Only in New York

THE WORLD BEFORE YOUR FEET (B) - This is the charming story of Matt Green who is documented here on his mission to walk all 8,000 miles or so of New York City. New Yorkers might have an inside appreciation for the nuances here, but it manages to have entertainment value for those of us in flyover country.

Green is an engaging subject, and it's fun to tag along as he explores beyond the beaten track. Rain, snow or sun, he gets his miles in each day, and then blogs about it, tagging various trends he spots -- from 9/11 memorials to barbershops featuring a Z in their names.

Filmmaker Jeremy Workman struggles to knit together a narrative arc. And this clocks in at 95 minutes but truly feels 10 minutes longer and should be 10 minutes shorter. But tag along. It's an interesting trek. Worth it for the cat-sitting gag featuring a cat flipping a light switch.

CRIME + PUNISHMENT (B-minus) - This profile of whistleblowers in the New York City Police Department does feel a little too inside baseball beyond the Big Apple.

The stakes affect people of color -- both the policemen forced to hit quotas (despite the official abolition of such tactics) and the victims who get roped into the system. This feels important but not urgent viewing.

R.I.P., Bruno Ganz

Bruno Ganz, perhaps the only actor to have played both an angel and Adolph Hitler, died last week at 77. We screened his collaboration with Wim Wenders, in memoriam. 

WINGS OF DESIRE (1987) (A) - Wim Wenders at the height of his powers, co-writing a rambling, fascinating treatise on humanity and mortality, told through the eyes of guardian angels who watch us and know all but are unable to feel.

I don't remember my specific reactions when I first watched this movie 30 years ago. But this time I was knocked out by the philosophical noodlings authored by Wenders and Peter Handke. There is a soulfulness on display, much deeper than the general ideas of what it means to be human -- to feel, to taste, to love, to hurt. There is also a playfulness to the idea that some humans can either see the angels or sense their presence. (Peter Falk, as himself, is a delight in this mode.) I also was reminded of the Wenders' heavy emphasis on the postwar devastation of Berlin, which, at the time, had been only 40 years in the rearview mirror. The power of evil is palpable throughout in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

Bruno Ganz carries the film as Damiel, the angel who falls for an elegant trapeze artist and longs to return to human form in order to interact with her. Is there a male-fantasy element to that? Possibly. But the sense of innocence and wonder is captivating. Ganz's sad-eyed but mischievous Damiel plays well against his hangdog counterpart, Cassiel (Otto Sander). Solveig Dommartin glides through her scenes as Marion, the beauty who defies gravity (and, literally at one point, dresses in angel wings).

And Wenders' camera, too, seems to float all over Berlin, switching from gritty black-and-white (when shooting from the angels' perspective) to lurid color (human perspective), an unsubtle reminder of life's rich pageant.

BONUS TRACK
Damiel with a motorcycle crash victim:


 

New to the Queue

On a roll ...

A 10-year-old girl's summer is upended when she is torn between the woman who raised her and the party gal who is her biological mother in "Daughter of Mine."

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has never let us down, so we'll give him three hours of our time for his latest, "The Wild Pear Tree."

Steven Soderbergh takes a "Moneyball" approach to the NBA in his iPhone-shot "High Flying Bird."

Chris Elliott and his wife and daughters gather for a comedy about a dysfunctional family in "Clara's Ghost."

A documentary about four high school athletes dealing with their tribulations in Huntsville, Ala., "Wrestle." 
 

Doc Watch: Vox Populi

TVTV: VIDEO REVOLUTIONARIES (B-minus) - This is a fun but marginal throwback to the 1970s, after the invention and marketing of the Sony videocamera that made it possible to shoot picture and sound together via a device that was easy to carry around and offered immediate playback possibilities. So, of course, legions of hippies and counter-culture utopians set out to reinvent journalism. They had limited success.

TVTV was a cooperative that developed relationships with CBS News and with PBS and made a small dent in the world of TV news. They also consorted with National Lampoon types (including Bill Murray and John Belushi, pre-"SNL") and later Hollywood to create what we would now call DIY YouTube content. They invaded the 1972 Republican convention Miami, sneaking in Vietnam vet Ron Kovic for a protest on the floor of the convention. They lurked behind the scenes at the Super Bowl.

The former long-hairs look back fondly on their days chronicling the counter-culture. The clips are entertaining. Like most things, this boomer fantasy sputtered and died by the time the Reagan era got going. But they planted a few seeds, and their gumption is charming.

HERE COME THE VIDEOFREEX (C+) - This is a lesser version of "TVTV." The Videofreex were another guerrilla video outfit, pointing the camera at the events the mainstream media tended not to show. This gang is just not as interesting as their contemporaries. And the production here is sluggish. One of the best scenes is a repeat of the joint venture with TVTV at the Miami convention.

The Videofreex eventually embarked for rural upstate New York, where they pirated Channel 3 for their own use and for the entertainment of the locals. They intended to cause outrage and gain publicity. The establishment, however, didn't care. So they put on cheap programming for about five years before fading away. You get the sense that they just were not that talented and didn't have anything truly compelling to say.

BONUS TRACK
Christopher Guest and Bill Murray cover the Super Bowl festivities for TVTV:

Sweet Mystery of Life

BATHTUBS OVER BROADWAY (A-minus) - Dava Whisenant, a former editor for David Letterman's talk show, tags along with Steve Young, a "Late Show" writer, as he explores his passion: the underground world of industrial/commercial musicals of the 1960s and '70s.

Young is eminently likable as he geeks out on these vinyl treasures that captured a postwar era of big-budget company conventions where more money was spent on one-off shows than on the Broadway hits at the time. The film captures an era when the United States was still a manufacturing powerhouse, and a time when old-fashioned entertainment still held sway.

Young shares his nerd passions with other fans of the industrial musicals, such as punk-rock drummer Don Bolles and former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra. Veterans of the shows appear, including Chita Rivera, Florence Henderson and Martin Short. Young tracks down the composers of these cheesy showtunes about tractors and plumbing fixtures. The centerpiece, undoubtedly, is "My Bathroom," which provoked my inner 12-year-old to guffaw uncontrollably:

My bathroom, my Bathroom
It's much more than it may seem
Where I wash and where I cream
A special place where I can stay
And cream and dream and dream and dream ... 

Ah, yes. I recall those teenage years in the bathroom just as fondly. Whisenant finds both the retro humor and the true heart of the genre and the folks who lived it. The pitch is irresistible.

THE IMPOSTER (2012) (B) - There's a fine line between ridiculous and fascinating. This documentary, about a French con man who somehow tricked a Texas family into thinking he was their teenage son/brother who had gone missing three years earlier, is a little of both.

The filmmakers spend a lot of time with Frederic Bourdin, the trickster who pulled off his scam for a few months before locals, including a private investigator, got suspicious. Maybe it was the fact that Bourdin was 23, not 16 like the missing boy, had a heavy accent, and had brown eyes instead of the boy's blue eyes.

Nothing adds up here. Why did the family fall for it? Blind hope? Were some of them in on the boy's disappearance? Nothing gets tied up neatly in the end here, and the numerous re-enactments might try your patience. But it's all so implausible that it's hard to resist.

BONUS TRACK
From "Bathtubs," the incomparable, "My Bathroom":



And Madeleine Kahn, from "Young Frankenstein," with our title track:

Midwest Ennui

COLUMBUS (2017) (C+) - Expectations were crushed after finally getting around to screening this moody character study set and shot in Columbus, Ind. It's too lethargic to spark inspiration in the viewer, and it borders on dull and repetitive.

John Cho (the recent "Star Trek" series of films) stars as Jin, a man returning to the Midwest after his father, a noted architect and professor at the local university, ends up in a coma. Jin runs into Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a fan of his father's work, a bright young woman who refuses to pursue an education because she wants to help her mother recover from drug addiction.

Cho and Richardson (one of the best things about "Support the Girls") are naturally charming, but writer-director Kogonada (a prolific maker of short films) goes all in on gloom to the detriment of narrative. Parker Posey is downright neutered as a soccer-mom-coifed acolyte of the architect father. Jin and Casey admire the architecture of Columbus (Kogonada has an eye for framing) and smoke a lot, but virtually nothing happens, plot-wise, and the two hours can drag. Rory Culkin brightens the proceedings in just a couple of scenes as Casey's library co-worker. But by the end, we don't care about Casey or her mom; we just wish both of them would do something interesting.

BONUS TRACK
A highlight -- and a welcome jolt of energy -- comes courtesy of the Ettes and "Eat the Night":


 

En Fuego

FYRE (A-minus) - A highly entertaining documentary from Netflix about the scam in the Bahamas that was the Fyre music festival run by a crook. The story sells itself. A con artist, Billy McFarland, bilked investors and duped thousands of (what we used to call) yuppies into believing there would be a music concert on an island in the Bahamas.

Netflix boasts exclusive footage of the planning and execution in the run-up to the event, planned in April 2017. Even after he was busted for the scam, McFarland invited cameras in to capture his follow-up fraud involving ticket access. The footage throughout, beginning with the initial marketing scheme involving the world's most sought-after fashion models cavorting on the beach, lends gravitas to the unfurling of events.

The key inside players are here, and they essentially admit to enabling McFarland and rapper Ja Rule as the party boys carried out the cruel shell game. The ridiculousness of internet "influencers" and the gullibility of their followers is exposed richly. This was a perfect storm of Trump-era ignorance and empty lives craving experiences. Some people shelled out tens of thousands of dollars expecting swank digs and exclusive hang-outs with models and rock stars. They were eventually greeted with FEMA tents and cheese sandwiches.

All of this creates a certain guilty giddiness in watching the clusterfuck unfold. The victims are not particularly sympathetic, so you don't feel so bad watching them "suffer" in economy class on their way to a non-event. And the character study of McFarland, mostly done through the footage he authorized, is sharp and insightful. What some of his underlings were willing to do out of desperation as the date of the festival approached might appall you or might make you skeptical. Either way, you will be entertained by this documentary.

FYRE FRAUD (B-minus) - Hulu weighed in simultaneously with its own take on the debacle. Their version is flat and less compelling. This one spends the first half hour exclusively on the background of Billy McFarland, which is way too much back story. The meat of the story about the festival doesn't kick in until about halfway through. Such strict chronological storytelling is a big mistake here.

There really is nothing much here that you can't get from the fuller Netflix offering. Hulu does sit McFarland down for an interview while he was under indictment, so we get to watch him spin and squirm a bit, but the strategy feels a bit like a stunt. Jia Tolentino, a writer for the New Yorker, pops up but is under-utilized in favor of much less insightful talking heads.

BONUS TRACK
The Netflix trailer:


  

Best of 2018

As always, it takes us an extra month to put together an informed list of the best films of the past year, and after a flurry of last-minute viewings this past weekend, here we are.

It was a quiet year, and we have no profound insights to bring.  "The Rider" and "Foxtrot" were released early in 2018, and no movie really came close to the powerful storytelling of those two deeply moving films. "Shoplifters" was in the ballpark. After our top five, there's a noticeable drop-off.

Documentaries made a strong showing, with three in our top ten and a particularly strong crop represented below under More Top Docs.

We're not diving as deep into these movie reviews since the start of last year, but we're seeing nearly as many movies. By our count we reviewed 66 2018 releases in the past year and about as many older releases. We are still in the same slump we were in last year as far as our enthusiasm for movies in general and our view of the industry. Weeks would pass when there was no new release worth paying for. But there still is fun to be had at the cineplex and the art house.

If you're picky, you can still appreciate the genre. Pick through the following lists and see what you find.

THE TOP FILMS

 

  1. The Rider - A heart-wrenching look at a real family, their life dramatized by this bold, poignant film.
  2. Foxtrot - An ingenious story, told with grit and whimsy.  From Israel, this had the year's BEST SCREENPLAY.
  3. Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. - A fastidiously curated presentation of the video life of the rapper M.I.A. It pulses with life.
  4. The King - Eugene Jarecki continues his examination of the soul of America, creatively riffing on the life and legacy of Elvis Presley.
  5. Shoplifters  - A script as precise as a Swiss watch, and a searing tale about a broken family.
  6. En El Septimo Dia - A feel-good movie about a working-class immigrant who just wants to play soccer on Sunday.
  7. Outside In - Edie Falco and Jay Duplass plumb depths of sorrow and missed chances in this quiet character study.
  8. Let the Sunshine In - Juliette Binoche is impeccable in this tale of middle-aged love and ennui.
  9. Won't You Be My Neighbor - What a joy to spend time with Fred Rogers and daydream about a gentler culture.
10. The Endless - The best time-twisting sci-fi thinker since "Primer."
11. Private Life - Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti sink their teeth into a juicy New York story from Tamara Jenkins.
12. Dark River - This overwhelming slog from Clio Barnard is difficult to avert your eyes from and hard to shake after seeing it.
13. A Star Is Born - Hooray for Hollywood. Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper grab this one with gusto and put on a hell of a show. Highly entertaining.
14. Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town - Mackenzie Davis romps through this day-in-the-life LA story of a spurned lover on a slovenly mission.

BONUS TRACKS

We got to a few leftovers from 2017, too late to make last year's list. A few that stood out:
The visually stunning magical realism of Viktoria; Annette Bening giving it her all as a fading diva in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"; and Cullen Hoback, whom we met years ago at the Santa Fe film festival, offering a strong polemic, "What Lies Upstream."

JUST MISSED THE LIST

(Honorables mentioned)

• Burning
• The street-punk sagas Skate Kitchen and Minding the Gap
• Mr. Roosevelt
• The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling
• Fahrenheit 11/9
• Cold War (including BEST DIRECTOR, Pawel Pawlikowski)

MORE TOP DOCS

• Dark Money
• Three Identical Strangers
• They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
• Escapes
• The Rape of Recy Taylor
• They Shall Not Grow Old

GUILTY PLEASURES

• Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
• The Week Of (yes, an Adam Sandler comedy)
• De Palma
• The mindless summer fun of "Deadpool 2" and "Ocean's 8"

TOP PERFORMANCES

• Olivia Colman and Emma Stone in the slightly disappointing farce "The Favourite."
• Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti in "Private Life."
• Juliette Binoche in "Let the Sunshine In."
• Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in "A Star Is Born."
• Young Jyo Kairi in "Shoplifters."
• Julianne Nicholson in "Who We Are Now."

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME

(Some of our favorite directors didn't thrill us this time around)

• Wes Anderson's direction was meticulous and loving in the stop-action "Isle of Dogs," but we struggled to care about the story.
• Lynne Ramsay went super-dark down a Joaquin Phoenix rabbit-hole in the squalid but off-putting "You Were Never Really Here."
• Andrew Bujalski never put it all together while delivering a solid effort, "Support the Girls."
• Spike Lee had a golden opportunity with "BlacKKKlansman," and he under-performed.
• The Coen brothers entertained but didn't wow with the inessential "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs."
• Alfonso Cuaron couldn't draw me in to his visually riveting "Roma."
• Diablo Cody ("Juno") and Jason Reitman ("Up in the Air") dropped a dud with "Tully."
  
  

COMING ATTRACTIONS

(Haven't caught these yet)

• Golden Exits
• Bisbee '17
• Monrovia, Indiana

Stay tuned for reviews of those three titles and plenty more, albeit in condensed form, as we gleefully charge into 2019.
  

Doing Blue

TOO FUNNY TO FAIL (B+) - This is an irreverent reminiscence of the ill-fated "Dana Carvey Show" that scandalized ABC in the mid-'90s and lasted only seven episodes before crashing and burning despite a wealth of writing talent. I have a soft spot for Carvey, who rarely fails to make me laugh. His talent pool here included head writers Rob Smigel and Louis C.K. and the recent Second City alums Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell.

The show held much promise, as Carvey still had the glow of his glory years at "Saturday Night Live" and the wildly popular "Wayne's World" movies. But, with Smigel and C.K. in an anti-establishment mood, the show's very first sketch involved Carvey as President Clinton breast-feeding babies and animals, appalling both the sponsors and the audience coming off of the family-friendly "Home Improvement" juggernaut.

The story of abject failure is both scorching and funny. The ABC executive who oversaw this train wreck provides his perspective. Bill Hader is on hand as a fan who recalls the show from his high school days. Forgotten sketches still pack a punch, including a pair of would-be pranksters who always end up punishing themselves instead of others and the deliriously deadpan "Grandma the Clown." This is a fun traipse through a golden age.

GILBERT (B-minus) - Comedian Gilbert Gottfried gets a rose-colored bio-doc that investigates the man behind the mania. This one might be for fans only, though the filmmaker, Neil Berkeley does peel off a layer or two from a performer who is always "on" in public. The glimpse behind the facade is interesting at times, but a viewer could also get the sense that the  man we see here -- now married with two kids -- might also be a bit of a character.

The jokes are funny, and we get a good sense of Gottfried's upbringing and his neuroses, as well as his apparent universal acceptance in the comedy world. Berkeley lays things on thick at the end -- Gottfried's sister was dying of cancer during the filming, and he spent time with her every day. He does hit the highlights and lowlights -- the post-9/11 "Aristocrats" bit and his distasteful jokes after the Japanese tsunami, cracks that got him fired by Aflac.

I once took a piss with Gilbert Gottfried. It was before his show at a small club in Chicago, probably more than 25 years ago. He kept his head down and avoided eye contact. He seemed like a social freak then, and he doesn't seem to have relaxed much in the intervening years. He's an acquired taste, but it was fun to spend an hour and a half with him.

BONUS TRACK
Gottfried doing a set on "Letterman," including, at the 4:37 mark, his impression of Jackie Gleason in "Casablanca":


  

Doc Watch: Nature vs. Nurture

MINDING THE GAP (B+) - Bing Liu tells a compelling tale of his skate-punk upbringing through profiles of his two best pals from their teen years into the challenges of adulthood. Bing is mostly behind the camera, but we often hear his voice during conversations with Zack and Keire. Bing emerges late in the film when he confronts his mother about why she allowed a stepfather to physically abuse Bing and his half-brother. Buddy Zack also suffered abuse growing up. Keire doesn't offer a similar excuse as to why he is a dysfunctional young man (bordering on simpleton), but I suspect there is a decent amount of pot-smoking in his case. (His father died young, leaving Keire directionless.)

Bing has a fluid style -- literally at times, as he skates along behind his pals to film their maneuvers. These guys are seriously talented. But Zack is an alcoholic who abuses his girlfriend and often ignores the son they have together. Keire lives in a series of pig sties. Neither has his shit together, and a contrast with Bing is implied through the existence of this film, his big accomplishment. Is there a bit of exploitation involved? If so, no one calls him on it. Bing does overreach in the scenes with his mother, edging toward the line of mawkish and exploitative.

But, unlike the two films reviewed below, this documentary digs deep into the psyches of each man and their relationship, tenuously held together by their love of skating. It helps that Bing took a reported 12 years of filming to complete the project. His patience paid off with a sharply observed study of boys struggling to grow up.

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING (B-minus) - This 86-minute tone poem has flashes of brilliance but is too artsy and scatter-brained to tell a coherent story of an African-American community in rural Alabama. This debut from RaMell Ross plays more like a montage of images from a film-school thesis. Teaching photography and basketball at the local school, he alights on several teens to focus on -- though "focus" is a generous term.

It's difficult to track with either a narrative or even a theme among the folks living in relative poverty. Infants and toddlers play a starring role -- a fatal flaw unless these are home movies of your own kids. Some images are so fleeting as to be undefinable (kids reveling in a storm, and boy skidding to a stop on his bike -- both of which are in the trailer), while interesting ideas like watching a toddler do laps around his living room drag on interminably. By contrast, watching a basketball player practice his jump in an around-the-world drill is compelling as Ross' camera hugs the hot shot's every move (behind the shoulder, like a Dardenne brothers maneuver).

Ross flashes a lot of talent, but this mix of Frederick Wiseman and David Lynch (Ross likes bugs, too) simply lacks a hook. A baby soaking himself in the bath? Cute. But random and uninteresting.

SHIRKERS (B-minus) - Singapore filmmaker Sandi Tan gets in the way of a good story, falling into a trap of self-indulgence. In the early '90s, as a teen film geek, she and her friends scraped together the resources to film Tan's screenplay called "Shirkers." They were assisted by a creepy, mysterious foreigner named Georges, who drained their bank accounts for the production and then absconded with the film.

Tan makes the mistake of thinking that the most granular elements of her teen-zine existence and the film itself are fascinating to anyone other than her former social circle. We don't get to the meat of the story -- George's theft -- until halfway through the 97-minute running time. She just doesn't understand that her youthful film antics, while admirable, are not that interesting; Georges is the story here, and that's why the second half is more interesting than the first.

The production here is also muddled with amateurish narration (by Tan) and annoying mood music. A third party could have told this story better with a shorter run time.