How to Fight Loneliness

SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE (A) - This assured comic drama takes a fairly trite premise -- two young adults in Paris living in adjoining buildings never noticing each other but suffering from similar ennui -- and injects it with sweetness and insight. Two appealing leads -- Francois Civil as worker-bee Remy and Ana Girardot as research scientist Melanie -- infuse the story with the stuff of life as we watch them navigate parallel tracks. 

Cedric Klapisch ("My Piece of the Pie," meh), who co-wrote the screenplay with Santiago Amigorena, fills each scene with charm and wit. His set pieces are meticulously staged, using luscious but muted colors in tight Parisian interiors.

Girardot and Civil come off as fully formed but insecure millennials looking for companionship and contentment while battling their own forms of depression. Their therapists, with wildly divergent styles, provide a sounding board for each and dry comic relief that is the hallmark of the film. Simon Abkarian is wonderful as a know-it-all shopkeeper and an inadvertent would-be cupid. Klapisch juggles it all like a pro, bringing it together in a plump but satisfying 110 minutes, nailing the ending perfectly.

This late 2019 release slipped in under the radar and is now available for streaming here.

RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES STORY (B-minus) - This is kind of an odd documentary about an eccentric person. Marion Stokes, a leftist from the '50s and '60s who co-hosted a local public-affairs show in Philadelphia in the 1970s, dove into the VCR era, an obsessive recluse in a mansion (she married rich), running multiple machines around the clock for decades.

This film is split between curating her truckloads of videotapes and analyzing her life and her behavior. It is not always successful at both. It never really cracks the mystery of Stokes, despite stories from her children and ex. (Stokes may not have been that interesting a person.) The excerpts from her vast archive are sometimes interesting, especially when the screen splits in quadrants and we watch live coverage of the 9/11 attacks as they are first reported, initially just CNN and then finally the other networks breaking into their regular programming. Then again, too much time is spent on the Iran hostage crisis of the Carter era.

This feels like a missed opportunity but an intriguing curiosity at the same time. Stokes seemed to be obsessed with pursuing an ultimate truth. Whether she ever found it, we'll never know.

BONUS TRACK
Our title track, from Wilco:

  

Buddy Movies

MY EFFORTLESS BRILLIANCE (2008) (A-minus) - An early effort from Lynn Shelton, who died this past spring, this comic-drama features a pair of talented actors riffing through some improvisational material under Shelton's firm gaze.

An urbane, self-obsessed author, Eric, (Sean Nelson, better known as the lead singer for Harvey Danger) travels way out of his element to rural Washington in order to repair a friendship we see him trashing in the film's opening scene. His old pal Dylan (Basil Harris) is loath to warm to this horrid old acquaintance, but Eric humbles himself and tones down the snark, and the two find slivers of opportunities to bond.

That's the whole movie, a classic of the Mumblecore genre. It was Shelton's dry run right before her twin gems of "Humpday" and "Your Sister's Sister," creating a hat trick that Shelton could never replicate. But here she sketches out a story and lets two talented personalities fill in the gaps with bon mots and a natural rapport. (Nelson rarely acted outside of Shelton projects.)

The result is funny and tender, with a hunting scene that serves as a Gen X ironic slap at David Mamet. A key piece of the indie canon.

WITHNAIL & I (1987) (A) - This classic from the post-punk hangover era ages well. IMDb sums the plot up well: "In 1969, two substance-abusing, unemployed actors retreat to the countryside for a holiday that proves disastrous."

Richard E. Grant is bonkers as the lighter-fluid-drinking Withnail, and Paul McGann (as & I) plays the straight man whose uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) lusts for Withnail. Ralph Brown is brilliant as Danny the drug dealer.

Bruce Robinson (who followed up with Grant to make the equally askew "How to Get Ahead in Advertising"), apparently working from a fever dream, tosses this all together in a wacky salad. It is offensive and inspired, a descendant of a Shakespearean farce. 

BONUS TRACKS
We rarely bother with the extras, but the DVD bonus feature with "Withnail" is a short documentary about the making of film and the cult that grew around it.

  

New to the Queue

Post-apocalyptic ...

We just are a sucker for Michael Winterbottom's "Trip" series, and here come Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon with the fourth installment, "The Trip to Greece."

A documentary about shlockmeister Paul Verhoeven's '90s abomination "Showgirls," "You Don't Nomi."

A pair of films from Hong Sang-soo see the light of day: "Hill of Freedom" and "Yourself and Yours."

A documentary about the plight of the honeybees, "The Pollinators."
 

Basic Human Nature

THE RAFT (A-minus) - This is a deeply personal visit with six women and one man who took part in a psycho-social experiment, crossing the Atlantic on the Acali, a glorified houseboat, in summer 1973. Led by Santiago Genoves, a Mexican anthropologist, the crew consisted of five men and six women, led by Swedish sea captain Maria Bjornstam. They navigated from Spain to Mexico.

Trivialized in the media as a cult aboard a sex boat, the mission was the brainchild of Genoves, who wanted a pure setting in which to chart the interactions of a random subset of humanity. It didn't help that he chose attractive young adults and encouraged their most animalistic instincts. His diaries are voiced by an actor, and extensive archival footage is included courtesy of two photographers who were on board.

Debut director Marcus Lindeen builds a replica of the craft and invites all six women and one surviving man to relive their experience and share their stories. The women exhibit a deep connection at times, a unique bond 43 years later. Fe Seymour, in particular -- the only black woman on the mission -- offers rich insights, including the revelation that she was haunted by the voices of earlier generations of slaves who took that same route to North America. Not unlike "Spaceship Earth" in its subject matter, "The Raft" truly digs deep into the human condition and succeeds in telling a riveting tale.

BAD EDUCATION (C+) - This HBO film chooses camp over realism as it relives the turn-of-the-millennium graft among the top administrators running a school district in Roslyn, New York. Hugh Jackman does fine work as the vain superintendent living a lie, but Allison Janney is just clownish (like her unfortunate turn as the mom in "I, Tonya") as the assistant superintendent aiding and abetting the embezzlement that brought them both down.

Geraldine Viswanathan does a fine subtle turn as the student journalism who exposes the scam, and Ray Romano is just OK as the dithering school board president. Jackman swans, Janney mugs, and the story clips along at a bloated 108 minutes. Cory Finley ("Thoroughbreds") does yeoman work as a sophomore director. None of it feels essential.

BONUS TRACK
The trailer for "The Raft":


 

Doc Watch: Third Rock

SPACESHIP EARTH (B) - This is a fun but disjointed look back at Biosphere 2, the early '90s science project in which eight people (mostly former hippies) entered a secure atmosphere in the Arizona desert for two years to see whether they could create a utopian paradise.

Director Matt Wolf spends an inordinate amount of time -- about half of the nearly two-hour running time -- on backstory. The evolution of a hippie theater troupe, migrating from San Francisco to the east mountains outside Albuquerque, is fascinating, and the archival footage is insightful. It introduces us to guru John Allen, who was about 20 years older than the proteges who follow him out to the high desert to engage in activities that have the whiff of a cult. But Wolf could have sharpened and tightened this background portion.

He does capture the media circus surrounding Biosphere 2 and takes the viewer inside the sprawling replica of our planet. The project had its blips -- at one point the inhabitants were slowly being starved of oxygen and poisoned with carbon dioxide -- and some of the participants tell the story from their perspective. This documentary is insightful and serves as an interesting time capsule, but it never rises to the level of riveting or revelatory.

EARTH (B) - This tone poem leans heavily on visuals to quietly convey the destruction of Earth through construction, or as the New York Times put it, the case of humanity digging its own grave. Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter hangs out at a series of excavations around the world -- tunnels, coal mines, stone quarries -- and chats up the operators of backhoes and bulldozers who explain their jobs matter-of-factly.

The opening scene gives us a bird's-eye view of earth-movers creating yet another subdivision somewhere in southern California. Geyrhalter's establishing shots call to mind the work of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whose "La Terre Vue du Ciel" art project at the turn of the millennium celebrated the patterns of the earth as seen from the sky, also as part of the United Nations' Earth From Above ecology mission. Geyrhalter also uses static camera positioning to produce long takes of environmental beauty and destruction. He takes us to a museum, where a docent explains the subterranean levels plumbed by the coal miners. Other workers/foremen offer subtle polemics about the environmental impact their work has.

Geyrhalter masterfully concocts his grand theme by mixing macho bravado, reverence for virginal corners of the world, respect for the technological brilliance of mankind, and melancholy over the rape of the earth. He takes a leisurely (some might consider it boring) slow march that unfolds across seven sites over nearly two hours. You might be awed; you might be appalled.

BONUS TRACK
The "Earth" trailer:


 

Holy Crap*: "Shame"

This 1968 apocalyptic piece from Ingmar Bergman is about as dark a slice of life as you can get.

This relentlessly bleak drama stars Liv Ulmann and Max von Sydow as a couple suffering through the indignities of a rebel war descending on their buccolic island. Eva and Jan are not the happiest couple, but they have a chemistry between them as they work their farm, off the beaten path. Jan is weak and melancholic; Eva, apparently younger, wants a child.

One day, a civil war literally descends on their doorstep. They try to escape in their rickety station wagon, to no avail. There is no escaping war; that's the message Bergman is bashing us over the head with.

Bergman shoots in verite black-and-white, as if he is re-enacting newsreels from World War II. The onslaught never lets up. The apocalypse is coming, he suggests, and it doesn't care who or what gets in its way.

Life is a humorless slog and random fate decides whether you die young or are cursed to ride it out till the end. Harrowing and fascinating.

GRADE:  B+

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

BONUS TRACK
The trailer pretty much says it all: