The Creeps

 After venturing back in time to review some of the touchstones of Mumblecore, we check in to see what this generation's young adults are kvetching about.

THIS CLOSENESS (B) - Kit Zauhar made a passable debut feature, "Actual People," about a woman graduating college without clear direction, and now she gives us a low-budget potboiler about a couple whose relationship is on the rocks and pushed toward the edge by the people around them. This is a claustrophobic movie, akin to a stage play, which takes place almost entirely inside an Airbnb apartment that the couple shares with an odd tenant.

Zauhar writes, directs, and stars as Tessa, who is abiding the antics of her boyfriend, Ben (Zane Pais), during the weekend of his 10th-anniversary high school reunion in Philadelphia. For some reason they book a place that comes with oddball Adam (Ian Edlund), who is a video editor and mostly stays huddled in his bedroom, though he does share common areas with Tessa and Ben.

Added to the mix is good-time girl Lizzy (Jessie Pinnick), a former classmate who has an uncomfortably deep bond with Ben and parties with him and their classmates all weekend, while Tessa often stays behind. The McGuffin here is that Tessa is an ASMR videographer, specializing not so much in sounds as in sensory touching of her subjects on camera. 

What Zauhar has created is a jangly drama about the tenuousness of interpersonal relationships. Lizzy threatens the bond between Tessa and Ben, which is shaky to begin with. Tessa, who is smart and has exotic looks, seems to be settling for a conventionally handsome fun guy in order to tamp down her own insecurities. When Lizzy comes by for an ASMR session, it gets interrupted by Adam emerging from his room. Later, Tessa, a little tipsy, gives Adam a sample of her techniques, only to be interrupted unexpectedly by Ben, who is understandably upset by this.

Edlund brings layers to a character who at first seemed like a borderline dangerous incel. Zauhar's Tessa has depths of emotions that suggest she may be consciously or subconsciously sabotaging her relationship with Ben, who simply wants to have a fun weekend and doesn't want to be annoyed by the gangly weirdo in the other bedroom. Zauhar brings this to a boil -- including a charged scene of edgy, explicit role-play sex -- and a thoughtful resolution within 88 minutes. She does lean too lazily on a plot device halfway through in which Tessa spills her guts to her therapist in an emergency phone session. Still, it's another step forward for her filmmaking, adding more working parts to a narrative and using the confined space to force discipline on her visual art. Let's see where she takes us next.

SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING (B+) - Daisy Ridley ("Star Wars") is delightfully placid in this off-kilter black comedy about the tedious life of a wallflower who, as the title suggests, sometimes engages in flights of fancy revolving around death scenarios. It is a languorous meditation on the struggles of socially awkward people in the modern age.

Director Rachel Lambert -- working from a script from a committee of three writers -- leans heavily on Ridley, portraying bland Fran, who does little more than work diligently at her McJob in an office full of hokey work nerds. Lambert lets the camera eavesdrop on tedious office conversations (parts of which are intentionally inaudible), as if to give permission to Fran to seek escape through her daydreams of doom. If you've ever sat a desk, doing a task for the millionth time, surrounded by uninspiring drones, you might empathize with Fran wishing she were put out of her misery. It's no wonder that she's the type who walks into her home at the end of a weekday and pours herself a glass of wine before taking her coat off first.

But into this mind-numbingly dreary work space comes the new guy, Robert (David Merheje), who is refreshingly amusing, thoughtful and possibly even a little fun. He shows an interest in Fran, who, to her credit, manages to bust through her own shell and stick her neck out for a chance at some romance. They have quaint movie dates -- he's a film buff -- but her hangups are an obvious obstacle to a true relationship.

Lambert gives this all a gloomy texture, shooting along Oregon's Pacific coast, with a nod or two toward the American New Wave of the 1970s in general and even the emotional numbness of "Five Easy Pieces" in particular. She depicts Fran's doomsday daydreams with dramatic flourishes, as if she is staging artworks for the Romanticists. But a few death fantasies come out of nowhere, with the punch of an action film -- before returning us to Fran's bland living-breathing world. 

Ridley is a revelation, doing her own riff on something you'd see from Sissy Spacek back in the day. Merheje is convincing as a nice guy who himself is trying to figure a few things out after a couple of unsuccessful marriages. Megan Stalter (TV's "Hacks") steals a few scenes as the unnaturally perky boss overseeing this menagerie of misfits in a workplace that seems like a sci-fi twist on "The Office" or "Office Space." Character actors Marcia DeBonis, as a melancholy recent retiree, and Parvesh Cheena bring some veteran heft to the proceedings

Everything knits together pleasantly, and if you are patient with the overall gloom and snail's pace, you might enjoy this little gem.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

 

New to the Queue

 Striding erect toward Bethlehem ...

Should we give Kat Zauhar another chance after the shaky but interesting "Actual People"? We're wary but game for the domestic slow burn, "This Closeness."

A documentary about the electronic-music pioneer and crossword-puzzle stalwart, "Eno."

We have a soft ban on dementia movies, but we're drawn to Baltasar Kormakur's wistful flashback story about lost love, "Touch."

I've always claimed that I could watch Isabelle Huppert read the phone book for an hour and a half, and that test may have arrived in the form of the one-person play "Marianne."

We're wary of this one, but a journalist embedded with Afghanistan's Taliban after the U.S. pullout in 2021, and the result is "Hollywoodgate."

Hardcore Mumblecore

 In which we go back toward the beginning to reconsider the origins of the Mumblecore movement, which marks the transition from Generation X to Millennials, riffing on their parents' Cassavettes. We start with two collaborations between Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg.

HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS (2007) (A-minus) - I'll never understand the title, but I'll never forget my introduction to Greta Gerwig, who, in her early 20s, stars as Hannah, an impatient woman seeking a footing for a career as a writer and cycling through men who don't have the substance to match her desires. 

This project is an Origin Story of sorts for the genre -- Joe Swanberg was the prolific hit-and-miss writer-director of that era; Gerwig would be the It Girl and would go on to co-direct with Swanberg (see below); Andrew Bujalski, a co-worker and love interest here, started this whole movement in 2002 with "Funny Ha-Ha"; and Mark Duplass, coming off "The Puffy Chair" (2005), co-stars as Hannah's manchild boyfriend Mike, who has quit his job without a Plan B, sparking Hannah's first relationship crisis. 

 

Hannah has a chronic dissatisfaction that is rooted in her ambitions. She is interning at a production company in Chicago, and her two main co-workers -- Bujalski's Paul and Kent Osborne as Matt -- are lazy writers who goof off at work and awkwardly try to flirt with Hannah. She quickly dumps the unemployed Mike and takes up with Paul, an annoying nerd. It won't take long for her to tire of his wishy-washy antics. Soon Matt starts vying for her attention, and they have a cute connection when they discover that they both can play the trumpet.

"Hannah" captures that wonderful confusing time after college when you are technically an adult but you are more play-acting at the role than actually fully adulting. Hannah and her roommate, Rocco (a sly Ry Russo-Young), are hipster gals navigating Guyville -- smart, attractive but also nerdy. They are at that new-adult stage of eating out of orange plastic bowls and conveying clear-out signals when there is a potential for the other to have a makeout session.

The dialogue is breezy and mostly improvised. Swanberg has a cast that trusts each other, and they apparently trust him to mold these shaggy scenes into a cohesive movie, which he does well. Gerwig truly is a revelation. Her magnetism grabs your attention and dares you to ignore her. In one pivotal scene, Hannah deals with stress during a spat by grabbing an ice cube and crunching into it, a deadpan look on her face, creating yet another curious quirk of character. She is unpredictable and operating on a level or two above the others, who only occasionally rise to the challenge. Osborne is the best match for her improv skills, as Matt is the one who is the most flexible and the one most willing to patiently learn who Hannah truly is. (Gerwig and Osborne get co-writing credits with Swanberg.) Bujalski, true to the genre he birthed, mumbles quite a bit, and you might be well served by engaging the subtitles in order to catch every whimsical bon mot from the cast.

Gerwig is more than your run-of-the-mill manic pixie dream girl here, despite her peroxided pixie haircut. You can feel the waves of potential emanating from her. You can maybe even sense, in retrospect, that she would not be content to play the girlfriend in some guy's little indie films. Like Duplass, she had filmmaking skills and charisma to burn. It's not surprising that they carried the Mumblecore ethos into the mainstream in their own unique ways.

NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS (2008) (B+) - Going into this exercise, I remembered "Nights and Weekends" as superior to "Hannah Takes the Stairs." Not this time. Swap Gerwig's parade of love interests in "Hannah" with a whole lot of Joe Swanberg as her partner, and that's a lot of Joe to put up with. (He is like a poor man's Channing Tatum here.)

I wonder what Gerwig makes of these early films in her career. In both of these movies, which were released in succession, she is liberally naked. The nudity seems quite natural, but can it be considered excessive or exploitive in retrospect? That's not for me to judge. She is doing quality work here; but is she merely appeasing Swanberg and the boys to a certain extent?

The hook here is that Gerwig's Mattie and Swanberg's James are trying to make a long-distance relationship work, shuttling between Chicago and New York every few months. Their frustrations boil over in often passive-aggressive ways. Neither one can ever quite do the right thing in a given situation.

Gerwig has a natural awkwardness and vocal stammer that calls to mind the 1970s films of Woody Allen. She unleashes very real emotions at a moment's notice and she has a playful way of expressing her feelings. Mattie is frustrated by the era's blurring of irony versus sincerity. When James tries to make the best of a situation by acting goofy, Mattie is outraged; she scolds: "I don't respond to sarcastic fun!" All of this nuance takes place despite the fact that Swanberg is a bit of a cipher opposite her. (There is a reason that most of his quality work was behind the camera.)

You can watch the one-minute trailer and find five reasons to want to watch Gerwig in this film. One scene in particular cements her status as a major talent. Mattie is at a restaurant table, waiting for James, who can be seen in background, outside, making a phone call. She self-consciously primps her hair and touches up her lip gloss, like women used to do in movies. But she's also cycling through a stormfront of micro-emotions. There are so many things happening in that single moment, all captured in her eyes and her fidgety mannerisms. 

You could build a whole movie around that acting exercise. Considering that this is the naissance of a cinematic movement, maybe that's just what these adventurous filmmakers did.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

 

Doc Watch: Legacies, Part 2

 

KIM'S VIDEO (B) - It was with trepidation that we went into this adventurous documentary, which chronicles a New York video store and follows its inventory on a random odyssey to a small Sicilian village. It is often annoying but in the end wins you over with its sheer determination.

David Redmon co-directs (with Ashley Sabin) and narrates this ostensible detective story about the ultimate fate of the tens of thousands of movie titles -- many of them bootleg, obscure and cherished -- and their improbable transfer from the mysterious video-store owner, Mr. Kim, to the random village of Salemi in western Sicily. The narrative takes several odd twists and turns (some caused by the narrator himself), and you get the feeling that Redmon isn't telling you the whole story; but it's his movie, and he and Sabin can tell their own version of the truth.

The first half is dragged down by childish animated re-creations; Redmon's hushed, faux-reverent narration (he sounds like an obscene caller); and his constant strained references to movies -- both rare and popular ones -- that just make him seem like an insufferable hipster braggart who used to work in a video store. The overall style is off-putting, and Redmon -- who apparently had money to burn, traveling all over the world and running up production costs -- comes off like an entitled brat who has nothing else to do for years but make his precious little documentary.

But the second half hooks you with an old one-two and a splash of water in the face as the tale gets knottier and the impending resolution more intriguing. Redmon and Sabin develop the colorful characters from Salemi and unspool an underworld tale in tribute to Jules Dassin and the noir antecedents. They nest a few clever callbacks into the climax and wrap it up with a satisfying ending.

Doc Watch: Legacies, Part 1

 In what may be the latest ever recorded, we finally give out our first straight A grade of the year for a 2024 release, halfway through July.

FLIPSIDE (A) - I'm not the only one who wonders what would have happened if I had taken a more creative path in life. Never has a contemporary of mine captured that mix of regret and resignation until this urgent video essay. It's a friendly nudge but it comes with the resonance of a gut punch, right up until the final credits, as Paul Westerberg wails, "Look me in the eye and tell me ... that I'm satisfied."

Here we get another paean to a music store. (See also, "All Things Must Pass" and "Other Music.") At least ostensibly this one is a beloved Gen X hangout in suburban New Jersey, Flipside, but it, too, is about way more than trading in CDs and vinyl. 

Chris Wilcha has assembled his collection of failed and stalled film projects by creating a pastiche about creativity, facing head-on a question that haunts our generation -- have we been sellouts? Wilcha made a minor splash with a documentary 30 years ago about his work experience at Columbia House, the onetime emporium of records, tapes and CDs. But he would go on to make commercials for the next 30 years to pay the bills. He had a number of false starts in the documentary world, but those stalled projects end up on hard drives that stack up on shelves. 

Wilcha smoothly hopscotches along his themes here -- hoarding, career crossroads, roads not taken. He weaves in fascinating characters who each represents a touchstone in the narrative. He bookends the film with footage from a failed project profiling Herman Leonard, a photographer from jazz's classic era of the '40s, '50s and '60s. Wilcha was recruited to document Leonard's dying days by TV writer David Milch, who is more connective tissue, an example of someone at the other end of the spectrum, who was too devoted to the creative process, such that he ignored his family. Wilcha found Milch through Judd Apatow, who had given Wilcha a potential big break -- directing the making-of video for 2009 comedy "Funny People." (That project now languishes as an anachronistic DVD extra.)

Everything seems connected here, and that is the work of a journeyman in his craft who has finally assembled his masterpiece. The main character besides Wilcha is Dan, the disheveled proprietor of Flipside, a cluttered, rundown store stuffed with music -- vinyl and discs of all genres, from disparate eras. Wilcha figured he would make a film about Flipside (where he had worked as a teenager) and get it back on the map; but that project stalled, of course, and when Wilcha returns a decade later, Dan is still trapped in a bygone era, figuratively entombed amid his life's work; some months he doesn't make enough money to pay the rent or keep the lights on.

Wilcha must come to terms with Dan's decision to snub the modern world; improbably, there's another vintage record store that opens within walking distance, also owned by a person named Dan, but thriving with fresh young customers connected to the store through social media. (Grumpy other Dan refuses to develop a website, meaning he can't participate in the annual Record Store Day.) With those two goalposts set, Wilcha treats us to his own odyssey -- juggling his soul-sucking corporate career with his repeated documentary duds, all while supporting a family. Wilcha actually has an assured auteur style as he curates a lifetime of footage, both personal and professional.

More characters come and go. Flipside is a favorite of Uncle Floyd, the onetime host of an ironic local kiddie TV show (which fleetingly went national), who now, potbellied, serves up shlocky songs at conventions along the rubber-chicken circuit, and Tracy, Wilcha's former Flipside co-worker (and ex-girlfriend), a former punk who now, in middle age, dispenses wise koans while occasionally looking in on the old place. Wilcha also checks in with his father, who had a thoroughly satisfying and celebrated career in marketing; the son returns to his childhood home to finally clear out all of his old stuff (mostly music paraphernalia), under the watchful eye of his parents, and to confront footage of his brash teenage self. The emotional buildup in his childhood bedroom is nearly as suffocating as the physical one.

There is no way to convey how profound this all becomes. Leonard, the photographer in his 80s, also provides sage advice and perspective. His negatives sat for 40 years -- like Wilcha's hard drives -- before he finally became celebrated for his art. (We're also treated to glimpses of some of his celebrity visitors in his last days, including Lenny Kravitz and Quincy Jones.) Wilcha also introduces us to a would-be author, Starlee Kine, who is stricken with writer's block shortly after Wilcha thought it was a good idea to do a documentary about someone writing a book. (That all failed, naturally.) Both Kine and Leonard distill the essence of the artist here -- to be seen, to be validated, to leave a legacy. (NPR host Ira Glass provides additional "celebrity" cred here, but he has little to add while we watch footage of his midlife crisis.)

This all might hit you particularly deep if you are of a certain (middle) age. Not 10 minutes in Wilcha flashes a series of photographs of him and his teenage friends having fun in the old record store in the late 1980s, and I started to tear up a bit. By the end, when those credits rolled and that Replacements song kicked in, I had to shake off a blissful stupor while bobbing my head and remind myself that the name of that song is not "Satisfied," but "Unsatisfied."

Here's to the suggestion that it might never be too late for any of us to craft that masterpiece.

BONUS TRACKS

"Flipside," in a scene inside the record store, literally drops a needle on Tom Rush's 1966 take on Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love":

 

We get a clip of David Bowie singing a tribute to Uncle Floyd, called "Slip Away":

 

The Replacements with "Unsatisfied":

Noir Chronicles: Ray of Light

 Going deep for a pair directed by film noir legend Nicholas Ray:

IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) (B+) - Humphrey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with anger management issues who is suffering through an extended dry spell. He lands in hot water when a hat-check girl he took home late one night ends up dead the next day, and police reluctantly have to treat their pal Dix as a suspect.

A sultry new neighbor, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), an aspiring actress, might be Dix's alibi as well as his new love interest. But Dix's friend, the police detective Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) sows doubts in Laurel's mind about her flinty beau, and this turns into a tight little psychological thriller.

Bogart is suitably gruff, and Grahame ("Crossfire") goes toe to toe with him. Nicholas Ray's camera is fascinated by her captivating looks. In one scene, as she gets a massage, her face is foregrounded, taking up most of the screen, and uplit to enchanting effect. Ray's pacing is efficient, and he is at ease capturing a car chase and road-rage incident as if shooting a documentary. And his sucker-punch of an ending -- the screenplay is by Andrew Solt and Edmund North, based on a novel by Dorothy Hughes -- hits square in the gut.

SPOTTED: Don't blink. Billy Gray, barely glimpsed as a child autograph seeker, would go on to play Bud on "Father Knows Best." James Arness (TV's "Gunsmoke") makes an uncredited appearance as a detective.

BORN TO BE BAD (1950) (B) - Joan Fontaine dominates the big screen as a free-spirited wannabe debutante whose reckless demeanor upends several lives. Fontaine mixes a prim, innocent look with crazy eyes as Christabel, who flirts with a friend's rich fiance and strings along a struggling author -- while serving as muse for a suave painter.

It must have been racy for its time, as Christabel beds multiple lovers and doesn't mirror the more ladylike Donna (Joan Leslie), whose engagement is endangered by the carpetbagging jezebel. Even when Christabel wrests the wealthy Curtis (Zachary Scott) away from Donna, she can't suppress her lingering feelings for the ruggedly handsome writer, Nick (Robert Ryan) -- until everyone ends up miserable.

Fontaine ("Beyond a Reasonable Doubt") is a force of nature as the manipulative floozy, and the others raise their game to keep up with her. Visually, it's blander and more traditional than "In a Lonely Place," which immediately preceded it in Ray's catalog. But Fontaine's all-out performance makes this a fun hour and a half.

SPOTTED: Mel Ferrer (no relation to Jose but once married to Audrey Hepburn), here playing the bohemian artist, would have a full career in television in the '70s and a regular gig on "Falcon Crest" in the early '80s.

I Strain*

 We can't seem to get off the schneid with new releases lately ...

I USED TO BE FUNNY (C) - This infuriating comic downer positively crackles with indie possibilities in its first half hour full of snappy dialogue and interesting characters -- until it descends into a mundane story of obsession and depression. 

Our gal Rachel Sennott carries the day as Sam, a sharp standup comic who has hit the skids after a nanny gig went sideways two years earlier. She is shunning the stage and freeloading in a Toronto flat with a couple of comic pals, Philip (Caleb Hearon) and Paige (Sabrina Jalees), and the three of them have a clever patter that I could have listened to all movie. Unfortunately, the plot from hell takes over.

Turns out Sam used to nanny for a 12-year-old (you read that correctly), Brooke (Olga Petsa), who is now a 14-year-old runaway who haunts Sam. Brooke has a creepy dad (yet another film where a youngster's mom dies), and if you can guess that he factors into the fracture between Sam and Brooke, you get no extra points, because that was way too obvious and easy to guess.

Before you know it, Philip and Paige fade into the background, and we get stuck with flashbacks to what went south between Sam, Brooke and that cardboard cutout of a dad. The problem here is: Who cares? So Sam doesn't get to hang out with a 14-year-old anymore. Good riddance; she's moody little brat anyway. Things get worse, as the second half is dominated by a law-enforcement procedural; it's like a dull episode of Canadian "Law & Order." A convenient ending comes too quickly, too late (after a flabby 105 minutes), and it is too pat. 

Sennott ("Shiva Baby," "Bottoms") is a wonderful comic actor, and she probably is capable of reaching the necessary depths to pull off a dark story about a troubled stand-up comedian. But this feature debut from Ally Pankiw (who cut her teeth in TV and on music videos) is an infuriating waste of Sennott's talent, a film that takes a fatal left turn around the one-third mark and never recovers. It is one misstep after another for over an hour. (Try not to snicker when Sam's ex has the super-human ability to go from an unexpected kiss to full erection/penetration in about 8 seconds flat.) Don't be fooled by the trailer.

I SAW THE TV GLOW (D+) - Boy, what a couple of mopes this movie gives us. This meditation on .... having a favorite TV show, I guess ... is a complete mess, a Millennial wallow at the no-eye-contact end of the spectrum.

Owen (Justice Smith) is a painfully timid, sexually confused teen who befriends Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a depressed lesbian two years his senior, as they bond over their favorite show, "The Pink Opaque," in which two telepathically connected young women battle forces of evil. The film starts out in a refreshingly analog world of1996, when Owen is in seventh grade (and played by Ian Foreman) but it hop-skips into the 21st century after Maddy disappears and Owen must struggle alone with his otherness. 

I'd love to summarize a coherent plot, but there isn't one. It treats Owen like a baby throughout -- in high school he has to ask his parents (of course there's a dying mom involved in a movie like this, married to an emotionally distant dad) if he can stay up until 10:30 on a Saturday to watch the TV show. It takes the film a half hour to wake up to the fact that VCRs existed then, and time-shifting had long been a thing. (To call it an idiot plot would be an insult to idiots.)

At some point, Maddy visits the realm of the TV show -- a cheap "Xena"-meets-"Buffy" knockoff -- and Owen and the viewers are expected to believe that Maddy can exist in a different dimension. The show involves its heroes battling a villain named Mr. Melancholy. (I supposed writer-director Jane Schoenbrun couldn't get the rights to "Captain Obvious.") In one scene of the show within a show, Mr. Melancholy makes one of the characters drink a magic potion that makes a white liquid dribble out of her mouth, and god help me, but it looked like a cum shot from a porno. That's an example of how cheap and poorly thought out this whole exercise is. (It's also the lazy kind of movie where two characters in a bar can just whisper back and forth even though a band is playing.)

The two leads plod around like bored ghosts, Owen all slow and slope-shouldered. They speak slowly, and their scenes together feel like they are slogging through molasses. You want to fill in the obvious dialogue for them before they can manage to finally spit it out. I know that their situations involve some social anxiety and maybe mental illness -- perhaps some gender dysphoria, which is mostly hinted at -- but still, a director either needs to zip this along or develop some actual plot points.

As it is, "I Saw the TV Glow" comes across as an unintentionally amusing cult film, like "The Room" or "Rocky Horror Picture Show." (But what do I know; the Guild Cinema was nearly full of young adults for the summer matinee screening.) Maybe 10 or 20 years from now this will pack them in on Friday nights, with fitted-out Pink Opaque brigades shouting out the dialogue and singing along to the sad songs.

BONUS TRACK

From a key scene in "Glow," Florist with "Riding Around in the Dark":

* - I borrow "I strain" from my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Narkis, who cautioned against overuse of the first-person in essay writing.

Doc Watch: Bait and Switch

 Two movies that promise an interesting premise but fail to deliver the goods.

HATE TO LOVE: NICKELBACK (B-minus) - Boy, hey, what a great bunch of guys these maligned Canadian rockers in Nickelback are. You have to give them credit for grinding it out over the years and enduring the universal sneers of music snobs accusing them of robotically crapping out corporate cookie-cutter MOR pabulum.

It's literally right there in the title of the movie -- this is the band everyone loves to hate (or maybe hates to admit to loving). But the documentary has little interest in exploring the cultural phenomenon of four guys suffering as improbable pariahs. We get a glancing recognition of it in the first half and brief reprise toward the end, but this is just not that movie. It feels like we wait for some kind of payoff that never comes.

Instead, we get a rote career overview of four super-nice guys -- three of whom grew up together in a small town called Hanna in Alberta -- who churn out radio-friendly power ballads like "Photograph" and quirky earworms like "Rockstar." No offense, but these guys are earnestly inoffensive. In other words, Canadian.

At times this plays like the Hallmark channel's counter-punch to the crazy Metallica documentary "Some Kind of Monster." It's like a VH-1 "Behind the Music" episode with the middle section (the inevitable descent into drugs and dissension) cut out and replaced with a feel-good story from the drummer. I'm thrilled for Chad and the boys, and I'm glad that they are happy and well-adjusted (and rich), but their story just isn't very compelling, especially when you whitewash the one plot point that would have provided at least a little tension. 

Fans will probably love this (the fan I watched this with -- who took me to a fun Nickelback concert in 2017 -- did), but most others are likely to roll their eyes and possibly ratchet up a little hate for these talented choirboys. I'm sure Canada is proud of them.

QUEEN OF THE DEUCE (B-minus) - This messy biography of a tough old broad who reigned during the New York City era of X-rated cinema mostly skips its most interesting topic in favor of bland analysis from her family, who executive-produced the film. 

Chelly Wilson was a gruff grandmother who had survived Holocaust-era Greece and, without speaking a word of English early on, went from selling bags of peanuts on the streets of New York to owning multiple porn palaces in Manhattan that thrived in the 1960s and '70s. You might be curious about the lurid details of that grimy underworld; this movie won't satisfy that curiosity. An exploration of the true seediness of 42nd Street in the '70s is literally reduced to about a minute of air time in the final 10 minutes.

Otherwise, a good 20 minutes of the first half follows Wilson's odyssey as a barely closeted lesbian fleeing both a loveless marriage and the pogrom against the Jews before World War II. Students of 20th century Greek history might have the stamina for the extended foray; I didn't. Throw in a ton of childish animated re-enactments, and the first half really suffers.

Wilson's two daughters are the main protagonists who recount their mother's unique lifestyle and life choices with enthusiasm and good humor, along with two grandchildren whose appreciation for the old lady are more tempered by a generational awareness of the ills of capitalism and pornography. The daughters participated in the porn empire, along with one's husband, and by the end of this 78-minute film you get a strong sense that these timeworn family tales have had their edges smoothed and details elided to the point of unreliability. 

The clips from various adult films of the era (Wilson even got into producing films at one point with titles like "Scarf of Mist Thigh of Satin") are essentially PG-13 presentations (one talking head notes that some of the films could easily be shown on afternoon TV these days alongside soap operas). Now three decades after Wilson's death, enough (too much?) time has passed, such that her life is reduced to a bland gloss, a watered-down hero's journey by a determined grandma, all of it smothered in sepia.

BONUS TRACK

OK, I'm a sucker for Nickelback's "Rockstar," so here you go: