Damn Right I Got the Blues

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM (A-minus) - Viola Davis is a force of nature around which everything swirls in this blues allegory from Roaring '20s Chicago, focused on one day in the recording life of Ma Rainey and her swingin' band. Playwright August Wilson's dialogue shakes, rattles and rolls, from snappy one-liners to gut-wrenching monologues.

Wilson ("Fences," also starring Davis) presents a stark dichotomy in the ways southern blacks of the era handled the white men looking to keep them down. For Ma, she's all swagger and threats, knowing she has a unique talent that translates into money for the record labels and recording studios, and she wields that (temporary) power like a cudgel, whether it's driving a hard bargain over a day's pay or demanding the perk of ice-cold Coca-Colas for her refreshment. She treats her manager and the studio owner like trash, makin' 'em wait just to make 'em wait, as if they are beneath her -- and they put up with it.

On the other hand, we have hornman Levee (Chadwick Boseman), an aspiring songwriter/bandleader, who goes the deferential route, hoping to shmooze his way into a position of power or influence. With his $11 shoes and his smooth talk, he is convinced that he can rise to the level of equal, but you can sense his downfall coming early in the proceedings.

Director George C. Wolfe shows a sure hand visualizing the screenplay as adapted by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. The 94-minute production speeds by like a locomotive, with a crackling supporting cast tossing in fills with the cadence of an experienced jazz combo. Taylour Paige is especially arresting as Ma's kittenish girlfriend, whose flirtations threaten to get a few people in big trouble. While Boseman (looking gaunt a year or so before his death from cancer) has the flash and the passion here, it is Davis who just smolders with resentment, spitting out Ma's grievances and philosophies. Here's her take on the blues:

White folks don't understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. ... The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain't alone. There's something else in the world. Something's been added by that song.

And Wilson's dialogue -- crafted in the 1980s and looking back a half century -- resonates to this day, offering insight into our modern shallowness and ignorance. The piano player Toledo (a pitch-perfect Glynn Turman), an advocate of pride and self-determination for African-Americans, explains the ways of denial and idiocy: 

"Some mens is excited to be fools. That excitement is something else. I know about it. I done experienced it. It makes you feel good to be a fool. But it don't last long. It's over in a minute. Then you got to tend with the consequences. You got to tend with what comes after. That's when you wish you had learned something about it."

Who is the delusional one in this stage play? Ma knows that her leverage ends the second her voice is recorded on vinyl, and that she'll have to ramp it back up the next time. Meantime, she has a backup option, knowing that she can fill seats throughout the South at her live shows. But with Levee, there's a sadness and fatalism about his aspirations (and his backstory explains why this is so), and you detect that in Boseman's desperate eyes and empty boasts. Those are just two of the ways for these two souls to get by in the world. Wilson knew it all too well 40 years ago, and we live it still.

GIVING VOICE (B+) - This companion Netflix documentary studies the students taking part in a national competition involving monologues from August Wilson plays. These kids are so full of passion and good cheer that it can't help but radiate off the screen and into your heart.

Viola Davis and John Legend are among the executive producers, and Davis' "Fences" co-star Denzel Washington sits in as a talking head, but it is the high school students who steal the show. We meet bright youngsters from Chicago's inner city as well as from Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta and elsewhere. They are Juilliard-bound phenoms whose names are likely to become familiar a few years hence.

But for now, they are wide-eyed theater geeks who make their way from local competitions to the big stage in Broadway for a final showdown in 2018. This breezy reality-show feature celebrates Wilson's work and plumbs the depths of his exploration of black America in the 20th century. And it's a perfect distillation of how timeless that work is. These kids give you hope for the future, and the film is a welcome break from the doom and gloom of the day, with a refreshingly analog diversion for the next generation.

BONUS TRACK

The title track from "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom": 

"Ma Rainey" was our traditional Christmas Day Mainstream Movie. It sneaks into the top five among the 16 films we've scored at our annual holiday outing:

  1. Up in the Air (2009)

  2. Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)

  3. Dreamgirls (2006)

  4. Charlie Wilson's War (2007)

  5. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020)

  6. Little Women (2019)

  7. The Fighter (2010)

  8. American Hustle (2013)

  9. The Shape of Water (2017)

10. La La Land (2016)

11. The Wrestler (2008)

12. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

13. Young Adult (2011)

14. This Is 40 (2012)

15. Holmes & Watson (2018)

16. Into the Woods (2014)

Government Watchdogs

COLLECTIVE (A-minus) - This documentary could serve as a bookend to the era of the Romanian New Wave, with its horrifyingly real examination of that country's health care system, which was fictionalized back in 2005 with "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." Here, director Alexander Nanau and co-writer Antoaneta Opris get the inside scoop -- by following a crusading journalist and a progressive health minister -- regarding the aftermath of a deadly concert fire, in which more people died later of bacterial infections in the hospital than were killed by smoke inhalation at the event.

This starts out celebrating the power of investigative journalism, tailing along with Catalin Tolontan, the editor of a sports publication, and his dogged crew, as they keep asking questions about why victims of the fire continue to die in what quickly is discovered to be a scandalous lack of sanitation at the country's trauma centers. But what starts out as a real-life "All the President's Men," shifts gears at the  midpoint and pivots to Vlad Voiculescu, a young health minister who has good intentions but little clue how to turn this corrupt post-communist ship around and overcome the graft that allowed a chemical company to water down its anti-bacterial product.

Voiculescu's charms wear off quickly, and the film spins its wheels along with the health czar, eventually winding down to an uninspiring conclusion. This project had all the markings of a true eye-opener -- and the smuggled video of a horrific lack of care certainly shocks the conscience -- but it loses its momentum in the second half and falls short of perfection. The journalists were more interesting than the bureaucrat.

CITY HALL (B) - Frederick Wiseman long ago burnished his reputation as a master storyteller, one of the pioneers of fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and he is closing out his career (he is now 90) with tedious process stories that have examined the administration of a university ("At Berkeley") a New York neighborhood ("In Jackson Heights"), small-town life ("Monrovia, Indiana"), the public library system ("Ex-Libris") and now the inner workings of the city of Boston. "City Hall" -- a four-and-a-half-hour marathon -- is one of the better products amid a motley bunch in the past decade.

This one is another mixed bag. There again are a lot of low-level meetings that dwell on the minutiae of budgeting and priority-setting. Wiseman is obsessed with diversity -- nearly every scene touches on race issues in some way -- and while that is understandable when sketching out a city with Boston's sketchy history, the theme becomes suffocating. You would think that Boston is now the most culturally aware city in the world. By the end, you get the sense that Wiseman is over-compensating here and that we are not getting a full-bodied profile of Boston.

He also overdoses on the city's second-term mayor, Marty Walsh, a child of Irish immigrants who comes across as truly progressive, a product of the union movement. There seems to be no event too small or obscure for Mayor Marty to hobnob with the citizenry. 

Some scenes work, others don't. The best tend to appear in the second half. We spend about a half hour with a city-facilitated meeting between minority residents of a poor neighborhood and the entrepreneurs looking to bring in a marijuana dispensary. Meantime, when we can drag Wiseman's crew away from the conference rooms, we go out in the field to watch a street crew, 311 operators, a meter maid, a code enforcement officer and a pest inspector toil away to keep the municipality humming. And Wiseman luxuriates in the physical details of Boston with some magnificent establishing shots, a montage of which would make a pretty good short film in itself. 

I managed this one in three chunks. It is on a par with "Ex Libris," and doesn't suffer from the utter drudgery of "At Berkeley" and "Monrovia, Indiana." It does help to have a star to focus on.

BONUS TRACK

From "Collective," a jaunty tune from the Alternate Routes, "Nothing More":

Zombie Compromise

WE ARE LITTLE ZOMBIES (A) - This debut feature is a modern masterpiece about the way we live -- or fail to live -- seen through the eyes of four sharp 13-year-olds. This visual roller coaster comes from music-video veteran and ad man Makoto Nagahisa, and he infuses this story of four mopey kids with color and energy and wordplay.

The main hero is Hikari (Keita Ninomiya), whose parents died in a bus crash while touring strawberry fields and who has always been emotionally stunted and unable to cry, turning to video games, which give this movie its "Scott Pilgrim"-style theme. Three others also lose their parents -- involving a gas explosion, suicide, and murder -- and these four orphans meet at the crematorium and decide to hang out at Hikari's house. However, Hikari's mean aunt, who claims custody of him, cramps their style, so they set out on their own and decide to form a bubblegum-punk band.

Little Zombies features Hikari on shaky vocals, Ishi (Satoshi Mizuno) on drums (including a wok rescued from the burnt remains of his family's restaurant), Yuki (Mondo Okumura) on bass, and Ikuko (Sena Nakajima), the only girl, on keyboards. They get discovered by an older teen in a junkyard, and they become instant pop idols, mainly from the catchiness of the title track and hummable lines like, "We are zombies but alive." They are, ironically, "totally emo," to the max. (At one point they get compared to the Shaggs, which is apt.)

The film is flooded with nihilistic utterings from these numb young teens in this "story of four unemotional people":

• "Reality is too stupid to cry over."
• "Everything that matters to me disappears."
• "Despair is uncool."
• "I've always been good at being invisible."
• "All parents are cheats."
• "I'm sad but not in pain."
• "Are you dead inside?"
• "Future, money, courage, love -- don't know what they are."
• "Punk sucks."
• "You let your emotions show. Watch it!"

Ikuko snaps photos on an old-fashioned disposable camera, but she never develops the film. To her, it's more about the performance art in the moment, a shield against nostalgia. "If I look at the photos, I'll have to remember," she says. "All we have is now."

Because the kids are rudderless, this two-hour journey turns into a road film, with the kids metaphorically searching for the sources of their damage and seeking out whatever video-game enemy they can vanquish in order to feel human again. Each kids is eminently likeable and watchable, with filled-in back stories and wounds we can identify with.

This is all thrown together my Nagahisa, a true mix-master. His visuals pop, but he's much more of an auteur than some run-of-the-mill video director with a short attention span. He is in full command from beginning to end. He tests different senses -- using sound and camera tricks to play with the ideas of Hikari's sight and hearing, as if subjecting him to a medical examination. Whereas Edgar Wright's "Scott Pilgrim" skewed more silly than straight, Naghisa plumbs true emotional depths, without sacrificing fun (like a baseball scene that devolves into an homage of the Monkees). (Here is a link to an interesting interview with the director.)

And it's the kids who deliver. Ninomiya, especially, as Hikari seems to be the John Lennon of this troupe, and his little shoulders are more than capable. From the striking opening scenes to the gorgeous ending, this is a story to be savored.

ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP (C-minus) - Hard to believe there was a time, in the post-"Shaun of the Dead" era when ironic wisecracking zom-coms were appealing. The original "Zombieland" was 11 years ago, and the sequel trickled out late last year, coasting on the first one's laurels. The core four zombie hunters return here -- Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg and Abigail Breslin (the latter an afterthought here).  

This starts out with a tedious montage of CGI-abetted quality kills, most in slow motion, reminding us that the genre, at least a decade past its spoil date, has been reduced to pure pulp. The original director and writers return to beat the dead horse they shot the first time. Each actor doubles down on his/her character's quirks. Only occasionally does the script evoke a gut laugh.

A couple of ideas offer glimpses of a fresh take. Zooey Deutch shows up as a boy-crazy dumb blonde, and she stands out among the retreads with her valley-girl update for the millennial crowd. And an inspired scene introduces Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleton as doppelgangers for Harrelson and Eisenberg, respectively, and the on-screen twinning of the two neurotic freaks -- Eisenberg and Middleton -- is both a brilliant comedic marriage and a meta joke on itself. And yes, sadly, Bill Murray eventually shows up. And it all culminates in a truly sappy, almost Hollywood ending (if you can believe that), as if the stakes were no greater than a "Beach, Blanket, Bingo" romp.

BONUS TRACKS

A music video of the theme song of Little Zombies:

Our title track, from Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet:

 

Moving On

 

THE LIFE AHEAD (B+) - An elderly Sophia Loren anchors this melancholy but hopeful story about a mother hen to prostitutes who takes in a wild street kid and forms a bond with him. What could have been a sickeningly sweet Hallmark-level movie about a cultural/generational clash instead strikes at the human marrow of relationships in the hands of director Edoardo Ponti (Loren's son) and a trio of writers interpreting a book by Romain Gary. 

The film opens with Loren's Holocaust survivor Madame Rosa getting mugged by preteen street kid Momo, and before you known it, the pair are thrown together under Rosa's roof with a couple of other children hoping that their mothers will come retrieve them someday. Rosa's health is starting to slip, and she becomes prone to fits of catatonia.

But she shares a secret lair in the building with Momo, and the two bond over their respective emotional traumas and the basic human desire for connection and nurturing. When she informs him about her experience with Auschwitz, it sounds so foreign to him that all he can merely recite back to her is a homonym: "House witch." 

Momo matures and bonds with another boy in the house, but he also still works the street, selling drugs. He retains a dark outlook, holding out little hope that any of these prostitutes will return to retrieve their children. "I'm not going to suck up to happiness," he vows.

But happiness seeps through in this thoughtful story about a woman (no mere stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold) at the end of her life offering glimpses of optimism to a budding young man just figuring out his own path. The seaside town is captivating, and these two actors -- along with quietly effective supporting cast members, young and old -- are a winning odd couple

THINGS TO COME (2016) (B) - Mia Hansen-Love meanders a bit with the story of a middle-aged woman who placidly observes all of the guideposts in her life starting to unravel. With Isabelle Huppert in the lead role, this drama is rescued from a mild case of ADHD.

When it rains, it pours. Nathalie's marriage is stale. Her mother -- a whiny former model/actress -- is entering a mental decline. Her scholarship is out of date. And she has settled into a bourgeois lifestyle that raises the eyebrows of her radical students and one former student, Fabien, (a terrific Roman Kolinka) who is now choosing to live further off the grid. 

Nathalie does gain a cat out of this whole deal, and more important, she realizes the upside of having your life slowly unravel -- it can be liberating. With her classic placid demeanor, Huppert portrays a woman going with the flow and looking on the bright side. 

This movie follows in sequence from Hansen-Love's previous character studies -- a teenage girl in "Goodbye First Love" and young adults in "Eden." This one is not as sharp as the first but more focused and effective than the second.

BONUS TRACK

This Woody Guthrie nugget stands out during a car trip with Nathalie and Fabien in "Things to Come":

Lives on the Edge

 

CROCK OF GOLD: A FEW ROUNDS WITH SHANE MACGOWAN (B) - Like its subject, Julien Temple's documentary about the Pogues frontman is sloppy and disjointed but oddly satisfying. The video veteran cut his teeth on punk, first chronicling the Sex Pistols during their moment of glory, and Shane MacGowan will forever be linked to that scene, where he got his start as a famous local fan and then a band leader himself, first with the Nips and then the Irish traditionalists the Pogues.

It might be a chore to get through the hot mess of the first half hour, which takes us back to MacGowan's childhood in Tipperary (introduced to beer and cigarettes at a tender age by aunts and uncles), with the use of re-enactments, animation and faux-vintage footage. It takes about half the film, nearly an hour, for MacGowan to hit his 20s and form the Pogues, the band that would launch him to stardom and the brink of overdose by the end of the '80s. But that early anthropology is necessary, helping to explain MacGowan's mental health struggles and addictions.

Temple is like an alchemist with ADHD here, cutting up old audio interviews to let MacGowan narrate his own life over constantly shifting images. Temple also features vintage and current video interviews with MacGowan, which serve to chronicle his physical decline to the point of being a drooling drunk in a wheelchair. Johnny Depp, an old pal of the Pogue, is a producer here and insists on inserting himself into the proceedings as a drinking buddy, which comes off as both irresponsible and pathetic.

MacGowan's wife and family weigh in to add depth to the personality profile, though we don't hear from bandmates. (They famously kicked him out of the band in 1991 but welcomed him back for popular tours in the aughts.) The glory of "Fairytale of New York" is celebrated. (It is claimed to be the most popular British Christmas song of the 21st century and reportedly earns MacGowan a cool half million dollar a year.) Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Fein Irish resistance leader, stops by for a visit with MacGowan to reminisce about their bomb-throwing days fighting for Irish independence.

Like I said, this is all quite the Irish stew of rock 'n' roll lore, and you might not have the tolerance to sit with this subject for two hours. But credit goes to Temple for taking this hot mess and finding some gravitas in this portrait of a broken soul who wrote some of the best songs of the Heyday of the Planet of Sound.

THE BEE GEES: HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART (B+) - This sympathetic HBO documentary gives due to a musical group that proved its mettle during multiple eras in popular music and which was much more than three brothers in tight pants singing disco songs in falsetto. With a broad sweep from the '60s to the '80s, we see the brothers Gibb transform from Beatlesque skiffle rockers from Australia to R&B balladeers to dance-era legends to mature songwriters for adult-contemporary artists. 

Rather than chameleonic opportunists shape-shifting for various eras, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb had serious chops as pop-music artists and a keen ear for soulful hooks that worked across genres and modes of a given day. This documentary shows them to be serious studio rats who wrote their songs together as they recorded, producing some of the most iconic hits of the '60s and '70s.

The film, endorsed by Barry Gibb and his brothers' widows, goes heavy on the family dynamics, including addictions and breakups. It tells fascinating little tales, including the role label-mate Eric Clapton played in encouraging the boys to follow his lead and record their 1975 comeback album in Miami (staying at the same house at 462 Ocean Blvd.), as well as the magic they conjured up when asked two years later to provide the core songs for the iconic "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack. Bandmates and producers (including the transformative Arif Mardin) are finally given their due for their contributions to the '70s sound.

An odd amount of weight is given to Chicago DJ Steve Dahl's "Disco Sucks" counter-movement that popped the disco bubble by 1980; the filmmakers exploit that moment as a catchall shorthand for the general racism and homophobia that beset the club scene and its pulsing beats. But by that point in the film, the narrative has gone so deep into the Bee Gees' musical dynamic and their oeuvre that nothing can dim the glitz of their success. A final shot of the mature Bee Gees harmonizing on "Run to Me" might even bring a tear to your eye.

ZAPPA (C-minus) - God bless Frank Zappa. I'm glad he was in the world for a while (alas, only 52 years), but I'll never understand the appeal he had as a composer and performer. This two-hour documentary (from "Bill & Ted" actor Alex Winter) definitively confirms that I'm not really missing any secret message. Rather, Zappa comes off as a modestly talented but determined and prolific musical noodler who probably was a borderline workaholic asshole, if I'm reading between the lines of the talking-head interviews. His roles as a champion of the First Amendment (battlingTipper Gore and the lyric nazis) and as cultural ambassador for Vaclev Havel's Czech Republic get a gloss that adds nothing really new to the legend.

I can imagine even Zappa diehards straining to sift through the tedium of dumb home movies from the '60s and '70s, an era when video cameras were a novelty and the most creative reaction to having one trained on you was to stick out your tongue, make a face, flip the bird or drop your pants. Oh, those edgy hippies and veritable Mothers of Invention! There's nostalgia and then there's just blatant wastes of celluloid. None of the live performances sampled manages to approach any recognizable level of coherence. If anything, Zappa sports that disdainful sneer onstage more often than expressing any joy in connecting with a crowd.

I kept an ear peeled and my mind open for the musical genius to congeal and finally manifest itself. It doesn't help that Winter chops the music up into snippets that squelch any full appreciation that might be possible. The best example of compositional talent comes from about two minutes of the Kronos Quartet slicing through one of those typical pieces that sound like they come from a bad horror movie. Zappa, an ardent warrior for art over commerce, himself (twice) acknowledges that the music he recorded was done merely so that he could listen to exactly what he wanted to -- and if anyone wanted to buy it and listen too, then he'd be happy to ship a copy to them. We see his massive home-vault archives, which come off as obnoxious self-indulgence rather than an intriguing trove of hidden gems. You might even read the glint in his eye as a signal that his whole career was one big performance-art piece daring you to think the music was good.

So I finally feel like I'm off the hook. I'm not missing anything. "Don't you eat the yellow snow." Thanks for the advice. Rest in peace.

BONUS TRACKS

By 1989, Shane MacGowan had mostly checked out of the Pogues (this was the time of his infamous "Fuck you and your fucking Batman" phase), but they propped him up for this video tribute to '60s stomp rock, "Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah":

Here's that snippet of "Run to Me" from the Bee Gees:

And the best part of the Zappa doc was the song over the closing credits, "Watermelon in Easter Hay":

Black and White

 

THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION (A-minus) - Radha Blank explodes on the cinematic scene with this life-affirming autobiographical diatribe about art and race, as well as a valentine to New York City. Blank plays a version of herself, on the brink of 40 and having nothing to show for the past decade trying to live up to her 30 Under 30 acclaim.

Blank, a struggling playwright, finds an affinity for rapping but doesn't trust herself to dive into that competitive young person's world. A local proprietor of beats, named D (Oswin Benjamin), does believe in her, but her instinct is to fall back into her familiar world of the stage, where she alternates between getting her baby, "Harlem Ave.," staged and mentoring high school students in acting.

This tension is further frazzled by Blank having to capitulate to a white producer and white director in order to get even a watered-down version of her vision to Broadway. Blank uses a rather broad brush to portray the white characters as villains, but the actors, including Reed Birney as the bullying producer J. Whitman, overcome that handicap with a solid dose of energy.

In fact, Blank's forte here is her casting (shout-out to casting director Jessica Daniels), from Benjamin's sullen but big-hearted mix-master to the spirited high school kids (especially Haskiri Velazquez as Rosa); Peter Kim as Blank's childhood pal and flummoxed manager Archie; the character actors who play a Greek chorus of street people (a nod to Spike Lee); and Blank's own brother as her brother. Blank and Kim have such a natural connection, it would not be surprising if she really was his beard for the prom back in the '90s. This is a powerful collection of performers who sink their teeth into Blank's earthy script, and they orbit the appealing author who presents herself with an attractive mix of self-deprecation and fuck-you gumption.

The main distraction here is the black-and-white palette Blank chooses, a conceit that seemed tired when Lee and Woody Allen served it up in decades past. Blank and cinematographer Eric Branco have a deep appreciation for New York, both the street life and the enclosed spaces (they shot in Blank's own cramped apartment). But the colorless visuals both drain the life out of a colorful story and create a distracting artifice that feels as artificial as the play-within-the-film that Blank so decries as a compromise. Still, this is a thoroughly entertaining slice of life from a fresh, confident voice.

BONUS TRACK

There are a lot of fine beats and some nods to old-school rappers, but this Quincy Jones track, "Love and Peace," offers a dose of calm inside the storm:

 

A Bad Connection

 Two more movies that have been dwelling in my queue for the better part of the millennium finally inched to the top:

THE HOLY GIRL (2004) (A-minus) - This fascinating observance of human nature turns the table on the story of the schoolgirl and the creep. This gem from Argentina is from Lucretia Martel, who would go on to make "The Headless Woman" and "Zama."

Sixteen-year-old Amalia (Maria Alche) becomes infatuated with Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso), who is in town at a medical convention being held at the rundown hotel owned by Amalia's family. Amalia is introduced to Dr. Jano while in a crowd after he luridly rubs his crotch up against her. Miffed but not repulsed, she doesn't play a victim's role but rather shows concern for Dr. Jano's perversion. 

Meantime, Amalia's mother, Helena (Mercedes Moran), oblivious to the intrigue, welcomes what she takes as Dr. Jano's flirtations. And that's the game. The three actors do the rest. Alche imbues Amalia with both longing and playfulness, as she frolicks with a best friend but longs to be part of the adult world. 

INTIMACY (2001) (C+) - A modern concept -- two adults get together once a week for a zipless, wordless tryst -- never gets off the ground in this acting class by a young Mark Rylance. Jay is a failed musician, trying to run a bar, and is getting over the callous dumping of his wife and kids. He turns to Claire (Kerry Fox) for their Wednesday romps in his dumpy London bachelor pad. 

When Jay gets curious about Claire's life, obvious complications ensue. He gets to know her husband, Andy (veteran character actor Timothy Spall), and their son while attending Claire's small theater gigs. Side stories between Jay and his acquaintances muddy the waters.

Director Patrice Chereau worked the script with Anne-Louise Trividic, adapting the stories of Hanif Kareishi ("Venus," "My Beautiful Laundrette"), and something gets lost in the translation here. Rylance and Fox don't have adequate chemistry, and it gets to be a chore watching these two mopes snipe over what looks like unsatisfying sex. The chopped-up Anglo-rock soundtrack (David Bowie, Nick Cave) is a distraction. In the end, it all falls flat.

People of Earth

BABY GOD (C+) - Like its subject, something is decidedly off about this documentary chronicling a folksy 20th century obstetrician who secretly used his own sperm to impregnate dozens of patients, creating a legion of progeny. Director Hannah Olson seems more interested in creating a mood than in lining out a concise narrative of one man's obsession with duplicating himself.

Olson is all over the place in tracking down the spawn of Quincy Fortier, the Las Vegas doctor who died in 2006 at 94 and who spread his seed vast and wide. This creates some serious issues of heritage for the dozens (or more?) who must come to terms with how they were conceived and deceived. Principal among them is Wendi Babst, who is, conveniently, a private investigator but who struggles to convey a linear story. 

Even in the trailer, you can tell that Olson favors artfully crafted establishing shots and vintage clips. Late in the proceedings she attempts to drop another bombshell about Fortier, but it's awkwardly handled and questionably sourced. This one probably is better suited for a run-of-the-mill "20/20" TV special -- just the facts, ma'am -- than an art doc.

IDIOCRACY (C+) - They say that, as amazing as his music was, it was never as good or as dimensional as it was in Mozart's own head. The same might be said of the idea of "Idiocracy," Mike Judge's warning about America's dumb future -- the execution could not possibly match the way this sounded in his own brilliant brain. That, and a movie about idiots tends to be pretty idiotic.

Call him a prophet, but Judge ("Beavis and Butt-head," "Office Space," "Silicon Valley") was ahead of his time in predicting the coming idiocracy. He had the good taste of placing events 500 years into the future, the result of generations of nonstop reproduction by the endlessly horny lesser intellects and the dithering of egg-headed elites about wanting to wait for the just right time to finally have that one precious offspring. (The opening scenes setting up the conceit is the best part of the movie.)

Otherwise, this features Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph as average schmoes who, after a botched military experiment, wake up five centuries later to find that they are by far the smartest people alive and that American culture has deteriorated to grunts and farts. Having a pro wrestler in the White House might have been funny back in the carefree aughts, but after four years of a reality-show presidency, our tolerance for such flip gags might be too strained for this nostalgia trip. What was a diverting lark in 2006 seems better suited now as a long sketch rather than a dragged-out feature film. This one came and went quickly after it was released, and it's probably best left as a shorthand pop culture reference but left buried in its time capsule. 

Doc Watch: A Democracy, If You Can Keep It

 

SOCIAL DILEMMA (B+) - This sharp documentary about the dangers of social media and the growing specter of artificial intelligence brings together some smart people who have been at the forefront of developing the technology that has enslaved us over the past quarter century. Director Jeff Orlowski gathers an impressive roster of mostly former tech whizzes and executives from Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google, Instagram and YouTube, as well as ethicists and investors, to issue this warning from the present about the sins of the past and the potential perils of the future.

Tristan Harris (ex-Google) is the star, the one who best articulates the serious nature of the algorithms that breed addictions among the billions of users on the planet. He talks in easily digestible Ted Talk modern aphorisms. Also on board is the incisive Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality and a tech philosopher, who most keenly and urgently conveys the horrors of social media.

The tricky part here is the running dramatization that is threaded throughout the film, featuring a typical teen who represents the perfect target for those monetizing the internet. It features Skyler Gisondo ("Booksmart") as Ben, the zombie teen, and -- believe it or not -- Vincent Kartheiser (Pete from TV's "Mad Men") in a triple role (standing side by side by side) as the embodiment of the AI algorithms, seen manipulating  clueless Ben. The dramatizations can be effective at helping us visualize the tricks used by AI to make us think we are acting independently rather than falling for computer gimmicks; but they can also be cloying and annoying. 

But the message is compelling here, and the point is taken. 

THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY (B+) - Petra Costa, the daughter of left-wing activists, lines out the past 20 years of Brazil's politics, chronicling the rise and fall of the workers party in the nation's vulnerable democracy. It is an intimate story for Costa, and her bias is obvious in this polemic, for better and for worse. 

This plays like a liberal memoir, as Costa has personal (even familial) connections to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who served from 2003-11, and his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, who did not make it through her second term, having been impeached and convicted in August 2016 -- both victims of a zealous prosecuting judge (literally investigator, judge and jury) who linked them tenuously to corruption in the oil industry. 

What resonates throughout the Americas, especially in the United States, was how the Mitch-McConnell-like head of Brazil's upper chamber orchestrated what looked like a coup and opened the door to Jair Bolsonaro, the former military dunce who waltzed into office on Donald Trump's coattails in 2018. That gradual evolution toward a growing wave of angry right-wing populism comes off as ominous and eerie, especially when wrapped in Costa's luxurious, melancholy visuals. 

Costa creates lovely, spectacular images, and she has incredible insider access to Lula and Rousseff. Not knowing much about Brazilian politics, I assume that there's a whole nother side to this story; though, to Costa's credit, she does not shy away from the missteps of the left -- for example, she notes that Rousseff skulked out of office with a 9 percent approval rating. 

"Edge" shares a strong kinship with "The Other Side of Everything," the tone poem about life after the breakup of Yugoslavia. But whereas "Other Side" was unapologetically personal, Costa's piece seems more eager to be taken seriously as a definitive documentary on the subject -- when we know that a more dispassionate observer would tell a more balanced story.

Modern Love

THE OVERNIGHT (2015) (B+) - The Duplass brothers recruit the reliable Jason Schwartzman to anchor this dark comedy about a couple new to Los Angeles who get lured into the relationship intrigue of a quirky husband and wife. Writer-director Patrick Brice delivers this long night of debauchery in under 80 minutes, making his sharp point and not overstaying his welcome.

Alex and Emily (Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling) struggle with their sex life as they move to L.A. from Seattle to raise their preschool son. On a visit to the park, their son meets a playmate, and the father is Kurt (Schwartzman), who invites the pair to pizza dinner as the house he shares with his wife, Charlotte (Judith Godreche) and their boy. The wine flows with the pizza, but they soon turn to the harder stuff, along with weed, and before long inhibitions start to slip.

Kurt is a free spirit, and Charlotte is French, while Emily is uptight and inexperienced, and Alex is insecure about his manhood. Brice, in classic Duplass style, takes a specific circumstance that requires unique characters to react in realistic ways and sets loose a group of substantive actors on the material. Each actor delivers here, led by Schwartzman's over-confident Kurt (he is especially proud of his artwork, composed entirely of colorful renditions of various anuses). Scott can be hit-and-miss, but he keeps it under control here as a man genuinely excited to have his worldview expanded. Schilling (who was the drag on "Orange Is the New Black") is laid back but affecting, while Godreche is a wild card. It is an ensemble that clicks in a simple but effective exercise in storytelling.

HAPPIEST SEASON (C) - Generic in every way, starting with its title, this Christmas bauble about a closeted lesbian bringing her "friend" home to meet the family wastes a strong cast on a string of cliched scenes. It's a disappointing sophomore effort from Clea DuVall, who had broken out of her role in the "Veep" cast to debut as a writer-director with "The Intervention" in 2016.

As with her first film, DuVall is blessed with a talented cast, which is the only saving grace here. Kristen Stewart (doing her classic mope, only as a bleach blonde here) is Abby, who plans to ask her girlfriend, Harper (Mackenzie Davis from "Tully" and "Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town"), to marry her when they go home to Harper's family for Christmas. Except Harper fails to divulge fully that she lied about coming out to her family, and so Abby reluctantly agrees to pose as Harper's orphaned roommate.

Let the high-jinks ensue! The problem is, this made-for-Hulu concoction simply cannot rise above some of the lamest rom-com tropes, with cardboard stereotypes dotting the supporting cast. Allison Brie and Mary Holland overdo it as the sisters of Harper competing for the love of their ambitious father (Victor Garber) and the acceptance of their over-wound mother (Mary Steenburgen). Abby even has a wise-cracking gay best friend (Dan Levy), while Harper has a distrustful rival back home (Aubrey Plaza). That's quite a power-hitting cast, and they can often be fun to watch, but DuVall simply drops the ball and phones in a trite script and wince-inducing scenes stretched out over 100 bloated minutes. (Be prepared: This is another one of those movies where every character learns a life-changing lesson literally overnight.) In sum, this is the very definition of couch-coping during the holidays.

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, from Bowie, crisp as ever: