Down and Inside Out

 

SUNLIGHT (A) - Sometimes low expectations can be your ally. And when a movie full of wit and charm comes along -- packaged in a road-trip buddy movie that pairs a suicidal man with a woman hiding from life in a monkey suit -- you go along for the ride and smile broadly at the result.

 

Brit Nina Conti, who has been dabbling in monkey-puppet antics for a decade now, directs and co-stars with Shenoah Allen, who co-wrote the loose-limbed, slyly funny script with her. The pair play a couple of emotionally wounded people on the edge of nihilism who eventually bring out the dormant humanity in each other. 

Their meet-cute is at a dingy motel in New Mexico, where Jane (Conti), wearing a cheap monkey suit, spots depressed radio journalist Ray (Allen), dangling from a sealing fan in the motel where Jane works and is suffering through an emotionally abusive relationship with Wade, the proprietor. Cut to Jane -- who insists on going by Monkey, her alter-ego, and committing 100% to the character -- piloting Ray's Airstream trailer when Ray comes to in the passenger seat, startled.

Jane is trying to escape to Colorado, and Ray hatches a plan: Stop off first in Espanola, dig up his dead dad, grab a valuable watch and split the proceeds with Jane, providing them both the financial boost that will fund a fresh start for each of them. None of this, of course, will be easy. Ray has to confront his controlling mother (Melissa Chambers), who is a ball-busting sheriff's deputy. And maniacal Wade -- the amazing Bill Wise ("Krisha," "Thunder Road") -- has saddled up his racing bike and is hot on their trail through northern New Mexico.

All of this would go off the rails into silliness if it weren't for the two (well, technically three) very real characters created by Conti and Allen. He is cynical and wisecracking -- a sort of rich man's Jason Sudeikis -- is perfectly at home in his hometown of Albuquerque and its desolate surrounding environs. He cut his teeth in Albuquerque and around the world as part of a comedy duo, the Pajama Men, with high school pal Mark Chavez.

Ray's past is not explored in detail, but just one visit to his mother and his old home conveys volumes of pent-up angst. Conti speaks in a stilted British accent under that monkey suit, and her passive-aggressive approach to Ray -- foul-mouthed, self-lacerating, overtly sexual (yes, while covered in fur) -- snaps her new friend out of his stupor, renewing his vigor and expiating her own. A brief moment where she sheds the costume and soaks up the high-desert sun on her face holds more character development than most whole movies do.

The banter between the two is sharp and unrelenting. It is pithy but not in a self-aware Tarantino manner. Some of it feels ad-libbed, and Conti has a natural feel for how to end a scene with a dour punchline. (Her familiar editor is Riaz Meer.) You can't help rooting for these two to make it out of the harsh world of bumfuck New Mexico and onto a fulfilling next chapter, whether it is together or on a fresh path all their own (Jane dreams of running a boat-ride business).

Of course, that won't be easy, with Wade and Ray's mom plotting against them. And it won't be easy to dig up a grave, though it's both exhilarating and repulsive to watch Ray try. May this be a lesson in the futility of trying to excavate the past. 

BONUS TRACK

"Sunlight," for some reason, takes place around the turn of the millennium, and it has a gritty desert-noir soundtrack, including prominent placement of the Pixies gem "Hey":

Sympathy for the Late Sixties

 Two featuring Mick Jagger:

 

PERFORMANCE (1970) (B) - Ah, London in the Swinging Sixties. Donald Cammell, who would go on to direct a few horror films and thrillers, teamed with a young Nicolas Roeg ("Walkabout," "The Man Who Fell to Earth") to tell the trippy tale of a London gangster who goes into hiding at the home of a reclusive and libidinous rock star, played by Mick Jagger.

 

Square-jawed James Fox stars as Chas, who shares a thick Cockney accent with his mob mates, and their rough street life dominates the first third of the film, a sort of grimy homage to classic British noir. But then Chas kills a rival and, losing the faith and protection of his underworld boss, goes on the lam, sweet-talking his way into the home of Turner (Jagger) by posing as a fellow performer. He convinces a woman named Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) to let him crash for a while, and eventually he gets seduced by the hedonism of the household, which includes Turner's three-way relationship with Pherber and another woman.

Pallenberg -- notable for dating Jagger (purportedly) and his Rolling Stones mates Brian Jones and Keith Richards -- is quite of-the-era here, with her casual confidence, blond shag haircut and gravity-defying breasts, as she romps with her freckled friend, Lucy (a boyish Michele Breton). The women are intoxicating, and Jagger has quite a screen presence himself, with those lips and that swagger. Fox is convincing as the normie who ventures into the counter-culture, all the while knowing that there are thugs tracking him down. He will eventually experiment with drugs and gender identity, and make his way into the bed of one of the women.

Turner himself is in a crisis of identity and career, and the filmmakers morph the story into a taut, dark psychological grind. The camera shots are inventive, and the depictions of psychedelic trips manage to avoid coming off as trite. That first third could be a slog, but once the story settles into the claustrophobic confines of the country estate, the cast is engaging, especially whenever Jagger or Pallenberg are present. 

GIMME SHELTER (1970) (A-minus) - From the "Right Place, Right Time" files, in association with "Had to Be There" productions, we give you Exhibit A in support of the case for the final and absolute curdling of the Sixties high in America: this documentary about the December 1969 Rolling Stones concert in San Francisco that unraveled into chaos and a fatal stabbing. 

 

Part concert film and part detective documentary, "Gimme Shelter" is an infamous notch in the belt of the celebrated Maysles brothers (Albert and David) and collaborator Charlotte Zwerin. It curates fly-on-the-wall footage from the Stones' 1969 tour and recordings of iconic tracks at Muscle Schoals in Alabama, before the band arrived in San Francisco for the doomed "festival" at Altamont Speedway, a slapped-together free event that turned into the photo-negative of the peace-and-love gathering at Woodstock four months earlier.

The first half of the film is dominated by standard concert footage at Madison Square Garden in late November (the band was touring behind the album "Let It Bleed"), interspersed with scenes of promoters scrambling in a matter of weeks to cobble together the event that seemed snakebit from the start. (The star of the negotiations is famed celebrity attorney Melvin Belli, working the phones like a big shot.) The Stones are a bit lethargic at MSG (Jagger, of course, excepted). 

Many drugs seem to be involved. The Maysles camera crew (including a young George Lucas of "Star Wars" fame) observes the Stones in the recording studio, mostly watching them listen to playbacks of tracks that would end up on 1971's "Sticky Fingers," such as "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar." The crew also sits by as Jagger and drummer Charlie Watts review footage from Altamont, studying their reactions of an event that could have, at the time, ended the band's career. That is because the security force at Altamont was led by the Hell's Angels -- one of whom boasted that they got paid $500 in beer to protect the stage -- who roughed up the fans (and Marty Balin from Jefferson Airplane) and eventually stabbed to death a man who was reported to have wielded a gun and been hopped up on methamphetamine. The fateful moment is captured by the camera crew and analyzed frame by frame in the documentary.

The fantastic footage -- shot from all angles in and around the stage -- immerses the viewer into the chaos and the repercussions of some profoundly poor decisions by the organizers (which included Michael Lang from Woodstock). It is crazy to watch fans, roadies and Hell's Angels crowd the stage while the opening acts and eventually the Stones try to play music. Things got out of hand from the start (there was little planning for parking or the influx of 300,000 people), and it's no surprise that the Grateful Dead show up and decline to perform. 

Jagger -- ever immortalized by his pleas from the stage of "Why are we fighting?" -- looks shaken by the mayhem surrounding him. He later called the experience "a cathartic end of the era." Thanks to Zwerin and the Maysles brothers, this indispensable artifact chronicles the death of hippie idealism and the myth of Peace and Love.

BONUS TRACKS
From "Performance," the Last Poets with "Wake Up, Niggers":

 

Jagger, demonstrating how music videos would go a decade later, "Memo From Turner" (with Ry Cooder on slide guitar):

 

From "Gimme Shelter," Tina Turner giving an NC-17 performance at Madison Square Garden, opening for the Stones. Jagger blithely comments while reviewing the footage, "It's nice to have a chick occasionally." I'll be in my bunk:

 

The Flying Burrito Brothers, along with the Jefferson Airplane, opened for the Stones at Altamont. Here are the Burritos with the song featured in the film, "Six Days on the Road":

 

Let's give the Stones the last word, with "You Gotta Move" from the 1969 tour:

On Her Own

 

THE OUTRUN (B) - Every generation gets the "Days of Wine and Roses" it deserves. This one is more "Days of Sea Lions and Seaweed," but it gets the job done.

 

Saiorse Ronan turns in an understated but powerful and believable performance as a 29-year-old woman struggling to stay sober by leaving her London party scene and returning to the Scottish isles near where she grew up (with a pair of challenging parents). She communes with nature as a way to smother the desire to drink, with mixed results but with a clearer mind -- not only about her sobriety but also her eventual path in life.

Nora Fingscheidt, who seems to specialize in films about wild-card females ("The Unforgivable"), helps adapt a novel by Amy Liptrot, unspooling the story of Rona, splintering the narrative with flashbacks that can be a little difficult to follow but help illustrate Rona's jangled brain (and explain how she destroyed a relationship with a sweet partner (Paapa Essiedu)). Her mom (Saskia Reeves) and a gang of Jesus freaks annoy Rona, but the daughter is particularly triggered by her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane), whose mood swings spiral her back to childhood traumas, especially when he cocoons in bed, unresponsive.

Rona not only assists on the family farm but also helps conduct a head-count of the rare corn crake. She learns to appreciate the small joys in life, like a peek-a-boo swim with sea lions and learning the healthful benefits of seaweed. You sense that she has gotten her life on track, even if she has a long scuffle ahead staying sober.

MARIANNE (C+) - It has come to this. The culmination of my cinematic viewing and reviewing existence. Ninety minutes of pure, uncut Isabelle Huppert -- just her, and only her, addressing the camera. With that mesmerizing mask of a face, she could have been, as they say, reading the phone book for an hour and a half, and I would have forked over $10 to see it.

 

It turns out she reads from a rambling script (apparently) from newcomer Michael Rozek, who trains his camera inertly on Huppert seated on a couch as she unspools a disjointed monologue with a meta theme that dares you to keep watching. Huppert mainly addresses the camera when not flipping pages in the script she relies on, and she has an unmatched ability to pierce the screen and the illusion of cinema and seem to teleport into the movie theater and communicate directly with you. 

She mocks the concept of a narrative and plays with the idea that she will be taken as an elitist for engaging in such a (mock) vanity project (featuring her self-aware high-brow references to jazz's Thelonious Monk and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky). It's a one-woman high-wire act that few others could attempt, let alone pull off. She is droll at times, and it's fun to study her at length. I enjoyed trying to figure out how she manages to convey volumes with her eyes, passing time as she fussed with her hair or struggled to pronounce the word forlorn in her thick French accent. You have to pay close attention in order to catch the sly changes in her blase mien.

Toward the end, Huppert finally gets off the couch but quickly ends up back in (her?) spacious home, this time in front of a mirror reciting an extended passage about love and the "noisy gong" from 1 Corinthians in the Bible. She is quite earnest throughout, and it's hard to tell whether she is truly trying to convey some philosophical ideas or merely engaging in an absurdist lark, winking along with Rozek. She brings it all around with a subtly effective conclusion, and by the end of the 87 minutes, you have either lusciously indulged in all things Isabelle Huppert, or you walked out an hour ago because it was all too flippant to bear. I enjoyed the experience but I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to; thus the grade that might seem lower than this review suggests.  

BONUS TRACK

Rona listens to a lot of electronic dance music in her headphones during "The Outrun." But from the end credits, the ever-hopeful and fresh-sounding "This Is the Day," from 1983, by The The:

Doc Watch: Fight the Power

 Two from PBS ...

UNION (A-minus) - With ultimate insider access, this granular documentary provides classic fly-on-the-wall observations of the rag-tag group that heroically organized thousands of workers at an Amazon plant on New York's Staten Island, the first ever bargaining unit sanctioned at a warehouse of the e-tail giant.

 

In the shadows of COVID in 2021, Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer formed the unaffiliated Amazon Labor Union, following a worker protest that had led to the firing of Smalls, who channeled his fury into an Ahab-like determination to topple a giant. Shunning an affiliation with a major national union, the ALU focused on grass-roots organizing, zeroing in on individual sign-ups in a short period of time at a facility whose workforce turns over roughly every six months. 

In all kinds of weather, a handful of diehards manned a tent at a bus stop outside the warehouse, offering food (and at one point weed) to win over the overworked crew members. We sit on on the leadership's Zoom meetings, where democracy gets messy (and prissy) at times (one of them will defect by the time the big vote arrives) but hope never dies. We trek with them to the offices of the National Labor Relations Board as they navigate the ancient bureaucracy, and hidden cameras take us inside the facility to lay bare the anti-union indoctrination sessions known as captive-audience meetings. 

Smalls, on balance, is a hero you can root for. He is a single father who displays an interesting mix of empathy for the workers and vengefulness toward the behemoth that tried to crush his spirit. Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story are dogged in their pursuit of the story, their cameras often rolling in predawn hours as the huddled masses spill out of buses, steeling themselves for another 10-hour shift on their feet, with too-few breaks. As if we needed another reminder of the reality behind our blithe online shopping addictions.

HANNAH ARENDT: FACING TYRANNY (B) - This is another matter-of-fact installment of Philosophy for Dummies, meaning a Philosophy 101 class for people like me. We get a tick-tock through the life and career of Hanna Arendt, the foe of totalitarianism who rose to prominence when she coined the term "the banality of evil" while covering the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 (reporting for the New Yorker magazine.

A German Jew, Arendt fled the rising Nazi regime in 1933 after briefly being incarcerated, settling in Paris, working toward a Jewish state in Palestine, before a brief pilgrimage to her postwar homeland and then becoming an American citizen in 1950, the year before she published The Origins of Totalitarianism." This "American Masters" production is a bit obsessed with her love life -- she famously dated the legendary Martin Heidegger (who would fall in with the Third Reich) and later had an open marriage. But it gives full berth to her words -- through archival interviews and her writings, voiced by actress Nina Hoss.  

The rise of the Nazis (later echoed in the Nixon-Vietnam era) should send chills down the spine of modern Americans, with a rhyme scheme readily apparent. We get this quote:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.  And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please.

The message from this surface-level analysis of one of the 20th century's big thinkers: Pay attention to the past; totalitarianism can take root anywhere and at any time.

Doc Watch: I Know You Are

 

PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF (A-minus) - I've watched this twice, and I don't have much to say. It's a powerful final reveal of Paul Reubens, who died two years ago, giving the man his due after decades cloistered behind his fictional alter-ego, Pee-wee Herman. It's also a fascinating, but sometimes frustrating, first-person account by Matt Wolf of his years-long odyssey in bringing this troubled production to fruition.

 

 

Reubens sat for 40 hours of interviews, wrangling with Wolf throughout for a degree of control over the direction of his life story. He makes passive-aggressive jokes about being co-director, which eventually grow a bit tiresome, but the charm of Reubens shines through from beginning to end, the glint in his eye ever-present despite Reubens secretly suffering from cancer throughout the production. (Few people knew until his death was announced, and it came as a shock to Wolf as well as the rest of us.)

The over-arching theme here is Reubens' lifelong struggle to just be himself. He found a great excuse to avoid coming to terms with his homosexuality by creating the character of Pee-wee Herman, the fey, mischievous man-child. I consider that creation the post-war equal of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, and if you don't, you probably won't have the patience for this 3.5-hour two-part HBO Max special.  

The curation of clips here is impressive -- Reubens went to Cal Arts and then toiled as a founding member of the Groundlings comedy troupe, so there is plenty of archival film of him going back to the early '70s. Reubens developed a bunch of characters but settled on Pee-wee as the breakthrough, soon taking it to a bigger stage, and then on the road, which became an HBO special. With memorable turns on David Letterman's "Late Night," Pee-wee would eventually break through with a hit movie in 1985 ("Pee-wee's Big Adventure"), and then his brilliant Saturday morning TV show, before his career unraveled in 1991 after an arrest in a porn theater in Florida (where he grew up in the circus town of Sarasota and where his parents still lived at the time).

A decade later, Reubens would be the victim of overzealous prosecution when his vintage erotica collection was seized as a pretext to accuse him of possessing child pornography, an allegation that turned out to be false. But it was this later accusation that seemed to haunt Reubens all the way to his grave. Wolf is blessed with an ending when Reubens, who had ghosted him for the last year, recorded a final monologue the day before he died, still ruing that ordeal. 

By the time that ending arrives, however, Wolf has spent nearly an hour belaboring those two scarlet letters stamped on Reubens' career. The film feels out of balance, with grim regret suffocating the joy that Reubens brought the world, both through Pee-wee and on his own during the last decades of his career. An aftertaste of oppressive gloom lingers long after viewing.

Maybe that's a sign of success. Reubens comes across as, if not self-loathing, then severely repressed, and the keen exploration of one man's psyche justifies the extended run time. His genius shines through, but he also was imprisoned by his stratospheric success -- resentful, even, that Pee-wee got all the credit and Paul Rubenfeld did not -- and when the Florida incident presented the chance to be freed from that Candyland image, Reubens still could not seize the opportunity and live an authentic life. 

On hand are insightful talking heads, including Debi Mazar, who was Reubens' companion for a few years after the Florida debacle; co-stars Lynne Marie Stewart, Lawrence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson; director Tim Burton; Groundlings cohorts Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson and Laraine Newman; and sister Abby Rubenfeld. We get a well-rounded portrait of brilliant comedian and an appreciation for how difficult it was, in the end, for both him and his biographer to simply tell his life story. Treasure the many clips, and wish Reubens' soul well.

MY MOM, JAYNE (B) - This is a rather pedantic family history of an actress, Mariska Hargitay (from "Law & Order: SVU"), as she explores the life of her mother, the blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield, who died in 1967 when Mariska was 3. Mariska gathers her brothers and half-sister (who was the oldest and knew their mother best) for weepy and not very insightful reminiscences of the woman who spoke several languages and played the violin, in addition to parading her assets all over the big screen.

 

Mom Jayne also had some secrets that she took to the grave after the car accident that spared Mariska and her two brothers but not their mother's latest boy toy. Hargitay peels away the mysteries, which were withheld from her as a child and which she then kept from others after she discovered them as an adult. It's a lesson in blowing up stupid family secrets, but it's an awfully ham-handed presentation. (How many times do we have to see middle-aged people break down emotionally on camera while trying to tell a story from 60 years ago?) Apparently the siblings hadn't really reconciled their shared childhood, and they mostly come off as victims of their own denial, rather than insightful observers of the human condition.

The first half of the film does an admirable job of conveying the spectacle that was Jayne Mansfield's career in the 1950s and '60s. It also, grudgingly, digs beneath the glamour to chronicle Mansfield's seemingly casual way of cycling through partners, her kids' interests be damned. The final third wrings a little intrigue from the film's big reveal, but Hargitay drags it out way too long, with several false endings, limping to the 1 hour 45-minute mark. (This easily could have been a 60-minute PBS special.) She does stumble on an endearing punchline -- courtesy of a cheeky step-sibling -- but then it's back to maudlin mode for a couple of corny codas.

BONUS TRACKS

From a key road-trip visual in "Pee-Wee," Brian Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye" from 1974:

 

And the iconic opening to "Pee-wee's Playhouse," courtesy of artist Gary Panter:

New to the Queue

 Set for life ...

 

A debut feature, written, directed and starring Eva Victor, the gloomy comedy "Sorry, Baby." 

Based on the trailer alone, we'll check out the absurdist road-trip love story, "Sunlight."

Lynne Ramsay ("Morvern Callar," "You Were Never Really Here") corrals Jennifer Lawrence to star in her latest, about feminine fulfillment, "Die, My Love."

A Syrian refugee living in France stalks the man he believes tortured him in prison, "Ghost Trail." 

We're up for the sequel to the pulpy guilty pleasure "M3GAN," the next gen, "M3GAN 2.0."

Best of Ever, Vol. 12: New Wave Classics

 

SHAMPOO (1975) (A) - With a dream cast of appealing actors, the king of the 1970s, Hal Ashby, sends up the vapidity of Beverly Hills at the height of 1960s tensions, through the playboy exploits of a heterosexual hairdresser tending to unfulfilled women.

 

Warren Beatty is flustered throughout as George, the sought-after star of a salon, though he wants to open his own; if only he had his act together to pull that off. He rapaciously sleeps his way through the clientele, past and present, showing zero emotional connection to any of them. His head is so fogged that he cannot have a civil conversation with a woman, even the one he calls his girlfriend, an actress, played by Goldie Hawn. In one memorable scene, George blow-dries the hair of a client by facing toward her and lowering her head into his crotch, swirling her hair maniacally. Often, he is personifying cool by tooling around the hills on a motorcycle.

Superstar screenwriter Robert Towne (coming off "Chinatown"), working with Beatty on the script, sets this against the backdrop of the November 1968 presidential election, eked out by Richard Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War. Jack Warden helms this Republican enclave as Lester, who also considers bankrolling George's own shop, though the fact that George has been sleeping with his wife (Lee Grant) likely spells doom on that front. And wait till Lester finds out how easy it was for his teenage daughter, Lorna (Carrie Fischer, in her debut), to seduce George on a lazy afternoon.

If you're keeping track, that's quite a lineup of smart, appealing women, and we haven't even mentioned Julie Christie, positively glow, as yet another spurned lover, who is Lester's mistress but just can't quit her George habit. (Don't worry; Lester assumes George is gay because he is a hairdresser.) Her outburst -- during a gala dinner that brings the principals together late in the film -- is worth the price of admission. 

With Ashby at the helm, the characterizations run deep. Somehow we empathize with the lothario in his mid-30s and realize how much of a sad sack he is, and how vacuous and selfish the women can seem at times. The sexual politics are cunning, and the political politics quietly unnerving. Beatty is at the top of his game, and his co-stars are all game for high-jinks.

ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) (A) - Like "Jaws" did with the summer blockbuster 50 years ago this month, "Rosemary's Baby" arrived in 1968 and launched the modern horror film. It attacks humanity's most basic instinct -- motherhood -- with a subtle (at times whimsical) adoption of the theory of the banality of evil.

 

Mia Farrow is mesmerizing as Rosemary, the waifish victim of a coven of witches who target their naive neighbor in Manhattan's Dakota Building, grooming her to bear Satan's child. That coven is led by the irrepressible Ruth Gordon as Minnie, and her creepy high-brow husband, Roman (Sidney Blackmer). They first seduce Rosemary's husband, Guy (a devilish John Cassavetes), by using witchcraft to help advance his flailing acting career.

The cast is full of juicy roles. Ralph Bellamy is devious as the coven's hand-picked obstetrician (mis)treating Rosemary, who turns gaunt and raccoon-eyed as the devil's spawn lurks in her uterus. Maurice Evans is sweet as Rosemary's snakebit mentor who pays the price for his nosiness. Charles Grodin makes the most of a glorified cameo as her regular doctor.

Roman Polanski, who also co-wrote with Ira Levin ("The Stepford Wives," "The Boys from Brazil"), revels in the gothic ghoulishness of the Dakota's grim apartments (recreated on a Hollywood soundstage). He takes his time (137 minutes) gradually building the tension; it takes nearly an hour for Rosemary to be impregnated (with the memorable line, "This is no dream; this is really happening!"). Polanski delights in exploring themes of paranoia and the cults of religion. All of the bad guys come off as playful and charming, but just slightly off. 

It's easy to look back nearly 60 years and dismiss this as a facile psychological thriller, trapped in the amber of the Swingin' Sixties. But the mixture of suspense and dark comedy is intoxicating, and it's an intelligent examination of an innocent woman entrapped by idol worship.

BONUS TRACK

The haunting lullaby from "Rosemary's Baby," titled "Sleep Safe and Warm" by Krzysztof  Komeda:

A Mandate

 

FRIENDSHIP (A-minus) - Sometimes all you need is a string of belly laughs and a plot that always go where you'd expect it to. The trailer quotes a magazine critic as saying "Friendship" is "the funniest thing I've seen in my entire life," and while I wouldn't go that far, there is something unique and refreshing about this tale of a social outcast fumbling the rules of befriending another adult male.

 

Tim Robinson (above, left) stars as that bizarre man, Craig, and it might be a challenge for a viewer to dive in unprepared for the hawk-nosed Robinson's skewed comedic sensibilities. He is most known for his bizarre Netflix sketch series "I Think You Should Leaves," or for his previous collaboration with Sam Richardson, "Detroiters." He specializes in startling, inappropriate emotional outbursts. This is his first big-screen starring role, and he carries the film ably, with the help of Paul Rudd, who plays Craig's new neighbor, Austin, a local TV weatherman who invites Craig into his nerdy bro circle, only to dump him after Craig exhibits some odd behavior. Rudd borrows not a little of Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy ("Anchorman") for his insecure, buffoonish character. Austin tracks as extra cool because he also fronts a dad punk band.

Craig works at a drab advertising agency and seems to wear the same bland suit every day. His wife, Tami (Kate Mara) is a year recovered from cancer and is more intimate with their teenage son than she is with Craig. The fragility of the marriage is outlined fully in the opening scene, where Craig and Tami speak awkwardly at her cancer-recovery group meeting. There's always something unsettling about the couple's interactions, as if they also exist in a parallel horror film.

Craig is excited to have finally made friends -- especially one as nurturing as the sensitive guys Austin has assembled -- and he is crushed like a spurned teenager when Austin abruptly cuts him loose. This leads to some stalkerish behavior from Craig, and when he tries to re-create a bonding episode with Austin -- a bad-boy trespassing through the tunnels under the city -- with Tami, things go horribly wrong.  

All of this springs from the mind of first-time feature writer-director Andrew DeYoung (who directed six episodes of the TV series "PEN15"), who shows a command of the story and a fine ear for offbeat supporting characters. At one point Craig strains to connect with a young man selling cell phones, eventually scoring a hallucinogenic from the clerk, who takes him to the back room to guide him gently through what promises to be a psychedelic trip. What Craig actually experiences is one of the funniest scenes I've seen in a movie in ages -- a clever twist on the movie trope of the life-altering, mind-expanding drug experience.

DeYoung's comedy aesthetic tracks seamlessly with Robinson's eccentric style. Rudd, the quintessential team player, finds the right tone to harmonize with Robinson. Mara channels Julie Haggerty's "Lost in America" spouse with deadpan skill. DeYoung's script never falters, and he guides several running jokes (a suburban speed hump, a certain glass door) into savory payoffs in the end. This has a kinship with another Rudd vehicle, "I Love You Man," as it explores the pitfalls of trying to find a pal as an adult. Making friends late in life will never not be at least a little awkward, and rarely is it this funny.

BONUS TRACK

The trailer:

The studio version of the song the men sing to comfort each other, "My Boo" by Ghost Town DJs, released in 1996 and revived in 2016 during the "Running Man Challenge" meme:

It's All a Misunderstanding

 

THE IDEA OF YOU (B+) - Don't let me underestimate Michael Showalter again. With a trailer that looked like a silly romantic comedy, there was trepidation going into "The Idea of You," in which a 40-year-old woman falls in love with a 24-year-old pop star she meets-cute at his Coachella show. But Showalter -- and star Anne Hathaway -- pull off a thoughtful, heart-warming (and surprisingly believable) story.

 

Showalter won us over with "Hello, My Name Is Doris" in 2016, with the similar theme of an older woman and younger man. (We're assuming he has cougar issues.) He also scored as director of "The Big Sick" and "The Eyes of Tammy Faye."  He sits right in that B-plus/A-minus pocket as a filmmaker. Here he co-writes with Jennifer Westfeldt ("Kissing Jessica Stein") and newcomer Robinne Lee, both of whom are known more for their acting. And while they don't revolutionize the rom-com, they dodge plenty of potholes as we wonder will they or won't they make it in the end (not just the characters but the filmmakers).

Hathaway is Solene, who plans a solo camping trip for her 40th birthday, but instead has to sub for her douchey ex-husband Daniel ("Veep's" Reid Scott) and take their daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her friends to Coachella. Solene accidentally stumbles into the trailer of boy-band hunk Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), and he ends up dedicating a song to her at the end of the concert, sparking an affair that Solene keeps from her friends and daughter -- until the paparazzi inevitably expose the pair canoodling during his European tour. Eventually Solene feels snubbed and mocked by the much younger women tagging along on the tour. 

Solene storms out, but Hayes wants to give it a go back in L.A., and the film offers a fascinating depiction of life in the 24/7 media glare and the oppression it rains on all kinds of relationships. Hathaway is believable as a dedicated gallery owner (that's how Hayes tracks her down, proceeding to buy out her stock to free her up for the fling). The writers exploit the drawn-out game of cat-and-mouse, but they don't burden the plot. Even a leap in time doesn't take the viewer out of the story. And a running thread involving Hayes' wristwatch (helping mark the passage of time) is a jewel of a MacGuffin.

Hathaway, acting her age, remains a compelling presence, and she does a convincing job of playing an Everywoman with real feelings and desires. Galitzine is perfectly pouty but he's no lightweight, as he chafes at the artificial life he leads, seeing an off-ramp from the teen lark that has enriched him. The music (some of it created by Galitzine) seems perfectly legit as performed by a lightweight outfit called August Moon. I wanted to skip this entirely, and I was prepared to pull the plug after 20 minutes, but I was hooked, if not swooning like a teenage girl.

MAGIC FARM (C) - If I hadn't read a synopsis of the plot and a review or two in advance, I probably would never have been able to follow Amalia Ulman's sophomore effort, a purported comic treatise on the vapidity of internet influencers and ugly Americans in general. It is coy to the point of being inscrutable at times.

 

Let's consider it a treading-water transition phase for Ulman, who offered sharp satire and dry-as-toast humor in her 2021 debut, "El Planeta." (She also stars in both films.) In "Magic Farm," a Vice-like group of trend-spotting reporter/influencers -- led by the droll, older fashion maven Edna (Chloe Sevigny) -- ends up in the wrong South American city of San Cristobal, and rather than admit their mistake or go to the right place, they save money and stick around, conjuring up a fake trend to report on. 

It's a bumbling crew in a quirky Argentine town, and Ulman lightens the proceedings further by toying with camera perspectives (mounting one on a dog, for no particular reason, and bookending the film with a psychedelic distortion of perspective) and by allowing her cast to compete in a drollery contest. The town is full of what we once called freaks -- people either mildly or severely deformed physically but with-it mentally. It will turn out that there is "something in the water," as they say, which is causing the abnormalities, and Ulman's satire is apparently making a statement about the obliviousness of internet "news" culture, in that these trend-hounds can't spot a big story even when it's staring them in the face.

At least I think that's what was going on. Ulman never makes any of this explicit, or even, at times, implicit. She just shuffles along spinning a story that seems to have started before the first scene, leaving us in the middle, catching up. Sevigny is sharp as the exasperated Gen Xer annoyed by her young crew. Simon Rex is wasted in a cameo as her partner. (He literally phones in one of his scenes.) Alex Wolff is fun as Jeff, the horndog producer who lusts after one of the locals, Manchi (Camila del Campo), whose own libido overwhelms anyone around her. Ulman has the character climb a tree to achieve an internet connection so that she can preen online. (In one perfectly timed exchange, Manchi, in accented English, brags about having "online friends," and Jeff hears it as "OnlyFans.") 

I didn't shut this off, but I questioned why I was devoting an hour and a half to such a shaggy-dog tale. It has its charm, and I'm glad Ulman does not feel constrained by convention. Let's see what she does next.

UNDER THE TREE (2018) (B-minus) - This arch bit of feud-porn is a placid, frustrating satire from Iceland. It involves a man caught in a neighborly feud over a shade tree, between his parents and the couple next door.

Steinthor Hroar Steinthorsson stars as Atli, who crashes with his parents after his wife, Agnes (Lara Johanna Jonsdottir), kicks him out for watching porn of himself and an ex. That is strike one against the film; it's a stretch to think that a husband would be so unguarded, especially watching something that particular. His parents' suburban neighbors keep complaining about too much shade from the parents' tree, and so begins a series of microaggressions (slashed tires, surveillance cameras, personal insults) that slowly build to macro ones. 

Writer-director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurosson takes this thin premise and then burdens it with a brutal escalation of the dispute. If you notice both a cat and a dog in the trailer and fear for their safety, brace yourself. This isn't so much dark comedy as a disturbing series of events. He draws good performances out of Edda Bjorgsvindottir as Atli's vengeful mother, who has never gotten over what happened to Atli's brother, and Sigurdur Sigurjonsson as Atli's checked-out father, who takes solace in the comforts found "at the bottom of a bottle." 

It all passes in a tidy 89 minutes, and there are some interesting ideas explored. You just with Sigurosson could have maintained the thread and struck more of a tonal balance. 

Life Is Short: You're Killing Me

 

PAVEMENTS (C+/Incomplete)  - Call me pedantic, but I don't need much flash or contemplation out of a rock doc, and certainly not a notion wrapped in a concept, swaddled in an idea, nested in a scheme -- which is what Alex Ross Perry has put together, running longer than two hours, as an homage to the '90s indie darlings Pavement.

 

The oh-so-clever idea here is that Perry is not just assembling a documentary about the members of Pavement; rather, he is obscuring that typical documentary presentation with three other fictional fake-outs. He intersperses real footage with scripted material purporting to show the making of a biographical feature about the band (starring Joe Keery as singer Stephen Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as a Matador Records executive); the staging of a musical "Slanted! Enchanted!" interpreting the band's debut album; and a museum exhibit featuring artifacts from the band, either real or imagined, like Malkmus' lyric notebooks and drummer Gary Young's toenail clipping.

It's all ironic -- get it?! Because, like, the band was never that good or popular or deserving of exalted status or serious reconsideration, but wouldn't it be hilarious if we pretended that they were? Pavement's generation might have slung a lot of slacker shit back in the day, but what is this next level Perry's Millennial generation is playing at? Where's the nuance? Is a wink all you need?

Perry rotates his memes continuously, and in the absence of much actual footage of the band (then and now), you can quickly grow tired of the fake stories. It is not interesting to see Keery (yet another "Stranger Things" alum graduating to the big leagues) pretend that his method-acting obsession has him subsumed into the Malkmus "character," akin to Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan or Austin Butler as Elvis Presley. The whole biopic storyline could have been done better -- and clocked in under five minutes -- as a sketch on "The Ben Stiller Show," which splashed on Fox television around the time that Pavement broke out with "Slanted and Enchanted." And the musical mockumentary has nothing on Christopher Guest's exhausted oeuvre. A much more straightforward and satisfying documentary about the band's origins is the recent "Louder Than You Think," which focuses on the band's original drummer Gary Young but covers most of the group's origin story.

"Pavements" held our attention for only a little over an hour -- when the shtick became tiring and the band's heyday had faded (most notably with an atrocious performance at the fifth Lollapalooza). That was the year of the band's dud of an album, "Wowee Zowee," which I got to pan at the time in the Chicago Sun-Times. That was a year after Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the alt/indie/lo-fi scene was starting to curdle. (This comprehensive analysis of Pavement's top-40 songs per Uproxx notes that one of Guided By Voices' masterpieces, "Alien Lanes," came out a week before "Wowee Zowee," which didn't do it any favors.) To Perry's credit, he includes a clip of Beavis and Butt-head mercilessly mocking a "Wowee" track on MTV, urging the band members "to try harder." It wasn't an invalid criticism at the time.

You can make the argument that Perry ("Listen Up Philip," "Queen of Earth") hasn't made a great feature film in a decade. We walked out of his last music-based experiment, "Her Smell," after an hour, in 2019. He's still an interesting filmmaker, and his willingness to play with ideas and to experiment is admirable. But "Pavements" is a mess. If you didn't like the band members, this might be the movie you would make. Much of the time Perry seems to be mocking them as much as he is skewering music biopics or jukebox musicals. They seem to be good sports about the whole thing.

There are some insightful moments buried under the clutter. Tim Heidecker, who participates as a Matador executive, calls the band "the slacker Rolling Stones for the '90s" (to GBV's Beatles?). Another suggests that they were the band for people who thought "everything sucks and everything is stupid." It is fun to watch the band gather and rehearse for a 2022 reunion tour, straining to remember chords and lyrics, and looking back on their career. But digging out the nuggets here is a chore.

Perry's biggest crime is that nearly all of the archival footage he uses is from "Slow Century," a 2002 documentary shot and curated by Lance Bangs. Perry essentially grave-robs Bangs' film, slices and dices the footage, and then drags it out to 128 minutes by injecting his cute gimmicks. File this under "Life Is Short."

Title: Pavements

Running Time: 128 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  70 MIN

Portion Watched: 55%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 62 YRS, 6 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and listened to some early Pavement and started writing this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 2-1 (I'll probably check out the last hour someday; I just couldn't handle the wankery in one sitting. It's coming to Mubi next month.)

 

BONUS TRACKS

The band got together last month to promote the film. Here they are with "Harness Your Hopes," an old B-side that gained popularity in recent years due to an algorithm glitch at a streaming service:

 

Here is the 84-minute documentary "Slow Century," from 2002, available (for now) on YouTube. Check out a raggedy live version of "Cut Your Hair" at the 57-minute mark.

 

Beavis and Butt-head trashing "Rattled by the Rush":

 

Our title track, from the band's first release:

Go Rest, Young Man

 

JOSHY (2016) (A-minus) - We're delving further into the catalog of Jeff Baena, who gave us "The Little Hours" and "Spin Me Round" and who died earlier this year. "Joshy" is a typical fast-chatter comedy from Baena's deep bench of ace performers, led by Thomas Middleditch as a guy whose fiancee's death has left him adrift during a weekend gathering of what should have been his bachelor party at a mansion in Ojai, Calif.

 

Joshy cobbles together some of his mismatched friends who are intent on cheering him up or at least getting him drunk or laid. He does manage to get hammered most nights. Nick Kroll bigfoots the proceedings as type-A Eric, while writer-director Alex Ross Perry nearly steals the show with a deadpan turn as a sober board-game geek who just got dumped by his girlfriend of 10 years. Adam Pally grounds the film as Ari, a married man who woos a woman they meet at a bar, Jodi, played with manic improv glee by the always reliable Jenny Slate. Eric's friend Greg (Brett Gelman) tags along to bring an added jolt of anxiety to the proceedings. Cameos include Aubrey Plaza and Lauren Graham (both underused) and filmmaker Joe Swanberg as Aaron, who is appalled at the debauchery, though what was he thinking bringing his wife and toddler to the event. Toss in ringers like Alison Brie and Frankie Shaw in cameos and Lauren Weedman as a very open-minded sex worker recruited out of dweeb desperation, and when the dead fiancee's bitter parents show up? Lisa Edelstein and Paul Reiser!

Baena shows a keen ear for naturalistic bro dialogue, and the story keeps antics believable, resisting the urge to clutter the plot with "Hangover" hijinks. This feels like just a nerdy attempt to have a wild weekend. 

Middleditch -- sailing along a career high that included HBO's "Silicon Valley" and his improv special "Middleditch & Schwartz" -- is a master of subtlety, and he is the calm center allowing a talented cast to riff around him. Pally and Slate really click as a sweet snakebit pair. Kroll doesn't overdo it, like he sometimes does. And Baena weds humor and pathos in just the right mix.

WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD (2023) (B-minus) - Jesse Eisenberg's debut as a writer-director (before last year's "A Real Pain") has the potential to emerge as a smart indie, but there's just something off with most of the performances, and this mother-son pas de deux too often feels strained. In the end, it comes off like a pale remake of Eisenberg's early acting breakthrough "The Squid and the Whale." 

Julianne Moore never finds the right tone as Evelyn, an uptight hippie mom who just doesn't understand her nerdy son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard from TV's "Stranger Things"), who monetizes his earnest, bland songs on the internet to a tiny but devoted group of stans scattered around the world. Starting with that trope not far removed from "Family Ties," Eisenberg must dig himself out of the hole he starts in. But he never regains his footing.

Ziggy is kind of a creep, thinking he has a chance with beautiful classmate Lila (Alisha Boe), who is a cardboard-cutout "socialist," whose big cri de coeur is an anti-colonialist polemic about the Marshall Islands. Maybe teen activists these days gather in storefronts and raise their fists in solidarity with Joe Hill, but I'm guessing this is just Eisenberg's outdated idea of the resistance. (Ziggy apparently cut his teeth as a red-diaper baby singing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs; I doubt that was a thing during the Obama administration, though maybe it happened to Eisenberg in the '80s.)

Eisenberg -- ever since his remarkable debut in "Roger Dodger" -- has always rocked a millennial Woody Allen vibe, and here he drags his neuroses and anachronisms behind the camera. Moore does a barely veiled imitation of 1980s Mia Farrow, who stammered and ditzed her way through some of Allen's best films. Moore's Evelyn is a do-gooder who runs a women's shelter, but she is so shallow and misguided that she creeps on a client's teen-aged son. Tone deaf to the needs of the teen and his mother, she presses him to give up a job at his dad's body shop to pursue studies at Oberlin.

The theme here is not subtle: Mother and son can't see the appeal of the other, so they search out surrogates -- Evelyn replacing Ziggy (going so far as to give the boy a ball cap discarded by her son), and Ziggy must discover his mom's best qualities in a classmate he's crushing on. Jay O. Sanders ("His Three Daughters") has the thankless job of playing the dad who must tolerate his two unlikable housemates. It's hard to blame the cast, though, since Eisenberg's vision never really coheres. But he did show promise, didn't he?

BONUS TRACK

"Joshy" has an eclectic soundtrack, though most songs air only in snippets. Here is a 1980 nugget that got a reissue 10 years ago, "Whiskey," from Kenny Knight. Nice guitar work.

 

 

"When You Finish" mixes Ziggy's compositions with Chopin and other classical compositions, and then there is this new release, the airy "These Things Are Separate" by Emile Mosseri:

Doc Watch: The Artist's Way

 

SWAMP DOGG GETS HIS POOL PAINTED (A-minus) - Documentaries don't get much more giddy than this romp through the life and career of "Little" Jerry Williams, an R&B singer from the 1960s who retooled his persona in 1970 as Swamp Dogg, an underground legend in outsider music since. He and his band of eccentrics are a hoot to hang out with for an hour and a half. 

 

Three directors and two writers collaborate on a pedal-to-the-metal visual and musical bouillabaisse, which nonetheless pauses enough times to deepen the development of the characters on display here. Williams wrote and sang R&B songs and "country soul" in the '60s, but at age 28, at the dawn of the '70s, he embraced the counter-culture (a little LSD apparently helped) and went deeper into Stax-style southern soul. (He called it swamp music.) He eventually launched his own studio and label to record others, while mining obscure archives for K-Tel-type compilations. He even distributed the infamous "Beatle Barkers" album of dogs and other animals bleating out Beatles songs in 1983, hawking it with a 1-800 number at the time.*

While his biography is impressive, much of it goes by in a blur, the kind of frenetic flashing of images that filmmakers are fond of these days. If you don't suffer an epileptic seizure early on, settle in for the entertaining interviews of Swamp Dogg and his entourage. During the film, he lives in Southern California with gunslinger Guitar Shorty and a crazy cat named Moogstar (aka Larry Clemons), a flashy multi-instrumentalist who still plays with stuffed animals. Their personal dynamics -- bullshitting and philosophizing much of the time -- are endlessly charming and often hilarious. The rag-tag crew is joined by neighbors and admirers like Tom Kenny, Johnny Knoxville and Mike Judge. Much footage is mined from a local cable talk show that Swamp Dogg made dozens of appearances on, hosted by Art Fein.

It is to the filmmakers' credit that they matched their video and audio style to the sparkling personality at the center of the documentary. The spirit of Swamp Dogg is always front and center, and there is fun to be had whether you are watching old music clips, the banter among housemates, or just Swamp Dogg sitting peacefully in his yard watching an artist re-paint the concrete swimming pool. He is an artist and a hustler and a pretty deep thinker when all is said and done -- and the filmmakers are perfectly in tune with all of that. This feels like the homage the man has earned.

SECRET MALL APARTMENT (B+) - This is a delectable story -- 20 years ago a bunch of young artists created a secret apartment in the hidden walls of a mall in Providence, R.I. -- but the execution here gets sloppy in the second half and loses its momentum.

 

Director Jeremy Workman struggled similarly in "The World Before Your Feet," a problem of narrative focus. Here he zeroes in on Michael Townsend, a teacher who recruited his students in 2003 to infiltrate the gleaming Providence Place mall that had opened 4 years earlier as an anchor for revitalization of the city's decrepit downtown. At times the project comes off as an artistic statement about capitalism and urban gentrification; at other times it seems like just a fun lark that took a few years to get found out.

Workman is blessed with tons of archival footage -- the crew apparently filmed themselves nonstop as they slowly converted the 750 square feet into a surprisingly livable space. Most impressive was the hauling up a steep ladder of not only furniture but later dozens of concrete blocks used to build a privacy wall (and to frame a door with a lock). Townsend is an appealing character. Other co-conspirators spin stories 20 years later, all but Townsend finally going public for the first time since he was caught red-handed in 2007. 

Townsend is a natural leading character, and Workman explores his history of guerrilla art projects, most notably his pioneering of masking-tape art on the walls of a children's hospital. But deep dives into his responses to the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 feel dragged out and diversionary, as if needed to pad this out to feature length (91 minutes). We spend the second half of the film just waiting for the reveal of how Townsend got caught by mall security and what the consequences were.

But the setup can be a delight at times, delving into Providence's urban decay of the 1990s and the community created by artists and musicians at the time, with links to Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. The ingenuity of the mall crew -- a thoughtful and talented bunch -- is inspiring, and their camaraderie charming. Sometimes it's as simple as realizing that the security guards will ignore an alarm every time it goes off, and you can get away with a lot more than you think. 

BONUS TRACKS

* - True story: I was in Rolling Stones record store in Norridge, Ill., sometime in the '80s when the man ahead of me was demanding a refund -- he thought he had bought an actual Beatles cassette "but it's a bunch of dogs barking." He then imitated the barking dogs. He was furious and completely oblivious to his own culpability in the original transaction.

 

Dozens of songs zip by in "Swamp Dogg," and here are just a few samples. First, his early hit, as Jerry Williams Jr., "I'm the Lover Man":

 

He wrote "She's a Heartbreaker" for Gene Pitney in the late '60s:

 

With Gary U.S. Bonds, Williams wrote the country standard "She's All I got," a No. 2 hit for Johnny Paycheck in 1971:

 

Here's a snippet of an interview with Swamp Dogg and the recording of a bluegrass-style song he wrote for Jenny Lewis to sing, "Count the Days":

 

And here he is from his heyday, the album "Rat On!":

Con Jobs

 

ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR (C-minus) - A fun romp from 2018 didn't need a sequel and certainly not this spectacle. At least director Paul Feig and his cast got a free extended trip to Capri to rekindle the story of mommy influencer Stephanie and the mysterious, reckless Emily.

 

"A Simple Favor" had juicy performances from Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively and was clever enough to keep a viewer tuned in. It was incoherent in spots but entertaining and worth the effort. This sequel is a hot mess, and a cynical one at that. The same writing team from the original (with help from a third) churns the dialogue darker and nastier, a group of women trying to out-bro their writing colleagues.

The body count is higher and the blood flows more freely as Stephanie (Kendrick) tags along to Capri with Emily (Lively), who is marrying an Italian mobster with a secret. He has a mean mother, and Emily is confronted with her own acidic aunt (Allison Janney, in one of those horrible roles she just can't resist) from the family's convoluted past. A sister of Emily's will show up (Lively doing a ditzy turn as a dimwit), and poor Elizabeth Perkins mugs through the sunset of her career in a bad wig as Emily's addled mom. 

This is the kind of movie in which a father/ex-husband will be brutally murdered but the wedding will go on the next day, with barely a shrug from his adolescent son. On three different occasions characters are given needle injections, including a scene of Kendrick enduring a "truth serum" that turns her giddy, straight out of an episode of "Get Smart." Janney holds a gun to the kid's head, who rolls his eyes at her antics. LOL!

The original had a tenuous grip on reality and struck a balance between mean and playful. But this barrage of putdowns, with a plot that plays with incest and foul-mouthed children, is dark and disturbing. Feig shows off his epic drone-shot skills and drools over the scenery. But there is no joy in paradise. 

THE SUN CHILDREN (2020) (A-minus) - A confident child actor anchors a whipsmart story about street-hustling kids in Tehran who enroll in a school in order to gain access to a purported treasure underground. Acclaimed writer-director Majid Majidi nails every beat of this taut neo-realist thriller (streaming on DailyMotion).

 

Rouhallah Zamani (above) is beyond intense as 12-year-old Ali, the ringleader among his four-boy crew of petty thieves and little scammers, all of whom survive on the streets to provide for their families, having lost their fathers mostly to addiction, prison or death. Ali is a combination of aspiring entrepreneur and seasoned mobster, and he has earned the trust and respect of Hashem (Ali Nasirian), who keeps pigeons and runs a shady chop-shop operation. Hashem convinces Ali to enroll in a school that takes in troubled youth so that Ali can dig a tunnel under the neighboring cemetery in order to access what Hashem merely refers to as a treasure that will enrich them all.

Ali displays wiles and grit in surreptitiously accessing the bowels of the school to carry out the physically draining task. He also looks out for his pals, including Abolfazl, an Afghan immigrant who excels at math, and Reza (Mani Ghafouri), who dreams of making Iran's national soccer team. Ali also befriends Abolfazl's cute sister, Zahra (Shamila Shirzad), who hawks trinkets on the city's transit system.  And he skillfully navigates the school's administration -- itself a shell game of manipulating funders to keep the lights on -- finding at least one ally who believes in fighting for the futures of these exploited children.

Majidi, known for his late '90s coming-of-age tales "Children of Heaven" and "The Color of Paradise" (and co-writing with Nima Javidi), crafts a narrative as taut as a '70s crime caper. He packs a lot of plot development in 99 efficient minutes. His young star, Zamani, comes off as a scruffy young Tom Cruise intent on carrying out his mission impossible. Majidi fills in the boys' back stories with side plots about Ali's shell-shocked mother and another boy's meddling alcoholic father. Zamani and Shirzad are like a miniature Bogey and Bacall, finding each other attractive and respecting each other's grift.

It all builds to a shrewd, devastating conclusion. What is to become of the youth besieged by the inept and corrupt adults dominating their lives?

BONUS TRACKS

"Another Simple Favor" has the gall to borrow Spaghetti Western icon Ennio Morricone for its soundtrack, the lush touchstone, "C'era una Volta il West":

 

 The trailer for "Sun Children":

That '70s Drift: Listen Up

 

THE CONVERSATION (1974) (B) - Having finally gotten around to this touchstone of '70s realism, prompted by the death of Gene Hackman, I was surprised how sloppy this post-"Godfather" feature from Francis Ford Coppola is. Hackman plays Harry Caul, an audio-surveillance specialist who is overwhelmed by guilt over his role in what he suspects is a plan to kill a young couple.

 

Caul is cautious to the point of paranoia in guarding his own personal life and protecting his personal safety from the shady characters who pay him handsomely for his services. He becomes obsessed with his latest recording, of that couple (Cindy Marshall and Frederic Forrest) having a random conversation in San Francisco's Union Square. That conversation will recur in various loops throughout the movie, just like it might run through a person's mind, over and over again. 

Caul's own life will become jeopardized as he seeks to withhold the finished enhanced tapes, which then get stolen. Hackman will take his character through a spiral into mental instability, as he discovers the true motives of the couple and the mysterious man (the Director) who hired him -- as his own fears of being targeted become more justified. 

Hackman is surrounded by a fine cast -- in particular John Cazale as Caul's tech partner. Harrison Ford is the assistant to the Director. Teri Garr and Elizabeth MacRae are delightful as prostitutes whom Caul takes up with. A climactic scene between Caul and MacRae's Meredith is scored to a finished recording of the conversation, and it's a feverish scene that stands out in an otherwise frustrating visual palette. There is too much repetition of snippets of the conversation, and too much of the verite dialogue is muffled -- it's not clear whether that is intentional or ironic. Hackman saves this in the end, but it too often seems like a missed opportunity at key moments.

BEING THERE (1979) (A-minus) - Peter Sellers is mesmerizing as an improbably exalted simpleton, in the capstone to director Hal Ashby's perfect decade-long run, a parable about politics and media from Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski.

Sellers is Chance the gardener, who for the first time ever leaves the cloistered estate he has served his whole life after the wealthy old man dies and the man's lawyers dismiss the staff. Having only the knowledge of the world he has learned from his television set, Chance wanders the gritty streets of D.C. before falling in with another rich old man, Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), and his soon-to-be-widow, the much younger Eve (Shirley MacLaine). Ben, Eve, and others would never assume Chance -- now misnamed Chauncey Gardiner -- is an illiterate man-child, and so every interaction with him is misinterpreted as Chauncey dispensing mystical wisdom steeped in bland gardening metaphors. Background checks prove fruitless, as Chauncey is untraceable.

 

Ben is connected to the president (Jack Warden), and before long Chauncey -- these days we would call him mentally challenged -- is hailed as a straight-talking political pundit, a breath of fresh air in the cynical beltway. Ashby juggles the concepts of suspended-disbelief and magical realism throughout, maintaining a momentum that must never pause the conceit even for a second, lest the narrative completely fall apart. The dialogue is off just enough to be amusing but not too far off to be ridiculous.

It's an incredible feat pulled off by Kosinski and screenwriter Robert C. Jones (Ashby's regular editor who penned "Coming Home" the year before). But none of it works without Sellers, who developed a flat vocal affect, blank visage and halting gait for the lead role. His demeanor as the calm in the middle of the storm is a master class in restraint and character creation. MacLaine is delicious as the deathbed spouse who falls for Chauncey's raw appeal. In her early 40s at the time, she is at the top of her game. When Chauncey, who shows little interest in or knowledge of sex, tells her he "likes to watch" -- he merely is talking about television -- she is aroused to the point of self-gratification, writhing on a bearskin rug next to Chauncey's bed.

Ashby turns this into a sharp critique of elite society and a bold political statement. (He also takes an early swipe at the idea of white privilege.) He is blessed with the other-worldly talent of Sellers, who would die months after the movie's release.

Let the Mystery Be

 

TRENQUE LAUQUEN (B) - It takes a certain level of confidence to slowly unfurl a four-hour story, edited into shifting time loops, with a central mystery that does not get fully resolved or even explained. But if you have a fondness for serpentine storytelling with a small-town "Northern Exposure" vibe, then you might not mind spending time with this charming Argentine curiosity.

 

The film begins in the middle. Botanist Laura (Laura Paredes) has vanished, and her boyfriend Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd) and her colleague Ezequiel/Chicho (Ezequiel Pierri) begin to track her to the inland town of Trenque Lauquen, where she was in pursuit of an elusive flower and hung out as part of the cast of a radio news show hosted by the charming Juliana (Juliana Muras). In fact, the radio sessions, appealingly authentic, are perhaps the best part of the film, an entertaining Greek chorus helping the convoluted plot get straightened out.

Nested within the main narrative, in the first two hours, is an erotic correspondence between two lovers discovered by Laura hidden in books from the town's public library. She shares the letters with Chicho, and he falls hard for her, though they do nothing more than share a fleeting kiss. Throughout the film, Pierri, as Chicho, has a schnauzer-like beard and a puppy-dog longing for his crush. Just before disappearing, Laura sneaks into the radio station and records a rambling explanation of much of what led her to go off on her own, and Juliana shares the recording with Chicho, who helplessly falls further for the woman he cannot have.

Director Laura Citarella (who co-wrote with her star Paredes) -- as you'd expect in a four-hour stemwinder -- is in no hurry to explain herself here, and you can break this into anywhere from two to eight pieces (like half-hour episodes of a mini-series) and you won't sacrifice any momentum or understanding of Citarella's motivations. The second half is dominated by Laura's interactions with Elisa Esperanza (Elisa Carricajo), the frustrated lead investigator of a supernatural incident at the lake involving a beast variously described as a wild boy or an alligator. Laura is taken in by Elisa and Elisa's partner, but that storyline doesn't really lead anywhere. I'm not sure, but it seems Laura believes that Elisa might be the reincarnation of the woman from the erotic correspondence. Carricajo has an arresting presence, playing up her big pregnant belly and eviscerating Laura with sharp side glances.

The sci-fi angle can be a bit much; thankfully, Juliana and her zoo-crew have fun with the tabloid news angle, and I could watch (or listen) to them for four hours. Citarella finally wraps her tale by following Laura as she sets off on her journey to wherever. A brilliant visual tracks Laura walking and the screen morphs from standard ratio to a wide-screen format. A final shot sweeps slowly like a pendulum, landing on an image that will either explain everything to you or leave you even more nonplussed. Whether you have the patience to make it past the first half hour is your call; if you make it to the end you might end up haunted for days. 

[Note: The film is leaving Criterion streaming at the end of the month, and good luck finding it somewhere after that.]

BONUS TRACKS

The film's music is quietly appealing A good sampling of the techno twist to Spaghetti Western music on the soundtrack:

 

This jangly '70s-style folk song "Los Caminos" is by Miro y su Fabulosa and Orquesta de Juguete:

 

Our title track, unrelated, from Iris Dement:

Young at Art

 

JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE (B+) - I've led a fairly charmed life, free from trauma or even much struggle. But one of the toughest years of my life fell during the lonely existence of junior year of high school -- brooding over how long it would take before I kissed a girl or had a close friend. At 17.

I was a sucker in the 1970s for sensitive singer-songwriters, like Jim Croce and Paul Simon. And I learned from watching this documentary about their cohort Janis Ian that her most famous song can still feel like a sock in the gut, stirring feelings that to this day bring a tear to my eye -- "At Seventeen." As one talking head here observes, just about any one of us has moments of darkness and doubt. No song has captured that human vulnerability like Ian's 1975 smash. It was from "At Seventeen" that I learned the truth.

 

I watched her perform it on the first episode of "Saturday Night Live," when I was about 13. and it hit home four years later, an anthem for social outcasts. But Ian, of course, was much more than that one song. 

She was an accomplished songwriter in her early teens, and had a hit in 1966 at 15 with "Society's Child," a sophisticated song about race relations ("She called you 'boy' instead of your name"). And this documentary certainly allows her story to unfold, mostly through archival footage and narration by Ian, now in her 70s, who is mostly heard and not seen in present form. We also visit with talking heads, including contemporaries Joan Baez, Lily Tomlin and Arlo Guthrie; fans like actors Laurie Metcalf and Jean Smart; and fatherly former producers, George "Shadow" Martin and Brooks Arthur, all of whom put Ian's long career in perspective.

Ian comes off as a dynamo and a survivor during her various life cycles and musical phases (which, unfortunately, included a disco-era collaboration with Giorgio Moroder). Her first adult relationship was with a willowy woman who broke her heart. She would then marry an abusive alcoholic, a brute who once held her at gunpoint, before late in life finding her true life partner. Her longtime accountant left her broke in the 1980s and in debt to the IRS. She eventually reinvented herself by moving to Nashville, where she rediscovered the roots of songwriting and collaboration, penning hits for others.

Throughout, her deeply personal compositions -- she would have a career revival and fully come out of the closet in 1992 with her dark, layered album "Breaking Silence -- provide the through-line from teenager to senior citizen. (She had to cut short a farewell tour a few years ago when she lost her singing voice.) There are joyful stories throughout. She recalls getting upstaged in the late '70s, at her peak, by her opening act, an up-and-coming Billy Joel, after which she vowed never to phone in a performance again. 

The main problem with the movie is the oppressive use of re-enactments. Director Varda Bar-Kar, who styles herself as an "activist" filmmaker, assembles an entire cast of players to portray Ian and others throughout her life, and at least half the movie involves scenes scuffed up to resemble archival footage. It is amateurish and distracting. It almost ruined the film for me at several points. It was only the power of the songs and the charming tenacity of Ian that got me through the nearly two-hour running time. 

The re-enactments are especially annoying because we rarely get to view a contemporary Ian -- only at the very beginning and very end. Otherwise, she is the unseen narrator. Maybe that was Ian's choice -- why distract from the story being told with repeated visuals of a 70-something white-haired woman. I'm not a fan of biopics, especially of musicians, but Bar-Kar certainly had the material that would justify scrapping the documentary and going full tilt into historical fiction; instead, she slaps together a mixture and does neither genre justice. (She also has a curious habit of pulling back from her talking-head interviews to show the microphones, cameras and fake backgrounds, taking the viewer out of the moment.)

It is to Ian's credit that her life story weathers this artistic assault. She displays a knack for withstanding life's challenges and making a meaningful impact with her music decade after decade. It unmoors her from the gritty '70s -- and those ugly-duckling teen years -- and fleshes out her catalog. In the end, she is the star of her own biopic.

BONUS TRACKS

Ian's breakthrough, at age 15, "Society's Child," got the stamp of approval on TV from Leonard Bernstein:

 

She was influenced by English folk songs, in the era of Fairport Convention. An example is "Tea and Sympathy":

 

Ian wrote "Stars," which we previously featured in this review of a documentary about Nina Simone, after being inspired by Don McLean's "Vincent," one of those perfect compositions:

 

"Stars" plays over the closing credits, in a version by Bettye Lavette, but I couldn't find a version online.

Ian always had a jazzy side to her. Here's is a duet with Mel Torme on her song "Silly Habits"

 

Here is a song Ian wrote for a Nashville waitress who thought her average life didn't have an impact on the world. It is the lovely "Some People's Lives" (which Bette Midler covered as the title track to her 1990 album):