starts sniffing around (tipped off by a disgruntled Overnighter).

Suddenly the pastor's world starts to unravel. A huge reveal in the final 20 minutes is not hard to predict, but it packs a wallop nonetheless. A wrenching scene between Reinke and Alan Mezo, an ex-con who rose to the job of right-hand man while struggling to maintain his sobriety, is drenched in subtext.

Writer/director Jesse Moss doesn't make a misstep in 102 minutes. Moss was a producer on a documentary about civil-rights lawyer William Kunstler and directed "Full Battle Rattle" in 2008 about the Army's Iraq simulation in the Mojave Desert. Here he is confident and in command of his subject. You can tell from the start that not everything is kosher with Pastor Reinke; Moss hangs on for a rough ride. But he doesn't forget to pause to record the humanity of many of the troubled men Reinke sought to save while all those around him sought to drive them away. 

PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (2012) (B+) - A middle-aged documentarian, appalled and amazed by his slacker video-obsessed teen son, reconnects with his old mojo and retraces his own youthful journeys.

Give this 20 minutes. If you're hooked, you're hooked; otherwise, you might be bored by one man's struggles with fatherhood and the slog of aging. Ross McElwee is about 60 and feeling perplexed about son Adrian's general moodiness punctuated with bursts of creativity. Archival footage of Adrian as an innocent boy clashes with new images of a young man searching for an identity, mostly by staring at a screen.

This pushes Ross into such a reverie that he returns to the small French town that he lived in during a college dropout year. He looks for the photographer he worked for, the French woman he dated. But more poignantly he is searching for himself, both the 20-year-old who journaled feverishly and the older man reconciling his life choices.

McElwee has chops as a storyteller, and it's to his credit that he doesn't wallow in nostalgia or disappear into his own navel. He uses callbacks effectively, and he curates his old photos and edits this film with precision. Thankfully, Adrian and his Go-Pro are sidelined for most of the second half of the film.

McElwee has a weak voice -- he sounds like George Will with a cold -- which can be a distraction. But it's also cute to hear him valiantly butcher the French language throughout. His hosts in St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany tolerate it sweetly. 

BONUS TRACK
The closing song in "The Overnighters," from Steve Earle, "Lonely Are the Free":

Sincerely Yours, a Middle-Aged White Guy*

DEAR WHITE PEOPLE (C-minus) - Take an early-career Spike Lee script, ship it off to the John Hughes factory to apply several layers of youthful sap, and then place it in the hands of snooty Whit Stillman to put a final coat of highbrow sheen. Then you'd have the earnest mess that is "Dear White People."

Justin Simien, in his debut as a writer/director, has a lot of ideas to share, and his premise is strong: black students chafe at the "Animal House" stuffiness of the ingrained white culture at an Ivy League school. They are pushed by the ironically named Sam White (Tessa Thompson), a consciousness-raising young woman who hosts a radio show where she launches provocations aimed at white folks' misconceptions about black culture. Her resemblance to Lisa Bonet does not go unmentioned here, and her mixed-race heritage pushes a theme that borrows heavily from Lee's "Jungle Fever" and "School Daze."

Sam sharply rationalizes her class treatise on "Gremlins," which argued that it's a metaphor for suburban whites' fears of black neighbors: "The gremlins are loud, talk in slang, are addicted to fried chicken and freak out when you get their hair wet." While that's a good line, Simien's script is overstuffed with fussed-over zingers and rants. When Sam and Gabe (Justin Dobies) banter in rapid-fire fashion while walking through campus, you expect the actors to pause to catch their breath during the olympic line readings. Other dialogue comes off as Simien's barely disguised lectures.

The elders -- Dennis Haysbert as the dean of students who is more qualified but must play second fiddle to the white university president (Peter Syvertsen, missing only a mustache to twirl) -- are cardboard cut-outs. Each has a son at the school, and it strains credulity to think that the young men would act the way they do here considering the position their fathers hold.

Most of the actors look ridiculously old to pass as college students. Among those pushing 30 include Brandon P. Bell as Troy, Kyle Gallner as the snotty frat leader, Marque Richardson as the man pining for Sam, and Teyonah Parris (Dawn from "Mad Men") as Coco, a wannabe provocateur via her video blog. Every main character is also distractingly good-looking. The best part of the movie is age-appropriate Tyler James Williams (the child star of "Everybody Hates Chris") as Lionel, the quietly subversive budding journalist with the giant retro fro, whose homosexuality is meant to make him an afterthought in the battle over race. Without Williams, this would be mostly unwatchable.

The plot eventually devolves into a messy showdown between the black and white students over a "black-themed" party held at a white house. It says a lot that the party (and the reaction to it) seems ridiculously far-fetched even though it is ripped faithfully from actual recent events at schools across the nation. It's hard to tell if Simien is trying too hard in his freshman effort or whether he just isn't very good at telling a story. We'll find out after his next outing.


* - I'm certainly open to the idea that I'm too old and white to appreciate this film. I'm a little concerned about my recent attempts to appreciate black culture on film. I walked out of "12 Years a Slave," dozed during "Selma" and squirmed a lot during "Dear White People."  If it turns out that I am hopelessly out of touch, that's OK. Just go on without me. You'll have to someday anyway.