FAKE FAMOUS (B-minus) - "Stop paying attention to them, and they'll go away," my mom often liked to say, whether we were talking about detractors at school or wasps. Here we go along with an experiment in which debut filmmaker Nick Bilton picks three random somebodies to see if he can make them influencer-famous.
The main flaw here is that the three people he chose are not very interesting (maybe that's the point?) and the most engaging one doesn't have his heart in this experiment. But Bilton is enthusiastic, and he's determined to make a statement about the latest iteration of our obsession with celebrity. Dominique Druckman, a rather mousy young woman, makes the biggest splash, though she's smart enough to quickly realize how shallow her life becomes. Christopher Bailey, a talented clothes designer, just doesn't fall for the bait. A third participant chickens out fairly early.
There's no real lesson revealed here. But we do learn some of the cut-rate secrets of influencers appearing to be living the high life, as well as the ins and outs of securing fake followers. And the best part is that all these people go away after 90 minutes and you can choose to never follow them or their co-horts around again.
OPERATION VARSITY BLUES (Incomplete) - File this under Life Is Short. We couldn't make it past the first 20 minutes of this documentary about the college-admissions scandal, Chris Smith's follow-up to the eminently delightful "Fyre." Here, though, it's more of a docudrama, heavy on re-enactments of the prime offender, the oddball fixer Rick Singer, portrayed here by Matthew Modine, buckling under a bad Moe Howard wig and perhaps the realization that his acting career peaked about 25 years ago.
Where most documentaries would take phone-call transcripts and make them compelling, Smith chooses to have Modine act them out, over and over, while "Singer" is putting his shoes on or fixing breakfast. It all plays out like a bad Afterschool Special. There's got to be a better way to tell this story on film.
BONUS TRACK
Our title track, Bowie's "Fame," co-written by John Lennon:
ASSHOLES: A THEORY (B) - Just about what you'd expect from an adaptation of Aaron James' timely book of the same name that coincided with the resurgence of anti-social behavior in the past five years. A nice touch is person-on-the-street interviews, a quaint throwback. Otherwise, the pontificating is done by James himself and a few ringers, including Monty Python alum John Cleese and a bunch of academics. One law professor tells an insightful story about calling out an abusive student who, after the behavior was pointed out, turned it around and became a model student. "No one had ever told me," he lamented to the professor.
The definition is key to the strength of James' theory. He's talking about someone who allows himself (we'll go with the male gender here) special advantages amid cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against complaints from others in society. Self-awareness (indeed, provocation, usually) is key, as it tends to distinguish assholes from, say, narcissists, who are seen as lacking such awareness.
Director John Walker skips through a series of illustrative subjects, including the military, the bullying Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Italy's proto-Trump Silvio Burlusconi (vis a vis a transsexual Italian lawmaker, seen here confronting her online troll), an investment firm that plays nice (Cf. below) and, of course, social media. In a zippy 81 minutes, Walker makes his case well and finds entertaining ways to explore a disturbing subject that plagues contemporary society.
ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM (2005) (A) - Sometimes these things write themselves. Long before the scam known as "Fyre," the greedy crooks at Enron not only exhibited a biblical scale of amorality, but their dirty deeds made millions of people suffer, whether they lost power in California or saw their 401(k) disintegrate in Portland.
The recent power crisis in Texas is a good reminder that deregulation -- "the magic of the marketplace," in Ronald Reagan's famous turn of phrase -- takes the handcuffs off of assholes as well as the good guys. Alex Gibney made his bones with this energized (sorry) filleting of the Houston good ol' boys who exploited the loopholes in the trading of electricity as a commodity (they would expand to bandwidth and the weather as commodities, too), where they profited pornographically whenever misfortune struck (and giving them a perverse incentive to solicit misfortune in the form of needless random power plant reboots).
Bethany McLean, a reporter for Fortune as the turn of the millennium, is the hero of this story. A few simple questions about Enron's shady accounting methods arranged by its big three executives, who all eventually were convicted (one would die before he could be sentenced). This was a dry run for the subprime-mortgage crisis (and the devious idea of collateralized debt obligations) that would take down the whole U.S. economy just a few years later.
Gibney covers all the bases and slowly reveals the true assholery of the three principal villains -- Jeffrey Skilling, Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay, and Andrew Fastow -- and the inevitable collapse of their house of cards. This documentary is a true touchstone of our collective Clinton-Bush Y2K fever dream.
An occasional series in which we revisit some of our all-time favorites.
MAGNOLIA (1999) (A) - It was with trepidation that we returned for Paul Thomas Anderson's epic three-hour mopefest, wondering whether the past two decades have been kind to the movie that helped launch the stories of intersecting lives that was popular in the Aughts (and culminated with Paul Haggis' insufferable "Crash" in 2004). It has aged just fine. And it's no easier to make it to the end of this "psychological drama."
Anderson was in the middle of a run, in between "Boogie Nights" and "Punch-Drunk Love," headed toward his mid-career doldrums of "There Will Be Blood" and "The Master." He was at the top of his game, and he was blessed with a solid case of actor's actors and the indelible songs of Aimee Mann, who provided one of those cinematic chocolate-and-peanut-butter moments (while sharing the soundtrack with some classic Supertramp).
It would be hard to find a movie where so many characters weep and cry out in emotional pain without the proceedings descending into maudlin theatrics. Julianne Moore is the glue that holds it together as the damaged trophy wife of a dying TV producer, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards). When she lashes out, rather hysterically, at a pair of pharmacists for apparently judging her based on her prescriptions, she threatens to tear a hole in the movie screen. The supporting cast is incredibly deep: Philip Seymour Hoffman as a (weepy) medical aide; John C. Reilly as a glum, naive police officer drawn to a drug-addict (Melora Walters), who is the daughter of the guilt-ridden TV host played by Philip Baker Hall; William H. Macy as a love-starved former child quiz-whiz; gritty character actors Luis Guzman and Ricky Jay; and, of all people, Tom Cruise, in a career-reviving role as a phony men's-rights motivational speaker, who happens to be related to one of the above.
Anderson weaves these stories together like Godard mashing together a week's worth of episodes from a soap opera. He employs magical realism (the famous plague of frogs), musical interludes with singing characters, and over-the-top familial melodrama, and he has both the visual command and the multitasking skills of a master storyteller, in a rag-tag but assured manner that he would again employ with the shambling "Inherent Vice."
Fear not the turn of the millennium. We got some things right back then. "Magnolia" is a saga for the ages.
FLIGHT (2012) (A) - Welcome to the Denzel Washington show. The actor heroically shoulders the role of a hard-partying pilot who miraculously saves most of the crew and passengers with a daring landing of a plane in distress, only to be put through the wringer of an investigation into his blood-alcohol levels on the day of the crash.
Robert Zemeckis ("Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit") shakes off the doldrums of his Tom Hanks mid-career period and offers the anti-hero counter-narrative to Hanks' sappy Sully movie that would come four years later. The narrative is tight, and it doesn't shy away from the horrors of addiction, straight out of the gate with a scene of the morning after of a night of partying.
Washington stands at the center of it all, anchoring every scene, whether he is physically present or not. He gives us a man full of anger, grief, grit, self-loathing and an ache for companionship (Nadine Velazquez and Kelly Reilly are among his doomed love interests). You can't imagine this movie without him beating at the center of it. The supporting cast is strong, sinking their teeth into a meaty script by John Gatins ("Coach Carter"): Bruce Greenwood as a union official; Don Cheadle as the union lawyer; John Goodman as a drug dealer and enabler; and Tamara Tunie as a surviving flight attendant.
If this were a novel, it would be a page-turner. And Washington and Zemeckis prove that even in this day and age you can still milk emotion and suspense out of a dramatic courtroom reveal, exposing this as as much of a thriller as a character study. A high mark for both men.
BONUS TRACKS
Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," from the essential soundtrack to "Magnolia":
Our title track, the height of R.E.M.'s self-indulgence (both audio and video versions), is still a pretty good song. Here's a lovely acoustic cover by Mojo Spin:
JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (C) - This 1960s drama about Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and an FBI plant in the organization just lies on the screen, an inert exercise in period dress-up and speechifying. Daniel Kaluuya lacks the charisma and physical presence of Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield is forced to repeat the same emotions over and over as conflicted rat Bill O'Neal. Other cardboard characters spout slogans lifted from Wikipedia entries. This wastes the talents of Dominique Fishback as Hampton's girlfriend and Jesse Plemons ("I'm Thinking of Ending Things") as O'Neal's FBI sponsor, both in unforgiving roles. Martin Sheen shows up for the umpteenth portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover, a prototypical cartoon evil racist monster of the bygone era. A documentary about Hampton and O'Neal -- hinted at in a coda featuring actual clips -- would be much more satisfying.
CARMINE STREET GUITARS (A-minus) - This is a sweet biography of an old-world craftsman of handmade guitars in New York's West Village neighborhood. Rick Kelly scavenges old-growth wood from all over New York and sculpts them into one-of-a-kind guitars. Under-the-radar guitarists who stop by to shoot the breeze include Dallas and Travis Good (the Sadies), Nils Cline (Scarnella, Wilco), Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell (who performs a mournful "Surfer Girl"), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith), Eleanor Friedberger (Fiery Furnaces), Kirk Douglas (the Roots), Charlie Sexton (Dylan) and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (Squrl) and his old pal Eszter Balint. The modern world eludes Kelly, who gets Instagram exposure only because of his apprentice, Cindy, a pale punk artist with a bleach-blond shag and black fingernails. (Their conversations are goosed by a writer.) This is a perfect vehicle to learn trivia about guitars, wood, trees, bugs and the secrets of Lou Reed's tuning style. Lovely.
BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHE (B) - This documentary about the groundbreaking French film pioneer Alice Guy suffers from a case of the yips. Director Pamela B. Green, in her debut, has a lot of good ideas, and quite the visual flair, but her manic editing style and machine-gun manner of filling every corner of the screen with constantly changing information are an assault on the senses. The story of Guy-Blache, who competed with Edison, Pathe and the Lumiere brothers in the invention of cinema, is critical and fascinating. Green uses two interviews with her subject, from 1957 and 1964, to anchor the story, and Green acts like a digital sleuth in tracking down relatives, acquaintances and film scholars to tell that story. But those jump cuts and her way of attacking the screen (Green is a title-designer by trade), while at times creative and illuminating, are too often dizzying and confounding, as if this were assembled by an iPad on crack. We've had a century to give this woman her due; "be natural" and let the story unfold at a human pace, please.
PRAIRIE TRILOGY (B) - On the eve of the Reagan revolution, two filmmakers went to North Dakota to track down Henry Martinson, an nonagenarian socialist (and poet) who in 1915 helped found the Nonpartisan League, which soon took over North Dakota politics on behalf of farmers for a decade or so. Starting in 1977, John Hanson and Rob Nilsson spent time with Martinson, then in his 90s to relive the bygone era. The three films that resulted -- "Prairie Fire, "Rebel Earth" and "Survivor" -- were restored a few years ago. The first is a Ken Burns-style history of the socialist uprising, employing extensive footage of the harsh plains shot by Nilsson's grandfather from 1915-21. The second returns to the present day, around 1980, to follow Martinson around his old stomping grounds in Minot, culminating in a house party celebrating left wing poetry and music. The third is extraneous, once again following Martinson as he relives his history in the socialist movement and three decades as deputy labor secretary in North Dakota. This is a fascinating chronicle of a sweet old guy who once wanted to dismantle the capitalist system. Good times.
BONUS TRACK
Eleanor Friedberger, featured in "Carmine Street," with the studio version of "I Am the Past":
Darn it if we're not attracted to a Disney movie about a girl and her flying superhero squirrel, "Flora and Ulysses."
An arty documentary about workers in a Brazilian food store, "My Darling Supermarket."
Ava Duvernay's first film, from 2008, is a documentary about a sub-genre of hip-hop in Los Angeles, "This Is the Life."
With a good deal of trepidation, we're curious about the arch output of director Quentin Dupieux ("Rubber," "Deerskin") so we might start with his latest, "Keep an Eye Out."
A triptych of stories about love, sex and coincidence, "Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy."
MY BROTHER'S WEDDING (1983) (C) - This is the follow-up to Charles Burnett's obscure classic "Killer of Sheep." Whereas that first film (his UCLA thesis) used nonprofessional actors to underscore the travails of the working class, this follow-up is undercut by wooden performances and a script (by Burnett) that goes nowhere.
Characters are difficult to follow, and there is no hint of a plot during the first half of the film, which follows Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) as he rejects his brother's lawyerly life of privilege for the grittier life of his buddy Soldier and the street life of Inglewood, Calif. It isn't until nearly the end that Pierce is faced with a dilemma, having to choose between those two worlds.
Most of this makes little sense. Minor characters pass through with no purpose other than to provide a little quirk. This is the kind of movie where multiple characters are told of the death of a central character and no one asks how or why that person died, like people do in real life. In that way, this exercise is more artificial than it would have been had Burnett hired professional actors and collaborated with another screenwriter.
This film was withheld from distribution after its initial tepid review. We watched the director's cut (thankfully a half hour shorter than the original) that he released in 2007. A classic example of a sophomore slump.
THE EXILES (1961) (C) - More artifact than art, this fictionalized documentary about Native Americans in late '50s Los Angeles endures as a curiosity about a certain place and time. This is a day (more like a night) in the life of actual Angelenos, transplants from Arizona, as they smoke and booze and roughhouse. It was shot by Kent Mackenzie, himself a British exile, in 1958 and released three years later; he had previously made a short student film (included on the DVD) about the same neighborhood, Bunker Hill, which was undergoing urban renewal in the '50s.
The problem here is the artifice of the production. It seems almost entirely dubbed. While that is not unusual for the era and can be overcome (see "Spring Night, Summer Night"), it is a distraction here. Admirably restored at UCLA in 2008, this film still feels undercooked and unfocused. Mackenzie hopscotches between his subjects, goosing their situations and dialogue in an attempt to pump up the action or drama. Yet, he is left with scattershot stories and underdeveloped characters. It feels repetitive despite a slim 72-minute running time. The story of Yvonne, pregnant and disappointed in her mate's uncaring attitude, goes nowhere. The rest of the action is essentially a night of partying, ending in some whooping and braying on the hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles. Those howls feel unearned here.
BONUS TRACKS
"Wedding" features a couple of songs by our favorite melancholy crooner Johnny Ace, "Anymore" and "Never Let Me Go":
