The Noir Chronicles: Double-Barreled

 Let's go back to the postwar era for a pair from filmmaker Edward Dmytryk, best known for "The Caine Mutiny."

THE SNIPER (1952) (B) - Arthur Franz is weirdly jittery as a mentally ill military vet who can't help killing 20-something brunettes while hoping someone finally stops him and ends the misery. Luckily a strong supporting cast rights the ship, and director Edward Dmytryk settles into a "Naked City" verite style that stalks the streets of San Francisco. 

Franz plays Edward Miller, who likes to perch on rooftops and aim his carbine at women who remind him of his mother. Adolphe Menjou steals the show as gruff Lt. Frank Kafka, in a natural performance that would be mimicked for decades on TV police procedurals. He must battle with reporters, who, by the third or fourth homicide, demand answers and whip their readership into a frenzy over the serial killings.

Miller blends in as a delivery driver for a dry cleaner. He has a creepy scene where he tries to resist a casually flirtatious woman, only to be summarily dismissed from her apartment. She'll pay for that.

Dmytryk builds suspense steadily, though the final third drags a bit. The crisp black-and-white shots of San Francisco's landmarks provide a pleasant distraction on the way to the big climax.

Spotted: Frank Faylen as a lead police inspector. He would go on a few years later to play the father on TV's "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

CROSSFIRE (1947) (B) - Bobs are wild in this three-ring murder mystery starring Robert Young, Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum. Flashbacks and conflicting memories (clouded by a lot of drinking) among decommissioned WWII soldiers provide a "Rashomon" feel as the boys try to piece together the events that led to the murder of a Jewish man in an anti-semitic rage killing.

There is little doubt who the killer is before it is made plain about halfway through. Still, the performances are solid, and some snappy banter seeps through the sometimes dense dialogue. Young is a revelation -- a real actor instead of a TV hack -- as he grounds the film's narrative as a dogged detective who gives way too much leeway to his witnesses. Mitchum is sly in a supporting role -- assisting the cops but protecting his comrades. Journeyman George Cooper is compelling in his screen debut as the sweaty GI without a good alibi after a night of boozing. And Gloria Grahame runs them all ragged as a smart-talking lady of the night.

Dmytryk toys with light and shadows in classic noir fashion. And while it can be difficult to follow all the characters during the first third, this police procedural finds its swagger. It does get a little preachy in the final reel, and it probably will catch you off-guard with its sudden, unnervingly blithe ending. But that's what you get when you cross a cop who always gets his man.

Spotted: Robert Young, of course, would be known to my generation as TV's Marcus Welby, M.D., and as a pitchman for Sanka instant coffee.

In 'There There,' There Is No There There

 

THERE THERE (C-minus) - Maybe it's time for a reassessment, to sit back and judge whether Andrew Bujalski has been a good filmmaker all along or if we've cut him too much slack. Has he been treading water until finally producing this bland, empty treatise on relationships? Is he just another fauxteur?

Bujalski splashed 20 years ago with "Funny Ha Ha" and established his Mumblecore cred with "Mutual Appreciation," in which he also co-starred with Justin Rice in a low-key love triangle. It took him a false start and eight years to put together "Computer Chess," his masterful homage to the 1980s computer era. It was understated and keenly observed.

Since then, he managed a "quiet triumph" in 2016 with another love triangle, "Results," blessed with his first major-league cast. But he stumbled two years later with the sloppy and unfocused "Support the Girls." And now, he takes an already stale COVID gimmick -- shooting actors alone and splicing them together via the editing process -- and makes his most unimaginative and annoying movie yet, "There There," a series of six barely connected vignettes.

Here he has another strong cast, in particular TV veteran Lennie James (above) and indie hall-of-famer Lili Taylor (below), but his attempt at slicing and dicing the nuances of relationships comes off as stagey and at times tone-deaf. James and Taylor start us off with two middle-aged adults talking through the aftermath of their first night in the sack, in the harsh daylight, seguing quickly from "that was amazing" to "do we have a shot at making this work?" It's an interesting concept, and both actors are up to the challenge, but Bujalski's script has a few potholes in it, and the visual gimmick becomes too distracting.

Some may not know going in (or care) that Bujalski shot every actor separately, so that in each of the two-person stories, each actor is essentially talking to an iPhone. And the actors are blocked in ways that seem unnatural and which expand and contract distances artificially. And by the end of the movie, you'll find it absolutely bizarre that these characters are sitting in schools, restaurants or bars and yet a third person never materializes, even tangentially.  

What synergy Taylor and James manage to concoct in that opening sequence will gradually dissipate as characters come and go throughout the movie. The second piece has Taylor's character riffing over coffee with her AA sponsor, in a conversation that swerves into a shaggy-dog tale about Taylor's previous AA sponsor, who believed in aliens. Believe it or not, this is the second best of the scenarios. But then the AA sponsor takes over in a parent-teacher conference complaining about the teacher allowing her teenage son to download porn while in class. This bitter, angry exchange exudes macho bunk, a sort of tribute to David Mamet or Neil Labute. 

And then Bujalski drives this off a cliff. He abandons the thread of having one of the characters continue on to the next scene. Instead, we get Jason Schwartzman (looking puffy) as a lawyer on the phone to his tech-bro client, a rambling excursion into minutiae. But this is high art compared to the next scene, in which Schwartzman is visited in bed one night by his father's ghost. (I mean, really, how do you manage to waste Jason Schwartzman?)

Then, finally, James' lothario reappears for a rap session in the bar he owns with the high school teacher. The dialogue can be sexy at times, but too often -- particularly during the woman's climactic monologue -- the dialogue is over-written. You end up with a 20-something woman talking like a 45-year-old screenwriter, with hints of the worst of late-period Woody Allen.

By that point, it's clear that there isn't a great point being made. And when the camerawork is so uninspired and the visuals so flat, you realize that Bujalski has literally phoned it in. Next time you think you have a good idea, polish the script a little more. That will give you time for the latest COVID surge to subside, and you'll be able to put two actors in a room together, like a proper movie.

BONUS TRACK

Between each scene, Bujalski cleanses the palate with a musical interlude by Jon Natchez from the band War on Drugs. Natchez flashes talent on a bunch of different instruments (and in one instance found objects), producing a lovely ambience that deserves a better movie. I don't see samples online. NPR has a Tiny Desk sampling from his full band here. And here is the next best thing to the "There There" music, some of Natchez's soundtrack work for the film "Luzzu":

The Female Graze

 

BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER (B+) - This expansion of a lecture retains all the assets of a thoughtful polemic and juices it with engaging visuals to string it into a compelling narrative. Nina Menkes, an independent filmmaker for decades, began presenting her lecture around 2018 and turned it into a film release four years later.

Menkes is quite good at conveying some complex concepts, mainly through diagramming scenes from films. She goes beyond just the concerns about the "male gaze" and deepens our understanding of how filmmakers and audiences are the subjects who objectify the objects (female characters). Menkes never gets stuck in a trite academic rut.

We get numerous examples of cinematic tropes -- such as presenting women as disjointed body parts -- and we get to assess these entrenched ideas from a fresh perspective. There is invaluable insight from a host of film scholars (from the likes of UCLA and Dartmouth) and filmmakers, a refreshing mix of women who are not the same old talking heads, such as pioneering director Julie Dash ("Daughters of the Dust") and the young standout Eliza Hittman ("It Felt Like Love," "Never Rarely Sometimes Always"). Stories from the Weinstein-era trenches come from the likes of Rosanna Arquette and comic actor Charlyne Yi.

It does seem odd (even prurient at times) to indulge in so many examples of sexist filmmaking in order to make the case here, but Menkes never slips into voyeurism. She has important points to make, and she is a filmmaker who knows how to tell a compelling story. 

LOVING HIGHSMITH (B-minus) - This leaden documentary tries but fails to bring to life the famous novelist, Patricia Highsmith, as it sketches her biography through her love life. It too often feels like a trudge and glosses over the personality pitfalls of a woman who grew more and more bitter and insular as she aged.

Highsmith is most known for "Strangers on a Train" (brought to the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock) and the '90s cinematic touchstone "The Talented Mr. Ripley." We're more familiar with a novel she wrote under a pen name so as to hide her homosexuality; it became Todd Haynes' touching film "Carol" a few years ago. We get clips from those movies and others as pick-me-ups, though relative newcomer Eva Vitija otherwise dons a wet blanket to slog through Highsmith's love life. 

We visit with a trail of Highsmith's former lovers; she apparently left behind quite a few broken hearts on her path of devastation. (Besides being a diligent worker as a writer, she was a drinker and a smoker and eventually descended into a swamp of racism and antisemitism in her final years. That fact gets swept away with a quick line toward the end of the film.) Vitija also assembles three relatives of the author, but they seem oddly detached and fairly clueless about the subject.

It would be difficult to see this film as being perceived as inspiring to LGBT people. Highsmith isn't very fun to be around. She might have had good reason to be such a pill. But we don't have to wallow in it with her.

BONUS TRACK

The trailer for "Brainwashed":

Holy Crap!* I'll Replace You With Machines

A musical interlude:

What better place to see noisemakers Melt-Banana than at the quirk-hole that is Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, N.M. The band thrashed the twee venue on Election Eve with a sonic barrage that was enhanced by computer loops providing bass and drums and other skronks.

The surviving members (did the others go deaf?) Yako Onuki (vocals) and Ichiro Agata (guitar) sustained their violent speed-punk for about an hour, which was about as much as the modest crowd could handle. Even the moshers couldn't mosh fast enough to the blitz.

Onuki had a hand-held device that looked like a smart phone with a screen that had colorful circles on it (pink, blue, yellow, green), which she apparently used to control the music samples that backed her and Agata. She waved it around like a conductor's baton, and it seemed at times as if she was wielding it like she were manipulating a theremin. Hard to say.

Agata had his own assemblage of controls for tapes/loops at his feet. At one point he made his guitar sound like a gothic pipe organ. Most of the time it just sounded like a guitar turned up to 11.

Here's a good sense of the band's technique (in 2017 in, of all places, Birmingham, Alabama):

Midway through the show Melt-Banana offered a familiar concert staple -- I had heard them do it at Lounge Ax in Chicago in the mid-1990s, when they were a full co-ed band.  They offered up incredibly short bursts of songs, some lasting only a few seconds, each one followed by a quaint, perfunctory "Thank you. Our next song ..." and then launching into the next track. It was a technique that made the Minutemen seem like Yes by comparison. With her shrieks and wails throughout the night, Onuki could make Yoko Ono sound like Helen Reddy.

When she announced that they would play a cover song, I don't think anyone was prepared for the sonic assault on Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge":

There was something both comforting and exhilarating about watching these two old pals -- looking like a middle-age soccer mom and her kid brother -- body-slam a crowd for an hour.

Here is a half hour interview/concert (with a full band in 2010) from, of all places, Alabama Public Television:

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films (and now at least one concert), cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, and palate-cleanser, courtesy of Guided by Voices:

Gluttons for Punishment

 

A new release, "The Menu," offers an eat-the-rich fable, set in the world of high-end gastronomy. Film critics can't help themselves with the food puns.  Here's a sample platter of Gene Shalit wannabees from Metacritic, where the film, starring Ralph Fiennes, has a 71 rating.

 

Paste Magazine, Matthew Jackson:
"The complexity, both tonally and visually, is there to tease out the film’s black genre heart, and it’s that heart that makes The Menu a delicious and deeply filling experience that will make you beg for a second helping."

Associated Press, Jake Coyle:
"Even as The Menu teeters unevenly in its third act and things get gruesomely less appetizing, its greasy last bites succeed in capturing one common aspect of molecular gastronomy: The Menu will leave you hungry."

IndieWire, Christian Blauvelt:

"The Menu does do one thing exceptionally well: it holds your attention and makes you think for a time that any outcome is possible. That alone is something to salivate over."

Washington Post, Ann Hornaday:
"'Eat the Rich' might be a popular theme this movie season, but The Menu takes the idea to extremes that finally overpower the palate."

The Guardian goes back for seconds!

Peter Bradshaw:
"It is well-acted and well directed by Mylod with tasty side plates of droll humour."

Benjamin Lee:
"The Menu might not nail some of the more substantial courses but it’ll do as a light snack."

Empire, Siddhant Akhala:
"It’s deep-fried junk disguised as gastronomy; it may not fully satisfy, but it’ll fill a hole."

And the winner is ...

 
The Playlist, Charles Bramesco:
"Everything on the menu of The Menu looks good enough, but once its moldy tirade against the one percent has been fully dished out, it’s plain to see there’s not a whole lot of meat on the bone here."

New to the Queue

 More than halfway home ...

A "cryptic thriller" about a teenager's journey upon receiving an urn of his father's remains, "The Box."

The Millennial powerhouses Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver team up with Noah Baumbach for an adaptation of Don DeLillo's touchstone novel, "White Noise."

Mumblecore godfather Andrew Bujalski ("Computer Chess," "Results," "Support the Girls") returns with a cast that includes Jason Schwartzman and Lili Taylor, "There There."

We loved "Knives Out," so we're still game for Rian Johnson's rollicking sequel, "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery."

L.A. quirkiness greets some unexplained supernatural events at an apartment building in "Something in the Dirt."

Police Presence

 

RIOTSVILLE, U.S.A. (B+) - Sierra Pettengill follows up 2017's so-so "The Reagan Show" with this reverie about the government's response to the riots of the 1960s. The clips from 50+ years ago have a hypnotic effect, as this deep dive into the turbulence of the past shares ominous rhyme schemes with the present. Pettengill blows the dust off of one of the model towns built by the military to train law enforcement officers in counter-protest maneuvers, in the safety of a simulated city.

The mood is Big Brother kitschy. That ambience is driven by dispassionate, untethered narration (by Charlene Modeste), reciting philosophical musings akin to beat poetry, from a script written by Tobi Haslett. (It shares a vibe with Miranda July's dispassionate turn in "Fire of Love.")

Some of the clips are obscure and arch. We get NBC news team Huntley and Brinkley at their sardonic best, barely able to tamp down their contempt for the powers that be. Their telecast is sponsored by Gulf Oil, and its ad for bug spray sits there as one giant metaphor.

Pettengill dutifully pays respect to the urban riots of the day, and she spends a good amount of time digesting the Kerner Commission study on poverty. Then she takes a clever detour in the second half -- rather than rehash (yet again) the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic in Chicago, she revisits the Republican convention that year in Miami, when police cracked down on protesters in a black neighborhood far from the site of the proceedings. 

It's a fascinating slice of history, and it cements this documentary as a powerful polemic about the brutality of the state, a mindset we just can't shake.

HOLD YOUR FIRE (B-minus) - What could have been a sharp hourlong PBS special gets stretched out to feature length to tell the story of a 1973 hostage situation in Brooklyn that served as the foundation for the practice of nuanced hostage negotiations that have since become the norm.

Writer-director Stefan Forbes, previously a cinematographer, is blessed with entertaining survivors of the crisis, which took place of 48 hours at John & Al's sports shop under the el tracks. Shu'aib Rahim was one of the gunmen, and Jerry Riccio was the spitfire proprietor of the store, which happened to be stocked with guns and ammunition. One police officer was killed at the beginning of the standoff, and one of the four offenders survived his bullet wounds.

Forbes unwinds the tale with a noir style (mostly through still photographs and archival news footage), but his pacing is slow, and the narrative starts to feel strung out and repetitive. Halfway through we get the back story of the four men, who had run afoul of the Nation of Islam, in particularly Rahim, who was trying to steal weapons to protect his family. He and Riccio are well-spoken and form a solid yin-yang dynamic as they spin the tale. Two hardened ex-cops are on hand to lob volleys across the thin blue line. And the quiet star is Harvey Schlossberg, the psychologist ex-cop who led the police response and pioneered the style of dispute resolution. 

Like too many documentaries, "Hold Your Fire," after spinning its wheels a bit, rushes the ending and wraps things up too neatly. It's just not quite compelling enough to fill the 93 minutes.

BONUS TRACK

The middle of "Riotsville" features an entire performance of "Burn, Baby, Burn" on public television by Jimmy Collier and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick. Here is an alternative version:

Soundtrack of Your Life: Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me

An occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.

Date: November 8, 2022, 12:12 p.m.

Place: Trader Joe's in Uptown Albuquerque

Song:  "Tell Me Something Good"

Artist: Rufus (with Chaka Khan)

Irony Matrix: 3.8 out of 10

Comment: This castoff from the Stevie Wonder songwriting factory reached No. 3 in summer 1974, and it truly takes me back to my actual youth, reveling to Top 40 radio in the suburbs of Chicago. I don't know if I knew that the funk band and Chaka Khan (nee Yvette Marie Stevens) were from Chicago. It's got those Wonder staples -- a rubbery bass line and a jittery clavinet riff -- and infectious backing vocals. It's a pure jolt of joy that still slaps or bangs (as the kids say) five decades later. What fun.

Revenge of the Nerds

 

VENGEANCE (B) - This one loses at least half a grade for a forced, implausible ending that undercuts an otherwise smart culture-clash comedy from B.J. Novak. He writes, directs and stars as Ben, an urban NPR elitist who believes he has stumbled on the podcast that will make a mark -- a classic dead-white-girl mystery.

The dead girl is Abilene, a Texas innocent with whom he had a few romps in bed when she was visiting New York. Her family is convinced that the two were in a committed long-distant relationship, and so he finds his way out to the dusty roads of Texas to commune with the woman's stereotypical gun-loving, shit-kicking kin. Abilene's brother is determined to avenge his sister's death, which he is convinced was murder rather than an accidental drug overdose.

Novak walks a tightrope between insightful parody and cruel stereotyping, and his earnestness as both a performer and a filmmaker allows him to mostly pull it off. The writing is the key here. Novak has clever ideas and a way with a self-deprecating zinger or droll observations that capture the zeitgeist. He has great rapport with his editor back east, played with both verve and deadpan line readings by Issa Rae, who energizes the screen.

Novak also knows how to craft a riveting narrative, and we gladly follow him down the rabbit hole of good-ol'-boy culture. Ashton Kutcher shows up as a philosophizing drug dealer, a character meant to rescue the reputation of the entire small town and its idiosyncratic dimwits. It's a role that in the past would go to Burt Reynolds or John Travolta, and while Kutcher gives it his all, you can't help seeing a man positioning himself for the quirky middle-age phase of his acting career.

Nonetheless, the story zips along and entertains. But it begins to get repetitive in the final reel. And in the last five minutes or so it completely unravels, with several left-field plot twists, one more improbable than the next. It is a hugely disappointing denouement that can make a viewer feel cheated and a bit of a sucker (a rube?) for trusting Novak with his slick story.

THE FUNNY PAGES (B) - This impressive feature debut chronicles a few jangled days in the life of a high school senior determined to quit school and pursue his passion of comic-book art.

Daniel Zolghadri is fantastic as Robert, who bickers with his parents, is annoyed by his best friend, and craves to be a player in the comic-book world. The opening scene involves an awkward moment with his art teacher, and later Robert will meet a deranged character who happens to have had a cup of coffee with one of the iconic comic-book publishers as an assistant to the colorist. Character actor Matthew Maher is wonderfully creepy as Wallace, the object of Robert's obsession.

Writer-director Owen Kline (Kevin's kid, who played the little brother in "The Squid and the Whale") draws precise characterizations and his dialogue, sometimes realistically disjointed, has a fine cadence (when someone tells Robert that his car "is smoking," he beams, not realizing that the person was speaking literally about the junk heap). The scenes are enhanced, it seems, by some quality improv, especially by the parents, played by Josh Pais and Maria Dizzia. The supporting cast includes a lot of unique-looking actors who didn't pass through central casting but instead organically inhabit the grubby world of nerd culture. That includes a ghoulish cameo by Louise Lasser as a drug-seeking old crow.

However, in the end, the story is thin, and it never feels like anything important is at stake, or whether Robert truly believes in the sanctity of art. It too often feels like a poor stepchild of "Ghost World" and "American Splendor," the previous generation's oddball dramedies that had more depth.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

Holy Crap!* What in ... "Tarnation"

 

We rewatched "Tarnation," a 2004 primal scream of an autobiography from Jonathan Caouette chronicling his abusive childhood and his schizophrenic mother. This damaged man, around 30 at the time of the movie's release, was an inveterate video diarist, starting as a child. His home performance, as an adolescent, of a woman tortured by domestic abuse would be the stuff of legend if Caouette had stayed on track as a performer.

But it's the scenes with his mother, Renee, that are the most compelling and disturbing. The film overall features machine-gun editing and early-MTV flourishes and quick cuts, but the filmmaker knows when to pause and let a scene play out. He trains the camera on his mom multiple times, during various schizophrenic breakdowns and refuses to cut away. The effect is lurid but also informative. The pain behind her eyes is heartbreaking.

Caouette also spends time with Renee's parents, Adolph and Rosemary, who raised him. That's a generous term. At least they didn't lobotomize him, like they did to the young-adult Renee, crippling her for life. Caouette also tracks down his birth father, who visits both him and Renee for a dreadfully uncomfortable scene.

Throughout, Caouette is struggling to keep his own relationship together, blessed with a patient partner. But evil lurks around every corner, especially as his grandparents age and emerge as horror-movie figures.

The narrative sometimes fractures, as if to mirror his or Renee's thoughts and perspectives. The pace is frenetic, with the screen sometimes splitting and multiplying in psychedelic fashion. Connecting it all is that Jonathan character, a born performer but doomed by a lack of discipline and focus. If he had come of age 20 years later, he would be a Tik-Tok phenomenon, with no need to polish his hits and streamline them into a coherent feature film.

Bonus points for the eclectic soundtrack, dropping in samples from Bob Dylan and Marianne Faithful, as well as more recent deep cuts from Magnetic Fields. It reportedly cost Caouette only a few thousand dollars to put his collage together but a few hundred thousand dollars to secure the soundtrack.

GRADE: A-minus

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

BONUS TRACKS

One classic tune is "After Loving You" by Jean Wells:

 And Lisa Germano's contribution is "Reptile":