Best of Ever, Vol. 13: Job Security

 Two classics for the price of one. Inspired to finally finish these reviews so that I can at least start a tribute to Robert Redford, who died this week at 89. Expect a fuller retrospective down the road.

UP IN THE AIR (2009) (A) - Everything comes together perfectly synchronized in this charming rumination on loneliness and loss and the hubris of flying solo through life.

 

George Clooney is classic Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a motivational speaker with a winning smile who flies around the country for an HR consulting firm, for the express purpose of firing people during layoffs. Remember, this landed during the depths of the Great Recession, and Jason Reitman recruits a few real laid-off people to play the victims of corporate downsizing.

Clooney is the middleman among a powerful trio of co-stars -- there is Jason Bateman as Ryan's wonderfully cynical boss; Anna Kendrick as Natalie, a whippersnapper who has come up with a plan to conduct the firings efficiently by video conferencing; and Vera Farmiga as Alex, a fellow random frequent flier, who trysts with Ryan whenever they can arrange to overlap at the same hotel in the same city on the same night. Clooney and Farmiga smolder as the hot middle-aged friends with benefits, and Kendrick is manic as the ball of neuroses who, before implementing her video scheme, must first travel with Ryan in order to get a firsthand feel for the in-person process.

This sets the table for the characters to confront their lingering demons: Ryan as the smug confirmed bachelor who thinks he's got life aced, and Natalie, the emotionally icy automaton who must deal with the breakup of her engagement while sitting face-to-face with the workers impacted by her careerist corporate manipulations. Their mentor-mentee banter is priceless -- Ryan deploys strategic stereotypes to guide her through airport security as efficiently as possible, and when he confronts Natalie about her aggressive keyboard flourishes, she responds curtly, "I type with purpose." 

Reitman's screenplay (with Sheldon Turner) does not miss a beat across 109 taut minutes, and he builds to a third-act dramatic arc that upends the hero's (literal) journey. Ryan's goal is to achieve 10 million air miles to join a ridiculously exclusive club; his home is as much in the sky as it is in the barren apartment he keeps in the middle of nowhere (Omaha, Neb.). Reitman sends Ryan and Alex to Wisconsin for the wedding of Ryan's sister. Ryan seems estranged from his two sisters and out-of-place in the heartland (because he's out of place everywhere, you see), and he falls victim to the oldest tradition in the book -- being around a wedding and family digs up a well of emotion that he foists onto Alex, endangering their no-strings arrangement. (The cast is so overstuffed that some viewers might not appreciate the nuanced work of Melanie Lynskey as the bride and Danny McBride as the groom who gets cold feet and must sit for a talking-to from Ryan, the worst person to advocate for marriage and commitment. Good thing he's a bull-shitting motivational speaker.)

Reitman has a couple more twists to reveal in the homestretch -- Natalie will be confronted with the real-world consequences of her chosen profession, and Alex and Ryan must resolve their situationship. The filmmaker draws his characters so finely and deeply that the various fallouts from their interactions feel like gut punches. Ryan's tutoring of Natalie feels real beneath the wisecracks. There is not a false move here; it's just exquisite storytelling with both a brain and a heart.

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) (B+) - Were there three prettier people in 1969 than Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross? Were they believable back then as scruffy outlaws from the Wild West circa 1899? Let's not overthink a classic.

Redford and Newman chew up and spit out a script by William Goldman ("All the President's Men," "The Princess Bride") as swaggering bandits bedeviling the railroads before going on the lam. Butch Cassidy (Newman) is the head of a gang -- in an early scene he cleverly fends off a coup by a rival member (played by Ted Cassidy, Lurch from "The Addams Family") -- and Sundance (Redford) is a famed gunslinger. When a train robbery goes awry, this becomes a western road movie, with Butch and Sundance barely keeping one step ahead of the law. 

 

It's a little difficult separating the former cultural phenomenon with the product on the screen as it stands 56 years later. There is the famous leapfrom a cliff into a raging river -- trapped on the cliff, Sundance is afraid to jump because he can't swim, to which Butch guffaws: "Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill ya!" And then there's the famous scene of a new contraption, the bicycle, with Butch and Etta Place (Ross) frolicking to the tune of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" sung by B.J. Thomas. (Ross too often is treated like a third wheel in the film, pardon the pun.)

The film was a breakthrough for George Roy Hill, who would reunite with his two main leads a few years later with another touchstone, "The Sting," an even bigger hit. He keeps things loose, letting the charm of his cast buoy the narrative, without turning this into a farce. Hill has a firm grasp of the conventions of the western genre, which at that point was undergoing a "Bonnie & Clyde"-style correction at the onset of the American New Wave. 

Redford and his feathered coif never quite come across as authentic, but the veteran Newman is all grit as the weathered bandit who knows he is running out of options. Ross rejoins the proceedings when Butch and Sundance decide to flee to Bolivia, believing that their scent will go cold while they knock off some easy prey, like the local banks. The culture clash is amusing without being condescending. The one-liners zing right up until the very end, when a hail of bullets and a freeze frame solidify our anti-heroes as Hollywood legends.

That '80s Grift: High on Molly

THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985) (A-minus) - This is an hour and a half of memorable moviemaking. Unfortunately, the film runs 95 minutes, and the gooey final five minutes are tough to swallow four decades after the film's debut.

 

John Hughes, fresh off his directorial debut a year earlier with "Sixteen Candles," brings back Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall to ground this group of five students with nothing in common -- Ringwald was the deb, Hall the nerd -- forced together at a Saturday detention. We also get Emilio Estevez as the jock, Judd Nelson as the juvenile delinquent, and Ally Sheedy as the beta emo chick. Hughes' task is to humanize these social caricatures and help them find some common ground.

Their eventual bonding unfolds over the course of the day and feels natural. Hughes has a couple of adults to serve as foils who get the students to rally together -- the great character actor Paul Gleason as the gruff vice principal and Second City alum John Kapelos as the sly janitor. The common denominator for each student: various levels of abuse from their parents. (Gleason's character stands in as the domineering father figure. Elsewhere, actual parents who appear briefly have a distanced "Peanuts" quality to them.)

It's a smart hook that allows each cast member to dig into an emotional monologue. Things can get pretty deep at times, and a viewer can be instantly transported back to those days of insecurity and self-discovery, which could rattle a teenager on a daily basis. But the real draw here is the humor, and the young cast is up to the task. 

Even the fairly wooden Estevez shows nuance and a flair for delivering a one-liner. He snaps at Nelson's John Bender after the punk pulls out a joint: "Yo, wastoid, you're not gonna blaze up in here." And when the vice principal seems skeptical of prissy Claire's demand to go get a drink of water, lest she suffer from dehydration, Estevez's Andrew soberly intones: "I've seen her dehydrate, sir. It's gross." Hall is quite funny as the brainy nerd who makes quick assessments of his colleagues, and Sheedy is mischievous as the bizarre loner. (One way that Hughes drops the ball at the end is by having Claire give Sheedy's emo Allison a princess makeover, which causes Andrew to go instantly ga-ga over her. Hughes often had a compelling need to pair off his characters neatly through pat endings.)

Despite the MGM finale, "The Breakfast Club" holds up as Hughes' masterpiece. He captures the essence of high school in a single day, balancing cliches with insight, mixing raw angst with silly antics. It lets you return to those days protected by the armor you've built up in adulthood. 

PRETTY IN PINK (1986) (B-minus) - John Hughes wrote this, but he handed off directing duties to Howard Deutch, who launched his career directing middling mainstream comedies. If only it didn't feel so dated.

Ringwald is Andie, the boho poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks (literally the opening camera shot), who becomes the object of affection for one of the "richies," Blane (pouty Andrew McCarthy). But Blane keeps getting drawn back to his privilege by his sniveling pal Steff (a hammy James Spader, below). And Andie is hounded by her puppy-dog pal, Duckie (Jon Cryer, making his bones), who pines for her but must settle for the wise counsel of the older hipster record-store owner Iona (Annie Potts). 

 

It's getting difficult to remember a time back in the day when there was such a distinction between the cool kids and the outcasts, the rich and the poor, and why the differences seemed to matter so much. Maybe that still plays out today, but I doubt it. (For one, schools seem more specialized these days.) Andie is mocked for sewing her own outfits rather than buying off the rack (Annie Hall 2.0). She doesn't want Blane to drop her off at home because she is embarrassed for him to see where she lives; yet the vintage Volkswagen Karmann Ghia in the photo above belongs to her, not Steff or Blane (albeit with dents and dings).

If I were Andie, I'd be more embarrassed about my father who mopes around the house all day missing Andie's mother. Veteran Harry Dean Stanton drops his typical thug persona to play the lachrymose dad who must be mothered by his daughter. He is a humiliated basket case, who is pummeled by Hughes' sappy dialogue at every turn. 

The film has its moments. Potts and Cryer are adorable as two generations of new-wave hipsters. Cryer lip-syncs and nerd-dances to Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness." Potts rocks the eyeliner and plastic dresses. Ringwald bites her lip and shoots glances at the corner of the ceiling, oozing an appealing innocence. McCarthy is as cute as anything on the screen. The narrative builds to a Hollywood ending, complete with an iconic wink to the camera at the very end. And the music is ice cool. But everything here comes across as an anachronism. (Even the DVD extras, of the cast reminiscing in 2006, seem like they were created a lifetime ago.)

The first time I remember ever feeling "old" was on opening night of this film. I was 23 and surrounded by teenage Ringwald fans. I felt like the creep leering after an 18-year-old movie phenom. Now I am old, and I can't help thinking that this quaint little movie is just lost to a bygone era. 

BONUS TRACKS

Simple Minds had the big hit with "Don't You (Forget About Me)," of course, which bookends "The Breakfast Club's" credits. Here, though, is the memorable dance/chase montage to Karla Devito's "We Are Not Alone":

 

 

The Psychedelic Furs with the classic earworm, "Pretty in Pink":

 

 

The anthemic new-wave synth symphony "If You Leave" by OMD is just perfect for the climax of "Pretty in Pink":

 

It's as  good an excuse as any to delve deeper into the "Pink" soundtrack and pluck out "Left of Center" by Suzanne Vega, who fits into the same era cubbyhole as Ringwald:

Out of Their League

 

SPLITSVILLE (B) - Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin team up again after their refreshing debut "The Climb" and return to the twinned concepts of infidelity and male friendship. This one starts out promising but gets pretty silly by the end.

 

The pair again co-wrote the script and star together. Covino directs and plays Paul, a rich jerk married to a beautiful woman, Julie (Dakota Johnson), with a precocious little genius son. Paul's best friend, Carey (Marvin), has just been dumped by his wife of one year after she is rattled by a brush with death on a car drive to see Paul and Julie. Distraught, Carey takes advantage of Paul and Julie's proclaimed open marriage and sleeps with Julie. Everyone proceeds to flip out.

Carey's wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), wants to be sexually adventurous, and Carey eventually returns home and keeps house with her various oddball boyfriends, most of whom quickly become her exes.  Carey claims to be embracing Ashley's opening up of their flailing marriage, but he can't shake his feelings for Julie in the wake of their one-off tryst. Meantime, Paul's financial empire threatens to come crashing down, turning their living situation upside down.

This is all played quite broadly, and Covino and Marvin have several plot twists up their sleeves. You cheer for them to pull it off while they stage some truly funny scenes. But the basic premise gnaws at you -- what are these gorgeous, thoughtful women doing with these weird shlubs in the first place and why can't the women quit them? (The excessive male nudity might offer a few hints.) Arjona is full of life, and the film can barely contain her. Johnson commits to the uber-indie project and gives a rounded performance as a wife and mother who yearns for more than just her cushy life. 

Covino and Marvin are inventive, and their script seems peppered with improvised moments full of sly observations about relationships, both romantic and platonic. And there is an epic fight between the two men that drags on as they smash through rooms in Paul's house and eventually through a plate-glass window. It is cleverly choreographed for maximum credibility and comedic ordinariness. 

It would give too much away to explain how the narrative gymnastics exhaust the capital that is banked in the first half of the movie. Covino and Marvin have a Duplass brothers aesthetic with a Jim Cummings edge, a devotion to a nerd bro code. They are clever and funny. This sophomore effort feels like a bit of a fork in the road. Let's see where they head next.  

BONUS TRACKS
The film opens, appropriately, on a '70s vibe, Kenny Loggins and Stevie Nicks' hit "Whenever I Call You Friend":

 

The closing credits return to the '70s with Steve Forbert's passionate Dylanesque ballad "Romeo's Tune":

 

Then there is this Polish disco-era curiosity from ORM, "Pasky Z Cívek Odvijim":

It's All Downhill From Here

 

DEVO (A-minus) - Everything you could want in a documentary about Devo -- if that's what you are looking for -- can be found in this energetic and comprehensive biography of the band, featuring its two leaders, Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale. The story might give you a new appreciation for the nerdy new-wavers.

 

Chris Smith -- the entertaining director behind "American Movie," "The Yes Men," "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond" and "Fyre" -- takes a zippy approach, starting out with a deep dive into the Akron, Ohio, band's origins, which grew out of the 1970 Kent State massacre by the National Guard. The group was deeply committed to the concept of "de-evolution," the idea that human culture has peaked, and now it is declining -- a theory that has only gained traction as the generations have devolved in the past 50 years. The members of Devo (who tend to put the emphasis on the second syllable) also were pioneers in not just electronic music but in video production; they considered themselves an art collective devoted first to film and second to music.

That visual sense probably led to their well-timed big break at the start of the '80s. "Whip It" was their only top-40 single (in 1980), and it not only got new life the next year when MTV debuted, but the band was ready with plenty of video content for the hungry new channel, which added to the rotation the band's films made for their early releases. The documentary does not shy away from the band's demise as the '80s trudged along and the new-wave pioneers struggled to write more great hooks, while their shtick wasn't so weird anymore.

Mothersbaugh would go on to score "Pee-wee's Playhouse" and many movies, for Wes Anderson and others, and Casale directed music videos. Their brothers from the band would participate in an audio/video project. All appear here either in new interviews or in clips (Bob Casale and drummer Alan Meyers have died). The music is strong; they were more than one-hit wonders. Smith recognizes the band's connection to the late-night show "Fridays," with a few clips, including "Through Being Cool" and "Jerkin' Back and Forth." Those and other earworms are fun to revisit while learning the backstory of some devoted, if rather silly, artists.

DIANE WARREN: RELENTLESS (A) - This is a friendly career retrospective of the songwriter behind oodles of mega hits on mainstream radio, going back to the 1970s.

 

Diane Warren is a classic punk who writes adult-contemporary songs. She is unleashed here in all her F-bomb glory -- admired, beloved and feared by some of the titans of pop music of the modern era. Here is a small random list of artists who have recorded her songs:  Cher, LeAnn Rimes, Brandy, Belinda Carlisle, Chicago, Aerosmith, Jennifer Hudson, the Pretenders, Cheap Trick, the Smithereens, DeBarge (her first hit), Starship (her worst song), Gloria Estevan and Milli Vanilli.

Cher, Rimes and Hudson enthusiastically join the parade of friends/collaborators who explain the pitbull attitude of the woman who has been obsessed with songwriting since she was a child in Van Nuys, Calif. Former "American Idol" judge Randy Jackson is an especially enthusiastic colleague, and we also hear from old pals, including actress Kathrine Narducci from "The Sopranos."

We hang out with Warren in her overstuffed office, where the magic happens. (She still records demos on cassette.) We tag along as she bops around town, always accompanied by an old friend whom Warren hired to rescue her from a bad financial situation. We watch as Warren works out her psychological issues with her parents -- her mother constantly hounded her to become a secretary, but her father (who bought her her first guitar and a backyard shed to hang out in) was more supportive. 

Your enthusiasm might flag once the milquetoast music starts flowing and the deluge of tunes, especially the formulaic hits of the '90s, begin to pelt your senses. But the star here is Warren and her truly relentless personality, which seems barely dimmed from her teen firepower, even as she now approaches 70. This is a fascinating character study by newcomer Bess Kargman, and you don't have to be a fan of the music to appreciate it.

BONUS TRACKS

Devo on "Fridays" with "Jerkin' Back and Forth":

  

 

More sick synth solos on "Through Being Cool":

 

 

Always a good excuse to spin "Girl U Want":

 

Diane Warren's list of hits seems endless. (Just those that start with the letter I go on and on. (I could go on.)) Here is Toni Braxton with "Un-Break My Heart":

 

 

To the battleships! Ending with the GOAT, Cher belting out "If I Could Turn Back Time":
 

Soundtrack of Your Life: Music for Airports

 Soundtrack of Your Life is an occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.

We were at the Albuquerque Sunport, waiting for our Alaska Air flight to Seattle, the start of a working vacation -- a long weekend in Seattle, followed by a midweek mediation in Vancouver, Wash., and an arbitration hearing near Eugene, Ore., before wrapping up with a weekend in Portland that culminated in a concert at McMenamins Edgefield. 

The airport playlist was doubling down on the '70s. There was my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song, "Sundown," which we featured five years ago when reviewing the documentary about the Canadian singer-songwriter. But the ringer was "Bad Time," an unabashedly syrupy pop confection by Grand Funk (Railroad), the flinty long-haired power-rock quartet from Flint, Mich., who were partial to covers of '60s lollipop songs. They had hits with Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion" and the Soul Brothers Six's "Some Kind of Wonderful." They put more muscle into their own compositions, such as "We're an American Band" (No. 1 in 1973) and the epic saga "Closer to Home (I'm Your Captain)" (their first Top 40 single, from 1970).

"Bad Time" was written by Mark Farner while he was going through a divorce. It peaked at No. 4 in spring 1975, and it was not out of place alongside similar throwback tunes of the era like "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (an ultimate guilty pleasure) or as a counter-balance to "Love Will Keep Us Together," which "Bad Time" was chasing up the charts. 

 

I'm sure all the burnouts who worshiped the band in grungier days were appalled at the band's mid-decade descent into sap. (Producer Jimmy Ienner had worked with the Raspberries and Bay City Rollers.) I have a vivid memory of spinning the song at an '80s party, when it would have been considered the height of hipster retro, and my friend Marcy, a connoisseur of all things bubblegum, positively swooning over it. 

(The song comes from the album "All the Girls in the World Beware," which is notable as the only record I ever won in a contest. I figured out a way to game the system for the giveaway by WLS-AM (the big 89). You had to be the first caller when you heard the WLS theme rendered in phone tones. I had a plan. When the station ran a string of commercials, I would get ready by dialing the first six numbers, poised to hit the seventh as soon as I heard the prompt. I still have the vinyl album, with a cut-out notch in the upper right-hand corner of the cover.)

 

At the tail end of the trip, we spent our last full day in Portland at Edgefield for another round with the Pixies. Opening were Spoon and Fazerdaze, whose show closer, "Bigger," reminds me of John Lennon's "No. 9 Dream":

 

Fazerdaze (New Zealander Amelia Murray with Dave Rowlands) did not play our favorite single, "Treading Lightly":

 

Spoon crunched through a set of about 14 power-pop tracks. Talk about '70s throwbacks, I'm partial lately to 2017's "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb":

 

A highlight was "Wild":

 

BONUS TRACKS

The Pixies opened with five or six newer songs before segueing into the classics, like "Wave of Mutilation" (both versions), "Gouge Away" and a meaty "Head On" (their Jesus & Mary Chain cover). Once "Planet of Sound" kicked in, the band was fully in their catatonic state of unrelenting noise rock. They built to the inevitable climax, "Where Is My Mind?," and then tossed in a bonus track. As the stage filled with white smoke, Black Francis ceded the microphone to bassist Emma Richardson for a haunting version of the trippy b-side "Into the White." Here is Kim Deal's original from 1991:

 

 

 

And, Brian Eno with our title track:

New to the Queue

 It's not so much the heat as it is the cupidity ...

 

Mark Duplass co-wrote a debut feature about a family whose home is invaded, "The Knife."

Our guys Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin (2020's "The Climb") wrestle again with relationship issues, with the help of Dakota Johnson, "Splitsville."

Netflix offers what looks like a paint-by-numbers -- yet satisfying -- biography of the avant-garde music rascals of the '70s and '80s, "Devo."

From the writer of "Junebug," a multi-generational drama captained by David Straithairn, "A Little Prayer." 

A documentary about the troubled '90s singer-songwriter, "It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley."

Michelangelo Frammartino ("Le Quattro Volte") has restored his 2003 documentary about a tiny village in Italy, "Il Dono (The gift)."

Identify Crises

 

A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (B-minus) - Rachel Elizabeth Seed goes in search of her mother, a noted photographer and journalist who died at 42 when Rachel was 18 months old, in this ruminative documentary of personal discovery.

 

Seed, a producer on "I Am Greta," threads the film with 1970s interviews conducted by her mother, Sheila Turner-Seed, with famous photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson (whose quote about capturing moments -- "Life is once, forever" -- is featured twice in the film). As a visual gimmick, Seed stages coy black-and-white re-creations, with obscured faces and obtuse angles. (It turns out she plays her mother in these and other scenes.)

This is textbook filmmaking as psychotherapy, and the daughter's yearning spills out on the screen like a dull primal wail. You ache for her, as she never got to know her mother, but Seed fails to elevate the subject here to anything beyond glum scrapbooking. Interviews with her father, a onetime stock photographer based in Chicago, feel rather antiseptic.

The movie feels much longer than 87 minutes as Seed grasps for insight that eludes her. The images and clips get repetitive as she fumbles among several false endings. It's all rather touching but oddly unsatisfying in the end. I hope it helped her fill that hole inside.

HORSE GIRL (2020) (B) - The penultimate film from on of our favorites, Jeff Baena, finds Allison Brie as a lost soul gradually having a mental breakdown. What could have been cringe scans more like bittersweet heartbreak.

She plays shy, awkward Sarah, prone to nosebleeds, and psychologically damaged, apparently by a horse-riding accident that injured a girl she had been training. Sarah is haunted by a recurring dream, in which she is abducted by aliens, lying prone in a sterile white room along with an older man and younger woman. When she spots the man in real life, she stalks him. 

Sarah's increasingly odd behavior aggravates her roommate, Nikki (Debby Ryan), and worries her colleague at the fabric store, Joan (Molly Shannon). When introduced to sweet, awkward Darren (John Reynolds, one of the alums from TV's "Search Party" seen here), her cuteness charms him, but her quirks start to unnerve him. She likes him mainly because he has the same name as the lead character from a fictional TV show she binge watches. (She also is obsessed with an image of her grandmother, who bears a striking likeness to her; to most people that's a common genetic result, but to Sarah it is proof of a nefarious secret cloning experiment.)

Writer-director Baena ("The Little Hours," "Joshy") is at his most somber here. He finds the funny in small situations, and he cleverly mixes serious drama with nervous humor. He has an obvious chemistry with his star, Brie. (He and Brie and Shannon would take things a little lighter, but still moody, in "Spin Me Round" two years later. Brie co-wrote "Horse Girl" and "Spin Me Round.") She is compelling here as the proverbial slow-motion car crash. The film can drag across 103 minutes, but Baena, who died in January, knew how to mine his own troubled soul for the kind of dark comedy that always kept you off balance. 

Radio Friendly

 

35,000 WATTS: THE STORY OF COLLEGE RADIO (B+) - One of my more reliable memories is of my first week of college, at the University of Illinois-Chicago, in September 1981, and learning that the radio station was being shuttered. I had considered pursuing a radio gig at WUIC someday. That dream died quickly. I ended up in print journalism. 

 

Like many people of my vintage, coming into adulthood in the 1980s, I was a fan of college radio. Another vivid memory jumps ahead a little over a decade. I'm driving to work at the Chicago Sun-Times, listening to the shaky signal from WNUR, Northwestern University's station at 89.3 FM, which sometimes seeped through from up north, surviving the skyscrapers. I'm hearing music that feels primeval, as if it were being transmitted while I was vibing in my mother's womb. I pull into the covered parking garage and find a spot, praying that the signal won't fade. I need to make it to the station break to find out the name of the artist. The signal cuts in and out and fades and swells. The DJ comes on. He identifies that block of music as being from the mysterious indie band Guided by Voices. The rest is history.

"35,000 Watts" (I add the comma gratis) is a valentine to the history of college radio, mostly its heyday back then. It was made by Michael Millard, who worked at KTXT at Texas Tech in Lubbock in the early '90s. He gathers some of his former colleagues, along with a bunch of alums from WUOG, in Athens, Ga. (U of G), which was ground zero for the defining modern era, the emergence of R.E.M., along with Pylon, Let's Active, Love Tractor and others circa 1981. (The B-52s had emerged from there a few years earlier.) 

Like those and other college stations, Millard's documentary is low-budget and seat-of-the-pants. He cobbles together archival photos and snippets of songs that transport you back to the pre-internet dark ages, when you could curate your own music only by making cassette mixes and had to rely instead on dope-smoking 19-year-olds to hip you up to the now sounds. At that time, indie meant independent and alternative was truly the alternative. 

 

Millard's DIY ethic fits the subject here. He gathers a decent collection of talking heads in addition to the DJ alums, including Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, and two R.E.M.-adjacent characters, Mitch Easter (their early producer and the frontman of Let's Active) and the band's lawyer/manager Bertis Downs. (The cassette of R.E.M.'s "Radio Free Europe" is widely considered to be Ground Zero of modern college radio as we know it.)

The true stars are the former DJs, from a smattering of stations scattered across the country, including one diehard veteran still toiling away at KSPC (Claremont Colleges in California). The alums have some specific memories -- the smell of vinyl in the station's library, legendary stories of the infamous ratty couch that saw far too much activity. 

Millard takes a detour to provide added context -- the origins of college radio going back into mid-20th century, including its role in covering sports. But it's that heyday which holds the most charm. Needles drop on the Pixies (repped here by Joey Santiago), Violent Femmes, Bratmobile, the rise of rap. It's a heady mix. We could go on and on ...

BONUS TRACKS

R.E.M. contemporaries Love Tractor could jangle with the best of them. Here is their self-titled 1982 album, kicked off by "Buy Me a Million Dollars":

 

Big-hair alert! It's Mitch Easter leading Let's Active, with Sara Romweber on drums, on their hit "Every Word Means No":

 

"35,000 Watts" celebrates the diversity of college radio and name checks this early rap entry, Sugarhill Gang's take on the surf standby "Apache (Jump On It)": 

"Radio Free Europe":

In the Gloamin'

 

DROWNING DRY (B+) - This Lithuanian slow burn gnaws at you as it quietly examines two adult sisters and their romantic relationships in the shadow of an unfolding tragedy.

At the beginning of the film, Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite) tends to her husband, Lukas (Paulius Markevicius), after his victory in an ultimate-fighting cage match.  The couple then meet up with Ernesta's sister, Juste (Agne Kaktaite), and her husband for a trip to a lakehouse to relax, with each couple toting a child. One of the children will disappear under the water, and the rest of the movie surrounds the attempts to rescue Juste's daughter and get her medical care, and the aftermath. 

Writer-director Laurynas Bareisa ("Pilgrims") takes his time settling in with the characters, casually observing their banter and habits. He jumbles the timeline, jumping back and forth from a police investigation, and sometimes re-airing the same scene twice, with subtle differences the second time. One of those twists involves Ernesta and Juste doing a choreographed dance to a song that seems to go back to their childhood, and the only difference between the scenes is that the song is different the second time while the dance is the same. 

Glemzaite is compelling as the alpha sister, and Kaktaite feels like the conscience of this somber story. (The husbands are not nearly as interesting. The film's original title translates as "Sisters.") Bareisa seems to be suggesting that our memories can be a little unreliable -- or is he shifting perspective from one character to another? -- and that the mundane tasks of a weekend holiday can rival life-changing trauma. Invariably, Bareisa returns us to the lake house, itself indelibly altered as are the characters whose lives are overturned by the series of events they've endured. Just enough narrative adds up in the end for this to be slyly satisfying.

OH, CANADA (D+) - It's anybody's guess what Paul Schrader is going for here. He tells a jumbled story of a revered leftist documentary filmmaker, hours from dying, sitting for an interview with his former film students, trying to recall -- or intentionally misrepresenting -- his past as a failed husband and father and Vietnam-era draft dodger. Is he setting the record straight or setting fire to it?

Richard Gere is the only thing worth watching as arrogant Leo Fife, who welcomes director Malcolm (Michael Imperioli, bland) and producer Diane (Victoria Hill) into the home he has made with his wife, Emma (a dull Uma Thurman), who was another of Malcolm and Diane's classmates. Leo insists that Emma be present for the interview, not just for emotional support but also so that he can reconcile his past in front of her. I wish I could say what exactly that reckoning is, but I can't, because the flashbacks create quite a muddle.

It doesn't help that the young Leo is played in the late 1960s by Jacob Elordi ("Saltburn") who is exceptionally tall and who looks and sounds nothing like Gere. But maybe that's Schrader's way of showcasing his unreliable narrator? Sometimes Gere as old Leo subs in during the flashbacks, perhaps again as a way to show how badly Leo's brain is misfiring in his final moments. And Thurman shows up in an early scene as a completely different character. Someone make it all make sense.

Gere sinks his teeth into this deathbed confession. You see flashes of Leo's suave old ways when he flirts a bit with the slinky production assistant Sloan (Penelope Mitchell) while his voiceover worries whether she can smell his soiled underclothes or prescription ointments as she bends toward him to mic him up.

Leo's backstory, however, is just not that interesting. He had fabricated his experiences in the media for decades, including a made-up jaunt to communist Cuba, apparently.  It turns out that he rejected a corporate job in Virginia with his father-in-law in favor of a teaching job in Vermont, which was a quick step to Canada once he was in danger of being drafted -- though even that comes with a fibbed twist.

Maybe this is more meta than meta, and it's an example of Schrader -- the legendary muse to Martin Scorsese and others before directing his own films ("First Reformed") -- losing his own grip on filmmaking. Schrader, who here is interpreting a novel from Russell Banks, stifles his cast and can't tell a compelling story to save his life.  

BONUS TRACK

The first song that the sisters dance to in "Drowning Dry" is Lighthouse Family with "High":

 

And the second time, it's Jessica Shy with "Sokam Letai":

Imagining Things

 A trio of duds from debut filmmakers ...

DEATH OF A UNICORN (D+) - Very little makes sense -- even in a world of unicorns -- in this unfunny and needlessly gory black comedy about a nerdy lawyer and his daughter whose car strikes a mythical creature on the way to a dying rich client's mansion. 

Debut writer-director Alex Scharfman has way too many creative but dumb ideas about how a unicorn (and its unicorn army) can wreak havoc and exact revenge. This is part "Ghostbusters" and part "Alien," with no discernible payoff in either comedy or horror. 

You might be lured in by the cast. Don't be. Paul Rudd is a dud as the bumbling Everyman. Jenna Ortega ("Wednesday") is asked to bug her eyes a lot and act frightened. She has one scene where a delightful side of her character comes out -- on the early drive before the accident -- but she is throttled the rest of the way. Richard Grant plays that insufferable twit he always plays. Tea Leoni ends a long screen drought but is drained of her appeal. Anthony Carrigan (HBO's "Barry") makes the most hay as the put-upon servant, flirting with breaking the fourth wall with his deadpan asides.

But none of this adds up. The plot is a familiar one -- the horn and the blood of the dead unicorn (or IS it dead??) have miraculous healing powers, so the government scientists descend immediately to not only try to cure Grant's character, but also to lay claim to world-changing potions that seem to be the inevitable byproduct of this serendipitous hit-and-run. 

But none of this is interesting. It's hectic beyond belief. The plot twists are ludicrous. Once unicorns start rampaging throughout the compound, you roll your eyes at the inventive ways Paul Rudd can somehow outrun these Jurassic wonders, time and time again. I was exhausted halfway through and hated myself for finishing it.

MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE (C) - This earnest but trite drama follows the journey of an Army veteran who avoids confronting her trauma by conjuring a fallen mate as a crutch and a comedic diversion from the horror of the friend's death. 

Another newcomer, Kyle Hausmann-Stokes (with two co-writers), pours his heart into this passion project informed by his own military service. But the result is too trite by half and saccharine enough to numb your teeth.

Natalie Morales (above, center) is always a comic wonder, but her shtick as Zoe, the wise-cracking dead vet who shadows Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), crackles at first and then quickly grows stale. Zoe's presence is a giant symbol of Merit's refusal to confront her past and exorcise the demons from Afghanistan. That includes dodging her obligation to attend group-therapy sessions led by the wise and sympathetic Dr. Cole, portrayed in the millionth iteration by Morgan Freeman, criminally underused.

Meanwhile, Merit is stepping in for her too-busy mom and is looking in on her grandfather, Dale (Ed Harris), who lives by the lake but is showing signs of needing assisted living. Also an Army vet (Vietnam, still not played out, apparently), Dale is gruff and resistant, in part because he is played by Ed Harris, who lately specializes in that sort of thing.

I cheered for this to succeed. Martin-Green and Harris have some touching moments. But there is something way too corny about the overall production and its weepy worship of military service. You can spot dialogue -- major and minor -- coming a mile away in the paint-by-numbers script. A clever twist at the end is appreciated but not enough. I wanted it to work, but it's too much of a chore.

OPUS (D) - Movies don't get much more far-fetched than this goofy would-be thriller about a secluded legacy rock star who invites select media members to his vast compound to witness the unveiling of his self-proclaimed masterpiece. Strike one: John Malkovich plays the Bowie-style pop idol with not a lick of authenticity.

Strike two: The film wastes the vast talents of Ayo Edebiri ("Bottoms," "Theater Camp") who is reduced to mugging to the camera, either with a Woody Allen stammer or having to express shock over and over again as the weekend goes off the rails into cartoon horror. She's not the only one misused; there also is Murray Bartlett (HBO's first season of "The White Lotus"), who is just stripped of his typical appeal. And what is up with Tony Hale as a long-haired worshipper/enabler of Malkovich's Moretti? The star has surrounded himself with his own personal Manson Family, who will help Moretti turn the weekend into a torture chamber for his media guests.

Strike three: The script and execution are profoundly idiotic. First-time writer-director Mark Anthony Green must have thought he had something profound to say about idol-worship (the tagline is "There is no cult like celebrity"). And so we get to watch legacy journalists and online influencers alike get their comeuppance ... but just deserts for what, exactly? For making Moretti beloved and rich over the years? What exactly is Moretti's beef here? Is he just crazy? Did any of the guests in particular slight him in the past? 

Don't try to figure it out. By the time the violence kicks in, it is so out of left field and so granular in its tactics (a mild scalping, anyone?) that many will want to shut this off by the time the final-reel bloodbath escalates. That is, if you can make it past the idea of Malkovich as a bald rock god, croaking out tunes written by Nile Rodgers and someone who goes by The-Dream (don't forget the hyphen). 

Like the two previous efforts, this is an example of a newcomer regurgitating too many ideas on the screen at once. Let's see if any of these filmmakers settle down and eventually make a good movie. 

Oh, Pioneers

 

SUNDAY BEST (B) - "The Ed Sullivan Show," the Sunday night variety TV staple for more than two decades, is revisited mainly through the lens of race relations postwar and at the height of the Civil Rights movement. 

 

Sullivan was a sportswriter and columnist who often championed black athletes and entertainers. We watch as he fights to have Harry Belafonte -- suspected of having communist sympathies in the '50s -- appear on his show (and as Belafonte delivers a powerful performance). It was provocative at the time for Sullivan to be hands-on with his black guests, even kissing female performers, right there on CBS in front of his millions of viewers. 

Elvis Presley and the Beatles get their perfunctory moments, but they generally stand aside for the likes of James Brown, Pearl Bailey, the Supremes (above) and Gladys Knight & the Pips. The parade of performers is impressive. 

Director Sacha Jenkins -- whose previous subjects have included Rick James, Louis Armstrong, Wu-Tang Clan and the LA riots -- delves into Sullivan's personal life (living in a hotel, hobnobbing in New York as the "toast of the town") and digs through his early days in newspapers. (The movie is subtitled "The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan.") Jenkins leans on a gimmick that some might find annoying: He uses an AI-generated version of Sullivan's voice to narrate the film in the first person. It's a bit high-pitched, as you'd imagine a young Sullivan would sound like, but it is definitely obvious that the audio is not from archival recordings.

At 80 minutes, the Netflix release zips along, and the music clips are quite entertaining; if not deep cuts, at least they are not the obvious hits that we've seen over and over.  

OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING (2021) (B) - This jangled retrospective brings to light the career of Oscar Micheaux, the groundbreaking black filmmaker from the early days of the medium a century ago.

Writer-director Francesco Zippel, who specializes in profiling filmmakers, curates footage from the silent and talkie eras and gathers a bevy of talking heads to place Micheaux in the canon. That includes Chuck D from Public Enemy, Morgan Freeman, and disciples like John Singleton ("Boyz n the Hood"), Amma Asante ("Belle"), and Kevin Willmott (writer of "BlacKkKlansman"), all of whom provide a measured mix of insight and appreciation for the opened door. (A lot of them also wear or are surrounded by the color royal blue, which is either an obscure homage or just an aesthetic quirk of Zippel.) Learned analysts and historians (with the exception of one with not much to offer) provide key context about the wild-west days of early Hollywood.

It would be nice to have had fuller clips of the films of Micheaux, whose career spanned from 1919 ("Homesteader," based on his own novel) to 1948, a few years before he died in his late 60s. (Many of his reels are lost to history.) The film seems to gloss over his shortcomings -- he was a thieving train porter early on, and he apparently was quite the hustler in the movie business. But it provides a strong general overview of a trailblazer many of us have likely never heard of. 

BONUS TRACKS

Here are Ray Charles and Billy Preston from the Sullivan show in 1967 with "Double-O Soul":

 

And here is Bo Diddley jangling away with his eponymous earworm in 1955:

365 Days

 

Our favorite band, of recent vintage, Waxahatchee stopped by Santa Fe for an outdoor show with the western sunset as a backdrop. They were led by their heart and soul, the magnetic Katie Crutchfield. It had been 10 years since we saw her last in New Mexico. 

 

No one in the past 10 years has come close to her batting average, which is 1.000. I have never heard her record a bad song. She has six albums going back to 2012, the most recent last year's "Tigers Blood," which is still in heavy rotation.

Crutchfield, backed by a solid band, including Eliana Athayde on bass and harmonizing vocals, worked the stage like a superstar, like a Laurel Canyon Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She had a stool off to the side, where she would croon without the burden of her acoustic guitar and could play to the balcony.

There might be no finer song than "Burns Out at Midnight." She out-Prines Prine:

 

About half her songs were from "Tigers Blood," and most of the rest were from "St. Cloud, from 2020 (set list). That included "Lilacs," the most second-phase Bob Dylan song you can imagine, and it's better than anything on "New Morning."

 

Crutchfield crooned two country ditties from her side project Plains, and she and opening act, Brennan Wedl, belted out a fine cover of Kathleen Edwards' "Six O'Clock News." Here is Edwards' original:

 

And, finally, our title track:

The Male Ego

 

MOUNTAINHEAD (C+) - These two films were so forgettable I almost forgot to review them. "Mountainhead" -- a play on Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead" -- is a pitch-black comedy about four billionaire tech bros who gather at an isolated mansion while the world seems to be falling apart, the mayhem sparked by disinformation fed by their artificial-intelligence schemes. 

 

These four old friends quickly descend into backstabbing over business opportunities, until it gets to the point where three of them literally try to kill the fourth, in bumbling comic style. This is the directing debut of writer Jesse Armstrong ("In the Loop," "Four Lions"), and the script is maddeningly faithful to tech-speak, as if an AI program tried to write David Mamet dialogue. 

Jason Schwartzman is fun, as always, as the host at his Utah getaway. Steve Carrell, as the older mentor, does that mopey sad-sack thing that is rarely funny. Cory Michael Smith ("Carol," "Saturday Night") is fine as the alpha male Ven, and Ramy Youseff struggles to define his role as the one whose AI could save the planet from Ven's rampage. The four men never create a believable buzz, and we're always aware that this is a fictional exercise in what-if. Schwartzman is amusing, as the least wealthy of the bunch (only two commas) desperately pushing his meditation app Slowzo.

There is something to be had here about four rich jerks being so arrogant that they don't care about the destruction of the planet, but you also get the sense that Armstrong and his team might be just as thoughtless in how they go about the task at hand. Nothing gels here, and the self-aware over-written dialogue just consumes this whole thing by the end.

MICKEY 17 (C) - For us, "Parasite," was an outlier in the film canon of Bong Joon-ho. He is now back to his pulpy excess ("Snowpiercer," "Okja"), with an extraplanetary story here that, like its cloned main character, is insufferably repetitive and dour.

I admit, I mentally bailed on "Mickey 17" at some point and let it play out as background noise, for the most part. This is a relentless slog about the latest iteration of a kamikaze/suicide Expendable clone, Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson, looking miserable), who, through a glitch, has to deal with Mickey 18. (Each Mickey is supposed to die in the service of science before the next version is 3-D printed -- a cool special effect. And Multiples are verboten.) Meantime, the Mickeys will do battle with a pal from Earth (Steven Yeun) and fall for the lovely Nasha (Naomie Ackie), a security agent on the fictional icy planet of Niflheim. They also have to deal with the expedition leader, a smarmy politician named Marshall (a goofy Mark Ruffalo) and his unctuous wife (Toni Collette).

Just try to follow the convoluted plot, either by viewing the film or trudging through the Wikipedia entry. Pattinson always looks like he'd rather be somewhere (or someone) else. I was embarrassed for Ruffalo and his outlandish makeup. 

The storyline involving the native creatures battling the invading humans feels like a cheap video game. And would you believe there are the makings of a threesome involving both Mickeys? No one distinguishes themselves, especially Bong, who apparently gets to make any movie he wants, with final cut, even if it's a 137-minute intergalactic mess.

Noir Chronicles, Part 2: Dames in Distress

  Two decades and going strong, it's the Guild Cinema's annual July Film Noir Festival. Part one is here. Here are the rest of our samples:

BEWARE MY LOVELY (1952) (C) - It's Robert Ryan again, this time teaming up with the formidable Ida Lupino as a woman held captive in her home by a deranged handyman. But the movie is so lethargic that any tension it manages to conjure up dissipates rather quickly under the drab direction of Harry Horner.

 

Ryan plays Howard Wilton, who in the opening scene, flees a house he was working at after discovering a body in a closet, hopping a train in a panic. He shows up at the doorstop of Helen Gordon (Lupino), who runs a boarding house and puts on events for neighborhood kids. Wilton goes by an alias and exhibits mental lapses and delusions, as if fighting the urge to claim (another?) victim. 

Part of the problem here is that it probably would not take much for Helen to escape a house where the handyman has locked the front and back doors. You suspend disbelief hoping for more suspense. Lupino is appealing, but her character is one-dimensional. Ryan is more awkward than creepy. Seventy-seven minutes seem like two hours, and even a wry ending can't cover for the flimsy drama that even Lupino -- or Barbara Whiting as a bored teenager -- cannot rescue from the doldrums. 

SPOTTED: Brad Morrow would have a prolific career as a child actor, most notably in 1955's TV series "The Adventures of Spin and Marty." ... Blink and you'll miss William Talman, who would go on to play Hamilton Burger in TV's "Perry Mason."   

LADY IN A CAGE (1964) (B) - Here's another imprisoned woman -- Olivia de Havilland gets stuck in her home elevator (!) and is besieged by wild intruders who take advantage of her predicament. James Caan, in his first credited big-screen role, leads the gang of drifters who show little regard for human dignity.

 

Much of the terror is played for laughs -- the intruders are bumblers, inept at cleaning out a rich lady's house -- and this comes off as the Manson Family meets the Partridge Family. Caan's Randall is joined by ditzy blonde Elaine (a randy Jennifer Billingsley) and horny simpleton Essie (character actor Rafael Campos, memorable as Archie Bunker's Puerto Rican co-worker). The trio horn in on the discovery of the vulnerable house by a homeless drunk (Jeff Corey) and his hooker friend Sade (an unhinged Ann Sothern).

De Havilland's Cornelia Hilyard, whose son has gone off for the weekend, is limping from a broken hip, and she gets stuck in her caged lift when the power goes out on a sweaty Fourth of July weekend in Los Angeles. Her screams go for naught, drowned out my the constant thrum of holiday car traffic streaming past her house in both directions day and night. 

Caan, flaunting a thin but expansive carpet of poodle-tufted torso hair, is jarringly maniacal, both toward the trapped dilettante as well as his hapless cohorts. Writer Luther Davis ("Kismet") plants a seed in the opening scene -- Cornelia's son, Malcolm (William Swan), has left her a suicide note before hitting the road -- and the filial relationship has disturbing qualities to it. That "Psycho" twist adds layers to Cornelia's predicament, and De Havilland chews her cloistered scenery like the grand dame of cinema she was.

Director Walter Grauman, a TV journeyman, is partial to close-ups where his actors' faces fill the screen, and he has a sharp eye for exposing the seedy underbelly of the simmering city, portending a societal unraveling that would consume the 1960s. This anxiously shot black-and-white provocation certainly gets under your skin. 

SPOTTED: Hey, it's the inimitable Scatman Crothers, as a pawn shop assistant. His voluminous credits would include Louie the garbage man on TV's "Chico and the Man" ("Stick out your can!") and the scene-stealing janitor from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."   

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER (1946) (B+) - This piece from the classic era stars John Garfield as a con man who targets a recent widow who sits on a sizable inheritance that is there for the taking. Garfield has quite the chemistry with Geraldine Fitzgerald, who has an Anne Hathaway modern look about her.

Garfield plays Nick Blake, fresh from the war and back on the New York mob scene, who first must retrieve his nest egg from girlfriend Toni (Faye Emerson), who has blown the wad on a night-club venture. Nick eventually gets the money back from her slimy business partner and then agrees to a $2 million job out in Los Angeles hatched by mob boss Doc (George Coulouris). Nick has wise counsel from an old friend, the elderly Pop (Walter Brennan), and his loyal, wisecracking pal Al (George Tobias), but he can't help developing feelings for Fitzgerald's Gladys Halvorson.

How will he get out of this mess? Toni shows up in L.A. and tips off Doc, whose boys will eventually kidnap the rich widow, and it will be up to Nick and Pop to try to rescue her. (Emerson and Brennan are particularly good in juicy supporting roles. Pop, who is 65, warns Nick, who is 34, that "it's all downhill from here.") The final 20 minutes -- scripted by prolific novelist W.R. Burnett ("The Asphalt Jungle," "High Sierra," "Little Caesar") -- are taut and riveting, dimly shot in the wee hours along a Santa Monica pier by director Jean Negulesco ("Johnny Belinda"). It is a perfect slow build to a satisfying crescendo. 

SPOTTED: Robert Arthur, uncredited here as a bellhop, would have a memorable turn five years later as naive Herbie in the Billy Wilder classic "Ace in the Hole." ... George Tobias' claim to fame would be as Abner, the husband of the nosy neighbor Mrs. Kravitz on "Bewitched."

BONUS TRACK 

The art-deco opening credits to "Lady in a Cage," which, visually, are as good as anything in the movie:

 

The trailer for "Nobody Lives Forever":

Noir Chronicles, Part 1: Crooked Cons

 Two decades and going strong, it's the Guild Cinema's annual July Film Noir Festival. Here is our first batch of samples:

 

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959) (A-minus) - Racial tensions undergird this realist heist film from Robert Wise, starring Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and our favorite, Gloria Grahame. The glue holding it all together, though, is veteran character actor Ed Begley as the ex-cop who brings Belafonte's Johnny and Ryan's Earle together for a bank score.  

 

Johnny is divorced, settling for visitation with his 6-year-old daughter. A scene with the two of them attending a carnival is vividly rendered, as Johnny is distracted by the impending bill coming due for his $7,500 in gambling debts and by the logistical planning for the heist that he hopes will erase those debts. The miserable Earle lives in a cramped apartment with Lorry (Shelley Winters), who improbably puts up with his sour demeanor on every subject (most notably his ingrained prejudices sparked by the idea of working with a black partner). Begley figures his scheme can't miss, and cobbles together his team of misfits by promising them each $50,000 and keeping Earle's slurs in check. 

This is the film that Wise, an old RKO hand, made at the end of the '50s before he directed his calling card, "West Side Story." His black-and-white streets are bustling and a little grimy. He brings realism to upstate New York in towns along the Hudson River. The dialogue from a triumvirate of writers is facile and biting. They establish Earle's racism early on, but they don't let it consume the story.  

The supporting cast here is strong. Richard Bright (Michael Corleone's enforcer Al Neri in the "Godfather" trilogy) leers at Johnny lasciviously as the mob boss' henchman. Winters is saucy as Earle's wisecracking girlfriend who just can't quit him. And Grahame lights up the screen as their frisky neighbor lady. The heist doesn't kick in until the final 20 minutes, culminating in a shootout and foot chase that leads to a spectacular climax and a clever ending that exposes the folly of judging and hating another based solely on the color of their skin. 

SPOTTED: Wayne Rogers, who would populate the original cast of TV's "MASH," plays a soldier at a bar. ... Mel Stewart (Henry Jefferson on "All in the Family" and the boss on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King") is a chatty elevator operator. ... And don't miss a cameo by the stunning dancer Carmen De Lavallade as Johnny's estranged gal. (When he gives her a less-than-passionate kiss, she chirps, "That's good. But it was better when you wanted it.")

PEEPING TOM (1960) (C+) - This one goes nowhere fast. It's a creepy British offering that crawls out of the dregs of the noir era, focusing on a serial killer who gets off on filming women before he kills them. The glitch here is that Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), who was abused as a child and still lives in his parents' mansion that he partially lets out to boarders, is compelled to kill whichever women he trains his camera on.

He feels the need to reel in his mania when he meets mousy Helen (Anna Massey), who lives below him with her blind mother (a chilling Maxine Audley) and falls for the conventionally handsome Mark. She and her mom are curious about Mark's upstairs film-viewing activities. Meantime, a rather ineffective group of detectives belatedly follows the trail but gets nowhere close to nabbing Mark.

The journeyman production team -- from director (Michael Powell, "Black Narcissus") to writer to cast -- march through this limp horror procedural, which tends to grow tedious before it runs its 101-minute course. It has echoes of "Psycho," which came out the same year, but Boehm is just too stilted, and the would-be romance much too chaste, for any of this to gel into something resembling a thriller.  

SPOTTED: This is a British one, and so the C-listers don't really jog the memory. Nigel Davenport (as a detective here) would be a busy character actor who had a role in "Chariots of Fire." 

THE GLASS KEY (1942) (B-minus) - The oldest picture of the bunch mixes gangsters and politicians in a story based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. No one here has much of a grasp on Hammett's wise-guy dialogue, most notably Alan Ladd, a weak link here as Ed Beaumont, a crooked pol's fiercely loyal right-hand man who digs into a murder that is being pinned on his boss. 

Brian Donlevy is strong as that that slimy pol, Paul Madvig, who is trying to ride the coattails of a gubernatorial candidate, whose daughter Janet (Veronica Lake) juggles Paul and Ed. The governor hopeful's ne'er-do-well son ends up dead, and a mobster (Joseph Calleia) seeks to pin it on Madvig, who has been cracking down on the mobster's turf.

 

The plot is convoluted beyond words. There are so many characters that they keep having to call each other by their name to aid the viewer in tracking the players, and excessive exposition is needed to keep things straight, up until the twisty-turny final act. Donlevy gets Hammett's cadences, and William Bendix (TV's "Life of Riley") hams it up swell as the mobster's goon. But the whole 85 minutes can be dizzying and frustrating. The visuals are bland -- the director is journeyman Stuart Heisler -- except for an overhead shot of Ladd plunging through a roof and landing in the middle of a quartet's dinner table below. 

Lake has the anemic screen presence of a hemophiliac prince. She has a hushed gun-moll voice, and her acting chops consist mostly of coy side glances. Pretty-boy Ladd is a lightweight, too. The two stars -- who were quite the box-office Ken and Barbie in the '40s -- get in the way of a messy story.

SPOTTED: As a waiter serving beers, the rotund Vernon Dent, familiar to viewers as as the stuffy foil in countless Three Stooges shorts.

BONUS TRACK

Harry Belafonte slinging the blues in "Odds," with "My Baby's Not Around" (featuring the catty Richard Bright):

That '70s Drift: Texas Tornados

 

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974) (B) - Gosh, Goldie Hawn was fun back in the day. The "Laugh-In" star had a great run in the '70s, starting with this little gem, where she plays Texas trash running from the law as she seeks to reclaim custody of her toddler son. This is also Steven Spielberg's big-screen debut (his warmup for "Jaws"), and he has a gas cracking up cars as Hawn's Lou Jean and her husband, Clovis, kidnap a Texas officer and lead a convoy of squad cars on a slow-speed chase to the town of Sugarland.

 

It takes a while to get accustomed to Hawn and her Texas drawl. Lou Jean visits Clovis (William Atherton) in prison and quite easily springs him from the remarkably low-security facility. They bum a ride from a kindly old couple, steal the car, crash it, then commandeer the squad car of officer Slide (Michael Sacks), who develops sympathies for the couple and their plight along the journey, much to the frustration of Capt. Tanner (a perfectly sedate Ben Johnson), who has to wrangle scores of police responders who join in the procession, along with news vans and helicopters.

They are allowed to make pit stops along the way, allowing Spielberg to create a travelogue of small-town Texas in the era of fried-chicken shacks and collectible gold-stamps. Over the course of a few days, Lou Jean and Clovis become folk heroes, with crowds of well-wishers cheering them along and occasionally foiling the police pursuit. We know from the start that their plan to grab the toddler from the older, well-off foster parents is folly (the film is based on a true story).

The second half is much more entertaining, as the media circus grows and Hawn lets Lou Jean's quirky personality and even a hint of emotion blossom. Spielberg (who did a test-run road movie with his memorable TV film "Duel" in 1971) not only demolishes a load of vehicles on the road, but he goes ballistic at an RV lot, where a couple of vigilantes blow the place to smithereens trying to nab the outlaws. The mayhem gets a bit tedious, but a strong ending brings it all home in 110 minutes.

SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (1977) (B-minus) - Does this raunchy romp from the dawn of the "Dukes of Hazzard" era hold up five decades later? Yes and no. It's awfully dumb and about 20 minutes too long. But it maintains a good deal of Southern charm, mostly thanks to the chemistry between Burt Reynolds and Sally Field and the PG relationship that blooms between them on the road from Texarkana to Georgia.

Much of this might pivot on your tolerance for the broad humor of Jackie Gleason as the blowhard Sheriff Buford T. Justice, a buffoonish Ahab haplessly stalking his prey. I appreciate his broad comedic skills, even if his vocabulary rarely expands behind calling everyone in his path a "sumbitch." Some of the old tricks of the Great One can be glimpsed through the offensive caricature. It's amusing to watch the sheriff's car slowly break down and lose parts before it limps to the finish line.

Stuntman Hal Needham, in his directorial debut, not only has a hoot finding creative ways to destroy cars and trucks (except for Bandit's beloved Trans-Am), but he and his trio of screenwriters delight in the wordplay of the CB culture of the '70s. The jargon flies by fast and furious, including a reference to a cop with a radar gun as a "Kojak with a Kodak."

Jerry Reed doesn't add much more than the memorable soundtrack, and Reynolds chews the scenery as the swaggering Bandit. The real star here, though, is the car (Trigger), the symbol of freedom and rebellion. (It's hard not to notice the Confederate flag on the front license plate.) Field is charming as the runaway bride (she jilted the sheriff's dimwitted son) who just happens to end up in Bandit's car, and it's entertaining to watch her flirt with Reynolds (her real-life partner at the time) and stretch her comedic chops. It's not as outrageous as I remembered it originally, but it's still mindless fun.

BONUS TRACKS

The irresistible hit from "Smokey and the Bandit," Jerry Reed with "Eastbound and Down":

 

Our title track -- the Texas Tornados with "Who Were You Thinkin' Of":

New to the Queue

 Whatever ...

 

We were disappointed in Alex Ross Perry's adventurous "Pavements," but we'll brace ourselves for the nearly three-hour valentine to the VHS era, "Videoheaven." 

Jem Cohen ("Museum Hours") returns with another contemplative docu-style narrative film, "Little, Big, and Far."

Another thoughtful documentary from Brazil's Petra Costa ("The Edge of Democracy"), "Apocalypse in the Tropics."

A documentary about the long-running variety extravaganza "The Ed Sullivan Show," "Sunday Best."

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, from Husker Du:

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 ceiling fan in the motel where Jane works and where she 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 -- and 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":