The * of 2020

 

Let's just put an asterisk after every entry of 2020. We don't need to belabor the point.

Herein we celebrate the best films of the past year. As usual, it takes us a few extra weeks out in flyover country to catch up to the straggling titles. These past months it was actually easier to keep up with the scattershot slate of releases, because we could stream them on demand, with a few exceptions (more asterisks). 

The experiment that was the start of the third decade of the millennium (asterisk for the sticklers, you know who you are) mixed the good with the bad. On the one hand, a bunch of high-profile titles got pushed back to 2021. On the other hand, the ones that did get released were often immediately available, for a price, online. On the third hand (asterisk), we couldn't view them on the big screen in the company of others in a shared experience. It was what it was.

But as usual, there are only two or three films that could be considered truly great and which will stand the test of time (asterisk: I can't predict the future), followed on our list by some very good ones. We're going to be generous this time and make the list a fat 15, weighing it down with titles but lightening the load by including some sweet (if at times bittersweet) and uplifting minor-key movies that normally would have had a tougher time piercing our defenses. A little positivity couldn't hurt. (Asterisk.)

This year, it'll be a simpler list, with fewer categories and titles. Even before the asterisks started flying, we've made a conscious effort to downsize this forum and streamline what is now an eight-year relationship online. But you all out there still need images to stream, and below you'll find a couple of weeks worth of entertainment.

While it was easy to get cynical and jaded as a veteran moviegoer who feels like we've seen it all, we instead tried to get a little more discerning. And we were rewarded by seeing a lot of new talent and first-time filmmakers who made the list. We denote four of them below -- with an asterisk.

THE TOP 15

  1. We Are Little Zombies* - Easily the year's best director, Makoto Nagahisa, who splashes with this dark but heartwarming tale of four orphans banding together through post-millennial uber-angst. Never has nihilism been so colorful and groovy.

  2. Someone Somewhere - From France, the ache of loneliness, even when that certain someone is within reach, if only you knew.

  3. Never Rarely Sometimes Always - As raw as cinema gets, Eliza Hittman ("It Felt Like Love") gets back on her game in this jarring documentary-like traipse through the abortion system.

  4. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - Viola Davis (best actor) is like a cat with a bird in its mouth, big-footing around this August Wilson play like she owned the damn recording studio in 1927.

  5. The Forty-Year-Old Version* - Another fresh voice, Radha Blank, a complex exploration of both race relations and the imminent approach of middle age, and how both of those factors help or hinder the making of art. (Best screenplay.)

  6. Beanpole - Visually striking and heart-wrenching -- how we somehow manage to get by psychologically in the wake of war.

  7. Corpus Christi - A gripping tale of a doomed young man vainly seeking redemption.

  8. Epicentro - One of two documentaries on the elite list, this one a gorgeous, meandering dive into one aspect of Cuban culture.

  9. The Climb - A novel take on the classic buddy film involving love triangles and the shifting power dynamics between two grown men. Both funny and unpredictable, with a smart visual sense.

10. Driveways - A mom, a son and the codger next door. The subsidiary culture clash takes a backseat to old-fashioned sweetness and light, giving hope to outsiders.

11. I Am Greta* - Remarkably intimate, this one succeeds not on its politics but rather on its sociological and psychological insights of one teenager trying to make a difference. From Nathan Grossman.

12. The Wolf of Snow Hollow - Jim Cummings' sophomore effort gets a little silly at times, but there's no one like him tearing up the screen with wild ranges of emotions mixed with acrid comedy.

13. First Cow - Another buddy film, this Kelly Reichardt period piece takes its sweet time to charm you.

14. The Life Ahead - Similar to "Driveways," this Italian mood piece presents an odd couple -- Sophia Loren's Holocaust survivor and a rebellious street kid -- and tugs at the heart in just the right ways.

15. Shithouse* - Another debut film, this one about a young man (writer-director-star Cooper Raiff) putting his vulnerabilities out there as he struggles through his first year of college. 

JUST MISSED THE LIST

• I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Wonderfully bizarre, until Charlie Kaufman goes completely off the rails in the final 20 minutes.
• Banana Split - Two girls bro it up as they bond over a shared boy toy.
• The Trip to Greece - We just can't quit these two clever Brits fictionalizing themselves in the hands of Michael Winterbottom.
• The devastating documentary about Romania's health care system, "Collective." 
• From Iceland, the full simmer of "A White, White Day."
• The beautiful black-and-white Soviet period piece "Dear Comrades."

TOP DOCS

• Crip Camp
• Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults - HBO's four-part series is the epitome of historical storytelling, spanning the decades-long death march of the most captivating of all cults.
• The Social Dilemma
• Feels Good Man
• Harry Chapin: When in Doubt, Do Something
• Class Action Park
• The Raft
• Earth
• The Edge of Democracy
• Other Music
• One Child Nation
• The Go-Go's
• Red Penguins

THE LEFTOVERS

  The 2019 films we caught up with:

• The elegant, fascinating love story "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" would have made our top five last year.
• The invigorating documentary about a family of rogue EMTs in Mexico City, "Midnight Family"
• From Serbia, the somber '90s war story "The Load."

COMING ATTRACTIONS

As noted above, releases were a little scrambled in 2020. You'll see "Nomadland," from Chloe Zhao ("The Rider") on some lists, and it did appear briefly online late in the year, but it won't get an official release until 2021. Same for "Gunda," the wordless documentary about farm life, which comes out next month. 

We're curious about Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" anthology (especially "Lovers Rock" and "Red, White and Blue"), but it's an Amazon exclusive. And Sofia Coppola's "On the Rocks" belongs to Apple TV. Finally, we doubt "Martin Eden" would crack our Top 15, but it's coming out on disc next week, so we'll find out soon.

Stay tuned for reviews of those titles and more as we re-emerge in 2021, hopefully in a dark, confined space at some point.

Modern Deprivations

In what almost certainly is a blog record, we have our first straight A of the year before the end of January.

ACASA, MY HOME (A) - This Romanian tale of two parents raising nine children off the grid on the outskirts of Bucharest plays like a mix of "The Wolfpack" and last year's "Honeyland," and it's better than both of those documentaries. The father is that classic mix of eccentric and abusive, and the mother is subservient. 

The children are like feral moppets gorging on nature. They sleep on the floor with chickens and pigs, and they rely on outsiders who donate clothes and toys, but their daily outings along the reedy delta seem to be truly exuberant experiences. They even have a hideout to go to whenever Child Services makes one of its periodic visits.

One of those visits results in a relocation to a city shelter. As Roma, they are treated like second-class welfare recipients. The children miss their natural playground and soon fall victim to the lures of modern culture, like cell phones and video games. The oldest boy finds a girlfriend and is soon talking smack to the old man. When removed from their natural habitat, the kids exhibit sharper sides of their personalities and insecurities.  

Director Radu Ciorniciuc has a goldmine of sociological insights to juggle here. However, nothing is black and white. It's not necessarily the case that the kids are better off in the wilds, immunized from 21st century evils. The parents themselves are rather sickly (the father has diabetes), and the children are not only poorly nourished but also illiterate and socially retarded. And we see a good amount of empathy and good deeds out of both the Child Services representatives and the government officials overseeing the construction of a gaudy nature preserve smack along the family's compound. 

Ciorniciuc really makes no judgments here, and that is endlessly refreshing. He offers up no facile takeaways, but instead embeds his camera so snugly into the family's existence that it takes a while to be amazed at how intimate yet invisible his presence is in the mix. He makes no false steps while crafting a quiet masterpiece.

NOTTURNO (B) - This is borderline war porn and should probably be downgraded to mere fetishism, but oh, how gorgeous are these scenes from Gianfranco Rosi depicting life among the ruins in Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan and Lebanon. Parking his camera in one place and either making or waiting for the light to be just right, Rosi unspools a series of unrelated vignettes, one more mesmerizing than the other.

There is no narration or on-screen identifiers, so most people will either have to spot the clues in context or just go clueless about where we are at a given time. Rosi at times mixes heart-wrenching visuals with absurdist shots of everyday ordinary life. 

Some scenes in particular are mesmerizing. We watch children in art-therapy sessions, including a boy with a stutter, describing horrific crimes against humanity by ISIS. Adults in a psychiatric facility rehearse a play based on the horrors of war. A couple in love share a hookah on a rooftop as gunfire rattles in the far distance, before he heads off to the streets to sing the praises of Mohammed. A young man paddles along the shiny surface of water in the middle of the night as oil-well fires glow in the background. A colorless prison yard comes magically to life as a parade of men in orange jumpsuits slowly spill out of a doorway, like dye leaching out onto the screen.

It may bother you that such manmade and godly beauty are employed to convey the depths of human desperation. Or maybe it's a decent way to get you to pay attention.

BONUS TRACK

From "Notturno," the haunting "Mawtini":

New to the Queue

Apres le deluge ...

A documentary about Romanian parents trying to battle the state while raising nine kids off the grid, "Acasa, My Home."

From Ukraine, a dystopian nightmare that takes place in the far distant future of the year 2025, "Atlantis."

From Italy, a fancifully shot and moody documentary about the war-torn regions of Iraq, Syria and their neighbors, "Notturno."

A debut feature out of Mexico, a mother searches for her missing son in the border drama "Identifying Features."

Midlife Insights

A WHITE WHITE DAY (B+) - Ingvar Sigurdsson is a force to be reckoned with in this harrowing tale of an emotionally knotted man coming to terms not only with the death of his wife but also the apparent realization that she may have been unfaithful. A bit sluggish over its nearly two-hour running time, this simmering suspense film builds relentlessly and convincingly in the hands of writer-director Hlynur Palmason.

Sigurdsson's Ingimundur has a stony demeanor and seems to gain solace from only two things: the house he is methodically building and the time he gets to spend with his charming tween granddaughter, Salka (Ida Mekkin Hlynsdottir). Ingimundur is a small-town police chief on leave of absence, and he eventually develops a third obsession -- confronting the man suspected of sleeping with his wife.

Palmason does a brilliant job of setting the table in the first half, and his camerawork in the second half lends an immediacy that gradually heightens the tension until Ingimundur finally achieves his reckoning. Our hero seems barely in control -- it's almost amusing how many times he puts his granddaughter in danger, as if she's a patrol partner -- yet he is intellectually astute as he navigates his own emotional landscape. In the end, it seems that the only thing that could console him -- a reckoning with his dead wife -- is impossible.

THE MEASURE OF A MAN (2016) (C) - Not even Vincent Lindon can rescue this lethargic character study of an out-of-work husband and father trying to salvage his dignity as a breadwinner. Lindon reunites with Stephane Brise, the director of "Mademoiselle Chambon," but there is no spark in this depiction of the drudgery of working-class life.

Lindon's hangdog expressions are a good fit for the role of Thierry, who seems beaten down by the unemployment system that fumbles its attempts to retool his skills and who seems emasculated by the penny pinching he is forced to do on behalf of his wife and handicapped high school son. Thierry, finally -- but not until the second half of the movie -- lands a job as a security guard at a megastore, where he now must harass customers and employees who, like he was, are strapped for cash and down on their luck, descending into petty theft.

File this one under Fast Forward Theater. Brise drags out scenes interminably, too enamored of an apparently amateur cast to convey the realism of France's bureaucracy and the beatdown felt by the lower classes. But realism doesn't pop on the screen here; instead, interactions run in circles and later repeat themselves. This was a valiant attempt to connect with the hoi polloi, but it pretty much goes nowhere.

BONUS TRACK

From the closing credits in "White Day," Leonard Cohen's mournful "Memories":

Twilight of Twee: Part 2 -- The Drift

HAM ON RYE (D+) - This one is about as thin and derivative an idea as you can put forth, and the cheap production values and zombie-like non-actor cast drag this into the territory of unwatchable. This modest debut feature from Tyler Taormina tracks a bunch of suburban kids as they muddle through some sort of local rite of passage.

It is difficult to grasp the true narrative here. The first third of the film is all vague setup -- high schoolers getting dressed up and traipsing, pilgrimage-style, to a local sandwich shop, as if it is their prom destination. It is tempting to mention "Dazed and Confused," a landmark in slacker filmdom, but Richard Linklater's Gen X Austin nugget was some sort of intellectually engaging action film compared to this lethargic game of play-acting. 

This has more of a kinship with the early films of Matthew Porterfield, such as "Hamilton" and "Putty Hill," where non-actors toss off non-sequitur-filled mini-monologues and perform random menial tasks like cutting the grass in extended takes. Here, there is no one person to focus on (let alone a Matthew McConaughey lurking in the mix) until the final third, and even then it is by default, because she has suddenly become isolated. And her main duty is to call friends' voicemails or knock on their doors looking for them. (Yes, it's that exciting to watch.) One scene dramatically ends on a close-up of a balloon clinging to a ceiling, perhaps this generation's version of the plastic bag in the wind from "American Beauty." You sense Taormina is making some sort of statement about the schism between college-bound hetero-normative young adults and "outcasts," but that's about the best guess I can muster.

With no real narrative except for a bizarre, anachronistic teen mating ritual followed by under-explained extra-terrestrial twist to set up the final act, the writer-director leans into style over substance, and his style seems to depend on whatever he could scrape together on a micro-budget (including fake driving backgrounds). At first you wonder if it's a period piece, because no one uses a cell phone; but then late in the film a character casually whips out her device as if maybe she had somehow escaped to the future. Taormina underscores it all with music that obviously means more to him than it possibly could to his character -- a mix of oldies and more recently recorded faux-ldies, plus some cringe-inducing new-age pan flute airs -- none of which syncs with whatever these kids are going through.  I had way more ennui for 84 minutes than these kids did.

BONUS TRACK

The kids, for no rational reason, dance chastely to girl-group records, like "Tonight I'm Gonna Fall in Love" by the TearDrops:

The more modern entries on the soundtrack either try to emulate dusties or fall into the familiar "Garden State" patois of indie wimp-rock. Here is Captain DaFeira with "Tribe":

Twilight of Twee: Part 1 -- The Grift

KAJILLIONAIRE (C) - There was a moment in time for Miranda July. That era probably was the 1980s (but she was still a kid then), so we settled for the retro version that she presented a decade ago as an adult. But time has not been kind to her manic-pixie take on the world that she offered up so effortlessly back in the Before Times. Something seems stale.

July, a wry writer and occasional filmmaker, splashed with the witty and deadpan "Me and You and Everyone We Know" in 2005 and followed it up in 2011 with the quietly charming relationship film "The Future" -- which gave us a talking cat named Paw-Paw (voiced by July) as one of the main characters -- but hadn't produced a film since. Now in her mid-40s, it seems her moment in cinema may have aged out of the system.

Her cutesy idea here is to create a bizarro family of socially dysfunctional grifters and see if they can out-outre each other. She doesn't so much assemble a cast as take hostages -- powerhouses Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger as the cruelly unemotional parents and the way-past-her-prime Evan Rachel Wood as their abuse-victim daughter, whom they have charmlessly named Old Dolio, after a homeless man who they thought was going to bequeath them some money somehow. They live in an office-building connected to a factory, where waves of pink bubbles constantly seep through the walls, because -- well, because it's just one of July's fairy-dust brainstorms.

This has all the hallmarks of established actors indulging an avant-garde filmmaker by work-shopping her half-baked ideas and seeing if anything sticks. Jenkins and Winger give it their all (digging deep, I'm sure, into their '70s Method training), and they try not to seem embarrassed in their obviously out-sized but under-sketched roles. Wood affects a husky grumble of a 20-something who was raised by wolves and knows only one thing -- how to scam money in order to pay for the next meal. But she shows little range or ability to connect with Gina Rodriguez as Melanie, who comes along to help rescue Old Dolio from this suffocating existence.

Melanie is meant to represent empathy and humanity here, but she comes off as little more than a narrative device, almost a Magical Minority, who unconvincingly is powerfully drawn to her very own Eliza Doolittle. But Rodriguez, too, is victimized by July's inability to flesh out what could have been a fine short story into a feature-length movie, as well as July's failure to literally piece together a convincing fully-realized film. July attempts to convey a washed-out L.A. but shows none of the flair of Sean Baker or others who can use a camera to make their images come alive. July is a huge talent as a writer and performance artist/curator, but this tale of a family of emotionally stunted oddballs lays bare her own arrested development as a filmmaker. 

BONUS TRACK

Besides a well-placed Bobby Vinton song (!), July finds interesting sounds, including this piano piece, "Melusine," from her college pal Summer Mastous:

Which led us to this, also from Mastous:

RIP, Michael Apted

 

The man behind the "Seven Up" series of documentaries that spanned six decades (most recently "63 Up"), Michael Apted, has died at age 79.

We gave him some due in our reviews of his series that chronicled a cohort of British baby boomers since the 1960s as they passed through their seven-year cycles of life. About a year ago we revisited the entire series. Part one covered the first four episodes. Part two covers the next four entries, and our post includes video of an interview Apted did with Roger Ebert.

 

Apted was part of the crew for "Seven Up" in 1964 when it was made for British television, and he then took over the rest of the series. It remains to be seen if, five years from now, someone will take over the project and continue it with "70 Up." The series remains one of the landmark achievements of documentary filmmaking and an endlessly fascinating sociological study.

Apted had other achievements to list on his resume, including directing "Coal Miner's Daughter" in 1980, as wells as a run as three terms as president of the Directors Guild of America. Here is an obituary.

Men Behaving Badly

THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW (A-minus) - Jim Cummings comes storming back from "Thunder Road" with another character on the brink of a mental breakdown, this time as a small-town sheriff's deputy battling to stay sober as he hunts a werewolf-style killer that defiles its female victims under the light of each full moon. Cummings again writes, directs and stars, and his bottled-up John Marshall can rarely keep his emotions in check, not unlike the mysterious creature who emerges during each lunar cycle. As with his previous effort, Cummings manages to make his character's meltdown both hilarious and harrowing, achieving more character development in 10 seconds of emoting than many others can over the course of an entire film.

John worries about his dad, the aging Sheriff Hadley (a wistful Robert Forster in his final role), who has a heart condition, and about his teenage daughter, Jenna (Chloe East), who is a pawn in the bitter breakup between John and his wife. John, as de facto sheriff while he pushes his dad to retire, takes his frustrations out on the rest of the sheriff's crew, big-footing crime scenes and barking out insults. Riki Lindhome is on hand as a detective who provides the voice of calm and reason.

As the body count rises and the townies question the aptitude of this collection of Barney Fifes, John internalizes all the public and personal strife, continuing to lash out in every direction as he flails for a life preserver. (Last time we called him a cross between Jim Carrey and Jason Schwartzman. He's one of those tightly wound souls we used to call a ketchup bottle.) Announcing to an AA gathering in the opening scene that he has been with the program six years -- though sober for only three -- he finds himself stumbling along the 12 steps

 

This is Cummings' show for 83 minutes (he knows how to get in and out of a story), and you'll either fall for his shtick or you won't. And he might be pushing it if he keeps portraying crazed cops on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But for now, he's 2-for-2 and a refreshing new voice on the scene.

 

THE NEST (B) - Sean Durkin, finally following up "Martha Marcy May Marlene," teams Jude Law and Carrie Coon for this '80s period piece about an ambitious but delusional financial analyst who drags his wife and two kids back to his home turf of London, where their family structure just further disintegrates. Despite strong performances, the results are mixed.

Like with "Martha," Durkin creates a slow burn of a narrative that pivots on the tension between a couple at odds with each other, in this case boastful Rory (Law) and his unhappy American wife Allison (Coon). He is trying to recapture some former glory as a golden boy, but you can tell from the start that it's all a big bluff. She wants to train horses and riders, but shipping her prized equine across the pond creates problems, and Allison just cannot abide the role of trophy wife at British social gatherings, especially when she has to listen to her husband shovel the cocktail-chatter bullshit.

Rory has imprisoned his family in a creepy manor in the countryside, and the kids suffer the indignities typical of the era -- bickering parents who can't be bothered to do the simple parenting tasks, such as getting the kids to school on time. Teenage Sam (a sharp Oona Roche) acts out rebelliously, partying with her friends and talking smack to her parents over legitimate grievances. Younger Benjamin suffers from tween angst and neglect, at times a boy who just wants his mommy and daddy, a simple plea that often falls on deaf ears. 

Law and Coon, along with the kids, dig deep for emotional resonance, but Durkin too often drags this out as if he's about to spring a horror-movie surprise on you, but that ghost in the machine never jumps out. It's a mildly clever misdirection, but it's a disappointment nonetheless. Still, he knows how to set an ominous mood, and the cast does its best to pull this one out.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

Missing Persons

DEAR COMRADES (B+) - Andrey Konchalovskiy goes back to 1962 for this stiff but effective Soviet drama revolving around the massacre of civilians protesting price hikes and wage cuts in the small industrial town of Novocherkassk. Yuliya Vysotskaya is a tour de force as Lyuda, a devoted local Communist Party apparatchik who turns doubtful and distraught after her daughter goes missing in the scrum.

Konchalovskiy shoots in crisp black and white to give this a period feeling, and he gruffs up his extras to create that working-class smudge about them. Vysotskaya takes her character on an emotionally wrenching journey, from a kittenish wake-up scene with her married lover (who is a party colleague) to the disorientation of the growing anger of the mob to, finally, the anguish of fearing the worst for her daughter.

The residents' struggles with the Soviet Union are filtered through personal experience, such as the dynamic between Lyuda, who waxes nostalgic for the Stalin era, and her grumpy father, who is old enough to remember the relative luxury of the tsarist days. Lyuda and Loginov (Vladislov Komarov), a KGB agent she latches on to as an aid to tracking down her daughter, sing patriotic songs in the car, less as a celebration and more as a numbing balm for their wavering devotion. The suspense builds in the second half as Lyuda tries to reconcile her own action as a widget in the system with the pain inflicted on those around her. 

YOURSELF AND YOURS (D+) - This is a trivial, confusing and lightweight -- er, comedy? -- introducing us to the films of Sang-soo Hong, and we hope it is not representative of his overall work (which also includes "Right Now, Wrong Then"). As it glides by in 86 minutes, you wait for it to stop spinning its wheels and get to the point; it never does.

Min-jung (Yoo-Young Lee) is a hard drinker, which gets in the way of her relationship with a painter, Young-soo (Ju-hyuk Kim), and when he gives her the ultimatum -- the bottle or me -- she politely leaves. She then apparently reinvents herself, denying to those who have met her before that she is Min-jung, at one point claiming for the first time that she has a twin sister.

None of this is convincing. The trailer for the film hints at a charming relationship film with splashes of whimsy. Instead, this is a slog, with repetitive dialogue, twisted logic and dull performances and set pieces. It's not possible to figure this one out, and maybe that's the point. It's as if Hong workshopped an idea, captured it on film, and instead of writing a script from it, just released these outtakes. A real chore to watch. 

Binge Watching

 

SHITHOUSE (A-minus) - Perhaps the surprise of the year, this debut feature -- written, directed and starring Cooper Raiff -- about a college freshman who misses home and struggles to adapt to campus life is smart, sweet, tender and insightful. You just can't judge a movie by its title.

The first half of the film echoes a millennial version of "Before Sunrise," as Raiff's character Alex escapes his substance-abusing roommate and has a meet-cute with his dorm RA, Maggie (Dylan Gelula), a straight-talking young woman who refuses to be shamed for her sexual conquests but doesn't seem very proud of them, either. Alex manages to pry Maggie away from her friends and spend a long night wandering around and bonding.

When Maggie turns cold toward Alex in the coming days, he pouts and sincerely doesn't understand why she is no longer reciprocating his feelings. He finds himself on the brink of pulling the plug and going back home to his mother (Amy Landecker) and smart-mouthed little sister (Olivia Welch). What knits such an unoriginal story together is Raiff's ability as a writer-director and as an actor to make Alex vulnerable and emotionally fragile (he has silent conversations with the stuffed animal that he brought from home). He and Gelula have a wonderful chemistry -- even when their characters are on the outs -- and much of the dialogue feels lived-in and often improvised. 

It is likely that Raiff workshopped this production for a while, allowing the cast to gel and play off of each other. Extra credit to Logan Miller as Sam, Alex's roommate who begins his college career by majoring in substance abuse. Everyone contributes to a heartfelt coming-of-age romantic tale that reminds you how disorienting and challenging life can get right after high school.

BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS (B-minus) - This one is a cheat, like Sarah Polley's fictionalized documentary "Stories We Tell," only this study of barflies celebrating the final night of their local haunt is a documentary-ized work of surreptitious fiction. If only the filmmakers' acrobatic attempts at cinema verite had yielded a memorable story.

The setting is the Roaring 20s, a typical loser bar apparently in Las Vegas and populated by regulars but actually a fictional saloon in New Orleans full of ringers, including some out-of-work actors. The main character is cranky Michael, who looks like the loser version of Hal Holbrook, all grizzled and wrinkled at age 58, sleeping off his hangovers on the bar's couch. (He has 28 acting credits listed at IMDb, mostly shorts.) Michael is surrounded by other more happy drunks, plus a daytime bartender who serenades the clientele with acoustic cover songs and a nighttime bartender who is a stern single mom. (Her son (?) stars in a B-story about teens hanging outside the bar, smoking pot and sneaking in to steal some beers.)

If this were an actual documentary, it would be a modestly interesting sociological study of final 24 hours of a joint full of regulars. There's the sad veteran at the end of the bar. The young know-it-all spoiling for a fight. The 60-year-old broad who still likes to flash her tits (before eventually falling face first onto the barroom floor and becoming the night's first casualty). The friendly white-haired hippie who loves everyone. And there is faux philosophy slung about, mostly about the pride of drinking one's life away.

But none of it matters and it doesn't really count. Judged, then, as a feature film, this is a clever idea with some neat visuals -- all in search of a compelling narrative. If these sots were real, at least we could -- in the absence of any drama or sharp humor -- expend some effort in drawing meaning from their miserable existences. Instead, we get "Barfly" without Mickey Rourke. And where's the fun in that?

BONUS TRACK

From the "Shithouse" soundtrack, Girlpool with "Cherry Picking":