An occasional feature whereby we make it through slow-paced movies by deftly employing the FF button.
PERFECT DAYS (C+) - Wim Wenders ("Wings of Desire") takes a great idea and turns it into a Boomer wank, as he celebrates a simple Everyman who cleans public toilets in Tokyo while savoring the beauty of the every day. It's about as sappy as movies come these days.
Koji Yakusho is perfectly charming as Hirayama, a middle-aged regular Joe who refuses to let his lowly job define him. Rather, he studies photography, embraces nature, and reads highbrow books before nodding off to sleep each night on a simple mat in a humble home. He always has an amused look on his face, and he is a man of few words. Ah, let us celebrate the noble working man! (One who never gets his uniform dirty and who absent-mindedly scrubs away at porcelain that's already in cinematic ship-shape, as if the Japanese don't leave a mark on their public potties.)
Of course, Wenders imbues Hirayama with the exact musical taste you would expect Wenders to have. He pops a cassette (old school, but of course) into his car stereo on his daily commute and blares one overplayed classic pop song after another. (The world just never needs to hear "Brown-Eyed Girl" in a movie ever again. And "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay" is a close second.) And wouldn't you know it, young people -- especially young women -- go gaga over his taste in music and analog ways. One even crushes on him and gives him a peck on the cheek. Happens to us geezers all the time!
The plot, you ask? There really isn't one, and that's supposed to be the cloying point, I suppose. Hirayama's younger colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) makes a play for one of the women, a stereotypical manic-pixie dream girl, but the two men often toil in silence -- convenient for fast-forwarding through the toilet-scrubbing and the leaf-gazing. Hirayama's niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) comes to visit, and of course she is completely smitten with his zen bachelor-pad aesthetic -- not to mention his taste in literature, because what teen wouldn't want to live like a 60-year-old man.
If Hirayama were believable as a real working slug instead of an idealized slumming intellectual, this might have more than Hallmark appeal. But with so little action, the weaknesses and wish-fulfillment are glaring.
BONUS TRACK
ONLY IN THEATERS (C) - It's hard to describe how misleading and annoying this documentary -- about Los Angeles' elite art-house cinema chain, curated for decades by the Laemmle family -- is. You settle into your seat and hope to celebrate the dying communal experience of watching quality films in a quaint theater, only to be stuck with a dreary, drawn-out hagiography of the clan that has exhibited movies for nearly as long as Hollywood has been making them.
No one has an unkind word for four generations of Laemmles, and the filmmakers hang their narrative on friendly Greg Laemmle, the middle-aged grandson of the founder, who finds himself seriously considering unloading the chain when we meet him in the late 2010s. We hear praise from a wide range of eminent talking heads -- Ava Duvernay, Cameron Crowe, James Ivory, Nicole Holofcener and even old Leonard Maltin. The filmmakers are grateful for this type of theater chain that reached its heights during the '90s heyday of boutique indies.
But things here bog down about halfway through when Covid hits. Director Raphael Sbarge thinks he's got grand drama on his hands, but instead his documentary drops like a lead balloon. There is little narrative spark to be derived from rehashing the pandemic's closures and panic. (A nice touch is a running visual accounting of the clever marquee movie references the shuttered theaters feature during the shutdown.) Greg Laemmle and his fawning wife move to Seattle, and it's just hard to care how this all turns out. (You'll likely be as disappointed as Sbarge probably was at the outcome.) For some reason, Greg's kids, who have nothing interesting to offer, get a lot of face time, including during bland family gatherings.
Meantime, interview after interview waxes poetic over how precious these theaters are and how crucial it is that we watch prestige films in these hallowed group settings. No one finds an original or interesting way to articulate that. And when the narrative here stalls, you'll be grateful that you are watching this on home video so that you can fast-forward through this indulgent family album.
SUGARCANE (A-minus) - Heart-wrenching isn't an adequate word to describe this documentary about the ghosts of the past that are stirred up by an investigation into an Indian residential school run by the Catholic church, which enabled some unspeakable horrors over the past century.
Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, who also plays a lead role, take a highly polished approach to this searing dramatic story they have to tell. At times the visuals and narrative flourishes feel almost too stylized for the harsh truths they are unearthing. But there is no denying the power of the story.
Julian's father, Ed Archie NoiseCat (below), is one of several middle-aged Native Americans who continue to cope with the abuse they suffered at the hands of nuns and priests. (What is laid out is probably even worse than you imagine, even knowing the evils of the Catholic Church and its penchant for shuffling pedophiles from parish to parish.) Ed's harrowing origin story -- he was born under dire circumstances while his mother was a student at St. Joseph's Mission near Williams Lake, British Columbia, around the late '50s -- grounds this grave and clear-eyed film. He, understandably, had demons to slay, and he walked away from Julian at some point, though they reconciled and form the heart of the film. Their conversations are touching. Ed's mother appears, but she has never wanted to talk about what happened.
The narrative is scaffolded on a reconciliation project that returns to the school land in a grim hunt for human remains. We watch key figures from Canada's indigenous community diligently engage in research and forensics. A B-story involves an elderly survivor, Rick Gilbert, still beholden to his religious faith, going on a mission to the Vatican. He seeks a final healing or explanation but is greeted with not much more than sympathetic looks and shrugs from one of the Pope's flunkies.
A young Chief, Willie Sellars, gamely shows respect for the investigation but also serves as a bridge to the modern era, forging ahead and trying to outrun the past, while still honoring the victims. At nearly two hours, the documentary can be daunting to sit through, and maybe that's why Kassie and NoiseCat, along with cinematographer Christopher LaMarca, imbue the visuals with such beauty and reverence. Maybe the dissonance is their own way of trying to reconcile the past with the present.
BAD PRESS (B) - This interesting but overlong documentary spends years chronicling the fate of Muscogee Media, which fought for its free-speech rights against the Creek Nation in Oklahoma, where, like almost all of the 500-plus tribal lands, there is no First Amendment.
We meet scrappy reporters and editors, notably Angel Ellis, as they fall victim to the whims of the tribal council, which, at the beginning of the film, repeals a statute that had guaranteed independence to Muscogee Media. The filmmakers embed themselves with the staff (both video and print) and dig in for the long haul as political fortunes hang in the balance.
The movie is more about politics than journalism much of the time. It begins with the repeal in 2018 and slogs its way through several election cycles, to diminishing effect. The villain is the head of the 16-member council, Lucien Tiger III, who eventually runs for chief. The second half of the 98-minute film bogs down in a 10-person primary and then a two-person runoff. But even after a favorable candidate grabs the chief position, the next hurdle is trying to get approval for a ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment enshrining the right of a free press. A lot of the characters, who seem like good guys, come off as corrupt as the mayor of New York.
Directors Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler have a sly eye for artsy establishing shots, and they certainly steeped themselves in the fine details of Creek life. Sometimes that is to their detriment, as the passing years -- including an apparent break for COVID -- can be wearying to the casual viewer. They place a huge burden on Ellis, and there are only so many times we can empathize with her as she lights another cigarette and spews frustration. But this is a fine David vs. Goliath tale, as well as an insightful examination of a culture torn between tradition and progressive values.
BLAZING SADDLES (1974) (B+) - About 20 years ago, I was dating a woman 12 years younger, and I thought it would be fun if I schooled the young woman on the great joy of watching "Young Frankenstein." This was 30 years after its release, and I'll never forget how, after about 10 minutes of Borscht Belt slapstick (the worst part of the movie) that left my date stone-faced, I leaped for the remote to turn it off, embarrassed that I was now on the wrong side of my 40s and out of touch with the person on the couch who born the year the movie came out.
So it was with trepidation that I approached the whole idea of screening "Blazing Saddles," the other Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder collaboration, released earlier in 1974. And this one comes with a whole nother hornet's nest of pitfalls -- it has a script riddled with the n-word, and it leaves few vulnerable groups unscathed as it employs Brooks' patented broad vaudevillian humor to skewer the western genre that he and others grew up with. Good lord, should anyone watch this anachronism anymore?
The screenplay was a five-person effort, which included Richard Pryor, who gave cover to Brooks' regulars to let fly with the racial epithets and who was supposed to star, but for his drug and alcohol battles rendering him unreliable. Enter Cleavon Little, who is a revelation as Black Bart, who lucks out when he's plucked from a lowly railroad job and foisted on the town of Rock Ridge as sheriff. This is the plan of Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), who needs the town's real estate to reroute his railroad through. The plan is that the sight of a black sheriff will cause all the townsfolk to flee.
Surviving the initial backlash, Bart teams up with the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) to win over the residents and fend off Lamarr's henchmen, which includes the monstrous moron Mongo (football player Alex Karras), who achieves screen-legend status when the character drops a horse with one punch. Lamarr also sends in a German chanteuse -- the impeccable Madeleine Kahn satirizing Marlene Dietrich -- who succumbs to Black Bart's charms because ... well, you know what they said back then about the brothers.
This all gets quite silly, of course. And the movie has burnished its notoriety with scenes and one-liners that got passed around my junior high back in the day -- bean-eating cowboys farting around a camp fire; "Where the white women at?"; and, of course, "Excuse me, while I whip this out."
It's been 50 long years since even the idea of a spoof of westerns seemed like something that could work. Jokes about a man constantly being mistaken for Hedy Lamarr ("It's Hedley!") certainly don't age well. The kitchen-sink slapstick can still elicit belly-laughs, but too much now just seems more embarrassing than gut-busting. You can carve out a pretty fun drinking game every time a new vulnerable group gets made fun of. (Even Kahn's character, Lili Von Shtupp, not only has a slut-shaming name as subtle as a poke in the eye, but she comes with a wacky speech impediment.) Back then, you could be an equal-opportunity offender and be rewarded with a hit movie; these days, the few of us who bother to revisit that era will find it more quaint than hilarious. We won't even get into the beta-meta ending, which breaks the fourth wall and offers a spectacle of anarcy, featuring hundreds of extras, that would make Cecil B. Demille blush and which would leave anyone under 40 baffled as to how this would ever be considered amusing.
But, "Blazing Saddles," for better or worst, is a snapshot of a moment in time. In 1974, it had been less than 50 years since Al Jolson performed in blackface. Hollywood of the '40s and '50s was still a fresh memory, and Brooks was the master of satire. Nazis and Klansmen were played for laughs. Effeminate men were a riot. Ethnic putdowns were the coin of the realm. You could argue that the excessive use of the n-word is so over the top that it makes a powerful argument against racism. Who can say anymore? Who cares? Why did I even bring it up? (Counter-argument: the Library of Congress has preserved the movie in the National Film Registry.)
That said, there is much to enjoy about this crazy production. Little is smart and charming. Wilder is an understated gem. Kahn was probably the funniest actress of her generation (she would re-team with Wilder, more famously, in "Young Frankenstein"). I laughed when town leader Howard Johnson (again, that name was funny back when Nixon was president) held up a floral wreath and announced that he wished to "extend a laurel ... and hardy handshake" to the new sheriff. That one will always trigger the 12-year-old in me. Even during this enlightened era we now live in.
REMEMBERING GENE WILDER (C) - This is a rather glum hagiography about the career of Gene Wilder, narrated in his monotone from beyond the grave, presumably from the audio version of his 2005 memoir. He was not only a great comic actor who peaked in the 1970s, but he went on to make his own movies and was also a published author.
But this unimaginative slog through his oeuvre leans heavy on the likes of Mel Brooks -- almost certainly spinning apocryphal, embellished tales of their time together, especially that great run of "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein -- and, for some reason, Harry Connick Jr. Other random folks who show up include Alan Alda, Richard Pryor's daughter, and Eric McCormack. Ben Mankiewicz puts on his serious glasses to play cinema historian for the guy who played Willy Wonka.
Wilder was intensely funny. The bar he set in "Young Frankenstein" will always be tough to clear for any actor. But it almost diminishes his contributions to have folks fawn over him as if he were some sort of saint. His relationship with Gilda Radner -- her cancer was diagnosed not long after they fell in love -- gets surprisingly short shrift, with a couple of backhanded digs at the former "SNL" star's troubles. Wilder's widow -- whom he met within a year of Radner's death -- dominates the second half of the film, which takes up Wilder's descent into dementia (in a Hallmark fashion). The man (and poor Gilda) deserves better.
BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (A-minus) - There they are, at the top of the ticket, a dream team: Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. You go into it thinking "Please don't screw this up." Thankfully, filmmaker Nathan Silver -- who has flown under our radar up until now -- delivers, along with his stars.
Schwartzman plays Ben, a depressed cantor who has lost his voice -- but not his job, because his two moms are big donors to the temple. He gets drunk (and slugged) at a dive bar. He lies prone in front of an oncoming truck (to no avail; it easily stops before it gets to him). By chance, he runs into his childhood music teacher, Carla (Kane), who decides to take his bat mitzvah class, along with a bunch of tweens, as a sly way of getting closer to him to look out for him.
What develops is a charming update of "Harold & Maude," featuring a quirky odd couple who develop an improbable but deep bond that helps heal each person's psychic wounds. No one is better at this than Schwartzman, the master of intellectual quirk, and Kane (TV's "Taxi" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"), who can find the humanity in any screwball character. The two of them make the screen ripple with joy and melancholy, as they blithely carry every minute of the nearly two-hour run time.
It's a little disconcerting to see Schwartzman -- the breakout youngster from "Rushmore" and then so many other Wes Anderson films and lo-fi indies -- start to descend into a chubby middle age. But that aging process, while it threatens to take the zip off his fastball, has the effect of wiping that smirk off his face and revealing another layer to his personality. Kane looks surprisingly youthful here, a cross between Ruth Gordon and Julie Delpy, a savvy mix of would-be cougar and mother hen. Their bond is ostensibly platonic, but it does intrude on others' efforts to set Ben up with the rabbi's daughter, Gabby (a vivacious Madeline Weinstein), whose healthy lust is too much for Ben to contemplate these days. (The rabbi is played by gagster Robert Smigel, who delivers one-liners with a low-key confidence.)
None of this would mean much if Silver didn't imbue it with smart humor and carefully layered characterizations. The whole production has the grittiness of a 1970s comic morality play, even copping the retro graphic styles for the opening credits (plus, see the soundtrack samples below). And the cast sinks its teeth into the clever dialogue, much of it subtle and deliciously Jewish. At one point Ben has to explain away the concepts of the afterlife: "In Judaism, we don't have heaven or hell; we just have upstate New York." Upon first meeting Carla, he tries to jog her memory, bragging that he got top grades. Her retort: "It's music class; everybody gets an A."
You can never be certain, right up until the end, if Ben will get his voice back (and if that matters), or if he seriously thinks he has more of a future with a woman decades his senior while passing up a romp with a randy younger woman. But the particulars of romantic possibilities are not really the point here. Toss aside your scorecard and let a movie by adults, for adults, carry you away with its nuanced storytelling.
BONUS TRACKS
The soundtrack adds to the '70s vibe with a bunch of folky throwbacks, many in Hebrew. They set a Lee Hazelwood mood. There are a couple by Arik Einstein, including "Hi Tavo (She Will Come)":
There is the glum "Wish I Was a Single Girl Again," from Tia Blake from 2008:
And this dusty from Buddy Gibson, "To Be or Not To Be":
THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE (B+) - Writer-direct Ilker Catak spins a fascinating story about small-stakes accusations and misunderstandings that consume a new teacher and the middle school staff and students around her. It's a small but compelling film that's tough to look away from.
Much of that comes from the star, Leonie Benesch, who plays the cool, caring Carla Nowak, an immigrant to Germany battling some cultural prejudices involving her and her students of color. The film begins with the administration's interrogation of Carla's seventh-grade class after a Turkish boy is seen carrying an unusual amount of money. Carla shows sympathy to her students and to the boy when his parents are called in for a tense conference with administrators.
It turns out another bright student, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), grabs the teacher's sympathies, especially after Carla, through surreptitious video surveillance from her laptop, apparently catches Oskar's mother, a staffer, of stealing in the teachers' lounge (she's not the only one nicking things). The mother is sent home on admin leave, and Oskar becomes a sort of folk hero among students. (The supporting cast of students is another asset, especially the rebellious student-newspaper staffers.) Carla's group conference with parents brims with tension.
Catak, writing the script with Johannes Duncker, has a compelling message to convey about "outsiders" and the passive-aggressive ways that closed social systems manipulate the truth and create sparring factions. At only a few ticks past 90 minutes, the film unspools its story methodically, showing a subtle transformation in Carla as she learns to navigate her new environment. (In a telling scene, she insist that a fellow Polish teacher speak German in the teachers' lounge.) The ending is heartfelt, with a whimsical final shot that suggests the dangers and rewards of bucking the system.
BONUS TRACK: Life Is Short
Screenings don't get more timely than "Mountains," a minor-key mini-drama about an immigrant couple getting by in Miami's Little Haiti community. If only this debut film had a little more chicken meat on its bones. Xavier and Esperance are a sweet couple, but the monotony of their days eking out a living in a gentrifying neighborhood is too often as dull as plain white rice.
You can tell their neighborhood is gentrifying not only by the "We buy houses" door-hangers but also by the presence of an improv theater. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) works on home-demolition sites, and Esperance (Sheila Anozier) earns money as a crossing guard when she's not at home cooking and sewing. Surrounded by increasing affluence, Xavier spots a nice house that's bigger than their rundown one-bathroom place, seeing an opportunity to move up on the social ladder. Their son, Junior (Chris Renois) a college-dropout is a typical Americanized young man who has little patience for his parents' boring traditional lifestyle.
We find out halfway through that Junior is honing a standup act at the improv theater. Director Monica Sorelle gives us little to glom onto narratively in the first half -- how many times can we watch Xavier clear debris (to make way for McMansions) or dutifully eat his lunch out of Tupperware. Nazaire has a Mike Tyson roughness and gruffness to him, but there is no real dimension to this stereotypically noble blue-collar man. Junior's standup set, about five minutes, shakes the film out of its stupor. But I just didn't have it in me to return to the worksite and find out if Xavier and Esperance get the chance to rise in the wake of the gentrifiers. Sorelle has crafted a sweet, quiet slice of life that floats in Haitian culture, but she needed more of a hook to hang a feature on.
Title: MOUNTAINS
Running Time: 96 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 50 MIN
Portion Watched: 52%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 9 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Went home and started in on this review.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 3-1 (maybe I'll catch the ending some day)
What is it with annoying mother-daughter movies this year? We stuck it out for the execrable "Tuesday" a few months ago. But we were not as patient with "Janet Planet," a tedious tale of maternal melancholy told through the perspective of the nerdy tween daughter, an obvious avatar of first-time filmmaker Annie Baker.
We waited a half hour for a plot to develop, and it just never materialized. When tween Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) went to a bread-and-puppet show with her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), and the hippie-dippy performance droned on for a minute or two, it was time to bail out. Before then, Baker was meticulously trying to craft a relationship between friendless Lacy and her depressed mother who is in a dead-end relationship with a monosyllabic cipher named Wayne. Janet likes to lie in bed with her daughter to help Lacy fall asleep, and it presents an opportunity for Janet to inappropriately whine about her unhappiness to an unhappy, though highly clever, girl.
Lacy dominates the first half hour, and there just is not enough narrative to sustain the film. Her best shot at having a friend comes when Wayne's daughter joins one of their outings, but it's obvious that Wayne will get the boot soon, and so too will go the daughter. We are forced to watch Lacy entertain herself with nerdy pursuits. For some reason we have to watch her practice the keyboards three separate times -- in extended sequences that grow more and more annoying. We also have to tolerate Lacy being annoying to Wayne when he is suffering from a migraine, and it's not clear whether he's supposed to be seen as a jerk for not wanting Lacy to keep pelting him with questions when it's obvious that she should know better.
Baker takes a molasses-like approach to her scenes, in no hurry to bring this in at much less than two hours. If I'm going to watch a mother and daughter mope around, it would be advisable to start developing the plot in the first 20 minutes or so. Otherwise, it's just your old '90s diary performed as rural hippie theater.
Title: JANET PLANET
Running Time: 113 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 30 MIN
Portion Watched: 27%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 9 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Talked politics with my movie pal who bailed with me.
MAXXXINE (B) - God bless movie star Mia Goth and writer-director Ti West for their commitment to their trilogy of retro horror films, a delightful mix of spoof and homage. Here, they take their story -- which began with "X," set in the 1970s -- into the day-glo '80s around the seedy San Fernando Valley's porn industry as Goth's lead character Maxine yearns to cross over into the respectability of Hollywood.
Goth is riveting again as the cut-throat striver who will do anything to be a movie star, even as the friends around her start falling victim to a serial killer stalking L.A. In "X," she survived a slaughter on a porn shoot at a Texas ranch, with a dual role as the murderous old lady in the farmhouse, whom Goth then portrayed in the heady prequel "Pearl," set during the 1918 flu pandemic. Now set in 1985, the story finds Goth running from her past -- not just that '70s bloodbath but also her strict Christian upbringing, which is brought into stark relief through a single opening flashback scene to her childhood.
West crafts the story around his meal ticket, and he has an uncanny ability to not only send up the thrillers of the '80s era, but also to steep this film in the texture and tropes of the movies of that Cinemax era. (The needle drops of hits by ZZ Top and Kim Carnes don't hurt.) He also has a facility with writing dialogue that also walks the line between authenticity and parody.
Goth (who also stole a few scenes in "Emma" a few years ago) carries this on her shoulders, with a placid facial expression that brings to mind the mask-like visage of Isabelle Huppert. While portraying characters (Maxine, as well as Pearl) who were desperate to be stars, Goth emerges from this sequel as a classic movie idol. She gets solid support from veterans Giancarlo Esposito (as her sly business manager); Elizabeth Debicki as the mother-hen horror-movie director; and Kevin Bacon as a creepy Cajun private eye, chewing up scenery as if he just got kicked off the set of "The Big Easy" for overacting.
I could watch West and Goth follow this saga for a few more decades. It's a lot of dumb, juicy fun.
BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) (B+) - It was an interesting experiment, revisiting this onetime indie phenomenon on its 25th anniversary screening, along with a full house full of 20- and 30-somethings at a midnight show. I was wondering how it would hold up and curious about how it would play to a generation steeped in the internet and social media.
I first watched this on video some months after it was released in summer 1999. It was notable at the time for a brilliant PR campaign that tried to dupe us -- in the early days of the internet -- into thinking that this found-footage film was real (going so far as to hide the three stars from the spotlight during the rollout at film festivals). That all now seems quaint looking back from our jaded media-saturated land of artificial intelligence.
I heard several millennials grumble their disappointment as the lights came up and the final credits rolled, and the woman in front of me spent much of the final climactic 20 minutes of the movie scrolling through her cell phone. I was able to appreciate a slow burn of a thriller with fresh eyes and an open mind. When I first saw it, the steadily building terror had me jangled, even though I knew that it wasn't a real documentary.
This time, I was surprised to see how methodically -- and often blandly -- the suspense builds. And I was impressed by the three actors -- alpha female Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard (the only one to go on to have a decent acting career, including in "Humpday" and "Fully Realized Humans") -- who mostly improvised the dialogue and who wielded the handheld cameras, a key visual effect throughout the film.
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez conceived the movie and directed it and even edited it. The banality of three young adults getting lost in the woods, spooked by some strange but not necessarily scary sounds, dominates the running time until really the final 10 minutes when everything bursts into full-on horror. That includes the now-iconic scene of Donahue, snot running out of her nose, doing a video-selfie, her character apologizing on camera to the group's parents for her role in stranding the trio, and the final image before the cut to black.
It is difficult to reconcile the experience of 1999 with that of 2024, but you can still say that "Blair Witch" is a successful horror film, that can jangle your nerves even after multiple viewings.
BONUS TRACKS
"Maxxxine's" soundtrack blasts through era hits from New Order and Judas Priest, plus Animotion's synth earworm "Obsession":
And near the climax we are treated to Carol Burnett, of all people, belting out "There's No Business Like Show Business." (One character during the film reminds Maxine of the cutthroat nature of the industry: "It's not called show friends; it's called show business."
HIT MAN (B) - Every generation gets the Brad Pitt it deserves. Glen Powell is an engaging actor, easy to look at, and he has just enough charisma to carry a movie. Here, the star of last winter's guilty pleasure "Anyone But You" re-teams with indie darling Richard Linklater ("Everybody Wants Some") for this based-on-a-true-story tale of a nerdy college professor moonlighting with the police department as a fake hit man.
Problems arise when Powell's Gary Johnson goes rogue and falls for the sexy divorcee (Adria Arjona) whom he had previously talked out of hiring him to kill her estranged husband. He stays in character as the brawny tough guy while secretly dating her, but then his police colleagues get suspicious after the woman's ex ends up shot to death. It's a clever narrative (Linklater and Powell co-wrote it), and Linklater, settling into middle age, is content to create something that's good enough for Netflix.
It's too long, at just under two hours, but Powell and a strong supporting cast manage to inject this with enough zing to make it to the finish line. Arjona is not just another pretty face; she has a good feel for verbal and physical comedy. Retta is underused as a sassy, sarcastic detective. Austin Amelio is sharp as the grungy detective who has gotten pushed aside by Gary's rising stardom as the hunky fake hit man.
You can't ask for much more from an actiony romantic comedy, even if the final 20 minutes limp to a preposterous ending. Powell takes his shirt off a lot -- what philosophy isn't that ripped? -- and he and Arjona look good simulating R-rated sex. There is surprisingly little violence, which is refreshing. Powell and Linklater had to embellish the real Gary Johnson's story in order to attempt an entertaining twist in the final reel, and that elevates this to a pretty good date-night film.
BURN AFTER READING (2008) (A-minus) -- A wonderful cast sinks its teeth into this mid-career Coen brothers romp about a couple of goofballs from a local gym getting swept into international intrigue after a CD full of classified information falls into their hands. This expertly paced farce might make you nostalgic for the days in which truly talented filmmakers -- Joel and Ethan Coen -- showed a mastery of making a movie, from beginning to end.
Frances McDormand steals the show as Linda Litzke, an average-looking middle-aged woman eager to raise money for enough plastic surgery to make her appear youthful again. Brad Pitt hams it up as Chad, the air-head personal trainer who schemes with Linda to blackmail the spook whose secrets spilled out. That spy -- actually fired by the CIA in the opening scene -- is Osborne Cox, played with juicy style by John Malkovich, whose powerful performance right from the opening scene also reminds you of a meatier era of movies.
What a cast they lead. George Clooney, actually a little flat here as a federal marshal, having an affair with Cox's wife, played by Tilda Swinton, before also falling into bed with Linda. Richard Jenkins as the gym owner who pines for his employee Linda. J.K. Simmons plays a CIA superior, and let's give a shout-out to character actor Jeffrey DeMunn who steals scenes from McDormand as her plastic surgeon.
The Coens weave an airtight plot that continues to fold onto itself, they set off a gun at just the right moment, and they generally get out of the way of their actors. A few of them can be just a little too cartoonish -- Pitt especially, though he's charming as ever -- and those indulgences might bother some viewers. This is a fun diversion sandwiched in the brothers' catalog between their masterpieces "No Country for Old Men" and "A Serious Man."
BONUS TRACK
From the closing credits of "Burn After Reading," the Fugs with "CIA Man":
DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE (B+) - If I ever live to see the day when we don't have anything resembling "cinema" anymore, I'll think of this head-spinning vulgar gag-fest masquerading in super-hero body suits. That applies to the death of movies either literally or figuratively.
You would be wise to be wary of a third entry in the "Deadpool" series. I farmed out the first one to a fan of Marvel movies, though I did go back to view it myself to prepare for the sequel, in 2018. Choose any excerpt from that 2018 review, and it would apply to this latest one, which teams Ryan Reynolds in the title role with Hugh Jackman's reanimated Wolverine from the X-Men series. For example: "Reynolds besieges the viewer with randy one-liners, fleeting pop-culture references, and obscure Marvel call-backs (and loopy call-backs to call-backs)." Check.
This movie is more self-aware than Deepak Chopra. It doesn't break
the fourth wall so much as bulldoze through it; Reynolds does it so
powerfully you might expect someone to yell out, "Hey, Kool-Aid!" The
references fly by at warp speed. Even if you are not an obsessive Marvel
nerd or a subscriber to the paper edition of Variety, you can still
enjoy the random lines you manage to catch in this blizzard of
pop-culture references. It's easy to succumb to the shotgun approach to
screenwriting. The words pelt you as much as the CGI weapons do. It's an
endearingly funny form of entertainment.
Reynolds and crew up the ante here in two ways. First, the script is riddled with not just puerile humor but hyperactive homo-erotica that devolves into multiple anal-rape jokes. Second, the snarky asides to the camera wink not only at the Marvel universe but also to the movie studios and backroom shenanigans that resulted in Disney gobbling up Fox's studio assets since the last film hoovered up bajillions at the box office. (Someone counted, and there are five such references.) Uncle Walt must be proud. (Seriously, he seemed like one dark dude who would appreciate a good butt-fucking joke.) Also, a lot of guys get gored in the crotch by Wolverine's claws, for good measure.
It's all as bleak as it is relentlessly aiming to be hilarious. Maybe one day we'll look back on 2024 when there was an endless budget for the third film in a super-hero series, you hired five writers (including Reynolds and director Shawn Levy), you snapped your fingers and people like Channing Tatum and Jennifer Garner show up in glorified cameos, you can charge $19 for a ticket to a standard screening, you mock the former studio by half-burying its memorable logo in a scene of post-apocalyptic devastation (CGI, of course), you blow up stuff for fun, you stuff scores of people in Deadpool costumes just for fun (were some CGI?), money is no object when it comes to song rights, and you can mock the whole production process in every other scene with self-referential disdain. What an embarrassment of riches now, and in the future when we fondly look back because we are so desperate to suppress the reality of the mid-century water wars.
But darn it, it's still 2024, and we have the luxury of spending our disposable income on frivolous guilty pleasures. And Ryan Reynolds is a classic movie star. He's so winkingly Canadian that you just want to wag your finger at him and pinch his cheeks. So naughty, this one. Reynolds even pulls double duty as a de-aged Fabio-like alternative-universe nice-guy Deadpool (actually called Nicepool), all young and handsome, fond of French kissing his mop of a little dog and in need of a cult de-programming. Deadpool's geeky alter-ego, Wade Wilson, is a welcome wake-up call, as he cuts a little too sharply with his working-class satire of us wage slaves.
Jackman gives as good as he takes as Wolverine, who gets pulled out of a bar for this latest mission to save the world. Jon Favreau is wonderfully deadpan in a set-up scene that informs the audience that Robert Downey Jr. won't be showing up as Iron Man. His banter with Reynolds is the best of the movie.
The jokes are so plentiful that the writers -- like Major League ballplayers these days -- need only hit about .230 to be considered successful. Reynolds and Leslie Uggams go toe-to-toe rattling off euphemisms for cocaine -- Forrest Bump, White Girl Interrupted -- as if they were actually fighting over the dregs of an eight-ball. Deadpool likes to refer to a lie as "an educated wish." He accuses a sloshed Wolverine of having "whiskey-dick of the claws." He tells Blind Al (Uggams): "If you could hear the look on my face, you'd smell how sad I am." And when Wolverine is tired of Deadpool's verbal diarrhea and, in a menacing tone, dares Deadpool to utter just one more word, the boy wonder pauses and eventually complies: "Gubernatorial."
Yes, it's all such mindless fun. I will say, though, whatever ketamine-fueled algorithm that spat out the final script has a pretty heavy third-act moment of true bonding up its sleeve. There is actually a method to this madness, and Reynolds and Jackman certainly know how to work an audience.
So what's a couple hundred million in service of providing an air-conditioned refuge from the high-desert heat in August? So what if the billion dollars in profit will get plowed back into a four-qel or reduced to powder form and snorted off various parts of bodies lolling around Ibiza. Whatever balm you need to face down our modern existential threats as we peer over the edge into the Void ...
BONUS TRACKS
The meta mania builds to such a frenzy that it comes out the other side, and the use of Madonna's "Like a Prayer" is not only appropriate to the climax but it is somehow emotionally effective:
And what's a bar scene without some pure-grain Patsy Cline sloshing through "You Belong to Me":
The Guild Cinema's annual Festival of Film Noir returned, on schedule, during the dog days of summer, curated by archivist Peter Conheim, who founded the festival 20 years ago and was responsible this year for many of the restored prints projected in 35mm.
GUILTY BYSTANDER (1950) (B+) - Zachary Scott gives a knockout performance as an alcoholic ex-cop recruited by his estranged wife to sober up and hunt for their kidnapped toddler.
When we first see Scott's character, Max Thursday, he's face down sleeping off a drunk in the fleabag flophouse he slums in, run by a hardened old gal named Smitty (Mary Boland). Georgia (Faye Emerson) pleads with him to put down the bottle and look for their disappeared son. Max sobers up the best he can -- he'll still do shots if it lubricates his investigation -- and, as he navigates New York's seedy underworld, he ends up falling for a dame who works in a club. Angel is played with outer-borough bravado by Kay Medford, the veteran comic who would go on to success in TV with "The Dean Martin Show" and a few memorable turns on "Barney Miller." Here, she steals the movie, playing it a little saucy and a little sexy.
Scott handles a little action and physical comedy well, and Joseph Lerner's camera lurks furtively around New York's mob scene, finding particular glee in the underground lair of a somnolent creep named Varkas, played perfectly by J. Edward Bromberg. When the reveal comes at the end, it is smart and well earned.
SPOTTED: A few well-traveled character actors: Dennis Patrick from "Dark Shadows" and dozens of other TV dramas. ... Jesse White, who was the original Maytag Repairman in TV commercials starting in 1967, seen here hitting on Medford's Angel at a bar. ... And Maurice Gosfield, who memorably portrayed Pvt. Doberman on "The Phil Silvers Show" in the '50s, in a five-second cameo as a bridge guard.
THE BLACK VAMPIRE (1953) (A) - The best of the fest was this visual masterpiece about a lonely loser who goes on a spree killing little girls, earning him the nickname the Black Vampire. It was inspired by Fritz Lang's classic "M."
When we first see mild-mannered language professor Dr. Ulber (Nathan Pinzon), we are alerted by the scream of cabaret performer Amalia, aka Rita (Olga Zubarry), who spots his figure stuffing a dead girl's body down a manhole. Ulber is portrayed as a mentally ill psychopath who can't help himself, and his lust for the blood of little girls as he stalks the streets of Buenos Aires earns him the nickname the el vampiro negro.
Director Roman Vinoly Barreto bookends this luscious black-and-white film with courtroom scenes as Ulber's case is about to go to the jury. In between, the director's camera explores the grimier side (and literally the sewer system) of the Argentine capital, roping in the homeless population as a Greek chorus. He also luxuriates in Amalia/Rita's joint, which is populated by willing escorts and run by the sketchy Gaston (Pascual Pelliciota), whose drug running will catch up to him by the final reel.
Plot aside, it is the visuals by Vinoly Barreto, assisted by cinematographer Anibal Gonzalez Paz, that are breathtaking. Shot after shot has the beauty and composition of a painting -- the angles arch, the lighting just so. Watching this on the big screen, in its restored glory, was a sumptuous feast.
SPOTTED: C'mon. It's Argentinian noir. It's not like any of them ended up on "Adam 12" or anything. The final girl featured at the end, playing Rita's daughter, is nicknamed Gogo, and she is the daughter of the director.
THE SLEEPING TIGER (1954) (B) - Joseph Losey directs this lead-footed but interesting suspense film about a common criminal infiltrating the home and marriage of a couple who have long fallen out of love. Dr. Clive Esmond (Alexander Knox) is determined to rehabilitate the petty criminal Frank Clemmons (Dirk Bogarde) by inviting the young thug into his home, to the horror of Dr. Esmond's maid but the secret delight of his wife, Glenda (Alexis Smith).
It doesn't take too many horse-riding jaunts with Frank for Glenda to eventually fall into the bad boy's arms. But Dr. Esmond is seemingly oblivious to the shenanigans, because he believes he can get to the bottom of Frank's sociopathic ways. Here's a hint: It has something to do with his childhood, in particular his mom. (The doctor might as well have a copy of Freud for Dummies on the vaunted bookshelf in his home office.)
But Frank can't give up his thieving ways or his affinity for a racy jazz club populated by all of his shady friends who like to engage in dirty dancing to the sweaty rhythms. Dr. Esmond soon coddles Frank to the point of paying off the police to clear Frank of assault charges against the maid -- which only emboldens Frank.
This all builds to a fevered pitch and an inevitable tragedy. Blacklisted director Joseph Losey ("The Big Night," "The Concrete Jungle"), working in exile in Europe, could have tightened this up by 5 or 10 minutes, but he does a workmanlike job of shepherding the story, which grows on you like a clever potboiler should.
SPOTTED: No surreptitious ringers in this British drama, but I'll note that the North American Alexis Smith was featured as a pin-up during WWII in a GI mag called -- and I'm not making this up -- Yank.
STARK FEAR (1962) (C) - Even a powerful performance by Beverly Garland can't fully make sense of this dense, sloppy barn-burner that wallows too much in creepy misogyny. Cruel men are portrayed as caricatures in a skewed attempt at dark humor to counteract the intrigue.
Garland, beloved from my childhood as the stepmother in TV's "My Three Sons," brings depth to the character of Ellen Winslow, who yearns to break free from her horrible marriage. Ellen gets caught between her husband, Gerald (Skip Homeier), and Gerald's old business rival, Cliff Kane (Kenneth Tobey), whom Ellen has gone to work for as a secretary. The hubby disappears, and Ellen starts falling for Cliff.
The plot gets twisted in on itself, but this oddity from 1962 has snippets of prescient moments as a pop culture artifact. There is the sassy single galpal (Hannah Stone) and a tacked-on buildup to a rom-com rush to the airport -- beta rumblings of the genre's tropes to come. This all doesn't really add up, and the misogyny actually devolves into sexual assault at one point, but Garland carries it to the finish line with her sheer charisma.
SPOTTED: Tobey, who made a living out of playing sheriffs, wardens and judges, had a long career spanning from "It Came From Beneath the Sea" in 1955 to "Big Top Pee-Wee" in 1988. ... And this was one of the first "composer" credits for the legend John Williams ("Star Wars," "Superman" etal.), credited here as Johnny Williams, creator of the "party music."
BREATHLESS (1983) (B+) - Richard Gere can do no wrong in this cynical remake of the Jean-Luc Godard classic. Valerie Kaprisky pouts like a classic dame, and the two of them sizzle with Cinemax sexuality in this tale of a pretty-boy cop-killer hopelessly on the lam in grimy post-punk Los Angeles.
This re-imagining of the 1960 touchstone reunited L.M. Kit Carson (writer) and Jim McBride (writer-director) from "David Holzman's Diary." This was McBride's mainstream breakthrough -- he would go on to direct "The Big Easy" and "Great Balls of Fire" with Dennis Quaid. Here they craft a jangly script with an improv feel, delivering a well-turned one-liner at every key moment.
Gere's Jesse hunts down Kaprisky's Monica in L.A. hoping to rekindle a recent affair in Las Vegas. Problem is, he shot a highway patrolman while speeding through the western night (with a devil-red sky) in a stolen sports car. Or is that a problem? Monica, darn it, just can't keep herself from getting entangled with Jesse. Their naked interludes tell you all you need to know about why she can't quit the goofy hunk. (I kept imagining her saying at every key turn, "I really shouldn't, but ..."; she doesn't do that, but she does serve as a prime model for Maria de Medeiros' Fabienne in "Pulp Fiction.")
McBride lets Gere riff as Jesse spirals out of control. The soundtrack bangs out of the gate with Jerry Lee Lewis' "Breathless," and it roams from rootsy romps from Link Wray and Joe "King" Carrasco ("Caca de Vaca") to modern hits (as featured below). Kaprisky is a little shaky at first, and her accent is heavy, but she settles in eventually and gamely goes along for the ride (literally, in a series of flashy stolen cars). A cache of solid character actors (like Art Metrano, Henry G. Sanders and John P. Ryan) ground this as a foundational L.A. noir. And its freeze-frame ending is one for the ages.
SPOTTED: Hack comedy writer Bruce Vilanch as "Man With Purse" getting mugged in a bathroom by Jesse.
BONUS TRACKS
After the haunting opening scenes in "The Black Vampire," police sirens fade into the soft wail of a saxophone in this sequence full of arresting images and a gorgeous song:
The serial killer in "Vampire" reflexively whistles a familiar tune throughout the film. It is "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, a sly callback to "M":
"Breathless" rocks Godard's new wave with a new-wave music soundtrack. A climactic chase scene plays out to Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders vamping with "Message of Love":
And the memorable remake of the title track, over the closing credits, from X:
A couple of fairly obscure offerings from the Carter era.
BETWEEN THE LINES (1977) (A) - This is a dream cast that really only works if you wait a few decades and go back in time. Beyond that, it is a compelling ensemble work about a scrappy alt-weekly in Boston fearing a corporate takeover.
This is the film debut of John Heard, who stars as bad-boy reporter Harry Lucas, who has an on-again, off-again thing with photographer colleague Abbie (Lindsay Crouse, coming off "Slap Shot"). Heard carries the movie like an old pro, and he is surrounded by a lot of young actors, many in their first substantive role -- Jeff Goldblum (below) as trippy-dippy Max; Jill Eikenberry (below) (TV's "L.A. Law") as mousy office receptionist Lynn; Bruno Kirby ("Godfather II," "When Harry Met Sally") as the eager cub reporter David; Gwen Welles ("Nashville") as Laura, the neglected girlfriend of arrogant writer Michael (Stephen Collins from TV's "7th Heaven"); quirky Michael J. Pollard ("Bonnie and Clyde") as the street vendor; and a tart Marilu Henner as a stripper who gets interviewed by David and Abbie.
Joan Micklin Silver, who mixed TV movies of that era with films such as "Hester Street" and "Crossing Delancey," mother-hens this bright-eyed group of fantastic actors, doing justice to a smart script by newsroom veteran Fred Barron (with an assist from David Helpern), who would go on to work on such varied projects as "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts." Barron and Micklin Silver get just right the loosey-goosey feel of an upstart publication in the post-Watergate era, often populated with young, stoned, horny idealists who want to be the next ones to bring down the system. They get so many of the details of a news operation just right.
Little did they and the filmmakers know that they were actually on the brink of the great '80s heyday of the bulky ad-stuffed alt-weekly. But getting bought out by a rich asshole is never fun for a journalist, and the ensemble cast here plays off each other effortlessly, tossing around sharp banter, even in the scenes when they are not trying to get into each others' pants.
Micklin Silver shows an almost Altman-like command of the chaos at work here. And it's just pure joy to see hungry young actors -- led by Goldblum, Heard and Crouse -- riffing with each other, on the brink of, what seems in retrospect, the darkness before the dawn of a new era of cinema coming out of the American New Wave.
OLD BOYFRIENDS (1979) (C) - The only big-screen feature film directed by noted screenwriter Joan Tewksbury ("Nashville") stars Talia Shire as a psychiatrist who, "Broken Flowers"-style, hunts down her ex-lovers in order to analyze those failed relationships. Unfortunately it plays like a series of missed opportunities. And surprisingly, it's a limp script from Paul Schrader (and his brother Leonard) during his pulp heyday, in between "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull."
Shire is perfectly fine doing her usual mousy mope routine, but she just doesn't have the charisma to carry a movie. She plays Dianne Cruise, who had a painful break with her husband, and now delves into the past, with unexceptional results. She first tracks down the one who got away, college beau Jeff (Richard Jordan), a documentary filmmaker. She re-seduces Jeff and leads him to believe that there is a long-term possibility, only to dump him (and his adolescent daughter) abruptly and head back to Minnesota, where she pretty much does the same to the guy who humiliated her in high school, Eric (John Belushi), who sells formal wear and fronts a cheesy pop group. Belushi has totally the wrong tone for a movie like this, and you have to wonder if he would have had much of a career had he lived.
Dianne then goes further back in time to seek out her first boyfriend but only finds his lookalike brother, Wayne (Keith Carradine), who tells her that his brother died in Vietnam. That doesn't stop Dianne from toying with emotionally traumatized Wayne, to the point that she gets a lecture from his psychiatrist, played by a hammy John Houseman. Meantime, Jeff, the first guy, is intent on tracking Dianne down (employing a private eye played with deadpan amusement by Buck Henry).
There's definitely something going on here, but it's probably the episodic nature of the film that kills the momentum every 30 minutes. And while Dianne is an unlikable vigilante, it would be easier to identify with such an anti-hero if her motivations made more sense. Tewksbury's direction is uninspired -- she's fond of obtuse mirror reflections -- and this all limps to a rather bland Hallmark ending.
Roger Ebert used to write about the "idiot plot." Leave it to the Swedes to perfect it to the point of having every scene be an idiot scene. Movies don't come more frustrating than "Mother, Couch," which we really tried to hang in there with, but just could not make it to the end. (And probably a good thing, too. This review -- in an idiot move -- essentially gives away the ending. I would not have liked it.)
"Mother, Couch" clangs at the wrong tone from the start, as David (Ewan McGregor) is stress-walking across the parking lot of a furniture emporium, in which his mother (Ellen Burstyn) has parked herself on a couch, determined not to budge, for some unknown reason. The rest of the film involves the ridiculous idea that it's impossible to get David's mother to end her encampment. The viewer is also hard-pressed to care about why she's there and why David is beside himself over this development.
Also on hand are Rhys Ifans as David's blase brother Gruffud and their chain-smoking sister Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle, looking mummified), who is never told to stop lighting up in the store by the owner's daughter, Bella (Taylor Russell) or the eccentric owner and his twin (both played by F. Murray Abraham, in an embarrassing performance). Bella, young and cute, exists solely to flirt with middle-aged David, who is also harried because of the strains of his crumbling marriage to Anne (Lake Bell), who, in several idiot scenes, calls David on the store's landline instead of his cell, just so Russell has something to do besides stand their and look pretty.
The absurdism is tuned to 11, but the plot development never makes it out of the low single digits. This is the type of infuriating movie in which characters cannot give simple, straightforward answers to questions like normal people would, else the obvious would burst this artificial bubble. I walked out when David calls 911, and when asked to state his emergency, he keeps stammering. Try just saying, "I dropped my mom; here's the address; please come tend to her."
This is supposed to be a thinker about how our parents create obstacles and hold us down, even as we stumble into middle age. Instead, it's about annoying jerks -- Burstyn's pissy mother especially -- who don't have the sense to either let the old lady rot on the couch or simply each take an arm and a leg and not drop the old crank. I really wanted something interesting to happen and was kind of curious how it would turn out. Good thing I didn't stick around for the magical realism.
Title: MOTHER, COUCH
Running Time: 96 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 70 MIN
Portion Watched: 73%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 9 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Went home and started this review.
MUBI had some short films that were going to leave the platform by the end of July, so we lined up a few, all of them, coincidentally, focused on children.
LICK THE STAR (1998) (B) - This is a trifle with training wheels from a young Sofia Coppola, who embeds among junior-high girls in all their hormonal cattiness.
She would put it all together quickly the following year with her feature debut, "The Virgin Suicides." Here she mixes in some ringers with actual students to tell the story of the rise and fall of an alpha female who leads a group of girls intent on poisoning the boys at their school. The code name "lick the star" is roughly a reverse of "kill the rats," and rat poison is the tool the girls plan to use.
Coppola creates that lethargic mood that she would make her calling card, a Southern California ennui that is still milked effectively to this day by the likes of Lana Del Rey. Daddy springs for the rights to some cool alternative chick music (like the Go-Go's, Free Kitten and Kim Deal's the Amps. In a mere 14 minutes, Coppola creates a neat story arc and a thoughtful rumination on adolescence.
THE NEST (B+) - The intense Hlynur Palmason ("A White White Day," "Godland") spins a spare tale of siblings building a clubhouse over the course of a year. While respect is given to the harsh change of seasons, Plamason retains a sense of frivolity.
He sets his camera firmly in one place, as if he were planning to show us a time-lapse video from beginning to end. But he chops it up, with few scenes lasting more than 30 seconds in this 22-minute short. There is hardly any dialogue, much of it incidental. We see the structure grow from a simple pole out in the middle of nowhere into a sophisticated elevated play area.
The kids are mischievous, at one point showing how fun it is to let a big heavy disc, like a manhole cover, drop down and wedge sideways into the soil. Tragedy hits when one of the kids -- they usually are irresponsibly unsupervised, like the old days -- plummets to the ground like that disc. The subsequent scenes are reduced to two of the children, and Palmason makes you wonder if the third survived or will ever return. In the end, this is a spirited peek into the innocence of childhood and the joy of invention and play.
TUESDAY (2016) (B-minus) - Not to be confused with the recent dud starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, this short spends 11 minutes with a 16-year-old girl coping with a loss. It's from Charlotte Wells, who splashed magnificently in 2022 with her full-length debut "Aftersun."
It's difficult to talk about the plot without divulging too much. The first half of the film involves Allie (xx) going about the mundane tasks of her day, nagged and annoyed by family and friends. She is eager to get to her father's house, where she is scheduled to spend the night. What we find out when she gets there is quite moving, in part because the heaviness of the situation is referred to only obliquely. It's really not more than a germ of an idea, though, more of a film exercise than a fully realized film. It serves to set the table nicely for "Aftersun," sharing with it the nuances, happy and sad, found in the father-daughter relationship.
BONUS TRACKS
It's Tammy & the Ampersands with Tipp City, the kickoff song in "Lick the Star":
