While watching some tennis today, I was struck by one of the ubiquitous commercials for IBM that feature the computer Watson talking to celebrities (like Serena Williams and Bob Dylan). This one featured Frank Abagnale, the former grifter who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can." And it tugged at my heart a little.
In the spot, the pair banter about their latest roles in helping detect fraud. Abagnale suggests they team up for a sequel to "Catch Me If You Can." He tells Watson, "It could be a buddy movie."
Watson responds, in his monotone, with a one-liner that serves as the commercial's gut-punch of a punchline:
"I would like to have a buddy."
Oh, little dude. We all would. Some of us are lucky to have one. Don't despair.
How "advanced" can a "being" be if he or she can never boast of possessing the simplest of life's basic needs: having a buddy. Maybe someday great human minds, or artificial intelligence itself, will reach that holy grail.
MUSTANG (A-minus) - This debut feature zings with youthful energy as it burrows into the coming-of-age stories of five teenage sisters in a remote Turkish village who are placed on lockdown in their home to keep them pure until they can be married off.
Director Deniz Gamze Erguven zeroes in on the youngest of the sisters, Lale, as the eyes and ears of the film, and young actress Gunes Sensoy carries it all on her narrow shoulders. Lale watches her older sisters fall victim to the brutal familial regime of the girls' grandmother and uncle, who struggle to raise them after the death of the girls' parents.
Erguven, a 37-year-old Turk raised in France, penned the script with a filmmaker she met at a Cannes workshop, Alice Winocour ("Augustine"). The two women create a world that is both harrowing and thrilling. It closely echoes both the trajectory and the feel of Sofia Coppola's 1999 debut, "The Virgin Suicides."
Pay attention to the first two scenes. In the first, the girls say goodbye to their teacher, Dilek (Bahar Kerimaglu), who is moving to the big city, Istanbul. After that, the girls are off for a romp on the beach, frolicking with boys from the village. The scene burns with childhood exuberance.
But when word reaches their grandmother that the girls acted so scandalously, she calls in their uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) to lay down the law in order to preserve the chastity of the girls so that they can someday be betrothed to a man. Thus begins the house arrest that gradually grows more and more prison-like with every transgression.
The sisters take refuge in the deep bonds of their sorority, and Erguven basks in that electrifying interplay. The sisters loll around playfully, naturally, tenderly. They tease and taunt and dare each other. They protect each other from the harshly patriarchal world. They sneak out for a romp at a soccer match, despite Erol's proclamation that women belong in the kitchen, not a stadium.
Soon the oldest daughter gets married off, and then the next. The next one with a target on her forehead is the brooding, provocative middle child, Ece (Elit Iscan). Soon, a dark secret is casually revealed about Uncle Erol. The need for the girls to band together grows more dire.
Lale takes charge. She uses the resources of a local truck driver, Yasin (Burak Yigit), who teaches her to drive and becomes a trusted companion. The film builds to a showdown between the girls and their captors, toward a heart-breaking final scene.
Erguven finds just the right tone, mixing humor and stinging personal drama to bring the girls' struggle to life. The oppressive old-world treatment of women gets a lovely, nuanced fleshing out. And little Sensoy as Lale is a classic underdog that you can't help rooting for. This is a sophisticated polemic wrapped seductively in a well-worn cinematic structure. It feels fresh and urgent.
THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER (B) - This has all the elements of an indie powerhouse, but it too often feels like a patchwork created from other works. It is the story of a teacher in Tel Aviv who nurtures the poetic gifts of her 5-year-old student but grows over-protective of him to the point of obsession.
Nira (Sarit Larry) is a diehard devotee of the poetic form, with a high schooler's devotion to the idea that this unfeeling world just doesn't understand those sensitive types. When little Yoav shows up, Nira develops a maternal instinct that throws off her radar for rationality. She challenges the boy's father and uncle to push for his poems to be published, but they seem to be of no help. How far will she go in the name of art?
Nira also is unnervingly jealous of Miri (Ester Rada), Yoav's nanny, scheming to undermine the young woman's role in the boy's life. The interplay between the actresses, Larry and Rada, is both a little too catty and underdeveloped to be effective. Larry has a striking face, with hollowed eyes and a sharp nose. Rada, a noted singer, is statuesque and captivating. Writer-director Nadav Lapid captures them both from memorable angles, but his ardor for Rada in particular is distracting.
Lapid comes off as a disciple of Belgium's Dardenne brothers, two giants of indie realism. Lapid's over-the-shoulder camerawork and intense close-ups serve that devotion more than the production. He also succumbs to a few crucial idiot-plot devices in order to navigate to the film's disturbing climax. Other quirks come off as arty. For example, at times Nira or Miri will scramble to find a pen and notebook in order to transcribe Yoav's random bursts of inspiration that pour out of him whole, and sometimes they miss one of his little masterpieces; never does either of them think to record him on their phone. And the opening scene, in which Nira's husband is lazing to a vapid TV show, is a clunky way of setting up the contrast between the two worlds that Nira straddles.
This is beautiful to look at and compelling at times. But the parts don't add up to a truly satisfying whole.
APPROACHING THE ELEPHANT (C-minus) - It might be difficult to imagine the hell created by opening a totally free-form "school" where elementary-age children do whatever they want, with no structure, indulged by lenient ideological hipsters. I do know the hell of watching that experiment captured on film.
This documentary travels to a hole in the wall dubbed the Teddy McArdle Free School in Little Falls, New Jersey, where students are not required to attend classes and where they create all the school's rules by democratic vote, sharing an equal voice with the "teachers" and "administrators." Sounds like an interesting concept and topic for a film. It's not.
Newcomer Amanda Wilder overdoses on classic techniques of the Wiseman/Maysles school of fly-on-the-wall auteurism. She shoots in black-and-white and provides no narration or talking heads, using only a couple of brief opening title cards to set the scene. If only she had a substantive story to tell.
Instead, it's no exaggeration to report that most of the 90 minutes consists exclusively of 8- to 10-year-olds yelling and screaming and beating each other like the spoiled brats they almost certainly are. Much of the rest of the footage features the school's founder and assistants trying to patiently reason with the kids and treat them like little adults. Anyone -- child or adult -- can call a meeting at any time to hash out an issue, a concept that is moderately interesting the first time or two, but not the eighth or ninth time. The cacophony is relentless.
This could conceivably be tolerable if there were a grand point to make, perhaps an editorial comment on the usefulness of this radical hippie alternative to the Three R's of the public school system. No luck.
Wilder seeks to humanize a few of the children, including adorable, picked-on, lisping Lucy and the chief hellion, Jiovanni, who threatens to derail the entire operation. (It's hard to tell, but it appears that there are only about a dozen students occupying a rented church space.) Unfortunately, the drama of children falls far short of the minimum required for grown-up entertainment.
If I missed the point of this production, I apologize. With all the screeching I could hardly hear myself think.
THE WINDING STREAM (B+) - A compelling story overcomes pedestrian filmmaking in this fond portrait of the Carter Family, the founders of modern country music.
Journeyman filmmaker Beth Harrington assembles both members of the family -- including famous son-in-law Johnny Cash -- and admirers, such as Murry Hammond from the Old 97's. It features some fine modern performances from the likes of Sheryl Crow, George Jones, John Prine and Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, paying tribute to the Carters of Maces Springs, Va.: A.P., wife Sara, and her sister, Maybelle (married to A.P.'s brother), who also later performed with her own daughters, Helen, June and Anita.
The archival footage is often fascinating, but Harrington has a penchant for mucking it up with ridiculous, crude animations of photographs, to the point of distraction. Another curious note is the presence of a lot of dead folks in interviews, including Jones, Cash and Maybelle. Harrington apparently started this movie as far back as 2003, the year Cash died, and only recently finished it.
But there's no denying the music. Your toe will be tapping to originals and interpretations of "Keep On the Sunny Side," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," "Hello, Stranger" (memorably performed by Giddens and Hubby Jenkins), "Worried Man Blues," and the title track, beautifully rendered by Johnny's daughter, Rosanne Cash, in a swirling finale.
Harrington takes some enjoyable detours while telling the story. She follows the trio to Del Rio, Texas, in 1938, where they chased the money of an eccentric who founded a border-radio station, XET, which boomed 500,000 watts [cq] all over the hemisphere, helping cement the Carter Family's reputation and popularity. She spends a lot of time on the road with "Mother" Maybelle, through more modern video, including her revival in the early '70s with the neo-tradionalists the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Her contributions as a pioneering guitarist are settled.
This plays like a solid "American Masters" special on PBS, and the joy it exudes is undeniable.
BONUS TRACK We also re-watched "The Broken Circle Breakdown" (our No. 2 movie of 2013), which could become a January tradition, though can the heart take it every year? Even sadder than the first time. The couple in that movie names their daughter Maybelle and performs bluegrass standards. It hit me during Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You" that the first part of their duet is about them but that the song soon becomes about the wife and their cancer-stricken daughter, laying bare a mother's helplessness.
Here is Veerle Baetens with "Wayfaring Stranger":
Here's the soundtrack:
And, finally, Johnny Cash with the title song from "The Winding Stream," which his daughter performs before the final credits roll:
You think our political process has gotten nasty? Here are two reminders of the butchering by tyrants in the 1960s and '70s. They are both companion-piece follow-ups from celebrated documentarians:
THE PEARL BUTTON (A-minus) - Patricio Guzman has documented Chile's horrid '70s for decades now. His last two films are gorgeous ruminations on General Pinochet's purges of his political opponents after the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected government.
"Nostalgia for the Light" looked to the skies, grounding its theme in the powerful telescopes perched in the Atacama desert and tasked with scanning the cosmos for the secrets of life and the universe. Here, Guzman trains his gaze on Earth's vast seas, similarly inquisitive about the Meaning of It All.
Like in "Nostalgia," Guzman lulls the viewer into a contemplative state, pondering the unknown. Around the halfway mark (in each film) he imperceptibly flips the narrative and focuses on the Disappeared. In "Nostalgia" the hook was the women who wandered the desert sifting for bones and other remains. Here, Guzman is immersed (at times, literally) in the waters off the coast of Chile. It was reported that one method of murdering political opponents of the dictatorship was to inject them with cyanide, use wire to tie the bodies to railroad ties, load them onto helicopters and then drop them into the ocean.
Guzman's anthropology stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, when a British delegation took some indigenous people hostage, dragging them back to Europe and parading them around London. One of those captives provides the connection to the title of the film. Guzman's interactions with those indigenous people is fascinating. A scene in which he tossed ordinary words out at an elderly woman and she responds with the native version of the word or phrase seems both so utterly random and essential to the story.
I didn't know going in (or halfway through the film) what the title of the movie meant, and I won't explain it here, because the lovely story is best experienced fresh.
The images wash over you elegantly across 82 minutes. The camera is endlessly curious. We watch bubbles float to the surface. We hear ice crackling in a glacier. We gaze at the moon, the province of the white man. It's all profoundly moving.
THE LOOK OF SILENCE (B-minus) - I'm not sure what Josh Oppenheimer's end game is, but I'm hoping that his offbeat examination of the Indonesian massacres of the 1960s doesn't extend into a trilogy.
We were a bit perplexed by "The Act of Killing" two years ago, appreciative of its audacity -- Oppenheimer staged re-enactments with the killers in a bizarre burlesque -- but left cold by the experiment. In the latest, the Santa Fe filmmaker pits an optometrist, Adi Rukun, whose brother was a victim of the purge that killed hundreds of thousands known or suspected communists, against several offenders. He brings his crude mobile optometry kit to the home of one of them, promising a new set of frames to the grizzled, toothless old man. During the visit, he gently grills the man about his past sins until the conversation boils over into a defensive rant.
Much of Oppenheimer's own optics here are frustratingly static. For some reason, he plunks Rukun in front of a television set so we can watch him watch two of the former henchman talk casually about and play-act their 50-year-old crimes against humanity. The camera stares at Rukun's stony, stolid, vaguely Christopher Walken-like facial features. What are we looking for in his eyes?
Another thread follow's Rukun's ancient parents (his father is purported to be 103). The old man is deaf and blind and must be bathed and fed by the mother. We watch this infantile old man get powdered like a newborn, swaddled modestly for the camera, and we wonder, again, what the point is in gawking at his humiliating end of life. Was he torn apart for decades over the death of his son? Who knows? He's demented; it was all probably lost to him years ago.
We also visit with a victim who survived the attacks. He tells Oppenheimer, in dialogue later echoed by one of the assailants, that what's past is past and it's time to forget and move on. The consensus is that the ancient history can only be reconciled with an uneasy, unpleasant detente. It's a powerful message to the viewer. You wonder why Oppenheimer doesn't take heed and just move on.
QUEEN OF EARTH (B) - Alex Ross Perry stumbles a bit with this relentlessly downbeat tale of a woman having a post-breakup mental breakdown during a visit to the lake house of her childhood friend.
Perry emerged as an important new voice in cinema with "The Color Wheel" in 2012 and "Listen Up Philip" (our No. 6 film of 2014). His latest is a dalliance with the problematic Joe Swanberg, who is listed as a producer and whose influence shows in the style of the dialogue -- bratty, haphazard, and bordering on self-indulgent.
Elisabeth Moss is powerful as Catherine, who worked for her famous artist father, tamping down her own ambitions, landing on the doorstep of her old pal, Virginia (Katherine Waterston, "Inherent Vice"), in the wake of the suicide of Catherine's depressed father. Catherine herself is fragile and gradually unraveling mentally, as Virginia struggles to be patient with her guest. This visit is contrasted with Catherine's visit around the same time the previous year.
Perry alternates between the present and that previous visit to the lake house, when Catherine brought her now-ex, James, who grated on Virginia to no end. (The flashbacks are signaled by Catherine's stark pixie haircut and inclination to wear makeup.) This time, James is gone (though he might be on the other end of the phone at times), and Virginia's lake-house neighbor, Rich (Patrick Fugit, full grown since "Almost Famous"), hangs out a lot, annoying Catherine.
Catherine is highly protective of Virginia -- not wanting the men to call her "Ginny," because that's her thing -- mainly from muscle memory, as she's in no condition to take care of Virginia. Rather, it's Ginny who dotes on (and worries over) her wreck of a friend. Waterston seems to be under strict orders to mope a lot and to train her worrying Bambi eyes on her co-star.
During the week, Catherine sketches Virginia's portrait, and the
point Perry's trying to make is obvious: these two "best friends" have
trouble really seeing each other, getting each other, caring about each
other. He plays with an unrelenting sense of dread amid the bucolic setting. He's treading in the territory of early Polanski, including the paranoia of "Rosemary's Baby." (He is, however, clumsy with a scene in which Catherine hallucinates amid a crowd at a party.)
A spare, tinkly piano on the soundtrack lends this a vague horror vibe. At one point Virginia is seated next to Rich and reading a book
called "Madness & Women," although we can't be sure, at that
point, that Catherine isn't hallucinating that scene. This is dry storytelling, without the classic horror payoffs. The bits of humor land nicely here, including this quick little exchange when Catherine is startled seeing Rich in the kitchen in the morning, not recognizing him from the year before.
Catherine: "Sorry, I'm not good with faces and names."
Rich: "So, you mean, like, people?"
One intriguing thread in the movie is the conflict between Rich and Catherine. Rich calls her K the whole time, oblivious to the fact that her name starts with a C. He revels in pressing her buttons, to the point of immature sadism. Fugit wields just the right tone as a playful spoiled brat. Catherine eventually lashes back in an epic climactic speech: "You click your tongue and you revel in the affairs of others. ... You are why there is no escape from indecency and gossip and lies."
But there's a big head-scratcher here: If the women are such old, dear friends, then why does Virginia allow Rich -- who's just a casual hang-out -- to be around constantly? Why not just go goof off at Rich's place next door?
And that gets to the hangup with the movie. It seems to be essentially about how women let their unhealthy relationships with men interfere with their female friendships. And this, from the perspective of a male writer-director. "Queen of Earth" has something to say, and it has dialogue that quite often crackles. Perry is working with a Big Idea, but he's not in complete control. This is either a harmless misstep or a female story in the wrong hands.
NORTHERN SOUL (B) - Gritty is a word to be used sparingly, but this coming-of-age-story set in a British northern industrial town in the early 1970s wears the moniker well.
Writer-director Elaine Constantine has crafted a labor of love, a valentine to the notcturnal underground clubs that shunned the mainstream music and instead sweated to the heavy American soul songs that DJs dug out of obscurity. She uses the metamorphosis of teenage John (Elliot James Langridge) to tell an authentic tale of youthful exuberance, male bonding and life lessons in a grimy, dead-end town in Lancashire. (The accents are thick; best to use subtitles.)
Factory-line workers John and his buddy Matt (Josh Whitehouse) -- along with a few older ne'er-do-wells -- transition from schoolboy duds to wide flair pants and disco shirts and jackets, and they are determined to ditch the dull local youth dance hall (where Cliff Richard is still the rage), open their own venue, and spin the coolest R&B on the planet. Fueled by amphetamine, they take the area by storm and zero in on toppling the region's biggest DJ, Ray Henderson (James Lance), who protects his reign by masking the labels on his 45 RPMs so that rivals can't identify the artist and song and track the record down.
Constantine spent years fussing over the production, casting mostly no-name actors (though Steve Coogan makes a cameo as one of the square adults) and shooting them in natural (dim) light, while the roiling soundtrack throbs relentlessly. The characters gradually deepen and the speed-fueled odyssey starts spinning out of control. Numerous dance scenes, with proto-disco moves, exude pure joy.
In many ways, this is a traditional period piece. It borrows a lot from "Saturday Night Fever" and a little from scattered American touchstones such as "American Graffiti" and even an echo of "Animal House." Constantine hits all the familiar notes -- drugs tearing pals apart, the OD, a chaste boy-meets-girl story (Antonia Thomas is sweet as the love interest), rebellion against parents, the hokey reunion at the end -- but she manages to take a 40-year-old memory seem fresh and urgent. A few naive moments can't overshadow a heartfelt, tender tale that is as tactile as a needle in a vinyl groove.
BONUS TRACKS The two-disc "Northern Soul" soundtrack is fantastic, 54 songs you've either never heard or haven't in ages. Pick it up.
The unofficial theme song of the film, Frankie Valli with "The Night":
CAROL (A-minus) - Stylish director Todd Haynes drops the fussiness and forgoes a writing credit to present a warm, intimate, rather chaste love story between two women in the early 1950s.
Cate Blanchett stars as the title character, a rich wife trapped in a loveless marriage, living in a mansion in upstate New York ("the country"). One day during the holidays she visits a department store and takes a fancy to a cute shopgirl wearing a Santa's hat, Therese (Rooney Mara). Carol leaves her gloves behind, Therese returns them, and a fascination between the two of them builds.
The pedigreed Carol is always dressed and coifed to the nines, smoking elegantly, and dominating any room she's in with a confident flounce. Therese (with a short e in the second syllable) is a mousy amateur photographer from an immigrant background. She has a bland boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy from last season's "Girls"), who doesn't float her boat.
Carol and Therese, with a significant disparity in ages and styles, make for an unlikely pair. But since when is love a mathematical equation? The start to hang out together, casually. And when Carol's marriage blows up into a custody battle over her daughter, she decides to take a road trip, and Therese accepts an invitation to tag along. What follows is a tender story of a deepening, though mostly unspoken, bond between the women, as Carol's ghosts threaten to catch up to her. Just one love scene (ardently rendered) occurs throughout the movie.
Haynes presented "Mildred Pierce" on HBO in 2011 and made his mainstream splash in 2002 with another period piece (and another intense actress), "Far From Heaven" with Julianne Moore. Whereas that latter movie (which aimed to tackle race relations in 1950s Connecticut) reeked of artificiality and was starved of true emotion, "Carol" feels mature, raw and authentic. Haynes, as usual, is meticulous in his period detail, but not to the point of being overtly fastidious. He doesn't have to traffic in italics anymore in order to re-create a time and place.
Little touches are nice here. There's a close-up of a calendar notation in a datebook, accurately rendering Sunday, December 21, 1952, in just the proper font. A radio report emanates from a hotel office announcing the death of Hank Williams on January 1, 1953. A TV broadcast of Dwight Eisenhower's inaugural speech drones in the background of a lunch gathering, and we pick up snippets of his upbeat, Kennedyesque boasts of a modern, enlightened world -- a device that provides sweetly subtle irony to the tale of a forbidden love that wouldn't be legitimized until the Obama administration.
But it's not the narrative or the scenery that drive this story. It's the deep yearning and unorthodox connection between the women. (Some will find the pairing far-fetched; fair enough, but I'd rather give in to the romantic notion.) Blanchett is fabulous, as expected, but her character is a bit of an art piece, a narrative device. It is Mara (light-years beyond "Side Effects" and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo") who takes over the film and grounds it from Therese's perspective. She burns with the need to break free from her vanilla world and indulge a feeling that she prays will be more than a mere impulse. Carol is merely a Christmas tree on which Therese can hang her ornaments.
"Carol" captures the excitement of new love in a fashion not unlike two other gay dramas -- Andrew Haigh's "Weekend" and the French epic "Blue Is the Warmest Color." All three, refreshingly, make gender and sexuality beside the point. Love, flirtation, and that first spark are all universal.
The surprise here is how Rooney Mara not only holds her own with one of the era's great actresses, but also inhabits her character as the fulcrum of the film. The title of this film is rather ironic. It really should be called "Therese."
BONUS TRACKS A lovely song that Therese noodles out on the piano, Billie Holiday's "Easy Living":
And this jaunty joint adds an air of playfulness -- "One Mint Julep" by the Clovers:
In the early '80s, we junior and senior English majors at the University of Illinois at Chicago who were chosen to launch a literary journal thought it would be cool (unironically cool) to name the publication Red Shoes Review. It was a throwaway line taken from David Bowie's "Let's Dance," which was big at the time. Call it a youthful indiscretion or the perils of groupthink, but that album was a cultural powerhouse back then.
I had about a 10-year run with Bowie, who died yesterday at age 69, in what seems like his final artistic flourish, having released his morbid final record two days earlier on his birthday and having kept his cancer from the public. I started paying attention to him as a budding adolescent in the mid-'70s, and his gender gymnastics left this nascent heterosexual more than a little defensive.
The first album I bought was "Young Americans," because I loved the title song so much, but I was embarrassed by the cover. It took some courage to buy it. It wasn't so much the androgynous look, the luxurious nails or the sultry come-hither pose that challenged my still-developing teenage brain; it was more the shiny bracelets on his wrist that put me off. I associated such jewelry with my cousin Allison's baby photo. It was so ... Rocky Horror. It haunts a tiny section of my still-male, still-heterosexual brain to this day.
I spun through his "Changes" best-of package on a drive from Santa Fe today and was surprised at how muscular his hits were. It's odd, but I rarely think of him as British; his musical sensibilities -- rock, soul, disco -- and his booming voice (really, who else would dare duet with Freddie Mercury?) were as American as Springsteen to my ears. His most familiar and overplayed song, the prom-worthy "Changes," hit my ears from a more senior perspective, and, feeling protective of the era's new culture mavens, I gleaned a fresh take from the youthful admonition:
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their world
Are immune to your consultations;
They're quite aware of what they're going through.
The muscular yet playful "Suffragette City" and "Diamond Dogs" are quintessential rock 'n' roll workouts, with fat riffs and arena-rock production. The latter flexes horns reminiscent of Elephant's Memory on "Some Time in New York City," and then there's the reminder of his collaboration with John Lennon on "Fame," his first of two U.S. No. 1 singles. ("Let's Dance" was the other; he had five chart-toppers in the U.K.) You'll hear more Lennonesque arrangements on "Young Americans" (and the shout-out "I heard the news today, oh, boy"), as well as other echoes -- "No religion!" he proclaims on "Modern Love," with more R&B saxes wailing away (featuring SNL's Lenny Pickett).
As an artist, he rarely had an embarrassing phase. Yeah, Tin Machine showed he could have a tin ear, and we never again need to see him and Mick Jagger prancing in the streets smack dab in the middle of the '80s. (That's when I pretty much bailed.) He reinvented himself numerous times, but usually with substance. He aged with grace, and not just physically. He was a serious artist, cultivating his image and his legacy to the very end.
And he was a notable romantic. There are few songs that capture the essence of a romantic relationship better than "Heroes." And then there's the heady fantasy of a woman in your arms, trembling like a flower, under the moonlight, this serious moonlight.
I was there, at the height of his popularity (at the Rosemont Horizon in August 1983), for that trashy tour, Bowie barely breaking a sweat in his suave suit. But I was a fairly casual fan. Three vinyl, one disc. I've never moped to his Berlin trilogy. I eventually grew comfortable in my pedestrian sexuality.
I did always want to host a radio segment devoted to songs that play over the closing credits of films. Like "Where Is My Mind" at the end of "Fight Club." One of the sweetest is our swan song here, from "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou." There is a lip-sync version, with the TV announcer's intro that calls him a "bizarre, self-constructed freak." But we need the studio version for the whispery scatting that opens the "Hunky Dory" track "Queen Bitch":
We had deep reservations about this second 2015 offering from Noah Baumbach (this one with girlfriend Greta Gerwig). We've loved every one of his offerings since "The Squid and the Whale," but we feared that this tale of a free-spirited 30-something and an impressionable college gal would play more like Whit Stillman's tone-deaf "Damsels in Distress," which we memorably walked out of.
Our fears were realized.
Baumbach has consistently scored high grades here with "While We're Young," "Frances Ha" (with Gerwig), "Greenberg," and "Margot at the Wedding." He also co-wrote "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Fantastic Mr. Fox." But with this inane comedy, his streak comes to a crashing halt.
Here, Gerwig flits around as shallow New Yorker Brooke, who meets up with her future step sister, young Tracy (a comatose Lola Kirke from "Gone Girl"), as they romp through some fantasy sorority night life before heading to the suburbs to confront Brooke's nemesis, the tweely named Mamie-Claire, who stole both her schlubby Goldman-Sachs boyfriend (the painfully unfunny Michael Chernus), and her stupid idea for a T-shirt. They are surrounded by cardboard characters, none of whom bring depth or humor to the party. All the while, Tracy is taking notes for a short story that she seemingly crafts overnight.
The script is spine-tingling in its ineptness. It plays like a rough draft taken straight from a week's worth of diary entries that Baumbach scribbled in a notebook while sipping lattes at Starbucks, and then expanded on improv-style by Gerwig, who is aged out of her edgy hipster phase in a blink. The one-liners fly quickly, but they generate winces rather than belly laughs. Baffled, I wrote down a bunch of the cranky, grumpy quips that you can just hear emanating from Baumbach's self-satisfied thoughts. Here is the parade of gross generalizations and middle-aged aphorisms that riddle the script like fatal bullet holes:
"No one meets friends in classes."
"We need a sleepover party!"
"Must we document ourselves all the time. Must we??"
"People can be not in the mood."
"People wait in cars."
"Everyone in high school is an asshole."
"Rich people always give out bad Halloween candy."
"Records are so warm."
"Sometimes I don't know if you're a zen master or a sociopath."
"I'm so impressed by you and worried for you at the same time."
"You're funny 'cause you don't know you're funny."
"I'm the same. I'm just the same in a different direction."
"Stop calling her these old-timey names."
"I just learned what 'case-sensitive' meant, seriously, like, yesterday."
"You can't really know what it is to want things until you're 30."
At other times, Baumbach bombards us with intellectual babble disguised as class discussion or deep thoughts from random living-room study groups that seem to populate his world. Is he mocking these confabs or celebrating them? It's impossible to tell, and either way, he's whiffing more than riffing.
Meantime, the attempts at slapstick are embarrassing. Gerwig not only does a lame imitation of a person rewinding her actions on video, but she then comments on her clever maneuver -- and then does it again. Ugh. There is actually a scene of chess instruction, where one character (a young man, naturally) sets out to give another (a young woman, but of course) her first lesson, only to find himself in checkmate during their very first match! Has that gag worked (or even been attempted) since the Nixon administration? Oh, and that young woman is so irrationally (and inexplicably) jealous of her beau that Mel Brooks and Woody Allen would roll their eyes at the caricature.
As the characters pile up and the lunacy spins out of control -- and the credulity just snaps -- Baumbach and Gerwig crowd each scene with as many characters as possible, who spew one-liners with the timing of a Disney teen sitcom. At times you can almost hear Baumbach patting himself on the back and blurting out, "Look, I can write dialogue for seven people at once. Aren't I a clever boy?" You can actually notice actors walking into the frame, delivering a line, and then looking confused as to where they should step next.
And the acting cannot be defended. What worked flawlessly in "Frances Ha" comes off here as a retread at best, and screeching and mugging by Gerwig at worst. Kirke sounds like she's reading an operations manual throughout. The others would be best served to just leave this one off of their IMDb resumes.
Maybe this is all a big joke, Baumbach's wink at Stillman and Allen and others who live in their ridiculous literary/academic bubbles. "Mistress America" traffics in a good amount of stuck-up snooty types; it's a world where budding writer Tracy taps out her prose on onionskin, and when she submits an entry to the literary journal, rather than (in 2015) emailing or uploading a PDF, she daintily places one (1) pristine hard copy into the quaint inbox affixed to the exterior of the group's door, which is left playfully ajar.
If only Baumbach's script had been subjected to the red pen of an assiduous editor, or, better yet, crumpled into a ball and tossed in the direction of a wicker wastebasket that is theatrically littered all around with similarly scrunched-up discarded pages.
3-1/2 BULLETS, 10 MINUTES (B) - This somber retelling of the stand-your-ground shooting of a black teen in a gas station parking lot in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2012 plays like a really solid episode of NBC's "Dateline."
Writer/director Marc Silver ("Who Is Dayani Cristal?") takes a workmanlike approach to following the aftermath of the shooting by a white man of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, who had reacted angrily to a demand to turn down the "thug music" playing in his parked car. It helps to enjoy the narrative if you don't look the story up or refresh your memory about the resulting trial of Michael Dunn in early 2014.
Silver alternates between extended quiet scenes with Jordan's grieving parents (who separated when he was a child) and testimony at the televised trial. It's essentially a legal procedural with a touch of back story. The emotional duress of the parents gets tiring, but the legal maneuvering builds to a satisfying conclusion.
Silver overlays a phony sense of foreboding throughout, with ominous shots of Jacksonville set to a jazzy "Naked City" score. It doesn't quite work in the Sunshine State. He also drops in snippets of talk-radio debate, which provides pedestrian analysis of this shooting as well as a previous media sensation, the gunning down of Trayvon Martin. Little insight comes through. All it does is pad this out to 98 minutes, when the story could have been told in closer to an hour.
If you don't know how the trial turns out, you might find this moving and compelling.
PROPHET'S PREY (B-minus) - There's a nice, tight documentary somewhere in this mess. Amy Berg ("West of Memphis," "Janis: Little Girl Blue") digs into the skeevy story of Warren Jeffs, the disgraced spiritual leader of the fundamentalist Mormon church (FLDS).
Berg riffs on the work of two authors: Jon Krakauer (best known for "Into the Wild") and Sam Brower, author of the 2011 book that lends the movie its name. Brower comes off as a dogged watchdog journalist who wouldn't rest until Jeffs was exposed as a fraud and a pedophile.
We also hear form those close to the FLDS, which broke off from the mainstream church and, seeking to continue the practice of polygamy, settled in southern Utah. Warren Jeffs took over from his father and bloomed into a frightening cult leader, preying on dozens of women he took as wives, many of them underage. Family infighting causes a rift. The case against him slowly builds, and his scheme gradually unravels, eventually sending him on the run as a fugitive on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
This should be riveting cinema. It's not. Nick Cave music sets an ominous mood, and Berg wisely drops in excerpts from Jeffs' sonorous sermons. But there's little intrigue. One of his victims sits for an interview and, not surprisingly, offers little insight, as if she had yet to be deprogrammed. Talking heads seems to be scrambled into the mix haphazardly, with variations in video and sound quality. The film drags and sags during its 101-minute run (longer than advertised at Sundance and on IMDb).
It's a one-note tune, and there's no suspense in the build to the climax. This could have been a great story, but instead, it's just an average, if interesting, documentary.
We don't rush into our year-end lists. It takes a while for some of the big titles to trickle into Albuquerque (or Santa Fe).
We traditionally publish our list toward the end of January. Till then,
here's a list of the 2015 releases that received an A or an A-minus from
us in the past year and which will vie for a prominent position on our upcoming list.
