The Odd Years

If you've sensed some ennui from this remote corner of the internet, it's not you. And it's not me. We just haven't seen very many decent, let alone good, releases in 2017. In fact, we have handed out exactly one A-minus -- for "Obit" -- and I wouldn't say it's anywhere near a great documentary.

In the coming days, we'll hand out another A-minus to the quirky indie comedy "Donald Cried," a standout on a slog of a holiday weekend. And next up in our rental queue is "Get Out," which holds out some promise.

But no, we're not thrilled with the year's releases as we hit the halfway mark. And as we scan the horizon beyond the dog days of summer and into autumn, we're not encouraged.

Quo vadimus? Is this thing on?

BONUS TRACK
A sneak preview of "Donald Cried":


 

One Liners: Quiet Rebellions

A QUIET PASSION (B) - Terence Davies bounces back from the interminably dreary "Sunset Song" for this dour but powerful biography of poet Emily Dickinson, starring Cynthia Nixon in a role she seems to have been born to play.

Davies crafts a gorgeous period piece, delicate and moving throughout. Nixon rattles everything around her as the rebellious poet and social dissident, with a firm assist from Jennifer Ehle as Emily's sister, Vinnie, and Catherine Bailey as their free-spirited friend.

Events unfold at a glacial pace, but so elegantly and passionately that it holds your attention for a full two hours. The lighting is often dim, and rooms claustrophobic, no surprise coming from Davies, the hand behind "Distant Voices, Still Lives" and "The Deep Blue Sea."

Nothing that he throws at Nixon is too much for her to handle. Even her suffering from Bright's Disease somehow rises above standard TV Movie of the Week fare. Meantime, Dickinson's poetry -- along with her quirky style (involving many dashes) -- are celebrated with on-screen graphics and reverent narration. (Right up to the inevitable "Because I could not stop for death ...")

"A Quiet Passion" is a slow-burning family drama, with a rare sighting of Keith Carradine as the stern patriarch. It is a powerful and enduring character study.

LITTLE MEN (B-minus) - A sober but occasionally twee little comic drama pits two families in a business dispute, with the two adolescent sons

From the Ira Sachs earnestness factory -- see also "Keep the Lights On" and "Love Is Strange" -- comes this low-key slice of life about small businesses and class distinctions. The Jardine family, led by Brian (Greg Kinnear), owns a building in Brooklyn that houses a mom-and-pop (without the pop) tailor shop run by Leonor Cavelli (eminent Chilean actress Paulina Garcia), who has a son, Tony, who has a strong Brooklyn accent and dreams of being an actor someday. When his father dies, Brian assumes control of the building and discovers that his dad had been letting Leonor slide on ridiculously low rent for years, something Brian intends to rectify in the now-hip neighborhood.

Tony befriends the Jardines' son, the sensitive budding artist Jake (Theo Taplitz), setting up a generational battle between the wise-beyond-their-years boys and the squabbling adults locked in a gentrification showdown. Expect the boys to teach the adults a lesson or two in human kindness.

Sachs fusses over his characters and their dialogue with mixed results; at times he finds some fundamental truths while occasionally coming off as stagy. (It doesn't help that Brian is a local theater director.) Like "Love Is Strange," this one can be a little too tidy at times, and its impact fades fairly quickly. This is another solidly entertaining slice of life.

With Jennifer Ehle, mostly in the background as the loyal wife, making this an inadvertent double feature.

Fast Forward Theater: Mumble Corps

This feature covers 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 BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (D+) - In this horror story, three young actress tragically fall victim to an over-eager first-time director who slashes through his obvious influences as if with a dull hunting knife.

Very little makes sense here in the story of a pair of monosyllabic girls stranded at their girls school when their parents fail to show up to pick them up on the last day before break, for various cryptic reasons. Poor Kiernan Shipka (little Sally on TV's "Mad Men") plays Kat, a brooding little freak who gives the creeps to her older classmate, Rose (Lucy Boynton), a raven-haired beauty about to break some bad news to her boyfriend. The Northeastern prep school comes complete with the avuncular headmaster and a few mean old-crone teachers, all of whom are just begging to be slaughtered in some hideous fashion.

Kat's behavior is unsettling, and the movie starts with her picturing her parents in a deadly car crash, a premonition that she comes back to repeatedly as her mental state deteriorates. Meantime, a third girl, who goes by Joan (Emma Roberts), has apparently been sprung from a mental institution and hitches a ride with an unsuspecting couple who, it turns out, claim to be the parents of a girl who looks just like Rose and who -- get this -- died nine years ago!

OK. We're catching on. This isn't going to end well. It's just a matter of which of these three mopes is going to out-crazy the others. Just a few minutes in, I turned on the subtitles, because I don't speak Depressed Millennial, and I could barely make out what these poor girls were saying.

In the hands of Oz Perkins (who made this in 2015 before he made "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House" last year), this cliche-ridden story -- complete with creaky doors in seemingly every room and swelling ominous background music -- is devoid of originality. The debts to "Twin Peaks" and the "Exorcist" are huge. (There's actually an exorcism scene toward the end.) Perkins also has a disturbing leer when he gazes through the camera. In one scene, Joan, who is crashing in a motel in a room separate from the couple she just met, for some inexplicable reason answers the door in just a towel when she knows it's the husband knocking -- and lets him in for a casual chat.

There's a reason we don't watch horror movies anymore. Once you've seen a few, you've seen them all. These films are big lately -- they are popular and cheap to make. These three young actresses have seen better scripts and done better work before; they shouldn't have to be this director's ghoulish playthings.
 

New to the Queue

Bringing the heat ...

Kumail Nanjiani (HBO's "Silicon Valley") co-wrote and stars in a biographical love story, aided by director Michael Showalter ("Hello, My Name Is Doris"), "The Big Sick."

Our gal Emmanuelle Devos ("Violette," "Gilles' Wife") stars as a grieving mother hunting down justice in "Moka."

A celluloid archivist tells the story of the discovery of a trove of film cans in the Yukon, "Dawson City: Frozen in Time."

Mike White ("The Good Girl," "Chuck & Buck," HBO's "Enlightened") re-teams with Miguel Arteta for the story of a progressive woman (Salma Hayek) battling with a conservative man (John Lithgow) during a soiree, "Beatriz at Dinner."

With trepidation (will it be more like "The Virgin Suicides" or "Marie Antoinette"?) we list Sofia Coppola's Civil War costume piece "The Beguiled." 

A documentary about the din of daily life, Patrick Shen's "In Pursuit of Silence."

The swan song from the legendary documentarian Albert Maysles, with an assist from three co-directors, takes place entirely on a passenger train, "In Transit."

And a documentary about a male nurse in Iraq over five years, "Nowhere to Hide."
 

Punk'd (Part 2)

AUTHOR: THE J.T. LEROY STORY (B-minus) - I can't help thinking that there is a powerhouse documentary to be made about the epic literary scam pulled off by Laura Albert, who at the turn of the millennium posed as a troubled teenage boy to burn up the best-seller lists and hoodwink a cadre of C-list celebrities. This is not it.

Jeff Feurzeig ("The Devil and Daniel Johnston," "The Real Rocky") has such an explosive story at his fingertips, but he fails to put it all together. He spends a lot of time with Albert, a chubby girl turned lean middle-aged punk, as she unfurls the story of how her creation got out of hand.

J.T. Leroy was a literary sensation, the supposed teenage son of a truck-stop prostitute, pushing all the buttons of the book world and attracting celebrities drawn to the optics of gender politics. But it was Albert doing the writing and her former sister-in-law eventually taking on the mysterious public persona of the androgynous young writer.

With most people knowing how this turns out, Feurzeig doesn't pretend to be unraveling a "Serial"-type mystery. But he engages in a few of those tropes, and this one too often drags along. Albert can be engaging, but she's a little too in love with her legacy. Publishing-world talking heads don't much insight.

If you enjoy knocking B-list celebrities down a notch, there might be some thrills in watching the likes of Winona Ryder and Tom Waits fawn over "J.T." as the second coming of William Burroughs.

This wasn't the most shocking of scams of the last generation, and in Feurzeig's hands, it has lost a bit of its pop.

GIMME DANGER (B-minus) - Speaking of pop, our Jim Jarmusch trilogy ends with this fond, occasionally engaging documentary about Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the Nixon-era bad boys who are credited with inventing the '70s punk rock movement.

Jarmusch is too much of a fan-boy to really dig deep into the crevices of the band's legacy, and his visual style is surprisingly corny.  This is a lot more fond than it is engaging.

Depending on your tolerance for Iggy Pop (ne James Osterberg), your mileage here will vary. My biggest revelation halfway through this film: Iggy is really only moderately talented -- as a singer, songwriter, performer. And his bandmates were not particularly interesting.

The Stooges pretty much stole their shtick from fellow Michiganders the MC5. Iggy's lyrics, as Jarmusch notes, were embarrassingly rudimentary. Ron Asheton imagined a few killer hooks and riffs, most notably the legendary power chords that drive "I Wanna Be Your Dog."

These slacker dudes from Ann Arbor were discovered by Danny Fields, the subject of the recent "Danny Says," and signed to Elektra Records, which released their little-noticed self-titled debut in 1969 and their even more shunned (but enduring) followup, "Fun House," the next year.

Iggy, a former drummer with the garage band the Iguanas, developed that spastic shirtless stage presence that must have seemed stale by 1972. By then, he and most of his bandmates were hooked on heroin and had lost that record deal. David Bowie rescued Iggy around that time, and they gathered the old band for one last gasp, "Raw Power," with such scorchers as "Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell" and "Search and Destroy."

Iggy would go on to redeem himself later in the decade with alt-classics like "The Passenger" (famously covered by Siouxsie and the Banshees) and "Lust for Life" (forever stamped on the culture by "Trainspotting" in 1996 and later dropped through the lookingglass in a cruise-ship commercial).

In the end, here, the band members just don't have a compelling story to tell. They may have had a profound impact on a teenage Jarmusch back in the day, but his adoration can't justify a 108-minute slog through the faded past.

BONUS TRACKS
Alejandro Escovedo and Peter Buck cover "I Wanna Be Your Dog" in Athens, Ga., a few years ago:



James Osterberg drumming with the Iguanas in 1965:


 

Punk'd (Part 1)

GET ME ROGER STONE (B-minus) - Too long by a good 20 minutes, this by-the-numbers study of the guttersnipe political strategist who connived to stick us with Richard Nixon and Donald Trump revels in the man's obnoxious rubber-neck value.

A year ago, this would have been more amusing; now, it's a little frightening and depressing. Only a sadist would enjoy being reminded that we, as a nation, have come full circle since the Nixon law-and-order era of racial dog whistles.

It takes three guys to write and direct this fawning documentary about Roger Stone, the amoral prick who came of age in the era of dirty tricks. He was there for the Southern Strategy of the '60s, the rise of Reagan and the Christian coalition in the '70s, Willie Horton in the '80s, his own raunchy Clintonian scandal in the '90s, and of course, with his former partner Paul Manafort, the nightmare that was the election of Trump. As one talking head notes, after Stone's entrenchment among the Republican elite, "Washington's been worse off for it ever since."

Stone welcomes the hatred of his detractors; he has no principles; and he shows a deviant need to win at all costs, without a thought given to the well-being of Republic. We get it -- politics ain't beanbag. But this provocateur oozes oil like my '74 Chevy Nova used to.

It would be one thing if the filmmakers didn't have a crush on their subject. Sure, they let talking heads criticize him, but Stone always gets the last word. (He also wears the wildest outfits. Whether clad in a cream-colored suit or dark pinstripes with a violet fedora, Stone plays quite the dandy.) And the filmmakers can't help but mention the tabloid headlines that outed him and his wife as swingers; but they soft-pedal it, leaving any questions about his disinformation and his deflections, or his sexuality, on the cutting room floor. Never addressed, either, is the way his hairline quickly recedes in the early footage but is miraculously restored in middle age.

At times this can be quite entertaining, but then Stone can be too -- when he's not leering at the camera or shown in clips cavorting with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And the chronology seems out of balance. The film zips through the '60s, '70s and '80s and glosses past the outcast days of the '90s, before the film is barely half over. The rest of the film is devoted to the Trump phenomenon, from Stone's early grooming of the barbaric mogul to his and Manafort's deft exploitation of the disconnect between voters and the two major parties.

Either there's nothing particular amusing or intriguing about those recent events, or it's just ... too soon.

It Girl

We've been meaning to return to the British comedy "The IT Crowd," but we're hopelessly adrift in the era of Peak TV.  We stumbled across this clip, which makes reference to our beloved guy band Guided by Voices.  The usual response to the name of that band is, "Never heard of them."  Here, the case is made that a vibrant young woman shouldn't be expected to know who GBV is -- unless she is being drawn against her will into the valley of the nerds.


 

Obit noir

OBIT (A-minus) - This surprisingly tender, smartly crafted documentary goes behind the scenes of the obituary desk and the team of writers at the New York Times, with entertaining results.

Native New Yorker Vanessa Gould, in her first full-length film as director, shows a deft touch with the topics of death, journalism, the creative process and the arc of history. She is blessed with a few irresistible characters who carry the film. And she shows an appreciation for the inner workings of a newsroom and its various traditions, from coffee addictions to gallows humor.

And the morgue. That's the cavernous room full of file cabinets bursting with yellowing paper clippings and fading photos. It is manned by Jeff Roth (above), who provides broad comic relief as the eccentric keeper of the brittle files. With severely rolled-up sleeves and a self-deprecating demeanor, he takes the camera on a manic, dizzying tour of the archives, conveying the joys and frustrations of inheriting an impossibly complicated, archaic organizing system. Roth snaps off one-liners as relief from the mostly sober self-analysis of the obit writers themselves. In a word, he's a hoot.

The other star of the film is Bruce Weber, an introspective veteran pushing 60, who allows the cameras intimate access to his reporting and writing process as he spends a day on deadline reporting the death of John F. Kennedy's pioneering television adviser who famously orchestrated the pivotal Kennedy-Nixon debate late in the 1960 campaign. We see Weber meticulously interview the widow, nailing down the nuts and bolts as well as digging deeper into conversation for the details that will make the obituary come alive. For the camera, Weber spins a few entertaining journalism stories as well as waxing philosophical about confronting death daily for a living. We observe his hunt-and-peck typing style as he agonizes over the lede (opening paragraph(s) of the story) while his editor pitches the story for some front-page play. Weber embodies the heart and soul of a career reporter and writer. (He called it a career at the Times in 2016.)

And then there's Margalit Fox, certainly a talented journalist and vivid interview subject. Fox has an unflagging devotion to the English language and the written word, for better and for worse. She deserves some credit for enlivening a long-moribund genre, but she doesn't know her limits, and neither do her editors. We first flagged Fox in 2011 when we were regularly contributing to the internet bulletin board Testy Copy Editors (now on Facebook). We coined the phrase "obit noir" to describe her flowery writing and penchant for ending her pieces with a flourish, resorting to film-noir scene setting and purple prose (she has "the best words," like lachrymose) to convey what often seemed to be apocryphal anecdotes as punchlines. (The posts are collected on this thread between 2011 and 2013. Exhibit A is her obit of Lawrence Eagleburger.) On camera, Fox alternates between frothy exaggerations and tedious statements of the obvious. (It takes her numerous sentences to explain the simple concept that an inordinate number of obituary subjects are white males merely because they made their reputations decades ago when white males dominated politics, industry and entertainment. Noted.) Her theatrics and thesaurus-rex verbosity will either evoke admiration or annoyance.

Gould, however, juggles these and other personalities well.  The filmmaker certainly did her homework; she pays attention to detail, getting much of the small stuff right. She has a nose for pithy coffee-mug slogans and bulletin board clippings (usually of the gallows variety) endemic in the workplace. She studies the pitfalls of fact-gathering and fact-checking. She explains how a lede works and the tradition of writing obituaries in advance to have a bunch in the can ready to go in case a famous celeb or politician dies. She has one of the writers conduct a dramatic reading from a ridiculously cheesy obit from the 1930s to show how the form has morphed from cringe-inducing over-the-top euphemisms about subjects passing into the next realm to be greeted by angels on high, to the matter-of-fact style of the present day (and the ban on unnecessary alternatives to the word "died").

She notes the famous yarn about the death of Farrah Fawcett, who normally would have gotten pretty good play in the next day's paper had she not been overwhelmed within hours by bombshell reports of the afternoon death of Michael Jackson, which set off a deadline frenzy. She brings in music writer Jon Pareles to talk about the appreciation he whipped up in a few hours.

The filmmaker also is wise enough to follow up with Weber the next day to see how his story turned out and how it was played. Wouldn't you know it, he got a fact wrong. (If you pay close attention, it is foreshadowed during his phone interview with the widow.) Then again she fails to show us the lede that Paul Vitello agonized over all day while working on the obit of '60s ad man Dick Rich; here's a link to it.

Gould expertly works in clips of many of the obituary subjects. (A highlight is John Fairfax [1937-2012], who was the first person to row across an ocean.) The footage -- mostly grainy black-and-white or ambered -- brought to mind the wistful late '80s "time machine" ABC News series "Our World" with Linda Ellerbee. Late in the film Gould reels off a roll call of famous recent obit subjects -- Prince, David Bowie, Maya Angelou -- with a grace that brings to mind an award show's "In Memoriam" segment and which elicited "aahs" from various enclaves of the audience as the subjects flashed on the screen.

Maybe I was just in the mood for this one and was watching it with rose-colored glasses; I'm a former newspaperman and undying fan and admirer of obituaries. I was also watching it with one of my former Albuquerque Tribune colleagues who had just penned the obituary of one of another of our former Trib alums. And "Obit" certainly is a bittersweet affair, keenly aware that all of the Times' obit writers are middle-aged and many of their readers probably older.

As newspapers die off -- and its inveterate former staffers do as well -- it's worth documenting the golden years of an age when a news organization devoted so much time, effort, and care to thoughtfully telling the life stories of those who made an impact in our culture. And to present that process so poetically on the big screen must warm the hearts not just of cranky old journalists but of others who care about the written word.

BONUS TRACK
The trailer:


 

New to the Queue

Hold on hope ...

Steve James ("Hoop Dreams," "The Interrupters") profiles a small bank run by Chinese immigrants, the only bank to be prosecuted after the 2008 meltdown, "Abacus: Small Enough to Jail."

Our gal Alia Shawkat and the great Janet McTeer star as the girlfriend and mom of a young man who has committed suicide, in Amber Tamblyn's debut behind the camera, "Paint It Black."

From Argentina, a drama set in an artist's residency as intrigue of Shakespearean proportions envelops two women there, "Hermia and Helena."

If we ever find ourselves with four hours with absolutely nothing to do, we'll have this definitive Grateful Dead documentary squirreled away in the queue, "Long Strange Trip."

A profile of a teenage dissident who rallied others into the streets of Hong Kong in 2014, "Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower."

Fred Armison, as the wacky neighbor, may be enough to draw us to Zoe Lister-Jones' twee-looking directorial debut about a couple who channel their arguments into songs, "Band Aid."

BONUS TRACK
Our title track, from Guided by Voices: