Pop Star

FENCES (B+) - The difficulty of translating a classic stage play to the big screen is mostly overcome here, thanks mainly to Denzel Washington, both behind the camera and in front of it.

Washington is blue-collar everyman Troy Maxson, a 53-year-old former Negro Leagues ballplayer raising his second family in Pittsburgh in 1957. The era is now twice removed from when August Wilson first presented his play at Yale in 1985, but that postwar world still resonates in the psyche, thanks in part to the recent popularity of "Mad Men."

Here, of course, we delve into the African-American experience and Wilson's historical take on the "Death of a Salesman" phenomenon of the fading father big-footing the American dreams of his offspring, while his loyal wife frets over his boorish behavior.

Troy is a garbage man by trade and a payday alcoholic who likes to bullshit with his best friend, Jim Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson), while he haphazardly tends to the task of building a wooden fence in his backyard. Troy, an ex-con, is proud of his accomplishments in life -- taking Satchel Paige deep in the ballyard back in the day and holding down a job that supports his wife, Rose (Viola Davis), his high school football-star son Cory (Jovan Adepo), and even his grown first son from his first marriage, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), who is a jazz musician (code for drug addict), who is always asking to borrow ten bucks from Troy.

Then there is Troy's brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), tetched in the head from a war wound, a walking cliche of the insightful madman with a heart of gold and the moral clarity of a child. The character of Gabriel (who carries around a horn and bleats about the kingdom of heaven, in case the reference to Troy's mortality isn't obvious enough) is responsible for shaving a half-point off of the grade for "Fences." The other half-point-off is for excessive baseball metaphors. (For example, Troy warning his son -- after a couple of previous cautions -- "You're living with a full count! Don't you strike out!") Wilson just tries too hard to bake his baseball knowledge (or research) into the script. (He adapted his play for the screen.) (Full disclosure: I wrote a paper on the sports references in "Death of a Salesman" for my English class on Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction.)

Washington (who, along with Davis, won a Tony for his work in the 2010 Broadway revival) obviously has embarked on a labor of love here, and his restraint both in front of and behind the camera is remarkable. Troy has an opinion on everything, and his calculated outbursts are knockouts. Troy doesn't want his son pursuing professional football, because Troy knows how pro sports can break a man -- though Troy doesn't acknowledge the opportunities for black men in a post-Jackie Robinson world; he's still bitter about being too old to make it in the majors.

The humor here is rich. Troy is constantly harping on some backup outfielder batting .261 and riding the Pirates bench, when he insists, to this day, that he could hit .340 with his eyes closed. That paunch of Troy's (real or padded?) suggests otherwise. The banter between Troy and Bono crackles; Henderson truly goes toe-to-toe with Washington and even gets the better of the Hollywood legend here and there.

The tension between Troy and Cory doesn't always snap like it should, probably because Adepo, as a young actor, just hasn't developed the chops it takes to hold his own with Washington. Their clashes occasionally have a sitcom shallowness. At times, Washington shoulders the load all by himself. When Cory confronts Troy by asking him, "How come you ain't never liked me?", Troy erupts in condescension and disdain for the boy. It's an epic rant:

Like you? I go outta here every morning, I bust my butt 'cause I like you? You're about the biggest fool I ever saw. A man is supposed to take care of his family. You live in my house, feed your belly with my food, put your behind on my bed because you're my son. It's my duty to take care of you, I owe a responsibility to you, I ain't got to like you! Now, I gave everything I got to give you! I gave you your life! Me and your Mama worked out between us and liking your black ass wasn't part of the bargain! Now don't you go through life worrying about whether somebody like you or not! You best be makin' sure that they're doin' right by you! You understand what I'm sayin'?

Washington imbues Troy with plenty of angst and contradictions and an obvious dose of self-loathing. He is called out for grabbing the military/medical pension of Gabriel's while foisting his brother on a neighbor and paying her a paltry sum for Gabriel's rent. (Troy used the money to buy his house.) And, having two children from two different women, his weakness will lead to another (his third strike?), to the chagrin of Rose, who laments the breakdown of the nuclear family in black culture. It's Davis' finest moment, in a heartbreaking performance that beautifully emphasizes subtle gestures over emoting.

Washington, as a director, has a crisp visual style and an intimate way with all of the actors. He is handicapped, so to speak, with the Gabriel character, but he and Williamson do their best to avoid embarrassment and sappy sentiment. Washington has a keen eye for the era, and his ensemble cast nobly follows him into dramatic battle. At two-and-a-quarter hours, this powerful production never sags.

"Fences" is about barriers -- between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and between man and God. Troy at times is a familiar blowhard who takes them all on, mostly with tired boasts and threats. At other times, he is emotionally stunted and quietly insecure, struggling to exert his manhood. He is the 20th century man, a fading star. It's a story that never gets old.

RIP, Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme, a sharp-eyed pop-culture film maven of the '80s and '90s, died today at age 73. While he'd been very much under the radar after his heyday, he continued to produce much-admired documentaries and one final strong feature in the new century.

Two things jump to mind when I think of Demme: the visual and aural joy throughout "Stop Making Sense," and the exchange between Ray Liotta and Jeff Daniels in a parking lot in Demme's breakthrough hit "Something Wild." Liotta, the menacing Ray, is hunting Charlie (Daniels), a yuppie dweeb who has taken up with the "wild" Audrey, aka Lulu (Melanie Griffith). While their dates pop in to a convenience store (where fresh-scrubbed '80s teens play Ms. Pacman), Charlie and Ray shoot the shit when Ray -- in that haunting way of Liotta's -- slips into vulgarity and inquires about Audrey's sexual prowess. It's quite the "when we wuz young" time capsule featuring the three actors):

   "C'mon Charlie, you gotta admit, she looks like she could fuck you right in half, I mean just fuck you to pieces."
   "Ray, there's no call for that kind of talk."
   "You're right. You're right. I understand." 

Demme emerged from the young directors in Roger Corman's pulp factory, most notably with "Caged Heat." Our favorites among his other feature films:

• "Rachel Getting Married" (2008)
• "Philadelphia" (1993)
• And his most celebrated moment, "Silence of the Lambs" (1991)

But he might have reached higher achievements with his documentaries. (He certainly made more docs than features.)

• "Stop Making Sense (1984)
• "Swimming to Cambodia" with Spalding Gray (1987)
• "The Agronomist" (2003)
• "Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains" (2007)
• "Haiti Dreams of Democracy" (1988)

The New York Times eulogizes him this way:

Mob wives, CB radio buffs and AIDS victims; Hannibal Lecter, Howard Hughes and Jimmy Carter: Mr. Demme (pronounced DEM-ee) plucked his subjects and stories largely from the stew of contemporary American subcultures and iconography. He created a body of work — including fiction films and documentaries, dramas and comedies, original scripts, adaptations and remakes — that resists easy characterization.

Let's hope he doesn't fade into history known only for his last Hollywood effort, "Ricki and the Flash."

BONUS TRACK

Demme directed a lot of  music videos, including this one for New Order's epic "Perfect Kiss" in 1989:

  

Experiments in 2017

EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMA v12.3 -- Bryan Konefsky and his film students pushed boundaries again this past week in their annual festival of experimental cinema. The focus was on Cuba, where Konefsky had visited for the first time late last year.

We caught Program 3 (of 20) curated by Magaly Espinosa Delgado, who oversaw about an hour of experimental films from Cuba. It started slow, with a scattered documentary piece apparently about the relatives and/or friends of gang members talking about a violent night at a club.

The program finished strong with short films that found the intersection between parent/child relationships and patriotism in a changing land. The first featured a nana putting a baby down for a nap, patting the child's bottom in a percussive manner while singing the Cuban national anthem. In the second, an off-camera adult addresses a toddler who is standing in a crib, giving the child orders or suggestions (it wasn't translated), eliciting the word "no" from the child over and over again. Title: "Autocratico."

Our favorite was "The 'New Man' and My Father," a six-minute film from 2015 in which Adrian Melis sits his father, a former revolutionary, in front of the camera to be grilled about recent progress in Cuba and the prospects of changes in the horizon in a post-Castro nation. The questions are detailed and pointed, a clear challenge to the old guard. Melis' father sits shirtless and never gives an answer. It is apparent that Melis has included only interstitial shots of his father, outtakes and shots of set-up or prep. The premise suggests that the fading revolutionary generation has nothing left to say or no easy answers for what lies ahead. The film itself is a precise, stinging statement about both a father and a fatherland. Fascinating.

BONUS TRACK
The final film in the third program ended with vintage '60s footage scored to Miles Davis' "Now's the Time":


 

New to the Queue

Digging deep ...

A man crosses ethical boundaries when trying to help his daughter pass a college-entrance exam, in Cristian Mungiu's "Graduation."

Cynthia Nixon stars in Terence Davies' biography of the poet Emily Dickinson, "A Quiet Passion."

From Bulgaria, a railroad worker turns in a bunch of money he found on the train tracks, but he soon comes to regret doing so, in the twisted farce "Glory."

Something about Anne Hathaway in the trailer is drawing us -- inexplicably and despite the presence of Jason Sudeikis -- to the horror spoof "Colossal."

A documentary about writers of obituaries, one of our favorite newspaper features, focusing mainly on the gang at the New York Times: "Obit."

A retro boxing film (and love story), from Finland, "The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki."
 

Theater People: The Sequel

KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (C) - Kate Lyn Sheil has had an interesting run in indie films during this decade, while finding regular TV work to pay her bills. We noticed her in Alex Ross Perry's "Listen Up Philip," "The Color Wheel" and "Queen of Earth," and in "Gabi on the Roof in July."

She has an appealing 1970s little-sister vibe, and she's a reliable supporting player. At some point, Sheil fell in with a project telling the story of Christine Chubbuck, an anchorwoman in Sarasota, Fla., who shot herself to death on live television back in 1974. This quasi documentary follows Sheil as she prepares for the part of Chubbuck in a feature film, an assignment that jangles her nerves and toys with her emotions.

Writer-director Robert Greene trod similar ground a couple of years ago in "Actress," in which he chronicled the struggles of an actress and mother trying to get back into the game at age 40. But Greene fails to find the magic a second time around.

Sheil mopes through this exercise as she researches the role, rehearses and shoots a few scenes. Some of the best parts of Greene's documentary come when he follows Sheil around to her interviews with Chubbock's family and former colleagues, 40 years after the tragedy. She's a decent reporter in that sense.

Where this all breaks down is in the attempt to ratchet up the intrigue as Sheil builds up her nerve to put on the brunette wig, sit as an anchor desk and put a pistol to her head. (She actually goes shopping for the same model of handgun that Chubbuck had used.) We are supposed to feel a building sense of dread as Sheil teeters on the brink of losing herself in the identity of the troubled anchorwoman.

But something is off. The angst just doesn't feel genuine. I don't doubt that it was a difficult role for Sheil to take on; it's just that too often her heightened anxiety and fear comes off as theatrical posturing. Oh, woe is the actress who dares tiptoe to the brink of horrors of human existence! (See Heath Ledger Syndrome.)

Part of that comes from the cheapness of the feature-film production itself. The snippets we see suggest that it was on a par with a TV weepy-of-the-week. The dialogue is pitiful. (There is no evidence that whatever they were working on will see the light of day. They were beaten to the punch by Rebecca Hall and the biopic "Christine," which last year earned a respectable 72 Metacritic score.)

Sheil throws a few fits on the set like a C-list diva in an E! reality show. By the end, you want to take her aside and tell her, "C'mon, Kate. Your devotion to the craft is admirable, and you are a very good actress. But just say the lines and get over yourself."

Fast Forward Theater: "The Love Witch"

A new feature about movies that we don't have the will to pull the plug on but are so dreadful, silly or boring that we grab the remote and start zipping through scenes just to get it over with:

THE LOVE WITCH (D) - What were thinking? What were they going for? What made me watch it?

This faithful homage to trashy '60s and '70s Technicolor horror movies scores points for its attention to detail. But writer-director (and designer) Anna Biller, who trod the retro sexploitation territory nearly a decade ago with a movie called "Viva," makes a vital mistake. She forgets how bad those movies that she's replicating were.

But this is more of an art installation than a film, so maybe I'm not qualified to criticize it. The color red pops all over the screen, as do the usual-suspect primary colors in supporting roles. But "The Love Witch" conjures up a bizarre alternative universe where Jean-Luc Godard directed episodes of "Love, American Style" with his muse, Connie Stevens.

When I was pretty little, one of the first horror movies I recalled seeing on TV was "Two on a Guillotine," which starred the perpetually lip-glossed Miss Stevens along with miscast Disney refugee Dean Jones and Cesar Romero (scary to a child even without his Joker makeup) in an embarrassing haunted-house romp. I was too young to know enough to roll my eyes, and I was wide-eyed and willing to play along with the genre. (Unlike my sister, whose nerves couldn't even handle "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.")

I rarely can tolerate horror films and their tired tropes. I was of an impressionable age for the original "Halloween" (and for Jamie Curtis), and as an adult I was completely jangled by the original "Blair Witch Project," even though I knew it was a fake-out and was watching it at home on VHS. But in general, those chiller-theater features don't work on me. So, for all I know, "The Love Witch" -- about a sexy brunette who concocts potions and casts spells with unfailingly fatal results -- has subverted the genre brilliantly. Maybe this is a deep feminist statement.

But .... there's homage and there's inspiration, and then there is tedious note-for-note copy-catting. Biller fusses over every inch of every frame (albeit with low-rent production values), which perhaps explains why she makes one of these only every decade or so. But paying homage to "Dark Shadows" by way of the TV version of "Batman" plus a dash of "Dragnet" -- complete with corny dialogue and wooden characters -- is just plain flat and goofy.

Samantha Robinson stars as Elaine, whose name makes her sound more like a neighbor on "Bewitched" than a femme fatale. Robinson is conventionally pretty -- an alluring mix of Diana Rigg and Alison Brie. But she certainly can't act. It's as if she is parodying Megan's clunky acting in a soap opera on TV's "Mad Men." She has a friend with a British accent (for some reason), eventually seducing the friend's husband and driving him to suicide. Quelle fun!

Rolling my eyes frequently, I chose not to shut it off, because I was curious about how it would play out. But I'm sure I missed nothing crucial by fast-forward through healthy chunks of the movie. Robinson is lovely to look at. (The no-frontal-nudity clause in her contract is obvious by the way her long hair always strategically drapes over her breasts.)  By the time Elaine and a square-jawed police detective wed amid prancing renaissance-faire extras, "The Love Witch" has gone completely off the rails. Biller just has no ear for camp.

My curiosity satisfied, I got through this two-hour feature in a little over an hour. In retrospect, 3x speed might have been better.

BONUS TRACK
Don't be fooled by the trailer:


  

Poetry Spam, No. 2

Prosecute these substances

that inch shafts. 

Started opening volume in, say,

Gershwin, duke of specialties.

Hero, popular overnight with Brisbane.

Networks, Amazons

marketplace

Chesapeake Bay

-- none,

but pauses when perform on troop. 

Governmental, pay handsomely

on protons, neutrons.

Stairmaster and Portland cement,

vulcanized rubber.

Dams that rocks have the dose to …

to listen

to select source code.

Looked over reconstruction and australs.

Alexander has evaporated into small fragments.

Sidekick

fetal brain

to further at elements, and shaping the bundy.

Specific gravity

in tear

the proceeds

was minimized. 

Told that deviation of York

and astigmatism

may skydivers

at villa.

Jagged Edge

Two of our favorite actors get bogged down in a couple of muddled anti-mystery plots:

ELLE (B+) - I could watch Isabelle Huppert watch paint dry. And she certainly carries Paul Verhoeven's new thriller about as far as it deserves to go.

Yes, that Paul Verhoeven, the provocateur behind such '90s cultural touchstones as "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls." Verhoeven has matured, apparently, and here he strives for some Hitchcock cred, but he falls short, landing in Brian De Palma territory.

Huppert plays Michele, a video-game entrepreneur who, at the beginning of the film, gets raped by a masked intruder in her home. Michele, however, shrugs off the attack and doesn't want to bother involving the police. With that Huppert mask of hers, she stoically soldiers on. She casually drops news of the attack at a dinner out with her ex and her business partner, Anna (Anne Consigney from TV's "The Returned"), as if she were just ordering the next appetizer.

But Michele starts sizing up potential suspects, including a couple of young employees, particularly one who likes to tweak the prototype for the latest violent video game with images of Michele's face, for in-house amusement. Thus begins a slow burn of a whodunit, layered with levels of paranoia and misdirection.

Michele flirts with her married neighbor Patrick (Laurent Lafitte). At a dinner party she hosts, she sits next to Patrick and lets her foot wander to his crotch under the table. The look she gives him, with left-eyebrow cocked in mock innocence, is classic Huppert. Meantime, Michele steadfastly tries to put the attack behind her, while seeming to channel her energies in the detective work.

But the attack gets replayed in her mind. And sometimes the circumstances change. In one iteration she overcomes her assailant. Is that her memory faltering? Is she imagining what might have been? Eventually, the viewer begins to question whether the attack actually occurred the way it was first depicted, and whether Michele isn't perhaps playing a more sophisticated psychological game here.

Is she dead inside? She shamelessly has an affair with Anna's husband, but dumps him early on, only to spill the beans to Anna, needlessly harming her partner. "Shame isn't a strong enough emotion to stop us doing anything at all," Michele rationalizes to Anna. "Believe me."

What should be a taut thriller turns into a lumbering trompe l'oeil who-cares-who-done-it, dragging beyond the two-hour mark. Verhoeven's plot twists feel like cheats, and his style is surprisingly flat. He lazily leans on several spinnings of Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" as a tired soundtrack flourish.

None of the actors can really keep up with Huppert, making Michele's psychological maneuverings -- whether for grins or for self-preservation -- seem cruel and misplaced. Too much here just doesn't add up. For a better version of Huppert doing a psycho-sexual psych-out, try Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher" from 2002.

PERSONAL SHOPPER (C+) - When Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart teamed up last, for "Clouds of Sils Maria," they put us to sleep. With a solid nap under our belt for a rainy-day matinee, we stayed awake for "Personal Shopper," but still left the theater in a fog.

Stewart ("Adventureland," "Certain Women") plays Maureen, a morose millennial living in Paris, serving as a personal shopper for a celebrity while mourning the loss of her twin brother, whose spirit she desperately seeks to connect with. Maureen spends time at her brother's creaky old house out in the countryside, a mansion straight out of central casting.

Maureen rarely sees her employer, Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten), and has plenty of time to mouse around the old house and to interact with her brother's girlfriend, Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz), who has moved on quickly with a new boyfriend. Then Maureen starts getting text messages from an unknown number, from someone who apparently knows her comings and goings and who almost certainly is not the ghost of her brother.

The mystery here is disappointingly easy to figure out. It's as if Assayas ("Carlos," "Something in the Air") isn't even trying to create suspense. And while Stewart can be quite effective in certain roles, she is not one to enliven a movie with her natural charisma. In fact, she can be a walking Hipster Bingo card. Keep track every time she: nervously touches her face; runs her hand through her boyish haircut; texts; lights up a cigarette; converses without making eye contact; Skypes with her boyfriend; and rides her scooter through the streets of Paris (a lot).

It can make for a pretty dull 105 minutes. Assayas struggles to conjure up spirits with some bush-league Tim Burton effects. The story is just wafer thin here, bordering on laughable at times. (At one point, Maureen, frustrated by the signs she perceives are coming from the after-world, stares at a plumbing fixture that seems to have a mind of its own and says to it, "I'm gonna need more from you!") And not even the discovery of a brutal murder can raise the viewer's pulse.

The ending is heartfelt, evoking a rare flush of emotion in Maureen, gorgeously shot in Oman. But it can't make up for an hour and a half of moodiness from the Ghost and Mrs. Meh.

BONUS TRACK
The best part of "Personal Shopper" is the song over the closing credits, "Track of Time" by Anna von Hausswolff: