R.I.P-wee, Paul Reubens

 

We've been fans of Pee-wee Herman since the onset of his unlikely fame in the early '80s, when his nationwide tour passed through Chicago and he started annoying David Letterman. The man who created one of the all-time great comic characters was Paul Reubens, who died this week at 70 after a long, private bout of cancer.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that Pee-wee Herman was one of the funniest and most complex comedy inventions of the 20th century. The manic man-child worked on multiple levels. He was beta meta. He was a rorschach test, mining Baby Boomer nostalgia and filtering it through Generation X's craving for irony and kitsch. He perfected the age-old tightrope walk of being, like the Monty Python troupe, both sophisticated and silly. "Pee-wee's Playhouse" was a sui generis children's show, an improbable Saturday morning hit popular with adults, whether hung over or straight. Nothing like it had aired before, and no one has matched it since.

Pee-wee was the ultimate puppet, personified. A Pinocchio come back to life. Reubens was trained at the Groundlings in the 1970s, at the ground floor of the comedy proving grounds that would produce generations of extremely funny performers, including Lisa Kudrow, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig and Jan Hooks ("There's no basement at the Alamo!"). Some of the talent to pass through the Playhouse: Phil Hartman, Laurence Fishburne, Edie McClurg, Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne), S. Epatha Merkerson, and Natasha Lyonne as a child. (As well as talented voice actors and the music of Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh.)

Reubens was a talented actor in his own right, but Pee-wee was to him what the atomic bomb was to Oppenheimer. We have revisited his films in recent years. His debut, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," was the perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon, peaking at just the right time. Delirious. He couldn't really recapture the magic, though, whether it was a few years later with "Big-Top Pee-wee" or a few decades later with the limp "Pee-wee's Big Holiday" from 2016 (so funny I forgot to laugh).

To me, this was the perfect encapsulation of Pee-wee's naif aesthetic, rescuing the animals from a burning pet shop, sight gag after sight gag, all the while betraying his aversion to one scary type of reptile and culminating in a perfect punchline.

And such a graceful physical comedian.

I never outgrew Pee-wee. I still have the talking doll that they pulled off the shelves after he was arrested in Florida for exposing himself in a pornographic theater. (How quaint to think that that was a potential career killer at one time.) I'll never forget the image that the Associated Press sent over the photo wires, a side-by-side of the Pee-wee character with the Reubens mug shot. It was similar to this:

The concept of Pee-wee Herman was wrapped up in a faux nostalgia (one running gag mocked instructional films from the 1950s) and the desire to indulge our inner child. That Paul Reubens was able to do that in such a sophisticated way is a tribute to his genius as an artist. His romp through the '80s transformed the world from the grim '70s into a fresh three-dimensional technicolor existence. It was a youthful giddiness worth holding on to.

The Last Day ... Sinead O'Connor

 

There was nothing like the phenomenon of "Nothing Compares 2 U," which was ubiquitous on British radio in spring 1990 during my first-ever trip abroad. (I remember that song and "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants being in super-heavy rotation.) The indelible video -- a doe-eyed waif with a voice from the heavens interpreting a Prince song. 

Imagine being forever trapped in that one image -- the tear streaming down her cheek, a beta copy of a manic pixie dream girl -- and having to always compete with that initial stamp on the pop-culture consciousness. Nothing, or no one, compares, indeed.

 

O'Connor, who died this week at 56 after a trying life, was a key contributor to the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, from the mid/late '80s to 1994. From power ballads to dance grooves, her voice was unmatched. She was already in heavy rotation on MTV's "120 Minutes" with her first hit, the propulsive "Mandinka," when she followed that up with the sophomore effort "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got," an album that is as solid from track 1 to 10 than just about any release you can think of. There is the sparse "I Am Stretched Out on Your Grave," "Black Boys on Mopeds" and the title track, plus irresistible dance songs, "Jump in the River" and "The Emperor's New Clothes":

Within a year, she ripped up a picture of the pope on national television and shredded that version of her career. Two weeks later, when she showed up for a tribute to Bob Dylan (his 30th anniversary ... 30 years ago), she was booed so viciously (while also being cheered) that Kris Kristofferson threw an arm around her to comfort the pariah. She would sideline the band and shout out an a cappella version of Bob Marley's "War."

She made what was probably a common mistake with her third album -- a one-eighty into jazz standards and show tunes. By the end of the '90s her album sales had plummeted. As the millennium dawned, she would venture into albums of traditional Irish ballads, reggae (!), and theology (she was ordained as a priest by an outlaw Catholic sect). She would deal with health issues both physical and mental (among other things, she had to reconcile growing up in an abusive, highly religious family). Last year her son died at age 17.

In 2021, the New York Times profiled her here. The first sentence: "Sinead O'Connor is alone, which is how she prefers to be." It marked the release of her memoir, "Rememberings."

My favorite memory related to her is from 1988. I had made my way down to Atlanta for the 1988 Democratic convention, never scoring a ticket to the convention floor but spending time in the overflow hall of the Omni to watch on the big screen with the common man. (One of the few regrets in life was not taking up the offer of a pretty woman to be an extra in Robert Altman's "Tanner '88" HBO series, which was shooting concurrently as a quasi documentary.) 

My college friend Nancy B, who had recently relocated to Birmingham from Chicago, drove over to meet me for a night. We went to a club called Rio. It happened to be the same night that Rob Lowe and his brat pack pals were partying in a private room at the club, where Lowe would eventually pick up a 16-year-old girl, leading to a salacious video scandal. While celebrity shenanigans were unfolding, Nancy and I were on the dance floor of Rio, reliving our college-era club days, and we were completely blissed out to O'Connor's "I Want Your (Hands on Me)," a feeling I'll never forget.

Let's leave it with her live in 1990 in Rotterdam, starting out onstage alone (as she prefers to be) and tiny, before opening her mouth, with the unrivaled anthem "Last Day of Our Acquaintance." Alone and at peace.

New to the Queue

 On the road again ...

Christian Petzold ("Transit," "Phoenix," "Undine") is back, again with Paula Beer in tow, with the story of a writer on retreat, dealing with distractions, "Afire."

Always nice to see Lily Gladstone, here in a contemplative road movie (a feature debut) about a woman reconnecting with her family and heritage, "The Unknown Country."

Our guy Julio Torres (HBO's "My Favorite Shapes" and "Los Espookys") offers his twisted origin story, "Problemista."

A documentary about one of the most interesting and tragic figures from rock's psychedelic era, "Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd." 

The magnetism of Franz Rogowski ("Transit") and Adele Exarchopoulos ("Blue Is the Warmest Color," "Zero Fucks Given") will either attract or repel in a love triangle from the hit-and-miss Ira Sachs ("Little Men," "Love Is Strange"), "Passages."

In the Pink

 

When I saw the New Yorker headline calling the new "Barbie" movie "brilliant," I braced for news that the esoteric critic Richard Brody had maybe been lobotomized. His intellectual analyses can sometimes leave you with a dull headache. He, himself, is brilliant. 

But then I read his first few sentences of his review, and I knew he was still his old self:

It’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I. animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test of directorial art than realism. This is, first off, because the boundless possibilities of the fantastical both allow for and require a filmmaker’s comprehensive creativity. But, crucially, fantasy is also a vision of reality—the subjective truth of filmmakers’ inner life, the world as it appears in their mind’s eye. The great directors of fantasy are the ones who make explicit the connection between their fantasy worlds and lived reality ...

He goes on to say: 

"Barbie” is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of making pre-existing subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property. Moreover, it presents such acts of reinterpreting familiar subjects, as a crucial form of self-analysis, a way to explore one’s own self-image and to confront the prejudices and inequities built into prevailing, top-down interpretations of them.

Don't ever change, brother.

Jury Duty

 I recently experienced my first jury trial as a lawyer (we won), and in tribute, here are two examples of the genre.

12 ANGRY MEN (1957) (A) - The standard for courtroom dramas and teleplays, Sidney Lumet's feature debut is a master class in writing, acting and claustrophobic cinematography. It is an instructive example of turning a stage play into a film without it lying flat on the screen as a stage play. And it addresses issues of class and race in a way that still feels vital to this day.

The stellar cast features Henry Fonda as Juror 8, the lone holdout against convicting a teenager of stabbing to death his abusive father. He is surrounded by ace character actors -- E.G. Marshall, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, John Fiedler (Woody from TV's "Buffalo Bill") and Robert Webber (as the unserious ad man, Juror 12). Warden, especially, as the juror who is eager to wrap things up quickly so he can catch that evening's Yankees game, stands out while sketching out a subtly nuanced character.

You know the story: One by one, the others come around to Juror 8's side of reasonable doubt. Reginald Rose's impeccable script unwraps secrets and twists, each one as clever as the next. It's a utopian ideal in which logic proves persuasive. (Imagine that!) The men sweat and bicker in the cramped room. They casually toss out insensitive slurs. They get their dander up and do a little soul-searching. They understand the responsibility of carrying out justice.

You might wince at the idea of revisiting this 65-yeard-old artifact from another world. But as backward as it might appear to be -- it is, after all, 12 angry men; our jury in May had one man on it -- you'd have to have a hard heart not to be moved by the artistry and old-fashioned storytelling.

MY COUSIN VINNY (1992) (A-minus) - Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. When they say that times were simpler back in the day, this is a good example of it. Alternatively moronic and clever, this fish-out-of-water tale tosses Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei's New York goombahs into rural Alabama to rescue his young cousin arrested on a false charge of murder.

With an idiot plot wrapped inside another idiot plot, the movie requires you to suspend some disbelief early on -- sitcom-style -- in order to let the high-jinks play out. (Early on, there are a few plot holes you could drive a lime-green 1964 Buick Skylark through.) But once you do that, prepare to be entertained by Pesci's unprepared lawyer Vinny Gambini; Tomei as his straight-talking moll, Mona Lisa Vito; and Fred Gwynne as the gentlemanly and condescending judge, Chamberlain Haller. Ralph Macchio is the cousin who, in a case of mistaken identity (or railroading), is jailed with a buddy in the murder of a convenience-store clerk (as opposed to inadvertent shoplifting). Enter Cousin Vinny, who took years to pass the bar and has only recently begun cutting his teeth as an ambulance chaser. Who better to defend against murder charges?

The premise is goofy, but the cast has so much fun. The film was a prototypical meme generator in the pre-internet era. There's Vinny baffling the judge with his reference to the two "yoots" (youths) on trial. There's the banter between Vinny and Mona Lisa, who mocks him for thinking his cowboy boots mask his urban mien -- "Oh, yeah, you blend." And she schools him about the discovery process after Vinny thinks he conned opposing counsel out of this case files -- "He has to [give them to you]. By law, you're entitled. It's called disclosure, dickhead!"

 

Vinny -- sleep-deprived the whole week of the trial because of various local noise issues that occur before the crack of dawn -- nonetheless proves himself to be a quick study and a natural in the courtroom. He has the jury in the palm of his hand, and his built-in bullshit detector serves him well when cross-examining witnesses. And then Mona Lisa takes the stand as an expert witness with encyclopedic knowledge of classic 327-cubic-inch engines and four-barrel carburetors. It's all a hoot.

Now & Then: Micro-aggressions

 Let's check out the latest from Nicole Holofcener, along with one of her classics streaming on Netflix.

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (A) - This smart study of a personal slight that threatens to doom a marriage is so light and agile that you might mistake it for being inconsequential. After all, Nicole Holofcener returns to her go-to gang -- upper-middle-class New Yorkers whose lives are so comfortable that they must rely on their neuroses to manufacture crises. (I previously referred to the condition as "middle-age privileged angst.")

Never underestimate Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She previously nestled into a Holofcener character (a masseuse) in "Enough Said." No matter how many guises she takes on or the level exposure a project gets, she is uniquely funny, and she has only gained gravitas in middle age. Here she plays Beth, an agonizingly insecure writer and professor who had a moderately successful memoir and now is struggling with a novel. 

Holofcener reveals her McGuffin in the second third of the film -- in a playful moment, Beth and her sister eavesdrop on their husbands who are shopping for socks, and Beth overhears her husband, Don, trash the draft of the novel that he had been praising to her face. Beth is genuinely crushed, and she quickly assumes passive-aggressive mode, which baffles her clueless husband, who himself is insecure about both his skills as a psychologist and the bags under his eyes. Tobias Menzies (Prince Philip in TV's "The Crown") gives a brilliant hang-dog performance as Don.

Holofcener's sophisticated script is a bounty for a talented cast. Owen Teague provides great millennial angst as Beth and Don's underemployed son, who is jealous of his parents' loving relationship and friendship. (He harps on them for constantly sharing food orders and showing affection.) Michaela Watkins does her sidekick thing as Beth's sister, Sarah. She and Louis-Dreyfus have fantastic scenes with Jeannie Berlin, who plays their acerbic mother, Georgia. Both Sarah, an interior decorator, and her husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), an actor, exhibit high levels of insecurities about their own foundering careers. 

Critically, David Cross and Amber Tamblyn (married in real life) play a bickering couple who sour on Don and question his ability as a couples counselor. Cross and Tamblyn riff uproariously, alternating pot shots at each other and at their hapless therapist. Other patients pass through, in small but sumptuous roles for the likes of Sarah Steele, Zach Cherry and 80-year-old Kenneth Tigar (a former "Barney Miller" regular).

There is not a misplaced comma in the screenplay, and Holofcener's execution unfolds at a leisurely pace, though it passes by so quickly that you hate to see it end. The characters are so deep and appealing that you want to spend more time with them -- especially Louis-Dreyfus, who is a marvel yet again.

FRIENDS WITH MONEY (2006) (A) - Holofcener made the depiction of friendships and their foibles seem effortless. Here she is blessed with her first A-list cast: Frances McDormand, Jennifer Aniston and Joan Cusack join Holofcener's muse, Catherine Keener, for a slice of life among mismatched pals as each one makes peace with her lot in life.

 

Aniston is wonderful as the under-achieving Olivia, who is currently cleaning houses in the L.A. area. Aniston is always a revelation, and here she skirts past pathos with her pot-smoking drifter. Keener, perhaps at her peak, is in a sexless marriage with her writing-partner husband; she feels guilty of the gaudy addition they are adding atop their fancy house. Cusack's Franny is fairly well-adjusted as the richest of the friends. McDormand's Jane has a husband seems to be stereotypically gay, but their marriage works quite well. Jane, though, is a prototype Karen with anger and judgment issues.

The plot meanders, but the film is buoyed by the combination of Holofcener's incisive dialogue and the magnetism of the actors immersing themselves into the rich roles. There really aren't writer-directors out there making perfect little movies like this consistently over the years.

One Life to Live

 

PAST LIVES (A) - This remarkable debut feature never takes a false turn as it reveals a story that is deep, moving and engaging. It tells the story of two childhood friends from Seoul, South Korea, one of whom emigrates to Toronto at age 12 before ending up in New York as an adult. 

Writer-director Celine Song has a lot to say here about identity and nostalgia. She conveys multiple nuanced ideas while weaving together an elegant and air-tight narrative. Greta Lee is riveting as the adult Nora (the western name she adopts), who balances practicality with passion as she carves out her path and persona. Teo Yoo is the hang-dog Hae Sung, who pines from Seoul and eventually books a ticket to New York for a reckoning with his would-be soul mate. The hang-up is that Nora is now married and has seemingly purged the remnants of puppy love from her young self.

Do not take any of the above as evidence of a trite potential love triangle. This film punches way above that weight level. 

When Nora leaves with her family, there is no fanfare, and the relationship between the two pals (who once went on one cute date) gets locked in amber, with all the emotional consequences, healthy and unhealthy, that entails. (See also "The Eight Mountains," about two boys bonding at that age and then going their separate ways for years.) Nora gets curious about Hae Sung 12 years later, and the spark is definitely still there, but they don't meet in person, just over video. Flash forward another 12 years (the timeline symmetry is an asset), and Nora is now married to a fellow writer, Arthur (John Magaro), whom she met at a writing retreat around age 30. They have a loving but routine relationship (he's another 30-something addicted to video games), boho hipsters in the big city. They talk about how the other is not the type of person either one of them long dreamed of ending up with, but they seem appreciative of what they have.

Hae Sung re-enters the picture after he finally gets up the nerve to book a weeklong trip to New York to see Nora. When they meet on the street, that spark is once again ignited, but like 12 years earlier, it takes a different form. Hae Sung is handsome and engagingly moody, as well as alluringly single. What transpires takes up the second half of the film. A magical excursion to Brooklyn (at Jane's Carousel in Dumbo) echoes their previous chaste date as kids.

Lee is a radiant movie star, yet totally grounded, as she conveys the sweep of Nora's 20s and 30s -- her (shifting) career ambitions, her romantic needs, and her immigrant identity. Hae Sung's visit dredges up for her the question of whom she might have become had she stayed in Korea (besides being named Na Young). Nora, seemingly forever trapped between two worlds, explains to her husband the Buddhist concept of in-yeon, which incorporates the idea that the people you meet throughout your lives -- even in fleeting moments -- may have involved much deeper connections in past lives. Here, the past lives manifest as the past selves of one life, in addition to whatever previous iterations of the soul may have experienced.

All of this is rendered effortless by Song. She creates one big welling of emotion from sweet beginning to bittersweet end, culminating in one perfect, quick catharsis. She has an eye for visuals that invoke instant nostalgia. Her secret weapon here is Magaro, a crucial third leg to the stool. He has a hang-dog appearance but he is a deeper character than he appears. (In passing we learn that Arthur published a fat book; it looks like a novel and is titled "Boner.) Magaro splashed as the appealing young star of "Not Fade Away" and recently vamped as Silvio Dante in "The Many Saints of Newark." (TV viewers probably know him from "Orange Is the New Black" and "The Umbrella Academy.") A climactic scene (teased in the opener) places all three characters in a bar together -- at one point Nora and Hae Sung speak in Korean (which Arthur has only passing proficiency in), and later Arthur and Hae Sung talk without Nora present.

It's all such a quiet, tender rumination on the lives we either craft or fall into, how we are shaped by happenstance and destiny. It explores the alluring idea of the parallel lives we might lead if we could subdivide ourselves and pursue multiple friends and lovers, trying on various guises and exploring different aspects of our souls. It's lovely to think about all of that, but damn if the whole exercise doesn't slam you in the gut and plunge deep into that well of emotions.

BONUS TRACKS

The soundtrack is impeccable, both the music composed for the film and the obscure needle drops. A pivotal scene in the final reel, set in the bar, features John Cale in the background with 1974's "You Know More Than I Know," sounding more like Harry Nillsson:

 

The film's composers are Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen. Here is "Across the Ocean," a sample of the spare sounds they created:

Cat Power is featured in the trailer, but not the film, with "Stay":

Love Stories

 

ROMANCE (1999) (B+) - Catherine Breillat goes full-frontal and full-throttle in this daring examination of the emotional turmoil of an unsatisfied woman exploring her sexuality. Graphic sex is interspersed with psychological gymnastics as we follow Marie, a 20-something stuck with a sexless boyfriend as she yearns to let loose.

Breillat made a splash with this bold movie, beginning a run of provocative films like "Fat Girl" and "Brief Crossing," more than a decade after her breakthrough, "36 Fillette." Not only does she traffic in explicit sex, but she commissions a porn star to abet her mission. That would be Rocco Siffredi (to give you a sampling of his 620-film career, one of his latest titles in "Rocco's Psycho Teens 18"), who here plays Paolo, a mysterious hunk who provides some sex on the side to Marie (a sweet, unassuming Caroline Ducey), who can't get her boyfriend to respond to her come-ons in bed. 

Marie also visits an older man -- an ordinary guy who claims he has bedded thousands of women, many of them famous -- to engage in some sado-masochistic play. In one disturbing scene, Marie also hooks up with a rando in a stairwell, letting him go down on her before he then rapes her. Throughout the film, we are privy to Marie's thoughts. Some can be profound, others the musing of a fairly immature woman. She often voices cravings to be a mere vessel of sex, but it's hard to tell if she truly holds such dehumanizing desires or if she is venting her frustration. Things get muddled by her attachment to the boyfriend (Sagamore Stevenin), who is a blandly handsome sexist pig.

As I said, the sex is explicit -- refreshingly so. There are no games of hide-the-penis; Ducey (who comes off as a poor man's Charlotte Gainsbourg) services and is serviced. Looking back at a film made a quarter of a century ago, I can't tell if this was cutting edge for its day, or if it was anti-feminist feminism, or whether it foresaw the demystification of sex (especially as captured on video these days) or if it should be trash-canned as puerile voyeuristic exploitation. I'm not the one to solve that riddle. 

I will say that the movie drags a bit, even at 84 minutes, as Breillat provides a dollop of "Jeanne Dielman" tedium, perhaps to prove her point about both the excitement of sex when it finally pops up on screen as well as the drudgery of both the chase and catch at times. Those numbed by years of anodyne R-rated fare might find this a breath of fresh air.

MONOGAMISH (2017) (B-minus) - There are both too many ideas and a lack of a coherent theme that drag this vanity project all over the map. Tao Ruspoli, who happens to be an Italian Prince, dives into the shallow end of the debate over monogamy in this slapdash documentary.

Just try to keep up with his thoughts. Ruspoli distracts himself and the viewer with forced artsy visuals (journeyman Christopher Gallo is listed as cinematographer), and he complements talking-head narration with dumb staged scenes of an exotic young threesome frolicking in various places. Philosophical musings are tossed out willy-nilly. We have to sit through a cousin walk us through his family tree, so that we are impressed with their lineage.

The most compelling talking head is columnist Dan Savage, but Ruspoli over-uses Savage and turns him into a device -- Ruspoli shares the letters he has written over the years to alt-weekly guru, as if we care about his youthful ramblings. Savage deserves a better movie to have a sober discussion about the issues of monogamy and polygamy.

Other distractions abound. Ruspoli changes his look -- sometimes bearded, sometimes not -- so you might have to pause or rewind to make sure it's him in a given scene. He introduces some random 17-year-old mom, with not much to offer; doesn't identify her; and then doesn't seem to come back to her (I couldn't tell). This all is way too distracting for the 74-minute run-time. I will give Ruspoli credit for one thing, though -- he has a perfect ending. But sometimes the perfect ending is the enemy of the good of the whole.

Life Is Short: The Twilight of Twee

 

We can mark for history the moment when we finally gave up on Wes Anderson. It was during the suggested intermission in his latest fragile confection, "Asteroid City," a movie without a plot or a point, a $25 million cupcake that struggles to make you laugh or care. It followed a really cute scene of a space alien interrupting a midnight astronomy event to steal the small boulder that gave the town its name. It featured one of the best sight gags of the movie. That, in turn, followed a turgid scene of genius adolescents playing a game of memorization, apparently so Anderson could show off.

Anderson made two-thirds of a mediocre movie last time out ("The French Dispatch"), and this one is all bad. I didn't think it would be possible for a director or a movie to make Steve Carell seem funnier than Jason Schwartzman. Even by Wes Anderson standards, this movie is fussier than you can imagine. He flattens backgrounds to make them look 2-D cartoonish -- as if they are flat backdrops, inspired by '50s postcards. He drops modern vending machines into the lobby of a 1955 inn. He incorporates a CGI roadrunner who beeps like in a Warner Bros. short. He assembles one of his trademark stellar casts, and no one looks like they are having a bit of fun. They speak robotically and draw attention to it. It looks like it was as painful to produce and take part in as it was to sit through.

Anderson nests this technicolor town (famous for being hit by an asteroid) into a black-and-white teleplay with some of the same actors and hosted by Bryan Cranston, channeling Rod Serling. I didn't care enough to figure out which story was nested inside which story, and I didn't stick around to find out. I walked out on Wes Anderson. I had zero qualms that I would be missing anything cool or entertaining.

I felt bad for the cast. Schwartzman's newly widowed dad talks through gritted teeth, even when he's not clenching a pipe. Scarlett Johansson mopes as a depressed starlet. Tom Hanks gets outplayed by little girls as the widower's father-in-law. People like Jeffrey Wright, Hope Davis, and Liev Schreiber stand around like furniture. The annoying kids talk a mile a minute. Jokes crash to the ground. Sight gags earn shrugs.

We might want to reconcile the fact that, while he has made some good movies since then, Anderson peaked about 20 years ago as the creator of clever little universes. The epitome of that is "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," from 2004, where the filmmaker committed to a unique vision. But that movie came with fully fleshed-out (if quirky) characters and a compelling narrative. And genuinely talented actors were allowed to bring it all to life.

All of that is stripped away in "Asteroid City," which is as joyless as a planet-threatening impact event.  This project is a devastating blow to the world of Wes Anderson, who might just have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Title: ASTEROID CITY

Running Time: 104 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  50 MIN

Portion Watched: 48%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 6 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Had a chat in the lobby and went for a swim.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 14-1

BONUS TRACK

A (final?) update on the ranking of Anderson's films.

1. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
2. The Royal Tenenbaums
3. Rushmore
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel
5. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
6. The Darjeeling Limited
7. Bottle Rocket
   
8. The French Dispatch
   
9. Moonrise Kingdom
10. Isle of Dogs
11. Asteroid City
    

Soundtrack of Your Life: Sweet Nothings

 From morning ... till the end of the day ...

At the gym on Thursday, the music selection veered from mainstream pop to the National*. There is was, the new single, "Tropic Morning News." I've been listening to the new album, "The First Two Pages of Frankenstein," and I read the band profile in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, and the new songs haven't clicked yet. After Siri plays the album, she wanders off to some Matt Berninger solo work, and those songs resonate more.

As I emerged from the locker room to start my workout, there was the unmistakable tenor of Berninger's mumble and the familiar new tune. My buddy Ralph had just emailed the other day, name-checking the song that seemed to be bringing him 'round to the band. The National had a run as my favorite band -- saw them live in L.A. at the Greek in 2016 and then at the Santa Fe Opera in 2019. My latest favorite is Waxahatchee, who often sings me to sleep for pre-dinner catnaps. What a little kick to see the National get within earshot of the millennials pumping iron on a Thursday morning in the High Desert

Date: June 29, 2023, 10:40 a.m.

Place: Chuze Fitness in Uptown Albuquerque

Song:  "Tropic Morning News"

Artist: The National

Irony Matrix: 2.1 out of 10

* - After writing that, I realized that the National has won a Grammy and have had No. 1 albums, so maybe they've been mainstream for the past decade? Remember, we did hear them at JFK back in 2014.

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

 * * *

And then it was date night -- Wavves and Cloud Nothings double-billing it at Sister Bar. I assumed that Wavves would open, and we figured we had missed them when we walked in a little after 8 and saw the Cloud Nothings setting up their gear. They would proceed to thrash and burn. While they were setting up, the house PA blared classic New Wave. 

Before the show, I had sampled a couple of Wavves songs, and the YouTube algorithm, for some reason, segued into a recent "60 Minutes" profile of David Byrne. I devoted 13 minutes to it and then dared my childhood friend -- who famously claimed to have tossed his Talking Heads vinyl in the garbage in the mid-'80s after declaring the band sellouts -- to make nice with the memory of Byrne, now white-haired and avuncular. While the Cloud Nothings tuned up, "Psycho Killer" played, and I appreciated the inner-workings of the Matrix in that moment.

(YouTube followed the Byrne bit with another recent "60 Minutes" profile, this one of production guru Rick Rubin. It was heartening to see and hear Chuck D as one of the prominent talking heads.)

Cloud Nothings often traded in dystopian distortion, often engaging in death races to the ends of songs. In the middle of songs they would descend into jazz-odyssey noodling, only to re-emerge with the beat to finish a song.  Jayson Gerycz is a monster behind his center-stage kit. 

We last saw the band just before Covid hit, in February 2020, when they opened for Cursive.  Then, too, they deconstructed their songs before reassembling them, sort of their version of Nirvana's fast-slow-fast M.O. This week, though, they seemed miffed or annoyed, maybe because they were the middle band on the bill. The crowd was adoring the noise. There was a mosh pit that was mostly benign. For about two songs it was just young women slamming into each other, but they were friendly and pleasant about it. None of those skinhead skippers. 

Wavves were OK, but we left around 10, mainly because there was just no way the headliners was going to match the energy of the bashers from Cleveland.

BONUS TRACKS

The aforementioned National single:

 

Highlights from the Cloud Nothings set, starting with "Pattern Walks":

And always a favorite, the Replacements homage"I'm Not Part of Me":