And, Oh, the View!

 Schmoozing with the beautiful people ...

ANYONE BUT YOU (C) - Our Annual Christmas Day Mainstream Movie tradition put the emphasis on "mainstream" this year, with this trashy goof featuring handsome people in a gorgeous setting in a sort-of anti-rom-com romp. It's one of those movie when two hot actors pretend to hate each other -- but they probably really like each other! Let's just say that "Sydney Sweeney in a bikini" or "Glen Powell in a towel" does more than just rhyme.

That doesn't mean there's much reason to this painfully reductive genre exercise. Sweeney's Bea has a meet-cute in a coffeeshop with Powell's Ben, and they make a connection before she sneaks off from his apartment the next morning, but then has second thoughts, only to go back and overhear Ben, his male pride wounded, trash her to his roommate. Fast forward to them discovering months later that they are both on their way to the destination wedding of Bea's sister and Ben's friend. When their animosity threatens to overshadow the big event, the two concoct a scheme to pretend they are now a couple -- this will appease the brides and the families while also getting Bea's ex off her back (her meddling parents invited him as a surprise) while having the side effect of making Ben's ex jealous (she lives in Australia). What could go wrong?

 

There are enough laughs in this, and Sweeney and Powell are nearly naked enough, to make it a tolerable diversion. (One character refers to Bea as "the plump girl with the sad eyes.") What's most annoying is the film's pretensions to Shakespearean high jinks. The story is a high school sophomore's interpretation of "Much Ado About Nothing." Director Will Gluck ("Easy A," co-writing here with newcomer Ilana Wolpert) uses the Bard's quotes as chapter headings and also goes full-on silly by convening obviously transparent Greek choruses who engage in conversations meant to be overheard by Bea and Ben in order to psyche them into falling for each other, as if they were Samantha and Darren Stevens on an episode of "Bewitched." Gluck exaggerates these moments so that they are obviously unbelievable, which only serves to remind us that we're watching a contrived, light-hearted movie amid the smell of popcorn and the wails of a toddler dragged to R-rated fare on a holy holiday. 

I'm not demanding that we get drawn to the cineplex and then subjected to an overly faithful remake of a 17th century farce. Sure, Joss Whedon managed to do that successfully in 2013 with "Much Ado," but that was an artsy indie take, and no one would suggest that "Anyone But You" has such pretensions. Gluck and Wolpert pepper the script with some solid one-liners, even if it's not the most original banter. And they nod to rom-com conventions even while they blink out their desire to subvert them (though they fail to do that, big time, in the end). 

Sweeney and Powell are serviceable, but they don't have a ton of chemistry despite the ease with which their physical parts would likely fit together. The supporting cast is certainly C-List. Dermot Mulroney, as Bea's dad, is the biggest fish. Model Charlee Fraser stands out as the Aussie seductress, and Joe Davidson has a blast as her lunkheaded boy toy (but with a perfect comedic fake-out at the end). The soundtrack is packed with bangers -- "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield makes for a cute punch line at the climax (and for end-credits outtakes). All of this is about as close as you can get to a classic definition of dumb fun.

CREATIVE CONTROL (2016) (B) - I'm torn about this shallow but oddly compelling futuristic tale of a man getting cracked-out on AI (and drugs), shunning his lovely yogi lover in favor of a virtually enhanced version of his best friend's more conventional girlfriend. Benjamin Dickinson is disturbingly manic as his character David has a meltdown while working on an ad campaign for a drug that eases anxiety. The irony!

Dickinson directed this stylish black-and-white bid for auteur status, and he co-wrote it with Micah Bloomberg (a similarly provocative "Sanctuary"). This one has a cocky attitude throughout, and many viewers will find that a turn-off, but there are enough good ideas and crackling lines of dialogue that it overcomes its shortcomings. There is a temptation to dismiss this as shallow -- at times it absolutely is -- but then comes more clever, biting dialogue, and you set down the remote. A critical scene in the middle of the film -- where David responds to his passive-aggressive girlfriend Juliette (Nora Zehetner) with a shout-storm -- injects a burst of reality that is exhilarating.

Otherwise, David is self-medicating (with pills shaped like '70s cereals) while working up a strategy to sell Augmenta (a version of Google Glass) and obsessing over Sophie (Alexis Rasmussen), who is both a model at the advertising firm and the partner of Wim (Dan Gill), the firm's photographer, who himself is banging another model on the side. David is deft with virtual reality (this takes place in a future of translucent, mouseless computer devices) and manages to magically create a virtual fantasy character that embodies Sophie's face and voice. For all the good it does him; he seems to spend much more time moping than masturbating. David's slow-building train-wreck of a career and relationship grows compelling by the final reel (if you make it that far), as his obsession with Sophie goes off the rails. 

Dickinson shoots in a creamy monochrome, except for splashes of color whenever computer screens and avatars come to life. He leans heavily on modern takes on classical music (Vivaldi, Schubert), with lots of haunting strings that introduce chapters. Cinematography credit goes to Adam Newport-Berra ("Last Black Man in San Francisco"), as director of photography.

And props to whoever crafted the many yoga-class scenes, because they got the parlance, teaching styles and temperaments of Juliette and her rival, Govindas (Paul Manza), down perfectly. (Juliette's single-leg down-dog, elegantly framed, is an example of how breathtaking the visuals can get here.) Throw in Reggie Watts (as himself), for no compelling reason, and you have a sadly sexy and sometimes suspenseful character study from the mid-teens.

BONUS TRACK

As noted, "Anyone But You" was our annual Christmas Day outing that returned after a one-year absence due to 2022's pathetic offerings.  For the record, here is our full list from previous years, in order of preference, updated:

  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. Anyone But You (2023)

17. Holmes & Watson (2018)

18. Into the Woods (2014)

The Digest of 2022

 

As you know, it takes us flyover folks longer to track down all the key releases in a given year, so our highly anticipated Best of 2023 list won't be out for a month or so. To keep you on the edge of your seats, below is a list, in random order, of 2023 releases that (so far) have scored a B+ or better and thus will compete for the annual honors. (Spoiler Alert: One of these is head-and-shoulders above the rest and is a lock to be No. 1.)

• Fremont
• Blackberry
• Millie Lies Low
  
• Bottoms
  
• The Eight Mountains
• Fallen Leaves
  
• Jethica
• Elephant 6 Recording Co.
  
• Past Lives
  
• Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
• Turn Every Page
  
• M3GAN
• Have We Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
• R.M.N
• The Royal Hotel
• Chile '76
  
• The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic
• You Hurt My Feelings
• Everything Went Fine
• Missing
• Take Your Pills: Xanax
• Reggie
• Theater Camp
• Last Comiskey
• Blue Jean
• Biosphere
  

Life Is Short: Get On With It

 If you can't grab us by the one-third mark, you take your chances of getting the plug pulled on you. Here are two streamers that just went nowhere slowly.

Title: MAY DECEMBER

Running Time: 117 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  48 MIN

Portion Watched: 41%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 0 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Wrote this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 22-1

Comment: I gave this until past the one-third mark to allow Todd Haynes ("Carol") to introduce some sort of hook to keep me watching the fictionalized account of the Mary Kay LeTourneau story -- framed as a pompous actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visiting the disgraced former teacher, here called Gracie (Haynes regular Julianne Moore), in order to study for a movie about the woman's life. Very little happens as Portman's character methodically interviews the people in Gracie's life and observes the passive-aggressive family dynamics Gracie created with the person she seduced when he was 13 but is now 36, Joe (a dull Charles Melton).  This all plays out like the made-for-TV film that seems to be in the works in the movie. And the score is glaringly out of place. It kept reminding me of a cheesy '70s TV show or film -- and what do you know, it is a reworking of the score from the 1971 British film "The Go-Between." So I'm not crazy; Haynes is. Portman is all breathy affect, and there's just not enough attention paid to Gracie or Joe. I finally bailed when the middle third started with a visit to Gracie's lawyer and Gracie's son from her first marriage (a former classmate of Joe's), who is a complete asshole and whose band plays songs that 62-year-old Haynes thinks a Millennial would think are cool to cover: Peter Frampton's "Baby I Love Your Way" and Leon Russell's "Tight Rope." It wasn't worth going on and waiting for the inevitable sex scene between Elizabeth and Joe and whatever fallout, if any, results from it. That's not a spoiler, just an assumption.

 

 

Title: INVISIBLE LIFE (2019)

Running Time: 139 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  35 MIN

Portion Watched: 25%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 0 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Moved on to another title on Amazon Prime before the free month expired.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 14-1

Comment: Speaking of made-for-TV movies, this Amazon original is a melodramatic period piece about two sisters in Rio de Janeiro whose lives take different paths when they are teenagers back in the repressed 1950s and who apparently spend the rest of the movie headed toward some sort of reunion. I did not make it that far. This is about as melodramatic as a modern movie gets. The two girls (Julia Stockler and Carol Duarte) fall under the thumb of their macho working-class father. One of them runs off to Greece with a sailor but eventually returns home pregnant. But meantime, the other has gone off to pursue a music career (but not before getting date-raped on her wedding night). There is nothing compelling about their personalities. The storytelling is strictly by-the-numbers. It is not only initially set in the '50s but it has an old-fashioned sensibility about it that is downright corny. No offense to Karim Ainouz, but lush melodramas just don't fly these days.

BONUS TRACK

I've always loved "Tight Rope." But then, I'm 61 now and remember when it came out. My affinity for this and Cat Stevens' "Morning Is Broken" got me mocked a lot as a sensitive tween.

Immigration Tribulations

One of the best of the year, plus cleaning two out of the queue during a free month of Amazon Prime.

FREMONT (A) - Sometimes a movie is so pleasantly perfect that words fail a critic. Just go see it; trust me.

With a heavy debt to the deadpan storytelling and grainy visual style of Jim Jarmusch, writer-director Babak Jalali deftly unravels the story of Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), a refugee from Afghanistan, where she collaborated with the Americans as a translator. She is now in the bland Bay Area town of Fremont, dying slowly of boredom and desperate to make a human connection. She does have interactions -- with co-workers, neighbors, a therapist -- but she yearns for something deeper. 

Donya works at a small local fortune-cookie factory, where she graduates from making the treats to writing the fortunes, which gives her not only a creative outlet to process her emotional issues but also a way to slip in her phone number to whatever lucky soul might find it and contact her. That faux pas will backfire on her. But it will lead to an eventual trip to Bakersfield that offers the hope of a happier future.

Among Donya's acquaintances are co-worker Joanna (Hilda Schmelling), who at one point sings her an old folk tune ("Just Another Diamond Day," below); a cranky Afghan neighbor and his bullied wife; the factory owner (Eddie Tang) who is full of uplifting aphorisms and pithy life lessons; and the proprietor of the restaurant where Donya joylessly eats her dinner every night, joining him in watching a foreign soap opera. Best of all is Gregg Turkington as Dr. Anthony, the therapist, whose alternative methods appear to be self taught (and which revolve around teachings from the novel White Fang). Turkington ("Entertainment") gives this production comedic credibility, serving as the perfect foil for the exasperated Donya. Throughout, Wali Zada, a newcomer, is placid and monosyllabic but barely concealing the roiling emotions within, all suggesting hours of backstory conveyed in a single glance.

Jalali is partial to static shots framing a single character, another Jarmusch touch. The story is paced perfectly over an hour and a half. "Fremont" is co-written by Carolina Cavalli (whose "Amanda" also was released this year), and the script is spare but profound. When Donya has a serendipitous meeting with a brooding auto mechanic (the ubiquitous Jeremy Allen White), the slow grind of life's incivilities suddenly gives way to a glimmer of sunshine out there in California, a land of hope and dreams.

NOBODY'S WATCHING (2017) (B-minus) - Lightweight and uneventful, this earnest film depicts the challenges faced by  an immigrant from Argentina hustling to find work and a sponsor to stay in the United States.  Unfortunately, the main character is a pretty-boy actor who had made a name for himself in Argentina, and it's tough to empathize with his non-grueling existence as a nanny for a friend, among other odd jobs that are not back-breaking.

Nico (Guillermo Pfening) is mostly in denial after, early on, it is clear that the main reason for his move to New York -- a starring role in a Mexican director's independent film -- is falling through and he will be stranded without decent acting work. (It doesn't help that he's blond and blue-eyed and doesn't "look Latino," so he gets rejected at auditions.) Nico jeopardizes his job as a nanny with questionable behavior and soon descends into a decadent lifestyle of drugs and random sexual encounters.

It doesn't help that doors are closing back in Venezuela, too. The show-runner for the popular soap opera that Nico co-starred on had put Nico's character in a coma, though that's not the only reason Nico fled -- there is also a romantic history between him and the show-runner (Pascal Yen-Pfister), who is a closeted husband and father. Much of this movie actually plays out like a soap opera, and not a particularly compelling one at that. The director Julia Solomonoff (writing the script with Christina Lazaridi) is an Argentine who studied film at Columbia, so she surely has crafted a personal tale of an immigrant's life in dog-eat-dog New York. It would help if she gave us more solid reason to care about whether Nico will ever collect a TV show check again.

GOLDEN VOICES (2019) (B-minus) - This comic drama, set back in 1990, never finds an appealing tone as it follows an aging couple whose move from Russia to Israel lays bare the weaknesses of their relationship. It's simply not funny enough to be a comedy or compelling enough to be a drama.

Maria Belkin can be quite captivating at times as Raya, who dodges the mood swings of her surly husband, Victor (Vladimir Friedman), whose disposition is clouded by the fact that he can't get work like they had in Russia -- as renowned voice-over actors who dubbed some of the all-time great films. Raya, instead, gets a job at a call center, and she hides the fact that the work involves phone sex under a pseudonym. Victor eventually falls in with a shady operation that bootlegs theatrical screenings on videotape. If that plot sounds familiar, it's because it strongly echoes a "Seinfeld" episode about Russian pirates. 

Belkin is an aging beauty with an expressive face, in the mold of Katherine Helmond ("Brazil" and TV's "Soap"), and she does her best to wring pathos from her role. But Victor is just a gruff old brute, and when the inevitable climactic reveal comes, it's hard to feel invested in the marriage or to care about how this turns out. Toss in a deus ex machina involving Saddam Hussein's threat of a gas attack on Israel, and things just fall apart at the end.

BONUS TRACKS

This one from "Fremont" plays on a disc while Donya is driving in her car to Bakersfield. It is "Ulu Palakua" by Iwalani Kahalewei:

 

And here is "Just Another Diamond Day" by Vashti Bunyan, from 1970: 

Slumming in the Sticks

 

TO LESLIE (B) - Your patience will be tested as to whether you can endure this poverty porn and anxiety exercise about an alcoholic woman reaching another rock bottom six years after having won the lottery. Andrea Riseborough's haunting performance as Leslie is so authentic you might not have the guts to last the two hours of wallowing and desperation.

It doesn't help that she's surrounded by a supporting cast leaning heavily into the corn-pone. It is difficult to stay in the story when you have Hollywood types, raised in the northeast, slathering on the southern drawl. Allison Janney has her moments as Leslie's nemesis; her character Nancy is seethingly resentful that she had to raise Leslie's son, James (a typically mopey Owen Teague). And then there is Marc Maron, turning in another shaky performance, as Sweeney, a kindhearted motel owner who hires the destitute Leslie to clean rooms. Maron was an odd man out in Lynn Shelton's "Sword of Trust," and he shows no more range here as the one-note good guy. (Apparently Maron's role was originally slated for John Hawkes; that's quite a step-down.)  Andre Royo and Stephen Root are wasted in fringe roles.

But this is Riseborough's show, from beginning to end. But she is essentially too good, highlighting several weaknesses -- the so-so cast, the labored script, and the plodding pace of the production. Her take on the character is so raw and searing -- which is not to say that it's overdone in any way -- that it overwhelms everything around it. It is probably one of the all-time great depictions of addiction, and you ache for her at all times, even during the bittersweet ending, which offers the hope of redemption. But too often the plot is weak, the pace slow, the surrounding characters dull -- and you wonder if this is anything more than a master class in acting by Riseborough.

This is only the second film written by Ryan Binaco ("3022") and it is directed by TV journeyman Michael Morris ("Better Call Saul"), making his big-screen debut. They wallow in Leslie's condition. They smother the soundtrack with classic country songs that often are too precisely on point for Leslie's latest predicament. Their default is not so much to brutalize Leslie's addiction but to belabor it. Riseborough might leave you in awe, but she's also likely to leave you feeling, as one character notes, "rode hard and hung up wet."

SHELTER IN SOLITUDE (C+) - I just can't recommend a movie that -- no matter how entertaining at times -- is structured around a preposterous idiot plot.  This one is ridiculous, even if it has the low hum of amusing rural characters.

Siobhan Fallon Hogan (Kramer's girlfriend on "Seinfeld" way back in the day) is a talented comic actor, and puts her heart into the screenplay, about a washed up country singer who improbably befriends a death-row inmate. Viv (Hogan) is a hot mess; her juke joint has been closed by COVID (and has been robbed during the shutdown), and she likes to drink and sleep a lot in her sloppy home. Her brother Dwayne (a solid Robert Patrick) runs the prison, and Viv somehow manages to get a job overnight guarding a prisoner facing the electric chair, noble Jackson (Peter Macon). 

If you can make it over that logical leap, pace yourself -- there are plenty more hurdles to come. Would you believe that Jackson is an innocent man who was just trying to protect his daughter from a rapist? Viv tracks down the daughter, revealing more and more illogical plot contrivances in order to build up a mountain of sympathy for poor Jackson. By the end of the film, the story has gone beyond being cartoonish. 

But things pass along in a folksy manner for an hour and a half, and Hogan and Patrick do make for a delightful bickering brother-sister duo. Quirky characters, sporting southern accents, come and go. Viv abides. And it's all rather inoffensive, even if it's far-fetched.

BONUS TRACK

"To Leslie" begs for old-school country cred via its soundtrack full of ringers from the classic era. The best is an all-time favorite from Waylon Jennings, "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way":

Leslie sits in a bar at a crucial point in the movie, and the song is just a little too spot-on -- Willie Nelson shortening Waylon's title to three words, "Are You Sure":

Doc Watch: Damn Right I Got the Blues

 We're doing a free month of Amazon Prime, so let's catch up on our queue ...

BORN IN CHICAGO (B-minus) - This slim (77-minute) paean to white-boy blues pays its respect to Chicago's 1960s music scene, but it rarely rises above a paint-by-numbers history familiar to Boomers.  It also suffers from a sappy script full of saccharine sentimentality, robotically narrated by Elwood Blues himself, Dan Ayckroyd.

The first 20 minutes troops through the dawn of Chicago blues on Chicago's South Side around the end of World War II, and it feels like a rushed, forced march, barely hitting highlights. While it's a kick to revisit clips of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter and the rest, this is a perfunctory gloss that merely serves as a bridge to the white kids who crashed the scene by the '60s. 

The focus is mostly on Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, who befriended Howlin' Wolf and cut their teeth in front of black audiences, which paved the way for the British R&B invasion (Rolling Stones, Clapton, Yardbirds, etal.) to not only swamp the genre but also help revive the careers of the original artists by the 1970s. Some of the original band members remain, including Nick Gravenites, who penned the song "Born in Chicago," and nice guys like Corky Siegel. Selective archival interviews bring in heavy hitters like B.B. King and Bob Dylan, along with money men like Bill Graham and Marshall Chess.

It's tough to get over the hump early on -- the simplistic scan of the pioneers and the cheesy transition to the young boomers, wherein everyone is depicted as wonderful, talented and racially harmonious in every way. But the music is good, and the filmmakers' hearts are in the right place.

JOY RIDE (B+) - Let's follow two emotionally damaged middle-age men as they drive themselves to their comedy gigs and perform in hipster clubs. Onetime wild man Bobcat Goldthwait and the former wunderkind Dana Gould have been pals for decades, and Goldthwait, now known as a skilled indie director, filmed them on the road and during their two-man shows.

Gould, known for his work on "The Simpsons," is awfully intense compared to Goldthwait's zen demeanor these days, and it is heartening to see them open up about their unpalatable upbringings and ways of coping with their respective mental challenges. This, of course, is yet another insider standup buddy wank (in which they gaze lovingly at the other's inspired genius on stage every night, a less vaudevillian Gen X version of the duo of Martin Short and Steve Martin), and it's ironic that they have the chutzpah to dis Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," as if they are not essentially doing the same thing. But there's also something charming about the men's relationship -- and they are really funny. Stick around (or skip ahead) to the 55-minute mark and Goldthwait's flawless rendition of a shaggy-dog tale about an airplane flight that had engine trouble and made an emergency landing. (He, too, sticks the landing.)

The clips are well curated -- the highlights include Goldthwait trashing Arsenio Hall's set, torching Jay Leno's guest chair, terrorizing Regis and Kathie Lee with a fire extinguisher, and performing in a leisure suit and heavy makeup. (And the clip of Gould cutting a promo with Bob Hope is worth the price of admission.) There certainly could be fewer "I was pals with Robin Williams" stories, although it's eerily fascinating to hear about Williams playing Call of Duty for hours at a stretch while Goldthwait just sat at his side. And the attempt to perpetuate the feud with Seinfeld mostly flops, which Seinfeld would just love. But these two guys are old pros, and at 78 minutes they don't wear out their welcome.

BONUS TRACKS

One cool nugget from "Born in Chicago" is the story of how the Rolling Stones insisted on having Howling Wolf join them on the bill for their 1965 appearance on ABC's hip show "Shindig":

Buddy Guy (reported to be updating his name, in order to appeal to younger listeners, to Dude Bro) shredding through our title track:

 

The Pixies with their out-of-control-locomotive performance of "Born in Chicago":

What If ...

 ... two dudes tried to survive the apocalypse in a biodome and Nicolas Cage started showing up in everybody's dreams ...

BIOSPHERE (B+) - This whole experiment relies critically on your ability to suspend disbelief. And I won't even come close to ruining the plot twist that requires the viewer to toss most rationality out the window. 

The important thing here is that Mark Duplass and Sterling K. Brown ("Waves") are wonderful companions -- to each other and in relation to us -- and Duplass and director Mel Eslyn have written a fascinating, if weird, post-dystopian tale of survival. Duplass' Billy and Brown's Ray share a biodome designed by Ray, an oasis in a dark world. Billy, an aging hipster gamer, used to be president of the United States, and Ray's wiles somehow rescued them. Their survival, though, is threatened when the fish they rely on for essential protein start dying off. Will our heroes and the fish find a way to survive?

Since that's all I can say about the plot, let me wax on a bit about Duplass. First, Brown is really good here, but there is no filmmaker/writer/actor like Mark Duplass. He has a unique ability to create relatable characters and then imbue them with so much humanity and nuance that his performances can seem otherworldly yet impeccably grounded. Here he inhabits a complex man-child who is unafraid to explore the emotional depths of his lifelong friendship. He can be effortlessly funny -- in particularly subtle ways -- and deeply moving. Just a glance or a perfunctory line delivery can speak volumes

Maybe great actors really do need to suffer for their art. As I write this I noticed that the New Yorker just published a lengthy interview with Duplass, in which he discusses a lifetime battle with depression. I don't know what his secret is. But no one has created more quality films, TV shows and performances than he has, whether as a producer with his brother Jay or in projects such as this, where he collaborates on a script and then co-stars. Imagine putting yourself out there so often and in so many ways -- and succeeding in almost every project you take on. "Biosphere" is proof that he has not run out of intriguing ideas or creative ways to put a neat spin on a genre that has been beaten into the ground. 

From his film origins in the Mumblecore movement ("The Puffy Chair") through mainstream success while maintaining indie cred, Duplass is easily, by far, the best multi-hyphenate storyteller of our generation. And whether or not you buy the crazy gimmick in "Biosphere" you'd be hard-pressed to walk out on his and Brown's compelling two-man show.

DREAM SCENARIO (B) - I laughed a lot during this meandering thought experiment, mostly at Nicolas Cage's shlubby, passive-agressive college professor who, for some bizarre reason, begins to pop up in humanity's nightly dreams. Whereas "Biosphere" is meticulously thought-out and logically airtight (if farfetched), here writer-director Kristoffer Borgli was struck with a really good idea but didn't really map everything out well and loses the thread in the second half.

Kudos to the makeup department for the convincing bald pate on Cage's Paul Matthews, a nerd who lets others take advantage of him. His first appearances in dreams are innocuous, and he starts to get recognized wherever he goes, but then his actions in the dreams turn violent, and he in shunned, even ousted from polite society. It's kind of a groaning take on cancel culture, but it does finally draw Paul out of his doldrums as he tries to fight for his right to exist. 

All the while, Cage wrings melancholy humor out of the material. But the second half of the film is a mess. One bright spot is Michael Cera as head of a PR team trying to sell Paul on the idea of adding product placements to his appearances in people's subconsciouses. Cera is great, but the idea goes nowhere, gets dropped for a while, then gets wildly overplayed as Borgli rushes to wrap everything up. Another fun scene involves a gathering of Paul's fragile students, guided by another teacher who tries to gently reintroduce them to this Walter Mitty version of Freddy Krueger, only to frighten them all off.

There are some interesting ideas here, but they never gel. It's never boring, though, just clunky. Cage gets an assist from Julianne Nicholson as Paul's long-suffering wife and Dylan Gelula as a PR assistant who wants to re-create the sex dreams she has about Paul, to disastrous results. Even if it falls short of its potential, there's enough here to appreciate everyone's effort.

BONUS TRACK

At one point in "Biosphere," the friends dance around to obscure '70s-'80s pop songs by a band called Zeus. Here is "I Love the Night," which sounds like Rick Springfield fronting the Cars: 

I've never heard of this band, and I can't find out much about them on the internet. I mean, who are these masked rockers?

New to the Queue

 It all comes to a head ...

Todd Haynes might be going to the well once too often, but we'll look in on his twist on the Mary Kay Letourneau story, "May December."

Ava Duvernay takes Isabel Wilkerson's nonfiction book Caste and dramatizes it as "Origin."

A documentary chronicles the challenges of local news operations, "Bad Press."

Any description that starts out "The smoke sauna practices of southern Estonia ..." has me hooked, so we'll check out the documentary "Smoke Sauna Sisterhood."

A polemic about the idea of Black Americans moving to the South to wield political influence, "South to Black Power."

Doc Watch: Rock Docs

 

THE STONES AND BRIAN JONES (B) - This documentary from Nick Broomfield about the doomed co-founder of the Rolling Stones is incredibly intricate but not very intimate. Broomfield is very respectful of Brian Jones, and he draws out a lot of people who knew him back in the '60s, but the director never really gets under Jones' skin or inside his mind.

Jones was the pioneer of dying of rock-star indulgences at age 27. He succumbed to drugs and alcohol in the summer of 1969, just weeks after getting kicked out of the band by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard. And this biography can get quite granular at times -- not unlike the documentary from earlier this year about another troubled soul, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd -- tracking down a lot of the beautiful women who defined Jones' existence. There was at least one gasp in the audience when it was revealed that Jones had a pattern of finding a teenage girlfriend, moving in with her family, making a baby, and then moving on to the next one, doing that five times by age 23.

But why did Jones act the way he did, engaging in aggressive serial monogamy and drowning himself in pills and booze? Maybe something-something about his childhood, we're told, coming from a square household led by strict parents. There's not much to glean from Jones himself, seen in archival interviews. He was quite deferential to the songwriters Jagger and Richard, and Jagger quickly surpassed Jones as the face and appeal of the band. While he didn't mind standing off to the side, he did rue the evolution from blues to rock 'n' roll. What also seemed to bother Jones was the mate-swapping that the Stones principals engaged in, passing women around like baseball cards. A story is told that willowy model Anita Pallenberg arrived at the Cannes film festival with Jones and left it days later with Richard. Marianne Faithfull seemed to make the rounds with the trio, too.

Broomfield can't resist the urge to insert himself in the story. As a teen he met Jones on a train and was forever transfixed by the mop-haired rocker. Broomfield's narration at times is sluggish. Mick and Keith don't sit for an interview, of course. Bill Wyman, though, is a wonderful host, and this is worth it simply for his flair for spinning war stories, always with a twinkle in his eye. But in the end, it's difficult to conjure strong feelings either way for Jones. This might have been a touching tragedy, if the demons in Jones' head hadn't gone to the grave with him 54 years ago.

SQUARING THE CIRCLE: THE STORY OF HIPGNOSIS (C) - The stories of Baby Boomers sure are getting tiresome. Especially when many of the stories seem apocryphal. Here we delve into the British art studio Hipgnosis, which made its name during the classic-rock era designing a bunch of iconic album covers, such as the prism on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."

And, yes, we again come full circle with Syd Barrett (profiled in this doc), with now-familiar stories told, as we get to know Aubrey "Po" Powell, the co-founder of Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson, Barrett's old pal, a decade gone and seen here only in archival footage. Anton Corbijn ("Control," "The American") chugs chronologically through the cover designers' oeuvre, and the origin stories are pretty interesting at first. But he starts to pinball from David Gilmour and Roger Waters' Pink Floyd album covers to Paul McCartney's "Band on the Run" and "Venus and Mars" (a couple of billiard balls, cool) to 10cc to Led Zeppelin's "Presence." There's a twinge of curiosity piqued by references to the Sex Pistols and Peter Gabriel. Grumpy Noel Gallagher of Oasis brings a Gen X factor to play fanboy to his elders, his observations a clunky note in the proceedings. Everyone (shot in arty black-and-white) looks really old, even McCartney.

Maybe if this were less than an hour it would have made a snappier PBS special. In the second half, Powell, who seems like a genuinely talented and friendly person, just kind of drones on with more hoary stories (we yet again revisit the infamous inflatable pig from Floyd's "Animals"). By the time we get to McCartney insisting on posing a statue on Mount Everest, the documentary crosses over into the indulgences of rich rock stars from a million years ago. (Powell literally reminds us that "money was no object" back then.) OK, old dudes. Cool stories. Glad you all had fun.

BONUS TRACK

The "Jones" trailer:

Comiskey Park: An Unobstructed View

 

LAST COMISKEY (B+) - An unabashed labor of love, this DIY documentary pays tribute to the final season of Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, before it faced the wrecking ball after the 1990 season. Matt Flesch conducts interviews with former players and curates fascinating footage from the Dick Allen/Bill Veeck/Harry Caray 1970s, an era of rowdy fun, if not pennants.

The talking heads include Ozzie Guillen (the star of the 1990 team, who would go on to bring that elusive championship to Chicago as manager in 2005); journeymen pitchers like Donn Paul, Scott Radisnky, Greg Hibbard, Bobby Thigpen and Jack McDowell (who all pay tribute to veteran catcher Carlton Fisk); and scrappy players Scott Fletcher and Lance Johnson. A key figure is organist Nancy Faust, the team's scrappy little sister who invented the walk-up song in the '70s ("Jesus Christ Superstar" for Dick Allen, etal.) and popularized a little pop song called "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye," an all-purpose ditty to accompany home runs (with the exploding scoreboard) as well as disgraced pitchers going through the walk of shame back to the dugout.

The charm here emanates from the Everyman production, which lovingly slaps together home movies and video clips going back to the days of lonely WSNS-Channel 44. My brother, a teen back then, broke from the family's generations of hapless Cubs fans to adopt the South Side Hitmen as is favorite team, and he was old enough in '77 to lead excursions to the left-field bleachers and occasionally take me along, though I don't remember if I was allowed to sip from the fat thermos of lemonade (spiked with gin to create the exotic Jungle Juice). It was from there that we beckoned rocket salvos from the free-agents-to-be Oscar Gamble and Richie Zisk, whom Veeck had rented for the season, and fellow thumper Eric Soderholm. This documentary is smart enough to include shots from below the bleachers, the field-level picnic area behind the left-fielder. (And don't forget the discounted seats behind the huge poles in the grandstand; you'd have to lean left or right to follow the action.)

That was quite the season at 35th and Shields. Both the Cubs and Sox would taste first place in late June and early July before the inevitable collapse, and the working-class giddiness was infectious at Comiskey park all summer. This documentary cherishes that history but always returns its focus to 1990, as the clock ticks toward the last out at the revered ballpark that once hosted Babe Ruth and other legends at the first All-Star Game in 1933. Showdowns with the mighty Oakland A's (the former champs were bloated by steroid use, especially Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire) build drama toward a hard-fought pennant chase. It was the kind of year when the Sox beat the Yankees 4-0 despite being no-hit by Andy Hawkins.

No one is too incidental to the story. We hear not just from the former GM and the players, but also from Faust, beer vendors, diehard fans. It's fun to hear slugger Ron Kittle reminisce about the cook and clubhouse guy "Chicken" Willie Thompson. Kenny McReynolds, a basketball veteran turned broadcaster, grew up in the shadow of Comiskey in a public-housing complex and has great memories to share. We're reminded of Frank Thomas' Major League debut mid-season.

It certainly helps if you are a Sox fan or a Chicagoan, but just about any sports fan could appreciate this video fanzine. Director Flesch gets an assist from veteran sportscaster Tom Shaer, which must have helped with the narrative flow, which builds to a truly moving conclusion. If this movie happened by accident, it was a happy one.

BONUS BABY

REGGIE (B+) - With a free month of Amazon Prime we caught up with this admiring documentary about another '70s favorite, Reggie Jackson, who made us a Yankees fan back in the day. Jackson is remarkably self-reflective about his role in baseball and pop culture history. He pals around with his sports-celebrity pals, like Julius "Dr. J" Erving and his longtime Oakland A's pals Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi. 

The documentary by Alex Stapleton works methodically through Jackson's timeline, from growing up in the segregated South through his incredible exploits with the A's and Yankees. The theme of racial struggle is woven throughout the 105-minute film. Particularly moving is a story Jackson tells about being humiliated at age 12 by the father of a white friend who had lent him a bicycle; Stapleton places the story within the context of Jackson's battles with Yankee manager Billy Martin during Jackson's inaugural 1977 season in New York, fresh from signing a $3 million five-year contract. 

It is all worth it to a slow build toward the two-thirds mark, when we once again get to experience Jackson's epic performance in Game 6 against the Dodgers that year, when he hit three home runs on three consecutive swings, a power show for the ages. No wonder he had a candy bar named after him.

Jackson is wistful throughout this documentary, considerate not just about himself, but the game of baseball itself. This would come off as fawning if Jackson didn't seem so genuine as an elder statesman.

BONUS TRACKS

Here is Part 1 of "Last Comiskey":

"Na-na na na ......"

The Double Life of ...

 

BLUE JEAN (B+) - Newcomer Rose McEwen digs deep for a moving performance as a closeted gym teacher in Maggie Thatcher's England during the reactionary crackdown on gay rights in the late 1980s. She plays Jean Newman, a cute, conflicted woman struggling to balance her work life and private life, unsure how to handle the consequences of living an authentic life.

 

She lives in a cramped apartment (where she mopes in front of the blandly hetero program "Blind Date" on the telly) and enjoys nights at the pub with her butch, out girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) and their circle of incestuous gal-pals. Things get complicated when a new student, Lois (Lucy Halliday), pops up at the same gay bar, and Jean feels her worlds colliding. At school, Lois is bullied by her straight classmates, led by alpha girl Siobhan (Lydia Page), and Jean feels helpless to stop it.

This is a debut feature from writer-director Georgia Oakley, who avoids cliches and takes time to flesh out these key characters. Jean reads as straight, so she "passes" well in social situations and with the other teachers and coaches (though she refuses to hit the pub with them after school). Oakley builds tension slowly and assuredly, and Jean's inner turmoil thrums to an anti-climax. That ending feels a little too pat and simplistic, but it doesn't undo the moving character study of an era that still feels haunting.

MADELEINE COLLINS (B-minus) - There may be times that you make it to the end of a challenging movie, and you managed to figure everything out finally, but if you had been in charge you would have put it together differently. This story of a woman impossibly juggling two separate families (in Paris and Geneva) is too often a chore to parse, top-heavy with mundane world-building and a rushed over-emotional ending.

Virginie Efira is Judith, a striving professional (she is a translator who often works remotely), married to a orchestra conductor and with two teen boys who seem to spend a lot of time at boarding school. Judith has concocted an elaborate ruse of weekly work trips but instead takes the train to Abdel (Quim Gutierrez) and their preschool daughter Ninon (a haunting Loise Benguerel), in a tense, fragile household in Switzerland. At first, Judith seems adept at alternating between these two existences. But her subterfuge slowly unravels.

Director Antoine Barraud (from a script he wrote with Helena Klotz) opens with a bit of mystery and misdirection. A woman shopping for a dress has a fainting spell and then an apparently fatal accident. Her connection to Judith is not entirely clear, though some might be quicker than I was to notice the parallels unfold and piece this together well before the halfway mark. If you don't do that, you might be frustrated by the leisurely pace of Barraud in connecting the dots and unmasking Judith's untenable ploy.

Efira is occasionally arresting but too often bland (in a Kim Cattrall way) as a woman who wants to have her cake and eat it too, all while testing the patience of a boss frustrated by her growing unreliability. The film barely earns the right to then race to a climax that eventually reveals Judith's full motivations and her sociopathic weaknesses. Judith seems to have more of an emotional connection with the shady character who supplies her with fake IDs than she does with her two partners; that's an interesting idea that is underdeveloped but well played in the final scene. I wish there was a better way to put this whole puzzle together. (With Jacqueline Bisset as Judith's judgmental mother.)

BONUS TRACK

At a house party, a cathartic punk dance moment features "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out" by the Larks:

Soundtrack of Your (So-Called) Life

  Soundtrack of Your Life is an occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.

That Hulu binge we were on allowed for some TV viewing. We revisited "My So-Called Life" from 1994-95, and I was reminded of how charmed I was back in the day not only by the interactions of the three engaging teens but also by the parents, whose age I was closer to at the time. Claire Danes as, like, the beta emo chick; the endlessly appealing A.J. Langer as the art-punk Rayanne; Wilson Cruz as shy gay Rickie; and, of course, Jared Leto as Jordan Catalano! I picked up on Winnie Holzman's call-backs to "Square Pegs," another short-lived gem from more than a decade earlier. 

It's the soundtrack that helps sell the show. The first episode crescendoed with the now-cliche "Everybody Hurts" from R.E.M., and the 19-show playlist includes such early '90s darlings as Juliana Hatfield, the Cranberries, Afghan Whigs, Archers of Loaf, and even a nugget from Daniel Johnston (at least on the soundtrack).

The show premiered in late 1994, coasting on the gasoline fumes of the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, which had ended just months earlier with the death of Kurt Cobain (whose R.I.P. Rolling Stone cover is glimpsed during the Halloween episode). In my car I've been listening to an Apple Music algorithm that has spun off from that era's Wedding Present and Wonderstuff into some deep cuts (James' "Sit Down," for example). I'm reminded that nothing has quite sounded like Inspiral Carpets, either before or after their run three decades ago. 

I could go on about "My So-Called Life," but the song that inspired this post appeared in episode 11, spinning, improbably, at the high school dance. It was from those faux hipster-doofuses from the Chicago scene, Urge Overkill. That same year they would break big on the "Pulp Fiction" soundtrack with a Neil Diamond cover (that was originally on their "Stull" EP). When I heard the song last night I needed to Shazam it in order to identify the familiar beat.

Date: November 21, 2023, 7:20 p.m.

Place: Home

Song:  "Dropout"

Artist: Urge Overkill

Irony Matrix: 1.5 out of 10

Comment: With the album "Saturation," Urge Overkill went national with ironic power-rock songs like "Sister Havana," "Erica Kane" and "Bottle of Fur." "Dropout" is dripping with angst. "You're too old to cry," they deadpan, "you're too young to die." They name-check Dairy Queen. It fades out with a pleasant shuffle after nearly five minutes. The boys took a lot of crap as poseurs and obnoxious scenesters. They had indie cred on Touch and Go Records, working with star producer/engineers Butch Vig and Steve Albini. With "Saturation" they sold out to Geffen Records, and they would quickly flame out in '95, doomed to the cut-out bins. For a while they held their own with Chicago rivals Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair and Veruca Salt. It was a moment. 

Albini would infamously turn on Urge Overkill and the others, in a blistering letter to the weekly Chicago Reader titled "Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge," a literal "fuck you" to rock critic Bill Wyman. Castigating the bands as major-label whores, he refers to UO as "Weiners in suits playing frat party rock, trying to tap a goofy trend that doesn’t even exist." The whole letter is worth a read. (The vivid language still resonates, from "you wave your boob flag proudly" to "you don't know shit from fat meat.") I still laugh at his comparison of Phair to Rickie Lee Jones ("a fucking chore to listen to"). Like I said, it was a moment, and we tended to get a little het up about such things. 

I found something to appreciate about Urge Overkill, Smashing Pumpkins ("Siamese Dream" still mostly holds up) and even Phair, who, bless her heart, couldn't sing (every generation gets the Stevie Nicks it deserves), but "Girls! Girls! Girls!" is a great single. Urge Overkill might have, as Albini predicted, blown their promo wads and sunk into obscurity, but their early stuff had some heft to it. We'll always have Guyville.

BONUS TRACK

Episode 12 of "My So-Called Life" promises a live performance by the era's ultimate power trio Buffalo Tom. Let's spin one of our all-time favorites (and my dog Remy's, too, at the time), "Velvet Roof":

Amour Fou

 We reach the bottom of our Hulu queue just in time to cancel. Here are two French films.

TWO OF US (2019) (B+) - The only film by Filippo Meneghetti is a clear-headed ode to true love, the story of two late-in-life lesbians who are constrained by the fear of one of them to come out to her family. And when a health crisis hits, the other is helpless to step in.

This sounds like a classic TV movie-of-the-week -- except for the same-sex part -- but it is richer and deeper than that, a profound slice of life that explores the inner worlds of Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevallier), who live across the hall from each other in a nondescript apartment building. Madeleine's daughter, Anne, and family don't know that the two are lovers, having fallen in love ages ago when they met in Rome. When alone, they are a tender couple, cozy in each other's company; when dour Anne (Lea Drucker) and others are around, they appear to be cordial neighbors.

Then Madeleine suffers a stroke. Nina's instinct is to nurse her partner back to health. But Madeleine, who survived an abusive relationship with a husband, never had the talk with Anne, and so Anne treats Nina like a snoop. And Nina acts like one, using her key to creep into Madeleine's apartment, spooking the live-in nurse (Muriel Benazeraf). Nina is desperate, feeling robbed of the ultimate duty of an aging spouse.

Anne soon starts picking up the hints that have been obvious all along. Meneghetti (writing the script with Malysone Bovorasmy and Florence Vignon ("Mademoiselle Chambon")) crafts this like a claustrophobic thriller. The two leads are powerful, especially Chevallier who communicates volumes with her eyes while incapacitated. Sukowa, known for her biographical portrayals of Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg, is ferocious. Meneghetti paces the narrative like a pro, keeping you guessing as to whether this will end in tragedy or if true love will win out in the end.

ANAIS IN LOVE (B-minus) - I don't watch Lifetime movies, but from what I've heard, this movie might have a lot in common with them. Do they have harried heroines who run around a lot because they're late? Do the women make ditzy decisions about whom to fall in love with? Is their mom usually dying of cancer? Do they learn a deep life lesson from their 90-minute experience?

This French farce -- with a few dollops of gravitas -- checks all the right boxes to qualify as a run-of-the-mill rom-com, albeit with a French twist. Anais (Anais Demoustier) is 30 going on 16; her hyperactive nature drives away a live-in boyfriend, and when she hooks up with a married professor, she comes off as a stalker or striver rather than any sort of young muse. That bears out, eventually, when the shlubby professor turns out to have a riveting wife, noted author Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi from "5x2"), whom Anais exalts as a paragon of intelligence and beauty.

It is tough to buy into the relationship between Anais and Daniel the professor (Denis Podalydes), and thus everything after their meeting feels like a cheap plot device. The whimsical nature of the narrative always feels too breezy for any emotions to really land. This is a debut film from Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, and she occasionally shows a flair for a clever line or a dramatic swerve, but she never captures a believable tone. Demoustier is charming but lightweight. It feels like Tedeschi is slumming, the power of her talent wasted in a "New Girl" knockoff.

BONUS TRACK

"Two of Us" makes lovely use of Petula Clark's "Chariot (Sul Mio Carro)," the Italian forerunner of the 1963 hit "I Will Follow Him." (She also recorded a French version.) For Nina and Madeleine, it is their song, marking the love affair that began in Rome. 

New to the Queue

 Expanding the possibilities ...

We might have the bandwidth for a documentary about a hospital grief counselor during the pandemic, despite the missing comma in the title (?), "A Still Small Voice."

We're curious about a movie in which Nicolas Cage stars as an Everyman who starts appearing in everyone's dreams, "Dream Scenario."

We're wary that it might be too twee, but we might take time for the audacious, poetic debut film, "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt."

A documentary profile of the provocative sex researcher, "The Disappearance of Shere Hite."

Nick Broomfield ("Kurt & Courtney," "Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love") takes his X-acto knife to the troubled '60s blues rocker in "The Stones and Brian Jones."

A deadpan rom-com, from director Akis Kaurismaki ("The Match Factory Girl"), who has flown below our radar, "Fallen Leaves."

Doc Watch: Comedy Gold

 

ALBERT BROOKS: DEFENDING MY LIFE (B) - This is a friendly, by-the-numbers chronological march through the life of the funniest man of my lifetime. Albert Brooks sits down for coffee and poundcake with his childhood pal, Rob Reiner, as they kibbitz and introduce classic clips from Brooks' career.

 Brooks was a legend of absurdist standup routines going back to the '60s, a heavy influence on the likes of David Letterman and Judd Apatow, who appear here along with a bevy of admirers, including Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Nikki Glaser and Conan O'Brien. (Odd choices include fangirl Alana Haim and disgraced newsman Brian Williams.) 

Reiner and Brooks are fun to watch together, including in a clip of Reiner hosting the "Tonight Show" with Brooks and Penny Marshall as guests. All the touchstones are here -- the "Comedy Minus One" album, the foundational "Real Life" mockumentary, the beloved "Modern Romance," the ground-zero "Lost in America" and his star-making turn in "Broadcast News." (He has only eight directing credits in his career.)

The documentary, streaming on HBO's Max, spends a little too much of its 92 minutes on Brooks' show-biz parents. His dad Harry Einstein was a comedian's comedian known for his ethnic character Parkyakarkus and for dropping dead onstage immediately after slaying the crowd at the Friars' Club in the late 1950s. His mother was a singer and actress who gave up her career to raise their boys, though not without a dollop of bitterness.

If you're not a fan, little of this will register. If you are a fan, you might feel cheated by the chopping up of his best bits, such as the fumbling ventriloquist routine. Brooks trafficked in high-concept material, and 30 seconds of the Speak-n-Spell routine in front of Johnny Carson simply doesn't do justice to one of the funniest one-offs in the history of comedy. But a seat at the table with Brooks and Reiner is often a delight. Brooks' closing statement before the credits -- about why he never took the easy road -- offers a rather profound encapsulation of a great comic's career.

THE IMPROV: 60 AND STILL STANDING (B-minus) - This is not so much a film as a standup special extended to feature length, featuring the cream of the cop among the comics who have graced The Improv in Los Angeles for six decades. Your mileage will vary with each comic, ranging from the icy observations of Deon Cole from "Blackish" to -- yes, I'm actually typing this -- ventriloquist Jeff Dunham and that curmudgeonly old dummy of his.

We get about 10 new sets (though some of the comics do call-backs to their early years at the Improv) over 80 minutes, with interstitial classic clips from back in the heyday, featuring the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Wanda Sykes, Ray Romano, and impossibly young versions of Sarah Silverman and Adam Sandler. Those archival videos are astoundingly hit and miss considering they are to have been deemed the cream of the crop. Silverman and Sandler are great, but Seinfeld's brief excerpt is not among his best. Neither are Dave Attell and Margaret Cho. And if David Spade was ever funny, his baby-faced routine here is not evidence of it.

But, back to the present day, Whitney Cummings brings the heat. And Kevin Nealon is surprisingly sharp (until he descends into his hoary signature routine). Craig Robinson is on his own planet with an alluringly vulgar turn at the piano. Some of the younger comics have their moments, but none of them are very memorable.

It might have been fun to explore the venue's history a little more. A night of chopped-up comedy bits and some scattered greatest hits makes for a passable evening.

Group Therapy

 The Hulu binge continues ...

ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME (2021) (A-minus) - This is an utterly British cringe comedy, powered by its star (and co-writer), Tom Stourton, about a reunion of college friends that turns into a nightmare for our awkward hero. 

Stourton is amiable Pete, who is totally unprepared for the apparent gaslighting he will experience all weekend at a country estate with his former best friends, including an ex-girlfriend. There is an interloper, a local named Harry (a naughty Dustin Demri-Burns), who mocks Pete, invades his personal space, and likes to take notes whenever Pete makes a social faux pas. 

With a dash of Monty Python absurdism, the film locks Pete into a spiral of anxiety he just can't escape, thanks to the outrageous antics of his mates, who seem to resent him for dumping Claire (Antonia Clarke) and for being a goody-two-shoes aid worker. When his future fiancee arrives, there is a fear that she is joining the plot against him. Pete is a nice guy trapped in a no-win situation, a bit like a millennial Dick Van Dyke navigating a sitcom nightmare. 

The dialogue zips around among the characters, and the tension ratchets at just the right pace. Stourton commands every scene with an Everyman charm, and the ensemble keeps him on his toes. A climactic reckoning is both bizarre and a bit chilling -- a dash of David Lynch to seal the deal. A wry coda puts a neat bow on this little gem.

MARK, MARY + SOME OTHER PEOPLE (2021) (A-minus) - Hannah Marks ("Banana Split") writes and directs, and assembles a fantastic cast of millennials for a funny and insightful think piece about open relationships. She is blessed with two strong leads as the quirky couple, Mark and Mary, played with verve and nuance by shlubby Ben Rosenfield and the dynamic Hayley Law. 

Rosenfield's Mark is perfectly awkward but also situationally confident. He rocks a pathetic porn 'stache and wild hair. Law has a mesmerizing presence, with striking features and big, beautiful eyes. And she can sing. Mary fronts a punk band with her sister and a friend, Lana (an equally exotic Odessa A'zion), the latter of whom will find her way into a threesome with Mark and Mary after the couple opens up their marriage.

Mark and Mary start out with a meet-cute in a convenience store (having previously run into each other socially) and wed a year later. Mary comes up with the idea of non-monogamy but will soon feel some twinges of regret when Mark dives into the dating scene with verve. Never does their story descend into cliche or cheap gags; at all times this feels like a real couple exploring the future together and apart. 

The story has a heart and an edge to it. The script is meticulously written. Rosenfeld and Law live deeply in their characters, with a fair amount of workshopped improv apparent. It's constantly clever in a believable way. A laugh is always around the corner, but the emotional stakes are genuine.

The supporting cast bolsters the two leads. Mark, too, has a two-member Greek chorus to bounce things off of, and Nik Dodani and Matt Shively make the most of it, particularly when they are breaking down the dating scene or recoiling at the notion of parenthood. A couple of elders helps out as well -- Lea Thompson is cool as an OG poly, Aunty Carol, and Gillian Jacobs makes it look effortless as a wise-cracking gynecologist.

Marks has an ear for the patter of her generation, and she knows how to shape a narrative arc. Whether in front of the camera or behind it, she makes movies special.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

 

Over the "Mark, Mary" closing credits, Cults with "Always Forever" ...

 ... and Green Day with "Holy Toledo!":

Life Is Short: The C Team

 

We spent 2 months with Hulu (one month free) in order to catch up on some titles that we've been curious about but haven't seen streaming elsewhere. Some turned out well. Others not so much.

Here are three that didn't pan out, so we pulled the plug.

Title: DINNER IN AMERICA

Running Time: 106 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  5 MIN

Portion Watched: 5%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 10 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Watched the latest episode of "Last Week Tonight" on HBO.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 77-1

Comment: It was obvious right away that this is B-movie trash. The only question was whether sticking around for Hannah Marks ("Banana Split," "After Everything," "Mark, Mary + Some Other People"). It wasn't. This starts with a seedy leading man (Kyle Gallner), a punk rocker who will go on the lam with a fan. One of the first scenes features Gallner's character meeting the family of Marks' character, and would you believe the mom openly lusts after him across the dinner table? This one was going nowhere fast. It looked cheap and vulgar.

 

Title: MATERNA

Running Time: 105 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  41 MIN

Portion Watched: 39%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 10 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Watched an episode of the original British version of "The Office" on Hulu.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 13-1

Comment: This is a psychological study of four women revolving around their roles as (potential) mothers and their relationship with their own moms. We made it part-way through the second vignette, and the two lead women in those first two quarters were compelling at times to watch. Writer-director David Gutnik studies their faces intensely through frequent close-ups. We're a fan of Kate Lyn Shiel and never tire of her unique beauty. But her character's story was dishwater dull. Gutnik gives us long takes of her working on a virtual-reality project, interspersed with her routine daily habits (we get to see her water a plant and brush her teeth three different times each), all of which leads up to her discovering she is pregnant, performing a self-ultrasound (OK), and then conducting a medical abortion on herself. All the while, her mother nags her over the phone, worried that our heroine will turn into an old maid. The second vignette featured an actress, and that is one of our pet peeves -- actors playing actors, as if it's a back-breaking job. Jade Eshete is also fascinating to watch, mainly because of her perfect facial structure. But the tedium continued to build, and we started to squirm. Whatever Gutnik was trying to get across was lost in the monotony and lack of plot.

 

 

Title: SOMETHING IN THE DIRT

Running Time: 116 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  21MIN

Portion Watched: 18%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 10 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Sampled "Dinner in America" before turning to the latest episode of "Last Week Tonight" on HBO.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 22-1

Comment: Here was another psychological thriller that was more annoying than intriguing. We enjoyed the last outing from writer-director Justin Benson, the mind-bending cult psych-out "The Endless." And Benson and collaborator Aaron Moorhead again star in this new film. Maybe we're getting old (see data above), but the first reel of this film is all over the place, and the characters were off-putting. It was too cryptic for its own good. Two tenants of an apartment complex have a meet-cute and then weird supernatural evetnts, like flashing lights, keep happening. It looked like it was going nowhere fast and that it was going to be a chore to keep up over two hours. This looked promising, but we delivered a quick hook to this sophomore effort.

 

 

 

 

New to the Queue

 Glimmers of gloom and bada-boom ...

Chrisos Nikou follows up his wonderful debut "Apples" with an algorithmic romance starring Jessie Buckley, "Fingernails."

A three-hour Argentine film about a low-key heist, "The Delinquents."

Colman Domingo stars as the architect of the 1963 March on Washington, "Rustin."

We'll probably regret it (or bail out of the 135-minute run), but Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti reunite for a glum period piece, "The Holdovers."

One of the comedy greats gets the HBO documentary treatment, "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life."

Holy Crap!* Fiends With Benefits

 

NO HARD FEELINGS (D+) - This one starts out with a scene in which the lead character's car is getting repossessed because there is a tax lien on the house she inherited from her mother. I'm an attorney but not a tax/bankruptcy attorney, but I can't imagine a universe where someone's car would get grabbed under those circumstances. 

You see that out of the gate and you say, OK, it's going to be that kind of a movie. And it is. It is one long idiot plot, one contrivance after another. Jennifer Lawrence plays a down-on-her-luck 30-something who -- needing a replacement car -- happens to struggle across a classified ad from parents offering up a car (what a coincidence!) for a woman who will bust their son's cherry. Yep, it's that kind of movie. (It's also the kind of movie where the main character has to rollerblade everywhere and doesn't think to take the rollerblades off when she has to climb stairs -- because, then where would the comedy be without such physical humor from a glamorous actress.)

But wait, there's more. Not only does is this transaction arranged, but would you believe that Jennifer Lawrence can't close the deal with the nerd she has been assigned to? Yes, that Jennifer Lawrence, the highly attractive and charming one. In 2023, neither she nor the dweeb can manage to at least round third base, because ... well, take our word for it, they just can't bring themselves to sully themselves in such a cheap way. In 2023.

Lawrence is Maddie, one of those noble locals scraping by among rich seasonal snobs, this time in Montauk, N.J. She has a couple of fun scenes with her bitter ex, Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who happens to be the tow-truck driver who snatches her car at the beginning of the movie. They have a nice exchange when she tries to sweet talk him about how much she misses him, until a wild Italian in his underwear strolls out of her house, belying her claims. Natalie Morales has little to latch onto in the script as Maddie's best friend.

Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti are amusing for their first couple of scenes as the suffocating and super-sensitive helicopter parents who have babied their son into a ball of neurotic virginity. (Their incredulity at Maddie's claim to be in her early 20s elicits a chuckle or two.) Andrew Barth Feldman is meek Percy (that name reminds you that it's that kind of movie), a dog-shelter worker who insists on needing to be in love in order to make love. Sure thing, Perce.

As this ridiculous story grinds on (for more than 100 minutes), you hate yourself more and more for enduring it and indulging the fledgling director, Gene Stupnitsky, and his co-writer, John Phillips (who has one other movie on his resume). Sitcom predicaments abound, and the shtick grows tiresome. You might be wondering if there's any actual sex in the movie or any kind of saucy content. I can save you some time. Skip to around the 35-minute mark if you want to see Lawrence fighting naked on a beach. For better or worse it's a highlight, or at least a pleasant diversion.

Whether that's worth a fast-forward on Netflix is a choice. Some intellectual workouts will make your brain hurt. "No Hard Feelings" (Get it? "Hard"!) will have your brain craving some exercise.

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

Kangaroo Ugly

 

THE ROYAL HOTEL (A-minus) - Here is a litmus test to see whether you can be jangled for 90 minutes and come out satisfied or disappointed. Writer-director Kitty Green takes two young women on backpack holiday and tosses them behind the bar at a rough-and-tumble tavern way out in the Australian outback, for a few weeks to make a few bucks, to see if they'll be devoured by the drunken miners who haunt the joint.

It is to Green's credit that you care so much about these two women -- and believe in them as authentic characters -- to the point where there is no moment to relax throughout this winking pseudo-horror psych-out. And she is blessed with two devoted stars -- Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick -- who genuinely feel like BFFs on a youthful suicide gambit.

Garner (who starred in Green's disappointing debut, "The Assistant") is fair-skinned but mentally tough Hanna, who looks like a dandelion, with her peroxide curls. Henwick has a stoner's smile and an aching soul as Liv, the one most susceptible to falling victim to the debauched lifestyle into which the local lushes lure the rotating casts of women who pass through as bartenders.

Things start out ominously when the gruff owner, Billy (a perfectly beat-up Hugo Weaving) greets them with a sharp epithet, shows them their rundown quarters upstairs, rations the water, and tosses Hanna and Liv into the deep end -- a wild night bidding farewell to their two predecessors, who entertain the regulars with blind-drunk antics, dancing on the bar and flashing their tits. Will the same fate eventually befall Hanna and Liv by the end of their tenure?

Green, who wrote the script with Oscar Redding, has a great idea (inspired by the true story of two Finnish women) and carefully constructs an air-tight narrative that gradually ratchets the tension. The mystery throughout is this: Are these local misogynists a bunch of menacing monsters or are they a pack of pathetic losers who are over-served and over-indulged by Billy, himself a sloppy drunk. The men are subtly drawn, broken souls with distinct personalities instead of being presented a faceless mob of brutes. 

The only protection the young women have comes from Carol (Ursula Yovich), the level-headed mother hen at this insane asylum. Yovich helps ground the film. When she gets called away, the rats will play.

Hanna and Liv are not a couple of debutantes enjoying slum tourism on a world tour; there are hints of trauma in their past, and they are escaping as much as continent-hopping in search of the perfect beach. The men hit on them before they finish pouring their first drink, and the come-ons are unrelenting. Their defenses kick in immediately. Some of the guys are actually appealing, while others (one in particular) are just creepy and persistent. 

This could have been a cheap women-in-peril toss-off, but Green imbues every scene with a level of consequences that build toward an inevitable physical climax. How these young women navigate the danger out in the middle of nowhere -- they and the others basically fuck around and find out -- is gripping from start to finish.

BONUS TRACKS

The credits provide a final howl of exhaustion, courtesy of Party Dozen with "Worker," which kicks off this four-song live set:

Meantime, the soundtrack is full of classic pop, with a budget splurge on Kylie Minogue, who offers an ironic use of "Tears on My Pillow" (from Minogue's film "The Delinquents") near the climax:

Theater Kids!

 

THEATER CAMP (B+) - This is an appropriately campy send-up of east-coast summer theater camps for kids, an obvious labor of love by the creators and the cast. Their enthusiasm throughout is addictive.

Molly Gordon and Ben Platt star as camp leaders (and former campers) Rebecca-Diane and Amos at AdirondActs, an upstate New York summer workshop for artsy kids. They are working on a tribute to the camp's owner, Joan (Amy Sedaris), who spends the movie in a coma while her bro-son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) tries to fend off financial ruin. Rebecca-Diane and Amos are writing the musical (on the fly, and it shows), though Amos shoulders most of the burden while Rebecca-Diane goes AWOL more and more, presumably off seeking a legitimate acting job.

Gordon and Platt collaborated with Nick Lieberman and Noah Galvin on the sassy script; Gordon and Lieberman directed. They are expanding on a short that they created, and they have giddy fun spoofing the teenage drama of summer camp -- something they must know from experience. The script sizzles with one liners. Kids run through vocal warm-up exercises utilizing phrases like "Wolf Blitzer has a blister on his upper lip." They traffic in silly absurdities -- "I'm not mad," Amos tells a student. "I'm just furious" -- and over-the-top drama-queen therapy-speak like this, when Rebecca Diane is a no-show at bedtime story time: "Waiting for entertainment that was expected is a painful experience." Amos has an idea for an after-school program called Chekhov for Children of Divorce.

The adults are wonderfully hammy. Nathan Lee Graham treats the kids like a troupe of drag queens. Patti Harrison is always welcome.  Ayo Edebiri ("Bottoms") is underused as an underprepared teacher who makes things up as she goes along. Keep an eye on Glenn (Galvin), the all-purpose tech-support guy.

Gordon and Platt hold the center together as old friends who can read each other's minds but whose bond is holding each other back. Their "let's put on a show" zeal has a melancholic subtext to it. (Every generation gets the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney they deserve.) That bipolar B-story lends a certain gravitas to the mindless fun that carries the narrative along. That extra layer helps keep a funny movie from descending into trite parody.

BONUS TRACKS

Early in the film we get a snippet of Paul Simon's "Obvious Child," and we rarely pass up an excuse to play this one:

Death Wish

 Two more from our Hulu run:

ON THE COUNT OF THREE (B+) - Standup comedian Jerrod Carmichael impresses as director and star of this story of a couple of emotionally wounded pals who set out on a one-day adventure that is supposed to end with their mutual suicides. As usual, that journey is much more important than the destination at the end of the film.

Carmichael, as Val teams up with Christopher Abbott (HBO's "Girls"), as Kevin, who starts out the film locked up in a mental institution. If Kevin is amped and manic, Val is dead-eyed, having just quit his dead-end job in order to spring Kevin and find a place to end it all. Of course, they get distracted along the way, and each man expresses some level of apprehension about carrying out the plan. Carmichael and Abbott drill deep into their characters, and the relationship between the men thrums with emotion, even if they don't express it much, besides bickering over which music to play in the car. Carmichael, in particular, is deft with something as simple as a withering glance.

Freed from having to worry about a future, they get reckless. Kevin points a gun at a rude mini-mart clerk, and the pair track down the psychologist who fucked up Kevin as a child (Henry Winkler pops in as the arrogant therapist). Other cameos include Tiffany Haddish as Val's fed-up impending baby-mama and J.B. Smoove as Val's deadbeat dad.

Carmichael, working with a smart script by newcomers Ari Katcher ("The Carmichael Show") and Ryan Welch, works efficiently, clocking the production in at 85 taut minutes. They find a balance of grim comedy and heartache that sticks with a viewer.

THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS (2021) (B+) - This ultra-indie examination of a couple's trial separation is less a slow burn than a slow build. It benefits from natural performances that feel expertly group-workshopped to create a gritty human drama.

Clayne Crawford transforms into desperate David, who is shown in the opening scene standing over his marital bed, pointing a gun at his estranged wife and her lover. You'd be wrong to think, though, that this is a trashy revenge thriller. Instead, it is a nuanced and raw deconstruction of David's separation from Niki (Sepideh Moafi) and its impact on their three young boys and teenage daughter, Jess (Avery Pizzuto), who jousts with her father for failing to "fight for us." 

David is tightly wound, and with good reason. Some jerk is sleeping with his wife and hanging out with his kids, and David isn't sure why this marriage isn't working. He also is living with his father now and spending a lot of time stewing in his pickup truck, driving around rural Utah. Crawford's performance is subtle; you cringe a bit as David tries a little too hard to have fun with his kids during his prescripted time with them. He gets an earful from Niki the day after sneaking over to the house in the middle of the night and swapping Mitch Hedberg jokes with the kids. (For the extra touch of realism, actual Hedberg jokes are used.)

The conversations we see between David and Niki are as awkward as you'd expect from a wife and husband in limbo, and a showdown between David and her lover is drenched in sarcasm and dread. I can't believe the dialogue was scripted so finely; there had to be a good number of rehearsals and some well-earned ad-libbing allowed by the actors.

Journeyman Robert Machoian, working within a compact 85 minutes, has crafted a simmering character study, with a fine-tuned narrative that never diverts along a familiar path. He uses no soundtrack but focuses instead on ambient sounds, as if making a documentary. 

David and Niki are three-dimensional characters, and anyone who has gone through a breakup after a long-term relationship should feel this in the pit of their gut. Machoian nails that sudden welling of irrational emotion that can make us do stupid things, and the suspense crescendoes naturally. Hopefully there won't be deadly weapons lying around when that feeling overtakes us. In the end (the banal coda can be chilling, in retrospect), it's worth considering the alternate meanings possible for the movie's title.