Doc Watch: Appetite for Deconstruction

 

STRIPPED FOR PARTS: AMERICAN JOURNALISM ON THE BRINK (B) - There are multiple reasons for the decline of journalism in America -- specifically the ongoing demise of the metro daily newspaper -- but one recent bomb in the beehive involves hedge funds and the campaign to pillage individual newsrooms into extinction. This still-unreleased polemic focuses on one in particular -- Alden Global Capital, which has done its best in the past decade to destroy the Denver Post, along with the Chicago Tribune and its sister publications around the country.

 

The Media and Democracy Project -- and the director of the film, Rick Goldsmith, who was a producer on a documentary about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers -- gather veteran journalists in the trenches to chronicle their struggles and peel back some layers of mystery that surround the rapacious men behind Alden Global. The film could have gotten distracted -- by other bugaboos, like general corporate greed and the decision early on to give content away free on the burgeoning internet -- but Goldsmith is like a dog with a bone as he digs into the devious ways of Alden Global, led by investigative reporter Julie Reynolds, whose dogged investigative work has exposed the hedge funders to be the vultures that they are.

Goldsmith bookends his piece with Greg Moore, the editor who refused to gut the Denver Post. He leans on Dave Krieger, who rebelled at the Boulder Daily Camera, whose Ted Talk is quoted from here. He visits with the staff of veteran-staffed online upstarts like the Colorado Sun and the Baltimore Banner. He profiles the next generation of journalists still giving mainstream publications a fighting chance (and dodging ubiquitous layoffs), like Elizabeth Hernandez at the Post.

Some of this can get quite dewy-eyed and nostalgic (we get the requisite reference to the lovable cliche, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out"), and a younger generation might wonder what the fuss is about. But this is a measured but urgent warning that journalism as we used to know it may be gone forever.

STAND BY FOR FAILURE (Incomplete) - We made it through two-thirds of this 90-minute documentary chronicling the anti-capitalist experimental provocateurs from the Bay Area, who peaked in notoriety in the '90s when they named an album "U2" in huge type on the cover and got sued by Bono and the boys.

 

Negativland was known for its cutting-edge use of electronics, noise experiments, and subterfuge of the copyright system by pirating material from Disney and others. The problem with this documentary is that it often replicates the grating nature of the group's work -- and thus becomes difficult to watch. Most grating is David Wills, whom we see throughout his career and up to the present day, and his various noise wonkery. His presence can be a serious test of patience.

This is the work of Ryan Worsley, who previously collaborated with Negativland member Don Joyce, the alternative DJ at KPFA radio out of Berkeley, Calif., who conspired with the other members to pioneer "culture jamming" in the 1980s. The film is essentially a chronological home movie highlighting the greatest hits -- from the U2 incident to the audacious co-opting of the Little Mermaid and the airing of Casey Kasem's foul-mouthed outtakes.

Besides these familiar touchstones, we are treated to obscure archival material from a bunch of nerds who rarely passed up an opportunity to videotape their most mundane antics. An hour certainly was enough. It is unfortunate that Worsley felt the need to mirror the group's avant-garde style; there is no shame in using a conventional narrative structure to convince an audience to appreciate this unconventional gang.

Bringing It All Back Home

 We needed a reset after the disappointing biopic "A Complete Unknown," so we went back to the archives for the two definitive documentaries about Bob Dylan.

 

DON'T LOOK BACK (1967) (A) - In retrospect, it seems like D.A. Pennebaker, in following Bob Dylan on his London tour in 1965, was capturing a seismic pop culture moment in groundbreaking fly-on-the-wall fashion. The opening scene alone -- Dylan stands in the street shuffling through cheeky cue-cards while his current hit "Subterranean Homesick Blues" plays in full -- could be considered one of the first music videos.

 

Otherwise, a year after Beatlemania overwhelmed the United States, Dylan returns the favor as the pop-folk darling who is inscrutable to the stuffy, traditional British press. Dylan appears to be stoned or on speed (or both) most of the time as he toys with anyone who crosses his path, clearly chafing at the ideas that he was a folk savior or the voice of a generation of emerging war protesters. He is cocky, annoying and deliberately provocative, a chain-smoking egomaniacal punk. His verbal jujitsu with an older Time magazine reporter is particularly rude and vicious in its psychodelic Socratic faux philosophy. (When the reporter asks whether Dylan actually cares about what he's saying, Dylan takes high umbrage: "How could I answer that if you've got the nerve to ask me that?!" -- before absurdly comparing his singing talent to that of Enrico Caruso.) He is also whimsical and mischievous at times.

Dylan also is toweringly talented and bursting with ideas; Pennebaker's camera watches patiently as Dylan pounds away at his typewriter (while Joan Baez strums and sings in his hotel room), obsessed with corralling the words firehosing through and out of him at the time. He seems genuinely miffed that a new bloke on the scene, Donovan, is also getting ink in the local British papers during Dylan's visit. A bit like Muhammad Ali at the time, Dylan relishes the idea of toying with a foe, a pretender, and when they meet on Dylan's turf and Donovan plays a perfectly bland "To Sing for You," Dylan observes, oozing calculation and judgment. With unmasked condescension, Dylan says, "Hey, that's a good song, man" -- and then grabs the guitar and unleashes "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," leering knowingly at his audience, and if there had been a referee in the room he would have stepped in and escorted a bloodied Donovan back to his corner. You could half-expect the black-and-white footage to explode into color, such is the contrast.

Elsewhere, Pennebaker simply tags along, sitting in the back of cars with the pop idol as fans clamor for his attention. He sits in as manager Albert Grossman wheedles with an agent as they finagle a well-paying TV gig over the phone. The climax that Pennebaker builds to is Dylan performing -- solo, acoustic -- at Royal Albert Hall, a medley of iconic numbers that seem second-nature now but which were groundbreaking back then. (A reporter marvels at the moment when "a poet and not a pop singer fills a hall.") Every scene in the movie feels like essential footage documenting a tipping point in Sixties culture.

NO DIRECTION HOME (2005) (A-minus) - Martin Scorsese curates this extended "American Masters" master-class, which gets Dylan, then in his early 60s, to sit down for a straight interview without gimmicks or fictions. And so Scorsese assembles a vast amount of footage and curates a fascinating 3.5-hour deep dive into Dylan's formative years.

Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen, a producer here, conducted the interviews with Dylan and others, including Joan Baez, poet Allen Ginsberg, fellow Greenwich Village folkies Dave Van Ronk and Maria Muldaur (particularly insightful), and former girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Rosen and Scorsese dig out recordings from Minnesota, before Robert Zimmerman set out for New York City to conquer the world. 

It's all a fascinating collage. The through-line narratively is Dylan's epic 1966 appearance in England when he went electric (also shot, a year after "Don't Look Back," by D.A. Pennebaker), including restored footage (and audio) of the moment a fan called Dylan Judas for going electric and playing with The Band. Never-before-seen nuggets include Dylan's screen test for an Andy Warhol film.

Incredibly, Dylan, around age 60, is cogent and coherent during his interview and doesn't seem to be playing games -- unlike just about every other interview with him you've ever seen. It's a quaint contrast with the brash young provocateur from 40 years earlier. During the first five years of his career, the man was prolific, and his growth was exponential. There was a swirl of energy around him, and this retrospective captures that half decade and chips away at the enigma that took hold then.

BONUS TRACKS

Dylan and Baez jamming and harmonizing together in an outtake from "Don't Look Back":

 

A highlight of "Don't Look Back" is an urgent version of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." Here is the full studio version:

 

Dylan later used some of Pennebaker's footage as visual elements in the haunting 1991 bootleg release "A Series of Dreams":

Follow the Money

 

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (C) - I'm hard-pressed to come up with a more inconsequential movie than this whimsical curiosity, which tells an odd story about Iranians but sets the action in Winnipeg in winter. It's a series of mildly amusing vignettes stretched out to feature length.

 

I would recount the plot, but I couldn't figure it out -- or decipher whether there actually was a plot. Wikipedia describes it as a film that "blends the seemingly unrelated stories of Negin and Nazgol, two kids who find money frozen in ice and try to claim it; Massoud, a tour guide in Winnipeg who is leading a confused and disoriented tour group; and Matthew (director Matthew Rankin), who quits his unfulfilling job with the seceded federal government of Quebec and travels home to Winnipeg to visit his mother."

There are a lot of turkeys that show up throughout. Sight gags that are as light as air float by and dissipate; it's difficult to remember most of them just hours after having seen the movie. Matthew confronts a rival who has taken his place in his mother's favors. Everything here is deadpan and quaint. It's as effervescent as a Sprite, with about as many calories. It's Guy Maddin meets Jim Jarmusch, but drained of any special quirk and rendered in Persian (and French), for good measure. This one went over and around my head.

WIDOWS (2018) (B-minus) - This female revenge flick has both a ridiculous premise and trite screenwriting, but it is entertaining enough to get you to stick around and see if these gals can pull off a big heist.

Viola Davis leads an overstuffed cast as Veronica, who joins forces with the other widows who all lost their husbands in a robbery gone awry in order to pull off a $5 million job that Veronica's husband had been planning before the men died. A parallel story line involves Colin Farrell as Jack Mulligan, a Chicago-Irish ward pol running for election to the seat held for years by his machine-veteran father (a feisty Robert Duvall) against a black preacher, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning has a vicious brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya, truly menacing), who is tasked with collecting a multimillion-dollar debt owed by Veronica's husband (Liam Neeson). (Yeah, that's a lot of above-the-title names. Jacki Weaver has a cameo too.)

The improbable set-up is strained further by the paint-by-numbers script, the hack-work of Gillian Flynn ("Gone Girl") and director Steve McQueen ("20 Years a Slave," "Small Axe"). And you may never see a movie that is set in Chicago look and feel so unlike Chicago. The cinematography is antiseptic and the accents and phrasing are random. Farrell, especially, has a tin ear for next-gen Irish pol-speak.

The various story lines are trite -- toxic masculinity; women dependent on the ill-gotten gains of thugs; an average person instantly transforming into a fearless criminal mastermind; and a marriage strained by the tragic death of a son. I was able to predict the maddeningly unoriginal dialogue with uncanny accuracy. The stakes of a local election can't support a convincing narrative. A key plot twist at the end improbably relies on the trope of a pet dog sniffing out a surprise suspect hiding behind a door. 

Brit McQueen seems like the wrong choice to tell such a gritty, pulpy tale set in the American Midwest, imposing his auteur sensibilities on a dese-dem-and-dose tick-tock thriller. Somehow the cut-and-paste cast -- including Cynthia Erivo as a bad-ass hairdresser who joins the caper (though Michelle Rodriguez and Carrie Coon are wasted here) -- drag this over the finish line.

R.I.P., David Lynch, Part 2: Road Tripping

  We are doing a multi-part tribute to David Lynch, who died January 15 at 78. Our biggest debt to him, though, will always be non-cinematic: his alt-weekly comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, from the 1980s. Here is Part 1.

WILD AT HEART (1990) (B+) - When you take the David Lynch multiverse and inject into it Nicolas Cage, well, it's off to the races.

 

Cage and Laura Dern are off the wall but also sexually dynamic together in this story of a young couple on the run from goons hired by her mother to kill him. Cage's Sailor does time at the beginning of the movie for pummeling to death a would-be assailant hired by the mother of Lula (Dern), and upon his release, they go on the lam. Lynch plays with the myth of mid-century America, with nods to Elvis Presley (whom Sailor mimics throughout with his aphoristic pronouncements) and "The Wizard of Oz." Fire also plays a significant symbolic role, a common through line in Lynch's oeuvre. 

In the five years since her role as a naif in "Blue Velvet," Dern has come into her own as a sexual being, and she isn't shy during her romps with Cage. In one memorable scene, Sailor recounts an erotic experience with another woman, which gets Lulu going. "You better run me back to the hotel," she purrs. "You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt." 

Dern's mother, Diane Ladd, plays Lulu's lulu mom, Marietta Fortune. It's a bizarre, cartoonish role, and I felt sorry for Ladd, who just wasn't built for Lynch's brand of deadpan slaptstick. Grace Zabriskie, on the other hand, captures the essence of Lynchian eccentricity. But it's Willem Dafoe who takes honors for most outlandish performance as Bobby Peru, the creepy, dentally challenged gangster, who menacingly exploits Lulu's vulnerabilities as a childhood rape victim. He will rope Sailor into an ill-advised heist and meet a most unpleasant demise.

Pulp fiction at its finest, "Wild at Heart" always circles back to Sailor and Lulu as a snakebit couple (him in a snakeskin jacket) that you root for. Dern and Cage digest Lynch's outre dialogue as if they were born to play the roles. They find just the right pitch for Lynch's brand of kitsch, especially during a scene when Sailor grabs the microphone at a club and croons Presley's "Love Me" as Lulu and the other girls scream and cream like it's 1956. Toss in cameos and quirky turns by the likes of Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossellini and John Lurie, and it's a trip.

THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999) (A) - Was this just a goof? David Lynch playing it "straight" and directing someone else's mainstream narrative about an old man driving across the heartland on a lawn tractor to visit his ailing brother, presumably for the last time? Honest to goodness, it's rated G. (Open on: "Walt Disney Pictures presents ... a film by David Lynch.")

Lynch, working from a script by producer Mary Sweeney and John E. Roach, plays it mostly linear, blessed with journeyman actor Richard Farnsworth, in his final role, as Alvin Straight, who seizes an opportunity to make peace with his estranged brother. Physically broken down and unable to drive a car, he jerry-rigs a riding mower and a trailer and journeys 247 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin, camping on the side of the road along the way.

 

Alvin has heartfelt encounters with strangers along the way, which allows him to dispense pearls of wisdom, including to a pregnant teenage runaway. The fulcrum of the film comes in the second half when he meets a fellow World War II veteran at a bar and they trade quiet horror stories about their harrowing experiences. 

Lynch stays faithful to a traditional narrative, perhaps for the only time in his career. He patiently allows the journey to unfold at a snail's pace -- just like Alvin chugging along the highways at 5 mph, hugging the shoulder as vehicles whiz by. He employs a cast of mostly unknowns and non-actors to serve in various elderly Greek choruses. The astronomically high average age of the cast is virtually unheard of in a culture that worships youth.

Sissy Spacek just barely rises to the challenge of playing Rose, Alvin's daughter, who speaks with a stutter related to a horrific trauma in her life. Harry Dean Stanton tosses in a cameo as the brother, Lyle. The earnest depiction of rural life is tempered with occasional deadpan humor, such as when Alvin haggles with twin brothers straight out of "Green Acres" who bicker while repairing his John Deere.

Angelo Badalamenti's score is quintessentially 1990s, somehow both melancholy and uplifting at the same time. Farnsworth's eyes twinkle as the paragon of "Farm Aid"-era America (he even resembles Willie Nelson). Alvin is a wounded soul who has somehow managed to deal with his trauma, wrangle his alcoholism, and find peace of mind amid his physical and emotional struggles. This is a low-key tale (faithfully based on a true story) that sneaks up on you and wins over your jaded modern heart.

BONUS TRACKS

Elvis' "Love Me":

And from "The Straight Story," Angelo Badalamenti tries his hand at Americana, including the captivating "Laurens Walking":

New to the Queue

 The cruel month before the cruelest month ...

A documentary about the anti-comedian Andy Kaufman, "Thank You Very Much."

Korean stylist Bong Joon-ho ("Parasite") paints a bleak future with cloned Robert Pattinsons, "Mickey 17."

A paean to the concept of the ideal never-ending baseball game, "Eephus."

Paul Rudd and Tea Leoni lead a pleasant diversion that calls back to Spielbergian early '80s movies, "Death of a Unicorn."

Our gal Ayo Edebiri (and Murray Bartlett from season 1 of "White Lotus") might be enough to get us through a romp about a pompous rock star hosting a bloody listening party for his new release, "Opus."

From the team that gave us "Anomalisa" (director Duke Johnson, executive producer Charlie Kaufman), the tale of a man dealing with amnesia in 1950s Ohio, "The Actor."

Troubled Youth

 Another round with our latest favorite, Renate Reinsve, then a truly bad new release, followed by a palate-cleanser courtesy of our favorite analyst of French kids, Celine Sciamma.

 

ARMAND (C+) - Renate Reinsve literally and figuratively stomps all over a slow-burn suspense film from Norway about a parent-teacher conference from hell, but neither she nor the workmanlike supporting cast can make this debut film makes sense. It drags its mysteries out to nearly two hours, about a half hour too long.

 

Halfdan Ullman Tondel -- the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman -- pays homage to his grandfather with claustrophobic visuals inside a school and a narrative that is wrapped in several mysteries. Elisabeth (Reinsve), a harried and disgraced actress, is called to the school because her 6-year-old, Armand, has engaged in "sexual deviancy" with another boy. The accusers are the parents, Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), who happen to be her in-laws -- Sarah is the sister of Elisabeth's dead husband, Thomas, who also had been a student at the school and apparently suffered some unexplained accident or form of abuse as a child.

Reinsve ("The Worst Person in the World," "A Different Man") bigfoots the sessions with administrators like the deflated diva she is supposed to be. The heels of her boots terrorize the corridor floors, and she wields an overcoat like a toreador's cape. She carries the film and provides a key centerpiece (excerpted in the trailer) in which she has an inappropriate laughing fit that devolves into maniacal sobbing. It's an extraordinary few minutes of cinema, but it's just not enough to make up for the fact that Tondel has a thin story that he stretches out interminably.

The teacher and administrators cultivate a fascinating bureaucratic subplot among them -- Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) is the green instructor, Jarle (Oystein Roger) is the put-upon principal, and Ajsa (Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic) assists him when she's not dealing with bizarre nosebleeds. Tondel certainly has an appealing visual style -- he turns hallways menacing and crowds his characters into an intimate first-grade classroom. But his reveal is not very convincing in the end, and the expiation at the climax feels unearned. He could use a good editor.

HIPPO (D) - The less said about this creepy mess the better. The bizarre debut from director Mark H. Rapaport wallows in the breakdown of a broken family, in which the mother has lost her mind and the step-siblings have the hots for each other. 

Co-writer Kimball Farley stars as Hippo, a socially stunted young adult partial to crossbows and video games as he celebrates his 19th birthday, and Lilla Kinzlinger plays Buttercup, his step-sister who was adopted from Hungary and who is eager to both lose her virginity and have a baby. Of course, Hippo is her top choice for that; but when he declines, she goes online to find a much older weirdo, Darwin (Jesse Pimentel), to come over for dinner and do the deed.

However, Darwin seems more interested in the mother (Eliza Roberts), who quickly gets tipsy and flirty, and when Darwin and Buttercup do end up in her room, things go horribly wrong. (Roberts' husband, Eric, provides clunky narration.)

It's not clear which parts of this are supposed to be funny, even if just a little. I did laugh at a few of the one-liners. But in the end, there's little humor, black or otherwise, to be mined in this depiction of disturbing mental instability. There's nothing amusing at all in home-schooled teenagers belatedly getting the birds-and-bees lesson from their mentally ill mother. Other things simply don't make sense; for example, if Buttercup was adopted years earlier as a teen, why does she have a thick Hungarian accent as if she just stepped off the boat?

Rapaport's effort here is as derivative as it gets; it is equal parts David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch and early Yorgos Lanthimos ("Dogtooth," "Attenberg") but not nearly as clever or thoughtful as any of those directors' efforts. It's just a bad movie.

TOMBOY (B+) - An early film from Celine Sciamma ("Water Lilies," "Girlhood," "Petite Maman") explores a gender-neutral child trying to fit in with peers after moving to a new neighborhood. 

 

Ten-year-old Laure (Zoe Heran, above right) has a girly little sister and another sibling on the way, and when she meets new kids in the neighborhood, her short hair and stick frame read as male. As summer lazily winds down, she plays sports with the boys, and when a cute girl named Lisa (Jeanne Disson, above left) asks Laure's name, she identifies as Mikael, and everyone then assumes she is a boy. Her parent, of course, are clueless.

The final two-thirds of the movie follow Laure/Mikael as they walk the tightrope between genders, juggling family and friends. How do you navigate the swimming pool? How do you pee in the woods when others are around? Should she reveal her gender to the crushy Lisa? And what happens when school starts in the fall?

The freckle-faced Heran captures the innocence and confusion that dominate adolescence. Disson brings nuance to the concept of puppy love, and Malonn Levana makes for a pretty sophisticated 6-year-old as the suspicious little sister. Sciamma is a master explorer of the childhood experience, whether she is reveling in a soccer game or conveying the tenderness between siblings. The questions of sexuality in "Tomboy" are secondary to the universal narrative of a child finding themself.

Soundtrack of Your Life: For Your Dining Pleasure

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

 

Gen X has certainly made its move in completing its takeover of the soundtracks in restaurants and bars. Ex Novo opened last year in Downtown Albuquerque, a descendant of a hipster brew pub that started in Portland, Ore. 

Most of the songs during this lunch date with a friend were classics straight out of the Heyday of the Planet of Sound -- the late '80s and early '90s. There were tracks from the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Hole, Fugazi and plenty more. The one that stood out the most was perhaps the original seed planted in 1981, from the debut album by the Replacements, the one that inspired the greats to come, like Nirvana and the Pixies.  We marveled at the greatest hits of our 20s as we caught up with an old friend.

Date: February 25, 2025, 1 p.m. hour

Place: Ex Novo in Downtown Albuquerque

Song:  "Johnny's Gonna Die"

Artist: The Replacements

Irony Matrix: 4.2 out of 10

Comment: Here is the video that Rhino Records made in 2021 for the 40th anniversary of the album "Sorry, Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash":

 

Here is Fugazi with "Long Division":

 

BONUS TRACK

Date: March 6, 2025, 5:20 p.m.

Place: Buffalo Bar & Grill in Payson, Ariz.

Song:  "I Will Survive"

Artist: Cake

Irony Matrix: 3.8 out of 10

Comment: This one popped up during a dinner break on a road trip to Phoenix. Cake's album "Fashion Nugget" is one of our favorites of all time. With all due respect to Gloria Gaynor, who performs the quintessential version of "I Will Survive," Cake places its Gen X ironic stamp on the product of the disco era. I never tire of any of the 14 tracks on the album, from "Frank Sinatra" to a heartbreaking cover of Willie Nelson. (The matrix glitched a few songs later when the muzak system puked out "Mr. Roboto" by Styx, perhaps the nadir of the previous era.)

Soundtrack of Your Life: Remakes

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

Date: February 22, 2025, 9 a.m. hour

Place: Chuze Fitness in Uptown Albuquerque

Song:  "Beds Are Burning"

Artist: Awolnation ft. Tim McIlrath

Song:  "We Didn't Start the Fire"

Artist: Fall Out Boy

Irony Matrix: 1.9 out of 10

Comment: I was on the elliptical at the gym and heard "Beds Are Burning" come on, and it just didn't seem right; it didn't have the oomph that I was used to. That's because it wasn't the 1987 original -- by Midnight Oil -- but instead a cover from a couple of years ago by Awolnation. I don't know what exactly is lacking in the new version, but it never achieves lift-off. Is it merely that the vocals are not by Peter Garrett, the frontman for Midnight Oil? Was there something about the urgency of the Reagan era that doesn't translate to the Trump era? Do I remember the video and a fonder time from my (relative) youth? Is it just a crappier version? The new version has a techno feel to it (and, for some reason, a "Munsters" groove line). There's just no snap to it, however. And the vocals (by Tim McIlrath of Rise Against) feel shouted; so, props to Garrett as the O.G. in this one. Here is the original.

 

And then there is the infamous 2023 sequel to Billy Joel's much-ribbed 1989 original of "We Didn't Start the Fire." Let's call the original the beginning of the end of the MTV era. It was a list song, churning through Joel's 40 years on earth (he was born in 1949) and hopscotching along the global highlights of the second half of the 20th century, a "This Is Your Life" to all Boomers still stuck on JFK's assassination and the arrival of the Beatles and biding their time until Fox News would come along in the mid '90s. 

Joel's song actually reached No. 1 on the charts (he had only three in his career, and the other two are just as forgettable). I didn't have anything against the song -- it's clever in spots -- and I'm a pretty big Billy Joel fan; I just was more interested in Nine Inch Nails at the time. Anyway, Fall Out Boy (!) thought it would be a good idea to carry the torch and draft a whole new version, updating the years from 1989 to 2023. From a simple Google search, I learned that the band has been savagely roasted over it. I'm sure it's not much worse than the original (I haven't listened to it closely), but it's certainly not essential listening. And maybe the point here is that Joel made a lot of things look easy; I'd put him in the songwriting category a notch below the ones at the top -- Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Lennon-McCartney and Robert Pollard. In his prime he was brilliant. I haven't heard anyone say that about Fall Out Boy, but then I'm a little out of touch with the emo kids.

It did remind me that I've been working on a joke forever about taking my own stab at updating "We Didn't Start the Fire." It goes like this. "I see Fall Out Boy did an update of Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire' by writing new lyrics that touch on all the crucial people and world-shattering events that have rocked the globe since his song was released, right up to the present day. I worked really hard on it. I think it encapsulates every key moment that led us to where we are at this moment. Like the original, you have to sing it really fast, listing things rapid-fire. And I had to memorize the whole thing. I think I can't do it for you now. (Long pause.) Here goes:

"Kim Kardashian

Donald Trump.

"Thank you."

That's the bit. No need to embed a video of either version, right? 

Life Is Short: Hey, Bobby Dylan, I Wrote You a Review

 

Everyone was warned. In my recap of 2024 ("How Does It Feel?"), I contemplated the idea of going to see "A Complete Unknown," the biopic covering Bob Dylan's fertile period between his arrival of New York City around 1961 and his plugged-in spectacle at the Newport Folk Festival in summer 1965.

 

I made it through an hour of the movie at a sold-out matinee at the Guild Cinema before I walked out. The main problem with the film is that it barely qualifies as a movie; it's a wafer-thin narrative stitched together with extensive song performances -- meticulous reproductions earnestly rendered by Timothee Chalamet, who might have needed sinus surgery after his faithful parroting of Dylan's signature Midwest nasal twang. It's not much more than a karaoke festival, as Monica Barbaro jumps in to portray Joan Baez and also does her own singing. But while anyone can mimic Dylan, no one should ever try to re-create Baez's ethereal voice (or suffer comparison to her luminescent presence). I felt bad for Barbaro, who sings perfectly well, just not in another dimension; there's nothing special about her.

Elsewhere, "A Complete Unknown" suffers from the same limitations that drive me away from Hollywood biopics, particularly movies about artists I've admired as their careers unfold in real time along with mine. I'm no Dylanologist, but I dove deeply into his music for about 25 years at the end of the last century, and this movie had nothing to offer me after the magic of early-'60s Greenwich Village (derivative of a "Mad Men" episode) quickly wore off. 

Chalamet's performance of early Dylan songs was fun at first, but it eventually got stale. Plus, the love triangle -- Dylan falls for Suze Rotolo (here named Sylvie) and then beds Baez while Sylvie is studying art in Italy -- was building toward a histrionic showdown in which two smart, beautiful women put up with and perhaps fight over an immature jerk. (It's inadvertently comical when Baez drifts into a club at the sound of Dylan's voice, watches rapturously as he performs "Masters of War" at the height of U.S.-Soviet nuclear panic, and instantly drops her panties for him.)

Once Dylan received a royalty check for $10,000 from his second album and struck up a fanboy pen-pal relationship with Johnny Cash (the women behind me swooned as Cash's voiceover praised Dylan), I headed to the exit. All that lay ahead, I feared, were more movie-star impressions. A bland Edward Norton tries way too hard to capture Pete Seeger's earthy goodness; and I cowered at the prospect of someone named Boyd Holbrook -- surely named with this silver-screen moment in mind -- pretending to be a bad-ass Cash (who probably at the time was interested in Dylan's stash of amphetamines more than anything).

In fact, most of the performances are remarkably flat -- perhaps the result of deciding to cast actors based on historical resemblence (manager Albert Grossman, for example) -- including the talented Elle Fanning, who brings very little to the role of Sylvie beyond being a plot device as the woman who made Dylan woke in the era of civil rights and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It all felt like a clear-out for Chalamet, with the cast bowing to his transformation into a Boomer icon. If Chalamet's performance were anything more than passable -- and if the dialogue (some of which he swallows) had any snap to it -- that might have been acceptable. (Also, perhaps most mystifying of all, Chalamet is somehow not as pretty as the 21-year-old Dylan.) Director James Mangold, penning the screenplay with Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald, gives us repeated ham-handed winks to Dylan's penchant for fabricating his biography at the time but does nothing to dig deeper below the surface of that. (The movie suggests it's a mystery; but is there more to it than Robert Zimmerman was bored or embarrassed by his suburban upbringing and would do anything to be a rock star?)

Finally, I feared the coming melodramatic, too-faithful re-enactment of the (in)famous day in July 1965 when Dylan set the old folkies' hair on fire when he went electric, shredding "Maggie's Farm" with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, days after the release of his single "Like a Rolling Stone," which would alter the landscape of American popular rock 'n' roll. This is by-the-numbers storytelling; Boomer culture porn. 

A month ago I noted that Dylan himself "is the ultimate work of fiction" and wondered if there is a point in "fictionalizing fiction -- or worse, trying to faithfully replicate it." I asked before if there was "a need to see America's puppy do a karaoke imitation" of Dylan. I have my answers: There is no point, and I don't need to watch it. If you want to know what the man was like back then, go watch "Don't Look Back" instead, or go deep into this exhaustive, fascinating fact-check of the movie from Variety.

Title: A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Running Time: 141 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  60 MIN

Portion Watched: 43%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 62 YRS, 3 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and listened to early Dylan ("Freewheelin'" and "Another Side") and watched the first half of Martin Scorsese's doc "No Direction Home," and started writing this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 3-1 (I might check out the ending someday out of curiosity.)

 

BONUS TRACKS

A moment in time that we shouldn't try to recapture or re-create -- "Like a Rolling Stone" at Newport (a version of which I presume runs over the closing credits): 

 

 

The transcendent slam poetry of "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," April 1963:

 

Holy Crap!* The Gulf Between the Sexes

 

GORGE (C-minus) - I rolled my eyes so much that it was difficult to keep focused on how embarrassed I was for Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller as they were toting guns, doing battle with alien life forms and, of course, falling in love.

 

It's also hard to write a quick synopsis with a straight face. You see, they are expert sharp-shooters, with hundreds of kills between them and the requisite guilt that piles up on the soft shoulders of these earnest millennials who are good people deep down, because they care about their dad (her) or write poetry (him), and they're cute. Teller is American Levi, and Taylor-Joy is the Russian Drasa, and they are each on a secret mission to guard opposite sides of a grand abyss that, below a layer of fog, hides deformed superhuman creatures down at the proverbial gates of hell. The critters like to scamper up the sides of the gorge, but darn it if Levi and Drasa don't pick off every one of them (sometimes just in the nick of time!). The critters, conveniently, don't scamper up the sides and try to escape during times when it's convenient for the plot -- like when Levi and Drasa have a forbidden sexy date together or drop down into the pit to do a little battle with the devil's spawn.

You can't go five minutes in this two-plus-hour technicolor yawn of a movie without enduring an absolutely implausible tick in the plot. Sigourney Weaver plays a bad-ass intelligence commander who oversees the American side of the divide, and it's hilarious to watch Weaver's much younger stand-in run for her life when all hell breaks loose at the climax. Taylor-Joy, who can't weigh much more than 92 pounds here, effortlessly wields automatic weapons that are half her size while never missing her target. Teller struggles to prove once again that he's not a lightweight himself, by spitting his lines with a bitter world-weariness and later soaping up in the shower. Right off the start, Levi would know not to engage with the other side under threat of certain personal extinction, but doggone it, the heart wants what it wants, right?

Drasa and Levi can not only read each other's cue-card-size notes across the foggy gorge, but they can often hear incidental sounds from that distance. (The ears are as sharp as the eyes!) When all hell breaks loose, nothing goes wrong for our intrepid couple -- computers improbably spring to life; a long-dormant Jeep rumbles into action at the touch of two wires (and runs great!); the pair have an unerring sense of direction, even without GPS; explosions barely mess their hair let alone separate their bodies from their limbs; and little Drasa gets dragged at 40 mph, banging her head on a fallen tree trunk along the way, and she's none worse for the wear. And, as in every movie, the bad guys (things) conveniently like to attack one at a time, so that the hero can fend them off in succession. Some things haven't changed since I watched "Batman" on TV as a child.

There is a germ of a clever idea here. Whatever is going on down below is the unintended result of a post-WWII pact among the victors, a misguided act of hubris that told Robert Oppenheimer "Hold my beer." Levi and Drasa are on one-year assignments, cut off from the rest of the world, under strict orders not to engage with the other side. (But how could they not when a cute gal is acting all flirty and is packing a hipster collection of 45-rpm records.)

Pulp director Scott Derrickson and journeyman writer Zach Dean regurgitate plot points gleaned from binge-watching every action film and horror movie they could get their hands on. They create a somewhat interesting mucky underworld, and their budget allowed for unlimited explosions. They lucked out in getting two of the hotter young actors to agree to play some combination of Maverick, Indiana Jones, Wonder Woman and American Sniper. Taylor-Joy rocks a mild Russian accent that isn't too silly. Teller broods like a child doing an imitation of Robert Mitchum or Steve McQueen.

But the idea that these two relative soft targets could even think of racing through the bowels of hell to save humanity is just too absurd to take as seriously as we are doing right now. I've seen Roadrunner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote performs more believable stunts than Levi does here. They'll greenlight anything these days to provide content to Apple TV, especially when it is needed for Valentine's Day.

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

BONUS TRACK

The schizophrenic soundtrack includes a jolt of "Blitzkrieg Bop" from the Ramones, a Bach suite, and a part-rap version of Bob Dylan's "(All Along the) Watchtower." The most on-the-nose choice is "Spitting Off the Edge of the World" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Perfume Genius:

R.I.P, Gene Hackman

 

News broke today of the death of Santa Fe's Gene Hackman. He was 95 and had been retired the past 20 years.

We reviewed three of his films in recent years. His comedy chops were at their peak in "The Royal Tenenbaums" from 2001 (see below). He made his bones with the gritty classic "The French Connection" in 1971. But treat yourself to the obscure release from a couple of years later, "Scarecrow," the shaggy-dog story that teamed him with Al Pacino. It is streaming on Turner Classic Movies.

We will take an opportunity in the coming weeks to catch up on Hackman's catalog. That will include Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" (1974), a touchstone we've never seen.

BONUS TRACK

"That's the last time you put a knife in me, hear me?!"

Nevertheless, She Persisted

 

I'M STILL HERE (A-minus) - It was a heavy weekend. There was a memorial service for a colleague and friend who died in November. And then there was Walter Salles' paean to perseverance, a drama drenched in Brazil's military dictatorship of the early 1970s, "I'm Still Here." 

 

It is an emotionally challenging movie, but it is full of heart and humanity. Based on a true story, it follows Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her five children after her husband, Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman in the days before a military coup six years earlier, is snatched by government thugs, never to return. It is Torres' movie from beginning to end, a performance so intense and moving that you often ache for both her and her character.

Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries") grounds this is an authentic family life in a seaside neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. The Paiva household buzzes with activity -- kids, a housekeeper, a dog and numerous friends, parties filled with food and fun. Record needles drop on vinyl, a 16 mm camera shudders as it captures memories, photographs from these happy days pile up. I was transported to the '70s watching the kids come and go, often barefoot on their way to or from the beach or a street soccer match. The first half hour is a master class in narrative table-setting, as Rubens and Eunice provide a family sanctuary that we know will be invaded and forever changed.

Meanwhile, street scenes and news reports cast a pall over the charmed life the family leads. The parents send their oldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage) to London with friends going into exile, and Eunice and Rubens hunker down, knowing that Rubens is a target. We are aware that he is surreptitiously volunteering as a drop-source for communications among the resistance. Not only does he get escorted out of this happy home, but a day or two later so do Eunice and another daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski). Few horror movies can match the banality of evil imposed on Eunice for two weeks in a small cell, subjected to the inquisitions of apparatchiks, finding only a sliver of humanity in the occasional apologies of a sympathetic but powerless guard.

The film then becomes a tale of bravery and endurance. Eunice will get unofficial word of Rubens' death, but she will pick and choose how she confides in each child, eventually uprooting them from that tainted dwelling and moving them to Sao Paulo. Eunice stays active in the resistance network, keeping Rubens' story alive. In a memorable scene, when posing the kids for a news photographer, she resists the journalists' request to appear stoic, and she insists that the kids smile for the photo, and they happily oblige. That bravado in the face of tyranny will become a rallying cry that will echo through the years as the family's rallying cries. Torres, throughout, is never short of riveting.

Salles jumps ahead 25 years, to the mid-'90s, when the democratic government, in its reconciliation phase, finally provides Eunice, now a lawyer and activist in her own right, with Rubens' death certificate. She is accompanied by her son, Marcello (Antonio Saboia as an adult; Guilherme Silveira as a spunky child), whose real-life memoirs formed the basis for the movie. The film then transitions to Eunice's late-in-life work; another jump, to 2014, will find her infirm and wracked by Alzheimer's, as her children and grandchildren carry on the tradition of joyful gatherings.

The film embarks on a journey that goes from heart-warming to heart-pounding to heart-breaking. It is a profound rumination on the determination of individuals in the face of authoritarianism, and you can't help but feel uneasy watching it in an era in which 20th-century fascism is returning to fashion. The only criticism is that Salles overstays his welcome here. He doesn't need the 18 minutes beyond the two-hour mark. It's as if he wasn't confident enough to end it in an earlier era and perhaps he was being too faithful to Marcello's memoirs. The scenes with subsequent generations lack the spark of 1970-71, and there are too many interchangeable characters by that point, dragging down the narrative. A quick flash-forward is all that was needed, and the diminishing returns are the only barrier between Salles and a masterpiece.

BONUS TRACKS

Salles' characters bask in the pop music of the day, and while there are understandable nods in dialogue to the Beatles in the wake of their breakup, he resists the lure of obvious needle-drops and instead celebrates some catchy Brazilian hits of the era. Here is "E Preciso Dar Um Jeito, Meu Amigo" by Erasmo Carlos:

 

Caetano Veloso is name-checked in the film along with John Lennon by Veroca, who is besotted with London. Here is "Baby" by Os Mutantes":

 

Tom Ze with "Jimmy, Renda-se":

 

And a rollicking Tex-Mex-style number, "A Festa Do Santo Reis" by Tim Maia:

More Than Just Friends

 

MATT & MARA (B+) - Mara, a creative-writing adjunct professor, is discombobulated throughout this indie endeavor, and it is to Deragh Campbell's credit that the character can hold your interest in that state for 80 minutes. She is numb to her husband and toddler, and she is being hounded by an old friend, whose passive-aggressive antics push her buttons.

 

Matt (Matt Johnson) is Mara's pal from grad school. He reminds her -- by pointing out that he really shouldn't remind her -- that he's a published author and she is not. It has apparently been years since Matt has graced her presence in Toronto, but their deep platonic connection has never waned. As her husband forsakes her for an album his band is recording, Mara will be vulnerable to Matt's goofy charms. The question is, will they cross a line during a road trip to a conference that Mara is presenting at across the border in New York.

Johnson is one of our favorites, both in front of and behind the camera, most recently in "Operation Avalanche" and "BlackBerry." He has a rubbery face and impeccable timing, with an improvisational ease. Campbell here does everything with her face, especially her eyes, suggesting a deer-in-the-headlights daze from everything life is throwing at her, whether it is her marriage or her students or a general numbness over her career. She has a delicate voice but a determination to push through whatever phase this is in her life.

Writer-director Kazik Radwanski (who also used Campbell in "Anne at 13,000 Ft.") chronicles every tic and furrowed brow of Mara, and he lets his two stars vamp and bicker. There are a couple of deep conversations -- at one point Matt offers his philosophy of existence by saying, "I'm letting my imagination reach right to the level of my own stupidity which makes it my reality" -- but he also keeps it loose, like with a scene in which a barrista rudely drives them out of a coffee shop at closing time or when the two practice smiling at strangers on the street. This is smart neo-Mumblecore, propelled by two talented leads.

SLOW (B) - This offbeat character study out of Lithuania explores the lifestyle of the asexual. It's a laconic slice-of-life that manages to wring joy and pathos out of a tender love story.

Dance teacher Elena (Greta Grineviciute) has a meet-cute at her studio with Dovydas (Kestutis Cicenas) a sign-language interpreter, and after a few hangouts he drops the A-bomb on her: He has no interest in sexual relations with another person. After getting over the initial shock (it's not a joke, Elena immediately learns), Elena booty-calls an ex, but the sex is so underwhelming that she returns to Dovydas and agrees to explore a relationship full of kissing and cuddling but no serious rounding of third base. 

Writer-director Marija Kavtaradze takes a low-key approach and refuses to sensationalize the topic. The narrative unfolds steadily, as the couple rewrite the rules of a romantic relationship. The highs are not too high and the lows are not too low. The actors are attractive but average-looking, with regular-sized personalities. Grineviciute captures the quiet torture of a woman who has finally found a suitable partner and true love but cannot close the deal in a way that suits her physical needs.

BONUS TRACKS

"Slow" has a pop/techno soundtrack that features a couple of songs from Sweden's Irya Gmeyner, including "Dancing in the Park":

 

And "Electric," from Gmeyner and Martin Hederos:

 

And from the movie's climax, April Snow (Gmeyner's alter-ego) with "We Fucked It Up":

R.I.P., David Lynch, Part 1: In Utero

 We will be doing a multi-part tribute to David Lynch, who died January 15 at 78. Our biggest debt to him, though, will always be non-cinematic: his alt-weekly comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, from the 1980s.

BLUE VELVET (1986) (B+) - David Lynch found his storytelling sweet spot -- call it psycho-comic nostalgic noir -- with a major breakthrough that would provide the template for his next two decades in film and television. From the opening scene -- flowers, a white picket fence, friendly firemen passing by on the fire truck -- Lynch announces that he is either celebrating or skewering a sclerotic vision of bygone American values. His camera immediately digs down beneath the surface of a groomed suburban lawn and then spends the next two hours wallowing in the underbelly of a culture gone to seed.

 

Kyle MacLachlan emerges from Lynch's "Dune" bomb of 1984 and leads the cast as a wide-eyed but overly curious squeaky-clean college boy Jeffrey, who plays junior detective and noses around the adult world of quirky intrigue, sparked by the discovery of a human ear. He hides in the closet of morose lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and learns that her husband and son are being held captive by creepy Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), whose oedipal kinks beset Dorothy. Frank heads up a crime syndicate best described as art-school Batman villainy, replete with giggling henchmen.  

Lynch is tipping his hand at a world that would blossom into his TV series "Twin Peaks." There is the northwest burg of Lumberton (where the AM radio station marks the bottom half of the hour with the sound of a falling tree); we get gruesome crimes and sexual perversion in small-town America; and there is always Dean Stockwell lip-syncing Roy Orbison's "In dreams" into a vintage industrial drop light.

Lynch has a ball inserting Jeffrey into a love triangle between Rossellini's masochistic submissive Dorothy and a teenage Laura Dern's straight-arrow girl-next-door, Sandy, for whom Jeffrey is the buttoned-up bad-boy alternative to her lunkheaded jock boyfriend. This all works not only as avant-garde absurdism but also as a tightly wound crime mystery. MacLachlan plays it straight down the middle while Hopper, huffing from an oxygen mask whenever he gets his jollies, is just bat-shit bonkers. This is a perfect bookend with the "Twin Peaks" run, before Lynch would get more bold and experimental at the turn of the millennium.

ERASERHEAD (1977) (B-minus) - You had to be there. And back then, most people didn't want to go anywhere near there. A years-in-the-making film school project improbably saw the light of day, although it made its bones as one of the original '70s midnight movies, first in Los Angeles and then across the country when it became a cult favorite

Revisit it now, and it's tough to see this as much more than an interesting novelty, a signpost along the road to David Lynch's origin story. It was shot on a shoestring budget, strung out over years, edited on the fly -- more of a provocation than a cohesive narrative. It is trapped in the uncanny valley between experimental cinema and B-movies. 

At least it is a first crack in the window into Lynch's brain. He apparently was obsessed with urban decay and serious fears of parenthood (or of abortion?). This is ostensibly the story of a couple torn apart by the birth of a deformed child -- one that is not much evolved from its sperm-shaped origins and resembles the creature from "Alien." Jack Nance plays the father, Henry, who lamely tries to care for it (a sight gag involving a vaporizer made me laugh out loud) but who is tortured not only by the being's presence but also by the fever dreams he pivots to, mostly involving a vaudevillian woman singing to him from the radiator in his apartment. 

Lynch's touches can be inspired. The apartment is decorated with plants, but they are scrawny sticks that jut from a pile of dirt, sans flowerpot. When the wife goes to retrieve her suitcase from under the bed, she tugs and tugs, and Lynch holds the joke so long that the Three Stooges would nod in admiration. Henry is dressed in the classic nerd outfit of the day, with a pile of hair that might make you think it inspired the title -- until the story spins off into German fairy-tale gloom to provide the true reason for the title. Nance, always with a worried brow, comes across as Babe Ruth with a bellyache.

This is all assembled with bargain-basement special effects and a churning score of ominous industrial sounds. You might be tempted to fast-forward through some of these painfully long takes. It's like a film-school study assignment you wish you could skip but know you shouldn't

***

If you can access the two-disc Criterion release of "Eraserhead," the extras are worth it -- there are multiple previous short films by Lynch and several short documentaries (across decades) discussing the making of the "Eraserhead," a fascinating dive into the L.A. film scene during the American New Wave era.

BONUS TRACKS

"Blue Velvet's" gritty soundtrack offers up Bobby Vinton's original title track, a few hip entries from Chris Isaak, and the introduction of Angelo Badalamenti to the Lynch oeuvre. We'll pluck out the easy boogie of Bill Doggett with "Honky Tonk":

New to the Queue

 Wait, where were we ... ?

Walter Salles' period piece about a woman standing up to the Brazilian government that disappeared her husband, "I'm Still Here."

We'll probably regret this, but we're willing to take a chance on the bloody AI GF dark comedy "Companion."

Our gal Renate Reinsve ("The Worst Person in the World," "A Different Man") stars in a suspense film sparked by a parent-teacher conference, "Armand."

A surrealist comedy, linking Tehran and Winnepeg, "Universal Language."