The Best of 2021: Any Number of Things

 

In place of an essay this year, let's crunch some numbers.

It didn't seem like a particularly good year for movies, but I've never given out so many high grades in the 9 years we've been reviewing movies here full-time. I don't know if I can explain that. Grade inflation? Laziness or resignation on my part? A soft spot for small movies that try hard? A tiny rip in the fabric of space and time?

Over the past 5 years, I have given out, on average, about 4 perfect A-grades each year (only 3 in 2020). In 2021, by contrast, I gave out 9 top grades. And in the past 5 years, I have given out, on average, about 8 A-minuses per year. This year it was 12.

In other words, I can fill out a top 20 this year without resorting to one B-plus. (Those B-plus movies will land in the honorable-mention section.) Let's just make it a Top 21 for 2021. That includes 9 documentaries, another record.

I'll skip the ranking this time, mainly because my mind changes on any given day as to which one was the best or which ones belong in, say, the top 5. The top 9 are so varied, and their releases were spread out over the year, that it doesn't feel right to impose a firm ranking system on them.

You might have a tough time finding some of these on streaming sites. I still get DVDs through Netflix and the library for that very reason. Vudu is a handy service, sort of a modern Blockbuster, where you can rent films, often for $3 or $4. Luckily, I saw one-third of the top 21 on the big screen, back where they belong.

This site has always been intended, in part, to help out all of you who feel inundated by algorithms and waves of new releases, seemingly hundreds of new ones each week. Just stop by here and cut through the clutter. Trust us, we're trained. Just this past month we reviewed 25 films, ranging from Pee-wee Herman (twinned with Wes Anderson) to Tsai Ming-Liang (paired with a debut Native-American filmmaker). There are films on Netflix ("Passing") and in theaters ("Licorice Pizza"), offerings from Romania and Argentina. Or just google any title and "streaming" to see if it's available online. We cover just about everything we need among HBO, Netflix, Vudu, Mubi and DVD. And the most reliable guide to critics' reviews is the aggregation/averaging site Metacritic.

There's no excuse not to watch exactly what you want and intend to watch, and be pleasantly rewarded for it. Just my 2 cents.

THE TOP 21 of '21

The straight A's, in alphabetical order:

• Acasa, My Home: A fascinating sociological study of a family living off the grid.
• The Macaluso Sisters: From Italy, a haunting but gorgeous elegy about sisters across the decades. 
• Monday: A roller-coaster romp of a tumultuous relationship between two ex-pats hanging out in Greece.
• Nine Days: The Best Screenplay of the year examines souls in limbo, thirsting for the human experience.
• Procession: The best experimental documentarian out there, Robert Greene, brings fresh insight to the plight of six middle-aged men coping with their abuse as boys at the hands of Catholic priests.
• Quo Vadis, Aida?: A devastating drama, told through the eyes of a tough woman, about the horrific massacre at Srebrenica in the 1990s. This one had 2021's highest aggregated critic score, 97 out of 100, at Metacritic, and it might end up being my favorite, too.
  
• Red Rocket: Sean Baker is back to claim another Best Director trophy with his latest race around town with the underclass.
• Summer of Soul: A joyous burst of life, found footage from 1969 brought back to relevance and context. A true curatorial labor of love that was so vibrant on the big screen.
• The Velvet Underground: Another music doc to be seen in a theater, Todd Haynes presents a heady, dazzling biography worthy of the niche art-rockers of the '60s era.

 

And the A-minus crowd:

• All Light, Everywhere: An intelligent, high-concept examination of human perception and how it plays out in surveillance and policing.
• Bergman Island: Another fine tale of female yearning from Mia Hansen-Love.
• Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts: A poignant look at an outsider folk artist from a bygone era.
• Bring Your Own Brigade: A cagey, harrowing revisiting of the California wildfires from a few years ago, and a polemic about why it's happening.
• Carmine Street Guitars: A loving tribute to those who make and play guitars.
• Gunda: A remarkably human rendering, bereft of dialogue, of a big sow and her piglets. 
• Lamb: Bizarre and captivating, the touching tale of a couple and their half-human/half-ovine bundle of joy.
• Passing: Rebecca Hall writes and directs a poetic interpretation of two women straddling opposite sides of the racial divide in the 1920s.
• El Planeta: From Spain, a quirky, touching mother-daughter story.
• Shiva Baby: A young woman riddled with anxiety. Full of tension and cutting humor. On second viewing, it probably deserved an A.
• Wojnarowicz: A daring and fascinating warts-and-all biography of a memorable artist.
• Zola: A razzle-dazzle blast of a road/buddy picture, full of exhilarating sights and sounds.

 

JUST MISSED THE LIST

• The Beatles: Get Back -- A special shout-out to Peter Jackson's meticulous curation of the "Let It Be" footage for his nearly eight-hour fly-on-the-wall celebration of a great band in the studio creating magical music.
• The uplifting and inspirational origin story of tennis' Williams sisters, King Richard.
• A romp through the infamous heyday of televangelism, The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
• The latest moral conundrum from Asghar Farhadi, "A Hero."
  
• The quietly menacing period piece Azor.
• The sweet, affecting Language Lessons.
• And a token mention for the guilty pleasure of the year, "Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar."
  

 

MORE TOP DOCS

• PBS' North by Current
• Truth or Consequences
• Sisters on Track
  
• Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage
• Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over 
• David Attenborough: Life on Our Planet

TOP PERFORMANCES

• Jessica Chastain, riveting and all-in as televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" (which she also produced).
  
• Rachel Sennott, captivating in "Shiva Baby."
• Denise Gough, emotionally naked in "Monday."
• Simon Rex, racing 99 mph through "Red Rocket," along with his co-star Brittney Rodriguez.
  
• Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis raising two tennis stars in "King Richard."
• Alana Haim, a revelation in her debut, holding the center together in "Licorice Pizza," while Bradley Cooper is simply nuts in a cameo as Barbra Streisand's gonzo boyfriend.
• Lee Kang-sheng, stone-faced and pining for a connection in "Days."
• Chaske Spencer bursting with pent-up rage in "Wild Indian."
• Stephanie Cleau, smoldering as the loyal business wife in "Azor."
• Winston Duke, poignant as the docent of yearning souls, in "Nine Days."
• Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales clicking in the two-person "Language Lessons."
• Alba Rohrwacher as the town drunk and bad mother in "Daughter of Mine."
• Noee Abita, fascinating to watch as a young athlete in peril in "Slalom."
• Jim Cummings, bat-shit crazy, as usual, in "The Beta Test."
  

 

THE LEFTOVERS

Some 2020 films we caught up with:  It's debatable whether "Nomadland" was a 2020 or 2021 release, but we'll give in to those who placed it in the earlier category. It was another beautiful, soulful story from Chloe Zhao. ... Meantime, Rashida Jones and Bill Murray were touching and quietly funny in Sofia Coppola's "On the Rocks." ... "Martin Eden" was interesting but rather flat. ... Next month we will finally get to Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" series, including "Red, White and Blue" and "Lovers Rock."

Wayback Machine:  We ventured to 1973 to luxuriate in yet another nuanced performance by Jack Lemmon, this time in "Save the Tiger." ... We finally watched "Casablanca," and it's everything everyone has always said it was. ... We filed volumes 2 through 7 of "Best of Ever," our occasional series revisiting some of the greatest films ever made, from foreign classics to the silly romps of our relative youth. ... We paid tribute to Mike Nichols. ... We revived our annual pilgrimage to the summer film noir festival at the Guild Cinema. ... And we made progress going through deep cuts that had long lingered in our Netflix DVD queue; the two best were 2009's "California Dreamin'" and 2011's "Carancho."

 

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME

(Well, maybe this time it is you)

• Licorice Pizza: Paul Thomas Anderson's childhood reverie is a delight but it meanders just a little too much. It could have been great.
• The French Dispatch: We gawped and laughed a lot, but Wes Anderson forgot that he was supposed to tell a coherent story.
• Last Night in Soho: Edgar Wright careens over the edge and fails to entertain while he's assaulting our senses.
• The Many Saints of Newark: A disappointing, unnecessary prequel to "The Sopranos." 
• C'mon, C'mon: Mike Mills gets too cute, and the tedium here was maddening.
• Swimming Out Until the Sea Turns Blue: This documentary tosses around too much inside baseball from the master of Chinese cinema Jia Zhang-ke.
  

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Here are a few we wanted to see but didn't get the chance:

• Memoria
• Petite Maman
• Mark, Mary & Some Other People
• The One and Only Dick Gregory
• Julia
  
• Pig
  

Join us in 2022 as we hunt down those titles and more of the finest movies you wouldn't otherwise think of watching.

Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

 

RED ROCKET (A) - No one has been on a roll like our guy Sean Baker. This is his third perfect movie in a row, counting "Tangerine" (our fourth favorite film of 2015) and "The Florida Project" (No. 1 in 2017). He has the unparalleled ability to bring to life the joys and travails of the underclass. 

For the first time he focuses on a charismatic, somewhat experienced actor -- here it's Simon Rex -- to tell the story of the childishly named Mikey, an aging discarded porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown to try to plot and scam his way back to L.A. Rex is a feverish ball of energy as Mikey, who makes nice with his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), while plying his snake oil to seduce a 17-year-old doughnut-shop worker who likes to be called Strawberry (Suzanna Son). Those are the only three actors with any experience, as Baker, like he often does, leans on non-actors to capture an impressive level of realism. Some of the newcomers are revelations, including Brittney Rodriguez as June, a menacing enforcer for her family's drug operation, and Ethan Darbone as Mikey's sad-sack neighbor and foil, Lonnie.

Mikey moves in with Lexi and her mom while reconnecting with June's mom to sell weed as a way to reboot his finances. He re-seduces the skeptical Lexi, giving her false hope about a future together, while going rogue with his weed sales by targeting oil-field workers who patronize the doughnut shop, pocketing those extra proceeds. (At least the third film in a row that Baker centers around a doughnut establishment.) Mikey sees the soon-to-be barely-legal Strawberry as his ticket back to  porn stardom back on the west coast. 

Baker locks this plot together like a jeweler and then picks it apart like a safecracker. Two hours fly by as he unleashes Mikey, who can barely mask his massive insecurities, to maraud through this fictional depressed town, headed for an inevitable crash that is well earned and deliciously delivered. This is a thrill ride masterfully executed by a director that no other can come close to these days.

THE BETA TEST (B) - Our other guy, Jim Cummings, is Sean Baker and Simon Rex rolled into one, presenting here as another high-strung man this/close to completely losing his shit. Here he plays Jordan, a C-list Hollywood agent who is lured by a mysterious purple invitation to a one-night-only, no-strings-attached hotel-room fling with a stranger. He spends the rest of the movie unraveling before our eyes in the weeks leading up to his wedding day.

Cummings has been down this path before. He broke through in 2018 with "Thunder Road" and dialed it up a notch in 2020 with "The Wolf of Snow Hollow," both times playing a law enforcement officer having a major meltdown. Here we have a different career choice, but the main character is yet again battling sobriety and sanity. Cummings writes, directs and stars with pal P.J. McCabe who plays his business partner.

But it's Cummings' show, and his impeccable timing turns incredulity into an art. There's a hint of diminishing returns with this unstable type, and this time, like with "Snow Hollow," Cummings leans into fantasy and horror sequences, mostly to show Jordan's mind breaking apart. He can still stick the landing of his shtick, but you have to wonder where he goes next.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

Doc Watch: Experiments in Cinema

 Four for the price of one!

PROCESSION (A) - Robert Greene scores again with this unique perspective on victims of abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. The gimmick here is that Greene assembles five such men (with an assist from a sixth) to collaborate and tell their individual stories by creating their own short dramatic films. If ever a gimmick was justified it is here, and not just because it pays off.

The men, now in middle age, experience therapeutic moments of emotional release while performing the mundane tasks of writing and laying out the visuals for the particular stories they want to tell. The sixth member stands in as a priest, and one young boy plays the victim in every version. 

Greene is a bold filmmaker, with hits and misses. In his last effort, "Bisbee '17," he similarly staged a centennial anniversary performance to tell the story of the union-busting at the mines in Bisbee, Ariz., in 1917. Greene is good at embedding himself in a situation such that you forget about his own presence and feel embedded yourself. He gains the trust of his subjects, who open up here in a rather matter-of-fact manner, without any faux dramatics, and genuinely bond and empathize with each other. Greene's tactic is truly effective and brings a fresh perspective on the banal evil visited upon these men when they were vulnerable boys.

ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (A-minus) - "Who're you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" -- Chico Marx. 

This fascinating documentary launches from the idea that the human eye is not perfect (it has a literal blind spot) and then explores the concepts of perception in an age of digital electronic surveillance, most notably police body cameras. It is an ambitious examination of the human gaze, a variation on Bentham's Panopticon.

Theo Anthony -- who struggled in a previous attempt at high-concept storytelling (the tedious "Rat Film") -- shows a stronger command of the subject from start to finish. He delves into the history of the moving image captured by devices, including the 19th century Venus transit across the sun and early 20th century pigeon-cams, linking them to coincidental military applications. Anthony more narrowly focuses on Axon, the company that makes body cameras and tasers, and its use by police in Baltimore in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

A flat female narration adds an ominous overall tone to the production. A cocky Axon executive probably thought he and his company would come off as cool and cutting edge. The bottom line is that the eye sees what it wants to see. There is built-in bias in every observational tool, whether natural or manufactured. It's surprising to have that presented to us in this way.

PAPER & GLUE (B+) - This egregiously upbeat documentary follows J.R., whom we met when he teamed with Agnes Varda in "Faces Places," as he spreads his positivity through his grand-scale photography and art installations around the world. This is a feel-good movie in just about every sense, even if it mainly consists of J.R. tooting his own horn for an hour and a half.

This is another production from the Ron Howard stable of smarm (see also "Rebuilding Paradise"), so it can be a bit too sugary sweet at times. But J.R. is a truly engaging character, and he dreams big, so it's fun to follow him around and join in his projects. His shtick of blowing up portraits to monumental size has a primal appeal -- we all want to be seen, and having your mug on the side of a building or on a border wall certainly does that.

J.R. acts as an ambassador, as he unites people on both sides of the border between California and Mexico with an installation that bleeds across the boundary. He embeds in a prison full of hardened criminals (including one with a swastika on his cheek) to capture their portraits and then cover the prison yard with their images. Like with the border residents, J.R. works closely with the prisoners, giving them buy-in to the artistic endeavor. The artist also delves back into his own origins, explaining how a directionless street punk's life was changed by randomly finding a camera lying around. This film shows him paying that moment of grace forward to those who usually go unseen by the rest of us.

A COP MOVIE (incomplete) - We made it through only a half hour of this enhanced (fictionalized? who knows?) documentary that follows a couple of police officers in Mexico. It starts off on the wrong foot by blaring a droning siren for about the first five minutes. That's followed by five or ten minutes of jabbering police radio jargon narrating a distress call, just letters and numbers being rattled off, in Spanish with subtitles. It all seems rather meaningless.

When we finally get to meet and follow one of the officers, her narration tends to drone on. At times that narration plays over random scenes; at other times she speaks the words to another person in the film. Eventually, at the half-hour mark, it becomes evident that this exercise seems to be nothing more than a stylized episode of "Cops," only less real and with subtitles whizzing by. Nothing suggested that this was anything more than a routine profile of police officers doing their jobs, and the world isn't clamoring for more of those.

Primal Connections

 

DAYS (B+) - Tsai Ming-Liang, the Taiwan-based master of slow cinema, returns to his turn-of-the-century roots for a spare tale of loneliness and bonding among two souls across a distance. And he leans on his regular muse, Lee Kang-Sheng, for the charisma to pull off what is essentially a short story expanded to feature length (a full two hours).

Lee plays Kang, who lives alone in a sprawling house in Taiwan and suffers from neck pain. We meet him in long static takes -- Tsai likes to put his camera in the corner of a room, usually at a low angle, and just let it run -- where Kang smokes or broods. We see him get a fiery acupuncture treatment in town. Meantime, in Bangkok, Thailand, Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) lives a spartan existence in a rundown apartment. He usually is seen preparing vegetables and cooking dinner. (Jeanne Dielman's meat loaf has nothing on this movie.)

Eventually, the two men will meet when Kang seeks out massage therapy to treat his chronic pain. Finally, the film bursts to life, as Tsai shows us what can happen when pain and alienation meet the simple touch of another human being. The pivotal scene at first might seem shocking, or it might seem wholly natural. 

Kang pays Non not only with money but with a token gift, a tiny music box. That trinket won't leave Non's backpack, and it will appear again in a heartbreaking/heartwarming final scene that, like the other images, is both routine and profound. If you have the patience for slow-motion storytelling, you'll appreciate a masterful tale of fundamental human connection.

WILD INDIAN (B) - This debut feature from writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. is powerful stuff, but too often it stumbles into TV movie-of-the-week territory albeit while usually avoiding the pitfalls of horror-revenge tropes. 

Two cousins growing up on the reservation in Wisconsin share a secret tragedy: out in the woods, troubled, abused Makwa takes the rifle that Teddo grabbed from his father's closet and randomly shoots a classmate out of jealousy. The boys bury the body and carry the secret into adulthood. Flash forward, and we see Makwa, now Michael, succeeding in a white world with an executive position and the Nordic wife he always coveted, and it is Teddo, who abetted but did not kill, emerging from prison after a 10-year stint for selling drugs, his own life having collapsed. 

This twist on the fates of the two men is a fascinating premise. Teddo (Chaske Spencer, brimming with passion and emotion) needs to exorcise this demon, and he endeavors to track down Makwa (Michael Greyeyes) who is now a block of granite, resentful of his upbringing and heritage. This showdown doesn't come until the final third, after Corbine meticulously establishes the characters in their own right. The two men are such complete opposites -- self-hating Makwa is beyond stoic, while tortured Teddo might burst at any moment -- that the whole production teeters on the edge of caricature. 

But it never crashes over into pathos. Instead, Corbine and his two stars (aided with some B-level movie names, Jesse Eisenberg and Kate Bosworth) delve into the twin themes of guilt and culture, crafting this thoughtful suspense film.

BONUS TRACK

A simple melody central to "Days" is the delicate "Terry's Theme" from Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight":

Best of Ever, Vol. 7: Alternate Worlds

 

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001) (A) - An absolute delight of storytelling features a killer cast and the coming of age of Wes Anderson as our quirky creator of new realities. Anderson creates one of those classic Manhattan families -- upper crust but awfully crusty -- full of fascinating oddballs descended from acting royalty, Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum and Anjelica Huston as his long-suffering wife Etheline. 

Royal is an inveterate scam artist, once stripped of his law license, and now so broke he's getting kicked out of his hotel, and so he feigns a terminal illness to move back into the family home he long abandoned. The house is full because a series of setbacks have landed his three children back under the same roof -- depressed former tennis star Richie (Luke Wilson), depressed young widower Chas (Ben Stiller), and melancholy (and depressed) would-be playwright Margot (a perfectly emo Gwyneth Paltrow). Margot is being pursued by coked-up childhood friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) who has to compete for her affections with Richie, who has long crushed on his adopted sister but never acted on it. (Instead, he suffered a nervous breakdown after she married the stuffy neurologist Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray at his most deadpan).

Anderson fleshes out these rich characters with deep back stories, and he intertwines them all in a meticulous narrative that never feels like it's going to veer off-track. Each talented actor goes all-in, and the memorable lines fly by nonstop. Royal is a cad, but he has been so defanged past his prime that he is a pitiable and even sympathetic character. He surreptitiously befriends Chas' two curly-haired boys and schemes with the household's longtime loyal servant Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), who has a penchant for stabbing his old boss. (The two best lines: "That's the last time you put a knife in me, y'hear?" and "She smokes.")

Pathos abounds, even for Etheline, who is finally finding the gumption to get on with her life and give in to the courting of nerdy Henry (Danny Glover), the family's veteran accountant. Both sad and brimming with life, the story comes across as one that Anderson had been plotting since childhood. His third feature is his first masterpiece and would set the template for he and his creative partners creating unique detailed worlds that we can happily disappear into for two hours.

PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985) (A) - If you don't get Pee-wee Herman -- or didn't at the time -- I don't know how to explain it to you. This complex man-child just strikes an ulnar nerve as a brilliant, layered send-up of pretty much all of 20th century pop culture and social customs. This avant-garde spoof of kiddie entertainment was peaking at the moment Tim Burton was ready to direct his first big-screen feature film, and the combination of talents is intoxicating.

Pee-wee evolved from the mind of Paul Reubens when he was with the Groundlings alongside people like Phil Hartman, who co-wrote this tale of a boy and his beloved bike. The hero's journey takes the manchild on a mission to find his stolen bike, even if he has to scour the basement of the Alamo to find it. The movie stands as the culmination of Reubens' honing of the character, with all of his quirks and catchphrases landing just so.

From the opening scenes, his home full of toys and a Rube Goldberg cooking device, we are ensconced in Pee-wee's fantasy world stuffed with kitschy Americana. When his beloved bicycle is stolen -- the number-one suspect is grubby rich kid, Francis (Mark Holton) -- Pee-wee is inconsolable and will not be stopped before he gets it back. This launches a truly Big Adventure, introducing a calliope of characters buoyed by Burton's giddy storytelling techniques. The narrative incorporates a mix of concepts high and low, drawing in vaudevillian shtick, exploring childhood psychological trauma, and flirting with queer culture. 

But deep down it is riotously silly and raunchy. Indelible scenes abound: Pee-wee winning over gruff bikers by doing his big-shoe dance to "Tequilla"; him saving animals from a burning pet store while constantly fearful of the snakes; Jan Hooks' sassy gum-snapping tour guide at the Alamo ("Did I hear someone's stomach growl?"); James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild, a Ken and Barbie of their day, playing the film version of Pee-wee and his would-be galpal Dottie (voice actress Elizabeth Daily); Diane Salinger as a wistful, abused woman dreaming of Paris. 

While the Pee-wee Herman phenomenon would burn fairly hot and quickly -- his Saturday morning TV show took off in the '80s before Reubens crashed his career in a Florida porn theater -- this big-screen gem feels timeless. Maybe younger generations won't be charmed by retro putdowns like "I know you are, but what am I?", but Pee-wee's freaky Peter Pan persona can fit in comfortably in any setting, from Punch & Judy to Key & Peele. The film celebrates classic cinema, and its narrative arc is a thrill ride.

BONUS TRACK

BIG-TOP PEE-WEE (1988) (C+) - Paul Reubens' follow-up could never be as fresh and inventive as the first big-screen adventure. And,alas, there's not nearly enough to laugh at in this second go-round as our boy wonder welcomes the circus to his mythical bygone town. 

Without the inspiration that infused the first film, this sequel too often comes off as either knockoffs of the "Big Adventure" or pale attempts to recapture the lightning. We also get an oddly sexed-up Pee-wee, who is frustrated by the chastity of his fiancee, Winnie (an unfunny Penelope Ann Miller) and thus openly lusts after the gorgeous Italian trapeze artist, Gina (Valeria Golino, most recently of "Daughter of Mine" and "Portrait of a Lady on Fire"). It is unsettling to see the manchild jump women's bones, a jarring rebuke his asexual persona in "Big Adventure" and his Saturday morning TV show.

There also is little fresh humor to be mined from Pee-wee having turned into a farmer who is creating a secret concoction to better grow plants and whose assistant is a talking pig. "Green Acres" this ain't. Kris Kristofferson is on hand to play the straight man, the head of the circus troupe, and he's fairly game, but the gags he's playing off just don't have the necessary zing. Then there's the passage of time and the slight unease in watching people portray circus "freaks" (including Benicio del Toro in his film debut, made up as a dog-faced boy, or Reubens regular Lynne Marie Stewart as (groan) a bearded lady) and the circus animals being put through their paces. Time has not been kind to Pee-wee's sophomore effort.

***

And just one of the classic scenes from "Big Adventure" -- "I'm trying to use the phone!"

That '70s Drift: Misty Watercolor Memories

 

LICORICE PIZZA (B+) - Paul Thomas Anderson rights his comeback with another time travel back five decades, this time a sweet old-fashioned love story about an improbably odd couple. The charm of its two stars carries it far, despite the absence of a coherent full-length story.

The shaggy-dog L.A. story here -- reminiscent of 2015's "Inherent Vice" and Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" -- focuses on 15-year-old child actor Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and 25-year-old photography assistant Alana (pop star Alana Haim), who develop a mostly platonic arms-length relationship, mostly because she is wary of dating a child, despite the pimple-faced boy's suavity and worldly charms. Anderson places the pair in a series of escapades -- Gary, somehow, back in simpler times, has the means to open his own businesses, including a water-bed emporium -- and lets their energy buoy the screenplay for two-and-a-quarter hours. 

Hoffman (the son of Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a natural as the glib Gary, and Haim (whose family plays her family here) makes an assured film debut as the self-doubting but eminently capable Alana. In one memorable scene, she captains a box truck that has run out of gas and maneuvers it backward down a winding hill and then coasts forward through traffic to a service station -- quite a feat of Anderson's camera crew, too. It's Haim's movie, for better and for worse; she snaps off putdowns and zingers, but she's also used as a sexist prop at times, at one point paraded around in a bikini and high heels while pining for a boy 10 years her junior.

Like Tarantino, Anderson here feels the need to drop in cameos of his friends camping it up as thinly veiled celebrities of the era; they contribute little to the movie and distract more than enlighten. He sends up Lucille Ball (Christine Ebersole), William Holden (Sean Penn) and, most effectively, Jon Peters, the horndog boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, a status Peters is quick to remind everyone of, even women he's trying to pick up. As Peters, Bradley Cooper steals the middle of the movie with his coked-up hilarity. And like in "Hollywood," Other dead-end distractions include John Michael Higgins as a racially insensitive owner of a Japanese restaurant and Benny Safdie as a closeted politician. Meantime, Anderson pays microscopic attention to period details, from the fashions to the AM-radio sound drops (along with a heavy-handed soundtrack).

But it's the meandering interactions between Gary and Alana that keep us bouncing along with the movie, trusting the filmmaker to guide us to a satisfying conclusion. Anderson certainly retains his quirks -- for some reason each of the main characters is filmed multiple times running through streets -- but the baggy storytelling fits the mood, like it did in "Inherent Vice," and there isn't the fussiness of the director's other period pieces, like "The Master." Anderson also works in extreme close-up often, with whole faces filling the screen at times, most notably Harriet Sansom Harris in a delectable scene as Gary's agent interviewing Alana for possible acting work.

"Licorice Pizza" (the title is never explained; just go with it) exists because Anderson had a particular vision -- and perhaps some old axes to grind from his adolescence. There's not much more to it, but it's funny, touching and entertaining, and that's enough.

BONUS TRACKS

A critical scene midway through the movie cements the innocence of the relationship between Alana and Gary, to the strains of Paul McCartney and Wings' plaintive "Let Me Roll It":

Every generation gets the Fleetwood Mac it deserves. Here are the Haim sisters going old school with "Oh, Well" and ripping it up:

 THE LIST

"Licorice Pizza"  was our traditional Christmas Day Mainstream Movie. It slots into the eighth spot among the 17 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. Licorice Pizza (2021)

  9. American Hustle (2013)

10. The Shape of Water (2017)

11. La La Land (2016)

12. The Wrestler (2008)

13. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

14. Young Adult (2011)

15. This Is 40 (2012)

16. Holmes & Watson (2018)

17. Into the Woods (2014)

Tired Rackets

THE CARD COUNTER (C-minus) - It may be the case that Paul Schrader's story line of brooding men seeking redemption for two hours has run its course. Here he shows kinship with the likes of David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin by offering to teach us how to play poker and blackjack via a character who participated in the Abu Ghraib atrocities in Iraq and did time in prison for it, coping by playing cards 24/7 to the exclusion of having a life.

Oscar Isaac's eyelids are particularly heavy -- though his hair is always perfect -- as William Tell (klever!), a world-weary soul who exhibits quirks that you'll only find in a movie: in the dive hotels he inhabits along the road, he wraps all the furniture in sheets and at nights, aided by a desk light and a bottle of booze, he scribbles stray philosophical thoughts in a diary using (of course) an old-timey fountain pen. The horrors of war and jail have made him quirky.

For no real good reason, he accepts the friendship of a much younger man (Tye Sheridan), whose father also was traumatized at Abu Ghraib under the directives of the brutal military contractor who goes by Gordo (Willem Dafoe). Because this is a movie, Sheridan's character is named Cirk, which often gets pointed out as "Cirk with a C," ad nauseam. You can also tell it's an outre film, because it's one of those annoying movies where a character orders a drink and the other person will decide to have the same drink; for some reason, that happens three times in a row.

You start to feel bad for Isaac, a good actor searching for some way to bust through these cliches. Tell meets an agent, La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who draws him in with a sponsorship that can put the low-stakes gambler on the map, if he wants it. Isaac and Haddish have little chemistry; it's actually refreshing that they are just friendly business partners, until, of course, they suddenly and improbably hop into bed. Tell's main rival is a red-white-and-blue-clad character named Mr. USA, who wins a lot and is followed everywhere by flunkies who chant "USA! USA!" after every victor. Gee, who's the real patriot at the poker table, I wonder ... yadda, yadda, yadda. The kid wants to exact revenge against Gordo, but Tell resists. Does he want fame and fortune, or does he want to exorcise his ghosts?

This movie plods from scene to scene; Isaac has never been the most dynamic screen presence. Considering the stakes (both literally and psychologically), little seems to be at stake, in the end. From "Taxi Driver" to 2017's "First Reformed," Schrader's earnest examination of manhood, religion and patriotism has yielded some powerful drama. But after five decades, this brand of masculinity feels stale, if not always toxic.

FREELAND (C+) - It's difficult to feel sympathy for Devi, the aging boomer and former idealist hippie whose 30-year underground weed business is getting aced out by the legalization of pot and those who decide to follow the rules. This maudlin slice-of-life character study, even at a slim 80 minutes, struggles to draw us in to the tale of a longtime freeloader, living the high life tax-free but now facing a reckoning in the real world.

Devi, played by Krisha Fairchild (who splashed memorably in the jagged "Krisha"), leads a crew of millennials, who mostly get high all day while they work the harvest on the lush California farm. They smoke so much pot that the viewer might feel like someone late to the party who then doesn't get the joint passed to them. Meanwhile, doom hangs in the air, as Devi's jig is up, and she doesn't seem to have the funds or the wherewithal to transition to legitimacy.

The crew that she is stringing along (Frank Mosley is refreshing, but Lily Gladstone ("Certain Women") is underused) don't seem fully invested in this outdated utopia of communal living. Some of Devi's fellow boomers from her past occasionally stop by to reminisce and to rue the loss of their Sixties innocence, but they come off mostly as mewling about an outmoded rose-colored view of lost idealism. Filmmakers Mario Furloni and Kate McLean -- who come from the documentary world -- get stuck in repetitive images, whether it's establishing shots from nature or Devi agonizing over her financial books.

Here, too, little seems at stake, and another fine actor's talents are mostly wasted.

BONUS TRACK

The closing credits to "The Card Counter," when they finally arrive, feel like a blessed end to nearly two hours of misguided drama. The soundtrack is generally "Garden State" moody, but the final song stands out, "Mercy of Man" by Robert Levon Been featuring S.G. Goodman:

Doc Watch: Tortured Artists

 

WOJNAROWICZ (A-minus) - This documentary about a true insurgent, outsider artist follows David Wojnarowicz as an East Village pioneer and leading provocateur during the AIDS crisis. It is urgent filmmaking, delving deep into an important era in 20th century art.

Wojnarowicz, who came from an abusive household and escaped in his mid-teens to turn tricks on the streets of Manhattan, was a purist who never relinquished his grievances. He was passionate about bucking the system in the late 1970s and was a driving force in the underground art movement that included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and which exploded in the early '80s. He was skeptical of the mainstream art world, even though he eventually made the cut of the Whitney Biennial. He led the surreptitious takeover of abandoned Hudson River piers -- the former scene of some of his sexual trysts -- by outsider artists ... until the City caught up with them and demolished the buildings. When rich benefactors commissioned a new work for their house, Wojnarowicz, repulsed by their wealth, created an installation full of garbage and bugs.

The artist left behind a trove of recordings that were part diary and part polemics, and his deep haunting voice narrates Chris McKim's faithful, exhaustive biography. We also hear pithy answering-machine messages from his former lover, the portrait photographer Peter Hujar, as well as present-day interviews with Wojnarowicz's siblings and surviving partner; mother-hen gallerist Gracie Mansion; and fellow traveler Fran Lebowitz, the writer who knew him.

A key scene near the climax of the documentary involves Wojnarowicz -- finally diagnosed with AIDS -- explaining the fascinating thought-process behind one of his final pieces, how circles could represent both microscopic images and telescoped views of much larger images, all positioned within or near squares. It's one of the most compelling examples of an artist's mind that I've ever heard. It elevates Wojnarowicz far above the cliched image of an artist as an angry young man and makes you wonder why more of us had never heard of him before.

WHO IS HARRY NILSSON (AND WHY IS EVERYBODY TALKIN' ABOUT HIM)? (2010) (B) - I doubt the parenthetical part of this title was relevant even back when this film was released about 16 years after Harry Nilsson's death, and decades after he was a relevant singer-songwriter. But the first question is pertinent, and it's worth getting to know the man whose two biggest songs were written by others and who then became known for his epic drug- and alcohol-fueled benders in the 1970s. 

Nilsson left a broken home as a teenager and was recognized in the '60s for his smart songwriting and an impressive full-range voice. He broke big with "Everybody's Talkin'" from the award-winning  1969 film "Midnight Cowboy," and he soared to number one two years later with "Without You." Both songs were written by others. (And the big hit song he did write -- "One" -- was a hit for "Three Dog Night.") He probably peaked in 1971 with the "Nilsson Schmilsson" album, which featured that "lime and the coconut" song. By this time he had caught the ear of the Beatles, and he became particularly close friends with John Lennon and Ringo Starr. 

This documentary fills in a lot of the early years and the run-up to Nilsson's stardom. It saves for the final third his descent into debauchery, including the infamous "lost weekend" with Lennon and May Pang, which included the heckling of the Smothers Brothers, who recall that meltdown here. Also on hand are some of Nilsson's friends and co-conspirators, including Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, Gerry Beckley of America, Pythons Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, Robin Williams, producer Richard Perry and percussionist Ray Cooper, who calls Nilsson "a wonderful perpetrator" famous for his days-long benders. Nilsson's contemporaries as songwriters Jimmy Webb and Randy Newman weigh in.

Nilsson's attempts at career suicide and his apparent death wish are examined. Pals have fun recounting his colossal appetite for substances and a lifestyle that wore out his heart by age 52. 

BONUS TRACKS

Nilsson was in full voice for his cover of Badfinger's "Without You" from 1971. It was three years later, while recklessly recording an album with Lennon (originally to be titled "Strange Pussies"), that he blew out his vocal cords and never really recovered.

 

David Wojnarowicz was quite the renaissance man. He fronted a post-punk band called 3 Teens Kill 4:

 

And a fuck-you from career-crashing Nilsson:

Fight the Power

 

PASSING (A-minus) - Actress Rebecca Hall pens a script and sits behind the camera to direct a period piece about the reconnection of two former high school friends, both black, one of whom passes as white in segregated 1920s America. Hall conjures up a specific world brought to life by a pair of powerhouses: Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, who expertly explore depths of emotion while juggling dialogue that has a subtle air of the era's bebop jazz to it.

Thompson is Irene, married to a doctor, Brian (Andre Holland), and raising two boys in a middle-class milieu in Harlem. Negga ("Loving") is Clare, a free spirit married to a virulently racist white man (Alexander Skarsgard). Moving back to New York, Clare infiltrates Irene's family, connecting with the husband, playing auntie to the boys, even shooting the breeze with the maid/cook. Clare also makes the social scene with Irene, Brian and Hugh (Bill Camp), a noted writer and bon vivant who is skeptical of Clare. We get hints of what these two women were like together as teenagers but never get a true grip on the depth of that earlier connection.

Hall, working from a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, captures the subtleties of a fraught female friendship, and she adds layers of nuance to the character interactions throughout, especially Clare's ease with Irene's husband and friends, which introduces an element of jealousy but not in an obvious way. The dialogue -- especially as it sometimes sneakily overlaps -- is both sharp and lovely, even poetic in the manner of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, though much more stripped down. (As one character intones: "We're all of us passing for something or other.") Meantime, the visuals in the black-and-white cinematography have a washed-out haze to them, as if reproduced from the women's clouded memories. Spare tinkly, jangly piano interludes add to a sense of hallucinatory dread.

Thompson, especially, excels in close-ups, as the fulcrum in this warren of relationships. Irene is melancholy, spending her afternoons napping the day away and rousting herself to perform for everyone in her life, including a charity that she devotes her time to (to the detriment of the passion in her marriage). Negga is wide-eyed and masked to the world, rarely giving a hint to the emotional toll of tamping down her identity and roots. Clare is reveling in the rediscovery of her heritage (from soul food to the company of handsome black men) but she teeters on the tightrope she is dancing along.

This is a satisfying mix of grit and mood and the quiet longing of two women reaching toward and away from the worlds that have been created for them and which both comfort and entrap them. Hall, of mixed race herself, seems to have an innate feel for this internal struggle of not only racial identity but also the role of women a century ago.

HIVE (B) - This is a touching feminist cri de coeur but a bit of a by-the-numbers character profile set in the wake of the horrors of Kosovo in the 1990s. Writer-director Blerta Basholli, in her feature debut, chronicles the daily struggles of Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), who battles old-world misogyny while she awaits definitive word on the fate of her husband, suspected of being one of the many men and boys of Albanian dissent slaughtered or disappeared under Serb occupation. (It is based on a true story.)

Desperate to fend for her two teenage kids and her handicapped father-in-law, Fahrije gets entrepreneurial and begins manufacturing ajvar, a roasted-red-pepper relish. She encourages other women to defy the patriarchy that forbids women working and join her project. The appeal here is in the can-do spirit and the grit Fahrije shows in overcoming the odds.

The problem here is that Basholli occasionally traffics in simple stereotypes of the old men and fails, eventually, to rise much above the conventions of the standard underdog tale. Gashi, with a bit of a masculine air and look about her, is an interesting choice for this story, and she does a good job of inhabiting Fahrije as she fends off the slings and arrows, all while hanging in limbo between mourning her husband and holding out hope for his improbable return. The depictions of the life of the working poor are compelling, even if you have a hunch about how the twin narratives here will turn out.

BONUS TRACK

"Passing" sounds as good as it looks. And the closing credits are haunted by the lazy bluesy strains of "The Last Tears of a Deceased" by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, an Ethiopian nun born in 1923:

Dirty Wars

  A pair from Argentina, then and now and then:

AZOR (B+) - It's everything that's left unsaid that makes this period piece inscrutable but mysterious and satisfying. Swiss private banker Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rangione) travels to Buenos Aires in late 1980, at the height of the repressive military regime, to clean up after his business partner, Rene Keys, who, like many dissidents at the time, has gone missing. Yvan has his elegant wife, Ines (Stephanie Cleau), with him as part of his sophisticated presentation as he navigates a country-club world of rogue strongmen looking to move their dirty money around. 

The pace of this 100-minute drama is gorgeously slow; it unfolds like a casual vacation outfit. Yvan seems to be in over his head, with his old-fashioned sophistication and slight features, which are no match for the macho men of Argentina. Rangione has a hang-dog look, like a chagrined poker player, and his wife, a statuesque femme fatale who can disable a man with an exhale of cigarette smoke, prods him with a few strategically placed passive-aggressive putdowns meant to rally his manhood. Cleau and Rangione are a post-Peron Nick and Nora.

It helps to not try to understand all of the politics of the day or to follow every single character or name that gets dropped throughout the story. First-time director Andreas Fontana (writing with a veteran, Mariano Llinas) apparently intends to keep us a bit confused and off-kilter, perhaps to heighten the tension and mirror Yvan's own flailing through a treacherous world of shady figures. Yvan tries to solve the mystery of "Lazaro," a possible clue to Keys' whereabouts. 

Meantime, he shmoozes and spars with an interesting cast of characters: a sophisticated older woman with roots in Europe (played by the poet Carmen Iriondo); a melancholy horseman whose politically active daughter has been disappeared; a bully who can barely give him the time of day; and most menacing of all, a monsignor (a smoldering Pablo Torre Nilson) who makes mob bosses look like Arby's managers. Eventually Yvan will take a Kurtzian excursion into a veritable heart of darkness, which will test his Swiss manners and willingness to play the treacherous global game of Follow the Money.

CARANCHO (2011) (B+) - This brutal, pulpy love story is an unrelenting examination of the shady practice of ambulance-chasing and insurance fraud. It's a bloody, bruising game that has ensnared Sosa (Ricardo Darin) after he loses his law license, and the goal here is to go straight, if he can escape the gravitational pull of the mafia-like operation. 

On one of his gambits, Sosa meets Lujan (Martina Gusman), a cute doctor who rides the ambulance as an on-call responder, and he is smitten. With her own issues (she shoots up drugs to get through her double shifts), she will make Sosa work to win her over, especially after she finds out the racket he is wrapped up in. Sosa gets beat up a lot, and between those drubbings and the staged accidents (sometimes with codeine injections beforehand to steel the "victim") there is a lot of blood, broken bones and stitches.

Director Pablo Trapero shoots this in cinema verite documentary style, bathing the visuals in grit and grime. Darin is an appealing actor who has been invaluable in movies like "Nine Queens," "The Secret in Their Eyes," as well as more recent turns in "Wild Tales" and "Everybody Knows." He carries this movie like an old-school noir PI, and he pairs well with Gusman as the recalcitrant, beleaguered medical professional trying to keep it all together.

Three longtime collaborators helped Trapero hone the screenplay, which is spare and affecting. They could have pared about 15 of the 107 minutes (I could have used fewer shots of Lujan jabbing a needle into the top of her bruised foot). As it becomes clear that Sosa will be incredibly lucky to escape the vortex he is in, the screenwriters build this to a shocking crescendo. They have a clever echo double ending up their sleeve, and it's perfectly rendered.

BONUS TRACK

From a tender scene in "Carancho," Javier Solis with "Nuestro Juramento":

The Latest Romanian Wave

 The latest two films from Radu Jude, who gave us 2016's "Aferim" and was assistant director on the groundbreaking 2006 Romanian film "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu":

UPPERCASE PRINT (B+) - Mugur Calinescu was a teenager who in 1981 sprinkled pro-Western messages around his hometown, drawing the interest of the secret police. Director Radu Jude takes a droll stage play based on surveillance transcripts from police files to tell the boy's story, flavoring it with historical patriotic videos from the Ceausescu era that would last another decade before the fall of communism.

Actors playing Mugur and his family, friends and interrogators stand on bare sets, address the camera stiffly and speak in monotone as if to emphasize the bland matter-of-fact reporting they are reciting verbatim from the Securitate files. There's a woodenness akin to a '60s episode of "Dragnet." It is the theatrical version of signaling to us the banality of evil.

To put this all in perspective, Jude knits this narrative together with vintage clips, including many songs extolling the virtues of Romania's socialist paradise and the kindly paternalism of Ceausescu's iron-fisted rule. Mugur's graffiti was mostly inspired by reports he heard on Radio Free Europe, mainly the workers' Solidarity movement in Poland. As the story unfolds, Mugur's predicament slowly grows more dire, as even his own parents (split by divorce) are afraid to be on his side. A coda reveals a tragic aftermath, and Jude's timeline stops short of the overthrow of Ceausescu or any belated recognition of Mugur as a hero. It's enough for Jude to unsettle us with the threats of fascism and the horrors of a life without free speech.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (C+) - It's not clear what Jude is going for here, besides taking a short film and padding it out to feature length. This is the story of a school teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu), the unfortunate victim of having her amateur home porn session leak out to the community, putting her job in jeopardy.

The story is told in four parts. First, we get a few minutes of the actual graphic porn -- full-on banging, no censorship.  Then we get about a half hour of Emi walking around Bucharest and occasionally talking on the phone, mostly with her partner as they try to get their story straight and squeeze the video back into its PornHub lockbox. It's as if Jude is conducting a sociological study of life and architecture in the 21st century. Then there a dramatic detour -- about another half hour of Jude waxing philosophical and cynical over Romania's communist past and humanity's nihilistic present. He does it through a series of word definitions that betray the writer-director's horrified view of Our Dumb Century. 

Finally, in the last half hour, we get to the meat of the matter, so to speak. Emi sits before parents and colleagues) to face the music and make the case for saving her job. The group includes prudes and conspiracy theorists. One off-camera voice at the meeting, a sort of one-man Greek chorus, injects crude comments and an occasional Woody Woodpecker cackle, for some reason. Emi makes good points, as do a couple of others. Jude cops out by offering multiple endings. But that is in keeping with his odd approach to the subject -- throwing at you pure porn, documentary-style camera prying, dialectical diatribes, and finally that reckoning. It's all a mish-mash, and if you don't walk out during that meandering first half hour, you might kick yourself for staying.

Best of Ever, Vol. 6: Borderline Inappropriate

 

THE WEDDING CRASHERS (2005) (A) - When you laugh so hard you nearly fall off the couch -- and you're alone when it happens -- you're watching comedy gold. So it was and continues to be with the pairing of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as they practice the art of crashing weddings and living their frivolous but dress-formal lives. 

Vaughn is at the top of his game here, with his rapid-fire banter and his uncanny balloon-animal skills. Wilson bounces off of him with elastic improv skills. His hangdog emotional bully complements Vaughn's glib conman. The hero's journey here involves the challenge of not breaking the quite elaborate rules of the game, most notably, don't ever fall in love with a bridesmaid or a guest. Of course, that is exactly what befalls our shallow pals, and they are gifted not only with a fine supporting cast but with a sizzling script by journeymen writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher.

Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher are dynamic as the love interests, and their family is populated by the likes of Christopher Walken and Jane Seymour (as the women's blue-blood parents) and Bradley Cooper as McAdams' rich asshole fiance. There's also the requisite socially inappropriate grandmother and weird brother (see also, "Annie Hall," circling back to Walken). Plus there's an assist from an uncredited comic cameo as the godfather of wedding crashers (who has since moved on to crashing funerals). Director David Dobkin gets out the way and lets Vaughn and Wilson lead the charge.

The gags fly nonstop. My favorite moment -- representative of the moral ambiguity that cradles the entire film -- comes when Wilson has a quiet moment with Seymour, who is trying to cougar her daughter's pursuer. She asks Wilson to inspect and prod her refurbished breasts, and rather than decline or dive in, Wilson tells her: "This is borderline inappropriate." That is precise writing and character work. 

We can overanalyze this one, but it's best to just to buckle up, enjoy the rollercoaster ride and try not to fall off the sofa.

BEST IN SHOW (2000) (A) - This is the height of the mockumentary movement, led by Christopher Guest, who starred in "This Is Spinal Tap" in the '80s and then took over the genre as director in the '90s, leading to this spoof of dog shows boasting a comedy all-star cast. Revisiting it 21 years later, the jokes still land, and the assemblage of actors is like a dream come true.

The improv all-stars are a who's who of snark: Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, as the Flecks, he with two left feet and she with a prodigious sexual history; Parker Posey and Michael Hamilton as OCD dog parents (who met at Starbucks -- competing Starbucks locations across the street from each other); Michael McKean and John Michael Higgins as a fussy, sarcastic couple; Jane Lynch as an alpha female, with an eye for Jennifer Coolidge's delightful ditz married to a codger; cameos from Bob Balaban, Larry Miller and Ed Begley Jr.; and the anchor, Fred Willard as the id-driven TV commentator. Then, out in left field, is Guest himself as homespun Harlan Pepper, famously serenading his homely bloodhound by naming nuts. The characters, of course, tend to resemble their animals, either physically or emotionally.

Guest juggles these various story lines until they all come together for the big competition, the annual dog show. Guest and Levy pack the script with inspired ideas and hilarious one-liners, assisted by some free-form work by the unparalleled cast. There are too many memorable one-liners to begin going down the rabbit hole, and they need the absurd context that Guest provides. It's a grand howl.

BONUS TRACK

"She was very popular back then."

Life Is Short: How 'Soho' Can You Go?

 

Has Edgar Wright gone off the deep end? We loved 2017's "Baby Driver" so much that we went to the theater to see it twice. We rhapsodized about its "dazzle of visual and aural delights." It was a challenge to the senses, but it was never an all-out assault on the senses, which we experienced watching "Last Night in Soho," a blistering attack of images and sounds with barely a narrative to justify its experience. 

An hour into this obnoxious screamer about a Woman in Peril, we leaned over to a friend to gauge her opinion, and she was willing to hang in there. Before the 90-minute mark -- when the horror tropes really kicked in -- we both were ready to leave. As Wright likes to do, he bombards the soundtrack with period songs, in this case from the late '60s, the time traveled to by Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie from "Leave No Trace"), an aspiring fashion designer experiencing London for the first time. During her time travel after she falls asleep each night, she lands in 1967 Soho and sees the mirrored reflection of a big-eyed blonde (Anya Taylor-Joy) and then sort of trades places with her, learning vicariously of the horrors of "Sandy" being forced into prostitution.

Wright has become a master of quick-cut jump scares and dazzling visual tricks involving the mirrored images of the two different actresses. And in once scene, Handsome Guy (Matt Smith) twirls them on the dance floor as their likenesses keep alternating with each swing on the beat. But those devices grow old quite quickly. And soon this settles into yet another literal assault on a young woman desperate to survive. Eloise has a family history of mental illness, with suicide claiming her mother, whose image appears to Eloise in, yep, mirrors. As the routine gets repeated every night during her sleep, Eloise gets further drawn into the degradation, including being hounded by zombie ghosts of Sandy's former sex clients. I started to shut down halfway through, because the story was going nowhere (I later learned there's a twist at the end; ho-hum) and the visual and aural onslaught was unbearable amid all the horror trash. I didn't even make it to the best line in the film (it's in the trailer): When Eloise confronts Creepy Old Guy (Terence Stamp) by saying she knows what he's done, he replies, "I've done a lot of things. You're gonna have to be more specific, luv."

Wright earlier this year over-indulged in a documentary about a cult band, and it seems that he is now editor-proof. Alas, everyone needs an editor, especially when a bloke's having a wank like this. Let's hope he recalibrates soon.

Title: LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

Running Time: 116 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  85 MIN (I was ready to go after an hour)

Portion Watched: 73%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 59 YRS, 1 MO.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home, did a crossword puzzle and fell asleep.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 8-1

BONUS TRACKS

One highlight of the engaging soundtrack is "You're My World," as belted out by Cilla Black, with the Hitchcockian opening chirps a nice touch:

And Taylor-Joy gets her Julee Cruise on with a wispy version of Petula Clark's "Downtown":