The Journey, Not the Destination

 

PLAN 75 (B-minus) - Maybe it's me, but I've been having trouble making real connections with movies that are intended to pack an emotional punch. This drama features a near future (or alternative present) where the Japanese government offers an incentive to people 75 and older to submit to euthanasia, a program intended to relieve the burden of an aging population.

It focuses on Michi (Chieko Baisho), who is shown losing her hotel-cleaning job at the beginning of the movie, and her decision to enter the program, which we learn about through snippets of TV ads that occasionally pop up in the back ground of scenes.  We also spend time with a couple of young people selling Plan 75 (one of whom who has an uncle entering the program) and a former co-worker of Michi's who is a Filipino immigrant worried about getting surgery back home for her 5-year-old daughter. 

It would have helped to have maintained focus on just one or two characters here. As it is, it is difficult to get fully invested in Michi's fate, especially since she is rather blase about the matter.  This is a debut feature from Chie Hayakawa (co-writing with Jason Gray, normally a translator), and she definitely knows how to create a mood. There just needs to be a more compelling narrative to go with that mood and the nuanced performance of her placid star. Sometimes showing the banality of bureaucratic evil is just banal.

HERE (B-minus) - Movies don't get duller that this lethargic contemplation of human connections. It's about as exciting as watching moss grow -- moss being one of the key characters in the limp, laconic drama from Belgian writer-director Bas Devos ("Ghost Tropic").

Construction worker Stefan (Stefan Gota) makes a pot of soup from the dregs of his refrigerator in anticipation of his four-week vacation back in his homeland of Romania. Over the next few days, while waiting for his car to get fixed, he gifts Tupperwares of soup to various people, including the mechanic and Stefan's sister. While on his haphazard rounds he happens to meet a woman, Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), who studies mosses. In a typical film this would qualify as a meet-cute, as the pair cross paths several times and seem to make a good match.

Apparently this is supposed to represent the "organic" development of a relationship, whether it turns out someday to be romantic or platonic. The problem is the film rarely rises above the excitement of watching moss grow. It's not particularly funny or even heart-warming. It just exists. Sometimes it's enough to present a slice of life and move on. Here it feels too much like Devos has just the bare bones of an idea and he's stretching the soup into some pretty thin gruel.

DRYLONGSO (1998) (B+) - This is more like it. Cauleen Smith's debut feature, coming out of film school, turned out to be her only full-length film. That's a shame, because she showed a lot of potential with this visually interesting tale of a photography student chronicling the dangers faced by young black men in Oakland in the late 1990s. 

She follows a restless young woman named Pica (Toby Smith) who insists on taking Polaroids even though she is taking a class on 35mm photography, and she's woefully behind on finishing her final presentation. She is distracted by a gloomy job pasting up posters on walls, and she is disturbed by society's targeting of young men who, like now, too often ended up in the criminal justice system or dead on the streets.

Smith is a low-key but sturdy force of nature as an artist and an advocate. A young man she falls for soon ends up dead at the hands of a serial slasher terrorizing Oakland's west side. At the start of the film she also meets a woman getting slapped around by a boyfriend and lends a hand to the woman, Tobi (April Barnett), who later turns up dressed as a young man as a way to avoid the pitfalls that women face. Pica and Tobi form a strong bond that artfully blurs traditional gender roles or expectations. 

The film is full of one-off performances by non-actors. Salim Akil is particularly crucial as Pica's professor, who nudges and nurtures in perfect proportion. (Akil co-wrote the script with Smith.) Pica's mom (Channel Schafer) likes to laze on the couch and open the house to massive poker parties, presenting a challenge to Pica's ability to focus on her art and future.

Smith actually has a compelling plot to unfold, and she meanders pleasantly to a satisfying conclusion after an efficient 86 minutes. No one associated with the film went on to have a breakthrough career, as if this were intended to be an urban bookend to a previous generation's "Spring Night, Summer Night." They left behind this little gem, which is just now getting a proper release (on Criterion).

Life Is Short: Now I Am Become Death

We slummed with cheeky writer Diablo Cody as a Valentine's Day choice and we pretty much got what we deserved.  And then we rented "Oppenheimer," and it was nearly as buffoonish. We pulled the plug on both.

"Lisa Frankenstein" is the kind of mid-career film that makes you reflect on whether the author was really any good all along. We have fond memories of "Juno" and are pretty sure it would still hold up. We skipped "Jennifer's Body," whose cheeky snark this movie fails to successfully imitate; were disappointed in "Young Adult"; couldn't get into the TV show "United States of Tara"; and couldn't fully buy into "Tully," though it had its moments.

"Lisa Frankenstein" plays out as if jarred in molasses, with long beats before punch lines and just a sluggish narrative churn. (Give some of the blame to hack director Zelda Williams?) It wasn't clear that it was apparently set in 1989; I just figured Cody was suffocating us with her old hipster music references, such as a teenage girl into Bauhaus with a boyfriend sporting a Violent Femmes T-shirt (under a sport coat, of course). The execution of the story of a misunderstood teenager who reads books in a cemetery and whose dream boy, a long dead young man, comes back to life after a lightning strike is laughable but rarely funny. Carla Gugino is cringeworthy trying her hand at comedy as the stereotypical evil stepmother. Liza Soberano comes across as a rookie playing the uber-popular stepsister named Taffy. The lead, Kathryn Newton, is pretty good, at least.

None of it works. It's insulting. It could have been another smart, tongue-in-cheek teen satire, like "Bottoms," but it is the polar opposite. It's not clever; it's just a lousy movie. 

Title: LISA FRANKENSTEIN

Running Time: 101 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  50 MIN

Portion Watched: 50%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 2 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and watched another movie.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 48-1

Then there is "Oppenheimer," a melodramatic wank that barely rises above the level of your average soap opera. It's an opportunity to single out Christopher Nolan, too, to rethink why we thought the pre-Batman auteur was a great writer-director. (We should watch "Memento" again soon.)

This seems like an interesting story, and I bet the book (American Prometheus) is a good read, but what's on screen is a mess, spending much of its opening scenes repeatedly displaying star bursts, nuclear reactions, and glass shattering in order to replicate the fractured mind of a young genius. It jumps around in time, using the device of a catatonic older Robert J. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy laying it on thick) reciting his biography to some security commission, while parallel scenes (in black and white, for some reason) star a gaunt Robert Downey Jr. as a candidate for Commerce Secretary testifying before a Senate committee about his association years earlier with Oppenheimer. 

And that's just the first 20 minutes of this three-hour monsterpiece. Maybe this was an impossible ask of Nolan, who seems overwhelmed by the vast amount of facts and players involved. Even though it feels sluggish, it also feels rushed, as if there is too much history to stuff into the film. The red-scare thread throughout the film is simplistic and repetitive. Oppenheimer and other brainiacs converse in meticulous speeches and never stoop to small talk; even cocktail banter inevitably comes around to quantum physics. I swear, as the wooden dialogue unspools endless exposition, you can hear the clack of Nolan's old-fashioned typewriter spitting out what he thinks are pearls.

Improbable events are concocted to add a modicum of zing to the leaden storytelling. I counted about 5 examples in the first half hour of characters pointing out how brilliant Oppenheimer was, usually involving his ability to speak other languages. I almost bailed out around the 20-minute mark when Oppenheimer's communist lover pauses mid-fuck, walks over to his musty bookshelf, grabs a volume written entirely in sanskrit, turns to a bookmarked page and asks Oppenheimer to interpret a random passage, and you'll never guess what the line is:  "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds." What a perfect coincidence!

The film's sound design is also frustrating. Ambient noise drowns out dialogue. Characters whisper for no reason (for example, multiple times when two people are out in the middle of nowhere in rural New Mexico, like no one would ever do). Murphy is the biggest offender.  Hamming it up as the troubled guru behind the atomic bomb, he rasps ominously like a depressed Batman villain or perhaps Nick Cave giving a spoken-word performance.

The supporting cast squirms in no-win situations. Downey looks the part but his tone is off. Emily Blunt goes from 0 to 60 as the cliched, betrayed drunk wife. Florence Pugh sits around naked as the obsessive communist lover, a cheap distraction from the nerdfest. The last straw was Matt Damon pretending to be a hard-ass general overseeing the Manhattan Project; back in the day, a performance this hilarious would be found usually in a Second City TV spoof called Bad Acting in Hollywood. 

This whole concept and production is everything that is wrong with Hollywood as a cultural cog of capitalism. This is a dud of historic proportions.

Title: OPPENHEIMER

Running Time: 180 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 50 MIN

Portion Watched: 28%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 2 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Read a book about political organizing.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 16-1

BONUS TRACK
The needle drops in "Lisa Frankenstein" are clunky and distracting, and some good songs are put in danger of getting hated merely by association. Let's rehabilitate one, "Strange" by Galaxie 500:

Doc Watch: Music Television

 

THE GREATEST NIGHT IN POP (B-minus) - Anyone over 40 is likely to find something to like in this tick-tock about the making of the "We Are the World" charity single, in which Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones assembled a who's who of mid-'80s superstars together in a recording studio for one long night devoted to one sappy song.

It's a mildly interesting reminiscence of a time nearly 40 years ago when the culture was more bunched around familiar faces and names from the worlds of rock, pop and R&B. Richie hogs the limelight with his stories, and he is joined by Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Cyndi Lauper, Dionne Warwick and a particularly humble Huey Lewis. We also hear from a few tech people who were crucial to the recording and who tell some of the liveliest stories. (My favorite is the one who looked around at the end of the long night wondering when he'd get paid only to be told that everyone was working for free. Charity, you know.) There's a bit of fun to be had when glimpsing some flash-in-the-pan talent. (Remember Kim Carnes?)

Many of Richie's stories seem embellished, especially the allegedly hectic nature of writing the song at the last minute, which also involved Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. There is a fun side story of whether Prince was going to show up or not (and how Sheila E felt like she was treated as bait). The song was recorded into the wee hours of the morning after the most of the stars had attended the previous evening's American Music Awards (hosted by Richie). Too much of the film seems like generic build-up, involving the recording of the group parts. Things don't pick up until the second half. In one scene it's fun to watch a bevy of superstars crowd around a piano and start to try out their solo parts, as if they're rehearsing a high school musical. Lewis, Lauper and others recall how nervous they were to deliver their one big line each and how drunk Al Jarreau got during the session. We cringe watching an uncomfortable Bob Dylan (his drugs have either kicked in or run out) having no clue, it seems, how to deliver his solo lines but then finally (finally) nailing it (or thereabouts), with the help of Wonder. 

It might be tough for most people to get excited about that era again, especially a night devoted to such a generic song. You get the feeling that some of the juiciest scenes might have ended up on the cutting-room floor, so as not to offend the likes of Billy Joel, Tina Turner or Willie Nelson, or one of the dozens of others who got roped into a long, trying night amid a sea of egos.

ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL (2009) (A-minus) - In the holy trilogy of metal movies, we consecrate "This Is Spinal Tap," "Some Kind of Monster" and this indie gem from Sacha Gervasi, a tribute to an early '80s phenom, a band that had a moment before the Metallica surge and dwindled into obscurity back in its hometown of Toronto. This documentary tells the story of two childhood pals, frontman Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, now north of 50, working dead-end jobs but still clinging to the dream of superstardom.

Gervasi, their former roadie, returns in 2006 with a camera to follow Kudlow and Reiner everywhere they go, creating a portrait of two longtime pals near the end of their tether, with Reiner more resigned to an unhappy fate but Kudlow refusing to believe that their career is finished. They muddle through a slapdash tour of Europe, missing trains and hitting rock bottom when they show up two hours late to a gig in Prague such that Kudlow has to physically threaten the owner to pay them after they perform. They toss a hail mary to a former producer who agrees to record a comeback album in the English countryside, but that turns into a catastrophe when Reiner threatens to pull the plug and they can't find a record label to distribute the CD.

The nods to "Spinal Tap" involve more than just a similar vibe -- they playfully echo the "Hello, Cleveland" line and make a pilgrimage to Stonehenge. Their wives and families are supportive (Kudlow's sister foots the bill for the recording), and Kudlow's Muppet-like good cheer is endlessly appealing. Gervasi manages to humanize the men without mocking them or their art. The songs -- including the foundational "Metal on Metal" -- are generic, but it's fun to watch these guys give it their all in front of middle-age fans who never outgrew their own head-banging fandom. Talking heads including Lars Ulrich, Lemmy and Slash bookend the film, offering respect to these two diehards who never allowed mediocrity to defeat them.

THE ORDER OF MYTHS (2008) (B) - This documentary examines the queasy detente of segregation beneath the surface of the annual Mardi Gras celebration in Mobile, Ala. It can be fascinating in its granular detail at times, but it sometimes comes off as merely quirky and inconsequential.

Filmmaker Margaret Brown would go on to make documentaries about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and, more recently, about the Clotilde, the last African slave ship to reach U.S. shores, an incident that gets name-checked here, too. She obtains VIP access to both main organizations that crowns kings and queens of Mardi Gras each year -- one run by the white community and the other by the black community. 

Everyone claims that this is the natural order of things and that no one is offended by this 21st century remnant of a more venal segregated past. Toward the end of the film, we'll watch the black couple pop in at the white gala (and mostly get ignored), and then the white couple will pay back the courtesy the following night, looking quite awkward the whole time. 

Brown's deep dive into an unusual, quaint ritual has a cult-film feel to it; her devotion to the subject is admirable. But, racial politics aside, her painstaking examination of a subculture comes off a bit too esoteric to land solidly.

BONUS TRACK

Anvil's signature tune was "Metal on Metal." Kudlow often performed in a S&M harness and like to use a dildo as a slide for his guitar. It was the '80s.

Cool Story, Bro

 

THEY CALLED HIM MOSTLY HARMLESS (C+) - This HBO Max true-crime documentary might have made a pretty good 20-minute story on "60 Minutes" or "Dateline NBC." But padded out to more than an hour and a half, it becomes the tedious story of the crowd-sourced hunt for a mysterious hiker found dead on the Appalachian Trail back in 2018.

The most annoying aspect is the repetitive arty B-roll shots, mostly re-creations of internet nerds typing on their keyboards with their chubby fingers, or of overhead drone shots looking down past the tops of trees to hikers retracing steps from years ago. The film also takes needless detours. At one point, the group is convinced that a cancer-sufferer's blog from that time is that of the missing hiker, known to most as Mostly Harmless. But that wasn't him; the cancer guy is still very much alive and totally someone else. Why bother with such distractions?

The filmmakers drag out the mystery to an interminable degree. I was ready to either bail out or fast forward to the end, but I was patient. I had a strong hunch that the reveal would be anti-climactic. (The most logical theories posited at the beginning of the documentary are either that Mostly Harmless was ill or was on the run from the law.) I was not rewarded for my generous devotion of precious time.

THE END OF THE TOUR (C) - Boring doesn't begin to describe this two-man acting exercise between miscast and mismatched actors reliving the time back in the 1990s when a Rolling Stone reporter spent days with author David Foster Wallace during the initial craze over Wallace's notorious novel "Infinite Jest."

Two talented actors are miscast and wildly mismatched. Jason Segel has stoner eyes and the patented bandanna to replicate Wallace's look, and he interprets the author as a mild-mannered, almost Jesus-like broken soul. Jesse Eisenberg plays dress-up as the nerdy reporter. Emo director James Ponsoldt ("The Spectacular Now") thought it would be a good idea to have Eisenberg chain-smoke and snack throughout the movie, someone's idea of humanizing him as a regular working joe, perhaps. I'd bet a crisp 20-dollar bill that Eisenberg has never been a regular smoker in his life. The attempt at millennial Method acting is quite distracting. The two actors occasionally look almost surprised to realize they're actually in the same movie together.

Put these two misguided duds together and watch them drone on about nothing interesting for an hour and 45 minutes. We know from the beginning of the movie that Wallace has gone on to take his own life, and the script (from two writers with scant resumes) renders this entirely in melancholy flashback. The tone is off right from the start, and it never gets interesting.

BONUS TRACK

"The End of the Tour" is the only film in the past 11 years that I previously watched but didn't review. It was a simple oversight. My partner rented it this time, and after 20 minutes I half-watched it, and I remembered why it had such little impact on me. And, for the record, I once made it about 150 pages into Wallace's tome, "Infinite Jest." Probably about average among all human attempts.

New to the Queue

 And now ... on with the countdown ...

Do we stick with the Turkish master, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or put him on probation for giving us another three-hour-plus drama, "About Dry Grasses"?

A filmmaker documents his own obsession with building an ark of knowledge and history in a field in Maine, "The Arc of Oblivion."

A debut feature about partying teens and consent, set on a Greek island, "How to Have Sex."

A long-delayed release of a 1971 drama about a Nigerian immigrant in New York, "Bushman."

Ethan Coen looks like he had fun with the pulpy comedy/action romp "Drive-Away Dolls."

That '70s Drift: Pale Homage

 

THE HOLDOVERS (B) - If I want to see a Hal Ashby movie, I'll rent one. What I don't need is a note-for-note period piece shot as if it were produced in 1970 or 1971, not just taking place in that year.

The opening credits of this movie -- about a prep school teacher and a student stranded together over winter break -- faithfully re-create the mood, style and font of classics from the American New Wave, and the mood never budges from that of movies like Ashby's "Harold & Maude" (down to the Cat Stevens needle drop) or Bob Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces." The gimmick -- extended for the length of two and a quarter hours -- is so self-consciously indulgent that it can take you out of the movie from the start and make it nearly impossible to get back into the actual story.

And that's not an insignificant complaint. This film is intended to casually unfold some emotional bonding not just between Professor Paul Hunham (a weary Paul Giamatti) and his young ward Angus Tully (drab newcomer Dominic Sessa), but also between the men and the campus cook, Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Rudolph), who is mourning the recent death of her son in Vietnam. But mix and match them every which way you can, and you'll be hard pressed to bind anything resembling an authentic connection among them. By the end of this glum, slow-paced drama (with dashes of dry, acerbic wit), we are left with three people who still don't have much in common and who haven't gained much insight into one another.

Rudolph's Mary is the classic (stereotypical?) noble working-class mother, and she doesn't get much to do here besides be sassy around these two under-achievers. Giamatti makes for a good shlub and an amusing nudnik, but it feels like we've seen him shovel this stuff before. Sessa is a bit of a cipher as Angus, who is kinid of a Holden Caulfield Without a Clue. His dad is dead and his mother has remarried a rich guy, and so she has dumped Angus into yet another prep school hoping he won't crash and burn there like at the previous ones. Angus is supposed to be a bit of a rebel, but he seems more lazy and disaffected than anything else. Put these three together, and you've got ... not fireworks, but maybe a couple of sparklers

This film reunites director Alexander Payne with Giamatti 20 years after their breakthrough, the indie touchstone "Sideways." Here Payne realizes a script by TV journeyman David Hemingson, with dialogue peppered with a good share of zingers but serving a story that meanders and wallows in its doldrums. The film is easily a half hour too long. A late plot twist doesn't have nearly the impact intended, and the lessons learned by everyone here on their various journeys come across as underwhelming and unearned.

That's not to say it's a bad movie. It's pretty good at times. Most everyone I know swears by it as a new masterpiece from Payne, who had a good run a decade ago with "The Descendants" and "Nebraska." It's been even longer since his millennial hat trick of "Election," "About Schmidt" and "Sideways." We can't blame the sloppy story on him this time, but he needed more discipline to shape this into a more convincing period piece. And he needed to drop the overly reverent New Wave shtick (and the cheap use of era-appropriate songs). These three characters deserved better. So does Hal Ashby and his contemporaries.

BONUS TRACK

The twee soundtrack also includes lethargic faux period pieces, like this dreary tune from 2014 by Damien Jurado, "Silver Joy":

R.I.P., Norman Lear

 TV pioneer Norman Lear died in December. In tribute, we went back to a movie he co-wrote when he was on the brink of shaking up network television in the 1970s.

THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S (1968) (B) - There is a bit of an embarrassing back story that explains this obscure choice from Norman Lear's oeuvre, a film he co-wrote with two others. Let's go back to the mid-'70s, when Lear was the king of prime time. It was an era when local TV stations would commonly follow the 10 o'clock news with an old movie. One night, when I was barely in my teens, this slapstick homage to the days of vaudeville popped up in a late-night slot, and I settled in to watch.

The film, set early in the 20th century, is about a young Amish woman, Rachel Schpitendavel (take that, Mel Brooks), who wants to share her religious dancing with a wider audience, so she goes to New York City, where she ends up at a raunchy burlesque venue inquiring about an opportunity. The managers don't really know what to do with this delicate innocent. Eventually, as a way to troll the local censors breathing down their necks, they come up with the idea of teasing Rachel as a mysterious exotic dancer from France only to present her performing her chaste dance. 

Here's where the teenage me comes in. I loved the movie because it was about classic comedy, and one of my favorite movies back in the '70s was "The Sunshine Boys," another ode to vaudeville. I was content to enjoy the broad stylings of the Minsky's duo of Raymond Paine and Chick Williams (Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom), but I was also drawn, of course, to Rachel, played by '60s it-girl Britt Ekland. It's not giving too much away to report that during a climactic scene, when Rachel finally gets her turn on stage, that she, unintentionally, bares some flesh to the crowd. Now, on Channel 2 back in the day, they would have edited out any nudity -- if, in fact, the movie itself revealed Ekland's bare torso in any way. My young self didn't know either way. The TV edit left everything to my imagination. And what a powerful imagination I had back then. And what a steely memory I have since forged, well into middle age. To this day, when prompted to remember this movie, I would wonder: Does the movie actually cut to a shot of the breasts of Ekland('s body double)? 

In memory of the dear centenarian Norman Lear, I vowed to finally find out through the technology of home DVD.

Lear was, by all accounts, a kind and generous man as well as a legendary producer of foundational sitcoms throughout the 1970s. He was profiled in a documentary in 2016, which we reviewed here. "All in the Family" still holds up to this day as a biting satire of ignorance and bigotry. The cringe factor among his other shows is surprisingly low considering the passage of a half century and the evolution of sensibilities in the culture. Networks are still replaying and remaking that and Lear's other shows, most recently "One Day at a Time." If you have any memory before 1970, you have to acknowledge that Lear permanently reconfigured television, with a legacy that lingers to this day, through "Roseanne" and "Black-ish" and the whole Chuck Lorre catalog. Lear cut his teeth on 1950s variety shows and a few well-considered scripts in the '60s, such as "Divorce American Style" and "Come Blow Your Horn" (with Neil Simon of "Sunshine Boys" fame). He teamed with Arnold Schulman and Sidney Michaels for "Minsky's." The fun songs are by Charles Strouse ("Bonnie and Clyde") and Lee Adams ("Bye Bye Birdie")

William Friedkin sat behind the camera for "Minsky's," honing his craft for his own '70s run. (His next three films would be "The Boys in the Band," "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist.") His shots are hectic and choppy, providing a jangled sense of the zaniness of entertainment that was popular in theater houses a hundred years ago. He overplays the gimmick of taking old black-and-white documentary footage from the streets of Manhattan and morphing it into fresh color scenes. But he serves the wild comedy well, perhaps even setting the table for "Cabaret," even if the touch is much lighter.

Robards is wonderful as the Bud Abbott-like straight man and Rachel's would-be seducer. Wisdom, a British clown, is delightful as a more physical Costello who quietly pines for Rachel's company. Ekland stands around a lot looking pretty and discombobulated, her ginger bangs never budging an inch, while she struggles through a German accent. The bench is deep, with Elliott Gould mensching it up as the son of the owner who is threatening to close Minsky's, vice squad or no; Denholm Elliott as the snooty censor; ol' Bert Lahr as the fading star named Spats; Forrest Tucker as a hoodlum (and Richard Libertini as his goon); Lear favorite Gloria LeRoy as the sassy dancing girl; and Jack Burns as a warm-up comic.

The film is packed with throwaway one-liners and goofy plot twists, and Friedkin is generous with the skits and songs, many of which stand on their own as fine seltzer-soaked representatives of a lost era. ("Nurse! Nurse!") And it all builds to that fateful climax, as Ekland's Rachel sashays on the stage. Will she truly invent the striptease on the spot? Has this been, for me, the longest tease in the history of moving pictures? 

Now that I've seen my share of bare breasts, will this whole experiment fall flat (so to speak) as anti-climactic? Oh, just give it a go and have a romp. Find out for yourself. I'm no longer (as) desperate for a glimpse of a boob, but may my 13-year-old's mindset never fade away.

Comedie Francaise

 

THE CRIME IS MINE (B) - What a delightful diversion. Francois Ozon twirls an entertaining screwball comedy set in Paris in 1935 about an actress who exploits the murder of a producer to advance her own career.

Ozon has written and directed some profoundly serious films the past 20 years (as recently as last year's release about a daughter honoring her father's suicide wish, "Everything Went Fine"), but he does have a lighter side. Sometimes, as in 2016 with "The New Girlfriend," he finds a beguiling mix of serious and slapstick. "The Crime Is Mine" is mostly slapstick, a true throwback to the screwball comedies of nearly a century ago (and apparently is loosely adapted from a 1930s French play).

Nadia Tereszkiewicz (above left) stars as Madeleine Verdier, an actress who storms out of a much older producer's home after he pulls a Harvey Weinstein on her. When hours later he turns up dead, Madeleine comes up with the idea of copping to the murder, even through she didn't do it, as a way to put her acting skills to the test on the witness stand and in front of a rapt nation. (She cares much less about marrying her suitor, who is heir to a rubber-tire fortune.) When she is acquitted, with the help of best friend and aspiring lawyer Pauline Mauleon (Rebecca Marder, above right), her career does, indeed, take off. 

But Madeleine, it seems, has stolen the thunder of the apparent real killer, faded ingenue Odette Chaumette (a bonkers Isabelle Huppert, above center), who wants her own chunk of the spotlight. Ozon has a ton of fun with this as a courtroom farce and Keystone Cops police procedural. He also lards on the costuming and decor, fully immersed in the era and its style. Huppert balances a giant bright-red fright wig on her head and should have been jailed for theft of scenery instead of murder.

Don't worry too much about the details of the plot and whether and how they might add up. The investigating judge is played by a wonderfully droll Fabrice Luchini, another Ozon favorite. This all would be frivolous and inconsequential if it weren't for the prodigious narrative skills of our generation's best overall storyteller. It's the kind of fun that makes you forget the world outside the dark movie theater.

GODARD CINEMA (B+) - With workmanlike precision, cinematic biographer Cyril Leuthy walks us through the career of Jean-Luc Godard, making the case for the French filmmaker as the foundational voice of the New Wave and what has come after it. Godard broke through in 1960 with "Breathless," and by the end of the '60s, he was burned out on commercial filmmaking, particularly radicalized by the May 1968 protests.

Leuthy, who has previously profiled Godard's contemporary Jean-Pierre Melville, shows a deep understanding of Godard as a man and as an artist. Talking heads are knowledgeable and articulate. The clips are generous. Some of his past loves -- still lovely -- weigh in on the man with a troubled mind. 

I'll probably never shake my fascination with Godard, even if I will forever be stranded in his '60s heyday and will never fully grasp his later movies, which just got denser and denser. The mystery is part of the allure; this documentary is a good example of the unpacking that is necessary to peel through the layers of the man and his art. My goal is to re-learn French to a degree advanced enough to not need subtitles for a lot of his later work and make it easier to comprehend the clutter that spills from Godard's mind. 

BONUS TRACK

Let's try to update our list of Ozon films, in order from our favorite on down, which is a very short step. They are all worth seeing.

1. Under the Sand
2. Time to Leave
3. 5 x 2
4. Young & Beautiful
   
5. The New Girlfriend
   
6. Swimming Pool
7. Everything Went Fine
   
8. In the House
9. Hideaway
10. Frantz
    
11. The Crime Is Mine
    
12. Ricky
13. See the Sea
14. Double Lover

Outside the Law

 

CHILE '76 (B+) - Carmen is a woman of means who is asked to assist a wounded young insurgent in Pinochet's Chile in the mid-'70s. Newcomer Manuela Martelli conjures up a simmering tale of danger under autocratic rule.

Aline Kuppenheim is the placid face of privilege as Carmen, who is renovating her beach house when a local priest asks her to tend to a bullet wound of Elias (Nicolas Sepulveda) at a safe house. Carmen's husband and son are doctors, but she decades ago gave up her pretensions to practice medicine while serving with the Red Cross during World War II. She surreptitiously finagles drugs and supplies without trying to get caught. She also gets swept up in the secret underground in an effort to find Elias safe passage. One false move and she and Elias and the padre could be disappeared.

Martelli's storytelling (she wrote the script with Alejandra Moffat) is clever and efficient. She sets the table for the whole movie in the first five minutes via two scenes full of subtext and visual cues. Kuppenheim, with a conventional middle-aged beauty, speaks volumes through her precise facial reactions. It's not always clear who is a good person and who might be a collaborator. The setting of the sea is a knowing nod to the Pinochet administration's fondness for dumping its enemies into the ocean. 

It all contributes to a growing sense of dread, not unlike "The Lives of Others," set in 1980s Germany. Perfectly paced, "Chile '76" is a chilling lesson in defying both the political system and social castes.

THE DELINQUENTS (B+) - What price freedom? Splayed leisurely over three hours, this Argentine drama goes deep into character study to tell the tale of two men who collaborate on robbing the bank they work at in order to avoid a life of wage drudgery. An intentional stint in jail for the mastermind sets the table for a generous sweep of time that allows writer-director Rodrigo Moreno to offer a mini-homage to "Crime and Punishment" by way of "Godfather's" storytelling techniques. 

Moran (Daniel Elias) decides to steal from the bank just enough money to cover the expected wages and retirement needs of himself and one other person, whom he recruits to hold on to the money while Moran serves a precisely prescribed prison term of three to six years under civil law. The accomplice is accommodating co-worker Roman (Esteban Bigliardi, above), a lowly teller with a hangdog expression who succumbs to the pressure of participating and consents to take the bag of money to a remote location by a lake surrounded by woods and hills. (Moreno, for some reason, quaintly plays with anagrams to name these characters as well as others, named Morna, Norma and Ramon. He also has the same actor, German de Silva, play both a bank manager and an inmate.) The first hour sets up the heist and sends Moran off to prison after a bit of reconnaissance to decide where to stash the cash. The second hour finds Roman actually hiding the loot and while doing so running into Morna, Norman and Ramon, who record the sights and sounds of the idyllic areas surrounding their village for a documentary about gardening. His brief trip fractures the connection to his wife, Flor (a tough Gabriela Saidon), upon his return.

Moran will learn that life in prison is not as easy as he may have expected (some of the money will have to be set aside to pay protection to a fellow inmate), and Roman will face consequences at work and in his marriage. A somewhat implausible coincidence will bond the men by the time Moran's prison sentence ends. Key to that is Norma, brought to life in a grounded performance by Margarita Molfino, in a deftly sketched characterization. In the final hour, we finally get a flashback to when Moran first visited the town, before his imprisonment; he falls in love with the rural lifestyle of Norma, Morna and Ramon, and perhaps regrets now having to interrupt this utopian existence for a stint of hard time. I was reminded of Michael Corleone's jaunt to Italy during his days in hiding in "The Godfather," especially the languid pace and the charm of the countryside. 

The film in general has a major feel of that '70s Drift of the American New Wave ("Five Easy Pieces" also comes to mind), a tactile fabric almost, so you don't mind the leisurely pace. The final scene -- of a character ambling along on horseback into that same countryside -- features a perfectly timed needle drop and a slow reverse zoom to reveal a John Ford panorama as the credits roll, and you feel hope for both men, even if we never learn their eventual fate.

BONUS TRACKS

The opening scene from "The Delinquents" features the first of several songs from my favorite tango composer, Astor Piazzola, "20 Years Ago" (with Gerry Mulligan):

One plot thread involves an album by Buenos Aires blues artist Pappo getting passed around among the characters. His "Volume 1," from 1971, includes "Where Is Freedom?"

Now and Then: Once and Again

 We look at the latest from John Carney and then go back to the start of it all, the musical love story "Once."

FLORA & SON (B) - With sass and confidence, the cast of this corny underdog story overcomes a thrum of shmaltz to sell the hell out of a heartfelt film. Ireland's John Carney -- known for his musical dramedies like "Once" (see below) and "Sing Street" -- approaches middle age with a healthy amount of cynicism.

Eve Hewson stars as Flora, a frustrated part-time mom searching for a purpose in her disappointing existence in Dublin. On a whim, she buys an acoustic guitar for her teenage son, Max (Oren Kinlan), and when he rudely snubs the offer, she searches online for tutorials for herself. She meets Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) an L.A. singer-songwriter who charges $20 a session by video.

Flora is foul-mouthed and forward, and soon Jeff -- a New Age nerd -- develops a soft spot for his working-class client. Meantime, it turns out that young Max does like music; it's just that he prefers techno and hip hop, dropping some dorky but charming rhymes. Flora's ex, Kev (Paul Reid), is actually a bass player in a dormant band, and he serves as a fine foil to Flora, who still knows how to push her ex's buttons.

Carney unravels his story in classic fairytale fashion. Hewson's sharp edge keeps this away from the territory of cloying and sentimental. But just barely. Gordon-Levitt finds depth as the lonely failed songsmith. The tunes -- written by Carney and Scotsman Gary Clark -- are perfectly understated. Flora's dramatic learning curve might elicit an eyeroll, but enjoy the rich dialogue and the cast's commitment to a smart script full of heart.

ONCE (2007) (A-minus) - Carney started out with this drama that has a documentary feel, about a Dublin busker who meets another melancholy soul and makes a musical connection. Glen Hansard (of the band the Frames) is the Guy, and Marketa Iglova is the Girl he meets-cute on the street, and the two stars wrote most of the songs -- separately and together -- that are featured prominently in the film, often played in full.

Guy is getting over a girlfriend who has since moved to London, and Girl is a single mom, an immigrant whose estranged husband is back in the Czech Republic. She plays piano (a music store lets her noodle there during the lunch hour), and the two communicate through songs and collaboration. She is sensible and adorable, and he's a bundle of edgy heartbreak seeking release through cathartic screeds.

Carney shoots in guerrilla street style, in what looks like crisp digital, and establishes a space where Iglova and Hansard can genuinely collaborate. The thin plot is essentially a will-they-or-won't-they romantic comedy during their week together. The sweetness extends beyond this improbable pairing, to her mother and to his father. Guy and Girl are in a bit of limbo, and their happenstance time together not only makes their purgatory bearable, but it also bears fruit in some gorgeous music.

BONUS TRACK

The signature tune from "Once," the anthemic love song "Falling Slowly":