It's All a Misunderstanding

 

THE IDEA OF YOU (B+) - Don't let me underestimate Michael Showalter again. With a trailer that looked like a silly romantic comedy, there was trepidation going into "The Idea of You," in which a 40-year-old woman falls in love with a 24-year-old pop star she meets-cute at his Coachella show. But Showalter -- and star Anne Hathaway -- pull off a thoughtful, heart-warming (and surprisingly believable) story.

 

Showalter won us over with "Hello, My Name Is Doris" in 2016, with the similar theme of an older woman and younger man. (We're assuming he has cougar issues.) He also scored as director of "The Big Sick" and "The Eyes of Tammy Faye."  He sits right in that B-plus/A-minus pocket as a filmmaker. Here he co-writes with Jennifer Westfeldt ("Kissing Jessica Stein") and newcomer Robinne Lee, both of whom are known more for their acting. And while they don't revolutionize the rom-com, they dodge plenty of potholes as we wonder will they or won't they make it in the end (not just the characters but the filmmakers).

Hathaway is Solene, who plans a solo camping trip for her 40th birthday, but instead has to sub for her douchey ex-husband Daniel ("Veep's" Reid Scott) and take their daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her friends to Coachella. Solene accidentally stumbles into the trailer of boy-band hunk Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), and he ends up dedicating a song to her at the end of the concert, sparking an affair that Solene keeps from her friends and daughter -- until the paparazzi inevitably expose the pair canoodling during his European tour. Eventually Solene feels snubbed and mocked by the much younger women tagging along on the tour. 

Solene storms out, but Hayes wants to give it a go back in L.A., and the film offers a fascinating depiction of life in the 24/7 media glare and the oppression it rains on all kinds of relationships. Hathaway is believable as a dedicated gallery owner (that's how Hayes tracks her down, proceeding to buy out her stock to free her up for the fling). The writers exploit the drawn-out game of cat-and-mouse, but they don't burden the plot. Even a leap in time doesn't take the viewer out of the story. And a running thread involving Hayes' wristwatch (helping mark the passage of time) is a jewel of a MacGuffin.

Hathaway, acting her age, remains a compelling presence, and she does a convincing job of playing an Everywoman with real feelings and desires. Galitzine is perfectly pouty but he's no lightweight, as he chafes at the artificial life he leads, seeing an off-ramp from the teen lark that has enriched him. The music (some of it created by Galitzine) seems perfectly legit as performed by a lightweight outfit called August Moon. I wanted to skip this entirely, and I was prepared to pull the plug after 20 minutes, but I was hooked, if not swooning like a teenage girl.

MAGIC FARM (C) - If I hadn't read a synopsis of the plot and a review or two in advance, I probably would never have been able to follow Amalia Ulman's sophomore effort, a purported comic treatise on the vapidity of internet influencers and ugly Americans in general. It is coy to the point of being inscrutable at times.

 

Let's consider it a treading-water transition phase for Ulman, who offered sharp satire and dry-as-toast humor in her 2021 debut, "El Planeta." (She also stars in both films.) In "Magic Farm," a Vice-like group of trend-spotting reporter/influencers -- led by the droll, older fashion maven Edna (Chloe Sevigny) -- ends up in the wrong South American city of San Cristobal, and rather than admit their mistake or go to the right place, they save money and stick around, conjuring up a fake trend to report on. 

It's a bumbling crew in a quirky Argentine town, and Ulman lightens the proceedings further by toying with camera perspectives (mounting one on a dog, for no particular reason, and bookending the film with a psychedelic distortion of perspective) and by allowing her cast to compete in a drollery contest. The town is full of what we once called freaks -- people either mildly or severely deformed physically but with-it mentally. It will turn out that there is "something in the water," as they say, which is causing the abnormalities, and Ulman's satire is apparently making a statement about the obliviousness of internet "news" culture, in that these trend-hounds can't spot a big story even when it's staring them in the face.

At least I think that's what was going on. Ulman never makes any of this explicit, or even, at times, implicit. She just shuffles along spinning a story that seems to have started before the first scene, leaving us in the middle, catching up. Sevigny is sharp as the exasperated Gen Xer annoyed by her young crew. Simon Rex is wasted in a cameo as her partner. (He literally phones in one of his scenes.) Alex Wolff is fun as Jeff, the horndog producer who lusts after one of the locals, Manchi (Camila del Campo), whose own libido overwhelms anyone around her. Ulman has the character climb a tree to achieve an internet connection so that she can preen online. (In one perfectly timed exchange, Manchi, in accented English, brags about having "online friends," and Jeff hears it as "OnlyFans.") 

I didn't shut this off, but I questioned why I was devoting an hour and a half to such a shaggy-dog tale. It has its charm, and I'm glad Ulman does not feel constrained by convention. Let's see what she does next.

UNDER THE TREE (2018) (B-minus) - This arch bit of feud-porn is a placid, frustrating satire from Iceland. It involves a man caught in a neighborly feud over a shade tree, between his parents and the couple next door.

Steinthor Hroar Steinthorsson stars as Atli, who crashes with his parents after his wife, Agnes (Lara Johanna Jonsdottir), kicks him out for watching porn of himself and an ex. That is strike one against the film; it's a stretch to think that a husband would be so unguarded, especially watching something that particular. His parents' suburban neighbors keep complaining about too much shade from the parents' tree, and so begins a series of microaggressions (slashed tires, surveillance cameras, personal insults) that slowly build to macro ones. 

Writer-director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurosson takes this thin premise and then burdens it with a brutal escalation of the dispute. If you notice both a cat and a dog in the trailer and fear for their safety, brace yourself. This isn't so much dark comedy as a disturbing series of events. He draws good performances out of Edda Bjorgsvindottir as Atli's vengeful mother, who has never gotten over what happened to Atli's brother, and Sigurdur Sigurjonsson as Atli's checked-out father, who takes solace in the comforts found "at the bottom of a bottle." 

It all passes in a tidy 89 minutes, and there are some interesting ideas explored. You just with Sigurosson could have maintained the thread and struck more of a tonal balance. 

Life Is Short: You're Killing Me

 

PAVEMENTS (C+/Incomplete)  - Call me pedantic, but I don't need much flash or contemplation out of a rock doc, and certainly not a notion wrapped in a concept, swaddled in an idea, nested in a scheme -- which is what Alex Ross Perry has put together, running longer than two hours, as an homage to the '90s indie darlings Pavement.

 

The oh-so-clever idea here is that Perry is not just assembling a documentary about the members of Pavement; rather, he is obscuring that typical documentary presentation with three other fictional fake-outs. He intersperses real footage with scripted material purporting to show the making of a biographical feature about the band (starring Joe Keery as singer Stephen Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as a Matador Records executive); the staging of a musical "Slanted! Enchanted!" interpreting the band's debut album; and a museum exhibit featuring artifacts from the band, either real or imagined, like Malkmus' lyric notebooks and drummer Gary Young's toenail clipping.

It's all ironic -- get it?! Because, like, the band was never that good or popular or deserving of exalted status or serious reconsideration, but wouldn't it be hilarious if we pretended that they were? Pavement's generation might have slung a lot of slacker shit back in the day, but what is this next level Perry's Millennial generation is playing at? Where's the nuance? Is a wink all you need?

Perry rotates his memes continuously, and in the absence of much actual footage of the band (then and now), you can quickly grow tired of the fake stories. It is not interesting to see Keery (yet another "Stranger Things" alum graduating to the big leagues) pretend that his method-acting obsession has him subsumed into the Malkmus "character," akin to Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan or Austin Butler as Elvis Presley. The whole biopic storyline could have been done better -- and clocked in under five minutes -- as a sketch on "The Ben Stiller Show," which splashed on Fox television around the time that Pavement broke out with "Slanted and Enchanted." And the musical mockumentary has nothing on Christopher Guest's exhausted oeuvre. A much more straightforward and satisfying documentary about the band's origins is the recent "Louder Than You Think," which focuses on the band's original drummer Gary Young but covers most of the group's origin story.

"Pavements" held our attention for only a little over an hour -- when the shtick became tiring and the band's heyday had faded (most notably with an atrocious performance at the fifth Lollapalooza). That was the year of the band's dud of an album, "Wowee Zowee," which I got to pan at the time in the Chicago Sun-Times. That was a year after Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the alt/indie/lo-fi scene was starting to curdle. (This comprehensive analysis of Pavement's top-40 songs per Uproxx notes that one of Guided By Voices' masterpieces, "Alien Lanes," came out a week before "Wowee Zowee," which didn't do it any favors.) To Perry's credit, he includes a clip of Beavis and Butt-head mercilessly mocking a "Wowee" track on MTV, urging the band members "to try harder." It wasn't an invalid criticism at the time.

You can make the argument that Perry ("Listen Up Philip," "Queen of Earth") hasn't made a great feature film in a decade. We walked out of his last music-based experiment, "Her Smell," after an hour, in 2019. He's still an interesting filmmaker, and his willingness to play with ideas and to experiment is admirable. But "Pavements" is a mess. If you didn't like the band members, this might be the movie you would make. Much of the time Perry seems to be mocking them as much as he is skewering music biopics or jukebox musicals. They seem to be good sports about the whole thing.

There are some insightful moments buried under the clutter. Tim Heidecker, who participates as a Matador executive, calls the band "the slacker Rolling Stones for the '90s" (to GBV's Beatles?). Another suggests that they were the band for people who thought "everything sucks and everything is stupid." It is fun to watch the band gather and rehearse for a 2022 reunion tour, straining to remember chords and lyrics, and looking back on their career. But digging out the nuggets here is a chore.

Perry's biggest crime is that nearly all of the archival footage he uses is from "Slow Century," a 2002 documentary shot and curated by Lance Bangs. Perry essentially grave-robs Bangs' film, slices and dices the footage, and then drags it out to 128 minutes by injecting his cute gimmicks. File this under "Life Is Short."

Title: Pavements

Running Time: 128 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  70 MIN

Portion Watched: 55%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 62 YRS, 6 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and listened to some early Pavement and started writing this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 2-1 (I'll probably check out the last hour someday; I just couldn't handle the wankery in one sitting. It's coming to Mubi next month.)

 

BONUS TRACKS

The band got together last month to promote the film. Here they are with "Harness Your Hopes," an old B-side that gained popularity in recent years due to an algorithm glitch at a streaming service:

 

Here is the 84-minute documentary "Slow Century," from 2002, available (for now) on YouTube. Check out a raggedy live version of "Cut Your Hair" at the 57-minute mark.

 

Beavis and Butt-head trashing "Rattled by the Rush":

 

Our title track, from the band's first release:

Go Rest, Young Man

 

JOSHY (2016) (A-minus) - We're delving further into the catalog of Jeff Baena, who gave us "The Little Hours" and "Spin Me Round" and who died earlier this year. "Joshy" is a typical fast-chatter comedy from Baena's deep bench of ace performers, led by Thomas Middleditch as a guy whose fiancee's death has left him adrift during a weekend gathering of what should have been his bachelor party at a mansion in Ojai, Calif.

 

Joshy cobbles together some of his mismatched friends who are intent on cheering him up or at least getting him drunk or laid. He does manage to get hammered most nights. Nick Kroll bigfoots the proceedings as type-A Eric, while writer-director Alex Ross Perry nearly steals the show with a deadpan turn as a sober board-game geek who just got dumped by his girlfriend of 10 years. Adam Pally grounds the film as Ari, a married man who woos a woman they meet at a bar, Jodi, played with manic improv glee by the always reliable Jenny Slate. Eric's friend Greg (Brett Gelman) tags along to bring an added jolt of anxiety to the proceedings. Cameos include Aubrey Plaza and Lauren Graham (both underused) and filmmaker Joe Swanberg as Aaron, who is appalled at the debauchery, though what was he thinking bringing his wife and toddler to the event. Toss in ringers like Alison Brie and Frankie Shaw in cameos and Lauren Weedman as a very open-minded sex worker recruited out of dweeb desperation, and when the dead fiancee's bitter parents show up? Lisa Edelstein and Paul Reiser!

Baena shows a keen ear for naturalistic bro dialogue, and the story keeps antics believable, resisting the urge to clutter the plot with "Hangover" hijinks. This feels like just a nerdy attempt to have a wild weekend. 

Middleditch -- sailing along a career high that included HBO's "Silicon Valley" and his improv special "Middleditch & Schwartz" -- is a master of subtlety, and he is the calm center allowing a talented cast to riff around him. Pally and Slate really click as a sweet snakebit pair. Kroll doesn't overdo it, like he sometimes does. And Baena weds humor and pathos in just the right mix.

WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD (2023) (B-minus) - Jesse Eisenberg's debut as a writer-director (before last year's "A Real Pain") has the potential to emerge as a smart indie, but there's just something off with most of the performances, and this mother-son pas de deux too often feels strained. In the end, it comes off like a pale remake of Eisenberg's early acting breakthrough "The Squid and the Whale." 

Julianne Moore never finds the right tone as Evelyn, an uptight hippie mom who just doesn't understand her nerdy son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard from TV's "Stranger Things"), who monetizes his earnest, bland songs on the internet to a tiny but devoted group of stans scattered around the world. Starting with that trope not far removed from "Family Ties," Eisenberg must dig himself out of the hole he starts in. But he never regains his footing.

Ziggy is kind of a creep, thinking he has a chance with beautiful classmate Lila (Alisha Boe), who is a cardboard-cutout "socialist," whose big cri de coeur is an anti-colonialist polemic about the Marshall Islands. Maybe teen activists these days gather in storefronts and raise their fists in solidarity with Joe Hill, but I'm guessing this is just Eisenberg's outdated idea of the resistance. (Ziggy apparently cut his teeth as a red-diaper baby singing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs; I doubt that was a thing during the Obama administration, though maybe it happened to Eisenberg in the '80s.)

Eisenberg -- ever since his remarkable debut in "Roger Dodger" -- has always rocked a millennial Woody Allen vibe, and here he drags his neuroses and anachronisms behind the camera. Moore does a barely veiled imitation of 1980s Mia Farrow, who stammered and ditzed her way through some of Allen's best films. Moore's Evelyn is a do-gooder who runs a women's shelter, but she is so shallow and misguided that she creeps on a client's teen-aged son. Tone deaf to the needs of the teen and his mother, she presses him to give up a job at his dad's body shop to pursue studies at Oberlin.

The theme here is not subtle: Mother and son can't see the appeal of the other, so they search out surrogates -- Evelyn replacing Ziggy (going so far as to give the boy a ball cap discarded by her son), and Ziggy must discover his mom's best qualities in a classmate he's crushing on. Jay O. Sanders ("His Three Daughters") has the thankless job of playing the dad who must tolerate his two unlikable housemates. It's hard to blame the cast, though, since Eisenberg's vision never really coheres. But he did show promise, didn't he?

BONUS TRACK

"Joshy" has an eclectic soundtrack, though most songs air only in snippets. Here is a 1980 nugget that got a reissue 10 years ago, "Whiskey," from Kenny Knight. Nice guitar work.

 

 

"When You Finish" mixes Ziggy's compositions with Chopin and other classical compositions, and then there is this new release, the airy "These Things Are Separate" by Emile Mosseri:

Doc Watch: The Artist's Way

 

SWAMP DOGG GETS HIS POOL PAINTED (A-minus) - Documentaries don't get much more giddy than this romp through the life and career of "Little" Jerry Williams, an R&B singer from the 1960s who retooled his persona in 1970 as Swamp Dogg, an underground legend in outsider music since. He and his band of eccentrics are a hoot to hang out with for an hour and a half. 

 

Three directors and two writers collaborate on a pedal-to-the-metal visual and musical bouillabaisse, which nonetheless pauses enough times to deepen the development of the characters on display here. Williams wrote and sang R&B songs and "country soul" in the '60s, but at age 28, at the dawn of the '70s, he embraced the counter-culture (a little LSD apparently helped) and went deeper into Stax-style southern soul. (He called it swamp music.) He eventually launched his own studio and label to record others, while mining obscure archives for K-Tel-type compilations. He even distributed the infamous "Beatle Barkers" album of dogs and other animals bleating out Beatles songs in 1983, hawking it with a 1-800 number at the time.*

While his biography is impressive, much of it goes by in a blur, the kind of frenetic flashing of images that filmmakers are fond of these days. If you don't suffer an epileptic seizure early on, settle in for the entertaining interviews of Swamp Dogg and his entourage. During the film, he lives in Southern California with gunslinger Guitar Shorty and a crazy cat named Moogstar (aka Larry Clemons), a flashy multi-instrumentalist who still plays with stuffed animals. Their personal dynamics -- bullshitting and philosophizing much of the time -- are endlessly charming and often hilarious. The rag-tag crew is joined by neighbors and admirers like Tom Kenny, Johnny Knoxville and Mike Judge. Much footage is mined from a local cable talk show that Swamp Dogg made dozens of appearances on, hosted by Art Fein.

It is to the filmmakers' credit that they matched their video and audio style to the sparkling personality at the center of the documentary. The spirit of Swamp Dogg is always front and center, and there is fun to be had whether you are watching old music clips, the banter among housemates, or just Swamp Dogg sitting peacefully in his yard watching an artist re-paint the concrete swimming pool. He is an artist and a hustler and a pretty deep thinker when all is said and done -- and the filmmakers are perfectly in tune with all of that. This feels like the homage the man has earned.

SECRET MALL APARTMENT (B+) - This is a delectable story -- 20 years ago a bunch of young artists created a secret apartment in the hidden walls of a mall in Providence, R.I. -- but the execution here gets sloppy in the second half and loses its momentum.

 

Director Jeremy Workman struggled similarly in "The World Before Your Feet," a problem of narrative focus. Here he zeroes in on Michael Townsend, a teacher who recruited his students in 2003 to infiltrate the gleaming Providence Place mall that had opened 4 years earlier as an anchor for revitalization of the city's decrepit downtown. At times the project comes off as an artistic statement about capitalism and urban gentrification; at other times it seems like just a fun lark that took a few years to get found out.

Workman is blessed with tons of archival footage -- the crew apparently filmed themselves nonstop as they slowly converted the 750 square feet into a surprisingly livable space. Most impressive was the hauling up a steep ladder of not only furniture but later dozens of concrete blocks used to build a privacy wall (and to frame a door with a lock). Townsend is an appealing character. Other co-conspirators spin stories 20 years later, all but Townsend finally going public for the first time since he was caught red-handed in 2007. 

Townsend is a natural leading character, and Workman explores his history of guerrilla art projects, most notably his pioneering of masking-tape art on the walls of a children's hospital. But deep dives into his responses to the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 feel dragged out and diversionary, as if needed to pad this out to feature length (91 minutes). We spend the second half of the film just waiting for the reveal of how Townsend got caught by mall security and what the consequences were.

But the setup can be a delight at times, delving into Providence's urban decay of the 1990s and the community created by artists and musicians at the time, with links to Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. The ingenuity of the mall crew -- a thoughtful and talented bunch -- is inspiring, and their camaraderie charming. Sometimes it's as simple as realizing that the security guards will ignore an alarm every time it goes off, and you can get away with a lot more than you think. 

BONUS TRACKS

* - True story: I was in Rolling Stones record store in Norridge, Ill., sometime in the '80s when the man ahead of me was demanding a refund -- he thought he had bought an actual Beatles cassette "but it's a bunch of dogs barking." He then imitated the barking dogs. He was furious and completely oblivious to his own culpability in the original transaction.

 

Dozens of songs zip by in "Swamp Dogg," and here are just a few samples. First, his early hit, as Jerry Williams Jr., "I'm the Lover Man":

 

He wrote "She's a Heartbreaker" for Gene Pitney in the late '60s:

 

With Gary U.S. Bonds, Williams wrote the country standard "She's All I got," a No. 2 hit for Johnny Paycheck in 1971:

 

Here's a snippet of an interview with Swamp Dogg and the recording of a bluegrass-style song he wrote for Jenny Lewis to sing, "Count the Days":

 

And here he is from his heyday, the album "Rat On!":

Con Jobs

 

ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR (C-minus) - A fun romp from 2018 didn't need a sequel and certainly not this spectacle. At least director Paul Feig and his cast got a free extended trip to Capri to rekindle the story of mommy influencer Stephanie and the mysterious, reckless Emily.

 

"A Simple Favor" had juicy performances from Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively and was clever enough to keep a viewer tuned in. It was incoherent in spots but entertaining and worth the effort. This sequel is a hot mess, and a cynical one at that. The same writing team from the original (with help from a third) churns the dialogue darker and nastier, a group of women trying to out-bro their writing colleagues.

The body count is higher and the blood flows more freely as Stephanie (Kendrick) tags along to Capri with Emily (Lively), who is marrying an Italian mobster with a secret. He has a mean mother, and Emily is confronted with her own acidic aunt (Allison Janney, in one of those horrible roles she just can't resist) from the family's convoluted past. A sister of Emily's will show up (Lively doing a ditzy turn as a dimwit), and poor Elizabeth Perkins mugs through the sunset of her career in a bad wig as Emily's addled mom. 

This is the kind of movie in which a father/ex-husband will be brutally murdered but the wedding will go on the next day, with barely a shrug from his adolescent son. On three different occasions characters are given needle injections, including a scene of Kendrick enduring a "truth serum" that turns her giddy, straight out of an episode of "Get Smart." Janney holds a gun to the kid's head, who rolls his eyes at her antics. LOL!

The original had a tenuous grip on reality and struck a balance between mean and playful. But this barrage of putdowns, with a plot that plays with incest and foul-mouthed children, is dark and disturbing. Feig shows off his epic drone-shot skills and drools over the scenery. But there is no joy in paradise. 

THE SUN CHILDREN (2020) (A-minus) - A confident child actor anchors a whipsmart story about street-hustling kids in Tehran who enroll in a school in order to gain access to a purported treasure underground. Acclaimed writer-director Majid Majidi nails every beat of this taut neo-realist thriller (streaming on DailyMotion).

 

Rouhallah Zamani (above) is beyond intense as 12-year-old Ali, the ringleader among his four-boy crew of petty thieves and little scammers, all of whom survive on the streets to provide for their families, having lost their fathers mostly to addiction, prison or death. Ali is a combination of aspiring entrepreneur and seasoned mobster, and he has earned the trust and respect of Hashem (Ali Nasirian), who keeps pigeons and runs a shady chop-shop operation. Hashem convinces Ali to enroll in a school that takes in troubled youth so that Ali can dig a tunnel under the neighboring cemetery in order to access what Hashem merely refers to as a treasure that will enrich them all.

Ali displays wiles and grit in surreptitiously accessing the bowels of the school to carry out the physically draining task. He also looks out for his pals, including Abolfazl, an Afghan immigrant who excels at math, and Reza (Mani Ghafouri), who dreams of making Iran's national soccer team. Ali also befriends Abolfazl's cute sister, Zahra (Shamila Shirzad), who hawks trinkets on the city's transit system.  And he skillfully navigates the school's administration -- itself a shell game of manipulating funders to keep the lights on -- finding at least one ally who believes in fighting for the futures of these exploited children.

Majidi, known for his late '90s coming-of-age tales "Children of Heaven" and "The Color of Paradise" (and co-writing with Nima Javidi), crafts a narrative as taut as a '70s crime caper. He packs a lot of plot development in 99 efficient minutes. His young star, Zamani, comes off as a scruffy young Tom Cruise intent on carrying out his mission impossible. Majidi fills in the boys' back stories with side plots about Ali's shell-shocked mother and another boy's meddling alcoholic father. Zamani and Shirzad are like a miniature Bogey and Bacall, finding each other attractive and respecting each other's grift.

It all builds to a shrewd, devastating conclusion. What is to become of the youth besieged by the inept and corrupt adults dominating their lives?

BONUS TRACKS

"Another Simple Favor" has the gall to borrow Spaghetti Western icon Ennio Morricone for its soundtrack, the lush touchstone, "C'era una Volta il West":

 

 The trailer for "Sun Children":

That '70s Drift: Listen Up

 

THE CONVERSATION (1974) (B) - Having finally gotten around to this touchstone of '70s realism, prompted by the death of Gene Hackman, I was surprised how sloppy this post-"Godfather" feature from Francis Ford Coppola is. Hackman plays Harry Caul, an audio-surveillance specialist who is overwhelmed by guilt over his role in what he suspects is a plan to kill a young couple.

 

Caul is cautious to the point of paranoia in guarding his own personal life and protecting his personal safety from the shady characters who pay him handsomely for his services. He becomes obsessed with his latest recording, of that couple (Cindy Marshall and Frederic Forrest) having a random conversation in San Francisco's Union Square. That conversation will recur in various loops throughout the movie, just like it might run through a person's mind, over and over again. 

Caul's own life will become jeopardized as he seeks to withhold the finished enhanced tapes, which then get stolen. Hackman will take his character through a spiral into mental instability, as he discovers the true motives of the couple and the mysterious man (the Director) who hired him -- as his own fears of being targeted become more justified. 

Hackman is surrounded by a fine cast -- in particular John Cazale as Caul's tech partner. Harrison Ford is the assistant to the Director. Teri Garr and Elizabeth MacRae are delightful as prostitutes whom Caul takes up with. A climactic scene between Caul and MacRae's Meredith is scored to a finished recording of the conversation, and it's a feverish scene that stands out in an otherwise frustrating visual palette. There is too much repetition of snippets of the conversation, and too much of the verite dialogue is muffled -- it's not clear whether that is intentional or ironic. Hackman saves this in the end, but it too often seems like a missed opportunity at key moments.

BEING THERE (1979) (A-minus) - Peter Sellers is mesmerizing as an improbably exalted simpleton, in the capstone to director Hal Ashby's perfect decade-long run, a parable about politics and media from Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski.

Sellers is Chance the gardener, who for the first time ever leaves the cloistered estate he has served his whole life after the wealthy old man dies and the man's lawyers dismiss the staff. Having only the knowledge of the world he has learned from his television set, Chance wanders the gritty streets of D.C. before falling in with another rich old man, Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), and his soon-to-be-widow, the much younger Eve (Shirley MacLaine). Ben, Eve, and others would never assume Chance -- now misnamed Chauncey Gardiner -- is an illiterate man-child, and so every interaction with him is misinterpreted as Chauncey dispensing mystical wisdom steeped in bland gardening metaphors. Background checks prove fruitless, as Chauncey is untraceable.

 

Ben is connected to the president (Jack Warden), and before long Chauncey -- these days we would call him mentally challenged -- is hailed as a straight-talking political pundit, a breath of fresh air in the cynical beltway. Ashby juggles the concepts of suspended-disbelief and magical realism throughout, maintaining a momentum that must never pause the conceit even for a second, lest the narrative completely fall apart. The dialogue is off just enough to be amusing but not too far off to be ridiculous.

It's an incredible feat pulled off by Kosinski and screenwriter Robert C. Jones (Ashby's regular editor who penned "Coming Home" the year before). But none of it works without Sellers, who developed a flat vocal affect, blank visage and halting gait for the lead role. His demeanor as the calm in the middle of the storm is a master class in restraint and character creation. MacLaine is delicious as the deathbed spouse who falls for Chauncey's raw appeal. In her early 40s at the time, she is at the top of her game. When Chauncey, who shows little interest in or knowledge of sex, tells her he "likes to watch" -- he merely is talking about television -- she is aroused to the point of self-gratification, writhing on a bearskin rug next to Chauncey's bed.

Ashby turns this into a sharp critique of elite society and a bold political statement. (He also takes an early swipe at the idea of white privilege.) He is blessed with the other-worldly talent of Sellers, who would die months after the movie's release.

Let the Mystery Be

 

TRENQUE LAUQUEN (B) - It takes a certain level of confidence to slowly unfurl a four-hour story, edited into shifting time loops, with a central mystery that does not get fully resolved or even explained. But if you have a fondness for serpentine storytelling with a small-town "Northern Exposure" vibe, then you might not mind spending time with this charming Argentine curiosity.

 

The film begins in the middle. Botanist Laura (Laura Paredes) has vanished, and her boyfriend Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd) and her colleague Ezequiel/Chicho (Ezequiel Pierri) begin to track her to the inland town of Trenque Lauquen, where she was in pursuit of an elusive flower and hung out as part of the cast of a radio news show hosted by the charming Juliana (Juliana Muras). In fact, the radio sessions, appealingly authentic, are perhaps the best part of the film, an entertaining Greek chorus helping the convoluted plot get straightened out.

Nested within the main narrative, in the first two hours, is an erotic correspondence between two lovers discovered by Laura hidden in books from the town's public library. She shares the letters with Chicho, and he falls hard for her, though they do nothing more than share a fleeting kiss. Throughout the film, Pierri, as Chicho, has a schnauzer-like beard and a puppy-dog longing for his crush. Just before disappearing, Laura sneaks into the radio station and records a rambling explanation of much of what led her to go off on her own, and Juliana shares the recording with Chicho, who helplessly falls further for the woman he cannot have.

Director Laura Citarella (who co-wrote with her star Paredes) -- as you'd expect in a four-hour stemwinder -- is in no hurry to explain herself here, and you can break this into anywhere from two to eight pieces (like half-hour episodes of a mini-series) and you won't sacrifice any momentum or understanding of Citarella's motivations. The second half is dominated by Laura's interactions with Elisa Esperanza (Elisa Carricajo), the frustrated lead investigator of a supernatural incident at the lake involving a beast variously described as a wild boy or an alligator. Laura is taken in by Elisa and Elisa's partner, but that storyline doesn't really lead anywhere. I'm not sure, but it seems Laura believes that Elisa might be the reincarnation of the woman from the erotic correspondence. Carricajo has an arresting presence, playing up her big pregnant belly and eviscerating Laura with sharp side glances.

The sci-fi angle can be a bit much; thankfully, Juliana and her zoo-crew have fun with the tabloid news angle, and I could watch (or listen) to them for four hours. Citarella finally wraps her tale by following Laura as she sets off on her journey to wherever. A brilliant visual tracks Laura walking and the screen morphs from standard ratio to a wide-screen format. A final shot sweeps slowly like a pendulum, landing on an image that will either explain everything to you or leave you even more nonplussed. Whether you have the patience to make it past the first half hour is your call; if you make it to the end you might end up haunted for days. 

[Note: The film is leaving Criterion streaming at the end of the month, and good luck finding it somewhere after that.]

BONUS TRACKS

The film's music is quietly appealing A good sampling of the techno twist to Spaghetti Western music on the soundtrack:

 

This jangly '70s-style folk song "Los Caminos" is by Miro y su Fabulosa and Orquesta de Juguete:

 

Our title track, unrelated, from Iris Dement:

Young at Art

 

JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE (B+) - I've led a fairly charmed life, free from trauma or even much struggle. But one of the toughest years of my life fell during the lonely existence of junior year of high school -- brooding over how long it would take before I kissed a girl or had a close friend. At 17.

I was a sucker in the 1970s for sensitive singer-songwriters, like Jim Croce and Paul Simon. And I learned from watching this documentary about their cohort Janis Ian that her most famous song can still feel like a sock in the gut, stirring feelings that to this day bring a tear to my eye -- "At Seventeen." As one talking head here observes, just about any one of us has moments of darkness and doubt. No song has captured that human vulnerability like Ian's 1975 smash. It was from "At Seventeen" that I learned the truth.

 

I watched her perform it on the first episode of "Saturday Night Live," when I was about 13. and it hit home four years later, an anthem for social outcasts. But Ian, of course, was much more than that one song. 

She was an accomplished songwriter in her early teens, and had a hit in 1966 at 15 with "Society's Child," a sophisticated song about race relations ("She called you 'boy' instead of your name"). And this documentary certainly allows her story to unfold, mostly through archival footage and narration by Ian, now in her 70s, who is mostly heard and not seen in present form. We also visit with talking heads, including contemporaries Joan Baez, Lily Tomlin and Arlo Guthrie; fans like actors Laurie Metcalf and Jean Smart; and fatherly former producers, George "Shadow" Martin and Brooks Arthur, all of whom put Ian's long career in perspective.

Ian comes off as a dynamo and a survivor during her various life cycles and musical phases (which, unfortunately, included a disco-era collaboration with Giorgio Moroder). Her first adult relationship was with a willowy woman who broke her heart. She would then marry an abusive alcoholic, a brute who once held her at gunpoint, before late in life finding her true life partner. Her longtime accountant left her broke in the 1980s and in debt to the IRS. She eventually reinvented herself by moving to Nashville, where she rediscovered the roots of songwriting and collaboration, penning hits for others.

Throughout, her deeply personal compositions -- she would have a career revival and fully come out of the closet in 1992 with her dark, layered album "Breaking Silence -- provide the through-line from teenager to senior citizen. (She had to cut short a farewell tour a few years ago when she lost her singing voice.) There are joyful stories throughout. She recalls getting upstaged in the late '70s, at her peak, by her opening act, an up-and-coming Billy Joel, after which she vowed never to phone in a performance again. 

The main problem with the movie is the oppressive use of re-enactments. Director Varda Bar-Kar, who styles herself as an "activist" filmmaker, assembles an entire cast of players to portray Ian and others throughout her life, and at least half the movie involves scenes scuffed up to resemble archival footage. It is amateurish and distracting. It almost ruined the film for me at several points. It was only the power of the songs and the charming tenacity of Ian that got me through the nearly two-hour running time. 

The re-enactments are especially annoying because we rarely get to view a contemporary Ian -- only at the very beginning and very end. Otherwise, she is the unseen narrator. Maybe that was Ian's choice -- why distract from the story being told with repeated visuals of a 70-something white-haired woman. I'm not a fan of biopics, especially of musicians, but Bar-Kar certainly had the material that would justify scrapping the documentary and going full tilt into historical fiction; instead, she slaps together a mixture and does neither genre justice. (She also has a curious habit of pulling back from her talking-head interviews to show the microphones, cameras and fake backgrounds, taking the viewer out of the moment.)

It is to Ian's credit that her life story weathers this artistic assault. She displays a knack for withstanding life's challenges and making a meaningful impact with her music decade after decade. It unmoors her from the gritty '70s -- and those ugly-duckling teen years -- and fleshes out her catalog. In the end, she is the star of her own biopic.

BONUS TRACKS

Ian's breakthrough, at age 15, "Society's Child," got the stamp of approval on TV from Leonard Bernstein:

 

She was influenced by English folk songs, in the era of Fairport Convention. An example is "Tea and Sympathy":

 

Ian wrote "Stars," which we previously featured in this review of a documentary about Nina Simone, after being inspired by Don McLean's "Vincent," one of those perfect compositions:

 

"Stars" plays over the closing credits, in a version by Bettye Lavette, but I couldn't find a version online.

Ian always had a jazzy side to her. Here's is a duet with Mel Torme on her song "Silly Habits"

 

Here is a song Ian wrote for a Nashville waitress who thought her average life didn't have an impact on the world. It is the lovely "Some People's Lives" (which Bette Midler covered as the title track to her 1990 album):

Enhanced Models

 

COMPANION (C-minus) - What a lackluster attempt at a sci-fi AI thriller. A flat no-name cast sleepwalks through a cobbled together idiot plot and commits the ultimate sin here -- it's boring.

 

Sophie Thatcher plays Iris, a very lifelike sexbot, who accompanies Josh (a duller than dull nepo baby Jack Quaid) on a weekend at a rich man's mansion, where the crooked millionaire (Rupert Friend doing a bad Russian accent) will end up dead, thrusting a bunch of young adults into a tale of intrigue that will involve trying to steal his stash of cash. Iris, clad in old-fashioned girl-next-door clothes, will be manipulated into helping carry out the heist. Will she be sentient enough to fight back?

Iris reveals in the opening scene that she ends up killing Josh; it's a clever device, but it does give away the ending too much. (Though the choice of murder weapon is an inspired touch.) Things get very sloppy in the end, as another AI bot shows up to raise the stakes. But things get way too sloppy, and some plot twists just don't make sense. The debut filmmaker, Drew Hancock, seems to have a bunch of ideas, but few are original. (See, for example "M3GAN," which is due for a sequel this year, or go back to "The Stepford Wives.")

Thatcher has her moments, and the idea borders on thought-provoking in the way that it plays with the idea of how couples manufacture their origin story or use it as a weapon against each other. But it gets tiring to have to figure out why some bot reboots go back to the factory setting but others don't, solely for the convenience of the narrative. The supporting cast adds no oomph, and it all leads up to an exceptionally bloody ending, as you'd suspect. Some relationships are just not meant to work out.

CAROL DODA TOPLESS AT THE CONDOR (B) - This is a breezy nostalgia tour of the phenomenon of the 1960s when Carol Doda made a splash in San Francisco and ushered in the mainstream era of nude dancing and outlandish silicone breast injections. Throw in a bunch of goombah club owners and a mob-related slaying, and there is plenty of pulp here to justify 100 minutes of documentary time.

 

Credit to filmmakers Marlo McKenzie and Johnathan Parker for their deft weaving together of archival footage with contemporary interviews of colorful characters who are good at storytelling. Doda, who died in 2015, is seen through old interviews. 

The film captures the buzz of the early '60s North Beach scene, especially glitzy Broadway Street, just as X-rated movies and stage shows were coming out of the shadows. The timeline here is consistent, as the decadence morphs into the permissiveness of the hippie scene and San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967. Old club owners, bartenders and strippers are on hand to wax on about the era and fill us youngsters in on the phenomenon of Doda emerging from the ceiling, standing on top of a piano, being lowered to the ground and unveiling the famous fashion design of the day -- the breast-exposing monokini. 

Doda would go on to get a ridiculous number of silicone injections, eventually swelling her breasts from a B-cup to double D's. A fellow stripper tells the horrifying tale of doing the same and suffering a bout of post-natal gangrene that cost her both breasts. It was a wild time, and Doda gets some credit for trying to stand up for herself amid the exploitation -- she eventually got a stake in a club and could be seen as a pioneer by future generations of sex workers. 

The footage is fairly tame at first, but it doesn't take long for the nudity to go wall-to-wall for the final two-thirds of the film. It eventually becomes beside the point, and you're able to appreciate a bunch of old pals spinning war stories from a classic era.

New to the Queue

 Let the countdown begin ...

 

We have high hopes for the teaming of Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in a debut film about how men become pals, "Friendship."

From the team behind "Buzzard," two losers try to reconcile their pasts during a trip into the woods, "Vulcanizadora."

A light-hearted look at an old R&B singer-songwriter, "Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted."

A documentary about New York's 1975 financial crisis, with a title riffing on the famous New York Daily News headline, "Drop Dead City."

Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively are worth revisiting as they return to their 2018 tale of intrigue, from Paul Feig, "Another Simple Favor."

High Point of the Lo-Fi Movement

 

LOUDER THAN YOU THINK: A LO-FI HISTORY OF GARY YOUNG AND PAVEMENT (B+) - We'll eventually get to see Alex Ross Perry's experimental history of the '90s indie darlings Pavement, but until then, it's good to have this straightforward mainstream tick-tock of the Stockton, Calif., good guys, even if it's done here through the filter of the band's bonkers original drummer, Gary Young.

In the headline to Richard Brody's review of Perry's "Pavements," the group is referred to as "big in the nineties and bigger in memory." One of the joys of "Louder Than You Think" is seeing all the band members participate and placing into perspective (and the historical record) the brilliance of "Slanted and Enchanted," the band's buzzy 1992 debut album that helped put the boutique label Matador Records on the map. Sometimes with a documentary, like a good song, all you have to do is to hit all your spots and have a catchy hook. Young (below, center), an unrepentant alcoholic and drug abuser up until his 2023 death at 70, makes for a fascinating character study while we celebrate a truly innovative indie band.

Young was of a different generation than the youngsters who knocked on his door wanting to record their first songs -- Scott Kannberg (above left) and Stephen Malkmus (right). Young was a Boomer, born in the early '50s, while the band members were born in the mid-'60s. In fact, Malkmus, the laconic songwriter and lead singer, just might be the quintessential Gen X person. His interviews alternate between ironic detachment and exasperation in recalling how Young's antics -- insisting on doing headstands during song and sometimes showing up in no condition to perform -- earned the drummer a following of his own. 

Malkmus and Kannberg (along with Bob Nastanovich, who would arrive later and serve as Young's backup and baby-sitter) had a near-phobia about being popular rock stars, while Young wanted to be Buddy Rich, Ringo Starr and Ginger Baker rolled into one. One great story from the road highlights Young's showmanship -- he was partial to tossing a drumstick in the air and catching it (ta-da!) -- while the normie front men cringe with hipster embarrassment. As Malkmus put it, Young favored "prog-rock extravagance" while surrounded by "unconfident dudes who are worried about being cool or something." A classic generation gap.

That tension would lead to Young's exit after their first big tour opening for Sonic Youth. By the end of 1993, about a year into their popularity, Young made crazy financial demands and parted ways with the band. Young seems to have few regrets about flaming out -- though you certainly can detect a catch in the voice of his long-suffering wife, Geri, as she recounts those days with a sigh. Young made some solo recordings, which have an outsider-artist feel (to be charitable) and went back to relative obscurity as a recording engineer. Pavement would release a solid sophomore effort (1994's "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain") and a collection of their early recordings before the magic wore off; by 1996's "Wowee Zowee" (which I panned in the Chicago Sun-Times) Malkmus' lyrical well would run dry, and after two more tepid releases the band broke up in 1999, a perfect capstone to a decade. (An academic article could be considered comparing Pavement's drop-off in quality following the loss of Young to the Replacements' slide after firing alcoholic guitarist Bob Stinson. Discuss.)

Young, hunched over from scoliosis and slurring his words because of his booze-soaked brain, sits for hours of interviews, recounting the band's early days and never hiding his ongoing drinking problem (he boasts of ingesting "a quart of whiskey" a day). When asked about Young out-drinking the other band members, the band's tour engineer says, "He usually outdrank himself." Young apparently was hyperactive his whole life; his brother observes that it must have been "energetically demanding to be him," which helps explain the self-medicating. He claims to have dropped acid more than 300 times when he was 16 years old.

Debut director Jed Rosenberg, with co-writer Greg King, balances a light-hearted approach with a, er, sober analysis of the band's early years leading up to the "Slanted and Enchanted" success. They use jangly marionettes (in the style of "Team America: World Police" and "Pee-wee's Playhouse") to re-enact some of Young's antics. Talking heads include Young's brother, other band members, and Chris Lombardi, who founded Matador in his New York apartment in 1989.

It was around that time that Kannberg and Malkmus reconnected in their hometown of Stockton, found Young at his Louder Than You Think home studio and put out a series of raw EPs and singles (most on Chicago's Drag City label), culminating in 1991 with their signature tune "Summer Babe." The recordings were fairly crude, in the mode of the era, though Young here bristles at the labeling of "lo-fi" -- he insists he was making quality recordings. He became their drummer by default, in the recordings leading up to "Slanted" and on tour

There is a nostalgic rush in the telling of the band's emergence in 1992. Tapes of "Slanted" circulated, and Spin magazine, the mainstream taste-maker of the day, reviewed the album from a cassette copy, giving it a five-star rave and launching a phenomenon. I still remember spinning the CD for the first time and feeling like a new genre had opened up. It was obtuse and clever and fresh.

Kannberg is listed as an executive producer, and you can appreciate his input, which must have helped the filmmakers walk the line between presenting Young as a clown vs. as a serious influence on '90s independent music. It's an admirable study of art and addiction. And it's a valentine to the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, when possibilities seemed endless across many genres of music. Young was a key contributor, and he gets his due here.

BONUS TRACKS

From "Slanted," the propulsive anthem "Two States":

 

Here is the Wedding Present's more hi-fi cover of "Box Elder," from Pavement's first EP:

 

And Young's memorable drumming on the timeless pop masterpiece, "Summer Babe":

Hearts of Darkness

 

BRING THEM DOWN (C-minus) - This debut film leans hard on its two rough-hewn millennial stars -- Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott -- to tell the grinding revenge thriller revolving around feuding ranching families in rural Ireland. It suffers from a confusing time-shifting narrative structure that makes its unrelenting gore even more of a chore to sit through.

 

Ireland's version of the Hatfields and McCoys bicker endlessly about property access and the theft of rams, and this dimly lit snit of a movie rains carnage on their lives. One plot point centers on an attack that cuts off the legs of the rams, leaving them to die, because just the legs have value, or something like that, but mainly just because this is a cruel and unrelenting howl. Abbott ("On the Count of Three," "James White") is a strong actor, but he's allowed just one speed here, and it involves perpetual brooding. He plays Michael who must care for his bitter, ailing father, Ray (Colm Meaney) and pine from afar for his old girlfriend, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who married his rival and bore a son, Jack (Keoghan), who leads the attacks on Michael's flock.

Director and co-writer Chris Andrews outlines this tale with a soap opera plot, face-planting in the first scene, as a young Michael, in a car with Caroline and his mother, intentionally crashes the car immediately after the mother announces she's leaving the family. The mother dies and Caroline is scarred for life. And then we're supposed to sympathize with Michael, somehow. By the end, there will be a human head carried around in a bag and a dog will get stabbed and ears will get shot off.

There is just no explanation for taking such a grim tale and then jumbling the narrative, telling it from one perspective in the first half and another in the second half, neither of them particularly compelling. Andrews is trying to make a point about fathers and sons (with women and animals as mere collateral damage), but his movie is too dark, both literally and figuratively. There is just no opening here to identify with the story or empathize with the characters. It's an assault. For masochists only. 

ABOUT DRY GRASSES (B-minus) - Up until now, there had never been a mediocre film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylon, even the slow-burn character studies that ticked past three hours (which his past three films have now done). But this micro-narrative about two teachers falsely accused by female students of inappropriate behavior is even more glacially paced and it takes place at a school in wintry Anatolia that seems more like a Siberian gulag -- making the first two hours feel like a chore for the viewer, too.

The third hour -- if you can get there -- redeems Ceylon's granular character study, when he turns the focus on the two teachers' passive-aggressive pursuit of a woman. Deniz Celiloglu stars as Samet, a bitter art teacher who vows to escape Anatolia after the school year, and he is roommates with social studies teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici), who has been there longer and copes better with the mind-numbing ennui and body-numbing winters. The meet Nuray (Merve Dizdar), another teacher, who lost a leg in a bombing by anti-government radicals in Ankara. Nuray is more inclined toward the handsome Kenan, but Samet -- who at first passed on dating her and introduced her to Kenan -- decides to pursue her.

 

Meantime, Samet has developed a strong bond with a student protege Sevim (Ece Bagci), who turns on her teacher after a perceived slight and then gets a classmate to join her in accusing Samet and Kenan of inappropriate contact. The first hour ends with the administration basically sweeping it under the rug, and you are never sure if the accusation is unfounded or whether there will be consequences for the men. 

The middle third sags appreciably, though. Ceylon's dialogue (he wrote the screenplay with his wife, Ebru, and Akin Aksu, a previous collaborator on "The Wild Pear Tree") is uncharacteristically wooden; characters pontificate and give political speeches, and you can almost hear Ceylon's typewriter clacking as the actors speak the lines. At one point, Samet visits Nuray, expecting to get laid, and he is subjected to a long philosophical screed -- which actually serves as an apt metaphor for the frustrations of the viewer looking forward to Ceylon's usually suavity as a filmmaker. 

One character laments "the weariness of hope," and you want to say, "Amen." Interiors here are poorly lit to go with exteriors that what character calls this "forgotten remote corner of the Earth," as if to pass along the Seasonal Affective Disorder to the viewers. I can handle a downcast story; "Climates" (2006) was no walk in the park, but it spoke volumes about fractured relationships and recriminations, and it did so in 98 perfect minutes. (Maybe Ceylon should have let his co-editor do more of the cutting here.)

If you have the patience, there are scenes and moods that are worth exploring and which might stick with you a while. Ceylon truly captures that connection between a teacher and student, which on the surface might seems inappropriately flirty but which is haunting in its depth, especially when each person feels betrayed. And Samet's late attempt at wooing Nuray (in effect betraying Kenan) is sad and sweet and smart. Nuray has the wise world-weariness of a victim of terrorism, and Dizdar turns in a nuanced portrayal of a woman (unlike a middle-school girl) who has no illusions about potential mates.

I broke this up over three nights, and the third hour was certainly worth enduring the drudgery that everyone goes through on the forgotten fringes of civilization.

BONUS TRACK

Other reviews for Ceylon's movies:

• Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2013)
  
• Winter Sleep (2015)
• The Wild Pear Tree (2019) 
• The brilliant early trio: Distant (2002), Climates (2006) (still his best), Three Monkeys (2008).

Doc Watch: Rock Docs (Old Wankers)

 Spending back-to-back nights with perhaps the two pre-eminent Boomer bands from the 1970s, whose music I scorned in my youth but grew to appreciate a bit as an adult.

BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN (B+) - The first third of this life-spanning profile of the foundational heavy-metal quartet of the classic-rock era is quite joyful. The three survivors sit for interviews and share their memories of childhood, accompanied by archival photos, concert clips from influences, and newsreel-style footage, all of which puts the postwar era into perspective. We also are treated to a rare, unreleased audio interview with drummer John Bonham, whose 1980 death ended the band's decade-long run.

 

Music archivist Bernard MacMahon recounts the early training of bassist John Paul Jones (who made a name in the '60s as a pop arranger for Shirley Bassey, Lulu and others), guitarist Jimmy Page (who took over the Yardbirds, which became the basis for Led Zeppelin), and vocalist Robert Plant, who basically ripped off R&B artists to establish his footing (nonetheless dodging a career as a chartered accountant). It all makes for an engaging origin story of these formidable talents who defied predictions and knocked the rock scene for a loop with their first two iconic albums in 1969. There is no denying their artistry and commitment, no matter what you might think of the songs that are now hoary chestnuts still big-footing FM radio.

The main problem with "Becoming Led Zeppelin" is that ... they eventually become ... Led Zeppelin. Within a year they were indulging in vintage heavy-metal excess. It didn't take long for Page to break out the violin bow to scratch across his guitar strings during interminable solos. All the positive forces that brought them together quickly transform them into egomaniacal rock gods. The familiar hooks still have heft and sway; but they are also emblematic short-hand for some of the worst hard-rock noodling of the 1970s.

Props to MacMahon for allowing the songs here to breathe. He faithfully devotes time to full versions of multiple touchstone songs that poured out of Page, Plant and Jones on "Led Zeppelin" and "Led Zeppelin II," in both studio takes and live performances. (And the audio quality is stellar throughout.) The filmmaker narrows his focus to that first year -- including mainstays like "Whole Lotta Love" and "Dazed and Confused" -- mainly between the breakthrough January 1969 performance at the Fillmore in San Francisco and their conquering of London at the Royal Albert Hall one year later. (As the credits roll, you can sense fans already starting to clamor for a Part 2 that would romp through the '70s.)

The first half of the film definitely has broader mass appeal; I especially enjoyed Page's visit to the boathouse where the band first rehearsed. That contrasts with the second half, which starts to grind down and morph from '60s optimism into '70s sloppiness and grim hedonism. I'm not the target audience; Led Zeppelin, with its leaden sound and faux mystical musings, was my brother's music. After a decade or two passed, I was able to get a perspective on the band and to recover from that ugly phase of rock 'n' roll. I'm drawn to their later stuff, more of a "Physical Graffiti" or "In Through the Out Door" guy, albums that are more nuanced. (A year after that last studio effort, just as the band was selling tickets for what would have been a monster tour of America, Bonham infamously choked on his own vomit and died.)

"Becoming Led Zeppelin" certainly does justice to the band. It's an acid test for both fans and detractors. As that very first song said, "Good Times Bad Times." The rest was history.

PINK FLOYD AT POMPEII (1972) (B) - This is a live performance -- it's not a concert, because there's no crowd -- captured in late 1971 and re-imagined this year in IMAX glory. Pink Floyd, by then led by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, spent four days recording music in the Italian ruins of Pompeii, with only their sound and film crews enjoying the show.

The film is bookended by slow-moving crane shots, inching in at the beginning and creeping out at the end, with the band at the center of a decrepit coliseum. At other times they wander amid columns and obelisks, producing visuals that might have been the inspiration for the Stonehenge scene in "This Is Spinal Tap." Director Adrian Maben, with cinematographers Willy Kurant and Gabor Pogany, intercuts images from frescoes and natural sights, such as steam and bubbling lava pools produced by Mount Vesuvius nearby.

 

Most of the songs come from 1968's "A Saucerful of Secrets" and 1971's "Meddle," though you also see the band in the studio, via added 1972 footage, recording tracks for their breakthrough "Dark Side of the Moon." It is fascinating to watch a baby-faced Gilmour, with headphones feeding him backing tracks, suss out lead-guitar licks for "Brain Damage" (above). Back at Pompeii, the band jams with precision, and you get a particular appreciation for Richard Wright's inventive work on keyboards. 

The opening scenes chronicle the outdoor setup by the crew, and I was amused to see two people reverently carrying out a gong -- Chekhov's gong, if you will, because you know that it will be involved in an assault before the film ends. (Waters does the honors.) Much like the Zeppelin film, this one requires a certain level of familiarity with the band's mythos and their penchant for ethereal jamming. 

I let the IMAX images and quadrophonic ambient sounds wash over me, and while I ingested no mind-altering substances in preparation, I did experience the occasional hallucinatory dozing, and so the 90 minutes passed pleasantly. The pretension of it all wasn't a bother; I know that "jazz odyssey" would arrive to burst the bubble about a decade later.

BONUS TRACKS

Pink Floyd with "Echoes: Part 1" from Pompeii:

 

Over the closing credits of Led Zep, from the January 1970 Royal Albert Hall show, a cover of Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody":

 

Spinal Tap with "jazz odyssey":

New to the Queue

 A quarter of the way through a century ...

 

Amalia Ulman follows up her debut "El Planeta" with a romp about vain New York City content creators exploiting the odd locals of a rural town in Argentina, "Magic Farm."

Master storyteller Jia Zhangke ("The World," "Touch of Sin") spins a love story that spans 20 years, "Caught by the Tides."

Alex Ross Perry ("Listen Up Philip," "Queen of Earth") takes an avant-garde approach to the rock documentary, "Pavements."

We're approaching our limit of '60s/'70s nostalgia, and we just revisited the topic, but, for completists' sake, we'll check out "One to One: John & Yoko."

We'll go down memory lane with filmdom's original two stoner buds, "Cheech & Chong's Last Movie."

Double-Jointed

We stumbled on the book 25th Hour by David Benioff, who co-created HBO's "Game of Thrones," so we watched the movie version and then twinned it with Spike Lee's breakthrough.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) (A-minus) - The 1980s culminate in Spike Lee's cultural howl, a defiant poke at race relations in Brooklyn during one sweaty summer day. Lee has a lot to say, and he crafts a smart script and is blessed with a strong, deep cast.

 

All of the action takes place within about a square block in Bedford-Stuyvesant in a 24-hour period in the middle of summer as the temperatures and temperaments reach a boiling point. Lee stars as Mookie, who delivers pizza for Sal (Danny Aiello) and spars verbally with Sal's jamoke sons, the aggressive Pino (John Turturro) and the clueless Vito (Richard Edson alert!). Mookie also bickers with his sister Jade (Lee's sister Joie) and his fiery baby mama Tina (the appealing Rosie Perez). 

Lee populates the street with a kaleidoscope of characters, including the real-life couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as, respectively, the town drunk Da Mayor and the town elder Mother Sister, as well as the firebrand Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and the towering Radio Rahim (Bill Nunn), whose tricked-out boombox blasts Public Enemy 24/7. Lee sets all of these characters loose in his circumscribed tinder box and grows microagressions into macroagressions and into aggressions. Things will eventually go up in flames.

The racial tensions are unavoidable in this world. The local black residents resent not only Italian Sal but also the Korean couple who run a bodega across the street. Recriminations are already stacked high, and as Mookie and Pino keep pushing each other's buttons, Buggin Out has found a hill to die on -- the pictures on the walls of Sal's pizzeria are all Italians and none are black. That's all it takes for this to spill over into pointless violence.

Everyone here is at or near the top of their game, especially Aiello, Esposito and Perez. Lee is the connective tissue here, showing both strength and vulnerability (especially regarding his  responsibilities as a father and mate), and he has an appealing swagger, with his knock-kneed jock walk. The centerpiece of the film, around the midpoint, is the famous bigoted rants by the main characters, each going off on a different race/ethnicity, a profound expiation, a twisted cry of racial pride and hatred.

In the end, it is Mookie who is asked to "do the right thing," and whether he does so or not will depend on your perspective. It's a litmus test for the viewer, and it's a clever device that Lee slowly assembles during the two-hour run time. Not everything works smoothly here. The dialogue is occasionally stilted, especially in the way in which characters keep repeating each others' names when they interact. The one-person Greek chorus -- here a street-front DJ called Mister Senor Love Daddy (played by Samuel L. Jackson) -- can feel trite and played out. And the frequent references to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X wear out their welcome by the end. But there is no denying that Lee has a command of the story and his bustling cast, and he has created a funny and forceful polemic that is a joy to watch from beginning to end.

25th HOUR (2003) (C-minus) - There is something cheap and tinny about the production values in this leaden tale about a drug dealer spending his final 24 hours with his loved ones before heading off to serve a seven-year prison sentence. The lighting and sound are off, and crowd scenes come off as artificial.

And this is a reminder that Edward Norton was a thing back then but he never really became a bigger thing. Since "Fight Club" (1999) and this, he has to be grateful to Wes Anderson for helping him keep food on the table. (Most recently he's done voice work for a TV series called "Sausage Party: Foodtopia.") Norton doesn't have the heft to carry "25th Hour" as Montgomery Brogan, who suspects someone close to him squealed to the feds.

This would be an annoyingly myopic New York City film even without the added mawkishness of it being filmed in the aftermath of 9/11. Thus, we get super-Irish, overly proud first-responders and bartenders and constant visual nods to hallowed Ground Zero and the American flag. Lee just can't help himself as he leans hard into the patriotic pap, all of which is unnecessary when telling a mob tale. 

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is most effective among the cast as Monty's friend Jacob, a high school teacher who lusts after one of his students, coyly portrayed by Anna Paquin. Barry Pepper, though, is a cipher as big-shot trader Frank, who lusts after Monty's girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson). The book is full of clever dialogue and has a pretty zippy narrative at just over 200 pages; here, much of that banter is flattened by Lee (David Benioff adapted his own novel) or jettisoned for time, even if the movie drags on for two and a quarter hours.

Brian Cox is around to lend New York gravitas as Monty's father, whose bar might now be vulnerable to the thugs that Monty dealt with. It's all a reminder that this old-school Boston/New York hardscrabble working-class bullshit was tired back then, even before Martin Scorsese and Ben Affleck/Matt Damon beat it senseless. Not much works here. Even the corny, old-fashioned jazzy score by Terence Blanchard is cloying and intrusive -- leading up to a collaboration between Blanchard and Bruce Springsteen on an earnest late-career ballad playing over the end credits.

Lee has had quite the up-and-down career, and there were times when his style of filmmaking fell flat, like it did here. He would rebound a few years later with "Inside Man" and his monumental documentary about Hurricane Katrina, "When the Levees Broke," but his feature films since then have been underwhelming ("BlacKkKlansman," for example). There's a big difference between the Brooklyn-proud insurgency of "Do the Right Thing" and this limp offering 14 years later from a dewy-eyed 40-something storyteller trafficking in Homeland Security porn.

BONUS TRACKS

One saving grace for "25th Hour" is a club scene that is buoyed by better music. Here is Liquid Liquid with "Cavern":

 

And the starting and end point for all things rap, Public Enemy, "Fight the Power":