New to the Queue

Under the radar ...

Taissa Farmiga might be enough to get us to someday rent the horror spoof "The Final Girls."

The rapper Rhymefest searches out his roots in Chicago in the documentary "In My Father's House."

Where did you spend the '90? I was in Tower Records most of that time, so I'm partial to a documentary about the mega-music store, "All Things Must Pass."

A one-hour documentary set on the grungy corner of 125th and Lexington in New York, "Field Niggas."

From 1988, Agnes Varda's biography of the iconic Jane Birkin, "Jane B. Par Agnes V."

Despite the red flags, Lenny Abrahamson ("Frank") and Brie Larson ("Short Term 12") draw us to the mother-son drama "Room."

Chilean Patricio Guzman follows up the haunting "Nostalgia for the Light" with another rumination, "The Pearl Button."

Sebastian Silva ("The Maid," "Crystal Fairy") has enough of a track record to draw us to his latest oddity (featuring Kristen Wiig), "Nasty Baby."

BONUS TRACK
Wiig spoofs her status as wacky comedian turned dramatic indie actress, with a trailer for "Crying in a Sweater":

Kristen Wiig - "Crying in a Sweater" - JKL from Jon Kimmel on Vimeo.
  

Doc Watch: Funny as a Heart Attack

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD (B+) - Ah, nostalgia. Submit, and you'll be rewarded.

This buoyant documentary chronicles the origins of the National Lampoon, which birthed a comedy movement in the final quarter of the 20th century. (They're the reason we still must put up with the 41st season of "Saturday Night Live" and an elderly Bill Murray remaking "Stripes" in Afghanistan.)

National Lampoon, an offshoot of the stuffy Harvard Lampoon, represented a raunchy coming-of-age for baby boomers in the late 1960s. Through incredible talent and sly marketing, a vulgar, sophomoric magazine quickly grew into a comedy industry -- spreading to radio, record albums, live theater, television and movies. Some of the greatest comic minds and performers passed through its halls. At their best, they took on the establishment, and they dared to take humor to the darkest reaches of the human mind.

Director Douglas Tirola brings great energy to the project and captures the spirit of the times and the personalities behind the industry. In addition to assembling a bevy of alums reminiscing, Tirola splashes gag after gag on the screen, each one more blasphemous than the one before it. The irreverence is balanced by a fairly respectful tribute to the comedy legends who burned hot and died too young -- magazine co-founder Doug Kenney (along with the enigmatic Henry Beard), "SNL" megastar John Belushi, and the insurgent genius Michael O'Donoghue.

The principals don't shy away from their foibles as well as their successes. They did too many drugs, made some questionable business decisions, and didn't always treat each other well. But the impressive cast here has a grand time celebrating their accomplishments. Directors John Landis ("Animal House," etal.) and Ivan Reitman come off as the sensible big brothers. Anne Beatts admits sleeping her way onto the staff. "Simpsons" rascals Al Jean and Mike Reiss tell great stories. Movie alums Kevin Bacon, Tim Mattheson and Beverly D'Angelo come off as thrilled to have been a part of the late '70s and early '80s run. Chevy Chase gets downright morose about his old pal Kenney (and tells a few too many you-had-to-be-there anecdotes). Judd Apatow hogs too much screen time. Other bit players remind you of how deep the roster went.

And then there are the clips. The bits definitely reek of a bygone era (Drugs! Boobs!), but much of the humor holds up. To think that a recording session could include Murray, Ramis, Flaherty, Radner -- just another day at the office. We're reminded of Christopher Guest's musical mimicry.  Tony Hendra is good at putting it all in perspective.

This is just a load of fun. It helps if you once were a high school student who memorized entire scenes from "Caddyshack," but that should not be required to appreciate the motley crew that upended the old order and eventually settled in as the comedy establi

FED UP (C+) - Katie Couric puts on her adult journalist cap and produces and narrates this glancing analysis of the menace that is the American diet. Four stars for trying to get our attention and urge us to change our diets. But too much of this goes down like empty calories.

Director Stephanie Soechtig treads a lot of familiar ground in workmanlike fashion. The filmmakers pinpoint the late 1970s as a key turning point in our culture's approach to diet. It's when the low-fat fads took hold and led to the proliferation of added sugar (and such variations as high-fructose corn syrup) to a lot of products. We now are headed down a road toward an epidemic of chronic obesity.

Corporate America also takes it on the chin here. They are seen throwing their weight around, blocking legislation and attempts by administrative agencies to address the issue. Even Michelle Obama suffers from some snark, as it's suggested (respectfully) that she buckled under corporate pressure and shifted her "Let's Move" focus from fresh vegetables to physical fitness.

The filmmakers try to humanize the story through the stories of a bunch of overweight kids. None of them is compelling, because most kids just are not interesting. One teen is pushing 400 pounds, but his overweight parents rationalize his girth on ethnic terms -- for Mexicans, being fat is beautiful and healthy. We get a lot of crying into webcams and sad footage of chubby kids swimming and power walking.

The occasional talking head brings heft to the proceedings. Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," helps deflate the myths of low-fat diets. But too often Couric's production is as shallow as a "Today" show feature. Her heart's in it, but the results are just average.
 

Doc Watch: Funny Peculiar

THE WOLFPACK (A-minus) - You couldn't ask for a spookier movie to rent than this documentary about six siblings essentially held hostage during their entire childhoods by their parents in their Lower East Side Manhattan apartment

The socially retarded kids -- six boys (the focus of the film) and their younger sister -- left the apartment perhaps a handful of times per year (one year they never left). Cooped up, they consume films and stage elaborate re-enactments. They are fond of Tarantino and "Batman." (A few of them are actually pretty good actors/impersonators.) The kids all have hair down to their waists and are mostly rail thin.

Filmmaker Crystal Moselle, fresh out of film school, ran across the boys on one of their rare fresh-air jaunts. She was invited into their home. She mixes family videos with her own footage, and it's a surreal stew.

The father is a drunk conspiracy theorist who, according to one son, has physically abused his wife. The parents met as hippies hiking the Incan trail. The father apparently doesn't have a job (he equates it with slavery), and the mother home-schools the children. The parents both share a suspicion about society. The father claims to be enlightened, and he blessed his children with Buddhist names, like Bhagavan, Govinda and Krsna. But his boys compare him to a plantation owner or a jailer. And it's hard to argue with that assessment. Only the father has a key to the apartment. One boy tells Moselle that any contact with the outside world rendered them mute zombies. (I won't bother to keep the kids' names straight; the director doesn't fully identify them until the end credits, and it's a wise move. It would be a distraction here to single out any kids by name.)

While the parents claim to have had pure motives in protecting their children from the evils of western civilization, the family life they ended up creating comes off as child abuse. Their imaginations stoked, the boys display an irrational fear of everything that lurks outside their locked door. They have a bizarrely skewed idea of how the world works.

It's not as if the parents seized the opportunity to educate the children and nurture their spirits. Rather, they created a pack of psychologically fragile freaks, their minds rotted by pulp fiction on a small screen. The father, in broken English, spouts idiotic quasi-philosophical bullshit or inarticulate rationalizations, and his wife smiles nervously and goes along. He chose to live in a rundown building in a rough neighborhood in New York and endeavored to lock out nasty elements, such as the alleged drug dealing in the elevators. It's a recipe for psychological torture.

The parents, frankly, come off as mentally challenged or simply moronic. It's as if two paranoid low-IQ outcasts holed themselves up in a wing of a mental hospital and started breeding. We watch in awe as the mother picks up the phone and finally calls her own mother after decades of zero communication.  The mother also expresses regret that her children have been denied the joys of nature.

Moselle uses ominous music, camera close-ups, and ethereal natural lighting in the cramped apartment to conjure a "Poltergeist" mood. (A Black Sabbath track is particularly effective.) There is a whiff of manipulation here, as if Moselle couldn't believe her great fortune, and decided that she must milk the story for all it's worth. But it would be unfair to suggest that she overstates or misrepresents the situation.

When the boys finally do start asserting themselves and venture outside more and more, their awkwardness is palpable. They dress like characters in "Reservoir Dogs," with dark suits and sunglasses, anachronistic hipsters. They are beyond giddy when they all go to a movie in an actual cinema, proudly waving their tickets.

But slowly, one by one, the boys begin to assert themselves and prepare to leave the nest. One boy develops an original film project, which is a therapeutic way to express his emotions and repressed feelings. He recruits family members -- and one outsider, a cute girl he's got a crush on -- to be filmed while wearing elaborate, macabre masks. It provides a haunting climax to the film, and it's a fitting visual gift to Moselle, who parlayed her incredible luck into an impressive debut of masterful real-life storytelling.


BONUS TRACK
The boys dance around the apartment joyously to this song, "Tarzan Boy" by Baltimora, somewhat of an anthem of rebellion:


 

Doc Watch: Funny Ha-Ha

MISERY LOVES COMEDY (B) - We just never tire of documentaries about the art of comedy. See also "Comedian," "The Aristrocrats," etal.

Here, veteran funnyman Kevin Pollak assembles a truckload of fellow comics (and offspring of comics, plus a widow of one) for an examination of what makes comedians tick. It's not much of an intellectual exercise -- and he fails to really prove his premise -- but his interviews elicit a lot of refreshing honesty, introspection and emotion. Not to mention laughs.

You either want to spend an hour and a half with insecure, neurotic comedians or you don't. The talent assembled here is quite an array of funny men and women. There's your ringers like Tom Hanks, Bob Saget, Amy Schumer, Martin Short, Lewis Black, Larry David and Jimmy Fallon. There are under-appreciated geniuses such as Stephen Merchant, Maria Bamford, Matt Walsh and Dana Gould; back-benchers like Alan Zweibel, Bobby Slayton, Paul Tomkins, Mike Birbiglia, David Koechner, Kathleen Madigan and Greg Proops; over-exposed moderately funny folks like Mark Maron, Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Norton, Kevin Nealon, Chris Hardwick, Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith; people you don't think of as classic stand-up comedians, such as Bobby Cannavale (he's got good stories), Sam Rockwell, Jon Favreau and Matthew Perry. We're even treated to George Carlin's daughter, Mitch Hedberg's widow and Freddie Prinze Jr. We're spared Jerry Seinfeld; we get Jason Alexander instead.

It's great company. Christopher Guest, now an elder statesman, simply can't not be funny. Janeane Garafolo is a sight for sore eyes. Australian Jim Jefferies steals the show with some delightful insights into the craft.

That's it. Nothing fancy here. It's a parade of talking heads. Endlessly entertaining talking heads. I could try to pluck out a bunch of one-liners, but I would do none of them justice. Few of them are gut-busters. This is not a game of one-up-manship like "The Aristocrats"; it's a relaxed exploration of the art of comedy. What it lacks in insights it makes up for in charm.

BONUS TRACK
Here's the trailer:


 
 

True/False Crime

A MURDER IN THE PARK (B) - This crude but effective documentary unravels the fascinating tangled tale of a shooting in Chicago that became embroiled in controversy when the suspect on death row was exonerated, only to have a second man falsely accused of the same crime.

Created by Christopher Rech and Brandon Kimber (the men behind the TV series "Crime Stoppers Case Files"), "A Murder in the Park" is a sure-handed exploration into not only the world of cops and robbers and prosecutors, but also the unique added layer of a crusading journalism professor and his students who mucked up the proceedings.

Indebted to the book by retired Chicago Tribune reporter William Crawford, "Murder" starts out with the heart-warming rescue of Anthony Porter from death row, just hours before his scheduled execution for a 1982 double murder. Northwester Professor David Protess was convinced that Porter, who served 15 years, was innocent, so he and his team of students did their own legwork, leading to Porter's eventual pardon. Combined with the reporting of the Tribune, Porter's cause celebre helped lead to the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.

The problem is, Protess did sloppy work, seemed to have an agenda, and employed a shady private investigator, Paul Ciolino, who is accused of skewing the evidence. They got one witness to apparently recant his story, and they had a hand in another man copping to the shootings -- Alstory Simon, who was feeling the heat for another crime and was duped into making a videotaped confession.

Rech and Kimber know their way around the pulpy world of rough neighborhoods, prisons and courthouses. They assemble members of the much-maligned Chicago PD, the original investigators who insist (with rich super-fan Chicago accents) that they nabbed the right guy from the start. The directors take subtle digs at the Chicago media, who fell head over heels for the irresistible news peg of a falsely accused inmate and the scrappy underdogs who battled for justice and saved his life.

Visually, the film is overcooked and needlessly salacious. Numerous dramatic re-creations distract from a compelling narrative that doesn't need those bells and whistles. It's often a riveting tale. Rech and Kimber have a great story to tell, and it would be tough to screw it up.
 

Fire, Walk With Me

ALLELUIA (B+) - This gritty horror film owes a debt to the early work of Abel Ferarra (down to the retro graphics), but it's also as stylized as an Adrian Lyne thriller.

The nod here goes to cinematographer Manuel Dacosse, whose resume is filled with foreign shorts. He works here with a fellow Belgian, writer/director Fabrice Du Welz, in spinning a disturbing tale of a woman who, victimized by a menacing con man, joins him for a series of sinister scams.

We're spooked right off the bat with the opening scene showing Gloria (Lola Duenas) sponging down a corpse as part of her job in a morgue. Next, she is being hounded by a friend to accept a date with an online suitor. The single mother relents, and she meets ruggedly handsome Michel (Laurent Lucas from TV's "The Returned"), who preps for the date by running through a creepy warlockian ceremony.

They hit it off. He spends the night. He gets her to lend him money because of an alleged business snafu (he claims to be in the shoe business). When he ignores her subsequent phone calls, she tracks him down at a slick nightclub, spotting him surrounded by women. She draws him back in, and she eventually convinces her to form a partnership. She dumps her daughter on her friend and hits the road with her new beau.

Gloria poses as Michel's sister, as he weds a well-off widow. But Gloria can't contain her intense jealousy, and she violently attacks the bride while the old broad is performing a sex act in the cellar. Drawing blood deepens the bond between Gloria and Michel. Soon they are chatting about marriage and performing ritualistic dances around a fire pit. Their connection is primal.

Subsequent scams include the deaconess of a church/charity and, finally, a single mother, Solange (Helena Noguerra), who works a rural estate with her own young daughter. That ratchets up Gloria's psychological breakdown, as she's reminded of the abandonment of her own daughter.

The story and execution is nothing Guillermo del Toro couldn't do in his sleep. Duenas, a Spaniard, plays the needy plain-jane role smartly. But what keeps you riveted are the stunning visuals. In scene after scene, Du Welz and Dacosse conjure up imaginative set pieces, provocative camera angles, unique close-ups that play with focus and depth of field.

One brutal attack takes place in the extreme foreground, at floor level, backgrounded by a bright, knocked-over lamp that glares into the camera lens. That segues into another low-level shot of bare feet parading through puddles of blood. It's both shocking and mesmerizing.

We are not fans of pulp violence. But we couldn't take our eyes off this one.
 

Digging for Cred

DIGGING FOR FIRE (B-minus) - OK, so Joe Swanberg can assemble an A-list cast of indie actors. And he's always had a knack for drafting a tight script full of natural dialogue. But where are we?

His previous three films have averaged a C grade, though I've never considered any of them a waste of time. Here he's got a fine idea -- a struggling couple has separate weekend adventures -- but he never gets things far enough off the ground.

Tim (the rather bland Jake Johnson from "Drinking Buddies," TV's "New Girl") and Lee (the endlessly appealing Rosemarie DeWitt) are in a bit of a rut, focusing their energies on their pampered 3-year-old boy, Jude (Swanberg yet again foisting his big-headed toddler on viewers). They take a house-sitting trip to the swanky upstate home of one of Lee's clients. While exploring the grounds, Tim finds a rusted handgun and a bone. Lee goes off to visit her parents (Sam Elliott and Judith Light), dropping off the kid so that she can have a gals' night out with an old friend (our gal Melanie Lynskey) who bails on her. So Lee, giddily child-free, heads out on the town. On his own, Tim starts excavating the property, in search of some sort of mystery.

Separated, Tim and Lee are presented with tests of their fidelity. Tim hosts a party with his buddies, and pretty young Max (Brie Larson) tags along and eventually spends the night. Tim takes her on a dinner date, and they go back to the house. She joins him in the dig, clad in short shorts and combat boots. Lee, meanwhile, has a meet-cute in a pub with Ben (a charming Orlando Bloom), and they embark on a "Before Sunrise" odyssey.

The film is weighted in metaphor. Tim's digging is a lesson in leaving well-enough alone and tamping down your deepest desires. Johnson is limited as an actor, but he plays well off of Larson, who is one of the most interesting actors around, though Swanberg doesn't really know how to handle her character. In fact, the director has an embarrassment of riches here. In addition to the fine actors mentioned already, we're treated to Mike Birbiglia in a wonderfully deadpan performance as Tim's pal (and conscience); Sam Rockwell as another buddy with substance-abuse and anger-management issues; the compelling Jane Adams in one throwaway scene; and Chris Messina, Jenny Slate, Ron Livingston and even Anna Kendrick (who starred in "Happy Christmas").

It's an impressive production. But the story is just a little too thin. There's not enough at stake here, and fears of a trite ending are realized.

Joe Swanberg has talent and friends. But he's been making average movies the past few years. He's overdue to either break out or fade out. We haven't given up on him yet.
 

The C-List

99 HOMES (C+) - What do we make of Ramin Bahrani?

From 2005 to 2008, he could do no wrong, mesmerizing filmgoers with "Man Push Cart," "Chop Shop" and "Goodbye Solo." He dipped below the radar for about a life cycle, and he re-emerged last year with the horribly tone-deaf clunker "At Any Price." It was a serious misstep. And now he fumbles another earnest drama, in which Michael Shannon plays an evil real estate schemer during the depths of the foreclosure scandal in 2010.

Everything goes wrong for 112 minutes, even though Bahrani's heart is in it. Andrew Garfield is woefully miscast as scruffy Dennis Nash, a hardscrabble foreclosure victim who enters into a deal with the devil -- he joins the shady operation Shannon's Rick Carver, the man who grabbed his home, in exploiting the system and preying on underwater homeowners. Nash is living in a rundown motel (populated, improbably, almost exclusively by foreclosure victims) with his mom (Laura Dern) and freckle-faced son (Noah Lomax), vowing to reclaim their family home.

Everything is at stake but you wouldn't know it from Bahrani's ham-fisted dialogue and sluggish pacing. Garfield (who I've seen only in "The Social Network," and I don't remember him) is just out of his league trying to carry a major motion picture on his narrow shoulders. Shannon is one of the finest actors of his day, but he has nothing and no one to connect to here. His venom comes off as a desperate attempt to step into the void created by the rest of the cast. Dern -- flailing ever since her wonderful HBO show "Enlightened" -- misjudges yet another mom role, as she struggles to find a suitable script now that she has transitioned to middle age (see also "Wild" and "The Fault in Our Stars").

But it's Bahrani who sticks them all with a dud. Those first three films -- which earned wide praise, including from the late Roger Ebert -- were small character studies, each with a gritty documentary feel to them. With these last two films, Bahrani is trying to ratchet up his storytelling, go big. But these solemn everyman tragedies just do not click. He seems to be hopelessly adrift. This movie was dedicated to Ebert, who, unfortunately, is no longer around to offer some advice to a filmmaker who has lost his way.

LOVE AT FIRST FIGHT (C+) - Too cute for an indie romance, and too slow for a slow burn, this quaint drama from a new French director, Thomas Cailley.

Here is a helpful, succinct plot summary from IMDb:

Between his friends and the family business, Arnaud's summer looks set to be a peaceful one. Peaceful until he runs into Madeleine, as beautiful as she is brusque, a concrete block of tensed muscles and doomsday prophecies. He expects nothing; she prepares for the worst. He takes things as they come, likes a good laugh. She fights, runs, swims, pushes herself to the limit. Given she hasn't asked him for anything, just how far will he go along with her? It's a love story. Or a story of survival. Or both.

Adele Haenel brings a refreshing depth and nuance to the role of Madeleine, a tough nut to crack. She longs to serve in the military, and she is determined to sign up for a summer boot camp. That drive wins over Arnaud (a rather static Kevin Azais), who also slowly develops a crush on the hard-ass Madeleine. The middle third of the movie brings the two together in sweet bonding moments.

By the conclusion, though, it's difficult to feel invested in these two young adults. We know that their initial meet-cute must eventually blossom into a tender moment. Once that moment passes, the narrative fizzles, and we're left with a rather ordinary story of two rather ordinary people. In the end, that's just not quite enough.
  

Soundtrack of Your Life: The Club Is Open

Date: 4 October 2015, 7:12 p.m.
Place: Brickyard Pizza
Song:  "My Valuable Hunting Knife"
Artist: Guided by Voices
Irony Matrix: 8.5 out of 10
Comment:  I've never heard Dayton's Guided by Voices piped in over a public music system. Robert Pollard and the boys soared in the '90s with three essentially perfect albums in a row. The middle one, "Alien Lanes," featured this pop masterpiece. I found them around the time of "Bee Thousand," during an afternoon commute to work. I struggled to keep Evanston's low-power WNUR tuned in as I sat in the parking garage on Wabash Avenue listening to a GBV block party, hoping the signal would hold out long enough to get to the end of the set so the DJ would ID the band. The sound was primal, classic English freakbeat, as if the lo-fi psych pop had been playing while I was in the womb and I had finally rediscovered it. I traveled to Southern California and Chicago for their final shows in 2004 (2 Texas dates that I had tickets for were canceled), and I flew to Portland, Ore., for a reunion show in 2010. My favorite band. A longtime crush under the radar. "I want to shout out to the world ..."



***

Date: 5 October 2015 9:32 p.m.
Place: Home
Song:  "Pardon Me"
Artist: The Magnolias
Irony Matrix: 2.5 out of 10
Comment: After a recent move, I'm culling my VHS tapes (!), and I'm sifting through the tapes I made at the end of the '80s and in the early '90s, mostly music videos from the Heyday of the Planet of Sound. Most are still familiar, but this nugget had been long forgotten. These guys represent the era well, with a guitar-driven sound that's more polished than the Dead Milkmen but not as powerful as Buffalo Tom.



BONUS TRACKS
And back-to-back in the Airport post office during the noon hour: Guns N Roses with "Paradise City" and Elvis Costello with "Pump It Up." Rough rock among the flat-rate boxes.
 

New to the Queue

It gets dark earlier ...

Ramin Bahrani seeks to get back on his game with the intense morality tale about class divisions, "99 Homes."

Iranian's banned director Jafar Panahi ("This Is Not a Film," "Closed Curtain") makes his third clandestine film, "Taxi."

A documentary about the rascals who ran National Lampoon in the raunchy 1970s, "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead."

A quirky doc about a man who found a foot in a grill he purchased -- and the man who lost that foot -- "Finders Keepers."

The team behind "Half Nelson" and "It's Kind of a Funny Story" pair Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds for "Mississippi Grind."

Newcomer Elaine Constantine looks back fondly on the 1970s UK dance scene in "Northern Soul."

A loner meets up with one of his students and the student's mother in a romp through Montpellier and the Langeudoc region of France in "Going Away."