The Ross brothers disappointed with "Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets," but we'll give them another shot at metafiction with their new teen road-trip film, "Gasoline Rainbow."
A debut feature, a comedy about a woman into BDSM humiliation, "The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed."
Pamela Adlon (TV's "Better Things" and "Louie") directs Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau in a farce about an unexpected pregnancy, "Babes."
A documentary about the hare-brained idea for a cheap cinema pass, "MoviePass, MovieCrash."
We might unplug our brain and watch a cartoon, with our heart, "Robot Dreams."
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) (A-minus) - Frank Capra directs Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in the granddaddy of all romantic comedies, and a classic newspaper picture, to boot. He's Peter, a reporter on the skids, and she's Ellie, an heiress running away from an arranged marriage. She's sassy and he's incorrigible, and they are thrown together when Peter runs across Ellie on the lam and realizes she is his ticket back to the big leagues.
The screenplay by Capra regular Robert Riskin (based on a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams) is clever and charming. Colbert has a looseness with the comedy, an underdog appeal that reminded me of Anna Faris. I must admit, I probably have never seen Clark Gable in a movie, besides clips from "Gone With the Wind"; my whole lifetime has involved watching imitations of him. Here, he is understated, quietly strong in his portrayal of a man torn between career and the heart.
The film still has a modern feel to it, 90 years later. (Circumstances require the pair to share hotel rooms, and they keep it kosher by stringing up a blanket between their beds -- they call it their Wall of Jericho.) Capra -- the feel-good legend behind "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," among other touchstones -- wields a light touch, but he keeps the story moving. The final third is just a little too long in wrapping things up. But you have to love that ending, which had to have inspired Mike Nichols and "The Graduate."
SPOTTED: Alan Hale Sr. (father of Gilligan's Skipper) as a singing driver who picks up the hitchhiking couple.
THERE'S ALWAYS VANILLA (THE AFFAIR) (1971) - Random algorithms led us to one of George A. Romero's non-zombie films, this surprisingly thoughtful slice of life about two opposites who try to make a random relationship work. Raymond Laine plays Chris, our narrator, a college dropout and Army veteran who is drifting through life for the moment. (His look here is preppy bohemian.) He meets-cute Lynn (Judith Ridley), a model who slums through shlocky TV commercial shoots.
This has the loose tone of TV shows of the time, a shambling narrative and a vignette format not far removed from "Love, American Style." But it also has the maturity of a Mike Nichols drama from the era, even if the vibe throughout is B-movie and based in Pittsburgh. We follow Chris as he runs into his estranged father, takes the old man to a strip club and then takes him to meet Chris' ex-stripper ex-wife, whose son may or may not be Chris'.
Once he meets the beautiful Lynn, he has the chance to level out his life, but he seems determined to sabotage the opportunity, mainly by being lazy and indecisive. You never get a good sense of chemistry between him and Lynn, and it will come as no surprise that there isn't much in the way of a happy ending in the cards for a serious woman marking time with a manchild.
Laine is a strong lead. He would not have much of a career; his IMDb profile lists such roles as desk sergeant, bus driver and "harmless man" and titles like the Romero follow-up "Hungry Wives" (tagline: "Caviar in the kitchen, nothing in the bedroom"), where he played another boy-toy. He's got just a hint of Duplass in his demeanor. He was a few decades too early to be appreciated as a Mumblecore mainstay.
A couple of valiant but off-key efforts that require some skipping through.
GODLAND (C+) - Life can seem like endless drudgery. Movies should be an escape from that. Or if you must present us with a humorless slog, go all in -- like Bela Tarr did with "The Turin Horse." Otherwise, get on with it!
Hlynur Palmason follows up his sharp and acerbic 2019 effort "A White White Day" with this dreary tale of a priest at the end of the 19th century trudging from Denmark to a remote part of Iceland to oversee construction of a church. It clocks in at a rubenesque 2 hours 23 minutes, and you'll miss nearly nothing if you fast-forward through these plodding (at times literally) scenes. Sure, you'll miss some amazing scenery, but then you're probably watching it on a small screen. (If you find it somewhere on the big screen, instead of fast-forwarding, you can periodically nap.)
Elliott Crosset Hove has the limp charisma of a bygone British stockbroker in his portrayal of Lucas, the priest who apparently drew the short straw and must trek from Denmark by sea and then across the forbidding Icelandic landscape, all while toting a newfangled tripod-mount camera that he will use to create portraits of those he meets along the way. The film apparently was inspired by the recent discovery on the coast of Iceland of some old wet-plate photographs. Now that might have made for an interesting documentary.
Instead, we follow the pale-skinned, soft-boned Lucas put through the paces of a rugged journey, even after camp is set up in the middle of nowhere. One man dies along the way. Lucas is then overseen by a gruff older man, Ragnar, played by Ingvar Sigurdsson, the catalyst of "A White White Day," who nearly rescues the film with his character's rough interpersonal skills. The second half of the film brightens, as Lucas falls for a local man's daughter, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), the older of two sisters who are on the market for a husband.
But this is all destined to end in gloom. I appreciated Palmason's nod to nature throughout. A time-lapse shot of a horse decomposing over winter and into spring brought to mind Michelangelo Frammartino's elegiac seasonal ode "Le Quatro Volte." And the depiction of the photography sessions are quaint and touching. But there's not enough story here to constitute anything more than a slide show or warrant spending this much time questioning whether God would put any of us through this dirge called life.
DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY (C+) - This is a sloppy, maniacally edited homage to the notorious and beloved X-rated film from 1969, John Schlesinger's gritty "Midnight Cowboy." Its critical flaw is a failure to convey a true sense of the film itself while employing a visual style that may induce nausea.
Nancy Buirski, who has a sketchy track record ("The Loving Story," "Afternoon of a Faun," "The Rape of Recy Taylor"), is all about mood and quick hits and less about thoughtful examinations of the subject film and the story behind it. You might come away knowing as little about the movie -- controversial at the time for its realistic depictions of a grimy New York and for a storyline that involves a hustler who engages in gay sex -- as you ever have been. The choice of talking heads can be curious, too. She lets writer Lucy Sante ramble on, to the extent that Sante at one point pauses a monologue and asks the camera, "So, where was I going with this story?"
Buirski is fond of showing clips from the movie and from its predecessors but without sound and with the talking heads prattling on over the images. And she insists on providing added perspective through a blizzard of nonstop stock images from the '50s and '60s, many you've seen before. They come in such short, quick bursts that the effect is dizzying. For no apparent reason there is a fraction of a second glimpse of comedian Mort Sahl onstage and then on to dozens more images in the next minute. The interview of talking heads is equally odd -- shaky extreme close-ups that often go in and out of focus.
We get a lot of Jon Voight here but no Dustin Hoffman, except (like with the director, Schlesinger) excerpts from previous interviews, all poorly recorded on tape. I was tempted to suggest that you just go back and watch the movie instead of this mish-mash, but when I viewed the scenes of Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo, I wonder if I can handle such a hammy Method performance a half century later. Maybe this whole exercise should remain in its Boomer crypt.
A THOUSAND AND ONE (A-minus) - This elegant and assured debut from writer A.V. Rockwell is a period piece from the '90s and '00s that tracks an ex-con mother who kidnaps her son from the foster-care system when he is 6 and raises him to the brink of college. A bunch of potential cliches probably just popped into your mind; don't worry, though, because this smart film dodges every trope and pitfall of poverty porn you might fear.
Teyana Taylor, known for her work in the music industry, grounds this film as Inez, who monitors little Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), a shy, quiet boy who not only languishes in the foster-care system but ends up physically abused. Inez, with the help of a straight-arrow friend (Terri Abney), finds temporary shelter and then finds a job and an apartment for her and Terry, then enrolling him in school under a pseudonym. She eventually reconciles with an ex, Lucky (William Catlett), who is not Terry's biological father, but who raises the boy as his own.
Rockwell goes deep into his characters and crafts soulful dialogue. Time jumps forward to Terry on the brink of high school, where he copes with stop-and-frisk cops and benefits when a counselor helps get him into a prestige school. A final time jump finds Terry preparing for college. At this age he is played by Josiah Cross, still dealing with his early trauma, often struggling to find his words, especially when manning up to ask a girl out. He and Inez are battling their slumlord, and Inez and Lucky are often on the outs (he has a wandering eye).
Inez is a devoted mother (she slogs away at a cleaning job instead of pursuing her dream of styling hair), so a twist in the final reel packs a powerful punch. It is believable and wrenching, leading to an emotional breakthrough between Inez and the wounded Terry. Rockwell subverts our lazy expectations at every turn. Taylor carries every scene, and she is surrounded by a supporting cast that creates a fascinating world, carved out of the recent past.
THE FIVE DEVILS (A-minus) - Lea Mysius follows up 2017's "Ava" with another focus on an exceptional girl, this one a child with post-cognition, the ability to see events from the past. Newcomer Sally Drame is quite the find as Vicky, the wild-haired girl whose journeys to the past are triggered after her aunt comes to visit her parents, an event that triggers the three adults whose histories are inextricably linked.
In a well-executed sci-fi maneuver, little Vicky can travel back in time to witness the unique teenage relationship between her mother, Joanne (Adele Exarchopoulos) and future husband Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), as well as Jimmy's sister Julia (Swala Emati), who was romantically involved with Joanne before Joanne would go on to marry Jimmy. A tragedy at that time had sent Julia off to prison, and the film opens in the present day with her returning to Joanne and Jimmy's home upon her release from jail. The tension is palpable for the full 103 minutes of running time.
Vicky collects objects and labels them by their scents, and those scents send her reeling back to the past. She gets to be a stoic observer, and in this way she can learn about her mother's past while finally getting an understanding of the aunt she had never met. Mysius captures a loveless marriage; a romantic spark that had been dormant for years; and the fascinating curiosity of a sharp girl. Exarchopoulos, as usual, brings depth to her understanding of Joanne's desires, and Emati and Mbengue well with emotion as the traumatized grown-up siblings. Young Drame often steals the show with her cheeky look and a whole Greek chorus bristling behind her big eyes.
It can all be a rather odd stew of storytelling -- there are a few trippy psychedelic freakouts to keep things lively, and I swooned to a karaoke duet of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" -- but Mysius and her cast manage to offer a nuanced and provocative tale of hauntings from one's past.
FREE TIME (B+) - Every generation gets the Mumblecore it deserves. It's just a matter of placing the characters properly on the autism spectrum. This debut feature, a minor-key Millennial riff on "Office Space," is well served by a short running time (just 74 minutes) and a winning no-name cast.
Colin Burgess (below left) stars as nerdy Drew, an office drone who, approaching his 30s, impetuously quits his soulless job as a data analyst (almost as an after-thought during a check-in with his manager) and sees an opportunity to make more fulfilling use of his free time. But he woefully miscalculates the allure of retiring in your late 20s and trying to live your modest dreams. Burgess, behind a silly porn 'stache and spectacles, is a perfect aimless dweeb. He is surrounded by a sharp cast, including a manic Rajat Suresh as Drew's roommate Rajat; the one-named Holmes as Rajat's bossy girlfriend who has no patience for Drew lazing around the apartment; Jessie Pinnick as a would-be love interest; and veteran James Webb (below right) as the exasperated boss.
Drew quickly realizes that he made a big mistake. First, he's broke. (As a former co-worker tells him at a party, the point of working for a living is being able to buy things, "products.") Second, the band he plays keyboards for has morphed into a country outfit since the return of its leader from a life-altering retreat with a guru, and Drew doesn't fit in anymore. (It's hard to tell whether he is bad at keyboards or he's just the odd man out.) He almost immediately starts scheming to get his job back in amusing inept ways. A last-reel twist aims for a Big Message about a potential rise of the office drones against mind-numbing capitalist servitude. First-time writer-director Ryan Martin Brown gets in and out of this diversion before it can fall flat, and he zips along to a tidy denouement.
You won't fall out of your seat guffawing, but I did laugh a lot, consistently throughout at the characterizations and the arch one-liners. It's a deceptively clever script -- it has something to say about office drudgery and that wall we hit in our late 20s careerwise -- and the cast finds the right tone of Millennial ennui. "Free Time" is a good use of your free time.
WAITING FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE (C-minus) - There's Mumblecore and then there's just mopey. In this case, we're toward the Gen Z end of the spectrum, the kind of film in which a 25-year-old moans about how old she is and scoffs at the idea of sleeping with a 20-year-old. Add in a heavy accent to the mumbling and grumbling, and this aimless story from first-time director Linh Tran becomes nearly unwatchable.
The movie is ostensibly about a reunion of sorts for two young women at the Michigan lake house of one of their boyfriends whose father has recently died, not that the plot point is developed at all, besides making the boyfriend a stoned, drunken, passive-aggressive jerk. The key pairing here is between Kim (Joyce Ha) and Amy (Jin Park), estranged friends walking on eggshells around each other. It's obvious that Amy used to have feelings for the lakehouse host, Jay (Sam Straley), but Kim swooped in after Amy introduced the pair.
Also on hand is Lin (Qun Chi), a foreign traveler with a tenuous connection to the group. She seems to have little to offer the narrative, although she does pontificate about love and relationships during a fulcrum point of the film. Rounding out the quintet is Alex (Erik Barrientos), who is that quintessential lake house guy who supplies the drugs and acoustic guitar.
It's all a pretty decent set-up, but Tran just does nothing with a spare script full of dull, whiny (sparse) dialogue that reveals little about the characters. Besides peeing outdoors in the opening scene, Amy is pretty much a cipher who coddles her insecurities and grudges. Kim continually tries to have an honest dialogue with her friend, but is rebuffed at every turn. Otherwise, their excessive quibbling over the two male ciphers pegs the Bechdel needle into the red zone.
Only occasionally do things come to life, as when Amy, out for a run with mop-topped Alex, gets instantly turned on by his admission that he had thought about how cute she was when they had met once before. But little else justifies an hour-and-a-half of post-teen angst dispensed by a bunch of drips.
UNFROSTED (C-minus) - Rarely will you find a comedy
with this many clunkers throughout. Jerry Seinfeld, who decided not to
go way or just stick to the occasional standup tour charging $400 per
ticket, instead blew tens of millions of dollars as director on his
star-studded sop to the breakfast industry, a paean to the Pop Tart. He
and his team of out-of-touch writers set the story in 1963, and they
also time travel to the 1990s to dig up some hoary jokes.
This
Netflix cheapie doesn't really know what it wants to be. At its core it
is one in a line of capitalist origin-story reveries, like "Air" or the
superior example of the genre, "BlackBerry."
On the screen, it is a comedy by committee, a series of gags that would
not be out of place on an episode of "The Monkees." Even though it is
set in the Kennedy era (props to Bill Burr for being one of the few to
salvage their reputation, with a winning JFK impersonation), it features
songs from the late '60s and riffs on future cultural touchstones like
"The Godfather" and other parodic flourishes that Mel Brooks beat to
death in the 1980s.
While the cast list is impressive, the two main parts go to the heads of the bitter-rival Kellogg and Post families, played by Jim Gaffigan and Amy Schumer,
two funny enough people who just are not meant for the big screen.
Their acting deficiencies, combined with Seinfeld's notorious wooden
delivery, are toxic here. And they cannot be rescued by an underused
Melissa McCarthy, or a laundry list of cameos: Peter Dinklage, Christian
Slater, Jack McBrayer, Dan Levy, Thomas Lennon, Kyle Mooney, Tony Hale,
Cedric the Entertainer, and a bunch of "SNL" cast-offs. Only a few
casting choices click: Fred Armisen as an FDA inspector; Hugh Grant as
the snooty real-life actor who played Tony the Tiger; and Jon Hamm and
John Slattery in an inspired set piece in which they revive
mean-spirited versions of their era-appropriate "Mad Men" ad men.
The
first 20 minutes of set-up was promising, and there are some laughs to
be had, even if the batting average is awfully low. But by the final
reel, it all turns ridiculous. The writing crew probably thought it
would be cutting edge or downright subversive to spoof the January 6th
Insurrection, but it's just tin-eared, childish and pretty much
offensive in this context. Meantime, Seinfeld cavorts with his comic
buddies in a candy-colored sitcom world and gets to drive around in
classic cars, just as he likes to do, so at least he got to have fun
with a big budget. But the film he created is shockingly amateurish.
This one is personal. No one defined the Soundtrack of My Life more prodigiously or aggressively than Steve Albini, the Chicago recording engineer who died Tuesday at age 61. Born in the same year, we both hit our strides in the '90s, he helping create music, me gobbling it all up at Tower Records with the big-newspaper wages in my pocket.
Most people of our generation know the foundational albums he engineered (he shunned the term "producer," because he was just that way) -- such as the Pixies' debut "Surfer Rosa" and Nirvana's finale "In Utero," two albums that almost perfectly bookend the Heyday of the Planet of Sound. There was also P.J. Harvey's urgent "Rid of Me"; the Breeders debut "Pod"; and hardcore albums by Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard.
But Albini considered himself a craftsman, a technician, a hired gun, and he worked with a wide range of bands and artists. That includes some of my favorite, more obscure, albums from the '90s, such as the Poster Children's "Flower Plower"; the Wedding Present's "Seamonsters" (and a lot of David Gedge's subsequent output); Man or Astro-Man's "Project Infinity": "Fresh Gasoline" by Phono-Comb; "Sport Fishin'" by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet; and the Bottletones' "Adult Time." He even contributed to peak Guided by Voices, with two tracks on 1996's "Under the Bushes, Under the Stars." The list goes on.
I could link to dozens of songs below. Better yet, seek out those albums and experience them in full. Albini's passing earned an outpouring of respect. Christopher Borrelli at the Chicago Tribune penned a thoughtful appreciation. Consequence of Sound did a nice job putting together this compilation of essential tracks. And the New Yorker's music critic, Amanda Petrusich, weighed in at the end of the week. As next-gen Petrusich put it: "When I was a teenager coming of age, in the late nineties, 'Steve Albini' was more of an idea than a person, a pair of
words—melodious, mysterious—stamped onto every other record I loved or
was terrified by."
It's not just nostalgia -- or the fact that Albini was about four months older than me -- that jolted me upon hearing of his unexpected death. He was a workhorse who dedicated himself to assisting artists in realizing their potential. He was a perfectionist, a meticulous craftsman, a clever writer, and an intellectual. I admired all of his qualities, as well as his measured humility.
I also simply dug his output. Here is a list of the bands whose Albini-led albums I have owned (in addition to his own bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac), a beefy 33:
Pixies
Nirvana
Slint
Urge Overkill
Helmet
Poster Children (the pride of Champaign, Ill.)
Breeders
Amps
Jesus Lizard
Pigface
Wedding Present
Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Fugazi
P.J. Harvey
Melt-Banana
Gaunt
Superchunk
Fleshtones
Man or Astro-Man?
Robbie Fulks
Phono-Comb
Guided by Voices (2 tracks from Under the Bushes, Under the Stars)
Veruca Salt
Sadies
Cinerama
Bottletones
Mclusky
Frames
Desert Fathers
Electrelane
Joanna Newsom
Cloud Nothings
I'll see the Cloud Nothings in June in Chicago, and before that, the Sadies in Santa Fe in late May. We'll catch the Pixies in Denver in late June. And we'll see GBV for the umpteenth tour, this time in Austin in late October. Those were all planned before the news of Albini's sudden demise. But it speaks to how indelible his impact on me has been across the decades, and endures.
Albini was a brash young man, who said and did things he later regretted and atoned for. He grew as a man. (In my 20s I once made a co-worker seek refuge in her car for a good cry. I got to apologize to her a decade or so later. And I corrected my behavior.) He could be devastatingly acerbic, such as when he penned the ultimate public fuck-you to a Chicago music critic whose year-end list hyped the record-company darlings of the day, the passing fads Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair and Urge Overkill (the latter one of Albini's clients). See his letter to the Reader alt-weekly, titled "Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge." He later was a professional poker player. He was a multi-dimensional guy. No one is one thing.
Neil Steinberg, a longtime writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, visited with his old J-school classmate Albini in a 2021 story. Albini, a working-class hero to the end, demystified the secret of getting through life: "You can’t say, ‘I want a long and important career.’ What you can do is keep plugging away doing what you think is valuable, in a way that you’re comfortable with." And that's what he did.
Steinberg asked him to define success. Albini gave a zen-like answer: "I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in
a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair
and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then
that’s a success." He then added "And success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”
I've always shared that self-declared working-class persona, even as a privileged daily newspaperman and a labor lawyer. I get to go punch a clock tomorrow and the next day. Albini's work is done.
BONUS TRACKS We featured a couple of Shellac tracks at the end of this review.
Check out the glorious, shimmery guitar solo in Guided by Voices' "Sheetkickers" from 1996:
Albini gave an extended tour of his studio about five years ago to EarthQuaker Devices, which produced this half-hour video:
And not an editorial statement, merely one of Albini's earliest and best productions, Kim Deal and the Breeders with "Hellbound":
A MARRIED WOMAN (1964) (B+) - Godard luxuriates in silky black and white as he trains his camera on his star, Macha Meril, and often on her isolated body parts as he delicately explores the psyche of a woman, Charlotte, who is juggling a husband and a lover as if coordinating two book groups. The body parts are never R-rated, as Godard seems more fascinated by Charlotte's wedding ring as he is by her private parts, which are always discreetly covered.
Maybe I'm just a pedantic older man who cuts the French director too much slack, but I've always admired the way he portrayed female characters in the 1960s. He exhibits an odd combination of male chauvinism (Charlotte and her husband's fights can get physical) and curiosity about the minds of first-wave feminists, especially the pretty ones. Charlotte is a step-mom and bored with her husband, who seems to love the small planes he flies more than her.
The first act focuses instead on Charlotte and Robert (Bernard Noel), an actor who is smitten with her and with whom she has strong chemistry. But Charlotte also has a life of her own, bopping around Paris as a woman of leisure. Godard challenges the male gaze and picks apart blatant commercialism, especially the capitalist industry fueled by the objectification of women (there's a particular obsession here with brassiere advertisements). In one key scene, Charlotte eavesdrops on two teenage girls naively sharing their rudimentary knowledge of how they think sex works.
Charlotte will be faced with an important life decision in the final reel, though Godard refuses to wrap up any of this neatly. It's fascinating to watch Charlotte live her life rather independently, taking challenges, both big and small, in stride. She doesn't seem to need either man, but she gets something from both of them. It wouldn't be a surprise if she continued to rotate men through her life.
FOR EVER MOZART (1995) (C-minus) - Even Godard's most inscrutable later works can be visually arresting and intellectually challenging. This mid-'90s toss-off is flat on the screen in multiple ways. It is also a derisive, almost borderline offensive shoulder shrug at the very real Bosnian war going on at that time.
Godard, whose reverence for the horrors of World War II drench his films of every era, is more mocking than horrified, turning the events of Sarajevo into a coked-up sex farce, as if the slaughter of Slavs means less than the decimation of western populations earlier in the century.
His wordplay is muted, and some of his set pieces are amateurish, particularly the "bombs" dropping on a camp where some actors are being held hostage. If Godard was going for campiness, he missed by a mile. And the story is a drip: a theater troupe endeavors to stage a play in war-ravaged Sarajevo. But the first of four sections of the film is so leaden and crowded that it's hard to care about the characters who hit the road and get ensnared in peril.
Godard's pontifications, channeled through his characters, feel forced and half-hearted. This feels like a mid-career slump, a toss-off that comes across as a lazy imitation of a cinematic genius.
BONUS TRACKS
From "A Married Woman," this French girl-group lilt, "Sad Movies":
We never made it through the three-hour "Drive My Car," but we'll take a chance on Ryusuke Hamaguchi's shorter follow-up, a slow burn about a town under siege by developers, "Evil Does Not Exist."
From Lithuania, a dancer falls for a great guy who happens to be asexual, leading to expected problems, "Slow."
