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!":