Doc Watch: Grifters

 

DEAR MR. BRODY (A-minus) - Documentaries have a way of rescuing obscure stories from the dustbin of history. This peppy production unspools the tale of Michael Brody, a highly unstable trust-fund hippie who in 1970 announced that he was going to start giving away his millions and invited the world to mail their pleas to him.

Writer-director Keith Maitland stumbled with his 2016 homage to the "Austin City Limits" TV show, "A Song for You," but he has a surer hand here unpeeling the fascinating tale of Brody's brief moment in the sun, when he was quickly revealed to have been too good to be true. Maitland, with the help of producer Melissa Robyn Glassman, unlocks a trove of the tens of thousands of letters stored in several locations, all but a few of them unopened for decades. 

We are introduced to some of the people, 50 years later, who are invited to unseal their letters and read them aloud. The emotions are genuine and powerful. These people, a few of them children at the time they wrote in, managed to carve out meaningful lives, even without getting a penny from the heir of a margarine fortune. We meet a daughter and mother who had separately written in for a handout. There is a preacher who, as a young man, envisioned expanding his hair salon that would have served a diverse clientele. Most touching are three sisters who jointly discover the letter of their mother, who also had dreams of being an entrepreneur.

Michael Brody was a spoiled con man. Age 21 at the time, he had dreams of being a pop star, and at the height of the media scrum he appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." He had a whirlwind romance with a cool hippie chick, Renee, who appears here, seemingly still befuddled by the phenomenon. (Their son appears, too; he inherited a stash of unopened missives.) We also hear from a former high school classmate of Brody's, now a filmmaker, who tried in vain to produce a fictionalized version of the story, as well as a concert promoter who got swept up into Brody's entourage and provides some inside perspective. Pay attention and you'll see young TV reporters, including Geraldo Rivera, Peter Jennings and future "60 Minutes" stalwart Ed Bradley, rocking quite the 'fro and perhaps inspiring the retro look of Questlove.

While Brody's personality dominates this narrative, in the end the story is about the thousands of desperate people whose hopes fell victim to a frivolous young man's greed for attention. These ordinary people reached out -- often on behalf of friends or family members -- but never got the courtesy of a response. They moved on, regardless. One scene involves footage from a feeding frenzy of hopefuls, where one man, after talking to others in line, realizes that his hardship pales in comparison to that of the others, and so he walks away.

Maitland uses visuals well to add poignancy to the presentation. We see closeups of hands, now old or middle-aged, gripping a letter, and we watch the reader get magically transported to their youth, to a head space they might have completely forgotten. We see close-ups of the printed words, super-close-ups of individual letters, even punctuation. The effect is touching. The three sisters recognize a little stylistic flourish of their mother's: she bound the pages of her letter not with a staple but with a safety pin. 

The words of the title, "Dear Mr. Brody," echo throughout the film, and you can hear the ellipses that follow that phrase, a hollow space for the wishes and dreams of ordinary folks. The movie, in the end, isn't about a fatuous playboy living out a self-indulgent fantasy. It's about the rest of us who forged ahead, soberly through the decades. Charity be damned; whatever they ended up with, they earned it on their own.

That '80s Grift: Cult Classics

 Revisiting a pair from back in the day:

ANGEL HEART (1987) (B+) - Mickey Rourke is in his prime as an alektorophobic* private eye who gets sucked into voodoo shenanigans in 1950s New Orleans, ending up in a battle for his own soul. Rourke swaggers through this neo-noir, blasting a Brooklyn accent, as Harry Angel, a hard-boiled dick who takes a job looking for a crooner named Johnny Favorite, a wounded veteran of World War II who sold his soul for stardom. 

Angel is hired by the mysterious Louis Cyphere (the adapted screenplay, by director Alan Parker, is not subtle), brought to life with diabolical suavity by Robert De Niro, schooling Rourke in just the few scenes he appears in. When Angel lands in New Orleans, where the practitioners of the dark arts lead him on a goose chase. Or maybe chicken chase. (What is it with his fear of chickens? Even eggs creep him out.)

He meets the mystifying Margaret (a sizzling Charlotte Rampling); the alluring teen mother Epiphany (a provocative Lisa Bonet, in her breakout from "Cosby"); and a blues guitarist named Toots Sweet  (musician Brownie McGhee), among other fascinating locals. Some of them end up dead shortly after Angel interacts with them. And the viewer needn't be a seasoned investigator to piece together the plot puzzle and figure out where this is headed.

 

Parker -- the elegant British filmmaker behind "Midnight Express," "Shoot the Moon," and "Mississippi Burning," among other hits -- pens a clever script, and he is a master at pacing. He also knows how to capture a sultry sex scene. You probably need to be a fan of Rourke's to buy into the fetishistic touches (that was easier to do back then), but this is solid storytelling and guilt-free entertainment.

* - Fear of chickens.

TRUE STORIES (1986) (B+) - David Byrne is now an old man who dresses like a celebrity communist and performs palatable songs on awards-show telecasts. But during the peak of his power in the mid-'80s, he walked the same tightrope that David Lynch trod in transitioning from the avant garde to the mainstream.

Byrne's ode to small-town America imagines the fictional town of Virgil, Texas, peopled by a diverse group of oddball Americans. It is on the one hand a glimpse of ordinary Americana but on the other hand an anomaly. It celebrates the state's sesquicentennial, and so the simple townfolk are putting on airs -- a fashion show, a parade (featuring an all-accordion marching band), a talent show. 

John Goodman, in one of his first big roles, grounds the film as lovelorn Louis Fyne, a mid-30s bachelor searching for a wife. Goodman is surrounded by character actors who add depth and soul to their portrayals. Byrne addresses the camera as the outsider conducting his sociological study of small-town America. It might come across as condescending if it weren't so heartfelt; this isn't an elitist artist mocking the plebes. It rises above the smirking snark of a John Waters film of the same era.

The film is buoyed by one of Byrne's best song collections. You probably remember the "Wild, Wild Life" video from that year, and it is taken essentially from a lip-sync scene in the movie. In most other instances, the movie characters sing Byrne's tunes -- Pops Staples doing "Papa Legba"; Tito Larriva interpreting "Radio Head"; and Goodman pouring his heart out to "People Like Us," which always tugs at my heart.

The narrative is shaggy and meandering, but it holds together. Swoosie Kurtz charms as a bed-ridden socialite who experiences life through contraptions (they feed her and turn the pages of her magazines) and TV commercials (real ones interspersed with fake pitches). Byrne's halting, innocent delivery sets just the right tone. Annie Culver and Spalding Gray play well off of each other as a snooty couple who communicate only through their children. And journeyman actress Jo Harvey Allen delivers skewed laughs as the Lying Woman. Byrne brings it all together in a technicolor dreamscape that still feels lived-in to this day.

BONUS TRACKS

Over the "True Stories" end credits, the sweet and sorrowful "City of Dreams":

 

And Steve Jordan and his band crank out "Soy de Tejas" during a rowdy bar scene:

New to the Queue

 Hey, it's been a while ...

From France, Louis Garrel writes, directs and stars in a rom-com caper film, "The Innocent."

The Dardenne brothers ("Two Days, One Night," "The Kid With the Bike," "Rosetta") are back after a layoff, with another tale of children in peril, "Tori and Lokita."

An indie film out of Oakland made in 1998, about fears of a serial killer targeting young men in that city, "Drylongso."

Ulrich Seidl (the "Paradise" trilogy) dramatizes the pathetic life of a washed-up singer of power ballads, "Rimini."

A documentary about baseball legend Reggie Jackson? Let's indulge our inner adolescent with "Reggie."

Doc Watch: Illicit Behavior

 

MONEY SHOT: THE PORNHUB STORY (B+) - Netflix brings a surprisingly thorough and balanced approach to the tension, in the world of online porn, between cracking down on victims and inhibiting honest sex workers. In a perky hour-and-a-half, director Suzanne Hillinger juggles a lot of facts and personalities and weaves them into a coherent and compelling narrative.

Pornhub is the Walmart of porn, and the main rub, so to speak, began when an advocacy group and a New York Times columnist convinced Mastercard and Visa to halt its dealings with the site. It forced Pornhub to jettison millions of unverified uploads (thus, presumably, eliminating a lot of illegal content), but that move also punished small-time verified users, who lost a valuable source of quick and easy income.

The film skillfully sways back and forth in its sympathies, with the sex workers probably getting most of the benefit of the doubt. But the crusaders against child pornography and sex trafficking (who have roots in prudish Christian activism) make a strong case too. In the middle is Noelle Perdue, a former Pornhub employee, who comes off as a wise insider and an expert able to juggle all the nuances here.

The other talking heads are knowledgeable, articulate and at times rather entertaining. What could have been a throwaway and sleazy presentation is instead a meaty examination of a topic that's much more intriguing than it looks.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF FENTANYL (B) - This PBS documentary about a safe-shoot-up clinic for drug addicts in Vancouver could use a little less fly-on-the-wall edginess and a little more context, but it nonetheless is effective at offering a sobering glimpse of a ragtag group of people trying to prevent overdoses and save lives.

Newcomer Colin Askey embeds with the crew of workers and volunteers -- many of them in recovery themselves -- at the Overdose Prevention Society, a storefront in the city's Eastside neighborhood, as they perform Job-like work tending to addicts looking for a fix. At any time an overdose can occur, and the team has Narcan at the ready.

We watch one man make strides with his sobriety, but the focus is on the manager, Ronnie, who wearily soldiers on after years in the urban trenches. The hirsute bear of a man is lovingly called Narcan Jesus, and he provides the film with an ending that is both hopeful and heartbreaking. 

But Askey does not deify anyone here. You realize that this is an uphill battle, a blip in the wave of fentanyl deaths sweeping across North America. These lives are fragile, and don't beat yourself up if a thought flashes through your mind about how and whether we go all out to rescue these lost souls.

No-man's land

 

SOUTH MOUNTAIN (2019) (B+) - This is a lyrical visual essay about a woman dealing with the dissolution of her marriage. It's not a tragedy, but rather a mere slice of life. Talia Balsam anchors a uniquely lived-in drama, full of authentic characters.

Lila (Balsam) lives an idyllic existence in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York with her writer husband Edgar (a solid Scott Cohen, Max from "Gilmore Girls") and their blended family. (She married him after his wife, her best friend, died.) Lila's pal Gigi (Andrus Nichols) is dealing with breast cancer, while their daughters fall in and out of friendship. Edgar's bad habit of infidelity hits a crescendo when his girlfriend gives birth, and Edgar finally moves out, triggering traumas of his past infidelities for Lila and her family.

Edgar's older daughter Sam (a sharp Macualee Cassaday) has a skeptical view of her parents' relationship, understandably. Sam's friend Jonah (Michael Oberholtzer) hangs around doing odd jobs and ends up in bed with Lila, who treats him as nothing more than cynical payback to her spouse, or merely a scratch to an itch. Naian Gonzalez Norvind is the secret weapon here as sharp-tongued Dara, the daughter of both Lila and Edgar.

Balsam has an even keel, and her wistful Lila grounds this deeply satisfying dramedy. She plays well against Cohen as her selfish husband, Nichols as her best friend, and especially Norvind's Dara. They are all surrounded by a wonderfully detailed set, centered around a summer house stuffed with a lifetime's worth of detritus. This comes from writer-director Hilary Braugher ("Stephanie Daley," "Innocence"), who has crafted a quiet, authentic chronicle of a familiar story of a middle-aged woman.

NO BEARS (C) - Jafar Panahi has made some brilliant films, but his latest is alternatively confusing and inert, a sloppy story about people limited by oppressive governments. It is honorable that Panahi traveled to the Iranian border to craft a meta-narrative about border politics; I wish it held together as a coherent narrative.

Panahi plays himself, a director who has gone close to the Iranian border with Turkey but who hides out in a remote rented house and directs the film-within-a-film remotely. The film he is making is about a couple -- based on a real couple he knows -- trying to cross from Turkey to Iran; meantime, Panahi gets caught up in some local intrigue in the Iranian village, as a young couple is planning to cross the border in the other direction.

It's an interesting set-up and a meta concept nested within a meta concept; if only Panahi had presented it that clearly and sensibly during his 106-minute odyssey. If it hadn't been so dull it might have been easier to engage with and follow. Furthermore, Panahi is just not a dynamic screen presence, and he is featured in nearly every scene.

Panahi, the man (as opposed to the actor), is a heroic filmmaker. He is a renegade fighting his government and willing to walk the walk, as he now sits in prison for his crimes of creating art. He brilliantly depicted his house arrest more than a decade ago in "This Is Not a Film," and he produced a much better meta experiment with "Jafar Panahi's Taxi." Not all of these experiments will pan out. Even great filmmakers can have an off year.

Don't Mention It

 

THE SILENT TWINS (A-minus) - Agnieszka Smoczynska has such an inventive, natural feel for filmmaking that her movies are a wonder to watch. She takes sophisticated ideas and presents them with flair but doesn't detract from the gravitas of the story she is telling. 

We discovered her with "The Lure," the "trippy fever dream, a nostalgic horror musical" about a pair of mermaids emerging from the sea to fulfill their dream of becoming cheesy lounge singers. Smoczynska gets a little more sober here with the true-life period piece about twin sisters who spend most of their life refusing to speak to anyone -- not their parents or their teachers or even psychologists. Cute boys are excepted. And, of course, they talk to each other, building a rich twin inner life.

Smoczynska takes a rich script by Andrea Seigel ("Laggies") and makes it come alive through the intimate interactions between her stars, narrative urgency, and rich fantasy sequence. Letitia Wright stars as June Gibbons, the sister who would channel her creativity into publishing a book, and Tamara Lawrence plays her sister Jennifer, who seems to be the more adventurous and troubled of the two. It is Jennifer who will have the confidence to seduce a jock at school and eventually lead the sisters toward a stupid crime of vandalism that would get them locked up in a psychiatric facility -- and separated, painfully, for the first time.

The film starts in the '70s when these daughters of Caribbean immigrants are little and struggling to fit into their working-class UK environment. (At that age, the sisters are played by Leah Mondesir-Simmons as June and Eva-Arianna Baxter as Jennifer. The casting is spot-on from childhood to young adulthood.) As little girls, their bedroom comes alive with their imaginative stories and artwork and their vivid conversations. They have a fondness for Marc Bolan and T.Rex. But as soon as there is a knock on the door, they fall silent. Out in public they do little more than bow their heads and exchange glances.

As young adults, their challenges only deepens, as they are expected to eventually connect with the rest of the world. Their confinement feels soul-crushing.

Wright and Lawrence never sag under the weight of their monumental roles. And Smoczynska finds a tricky balance between the somber dirge of the narrative and the playfulness of the sisters when they create stories or act out. Those looking for the standard fare of a harrowing biopic dealing with mental health should look elsewhere; rather than try to figure out the roots of the psychosis on display, the film merely offers a representation of what it was like at the time. Do yourself a favor and don't look up the real story of the Gibbons sisters online; instead, start with this fascinating deep dive into the twisted world of troubled twins.

BONUS TRACKS

In addition to period songs from the likes of T. Rex and the Clash, the soundtrack revels in nuggets from the early disco era. Here is one we never heard before, Helen Banks with "Starlight":

And then there is Hot Chocolate ("You Sexy Thing") with the Shaftian "Put Your Love in Me":

Creative Partners

 

TURN EVERY PAGE (A-minus) - This documentary about the half-century collaboration between LBJ biographer Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb is a labor of love by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie. It is a fascinating, and very personal, study of two true titans of publishing.

Caro, a ferociously diligent investigative journalist, broke big in 1974 with "The Power Broker," a legendary tome about the man who created the modern New York City. Caro was paired on that project with Gottlieb, who would head up Knopf publishing and, later, the New Yorker magazine, and the two remained business partners forever. Each man is the personification of old-school dedication to the written word.

Caro learned from a news editor early on to leave no stone unturned when sifting through research documents, or, as the title reminds us, to "turn every page." His three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has morphed into a five-volume life mission, with the fifth installment still pending perilously, as both men were pushing 90 when the movie was being made. His books are about more than just the men who serve as his subjects, but also about the accumulation and effects of political power -- and thus they tell deeply American stories. 

Other writers and editors, both old and young, are on hand to attest to the brilliance of Caro's chronicles. They also have deep admiration for Gottlieb, who estimates that he has edited between 600 and 700 books in his career, including such foundational titles as "Catch-22" (he changed the number from 18) and authors like Toni Morrison. Bill Clinton is on hand to sing Gottlieb's praises and to admit that he feels like a "lost little boy" after Gottlieb, at 89, took a pass on editing Clinton's latest book. 

Both men are pre-eminent storytellers -- Caro, in particular, is riveting as he reveals how he finally got LBJ's brother to open up to him about the Johnsons' childhood -- and they have character and charisma to burn. Gottlieb drops witticisms effortlessly -- like his observation that it's much easier to be adorable than to be industrious. Talking heads -- including the New Yorker's famous comma queen, Mary Norris -- go beyond kindly bon mots to break down the nuts and bolts about the trades of writing and editing. (Norris and others offer a playful disquisition on the semicolon, for example.) 

Perhaps the secret weapon of this film is that it is a valentine to the classic era of storytelling. Caro hand-writes his first drafts before typing them out, using carbon paper as a backup. Gottlieb, an inveterate reader since childhood, plies his trade with a yellow pencil. Just watching the lost art of detailed reporting and editing play out on the screen can make certain viewers a little misty-eyed. A few little touches pay off.  We are treated to personal details like Caro's voluminous trove of carbon copies (stashed above his fridge) and Gottlieb's quirky collection of purses.

But even though this is a delectable story, it runs too long. Lizzie Gottlieb, like other recent documentarians (see the Kurt Vonnegut bio), insists on inserting herself into the story, from beginning, middle and end. (We don't need multiple shots of photos of her as a little girl with her parents; footage of her wedding; or scenes with her son walking through a bookstore with his grandfather.) This story could have been told in a tad over 90 minutes; as it is, it runs nearly two hours. Ironically, the filmmaker could have benefited from more editing.

SIRENS (B+) - This chronicle of a female death-metal band in Lebanon -- let the uniqueness of that sink in -- is a little too arty, but it does a fine job of exploring the personalities of and relationship between the band's guitarists, who share the spotlight and open themselves up to examination. It is a study of female sexuality, bonding and empowerment in a restrictive society.

Lilas (above, left) is big-haired and ballsy, pretty openly lesbian, and confident, whereas Shery (right) comes off as hesitant and a bit insecure. The women, firmly in their 20s, and their bandmates in Sleeping With Sirens appear to be earnest and dedicated to their music, even if there isn't much of an apparent fan base, illustrated by a sad performance in front of a smattering of fans on the D stage of a British music festival. 

Filmmaker Rita Baghdadi embeds herself in the lives of Lilas and Shery, and the intimacy pays off. We also are privy to rehearsals and songwriting sessions, where the music seems much more nuanced and thoughtful than the noise that gets spewed onstage. Baghdadi tries too hard, though, to put a high gloss on the cinematography and scene choices. Too often, situations appear to be staged, with the camera happening to be in just the right place, at just the right angle, to perfectly capture a given moment, sometimes in soft focus. 

But deep down this is a moving story of two women struggling for their art. It helps that the subjects -- Lilas, in particular, especially when she decides to trim that mop of hair of hers -- are relatable and admirable.

Split Decision: 'Tar,' Part 2

 

 In this experiment, we paused a movie roughly midway through and reviewed it just from that perspective. (It was so bad that we were confident it wouldn't get better, or good enough to earn a recommendation.)  Here is that first review. We have now watched the rest of the movie and review it further, to see if anything has changed.

TAR (C) - So we made it to the end and bumped the grade up half a notch. It's still a failed spectacle. 

We paused at an interesting moment, around the 95-minute mark (with still another hour-plus to go), because "Tar" is certainly a very different film in its last hour. (And it needn't have spent a full hour and a half creaking along with a weak set-up.) As chickens start to come home to roost for the rapacious Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett), director Todd Field turns this into a low-rent horror film, with her grotesque gothic Berlin apartment building standing in for the Dakota Building in "Rosemary's Baby."

Whereas in the first half, Tar had insomnia, the final hour is full of her waking from disturbing dreams. She loses her grip on reality at times, including a bizarre sequence where she wanders into the basement of a dilapidated apartment complex and runs off frightened, leading to a nasty fall. (This essay, which includes a lot of spoilers, goes even further and makes the case that maybe most of the final hour takes place in Tar's head. I wouldn't go that far, but the author makes some good points.)

In the spirit of Part 1 of this review, let us pause to relate some more annoyances, in bullet form:

• Tar is often called "maestra" to her face, as if this were a bad episode of "Seinfeld."
• It seems like we get the same shot of a sleepless Tar, in bed with eyes open, nearly a half-dozen times.
• Would it surprise you to learn that this pampered diva comes from humble roots? Ben Affleck and Matt Damon would have a lighter touch than Field shows with his clunky reveal.
• Like a bad episode of "The Good Wife," a lawsuit apparently gets filed (unclear if Tar is a defendant) and a deposition gets immediately scheduled, which never happens so quickly in the real world. 

Richard Brody, my nemesis from the New Yorker (we don't agree on movies very often), nails a lot of the problems with "Tar," which he deems a regressive film, considering it mocking, sneering and derisive. In his review, he notes how director Field tries to have it both ways -- the famed conductor is accused of misdeeds, but Field presents the film from her point of view and keeps the details so vague that we will be tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt. We agree that the film is "utterly unilluminating" about her work as a conductor and composer. He chastises Field for daring to equate -- or, at the very least, hint at an equivalence between -- the so-called cancellation of Tar with the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II. (This involves a bizarre and unnecessary conversation she has with yet another old white man.)

Brody concludes: "The careful ambiguities of 'Tar' offer a sort of plausible deniability to its relentlessly conservative button-pushing, and its aesthetic is no less regressive, conservative, and narrow."

In the final hour of the film, we finally get some action (thus the bump in grade), but too much of the plot development feels rushed, especially coming after an hour and a half of plodding table-setting. Field continues to offer excuses for his misbehaving star, including letting her fabricate a physical attack in order to engender sympathy for this predator.

In our 2022 year-end review, we lamented the over-indulgence of mid-career auteurs, and this is a prime example of a pampered filmmakers given every opportunity to just run rampant with flabby storytelling. It does, though, have a pretty good ending.

Split Decision: 'Tar,' Part 1

 In this experiment, we are pausing a movie roughly midway through so that we can review it just from that perspective. (It's so bad that we are confident it won't get better, or good enough to earn a recommendation.) We will then watch the rest of the movie and review it further, to see if anything has changed.

TAR (C-minus) - How can a movie annoy thee? Let me count the ways. "Tar" is the award-hungry mature art film that is such a spotlight for Cate Blanchett that you truly ache for her every time her tightly wound conductor twitches and tics or belts out pinpoint-perfect diatribe after diatribe. Oh, the Hollywood trope of the tortured artist. R.I.P., Kirk Douglas.

This film, by the occasional would-be auteur Todd Field ("In the Bedroom," "Little Children"), is perpetually maddening right out of the gate, when we are expected to (maybe?) be able to read a blurry text on a shaky cell phone. I took notes on the parade of irritations:

• The film starts out with an extended string of credits (in small type), minutes long, like you'd see at the end of a modern film. 
• The opening scene is about 8 minutes of a long interview with Lydia Tar (Blanchett) by real New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik that goes on and on, basically a way to recite her biography for the viewer and to tell us immediately that she is so full of herself that it's leaking out of her pores. We see her assistant in the wings doing that thing where a person mouths along to what is being said onstage because she wrote it.
• Her assistant -- who apparently is a well-regarded conductor in her own right but acts like a lowly servant -- is played at full mope by poor misused Noemie Merlant ("Portrait of a Lady on Fire," a movie that knows how to treat an artist).
• At the 17-minute mark I noted "nothing has happened so far."
• Then there's another interview with Tar.
• She is constantly name-dropping (because she is hyper-intellectual, vain and apparently insecure, you see), names like Max Bruch. (Who? Yeah, I turned it into a sober drinking game. Every time Tar mentioned a name I hooted out "Who?") Tar, of course, pronounces Bruch's name absolutely perfectly -- because she's perfect -- just like she pronounces Bach as "Bahhh," swallowing the C.
  
• At the 25-minute mark I noted "nothing has happened so far." There is no hint of a plot for at least the full hour.
• Did I mention that this thing is going to run 2 hours and 37 minutes? Strap in.
• So far, there has also been virtually no music (this is a movie about a conductor, mind you), except from some foreign-language vocals over those tedious credits). Wait, a few bars of something trickle in briefly at the 32-minute mark.
  
• "Marin Alsop."Who?! (NOT a fan of the movie, either.)
  
• No one talks the way Lydia Tar does. She comes across as someone speed-reading a script, which is actually what Blanchett is doing. She never hesitates or stammers or comes up with anything other than le mot juste.
  
• In fact, Tar, at least three times, criticizes another person as being "robotic." Ah, but you see, that might be a light case of projection ... because, in fact ... she's the robot!! Screenwriting 101, my friends.
  
• One full hour in, we finally see her actually being a conductor. At least we see Blanchett mimicking the moves of a conductor based on her exhaustive research into even the tiniest of flourishes of a real conductor.
• But there is very little conducting done in the movie, especially when compared with the amount of time she spends at lunches with old men.
  
• There are several languages spoken casually here (but of course, our brilliant heroine is polylingual), but all of a sudden, during an exchange in German, there are no subtitles anymore. Oh, well, I guess most of us won't know what was just said. Must not be crucial to the plot -- or whatever plot we assume will eventually pop up.
• There is a lot of mumbling and whispering and speed-talking, making some of the dialogue unintelligible. We rewound and rewatched one line three times and could barely make a word of it. We went back one more times and engaged the subtitles. The assistant, being comforted by Tar, is sniffling (and whispering) about a lost love, and a million guesses would have never cracked the code. The assistant says, "I can't stop thinking about our trip up the Ucayali." Who? Where?! (Bzzt! It's a river in Peru.)
• 70 minutes in, the plot begins. It has something to do with Tar -- an apparent womanizing lesbian -- having had been mean to a former student, driving the poor woman (we never see her face, of course) to desperation. Meantime, she seems to be grooming a new cellist, right under the nose of Tar's partner who sits a few chairs over with the violins.
• This is also one of those movies where characters -- even super-geniuses -- think they can just empty out their Sent email folder and no one will ever discover the nastygrams they fired off to destroy that former student's career. (I bet someone will find them! We'll just have to wait and see.)
  

So, Lydia Tar is a tightly wound genius who flashes a fairly dark mean streak occasionally, though she comes off as more autistic than diabolical. She dresses down an overly sensitive student of color in the class she teaches for refusing to dig Bach because the composer was a personally repulsive old white guy. Take that, Gen Z! Tar also goes onto the playground of her daughter's school to confront the daughter's bully. What a stone-cold meanie!

This emotionally retarded elitist in fitted suits is unpleasant to be around.  Blanchett is trying way too hard here. (No one else is really worth mentioning , because the star sucks the oxygen out of every scene she's in.) I wouldn't have stuck around nearly as long as I did with the film if (a) my partner wasn't somehow enjoying the movie, despite my exasperated critical hysterics throughout (talk about annoying), or (b) I hadn't come up with this little gimmick of having a go at the first half of a bad film before watching the rest of it. It made what would have been a Life Is Short plug pull somewhat bearable.

This supposedly has a decent ending. Stay tuned for Part 2.

Soundtrack of Your Life: R.I.P., Wayne Shorter

 

This is an odd one. I am not a jazz fan at all. It too often sounds noodly and pretentious. Aside from a little Mingus here, a little Miles there, I just never got into it.

Last Saturday, we ventured to the Northeast Heights in search of a burger. We settled on a place that we had known as a burger joint in Nob Hill and of all nights the venue featured a jazz band from the University of New Mexico, showcasing some graduates of the neighborhood high school. The place doesn't serve burgers anymore, so I didn't get a burger and had to sit through jazz. But the non-burgers were tasty, the kids were pretty good, and they played a fine version of "Blue Moon," the sentimental favorite, so it wasn't a bust.

I did try, back during my formative years, to explore my feelings toward another style of music besides the pop and rock I grew up with. I had a lot of alone time during high school, so I had a chance to explore a bit. That's how I discovered Willie Nelson and the various forms of country -- such as outlaw and Hank Williams -- and why I'm a fan to this day.

When it came to jazz, my attempt featured the group Weather Report, circa 1980. This was back in the olden days when WXRT in Chicago (now owned by a conglomerate) was more experimental when crafting its playlist and would still throw in a jazz piece here and there. One of those was "Birdland" by Weather Report, featuring Wayne Shorter (below, right) on soprano and tenor saxophones. The first time I heard the boppy little number I was hooked. 

It was around the same time that the lite-jazz vocal group Manhattan Transfer was getting Grammy notice, and they scored airplay with a lyric-version of "Birdland," originally an instrumental written in 1977 by Joe Zawinul (below, left), the keyboardist in Weather Report. So it wasn't an obscure song at the time.

I splurged on a vinyl copy of Weather Report's "8:30," a double album recorded in Santa Monica and released in August 1979. I'm certain that it was junior year (perhaps the loneliest of the four high school years) that I dove into that album. I swooned to "Birdland," over and over, of course, but I scratched my head at most of the rest, including a skronky deconstruction of Bob Hope's theme song "Thanks for the Memory." Something about the combination of experimental jazz and old man Hope just gave me the willies.

But I never got over the swingin' suavity of "Birdland." I can hear the jazz purists scoff. It's cutesy and repetitive. The New York Times obit doesn't mention it. My clinging to it is probably the equivalent of someone claiming to be a rock 'n' roll fan by citing Chuck Berry and "My Ding-a-Ling." That's OK. 

I never followed Weather Report much, and there are probably no more than 10 CDs in my "jazz collection." (I've taken multiple runs at Coltrane and failed every time.) But I always perked up when I ran across the names of Zawinul and Shorter. Wayne Shorter died this week at age 89. When I think of him, I think of those seven minutes of "Birdland." It's still impossible for me not to whistle along -- and to think of the jazz aficionado I could have been. 

BONUS TRACK

One more knife-stick to the gut of the jazz world, and a whole nother separate essay about the indelible memory I have of discovering this album in my best friend's basement freshman year -- Shorter did the tenor-sax solo for Steely Dan's "Aja":