California Scheming

 

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' (2009) (A-minus) - This Romanian film tells a shambling tale, based on a true story, of a group of U.S. Marines getting stuck in a small town while chaperoning a load of weapons headed to support a NATO mission in Bosnia. Like a good Coen brothers film, it celebrates quirk and carves out some memorable characters.

Former action star Armand Assante plays it cool here as the captain of the crew who must haggle with the local mayor and the station manager who stopped the train and won't let it proceed. The station manager is used to getting a cut of merchandise that gets pirated as it passes through, but in this instance, it seems he's just being difficult.

That man is Doiaru (above), played to world-weary perfection by Razvan Vasilescu. Besides a persistent case of allergies, he is also dealing with his restless teenage daughter, Monica (Maria Dinulescu), who has broken up with her boyfriend and takes a liking to one of the Marines, though neither can speak a word of the other's language, so she recruits a classmate who harbors a secret crush on her to help translate during their dates. 

In the few days that pass, nothing significant transpires, and Capt. Jones and his crew get a chance to relax and partake in some local customs, including a large open-air banquet featuring an Elvis cover band. The mix of bored, yearning local girls with under-occupied Marines leads to a good deal of carousing. Eventually Capt. Jones and Doiarau engage in a casual summit, and hope emerges for an end to the standoff. 

Director Cristian Nemescu -- who died in a car crash during post production of this, his only full-length feature film -- shows a sure hand in juggling the storylines and deepening the humanity of his characters. His style exhibits hints of Iron Curtain masters like Krzystof Kieslowski and Emir Kusturica. His legacy is this charming, delightful minor-key slice of life.

BONUS TRACK

The original Mamas and Papas title track plays over the closing credits. Here is the more melancholy version, by Jose Feliciano live in East Berlin in the 1980s:

Breathtaking

 

OXYGEN (B-minus) - A woman awakes from a cryogenic coma, apparently in a space capsule, and must reason with a HAL-like computer to help rescue her before her oxygen runs out. Melanie Laurent puts on a hell of a one-woman show in her cramped pod, as she races against time to both survive and crack the mystery of her circumstance.

The screenplay, by newcomer Christie LeBlanc, is pretty clever, and its logic is internally consistent throughout, a neat trick. The biggest problem is how LeBlanc and director Alexandre Aja, in this futuristic excursion, are weighted down by the old-fashioned Bechdel test. Their heroine, Liz, is obsessed with reconnecting with her beloved "husband," whom she sees flashes of as she strains to access her memory banks and hunts for clues to who she is and how she can survive. In the end, this is mostly a cheesy soul-mate story about the power of love and companionship.

If it were not for that heavy-handed hetero-normative shmaltz, "Oxygen" could have been a fascinating sci-fi brain teaser. Liz is a resourceful researcher of cryogenics who seems to have been shot by her own gun. Her interaction with AI assistant MILO (Mathieu Amalric) provides snappy dialogue and narrative development; he is just helpful enough to tease Liz toward the next hint or revelation but never satisfying enough to help her fully unravel the full mystery. 

Fortunately, this zips by in a pretty neat 100 minutes, pushed along by the ominous countdown clock monitoring Liz's dwindling oxygen levels. And the ending is smart and, again, logically consistent. If only the anachronistic rom-com tropes weren't such a distraction.

THE WORLD TO COME (C) - Like clockwork, it's another lesbian love story set in the time before the invention of electricity. But this one is a lukewarm mess, with a mismatched cast and a laborious narrative structure.

Katherine Waterston almost makes this worth watching as Abigail, a dutiful but melancholic farm wife in pre-Civil War upstate New York. Waterston offers a mask of heartbreak and longing following the death of a daughter, and her inner emotional glacier is slowly melted when she meets a neighbor, Tallie (Vanessa Kirby), another matrimonial drudge-worker. As the women visit each other, a bond develops. Slowly. 

Problems abound here. The lethargic pace is frustrating. The men mumble and the women whisper (I eventually engaged the subtitles). The characters seems like four unrelated archetypes rather than organic people in a believable setting. The husbands are portrayed by a pair of mopey duds -- Casey Affleck (with Abigail) and Christopher Abbott (Tallie's menacing mate). The screenplay is written from the perspective of two men (and directed by Mona Fastvold) trying to imagine the inner thoughts of two women from two centuries ago. And the main device they use is extensive voice-overs, mainly Abigail narrating her diary entries but also the ol' corny letter-writing dictation. The leaden line readings, a sop to the era, nearly grind things to a halt at various times.

Waterston brings a haunting ache to the story, but Kirby comes off as way too modern, with both her look and her attitude (and, frankly, her fluffy flowing locks). Affleck's character shows a glimmer of understanding of his wife's attraction to another woman, and while that nuance is interesting, it also is rather far-fetched. Fastvold holds off on showing love scenes and then deftly underplays them, saving the most explicit one for close to the end, as she intercuts it with another scene of tragedy. But in the end, this slog mostly sits on the screen, inert, leaving the viewer as frustrated as the women born in the wrong time.

That Millennium Drift

 

NOMADLAND (A-minus) - Chloe Zhao follows up her wonderful breakthrough "The Rider" with more amateur actors from a real community. Here she embellishes into fiction the story of nomadic older Americans traveling between seasonal jobs and struggling to survive. Frances McDormand adds the professional sheen and emotional gravitas as Fern, a woman adrift since the death of her husband.

McDormand has help from David Straithairn as Dave, a fellow drifter, shooting puppy-dog looks at Fern, who isn't ready to connect with a man. The overall tone is rather morose, with the emphasis on the battle each day to make ends meet and find shelter from the elements. (While most people have RVs, Fern lives out of a van, and always on the brink of economic peril.)

The film is set right after the cratering of the company town of Empire, Nev., with the closure of a U.S. Gypsum plant in 2011, setting Fern on the road to survival. Whereas "The Rider" embedded Zhao in a real community and a non-actor as a star, in "Nomadland" McDormand and Straithairn (and a few other ringers) stand out as great actors. It's not so much a distraction as it is sort of the mirage of a CGI trick. It's almost as if McDormand, no matter how dirtied up she is here, has been digitally stitched into a documentary.

That might not be noticeable to a lot of viewers. Regardless of the casting fiction at play, McDormand wrings true pathos from Fern's situation. The budding relationship with Dave doesn't follow a predictable arc (thankfully), and Fern -- still hamstrung by grief over the loss of her husband -- occasionally is able to open up to a few fellow nomads to make a connection. The non-actors contribute a powerful moment, including Charlene Swankie as Fern's ailing friend and real-life RV-camp host Bob Wells, who pours his heart into a sorrowful monologue.

The undeniable strength here, though, is Zhao's vision and the cinematography of the West by Joshua James Richards, returning from "The Rider." The images, combined with the tinkling piano music of Ludovico Einaudi, set the melancholy mood and lay the foundation for Zhao's storytelling. 

This is gorgeous, heartfelt storytelling.

BONUS TRACK

From the closing credits, Cat Clifford with "Drifting Away I Go":

And a sample of Einaudi's soundtrack:

Musical Interlude: First Thoughts

 

 Headline:

Diver says he was swallowed by humpback whale while diving for lobsters off Provincetown

 

Video:

Baby Goat Movies

 

There is a certain type of art film -- quaint, rural, picturesque, mostly wordless, ponderous -- that will almost certainly get me mocked for liking, even among my most intellectual and erudite friends. These are little film-festival nuggets that rarely gain a wide audience. They can be a challenge to watch, at times, but the rewards can be sublime.

We have dubbed these films Baby Goat Movies, so named after our experience with a Santa Fe Film Festival entry from about a decade ago, "Le Quattro Volte," which prominently features a baby goat as central to its artistic aspirations, notably a fateful result for the little critter. That film has a kinship with the "Qatsi" trilogy of films by Godfrey Reggio, starting in 1982 with "Koyaanisqatsi" -- commonly referred to as a contemplative tone poem with a powerful visual flair. 

We followed up the Santa Fe viewing of "Le Quattro Volte" by dragging a friend to a screening at the University of New Mexico Film Center, and she shook her head, mystified, through most of it, and felt the need to flee halfway through for an extended oxygen break, missing the pivotal "baby goat" scene that shall long live in film infamy. I watched it again recently on the smaller screen, and our date this time appreciated the narrative. I was struck this time by how funny it is at times, especially that damn mischievous little goat. The film truly is a special experience.

Then, we made a triumphant return to an actual movie theater -- the venerable Guild Cinema -- to view this year's version of the Baby Goat Movie, this one starring a hog named Gunda.  Let's review both.

LE QUATTRO VOLTE (2010) (A) - We don't throw around the word profound too often, but this dramatized documentary about a remote rural Italian village drills down into the essence of life -- by analyzing the cycles of existence, from human to animal to vegetable to mineral and back to the start. (The title roughly translates to "the four times" or "the four turns.")

This unique brainchild of Michelangelo Frammartino follows the travails of a goat-herder who is old as dirt, which is an apt metaphor, because his secret to longevity is apparently a concoction he drinks every night, a mix of water and sacred sweepings from the local church. It is not clear if this elixir is meant to cure his hacking cough or cause it. 

Eventually the old man succumbs, and phase two begins with a start -- a goat falling out of the womb and splashing into the dirt. Now we follow the journey of the adorable baby goat, a little rascal among the spring class of upstarts. But a goat doesn't live forever, and if you thought this was a light-hearted animal romp, you will be mistaken. In a truly sorrowful and moving scene, our little hero will eventually end up, as we all do, feeding the tree -- in particular a mighty fir that will be felled, celebrated in a ceremony by villagers, and then converted to charcoal in time for winter so that it can heat the residents' homes.

This all sounds so dull and routine -- and you may find it tedious and pointless -- but Frammartino not only celebrates the natural elegance of the countryside, but he homes in on the fascinating details and rituals of daily life, both human and animal. There is hardly any dialogue, pretty much all of it incidental. It might be trite to say that a movie represents the true purpose of cinema, but I can't think of a better representative of the raison d'etre of the art form. 

GUNDA (A-minus) - I grew up with Arnold Ziffel, the boy-like pig who was treated like a son by Fred Ziffel on TV's "Green Acres." Now a half century later comes Gunda the wunda-pig, a sow burdened by a litter of cute little piglets, all the stars of an intimate black-and-white art documentary about farm life. It is shot by Victor Kossakovsky almost entirely from the pigs' ground level. After 90 minutes you can sense something resembling human emotion from Gunda, just like with clever little Arnold.

The opening scene focuses on the notched opening to the pigs' fenced-in pen, Gunda's exhausted face eventually overrun by the newborns clamoring and clambering over her and spilling out into the open space, perhaps for the first time. Much of the rest of the movie shows the mom either suckling the piglets (it nearly made my own nipples ache in empathy) or modeling the classic behavior of snuffling through the dirt.

At one point Gunda jams a heavy hoof onto the runt of the litter, and Kossakovsky lingers long enough to convey the peril but cuts away before we find out if the baby dies or whether it turns into the slow piglet hobbled by a paralyzed foreleg. About a third of the way in, the filmmaker suddenly cuts away to an extended scene of chickens -- including a one-legged clucker -- emerging from a cage and warily exploring their surroundings. The up-close camerawork reveals the birds' physical details, reminding us just how positively prehistoric they can seem. A later scene spends time with a herd of cows, who are constantly besieged by flying pests. I guess I never realized how cows tend to stand in pairs, facing in opposite directions, presumably so they can swat the flies away from the other's face with their tails. 

But then it's back to Gunda, still shot from snout level, whose piglets are gradually reaching maturity. We never see a human in the entire movie, but in the penultimate scene, a large tractor arrives to decide the family's fate and to engender an ending that wells with emotion. It dawned on me that the names of the animals featured in this film are used as pejoratives for humans -- pig, hog, chicken, cow -- but "Gunda" instead humanizes these beasts in an earthy way. I'm hoping that doesn't insult the animals.

New to the Queue

Thinking "We know how to do this ..."

A scorned man simmers in small-town America, "The Killing of Two Lovers."

Chinese master Jia Zheng-ke is back with a documentary revolving around writers from different eras, "Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue."

Christian Petzold ("Barbara," "Phoenix," "Transit") returns with Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski in the fantasy romance "Undine."

We were disappointed in Theo Anthony's debut ("The Rat Film"), but he's a filmmaker with a unique perspective, so we'll give him another try and check out his outre documentary about video surveillance, "All Light, Everywhere."

A restless New York actress wanders upstate for a meandering adventure in "Slow Machine."

Childlike Wonders

 

STREET GANG: HOW WE GOT TO SESAME STREET (B+) - This documentary about the ground-breaking children's show "Sesame Street" is more for history buffs than fans of the show. The filmmakers dig deep into the origins of the show, the groundwork done in the 1960s to turn the vast wasteland of television into an education tool, one targeting in particular inner-city preschool children.

Many of the key players, their faces aged now 50 years or so, are on hand to recall this sensation that first aired in fall 1969. That includes the creator, Joan Ganz Cooney, and a lot of the actors who created some memorable characters. Of course Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, is long gone, but we hear from him in archival interviews. And we see him, in clips, on set with Frank Oz, a puppeteering team for the ages. Highlights include an archival interview with Joe Raposo -- the songwriter who created the show's ear candy, who recounts the story of the inspiration behind "Bein' Green," the wistful hit song for Kermit the Frog in 1979 -- and Holly Robinson Peete joining her father, Matt Robinson, who was the original Gordon and the voice of Roosevelt Franklin.

The veterans -- from both behind the scenes and in front of the camera -- reminisce reverentially. What we're missing here is a true sense of the impact of "Sesame Street" on the kids who grew up with the show. It would be interesting to get a sampling of at least a few people whose lives were truly affected by this multicultural teaching tool beamed into homes all over the country. It's a bit ironic that this documentary is more about the adults than it is about the kids. That's not a fatal flaw, but it's certainly a missed opportunity.

TINY TIM: KING FOR A DAY (C+) - This documentary about the avant-garde singing sensation from the late '60s just never feels comprehensive or essential. Tiny Tim (born Herbert Butros Khaury), has been gone 25 years now, but during his heyday, he was a pop-culture phenomenon noted for his appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and for getting married to Miss Vicki on Johnny's Carson's "Tonight Show." He sang in an old-timey falsetto, most notably on "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," jarring dormant memories of 78-speed records spinning a few decades earliers.

The documentary stumbles out of the gate with excessive animated re-creations, in a graphic-novel style, giving the young Herbert Khaury his own sort-of gothic super-hero origin story. Director Johan von Sydow and writer Martin Daniel don't quite recover from that misstep, and the rest of the 78-minute endeavor feels a bit rushed and superficial. We hear from former friends, wives, and colleagues (Wavy Gravy was a big fan) -- plus cutting-edge filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Jonas Mekas -- and there certainly is an appreciation for Tiny Tim's talents beyond the fleeting freak he might come off as in the culture's collective memory.

Alas, the music clips are frustratingly brief -- as if the filmmakers were unable to score the rights to the songs and had to limit them to just a few seconds each. And while we get a sense of Khaury's unique personality and his groundbreaking gender fluidity, the sense of the man here feels incomplete.

People, Places, Things

 

MALNI: TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE (B) - This ode to the Pacific Northwest is grounded in the culture of the American Indian. It is a coy, ruminative pastiche of conversations and images, offering a gravitas that is mostly hinted at. The images of nature are captivating and are wasted on anything other than a big movie screen. 

Washington State product Sky Hopinka is behind this valentine to his heritage and homeland. He picks two subjects around Portland, Ore. -- Jordan a married father of young children, including a newborn, and Sweetwater Sahme, a pregnant woman setting her life on course after a wild youth. Both connect their beliefs to their ancestors and to the generations to come, embracing the circle of life. 

Hopinka's camera likes to wander away from his subjects, creating disjointed visuals, often involving water, whether it is Jordan or other unrelated people canoeing across a lake, or Sweetwater Sahme longing for the cleansing powers of the waterfalls she gazes on. Hopinka also weaves in a narrative connected to the Origin of Death myth, not always making clean connections but creating more of a atmospheric tone poem. He makes his point in 82 minutes, offering snippets of cultural touchstones but not overstaying his welcome or staking any claims to creating a comprehensive document on his subject.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES (B+) - Immersive documentary filmmaker Hanna Jayanti spent three years cultivating a relationship with five residents of Truth or Consequences, N.M., and she presents their stories in the form of a tone poem that ponders both the past and the future, using the nearby Spaceport (and its infinite possibilities) as a framing device for how we deal with space and time. Jayanti creates a narrative (science) fiction, set in the near future, of these five souls having been left behind on planet Earth after space travel has begun.

Jayanti is obviously going for a mood here, though she does not ignore her subjects or reduce them to props. The biggest gimmick is a camera trick, in which she does something with focus or lighting to atomize a scene -- a room or a landscape -- to make it look like the granular detail of an iced-over distant planet, only to eventually morph the image back to reality. I guess that's the futuristic space-travel theme at work. It makes for some fascinating visuals amid the bleak desert backdrop.

The characters here are quirky but real. They skew older, though there is a 30-year-old native who has boomeranged back to town to work at the Bullocks general store only to feel trapped and seriously depressed. She copes by joining a crystals club with a bunch of old folks. Then there is an 80-year-old chain-smoking woman who lives in a trailer with her two dogs and reminisces about her days running a circus. We meet a hoarder and a painter, too, each one with a unique philosophical take on life in southern New Mexico. 

It's not that the people here are incidental, but they are bit players in Jayanti's creation, and the sum of their parts, combined with the visual elements, add up to a provocative whole.

Bob Dylan turns 80

 

Today's daily New Yorker cartoon features an elderly couple, with the woman telling the man, "Dylan turns eighty today -- don't you think it's finally time you forgave him for going electric?"

I'm too young to remember Robert Zimmerman's "Judas!" moment or his audacity to expand beyond the folk movement to the point of inspiring Pete Seeger to take an axe to the band's power lines in Newport. I found Dylan when I was in high school, after I discovered the Beatles when I was in junior high. 

For me over the decades, the greatest appeal of Bob Dylan has been "discovering" him -- the different modes of him throughout his career. For decades now, the 1966 release "Blonde on Blonde" has remained in my Top 5 albums of all time, while others have come and gone. (Haunted to this day by "Visions of Johanna," I still mutter to myself a play on those lyrics, during a senior moment, "Jeez, I can't my my keys."

 

I had to forage my way toward "Blonde on Blonde." Early, rudimentary memories, though, evoke snippets of sonic recollections: of being in my parents' black Buick Electra 225 and thinking how "Lay Lady Lay" stood out from anything else I'd ever heard on the radio; in Jerry Woods' basement circa 1978 hearing "Positively 4th Street" and thinking it was Dire Straits, who were the hot new hipsters, not realizing Mark Knopfler was simply Dylanesque and that the real thing was so much more expansive; with a driver's license of my own, tooling down 26th Street in my forest-green '74 Chevy Nova, hearing "Buckets of Rain," being blown away, and thinking, "OK, now which iteration of Dylan is that one from?"

 

It was from "Blood on the Tracks," of course, and -- aha! -- a copy of that record was in my brother's collection. Maybe Dylan's second best release. That album actually led me backward, to start to fill in the back catalog, those legendary recordings from the '60s at the height of his creativity. As I was starting to delve into Dylan, though, it was by now the late '70s, and he had fallen out of fashion during the punk and disco era. Imagine my shock when I bought the new release "Live at Budokan" (1979) and couldn't believe how horrifically he'd butchered his own songs. ("Is that a goddamn flute?! What the ....?")

That was right before "Slow Train Coming," which reaffirmed his popularity but put off a lot of fans who were worried by the launch of that multi-album Christian phase -- which was a concern but which also produced some of his greatest individual album tracks. He would emerge from that phase in 1983 with "Infidels" -- Knopfler, by now producing; Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare the dynamic rhythm section; Dylan's songs again epic in nature. I started going to see him live, maybe four times in the '80s, once with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers backing him, often with the Grateful Dead either preceding him or following him into town but either way cluttering the parking lot each time. 

It was hit and miss for the rest of the '80s -- I had finally caught up with Dylan's recordings in real time -- until his next masterpiece, 1989's "Oh Mercy," recorded with Daniel Lanois. I can't imagine anyone else creating the perfect song "Most of the Time." (Check out Bettye LaVette's version on the wonderful compilation album "Chimes of Freedom." For another fine collection of Dylan covers, go to the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' film "I'm Not There.")

 

I stuck with him in the '90s when he stopped recording his own material and instead put out albums of traditional folks songs, each album powerful in its own right. He picked up his pen again in 1997 and reunited with Lanois for what is probably his third-best release, "Time Out of Mind," just a haunting howl from a spurned lover now in his 50s and realizing the depth of musical history that came before him. That album was released on September 30, 1997, and it was just a few days later that I found myself in Sacramento for my good friend's wedding, and I was prepared with my Discman and mini earphones, so that after I went down to Tower Records (the original store?), I could go back to the hotel and play the CD right away. Try putting on headphones, closing your eyes, and launching the opening track -- the plaintive, spine-tingling opening notes of "Love Sick," altered here from the original:

That was my heyday (in a lot of ways), and it's been a slow slide toward estrangement for Dylan and me. The last release of his I bought was "Love and Theft."  During this review of the documentary about Tower Records, I told the story of tracking down "Love and Theft" on its date of release -- September 11, 2001 -- despite the inconvenience of a terrorist attack that sunny day. That album was half disappointing, and it was then that I realized that Dylan is at his best when he has the right producer and at his worst -- like in the past two decades -- when his alter-ego Jack Frost is at the controls. Some writers need a good editor; some rock stars need a good producer. I've sampled his recent releases -- giving him the benefit of the doubt, even the horrific Sinatra stuff -- and have concluded that the man's lyrical muse has mostly abandoned him and that he has simply given up on writing melodies. He has essentially retired but keeps going.

I haven't seen him live since the '90s, the last time at a fairly intimate club in Chicago as he was launching that roadhouse version of his band, the sound he essentially still tours with, 25 years on. I've heard horror stories from fans who have gone to see the croaking-frog version of the elderly Dylan, sometimes genuinely baffled at which song he is singing, that's how recognizable the renderings can be. I've delved into his finely curated Bootleg series -- Rolling Thunder is simply the best live tour I have ever heard recorded, and I regret that I'm just young enough to have been too young to have caught that version of his band. It's a shame the recent movie about it is such a disappointment. If I had to pick one recording to leave you with, on Bob Dylan's 80th birthday, that I could take with me to that proverbial desert island, it would be, from "Bootleg: Vol. 5," the live version of "Isis."

Idle Chatter

 

KICKING AND SCREAMING (1995) (A-minus) - Going back to the beginning, here is the debut feature from Noah Baumbach, which establishes his ease with banter and fragile male egos surrounded by manic pixie dream girls. It revolves around Grover (Josh Hamilton), who leads a cadre of smart alecks as they are cast adrift after college graduation.

These prepsters can't quit each other as they stumble out of the career gate, preferring to cling to their alma mater, where life remains simple and familiar. Standing out here is the understated Chris Eigeman (who a few years earlier helped launch Whit Stillman's career in "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona") as the sullen Max. We also get the drolly funny Carlos Jacott as Otis (routinely clad in a pajama top) and Jason Wiles as dippy Skippy. These goofballs hang out in the vicinity of perennial student/bartender Chet (Eric Stoltz), the wise Yoda among these rascals.

Olivia D'Abo (transitioning from TV's "The Wonder Years") rocks a retainer as Grover's ingenue who got away (off to Prague, which is treated like a cliche getaway in the mid-'90s), while indie heavyweight Parker Posey (totally in her milieu) and Cara Buono show more of an edge and less patience with these grown boys. The writing is sharp, and the simmering ennui is wonderfully underplayed. This was the emergence of Gen X, and much of the characterizations ring true.

CABARET (1972) (B) - This seems more like a curiosity than a foundational piece of '70s cinema, but it has its moments. Being of the era, this dances around some sensitive issues as it goes back in time 40 years to Berlin on the brink of Nazi rule to filter everything through the lens of a nihilistic nightclub, though it does dare to address (to a degree) free love, homosexuality and abortion.

Bob Fosse recovered from his debut flop (1969's "Sweet Charity") and emerged with his signature visual flair as he mixes in cabaret numbers with the dramatic vignettes revolving around American Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) and her gay British pal Brian (a confident, nuanced Michael York). Joel Grey steals the show as the club's emcee.

The biggest issue here is the refusal to take on the Nazi problem with any depth or sophistication. The brown shirts are a looming menace, but they are treated more conceptually than head-on, depicted more as annoying pamphleteers than bullies. The original source material is to be respected, but the tension between musical decadence and the building political storm results in more affectation than piercing provocation.

Still, Fosse's vision here (his use of distorted images and misdirection are impressive) and the songs of Kander & Ebb (among others) are truly compelling at times, and just try to get some of these tunes out of your head a week later. Minnelli comes across as a lightweight in the first half of the film, but either she grows on you or she simply learned how to act by the end of the production, because she can be affecting down the stretch, leading to the belting out of the title tune and the haunting final visual.

BONUS TRACKS

Let's put together our list, now that we've seen 10, of Noah Baumbach films (as director), in order of preference and with links to reviews:

1. The Squid and the Whale
2. Frances Ha
3. Marriage Story
4. Margot at the Wedding
5. Kicking and Screaming
6. Greenberg
7. The Meyerowitz Stories
8. DePalma (documentary with Jake Paltrow)
9. While We're Young
10. Mistress America

Not seen: Mr. Jealousy

"Kicking's" soundtrack thrums with indie cred of the era, including Pixies, Grant Hart and Freedy Johnston, plus this pivotal number from Jimmie Dale Gilmore, "Braver Newer World." 

R.I.P, Monte Hellman

 

It's been nearly five years since I re-watched "Two-Lane Blacktop," the iconic (there, I said it) American New Wave road film from 1971. As that film turns 50, its director, Monte Hellman (below right) has died -- last month; he was 91. 

I first saw "Two-Lane Blacktop" when it was only about 30 years old at the old location of the Gene Siskel Film Center near downtown Chicago. It immediately captivated me, and it haunts me to this day. It is the obvious pinnacle of Hellman's spotty career as one of the many descendants of Roger Corman on the pulpy side of the '60-'70s New Wave.

In tribute, I ordered up Hellman's preceding movie release:

THE SHOOTING (1966) (C-minus) - Meh. This one is a laconic would-be Spaghetti Western, but it mostly sits flat on the screen. If you want to see Jack Nicholson on a horse, this a good opportunity to do that.

But if you want an Old World revenge morality play, you have plenty of options (such as "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"). Here, we are treated to Warren Oates, the only truly compelling part of the film. (He would go on to star in Hellman's next two films, including 1974's "Cockfighter.") He is joined by the arresting Millie Perkins as a woman who hires Oates' character to join her on a journey to track a mysterious rider (Nicholson). 

Like "Blacktop," the dialogue is spare. (It was written by Carole Eastman (as Adrien Joyce), who would go on to pen her masterpiece, "Five Easy Pieces" starring Nicholson.) It might help if you are a fan of westerns, especially of the more modern variety, but this one just dragged too often.

Life Is Short: We'll Always Have Paris

 

We went into "Paris Calligrammes" with perhaps misguided expectations. We were expecting a romp with artists through the French capital during the heady '60s culminating in the May 1968 protests and some thoughts on how that shaped the era. We never made it past 1966.

This is a memoir from German artist Ulrike Ottinger, who parachuted into the Paris literary and art scene in the early '60s, joining a circle of artistes, writers and poets who orbited around the Calligrammes bookstore. However, the production here is leaden, the pace is slow, her narration is dull, and the names she drops fly by quickly, few of them recognizable. At least to me. Here's a good litmus test. At one point, Ottinger references the staging of a Jean Genet play and notes that it featured three "famous" actors, and then she names Madeleine Renaud, Maria Casares and Jean-Pierre Granval. If none of those names ring a bell, then the rest of this won't resonate, I'm afraid. 

There's an audience for this, certainly. But you'd have to appreciate the extreme inside baseball to devote more than two hours to Ottinger's valentine to her youth.

Title: PARIS CALLIGRAMMES

Running Time: 130 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  50 MIN

Portion Watched: 38%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 58 YRS, 5 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.5 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went to bed to read myself to sleep.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 88-1

Noir Chronicles: Femmes Fatales

 A pair of barn-burners with two strong female leads in undercooked roles:

KEEPER OF THE FLAME (1942) (B-minus) - Celebrated war correspondent Steve O'Malley (Spencer Tracy) returns stateside during the middle of the war to pursue a biography of a beloved national hero who died in a car crash, and that means finding access to his widow, Christine Forrest (Katharine Hepburn). Yes, it's Hepburn and Tracy, but there is no flame between them.

Competing with his fellow news hounds and verbally sparring with the locals, O'Malley lands his prey and soon has access to the great man's archives, though you can tell off the bat that something's not adding up here. Ol' Steve surely will dig up the truth. Tracy is likeable but Hepburn is cold and melodramatic, a little out of touch with the loose cast around her. The supporting cast includes a wonderful turn by Audrie Christie as Jane Harding, a journalistic colleague of O'Malley's who is sharp and sassy and the life of the party here. She and Percy Kilbride as a wisecracking cabdriver leaven this with some sideways screwball comedy amid the gloom and glory.

This one from George Cuckor ("Gaslight," "The Philadelphia Story"), which landed in theaters a year after Pearl Harbor, lays the patriotism on awfully thick. And it's one of those old-fashioned creaky scripts in which a character uses most of the final 10 minutes to reveal everything in one long monologue just to wrap it all up. 

Spotted: A trio of familiar faces: Forrest Tucker (TV's "F Troop") as the widow's surly cousin; future blacklist victim Howard Da Silva as the widow's grumpy gatekeeper; and Pa Kettle himself, Percy Kilbride, as the cranky cabbie full of practical advice and putdowns.

THE FURIES (1950) (C+) - Barbara Stanwyck is constantly forced to be lady-like as a frustrated heiress in this western about a vain rancher who is just begging for a comeuppance. This has just too much bellowing by Walter Huston as T.C. Jeffords, the father of Stanwyck's Vance Jeffords, who is appalled by her father jeopardizing his empire by passing out IOUs all over the New Mexico territory and beyond, not to mention the gold-digging bride he brings home one day.

Vance is sympathetic to the Mexican homesteaders who camp out on the vast property, and she has a more business affinity than romantic interest in rival Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), who not only asserts a claim to part of the property but is too much of a cad for her to take seriously. This would-be epic from Anthony Mann meanders too much in the first half and struggles in the second half to make the intrigue jell. It doesn't help that Mann's reins on Stanwyck (the Parker Posey of her time) are way too tight. The movie finally does come through with a pretty clever payoff -- and some redemption for Vance -- but it takes nearly two hours to get there. And if you're not a regular fan of westerns, that can be an awfully dusty trail to wander down.

Spotted: Prolific TV character actor Frank Ferguson ("Lassie," "My Friend Flicka") in the familiar role of a doctor.

By Any Means Necessary

 

SLALOM (B) - This French production avoids the trap of presenting another repulsive take on the stale narrative of an older man exploiting a younger woman, or in this case, a skiing coach abusing his 15-year-old student. It's a scenario we don't need to seek out.

However, this debut feature from writer-director Charlene Favier pulses with dread and sadness, as young doe-eyed Lyz (Noee Abita) has been cast adrift by distracted divorced parents, and coach Fred (Jeremie Renier from Francois Ozon's "Double Lover") fills the void. A nuanced character, he comes across as someone with more of an uncontrollable compulsion than just some evil predator. Still, a rape scene two-thirds of the way through is shocking and disturbing; yet, Favier trains her camera on Lyz's face, those frightened eyes searching not so much for rescue but for a way to instantly process the attack and find a drawer in her mind to instantly shelve it away in her psyche.

Abita is fascinating to watch. She just turned 22, but she looks like an awkward teenager, with small hands but full lips, as if she's still growing into her body, which gets inspected and measured regularly to assess her progress as an athlete. But it is her eyes that constantly scan her surroundings (mostly teen social and competitive dynamics at the remote school in the mountains) and assess situations for survival options, whether Fred is stalking her or her best friend in the group, Justine (Maira Schmitt), gets a little too chummy.

Favier hints at the idea that Fred is just working every angle he can in order to motivate this future champion to maximize her talents. (He often uses "we" to describe Lyz's athletic accomplishments.) The filmmaker refuses to outright demonize Fred but rather provides just a few shades of grey to keep the viewer off balance.

Favier shows a strong visual flair in this resort setting (she is particularly adept at capturing the flurry of snowflakes, whether natural or machine-produced), but she lapses into conventional choices; there must be at least a dozen establishing shots of the snow-covered mountains, a technique intended to perhaps suggest emotional impediments involved here, but which eventually comes off as repetitive, if not nearly Pythonesque ("forbidding, aloof, terrifying ..."). And Lyz's ascent -- from budding phenom to world's greatest skier -- is a little too shorthand to be fully believable.

But this is Abita's movie, and Favier, like Celine Sciamma ("Girlhood"), has a distinctive connection with the adolescent experience, which allows her young actress to add layers and subtlety to what otherwise could have been a shallow, exploitive movie.

Renegades

 From the archives ...

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960) (B+) - Marlon Brando ends his first decade as a movie star by mixing "A Streetcar Named Desire" with "The Wild One" to flex his chops as a lone-wolf drifter named Valentine Xavier trying to stay out of trouble with the women of the Deep South and their feral male protectors. 

Tennessee Williams, adapting some of his earlier work, lays the groundwork for the beautiful Brando to smolder his way through this dark story of longing and regret. Anna Magnani plays Lady Torrance, the wife of a miserable cur (Victor Jory) who lies in bed dying in a room above the mercantile store she runs and where Brando's Valentine comes to work after giving up his life as a guitar player. Joanne Woodward is on hand as Carol Cutrere, the town floozy who is frustrated that her come-ons to Valentine don't work. He is drawn more to the older woman. 

Sidney Lumet, behind the camera, doesn't seem to connect much with the southern culture (he's prone to depicting the men as parts of snarling racist mobs), but, like Williams, he seems to have a natural connection to Brando, who carries the story along in the trail of his animal musk. Valentine and Lady Torrance form a genuine bond, and when it all comes to a head, there's real heartbreak and tragedy involved. This feels like adult storytelling despite the period melodrama.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964) (B) - This philosophical psychological horror film from Japan has style to burn, not to mention grains of sand in every crack and crevice you can imagine. A Tokyo teacher indulging his love of entomology while on vacation near a small sea village is tricked into staying overnight with a woman who lives in a sand it accessible only by a rope ladder. He soon finds that he can't escape and is trapped in this sandy purgatory, perhaps indefinitely.

The dread and drudgery of shoveling sand for the villagers above is sharply rendered -- though the depiction of mind-numbing servitude might weigh on viewers over the course of two and a half hours. (We admit to some strategic fast-forwarding in a few spots, but not enough to qualify this for Fast Forward Theater.) The man (Eiji Okada from "Hiroshima Mon Amour") eventually falls into the arms of the coquettish but practical woman (Kyoko Kishida).

Director Hiroshi Teshigahara develops a captivating visual palette, offsetting the suffocating amounts of sand with geometric patterns and extreme close-ups, including of the couple's bodies. At times the artistic flourishes are mesmerizing. The story itself soon devolves into a slow-burn tale of survival, one of Sisyphean proportions, suggesting that the repetitive days in a sand pit are a metaphor for the daily rat race in the big city. Your mileage may vary.