Alors

IN THE SHADOW OF WOMEN (B-minus) - Another relationship churn from the Garrel squad.

Veteran French filmmaker Philippe Garrel ("Burning Hot Summer," "Jealousy") burrows deep into a love triangle, sticking close to his wheelhouse. We follow glum Pierre (Stanislas Merhar), a struggling filmmaker, who works with the aid of his wife, Manon (Clotilde Courau), and uneventfully ends up in the bed of a young intern, Elisabeth (newcomer Lena Paugam).

Pierre is anything but excited by the thrill of the cheat. In fact, he is downright miserable, and outside of the romps with a hot young thing, he shows no emotion or joy. Merhar comes off as a working class Keith Urban with a nasty Kurt Cobain streak. A narrator (Louis Garrel, the director's son) conveys Pierre's thoughts, which skew mostly to whines about the curse of being a stereotypical male.

The women fare a little better. Paugam comes off as a bit of a prop, but Courau, as the bewitched wife, is a perfectly controlled roller-coaster of emotions throughout. It turns out that Manon has a secret of her own. That sparks a hypocritical hissy fit on the part of Pierre, who responds the only way he knows how: by launching stinging putdowns to her and his innocent young lover.

Yet, neither woman wants to quit him. Yes, it's quite French. A subplot about the subject of Pierre's documentary -- a French resistance fighter from WWII -- exists, apparently, to contrast Pierre's petulance with the gravitas of the Greatest Generation.

Garrel shoots in crisp black-and-white, which fits the throwback New Wave mood. He also reels this in at 73 minutes. If you know that going in, you'll have more patience for these brooding agonistes.
 

Soundtrack of Your Life: See the Light

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

Date: 14 October 2017, 8:18 p.m.
Place: Lowe's hardware store
Song:  "See the World"
Artist: Gomez
Irony Matrix: 3.3 out of 10

Comment: One of my favorite albums of the new millennium is "How We Operate" by the quirky British popsters Gomez. It's a smooth collection of bittersweet songs. "See the World" is a highlight.

It was a Saturday night, and we were on our way home from a wedding. Me in a jacket and tie, her in a beautiful skirt and top. Best-dressed pair at Lowe's. Seeking out a trip light for the driveway. Bouncing along the aisles as 10-year-old British mope rock bubbled on the store speakers.

Found something that took three D batteries. How analog and retro.

Here is a live version of "See the World" from 2011:



BONUS TRACKS
The best song on that album, "Girl Shaped Love Drug." It's truly addictive:



Their cover of the Beatles' "Getting Better," originally recorded for a Philips electronics commercial and included on the amazing B-side compilation "Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline" in 2000:


 

That '70s Drift, Part III: Palookaville

CHUCK (C+) - This surprisingly inert biopic struggles to communicate a reason for being. Liev Schreiber disappears into the role of Chuck Wepner, a tomato can from Bayonne, N.J., who is plucked from obscurity to fight the heavyweight champ, Muhammad Ali, thus inspiring Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky" story.

Canadian director Philippe Falardeau ("Monsieur Lazhar") never establishes a grip on this shambling script from four writers, including Schreiber, suggesting a labor of love by the actor. Too often this period piece is content to fetishize the sleazy '70s and wallow in the horrid fashions, not unlike recent HBO TV duds like "Vinyl" and "The Deuce."

Schreiber lays the Jersey accent on thick, and Elisabeth Moss, as his wife, Phyliss, goes toe-to-toe with him in striving for lower-class authenticity. It's a draw. Naomi Watts looks lost -- "What accent is this? What era am I in?" -- as a feather-haired bartender, Linda, who catches Chuck's roving eye. Only Ron Pearlman, as Wepner's crude trainer, finds joy and zip in a character. And you would be hard pressed to find an actor with less charisma than Pooch Hall as a bizarrely low-key Ali.

When it comes to the inevitable comparisons to great fight films like "Raging Bull," "Chuck" can run but it can't hide. Much of this ground has been covered ad nauseam, whether in Scorcese's classic biopic, or Stallone's fictionalized masterpiece. "Chuck" revisits an era -- late '70s, early '80s -- and comes off as derivative dress-up.

THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT (1974) (B-minus) - Back to the actual '70s, when men were men, character actors were character actors, and guns and cars were the tools of the trade. This is the directorial debut of Michael Cimino ("The Deer Hunter").

Here the buddy road movie meets the heist flick. Clint Eastwood and a young Jeff Bridges meet cute, with Eastwood's Thunderbolt (he's known for blowing open safes) on the lam from some hitmen and hitching a ride with Bridges' Lightfoot in the kid's stolen car. It turns out that the hitmen are old buddies of Thunderbolt, veterans of a bank job that left half a million dollars missing somewhere in a schoolhouse in Montana.

After Thunderbolt and Lightfoot learn that the schoolhouse has apparently been razed and replaced, Red (George Kennedy) and Eddie (Geoffrey Lewis) finally catch up to them, and they eventually believe Thunderbolt when he says he did not double-cross them. The four decide to team up, go back undercover, and rob the same bank.

Cimino flashes a confident, gritty visual style. Eastwood broods like he did throughout the '70s. Bridges is at the pupal stage of his career, still trying to figure out how to really act. Kennedy is the secret weapon here, playing a flustered thug with a short fuse. He and Lewis offer a Laurel & Hardy slapstick tone to the rather ominous proceedings.

This lumbers along leisurely, landing just shy of two hours. It has its moments, but Cimino struggles to mold it into a cohesive work of art. It's more of a time capsule than a classic.
 

New to the Queue

Chill ...

Let's hope Noah Baumbach is back on his game, teaming up here with Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler for "The Meyerowitz Stories."

A couple of troubled hoarders, twin brothers, give way to a cleaning crew in the documentary "Thy Father's Chair."

A recently divorced Italian documentarian explores the ideas of love, sex and fidelity in "Monogamish."

A documentary, rich in archival footage, about Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, "Jane."

A study of group therapy among a handful of inmates at Folsom Prison, "The Work."

A quirky Austin-based anti-rom-com from "Saturday Night Live" dropout Noel Wells, "Mr. Roosevelt."
  

That '70s Drift, Part II: Run That Baby

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) (A) - There is the myth of Woodward and Bernstein -- two young reporters working doggedly to bring down a president -- and the myth is real. It was arguably the height of a profession that is, now, in many ways, a shell of what it was back in the 1970s.

So it is easy for old newspapermen and political junkies to get caught up in the nostalgia of the post-Watergate high, a brief, shining moment of enlightenment. But even without that amber glow, "All the President's Men" is an exceptional suspense movie that bears up to repeated viewings.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman were at the top of their games as Woodward and Bernstein, the hungry, bickering, poor step-sons in the newsroom hierarchy. The two even have a meet-cute -- near the copy desk, when Woodward finds Bernstein intercepting his draft of one of the first Watergate stories and rewriting it. From then on, they were a team, collaborating like blood brothers and squabbling like siblings. (When the chain-smoking Bernstein lights a cigarette in an elevator, Woodward snaps, "Is there any place you don't smoke?")

Alan J. Pakula ("Klute," "The Parallax View," "Sophie's Choice") captures the clutter and clatter of the newsroom, the eeriness of an incestuous Washington, D.C., and the fear of bureaucrats swept up in a scandal. Pakula revels in the miscellaneous duties of a reporter -- the phone calls, the door-knocking, the cajoling, the persistence. A famous scene of Woodward and Bernstein painstakingly poring over individual check-out slips from a stack of thousands of slips at the Library of Congress is the perfect example of diligence and determination that personifies a profession. In another subtle moment, Redford conveys the rush of reporting with one reaction shot when, on the phone, a source utters the words that are music to a newsman's ears: "I know I shouldn't tell you this ..."

With heralded screenwriter William Goldman ("Marathon Man" (also starring Hoffman) "The Princess Bride," "Misery"), Pakula crafts a mesmerizing film noir for the ages. There is a buddy-cop snap to the dialogue, recalling the rapport of the outlaws in Goldman's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (also starring Redford). Newsroom story meetings crackle with one-liners. Toward the movie's climax, editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards), roused late at night by his cub reporters, calmly informs them that "nothing's riding on this -- except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country." 

It all seemed that important 40-plus years ago, decades before an accidental president could deflect criticism and scrutiny with the mere taunt of "Fake news!" In that sense, returning to the days of telephone books and rotary dials can be a bit depressing. What we did back then mattered, dammit. We saved the country. Please don't tell us it was all in vain.

Historical and psychological torment aside, shoe-leather detective tales don't come any more entertaining. Redford is charming as the preppy, often exasperated Woodward. Hoffman is compelling as the dogged Bernstein, pulling scraps of notes out of every conceivable pocket of his rumpled outfit. And the supporting cast is critical to bringing this home. Jack Warden is delightfully gruff as Woodward and Bernstein's supportive city editor. Hal Holbrook broods from the shadows as the informant Deep Throat. Stephen Collins agonizes over a sense of duty as one of the key sources from inside the Nixon campaign. Jane Alexander is heartbreaking as the reluctant bookkeeper who slowly melts under the pressure of Woodward and Bernstein's quiet interrogations.

But it is Robards, holding together the moral core of the movie, who looms large as the legendary editor in chief, a stern father figure guiding his eager reporters. Bradlee rejects a "thin" draft of a key story. He thumbs his nose at the Nixon White House and stands by his staff. He snarls at his underlings out of doubt and frustration. But when his boys finally nail it, he can hardly control his joy. 

One night, with minutes till deadline, as Bradlee meanders his way toward the exit in a rumpled tuxedo, Woodward and Bernstein work the phones to confirm a final detail of the story that would prove to be the tipping point. With a slam of the receiver they frantically retrieve their boss from in front of the elevators. He returns to examine their copy one more time, double-checking their reporting, as they burst with hope and suspense. Bradlee rises from his chair, hands the copy back to them and growls, "Run that baby." And as he walks back toward the elevators, Bradlee playfully taps an empty desk for emphasis. It's a tiny theatrical flourish, as if by a song-and-dance man. It's the exclamation point we wish we could throw at the end of a headline.

It's how it was done back then.
 

That '70s Drift, Part I: A Long Way, Maybe

BATTLE OF THE SEXES (B+) - One of the duties of a middle-aged man is to occasionally assure his mother that the world isn't going all to hell. Last November 9th, on the phone to my mom, I was at a loss for words.

We are moving through a phase of exposing, once again, the sexually predatory ways of the unyielding white male authoritarian structure -- in news (Ailes), politics (Trump), and entertainment (Weinstein) -- that seems to thrive and morph like a drug-resistant bug. How could 62 million people, including establishment Republicans and self-professed Christians, look the other way and sneak into the White House the poster child for male-chauvinist pigs? A desperate thirst for power is always the default answer.

But who could not be haunted by the sight of a horrible brute looming behind Hillary Clinton at that debate like a stalker or worse. The bullies have retaken the reins of power.

Reading the recent obituary of Kate Millett, I was reminded of the long slog of sexual politics and was tossed back to the second wave during the turbulent '70s. Was that the beginning of an endless historical loop? In that context, what a lark it was when Billie Jean King played a tennis match against the boorish huckster Bobby Riggs, a made-for-TV "Battle of the Sexes" that is lovingly re-enacted in this quaint but moving nostalgic romp.

I saw this movie with my mom, who was on the last full day of her annual visit, having spent the previous weekend attending the semifinals and finals of the Albuquerque stop on the sparsely attended professional women's tennis tournament. Our respective obsessions -- tennis and movies -- came together on a rainy afternoon. Two hours together in a dark screening room was preferable to trying to explain again how a qualified though deeply flawed woman was destroyed by a relentless media campaign and a wild spasm of the venerable power structure.

Instead, there is Emma Stone, with the talent to not only carry a film these days but to elevate it, donning the wire-rimmed spectacles and the frumpy shag hairdo of the 29-year-old King, as she not only sticks her neck out to prove a cultural point but also challenges the old-boy network by forming a union of female players and helping launch the Virginia Slims tournament. As early as 1967, she was critical of the United States Lawn Tennis Association for its shady dealings, and by 1973, she had convinced her colleagues to break away for their own circuit and had shamed the U.S. Open into awarding equal payouts to the winner of its annual tournament. Here that stuffy old-boy network is personified by the smug Jack Kramer, perfectly oiled by character actor Bill Pullman.

Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, the former music-video directors who splashed in 2006 with "Little Miss Sunshine," take a script from Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty," "Slumdog Millionaire") and dip it in amber and avocado green tones to craft a faithful period piece (down to the retro Fox studio marker at the beginning of the film). The movie looks and feels like it was shot in the shadowy '70s, which at times makes it feel alternatively authentic and like a cutesy conceit.

Stone dives deep into her character, exploring the personal demons of a closeted bisexual and showing enough athletic ability to not embarrass herself. (When the big match finally arrives, Faris and Dayton render it wonderfully.) In this version, King falls for a carefree hairdresser named Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough, "Birdman"), whose presence on the tour becomes an open secret for the married King. They have a winning chemistry without letting the weight of the relationship weigh down the movie.

Stone goes up against Steve Carell, whose natural smarm serves him well and makes him tolerable, like he was in "Foxcatcher." Carell's Riggs is a pathetic old man whose shtick has worn thin, both personally and professionally. Carell is always much better when he's not trying to be a cut-up, and here he reveals Riggs in layers, never quite tipping into syrupy pathos.

A secret weapon here is the supporting cast. Sarah Silverman hams it up as chain-smoking Gladys Heldman, who secured the Philip Morris sponsorship for the Virginia Slims tour. She slings one-liners all around, the sharpest ones reserved for Pullman, with classic movie-of-the-week cheekiness. Alan Cumming lights up the screen as Ted Tingling, the sassy designer of King's attire. Elisabeth Shue doesn't have much to do as Riggs' frustrated wife, but just a sprinkling of her talent is welcome, especially sporting that tanned Ethel Kennedy glow. Mickey Sumner ("Frances Ha") and Bridey Elliott ("Fort Tilden") pop in the background as regular players on the tour. Fred Armisen ("Band Aid") plays it mostly straight as Riggs' health guru, which I'm convinced is Armisen's subtle in-joke.

This ensemble effort makes the production pleasing and not too full of itself. Faris and Dayton revel, like kids, in the opportunity to re-create the America of their teen years. They seamlessly insert player/commentator Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales) into a TV image with the real Howard Cosell's arm draped around her. They relish Riggs' publicity stunts. They construct ominous wood-paneled sanctums where Kramer and his henchman plot the pompous pronouncements of the patriarchy.

It's all packaged as a slick two-hour window into a seemingly more innocent past. Or were those the good old days?
 

Fussy Boys

A couple of tortured souls ...

WILSON (B) - A misanthropic luddite with an apparent heart of gold, middle-aged Wilson navigates a mid-life crisis, jolted by the death of his emotionally distant novelist father, and he seeks out an ex who is more messed up than he is.

From the poisoned pen of graphic artist Daniel Clowes ("Ghost World," "Art School Confidential") comes this traipse through our dark and haunted subconscious. Woody Harrelson stars as Wilson, a man unafraid to let his id rule all of his personal and social interactions (uttering unpleasant truths that we all think but don't say). He rails against "the oligarchs" and the suburbs and chides himself for using the word "closure." He is a social provocateur who butts up against others at cafes and on buses (not afraid to nudge them awake, even), even though there's plenty of room to sit elsewhere. He is ardently devoted to a scruffy companion, his dog Pepper.

Wilson tracks down Pippi (a delightfully manic Laura Dern), a messed-up bleach-blond in recovery (with a former pimp's name tattooed on her back). He assumed that Pippi had aborted their child when she left 17 years ago, but it turns out that Pippi put the girl up for adoption.

They then begin stalking Claire (Isabella Amara, channeling Thora Birch's Enid from "Ghost World"), a chubby, nerdy teen who apparently has inherited Wilson's sarcastic ways. With the plot points cued up, skilled director Craig Johnson ("The Skeleton Twins," "True Adolescents") melds "Beavis and Butt-head" comedy with inch-deep indie drama. Engaging their "daughter" without her parents' knowledge is not likely to end well.

This is a hit-and-miss character study, almost a little too tidy.  For contrast early on, we see Wilson visit a childhood friend who's even more bitter and unpleasant than he is (or, in Wilson's estimation, a "toxic, soul-draining vampire"). ("Want some beet juice?" the host offers. "Fuck. No," Wilson responds.) Also early on, as Wilson's father lay comatose in a hospital bed, Wilson begs for a declaration of love. OK, we get it, he's scarred from childhood.

Harrelson does his best to keep this all zipping along, and he succeeds until the narrative runs off the rails in the final half hour, scattering its focus and diluting its message. Some cues are too obvious.  Elsewhere, Judy Greer, as Wilson's dog-sitter, is wasted in a dead-end role. And a sappy ending threatens to undo much of what came before. 

BEACH RATS (B-minus) - This gorgeous, intimate examination of teenagers frolicking around Coney Island digs mostly only skin deep.

The story follows Frankie (Harris Dickinson), an intensely disaffected hunk who dabbles in drugs with his loser friends and secretly trolls older men on a sex-hookup website. Frankie explores a traditional relationship with Simone (Madeline Weinstein), but suffers from performance issues that he blames on the drugs. The pair make for the perfect couple on paper -- they have arresting good looks, full lips and boy/girl-next-door qualities about them.

Frankie, though, is an emotional black hole. He repeatedly states that he doesn't know what he likes, wants or cares about. Twice he proclaims, defensively, that his Guido buddies are not his friends. And why older guys? No particular attraction; it's only because they won't know people in his age group. A rape scenario at the hands of one of the men is seemingly shrugged off by Frankie.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman first explored teenage sensuality and angst (and the beach) from the female perspective in her brilliant debut, "It Felt Like Love." But what felt like a shared intimacy with sharp insights then comes off here as artifice and inscrutability. (It could simply be a fact that young women are more interesting than boys.) Hittman's camera again gets up in the pores of her actors, but she struggles to break through the surface. Boys in bare chests play handball; they don wife-beaters for their jaunts on the boardwalk; the sharing of a cigarette is sexy. But those images can't detract from the fact that Frankie is mostly moping around like a zombie, exchanging monosyllabic grunts with interchangeable fellow teens with zero inner lives.

Most of the narrative heft takes place in the final third of the movie, but by then you might not care whether Frankie snaps out of his funk or not. Hittman makes a questionable plot choice to force a climax. She leans on the growing indie trope of fireworks displays to suggest romantic sparks (albeit ironically) and deeper emotional meaning. It's ever so stylish, but by the end, when we return with Frankie to the beach, there's a hint of an epiphany about him, but we're still clueless about what it is he wants and whether he has the wherewithal to pursue it.
 

New to the Queue

Cooler by the lake ...

Sean Baker ("Tangerine," "Starlet") follows a bunch of 6-year-olds who antagonize the gruff manager, played by Willem Dafoe, in "The Florida Project."

We're fans of Mike White ("The Good Girl," HBO's "Enlightened"), though we're wary that he may be going to the well once too often with his latest, starring Ben Stiller, "Brad's Status."

This documentary about vermin in Baltimore has as much to say about class and economic distinctions than about pest infestations: "Rat Film."

The latest from New Wave legend Agnes Varda is a collaboration with a 33-year-old photographer, a travelogue through France, "Faces Places."

A strong cast and filmmakers with a decent track record are drawing us to the cheesy time-warp nostalgia-fest about Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, "Battle of the Sexes."

Strangers make passing acquaintances on a train ride through South Korea in "Autumn, Autumn."