Past Indiscretions

 

KAWASAKI'S ROSE (2010) (A-minus) - This gorgeous, delightfully meandering drama explores the idea of complicity with the Communist system and possibility of repentance ... and forgetting. It proffers the theory that just because one man sold out another to the Czech secret police back in the '70s or '80s, it doesn't mean that (1) the victim who ended up an exile didn't end up with a better life after all or (2) the informant should be exposed and punished or couldn't have made amends many times over.

Director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky, working a few years after the epic Stasi drama "The Lives of Others," subvert the genre's expectations and nuzzle into the grey areas of individual personal lives. They are blessed with a stellar multi-generational cast, with no weak links. Martin Huba takes the lead as Pavel, a revered psychiatrist about to receive national honors for his vocal actions as a dissident during the Communist reign. But Ludek, Pavel's son-in-law (Milan Mikulcik) -- who is shooting a film about Pavel and cheating on Pavel's daughter with a fellow crew member, Radka (an organic Petra Hrebickova) -- digs deep into Pavel's files and finds that his father-in-law actually long ago ratted on his patients, helping the government weed out the troublesome citizens. One of those was a drunken artist, whose relationship was destroyed, with Pavel swooping in to marry the woman and live happily ever after with her and the daughter.

The film-crew technique is a wise choice here, as Ludek and Radka track down the Stasi official who worked with (blackmailed?) Pavel and then travel to Sweden to find Borek (Antonin Kratochvil), who seems untraumatized by the events of the past. In fact, it is mainly the daughter, Lucie (Lenka Vlasakova), and Ludek (who always resented his in-laws) who are most upset about the treachery that happened long ago. Hrebejk allows room for the ramifications to unfold and either explode or disperse. Life can be messy, but as time goes by, it doesn't have to seem that way.

NAKED (1994) (Incomplete) - With the dearth of enticing new releases, we continue to burrow backward into the catalog of notable landmarks in cinema, and so we went back to the early '90s for Mike Leigh's celebrated Cannes breakthrough from London. He'd had a critical hit the outing before with "Life Is Sweet," and he continued his depiction of the gritty life of the working class with "Naked." (He would go on to a career of mixed results, nailing the genre most successfully in the aughts with "Vera Drake" and "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Unfortunately, this one has not aged well. We watched the first 15 minutes, which were filled with clever repartee that even the actors struggled to keep up with and pawn off convincingly as anything but the showing off of a screenwriter (Leigh). And then there were three rapes by two different men in that opening reel, and we just didn't have the patience to see if either or both of these brutes overcame their demons and grew as a human being to the extent that they managed to stop defiling anything that moved. File another one under "Life Is Short."

BONUS TRACK
The trailer for "Kawasaki's Rose": Here.

What You Like Is in the Limo

FAKE FAMOUS (B-minus) - "Stop paying attention to them, and they'll go away," my mom often liked to say, whether we were talking about detractors at school or wasps. Here we go along with an experiment in which debut filmmaker Nick Bilton picks three random somebodies to see if he can make them influencer-famous.

The main flaw here is that the three people he chose are not very interesting (maybe that's the point?) and the most engaging one doesn't have his heart in this experiment. But Bilton is enthusiastic, and he's determined to make a statement about the latest iteration of our obsession with celebrity. Dominique Druckman, a rather mousy young woman, makes the biggest splash, though she's smart enough to quickly realize how shallow her life becomes. Christopher Bailey, a talented clothes designer, just doesn't fall for the bait. A third participant chickens out fairly early.

There's no real lesson revealed here. But we do learn some of the cut-rate secrets of influencers appearing to be living the high life, as well as the ins and outs of securing fake followers. And the best part is that all these people go away after 90 minutes and you can choose to never follow them or their co-horts around again.

OPERATION VARSITY BLUES (Incomplete) - File this under Life Is Short. We couldn't make it past the first 20 minutes of this documentary about the college-admissions scandal, Chris Smith's follow-up to the eminently delightful "Fyre." Here, though, it's more of a docudrama, heavy on re-enactments of the prime offender, the oddball fixer Rick Singer, portrayed here by Matthew Modine, buckling under a bad Moe Howard wig and perhaps the realization that his acting career peaked about 25 years ago.

Where most documentaries would take phone-call transcripts and make them compelling, Smith chooses to have Modine act them out, over and over, while "Singer" is putting his shoes on or fixing breakfast. It all plays out like a bad Afterschool Special. There's got to be a better way to tell this story on film.

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, Bowie's "Fame," co-written by John Lennon:

The Biggest Jerks in the Room

 

ASSHOLES: A THEORY (B) - Just about what you'd expect from an adaptation of Aaron James' timely book of the same name that coincided with the resurgence of anti-social behavior in the past five years. A nice touch is person-on-the-street interviews, a quaint throwback. Otherwise, the pontificating is done by James himself and a few ringers, including Monty Python alum John Cleese and a bunch of academics. One law professor tells an insightful story about calling out an abusive student who, after the behavior was pointed out, turned it around and became a model student. "No one had ever told me," he lamented to the professor.

The definition is key to the strength of James' theory. He's talking about someone who allows himself (we'll go with the male gender here) special advantages amid cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against complaints from others in society. Self-awareness (indeed, provocation, usually) is key, as it tends to distinguish assholes from, say, narcissists, who are seen as lacking such awareness.

Director John Walker skips through a series of illustrative subjects, including the military, the bullying Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Italy's proto-Trump Silvio Burlusconi (vis a vis a transsexual Italian lawmaker, seen here confronting her online troll), an investment firm that plays nice (Cf. below) and, of course, social media. In a zippy 81 minutes, Walker makes his case well and finds entertaining ways to explore a disturbing subject that plagues contemporary society. 

ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM (2005) (A) - Sometimes these things write themselves. Long before the scam known as "Fyre," the greedy crooks at Enron not only exhibited a biblical scale of amorality, but their dirty deeds made millions of people suffer, whether they lost power in California or saw their 401(k) disintegrate in Portland.

The recent power crisis in Texas is a good reminder that deregulation -- "the magic of the marketplace," in Ronald Reagan's famous turn of phrase -- takes the handcuffs off of assholes as well as the good guys. Alex Gibney made his bones with this energized (sorry) filleting of the Houston good ol' boys who exploited the loopholes in the trading of electricity as a commodity (they would expand to bandwidth and the weather as commodities, too), where they profited pornographically whenever misfortune struck (and giving them a perverse incentive to solicit misfortune in the form of needless random power plant reboots).

Bethany McLean, a reporter for Fortune as the turn of the millennium, is the hero of this story. A few simple questions about Enron's shady accounting methods arranged by its big three executives, who all eventually were convicted (one would die before he could be sentenced). This was a dry run for the subprime-mortgage crisis (and the devious idea of collateralized debt obligations) that would take down the whole U.S. economy just a few years later.

Gibney covers all the bases and slowly reveals the true assholery of the three principal villains -- Jeffrey Skilling, Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay, and Andrew Fastow -- and the inevitable collapse of their house of cards. This documentary is a true touchstone of our collective Clinton-Bush Y2K fever dream.

New to the Queue

 Light and dark ...

A drama about a U.N. translator navigating the horrors of the siege on Srebrenica in the 1990s, "Quo Vadis, Aida?"

A self-narrated documentary about a rebellious artist during the time of AIDS, "Wojnarowicz."

A look at the recent pay-for-entree dust-up, from the director of "Fyre," "Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal."

A speculative documentary about life and art in the high desert, "Truth or Consequences."

Best of Ever, Vol. 3: Everybody Hurts

 An occasional series in which we revisit some of our all-time favorites.

MAGNOLIA (1999) (A) - It was with trepidation that we returned for Paul Thomas Anderson's epic three-hour mopefest, wondering whether the past two decades have been kind to the movie that helped launch the stories of intersecting lives that was popular in the Aughts (and culminated with Paul Haggis' insufferable "Crash" in 2004). It has aged just fine. And it's no easier to make it to the end of this "psychological drama."

Anderson was in the middle of a run, in between "Boogie Nights" and "Punch-Drunk Love," headed toward his mid-career doldrums of "There Will Be Blood" and "The Master." He was at the top of his game, and he was blessed with a solid case of actor's actors and the indelible songs of Aimee Mann, who provided one of those cinematic chocolate-and-peanut-butter moments (while sharing the soundtrack with some classic Supertramp).

It would be hard to find a movie where so many characters weep and cry out in emotional pain without the proceedings descending into maudlin theatrics. Julianne Moore is the glue that holds it together as the damaged trophy wife of a dying TV producer, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards). When she lashes out, rather hysterically, at a pair of pharmacists for apparently judging her based on her prescriptions, she threatens to tear a hole in the movie screen. The supporting cast is incredibly deep: Philip Seymour Hoffman as a (weepy) medical aide; John C. Reilly as a glum, naive police officer drawn to a drug-addict (Melora Walters), who is the daughter of the guilt-ridden TV host played by Philip Baker Hall; William H. Macy as a love-starved former child quiz-whiz; gritty character actors Luis Guzman and Ricky Jay; and, of all people, Tom Cruise, in a career-reviving role as a phony men's-rights motivational speaker, who happens to be related to one of the above.

Anderson weaves these stories together like Godard mashing together a week's worth of episodes from a soap opera. He employs magical realism (the famous plague of frogs), musical interludes with singing characters, and over-the-top familial melodrama, and he has both the visual command and the multitasking skills of a master storyteller, in a rag-tag but assured manner that he would again employ with the shambling "Inherent Vice." 

Fear not the turn of the millennium. We got some things right back then. "Magnolia" is a saga for the ages.

FLIGHT (2012) (A) - Welcome to the Denzel Washington show. The actor heroically shoulders the role of a hard-partying pilot who miraculously saves most of the crew and passengers with a daring landing of a plane in distress, only to be put through the wringer of an investigation into his blood-alcohol levels on the day of the crash. 

Robert Zemeckis ("Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit") shakes off the doldrums of his Tom Hanks mid-career period and offers the anti-hero counter-narrative to Hanks' sappy Sully movie that would come four years later. The narrative is tight, and it doesn't shy away from the horrors of addiction, straight out of the gate with a scene of the morning after of a night of partying.

Washington stands at the center of it all, anchoring every scene, whether he is physically present or not. He gives us a man full of anger, grief, grit, self-loathing and an ache for companionship (Nadine Velazquez and Kelly Reilly are among his doomed love interests). You can't imagine this movie without him beating at the center of it. The supporting cast is strong, sinking their teeth into a meaty script by John Gatins ("Coach Carter"): Bruce Greenwood as a union official; Don Cheadle as the union lawyer; John Goodman as a drug dealer and enabler; and Tamara Tunie as a surviving flight attendant.

If this were a novel, it would be a page-turner. And Washington and Zemeckis prove that even in this day and age you can still milk emotion and suspense out of a dramatic courtroom reveal, exposing this as as much of a thriller as a character study. A high mark for both men.

BONUS TRACKS

Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," from the essential soundtrack to "Magnolia":

Our title track, the height of R.E.M.'s self-indulgence (both audio and video versions), is still a pretty good song. Here's a lovely acoustic cover by Mojo Spin:

One-Liners: Historical Record

 

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (C) - This 1960s drama about Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and an FBI plant in the organization just lies on the screen, an inert exercise in period dress-up and speechifying. Daniel Kaluuya lacks the charisma and physical presence of Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield is forced to repeat the same emotions over and over as conflicted rat Bill O'Neal. Other cardboard characters spout slogans lifted from Wikipedia entries. This wastes the talents of Dominique Fishback as Hampton's girlfriend and Jesse Plemons ("I'm Thinking of Ending Things") as O'Neal's FBI sponsor, both in unforgiving roles. Martin Sheen shows up for the umpteenth portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover, a prototypical cartoon evil racist monster of the bygone era. A documentary about Hampton and O'Neal -- hinted at in a coda featuring actual clips -- would be much more satisfying.

CARMINE STREET GUITARS (A-minus) - This is a sweet biography of an old-world craftsman of handmade guitars in New York's West Village neighborhood. Rick Kelly scavenges old-growth wood from all over New York and sculpts them into one-of-a-kind guitars. Under-the-radar guitarists who stop by to shoot the breeze include Dallas and Travis Good (the Sadies), Nils Cline (Scarnella, Wilco), Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell (who performs a mournful "Surfer Girl"), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith), Eleanor Friedberger (Fiery Furnaces), Kirk Douglas (the Roots), Charlie Sexton (Dylan) and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (Squrl) and his old pal Eszter Balint. The modern world eludes Kelly, who gets Instagram exposure only because of his apprentice, Cindy, a pale punk artist with a bleach-blond shag and black fingernails. (Their conversations are goosed by a writer.) This is a perfect vehicle to learn trivia about guitars, wood, trees, bugs and the secrets of Lou Reed's tuning style. Lovely.

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHE (B) - This documentary about the groundbreaking French film pioneer Alice Guy suffers from a case of the yips. Director Pamela B. Green, in her debut, has a lot of good ideas, and quite the visual flair, but her manic editing style and machine-gun manner of filling every corner of the screen with constantly changing information are an assault on the senses. The story of Guy-Blache, who competed with Edison, Pathe and the Lumiere brothers in the invention of cinema, is critical and fascinating. Green uses two interviews with her subject, from 1957 and 1964, to anchor the story, and Green acts like a digital sleuth in tracking down relatives, acquaintances and film scholars to tell that story. But those jump cuts and her way of attacking the screen (Green is a title-designer by trade), while at times creative and illuminating, are too often dizzying and confounding, as if this were assembled by an iPad on crack. We've had a century to give this woman her due; "be natural" and let the story unfold at a human pace, please.

PRAIRIE TRILOGY (B) - On the eve of the Reagan revolution, two filmmakers went to North Dakota to track down Henry Martinson, an nonagenarian socialist (and poet) who in 1915 helped found the Nonpartisan League, which soon took over North Dakota politics on behalf of farmers for a decade or so. Starting in 1977, John Hanson and Rob Nilsson spent time with Martinson, then in his 90s to relive the bygone era. The three films that resulted -- "Prairie Fire, "Rebel Earth" and "Survivor" -- were restored a few years ago. The first is a Ken Burns-style history of the socialist uprising, employing extensive footage of the harsh plains shot by Nilsson's grandfather from 1915-21. The second returns to the present day, around 1980, to follow Martinson around his old stomping grounds in Minot, culminating in a house party celebrating left wing poetry and music. The third is extraneous, once again following Martinson as he relives his history in the socialist movement and three decades as deputy labor secretary in North Dakota. This is a fascinating chronicle of a sweet old guy who once wanted to dismantle the capitalist system. Good times.

BONUS TRACK

Eleanor Friedberger, featured in "Carmine Street," with the studio version of "I Am the Past":

New to the Queue

 Letting go ...

Darn it if we're not attracted to a Disney movie about a girl and her flying superhero squirrel, "Flora and Ulysses."

An arty documentary about workers in a Brazilian food store, "My Darling Supermarket."

Ava Duvernay's first film, from 2008, is a documentary about a sub-genre of hip-hop in Los Angeles, "This Is the Life."

With a good deal of trepidation, we're curious about the arch output of director Quentin Dupieux ("Rubber," "Deerskin") so we might start with his latest, "Keep an Eye Out."

A triptych of stories about love, sex and coincidence, "Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy."

Americana Archives

 

MY BROTHER'S WEDDING (1983) (C) - This is the follow-up to Charles Burnett's obscure classic "Killer of Sheep." Whereas that first film (his UCLA thesis) used nonprofessional actors to underscore the travails of the working class, this follow-up is undercut by wooden performances and a script (by Burnett) that goes nowhere. 

Characters are difficult to follow, and there is no hint of a plot during the first half of the film, which follows Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) as he rejects his brother's lawyerly life of privilege for the grittier life of his buddy Soldier and the street life of Inglewood, Calif. It isn't until nearly the end that Pierce is faced with a dilemma, having to choose between those two worlds.

Most of this makes little sense. Minor characters pass through with no purpose other than to provide a little quirk. This is the kind of movie where multiple characters are told of the death of a central character and no one asks how or why that person died, like people do in real life. In that way, this exercise is more artificial than it would have been had Burnett hired professional actors and collaborated with another screenwriter. 

This film was withheld from distribution after its initial tepid review. We watched the director's cut (thankfully a half hour shorter than the original) that he released in 2007. A classic example of a sophomore slump.

THE EXILES (1961) (C) - More artifact than art, this fictionalized documentary about Native Americans in late '50s Los Angeles endures as a curiosity about a certain place and time. This is a day (more like a night) in the life of actual Angelenos, transplants from Arizona, as they smoke and booze and roughhouse. It was shot by Kent Mackenzie, himself a British exile, in 1958 and released three years later; he had previously made a short student film (included on the DVD) about the same neighborhood, Bunker Hill, which was undergoing urban renewal in the '50s.

The problem here is the artifice of the production. It seems almost entirely dubbed. While that is not unusual for the era and can be overcome (see "Spring Night, Summer Night"), it is a distraction here. Admirably restored at UCLA in 2008, this film still feels undercooked and unfocused. Mackenzie hopscotches between his subjects, goosing their situations and dialogue in an attempt to pump up the action or drama. Yet, he is left with scattershot stories and underdeveloped characters. It feels repetitive despite a slim 72-minute running time. The story of Yvonne, pregnant and disappointed in her mate's uncaring attitude, goes nowhere. The rest of the action is essentially a night of partying, ending in some whooping and braying on the hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles. Those howls feel unearned here.

BONUS TRACKS

"Wedding" features a couple of songs by our favorite melancholy crooner Johnny Ace, "Anymore" and "Never Let Me Go":

 

That '70s Drift

 

SAVE THE TIGER (1973) (B+) - There are few actors who could do the things that Jack Lemmon did. He was a leading man with the heart of a character actor. Here he is Harry Stoner, a harried co-owner of an L.A. fashion house where he and his partner have been cooking the books to survive and now are considering arson as a solution.

Harry is obsessed with the past, in this case (it being the ugly early '70s) the 1939 Brooklyn Dodgers, World War II (he's a vet) and big-band music (he once was a drummer). When Harry wakes up in the opening scene, hung over from a party the night before, he looks ten times worse than the lush he played in "Days of Wine and Roses." But he cleans up well (a running gag throughout the film finds multiple acquaintances complimenting on his Italian silk suit) and heads to the office on the day of a big fashion show for buyers. On the drive in (in his Chevrolet Aircraft Carrier) he picks up a hitchhiker, Myra, a hippie chick who aimlessly car-surfs the Strip and propositions Harry, who politely declines. (An example of snappy dialogue from Steve Shagan, adapting his own novel: when Myra claims to be 20, Harry replies, "No one is 20!" He then lies and says he's 33.)

You just know Myra (newcomer Laurie Heineman) will show up again in the final reel, but before then, we need to explore the depths of Harry's desperation and degradation. Harry, hectored by his wife to see a psychologist, is sullen, but his unhappiness sometimes has a point -- he laments that Capri went from a battle site in Italy to a fashion forum, with no one appreciating the sacrifice. Meantime, doctoring the financials has led Harry and his partner, Phil (an perfect Jack Gilford), into a dance dodging mob shylocks (a nice turn by Ned Glass) and placating greedy buyers, one of whom demands a repeat visit with a prostitute from Harry's little black book. The arsonist, played by an oily Thayer David (the fight promoter in "Rocky"), holds his meetings in a dirty-movie theater. Every step of the way, Harry looks to shield Phil from Harry's deviant intentions.

After Harry has a meltdown in front of the buyers -- imagining maimed fellow soldiers in the ballroom crowd -- he has his reckoning with the arsonist and then a come-to-Jesus moment with his manic pixie dreamgirl. It's clear that Harry is not just cloyingly nostalgic, but he also has a profound need to feel alive again, even if it means just tossing the ball around and reliving the joy he found in that boy's game. This is a fine character study -- brought to you by Lemmon, the master -- even if it overdoes the schmaltz on occasion.

HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS (1981) (B) - Not so much a full-length film but rather a disconnected series of vignettes, this documentary chronicles some of the forerunners of the outlaw country scenes in Austin and Nashville in 1975 and '76. Townes van Zandt, seen here lubricated as he gives a tour of his farm, and Guy Clark are the big hitters here. David Allan Coe wallows in his prison-porn shtick, and we get glimpses of young up-and-comers Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle (barely 20 at the time).

It's fascinating to watch a guy named Larry Jon Wilson record a song in the studio, including overdubs. Coe drives his own tour bus into the grounds of the Tennessee State Prison. We get rambling standup from Gamble Rogers and fiery fiddle playing from Charlie Daniels. In a home jam session, van Zandt brings tears to the eyes of 80-year-old Seymour Washington with a rendition of "Waitin' Around to die." Beforehand, Washington dispenses advice on living well.

Director James Szalapski does nothing to knit these stories and performances together, but he has a decent eye for period detail, and he gets his fingernails dirty capturing these men living the outlaw-country life in the shadow of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, who could at least claim commercial success during this period.

BONUS TRACKS

The opening theme from "Heartworn Highways," Guy Clark's "L.A. Freeway":

 

Here's a good taste of "Heartworn," a studio session with Larry Jon Wilson recording "Ohoopee River Bottomland":

Then there's Townes van Zandt with the first song he ever wrote, "Waitin' Around to Die":

And from the closing credits of "Save the Tiger," one of Harry's blissed-out reveries, "I Can't Get Started," by Bunny Berigan:

Mike Nichols Double Feature

Revisiting a pair of '60s classics, the first two films directed by one of our favorites, Mike Nichols, as a biography of him gets released.

THE GRADUATE (1967) (A) - It's still difficult to disentangle this influential '60s box-office smash from the cultural phenomenon that radiated out of it (including the iconic Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack), but it still crackles with visual wit and burrows deep into the ennui not just of its young boomer hero Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) but into the midlife angst of his parents' postwar generation. It's funny, heartbreaking and challenging.

Director Mike Nichols has fun breaking from convention with unique camera angles, whether it's looking out from the perspective of a scuba outfit or using a stockinged leg to frame (entrap?) Ben, caught in sexual confusion. At times Nichols' groovy perspectives come off like Hitchcock shooting an episode of "Benny Hill." Risque for its time, the narrative holds up over the years as a condemnation of the empty wasted lives of the bourgeoisie. 

Anne Bancroft sizzles as the seductress Mrs. Robinson, the wife of the business partner of Ben's father. She toys with Benjamin both during their affair and after, as she maneuvers to thwart his chances to date her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). The heavy subject matter is leavened by the jangly comic script from Buck Henry and Calder Willingham. Hoffman was pushing 30 at the time but he tracks well as a budding college graduate. (Bancroft was only 6 years older than Hoffman but her character was twice Benjamin's age.) Ben is an absurdist creation, mumbling, fumbling, often bursting into sprints out of desperation, and sometimes squeaking in frustration.

Ben and Elaine have no clue what they want, a winking acknowledgment of a new generation scoffing at its parents' conventions. This culminates in perhaps the most perfect ending in movie history, in which the young couple display a range of emotions on their faces, unsure of what the future will bring. Nichols keeps this all fresh and exciting, smart and snarky, syncing his humor with Henry's complementary dry wit.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966) (A-minus) - For his debut, Nichols, recruited by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, directed the rambunctious couple in Edward Albee's incendiary stage play. They play George and Martha, a foundering history professor married to the university president's daughter, and their toxic relationship ensnares an unsuspecting young couple, a new biology professor (George Segal) and his mousy wife (Sandy Dennis) for a drunken and disorderly wee-hours cocktail party.

Back in the day, heavyweight boxers used to go 15 rounds (instead of 12 or 10 now), and this script's onslaught of poisonous putdowns -- as slung by Taylor and Burton -- reminds me of those classic slugfests. The vitriol and emotional cruelty, even couched in black comedy, is relentless, and it might simply be too much for some viewers. The performances, however, keep this from descending into abject nihilism. Segal makes for a nice preppy punching bag, and Dennis' loopy young spouse injects a necessary fragility. Burton may never have been so darkly funny, and Taylor gives as good as she gets.

As the sun comes up and George and Martha figuratively slump in their respective corners, you might hear echoes of Apollo Creed's vow to Rocky Balboa -- "Ain't gonna be no rematch" -- but with these two, you suspect that this was just another Saturday night, and that their series of bouts will go on.

Exile in Guyville

THE CLIMB (A-minus) - This novel take on the buddy movie (and the age-old pitfall of the love triangle) comes from a fresh pair of voices, two guys named Kyle and Mike who play friends named Kyle and Mike.

Michael Angelo Covino takes the director's chair to oversee the script he wrote with Kyle Marvin, who starts out the film as the chubby friend to Mike, who waits for an arduous uphill portion of a bike ride to reveal that he has slept with Kyle's fiancee. Mike stealing Kyle's betrothed is just the first darkly comic twist of this bruisingly funny film. 

But the narrative doesn't go where you think it will. Quickly, Mike's fortunes crash and burn, and he becomes a pathetic mess. Meantime, Kyle, who has moved on to another fiancee, has cleaned up and shaped up and is trying to live a good life, said to be the best revenge. Slowly, the estranged friends start to warm to each other again, realizing their long-standing, if co-dependent, connection. Will Mike sabotage Kyle's relationship with a woman who, if we're being honest, is a bit of a controlling witch?

Covino and Marvin mix witty dialogue with old-fashioned slapstick but also penetrating observations in a thoughtful study of these characters. It is both laugh-out-loud funny at times, deeply moving at other times. It might make you wonder if a buddy -- and not the women you pursue -- could be the one best qualified to serve as a soul mate. This feature debut, expanded from a short that survives here as the extended cycling sequence that opens the film, heralds promising talent.

MARTIN EDEN (B) - This would-be epic based on the writings of Jack London -- transplanted to an indeterminate era in Italy -- keeps threatening to break out as a great film but never does. Director Pietro Marcello teams with writer Maurizio Braucci to adapt a novel from 1909 about a working-class autodidact determined to prove himself as a writer in order to win the love of an aristocratic woman.

Lucas Marinelli has the good looks and charisma to pull off the bigger-than-life title role of the fiercely resolved seaman who won't let anything stop him from getting published. Martin Eden fashions himself as a rugged individualist who refuses to get swept up in the socialist cause. He's a bit of a brute, and it is in defending a colleague in a fight that he gets invited to the friend's home and meets the friend's sister, Elena (Jessica Cressy). 

Martin can come off as a boor, trying to hard to prove his love for the lovely but somewhat bland Elena -- or at least to prove his worthiness. She insists that he go off and resume his education and seek out a mentor to learn the craft of writing before returning to her to be married. Martin, rejected by a school, buys a typewriter instead and perseveres by sheer dint of will and hard work to overcome class barriers. 

This all has the earmarks of a classic love story, and you cheer for director and cast most of the way through. However, a jump in time to the final reel -- where Martin's fortunes have changed, both for better and worse -- completely loses the momentum and the connections that had been scrupulously stitched together during the first hour and a half. (This one overshoots two hours, and it's poorer for that bloated runtime.) By the end, the wheels come off, any pathos is unearned, and it feels like a different movie altogether. It's a shame, because this one had promise.

BONUS TRACKS

From our title track, Liz Phair with "Girls! Girls! Girls!":

 

From "The Climb," a country dusty from Gary Stewart, "Drinking Thing":

Best of Ever, Vol. 2: Obsessions

An occasional series in which we revisit some of our all-time favorites.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000) (A) - It's difficult not to swoon over this gorgeous love story. It invites you to flow along with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung -- both old-Hollywood beautiful -- as they glide through 1962 Hong Kong, sometimes artfully in slow motion, ogled by Wong Kar-Wai's curious camera. 

The music, ranging from the hypnotic theme song that gets repeated to intoxicating effect to Nat King Cole crooning in Spanish, wraps everything in warmth and elegance. It takes a while to figure out who's who and why the attraction between the two main characters is taboo, and part of the fun is in figuring out not only their inclinations but what their spouses are up to, as well.

The outfits they wear are impeccable. Occasionally rain slicks the streets. Noodles are always aboil. Glances are stolen. Discretion is observed. It is looping but not repetitive. Cheung and Leung rhyme in more ways than one. If you're not in the mood for love at the start of the film, you'll almost certainly have succumbed by the end.

JAWS (1975) (A) - This is remembered by history as the first real summer blockbuster and for the ominous strains that herald the imminent arrival of the great white, but it is also the epitome of storytelling and moviemaking. Yes, we've had a ban on Steven Spielberg for decades now, but there is no denying that during his first decade or so -- roughly from "Duel" (1971) to "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) -- he had a magic touch and helped define a generation. 

"Jaws," to this day, is a rollicking epic with something for everyone -- it's a thriller, a comedy, a horror story and a snapshot of Americana in the middle of the Me Decade.  It has three lead actors -- Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss -- that feed off each other like dance partners. It updates the classic literature of "Moby Dick" and it skewers the evils of crony capitalism. 

Peter Benchley's screenplay (adapting his novel with comedy writer Carl Gottlieb ("The Jerk")) sings with wit and subtlety. And Spielberg, at the helm, wastes not a single frame or a minute of the two-hour runtime. (Try to catch it on the big screen.) He sweeps you up and carries you out to sea, eventually spitting you back on the beach emotionally wrung. It holds up 45 years later as a thrill ride that would make just about anyone fall in love with the movies. 

BONUS TRACK

That haunting theme to "In the Mood for Love":

And Nat King Cole's Spanish version of "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps":

Holy Crap* - Anal Retentive

 

There's an old Cheech & Chong bit from the 1970s about a guy who takes his kid to the doctor because the kid keeps shoving things up his nose. (Turns out, I'm reminded that it trafficked in stereotypical tropes, which hadn't triggered my teenage sensitivities back then, and it ended with the vaudevillian one-liner "Keep the change." We won't link to it.) 

The point is, it being 2021, the stakes for such crude humor are much higher now -- or should we say much lower? Exhibit A is "Butt Boy," in which our anti-hero, Chip Gutchell (writer-director Tyler Cornack) has a surprisingly enjoyable experience undergoing a prostate exam and celebrates his newfound joy by grabbing anything he can find and sticking them up his butt. Yes, that's the plot of a movie in this day and age. And ol' Chip doesn't just round up the usual suspects to indulge in anal gratification. In fact, you'd be quite surprised at what he can fit up there -- not just the TV remote but also small dogs and children.

If you were to bail out right there, I wouldn't blame you. I might have been better off diving for the remote after all of that is revealed in the first 10 minutes. I could have turned it off and filed a succinct essay under the Life Is Short umbrella. And yet, I persisted. Not that I'm proud.

So, the movie jumps ahead nine years, and Chip is still stuck in a loveless marriage, and he's in Alcoholics Anonymous, where he gets recruited to serve as a sponsor to a hard-drinking police detective, Russel (a ham-chewing Tyler Rice), who pines for an ex and seems to harbor a dark secret or two of his own. The two men find their anonymous world spill out into the open when Russel is called in to investigate the disappearance of Chip's co-worker's son during take-your-kid-to-work day at the office. (It was a mistake, during a game of hide-and-seek, to hide under Chip's desk. You think you've had to deal with anal-retentive co-workers? Wait till you meet Chip!)

This whole thing is not only ridiculous but fairly disgusting. (The trail of the investigation will lead -- literally -- up Chip's ass.) So why not turn it off and brand it with an F? Because there's almost something admirable to Cornack's devotion to the absurd premise. 

It's almost as if Cornack and co-writer Ryan Koch were dying for the opportunity to make their own detective movie -- maybe they were fans of the noir classics of Phillip Marlowe or old westerns -- and some movie executive, just to be rid of these pests, concocted the stupidest plot device they could think of just to toy with them. In my imagined scenario, Cornack and Koch take that dare and they say, "A movie where the bad guy hides all the victims and evidence up his butt? I'll see your crazy idea and raise you this otherwise conventional script starring a love-starved husband and a hard-drinking detective with some secret scores to settle!"

And they did it. Aside from that inane premise which permeates the entire film, "Butt Boy" is a conventional, borderline cliched whodunnit. Replace a man's anal cavity as the stash house with, say, an old barn in the woods, and cast Ryan Gosling in the role of the brooding, boozing cop, and you might have a mainstream hit on your hands. 

To me, that's the true takeaway from this exercise. Two filmmakers had a story to tell, and they knocked out a script, raised some financing, rounded up a cast of pretty good actors, and shot it and edited it. They had a vision, and they realized it. Their vision was an incredibly stupid one, but yet ... 

They persisted. They accomplished something, rather than just sit around feeling sorry for themselves with their thumbs up their ass.

GRADE for 'BUTT BOY':  C-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

New to the Queue

 Brighter days ...

An older lesbian couple must deal with hardship before one of them comes out to her family, "Two of Us."

A period piece about the Black Panther movement of the '60s, focusing on Chicago leader Fred Hampton and an infiltrator in the ranks, "Judas and the Black Messiah."

Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby may be too good to pass up, albeit in another tale of forbidden love in the 19th century, "The World to Come."

We liked Azazel Jacobs' early work ("Momma's Man," "Terri"), but he stumbled last time with "The Lovers," yet we are drawn to his latest, "French Exit."

Ingrid Bergman Double Feature

Confession: Until this weekend, I had never seen "Casablanca," considered one of the greatest movies ever made, an iconic touchstone in American popular culture. The legend goes like this: I was in college at the University of Illinois at Chicago, working a weekend part-time kitchen job at B&B Catering on the near Southwest Side and also co-editing the weekly student newspaper. I was busy while trying to maintain an A-minus GPA. So I decided to set aside a whole evening to unplug from all that -- "Casablanca" was scheduled to air at 7 o'clock on Channel 9. Even back then I knew it should be part of my cultural education, long before I would start writing about film regularly. 

After dinner I went to my room, turned on the portable television set, dimmed the lights, reclined on my bed -- finally relaxing. And then, probably not long after the opening credits, I fell fast asleep. Lights out for the full two hours. Oh, well, I tried. Now, nearly four decades later, I finally patched the hole in my game. Without commercial breaks ...

CASABLANCA (1942) (A) - What can you say? It is filled with lines that have become embedded in our pop culture for decades. It's Bogie and Bergman, the good guys vs. the Nazis. The setting is exotic, the booze flows, the intrigue builds, and there's Sam (Dooley Wilson) at the piano, to tug at our heartstrings with Rick and Ilsa's song, "As Time Goes By." As Herman Hupfeld had written a decade before, during the depths of the Depression: "You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss / a sigh is just a sigh."

Sigh. Even after all the time that has gone by, the parodies that have accumulated, the postwar glow that has worn out its welcome -- "Casablanca" still delivers. The story, the lines, the performances -- cutting edge for their time -- retain their power. It's a thrilling movie, even if you know in advance who gets on that plane at the end. 

Bogart's Rick Blaine is a hardened ex-pat who, after a series of dalliances with underground democratic movements in Europe, finds himself lying low in Morocco running a nightclub while walking a fine line among the Nazis, resistance and collaborators. Bergman's Ilsa is married to Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a resistance leader once feared dead. Ilsa and Victor are among the desperados seeking the transit letters that have fallen into Rick's lap and which will save the lives of whoever uses them to flee to freedom. 

Thus we have the epic set-up -- the "fight for love and glory," as the song goes -- of a love triangle unfolding in the early days of World War II, when no one new if democracy would defeat fascism. (Still an open question?) Amid the decadence of wartime Casablanca -- drinking, gambling, black-market haggling -- an international cast (including a marvelous Sidney Greenstreet as a rival club owner, Claude Rains as the French police captain Renault, and Peter Lorre as Ugarte the street hustler) savors a script (by Howard Koch and Julius and Philip Epstein) that crackles with wit and charm. Director Michael Curtiz makes sure it zips along in refined noir style. It is a cauldron of moral dilemmas tinged with old-fashioned romantic schmaltz. 

All the while, Rick drinks and smolders, and Ilsa agonizes about the choice she must make. Bogart's scowl is softened by those eyes of Ingrid Bergman, where all of her magic is contained. I defer the rest of the analysis to this Roger Ebert reconsideration from 1996. Whether you've ever seen "Casablanca" or haven't for a while, cue it up on a date night, dim the lights -- and hopefully you'll have had a nap earlier in the day, so you can savor this masterpiece.

GASLIGHT (1944) (B-minus) - Our curiosity got the best of us, marking the end of a presidential administration with a throwback to the origins (oranges?) of the term for making up lies and pretending reality isn't what it really is in order to make another person go crazy. Bergman plays the young wife who moves back into the London home where her aunt died, along with the creepy new husband who apparently stalked her and willed her into matrimony.

From the stable of fabled director George Cukor, this one slogs along for nearly two hours, taking its damn sweet time for Paula Alquist (Bergman) to start going crazy and then for her to figure out that she is not. Charles Boyer is magically suspicious, but he's pretty dull on the screen. A teenage Angela Lansbury debuts with a splash as a saucy maid.

This is a classic of film noir, and Bergman does her best to bring some realism to the era of emoting. But the suspense is just too creaky, and the inevitable reveal -- coaxed out by Joseph Cotton's handsome detective -- eventually loses its impact.

BONUS TRACK

HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (1959) (B) - This foundational film of the French New Wave from Alan Resnais has its moments, but it's a pretty chatty and solemn rumination on both the joys and horrors of both remembering and forgetting. Resnais shows a little too much deference to the flowery screenplay by Marguerite Duras, about a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who visits Hiroshima 14 years after World War II to film a movie and has a fling with a Japanese war veteran (Eiji Okada). Through flashbacks, the actress slowly unspools the wartime tale of her forbidden love with a German soldier that got him shot and her imprisoned in her family's basement. Rough stuff. Resnais' crisp black-and-white cinematography is bold and assured (it's his first feature after more than a decade of making documentary shorts), and his luxurious images -- in particular the modestly naked bodies of his handsome couple -- must have amazed audiences 60 years ago. However, the story itself creaks and lurches in ways that have not worn well. 

From the soundtrack: