The Golden Age of Dictatorship

Wherein we go back a decade and spend five-and-a-half hours focused on the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu's iron-fisted reign in Romania:

TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE (2011) (B+) - Cristian Mungiu ("4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," "Beyond the Hills," "Graduation") writes and curates a light-hearted remembrance of the final days behind Romania's Iron Curtain. He takes Romanian urban legends and plays them out in an anthology of six short films (the first four are under 20 minutes; the final two are a little longer than a half hour each). Mungiu wrote the scripts and shares directing duties with four others.

Many of the stories involve variations on the communist era grift. A town of bumblers prepares for an official visit from dignitaries, with two bureaucrats meddling on the day before the visit. A photographer for a Communist Party newspaper must alter a photo to make Ceausescu look taller and less deferential next to the French leader. A police officer is gifted with a live pig and he must figure out how to discreetly kill it in his apartment. Two young adults pose as water inspectors in order to collect glass bottles that they trade in for cash.

The focus is on ingenuity and the banality of a populace resigned to coping with an authoritarian regime. The humor is dry and wry. The stories usually end with an ironic twist, mildly unahppy endings. Try it in two sittings

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY  OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU (2011) (B) - Andrei Ujica shuns talking heads and narration in favor of raw archival footage, taking a curatorial approach to Frederick Wiseman's fly-on-the-wall documentary style. Events are understood in context. There is some fat in this three-hour endeavor, but extended scenes -- a lot of oration and applause at party meetings -- create a grinding sense of the numbing feeling of life under authoritarianism.

Ujica starts with Ceausescu's rise to the top in the mid-'60s as a compromise choice as party leader. The second hour segues into the '70s, as Ceausescu seeks to play a role on the world stage, beefing up the economy and playing ball with western powers. We see him getting the VIP treatment from the United States and Britain (the full royal welcome), as well as from North Korea and China. Nearly halfway through, the film bursts into color from dreary black-and-white. Oddly, his 60th birthday celebration in 1981 segues awkwardly back five years (and back to black-and-white).

Ujica bookends the film with crude video footage of the 1989 show trial of Ceausescu and his wife (where they go out bickering), but we do not see their execution or aftermath. The film drones methodically -- some fast-forwarding is useful -- and that's the point.

BONUS TRACK
For some reason, the Ceausescu documentary uses Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma's version of "Hush Little Baby (Mockingbird)" completely out of context:

Lurkers

In the absence of compelling new releases, we continue to burn through the queue to address the backlog.

MISTER FOE (HALLAM FOE) (2008) (B+) - Jamie Bell ("Billy Elliot," "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool") plays Hallam, an 18-year-old Scot who is obsessed with spying on people. This gets him in trouble with many neighbors, as well as with his MILFy evil step-mom, who banishes him from his father's country estate, exiling him to the big city of Edinburgh. There he spots Kate, who has an uncanny resemblance to his dead beloved mother.

Young Hallam scores a porter's job at the hotel where Kate (Sophia Myles) oversees the staff. The hotel conveniently has a clock tower that is within spying distance of Kate's apartment. Hallam works through his mommy issues and exploits his street smarts to survive in his new world. His creepiness is never dismissed casually, but neither is it meant to convey horror or suspense. He's just a bit of a freak.

David Mackenzie ("Perfect Sense," "Hell or High Water," "Starred Up") co-wrote and directed this adaptation, somewhat of a follow-up to his gloomy and disturbing character study "Young Adam." The cast is strong, including Ciaran Hinds as the father and Claire Forlani as the step-mother Verity.

ORPHEUS (1950) (B) - This classic from Jean Cocteau holds up as an exemplar of avant-garde cinema. It follows the familiar Greek myth of Orpheus, here a famed poet (played by Jean Marais) who is lured to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife. Cocteau was quite the thinker, and he gives the cast plenty of absurdist philosophy to chew on here.

Orpheus is lured by the Princess (Maria Casares) into the netherworld that is accessed through mirrors (the best to reflect on one's true self). Cocteau uses various tricks -- running film backward, turning mirrors into pools of water -- that are still rather impressive 70 years on. Inscrutable messages pour out of car radios. An undercurrent of same-sex attraction lightly pulses throughout. Fantasy can be a challenge, but Cocteau manages to pull this off without getting ridiculous.

BONUS TRACKS
"Mister Foe" boasts an engaging soundtrack from under-the-radar bands, sort of an Aughties Channel update of "Garden State." My favorite was "They Shoot Horses Don't They" by Quickspace from their excellent album "The Death of Quickspace":



The Lennonesque "Here on My Own" by U.N.P.O.C (Tom Bauchop):



Sons and Daughters with "Broken Bones":



The Spanish-language ringer, Juana Molina with "Salvese Quien Pueda":



From London, toytronica purveyors Psapp with "Eating Spiders":



More generic electronica, Peter Mergerner's "A Little Bit of Something":



Finally, the title track over the closing credits, Franz Ferdinand with "Hallam Foe Dandelion Blow":


 

Doc Watch: In Harm's Way

FOR SAMA (B+) - Waad Al-Khateab produces a video chronicle of her life in Aleppo, Syria, running a hospital with her doctor husband, Hamza, and their newborn child, Sama. This diary, filmed amid the civil war that has raged since 2011, is harrowing but hopeful.

Be warned: The violence is explicit. Dead bodies litter the screen, including those of children. The camerawork is urgent and compelling. The main drawback is the family intimacy she shares with the viewer. The love story is heartening, and little Sama is adorable, but, in the end, family videos are family videos. However, this is an invaluable display of life during wartime.

WASTE LAND (2010) (B) - This might have been a perfect one-hour TV news special, but at 99 minutes, this profile of photographer/artist Vik Muniz and his celebration of garbage-dump workers in Brazil drags too often. The characters, though, are memorable. They pick through trash for recyclables at Jardim Gramacho on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, living in horrific slum conditions.

Muniz, a successful artist who escaped the favelas, decides to return to his homeland and create grand portraits of the workers, based on his photographs of them, enhanced with trash as garnish in the frame. After a slow start, we delve into the various characters, including those leading the fight for the workers' rights. Filmmaker Lucy Walker employs an awkward framing device at the beginning and end of the film, but she takes care to let these personalities take root. And her camera does not shy away from the destitution that marks these workers' lives. 

SURFWISE (2008) (A-minus) - Doug Pray ("Hype!" "Art & Copy") digs into the alt-lifestyle of surfing enthusiast Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz and the family he raised off the grid. In the '60s and '70s, he and his third wife, Juliette, raised nine children (only one girl) in a winnebago that they mostly drove up and down the Pacific coast, shunning modern conveniences and common social interactions, like public schooling.

Paskowitz was a spry health fanatic, still going strong in his late '80s at the time of the movie's release. But he wreaked some psychological havoc on most of those children (who claimed that the parents had sex daily in the front of the mobile home and did not muffle their noises), and Pray spends time with each of them to explore the family dynamics. Each child displays unique qualities, and they have complicated relationships with their father and with each other. Several became top surfing competitors. Pray's exploration is a case study in family psychology, alternative lifestyles and nutrition.
  

Uninvited Guests

PARASITE (A-minus) - Bong Joon-ho finally finds the sweet spot between story and spectacle in this tale of class warfare pitting two families -- the working-class Kims and the rich Parks -- against each other. A mix of thriller and dark comedy, "Parasite" hums with fascinating characters and surprising plot twists. While things get pretty unhinged in the final third, Bong holds on for dear life and sticks the landing. To lay out the plot, it's easier to quote Wikipedia:

Kim Ki-taek, his wife Chung-sook, son Ki-woo, and daughter Ki-jeong live in a small semi-basement apartment, working low-paying jobs and struggling to make ends meet. Ki-woo's friend Min-hyuk, who is preparing to study abroad, gifts the Kim family with a scholar's rock which is supposed to bring them wealth. He suggests Ki-woo pose as a university student to take over Min-hyuk's job as an English tutor for the daughter of the wealthy Park family, Da-hye. Once Ki-woo is hired, the Kims all pose as sophisticated skilled workers, unrelated to each other, and integrate themselves into the lives of the Parks

Bong wastes little of the 132 minutes, taking his time to set up that foundation, as various members of the Kim family gradually infiltrate the Park household. The Parks are not presented as evil or even arrogant; in fact, they show quite a bit of empathy for their employees. And the Kims may be hustlers, but they are not horrible grifters. (They have a vague connection to the outlaw family in last year's gem "Shoplifters.")

Bong has a history of pulp and suspense. "Snowpiercer" (2013) was too overwhelming on the sense, and we couldn't get into 2017's "Okja," leaving us wary of digging backward into his classics, "Mother" and "The Host." But here, he's got the stew right. The ensemble cast is top-notch and appealing, grounding this farce in a skewed reality. The little things land just right, like various characters' random attempts to speak English.

There is gravitas to the narrative. Bong makes a point of distinguishing between the classes by having the Parks several times remark on the noticeable odor they detect on their lower-run employees and which they associate with the riff-raff. It's a sharp, shorthand way of drawing distinctions and just one of the ways in which "Parasite" gets under your skin and won't let you hide.

MELVIN GOES TO DINNER (2003) (A-minus) - We first saw this one way back in the day at the Santa Fe Film Festival; it doesn't seem to have gotten a wide release, but it is streaming on Netflix. Bob Odenkirk (TV's "Mr. Show" and "Better Call Saul") directed this glorified stage play from comedy writer Michael Blieden about four semi-connected adults gathering for a chance dinner where the booze flows and secrets get unsealed.

Blieden stars as Melvin, who is meeting his friend Joey (Matt Price) for dinner, only to find Joey's friend Alex (Stephanie Courtney, Flo the Progressive spokeswoman) and Alex's acquaintance Sarah (Annabelle Gurwitch) already starting to break bread with Joey. The cast is just right (including Kathleen Roll as the loopy waitress), but it's the natural dialogue that makes this such a joy to watch. Free of cliches and tired tropes, the screenplay crackles with wit and insight. The result is a believable slice of life among cynical 30-somethings (of the X Generation).

It all has a loose, improvisational feel but grounded in a strong script. The arc of the evening provides both tension and comic relief. You might see the final reel's twist coming, but it's a satisfying conclusion nonetheless. This is a rare indie find.

BONUS TRACK
The trailers:




  

New to the Queue

A head start on a new year ...

From the director of the original version of "The Kindergarten Teacher," the tale of an Israeli ex-pat in Paris, "Synonyms."

We're apprehensive about our former favorite Noah Baumbach ("The Meyerowitz Stories") -- and who needs two brooding elder Millennials moping through yet another movie about divorce? -- but maybe Baumbach truly is on the comeback trail with "Marriage Story."

We're not much for horror, blood and gore, but we like the sound of the love-triangle-at-sea escapade, "Harpoon."

A feature, with a documentary feel, about Sengalese migrants, "Atlantics."

A documentary about one woman's compulsion to create a library of recorded TV shows, "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project."

The latest from Trey Edward Shults ("Krisha"), another analysis of family, "Waves."
  

Holy Crap!* Too Little, "Too Late"

A guy named Dennis Hauck must have thought he was pretty hot shit when he scored John Hawkes to play  a smart-alecky private dick (yes, they actually make that lame dick joke in this movie) for the 2015 release "Too Late."  Thankfully, Hauck hasn't made a movie since. Do they ban directors who bomb with their debut film?

Painfully exploitative of women, this Tarantino knock-off features tough-talking guys and dames (most of the latter strippers) tripping over Hauck's "clever" dialogue. Not only are women repeatedly mocked for their looks, but most of them find the homely Hawkes irresistible. (They especially swoon when he picks up a guitar and croons his own Kristoffersonian composition.) I mean, there are multiple scenes of women walking around without pants -- in a movie where the go-to camera technique is long camera shots that conveniently follow the characters from behind. One actress, Vail Bloom (below), who plays Janet, a miserable kept woman of aging mobster Gordy Lyons (Robert Forster), does a good 10 minutes bare-assed (including a tracking shot down a loooong hallway). Your move, Julianne Moore!

The women are lovely, of course, and most of them bring serious acting chops to this chipped beef. Dichen Lachman (below) flaunts her hard body (especially, of course, the bottom half) and goes toe-to-toe with Hawkes, who dares to mock her exotic looks. Talk about noses, pal.

Hauck also lets his directorial quirks get in the way of a bad story. (Hawkes is hunting a stripper to whom he might have a special connection.) He jumbles the narrative so much that you probably won't care how to put the puzzle back together. (Really, all the movies he steals from, like "Memento," are far superior in every way.) He uses ambient music so much that it obscures dialogue. In one scene, in a projection booth at a drive-in theater (ya derivative geek), we get ambient music (a moody Hank Williams cover) and ambient noises. If that doesn't jangle you, then try the long camera takes of conversations that require the camera to swing back and forth between two people. (Hey, there's Joanna Cassidy! Whoops, there she goes away!) Then join me in guffawing as a boxing match at that drive-in (?)(!) features two men so obviously fake-boxing that you wonder, did Hauck not notice how bad they were at that or does he think he's creating a meta-moment.

Little of the above will matter, though, because most viewers will not make it through the bizarre first 20 minutes, which features a woman named Dorothy (Crystal Reed) hanging out in one of those L.A. overlook parks and having painfully long conversations with a pair of bumbling drug dealers (I say, a veritable Vladimir and Estragon!) and then a park ranger, as peril builds like creeping moss. This Movie Dorothy (yes, later (earlier?) Hawkes will utter the phrase "There's no place like home") is a wide-eyed innocent with a complicated but boring backstory. That opening scene, though, is interminable.

But this is all such a weak-armed assault on the senses that you might just stick around to see how awful it can get.

GRADE: D

* -- Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACKS

This is the kind of movie perfectly suited for a song by Joe Tex, particularly one called "You Might Be Digging the Garden (But Someone's Picking Your Plums)." Ahem. But it does boast an interesting soundtrack. We're introduced to Janet as she's slathering on her thick eyeliner to this rambunctious song, "Vibrational Match" by Marnie Stern.

Then there is the corny side of Dylan, from the '80s, with "I'll Remember You" (b/w "Emotionally Yours"):

The director gives some screen time to Sally Jaye, with a live version of "Leave You Alone":

Janet also melts down to this intense purge from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Nobody's Baby Now." It's a good example of the too-obvious, elbow-to-the-ribs nature of the soundtrack:

  

Outliers

YESTERDAY (B) - Danny Boyle comes through in the clutch with an entertaining and enjoyable interpretation of a script from the cheese factory of screenwriter Richard Curtis ("Mr. Bean," "Love Actually," Bridget Jones' Diary"). The story (by Jack Barth) focuses on struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), who, after a mysterious global power glitch, remains the only apparent person on the planet who remembers the Beatles, who otherwise have been erased from history.

Seizing the opportunity, Jack starts re-creating Beatles songs from memory and eventually becomes a sensation with all those catchy tunes. The joy of the film is in this conceit and the fun that Boyle and the gang have with it. The downside is that Curtis insists on jamming a stale (borderline misogynistic) rom-com cliche into the proceedings involving Jack and his longtime friend/manager Ellie (Lily James, "Cinderella," "Baby Driver"). That phony will-they love story itself drags this down a grade. There's also the assumption that Beatles songs would still drive the masses crazy if they debuted in the modern era.

But Boyle, Britain's pop-auteur ("Millions," "Sunshine," "Slumdog Millionaire"), is assured with the narrative otherwise. The little touches make this special. For example, Jack struggles to remember all the words and chords (especially the tricky order of the verses of "Eleanor Rigby"). His quickie internet searches for "Beatles" turns up pictures of insects and Volkswagens. And, naturally, Oasis never existed either -- because how could the uber-derivative Gallagher brothers ever have found inspiration without the Fab Four? Boyle works the prolific Ed Sheeran into the mix as himself, a (what else?) collaborator on the songs as well as a rival for songwriting supremacy. Sheeran is wonderfully self-deprecating and an amusing comic foil for Jack. (Not happy with "Hey, Jude," he spitballs an alternative title: "Hey, Dude.")

Meantime, the songs are as catchy as ever. Patel is a charming leading man. Boyle delivers a high-energy juggernaut. And a scene toward the end with one of the Beatles who never became a Beatle is touching and magical. It's worth tuning in for just that visual, but thanks to this team, the movie itself is an overall success.

JOKER (C-minus) - The less said about this nihilistic cinematic cipher the better. Joaquin Phoenix is a marvel to behold, but this dark, dank throwback to the gloom of '70s-'80s New York plays like both an homage to that heyday of Martin Scorsese (a mix of "Taxi Driver" and "King of Comedy") and a childish misinterpretation of that whole era.

Poor failed clown Arthur Fleck has a mental condition that makes him laugh at inopportune times. That gets him beat up. Does he take revenge on just those thugs? No, he somehow turns into a mercenary and a leader of an uprising against the rich. Huh? Because Bruce Wayne's parents are rich? Talk about a retrofitted narrative.

Anyway, this is bleak and unrelenting, and it's impossible to avoid comparing this to the white-supremacist (Joker is in whiteface, after all) and incel movements. (Arthur lusts limply over a neighbor who appears to be mixed race -- Zazie Beetz, a mere pawn in this script.) It justifies violent and impotent rage. You might be interested in how Stephen Miller got the way he is, but I'm not.
 

Intrigue

FAY GRIM (2006) (B+) - Maybe waiting more than a decade to finally get around to Hal Hartley's sequel to '90s favorite "Henry Fool" helped manage expectations for this follow-up featuring Henry's love, Fay Grim, played perfectly awkwardly by Parker Posey. Hartley moves from chatty indie to international intrigue, albeit just as deadpan as the original.

Posey holds it all together with her offbeat line-reading and patented blank stares. As Hartley perverts the idea of noir, Posey comes off as Pee-Wee Herman doing Barbara Stanwyck. Hartley's script starts slow (a lot of exposition to catch up on the nine-year gap between films) but finds a groove after the first reel, as Fay gets roped into an international mission by the CIA to track down Henry via his cryptic notebooks that date back to his apparent decades-long spook activities from Pinochet's Chile to Afghanistan battled against the Russian invasion, right up to the post-9/11 positioning of strange bedfellows among the terrorist networks.

Jeff Goldblum is a natural as the dry-witted CIA agent. James Urbaniak returns as Fay's brother (and Henry's pal) Simon. Elina Lowensohn and Saffron Burrows sink their teeth into femme fatale turns. Meantime, Thomas Jay Ryan towers over everything as the specter that is Henry Fool, and his powerful two-man scene in the final reel (I won't say if it's a flashback or not) is well worth the wait. (This clocks in around two hours.) Hartley balances the silly with the profound and his stellar cast pulls it all off. 

GOOD TIME (2017) (C+) - This is mostly macho bunk, about 24 hours in the life of a bungling would-be thug trying to spring his brother from jail. For some reason, a cheesy '80s-style synthesizer soundtrack plays like a siren throughout this thriller.

Robert Pattinson dirties up to play Connie Nikas, who interferes with his younger brother Nick's mental health counseling and drags Nick (Benny Safdie) to a bank robbery. When the heist blows up in their face, Nick is caught, jailed, beat up, and hospitalized. Connie, navigating the seedy underworld of New York, hustles to find and free Nick.

Both Benny and Josh Safdie directed this gritty, messy street tale. But their style is a color-faded mash-up of Scorsese and Tarantino, with Pattinson perpetually mugging as if in a De Niro/Pacino contest. The women here, including Jennifer Jason Leigh and Taliah Webster, are wasted as props. The brothers have a confident visual style, but their storytelling here barely rises above that of a police procedural. Their upcoming movie "Uncut Gems" shows promise -- and perhaps a leap of maturity -- so we'll keep them on the radar.
  

Unusual couplings

SATAN AND ADAM (B-minus) - An interesting but clunky documentary about the unexpected pairing of a young white academic harmonica player and an older black blues veteran who together went from the streets of Harlem to international venues. Adam Gussow helps narrate the story of his bold move in the 1980s in stepping up to jam with Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee, a virtuoso guitarist and one-man band.

The duo eventually landed a record deal and a decent amount of fame in the 1990s. But Magee's mental and physical woes precipitated their downfall, and that story weighs heavy on the middle portion of the film before the final reel gives us a tale of redemption and reunion. This debut by V. Scott Balcerek is pretty pedestrian and awkward in its attempts to keep a coherent narrative. The story is worth telling but this one is ragged around the edges.

SEX: THE ANNABEL CHONG STORY (2000) (C) - I was hoping for some psychological insight into the woman who, in the late 1990s, felt compelled to set a pornographic record by sleeping with 251 men in one day. But we don't really get traction on the thought processes of Annabel Chong, aka Grace Quek.

Chong started acting in explicit films while majoring in gender studies at USC, and there is promise in the opening scenes suggesting an academic point to her exploits. But no, she just comes off as psychically skewed and immature, perhaps a product of sexual abuse. The creepy part involves a late reveal of her infamy to her parents in Singapore. Chong's inclinations change as often as her pixie hairstyle. Even porn legend Ron Jeremy regards her with apprehension. In the end, this end product feels cheap and used.
 

Spiel, Spiel, Rock 'n' Roll

We caught two bands this past week:

Shovels & Rope, the dynamic duo from Charleston, S.C., showed up at Meow Wolf on the Night of the Dead for a blistering show of slapdash folk punk in Santa Fe. Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent are overstuffed with talent. Their songs are clever and soulful, and they swap instruments effortlessly. They don't harmonize so much as shout lyrics at each other. (They're married.)

They featured a bunch of songs from their new album "Bad Blood" and well-placed classics, including from their breakthrough album "O' Be Joyful" (though not my favorite, "Tickin' Bomb." They are natural entertainers, and the vibe they created was o' so joyful. John Paul White, ex of the Civil Wars, opened (wrapping with a cover of ELO's "Can't Get It Out of My Head").

On a Monday night ("a work night, a school night"), Minutemen alum Mike Watt brought his latest power trio (the Secondmen) to the Launchpad in Albuquerque. Tighter and more focused than his outdoor set at the Growlers' Beach Goth fest two years ago in L.A., Watt soldiered on in the high altitude and thrashed through his deep reservoir of freestyle punk songs from both his days with D. Boon and George Hurley and his varied solo career.

Watt was joined by longtime collaborator Tom Watson on jittery guitar and wunderkind Nick Aguilar a whirlwind on drums. Aguilar looks barely old enough to have a learner's permit but not quite a driver's license (he's actually 22), but sitting up front in the thick of things, he was Buddy Rich flying off the handle, mind-melding with the bass-master Watt. (Give the drummer some!) They communicated with Tourette's-like facial gestures and tongue wags. (Bass in your face!)

They surged out with a vigorous take on "The Red and the Black" (the Blue Oyster Cult song made memorable by both the Minutemen and the post-Boon trio Firehose) and then slashed away with the precise fury of jazzmen on speed. It's comforting to know that the old guy still brings the thunder.

BONUS TRACKS
"Tickin' Bomb":



The Minutemen with "The Red and the Black":



Watt also covered one of D. Boon's finest moments, "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs," still a punk classic: