Stumblecore

 

FREE TIME (B+) - Every generation gets the Mumblecore it deserves. It's just a matter of placing the characters properly on the autism spectrum. This debut feature, a minor-key Millennial riff on "Office Space," is well served by a short running time (just 74 minutes) and a winning no-name cast.

Colin Burgess (below left) stars as nerdy Drew, an office drone who, approaching his 30s, impetuously quits his soulless job as a data analyst (almost as an after-thought during a check-in with his manager) and sees an opportunity to make more fulfilling use of his free time. But he woefully miscalculates the allure of retiring in your late 20s and trying to live your modest dreams. Burgess, behind a silly porn 'stache and spectacles, is a perfect aimless dweeb. He is surrounded by a sharp cast, including a manic Rajat Suresh as Drew's roommate Rajat; the one-named Holmes as Rajat's bossy girlfriend who has no patience for Drew lazing around the apartment; Jessie Pinnick as a would-be love interest; and veteran James Webb (below right) as the exasperated boss.

 

Drew quickly realizes that he made a big mistake. First, he's broke. (As a former co-worker tells him at a party, the point of working for a living is being able to buy things, "products.") Second, the band he plays keyboards for has morphed into a country outfit since the return of its leader from a life-altering retreat with a guru, and Drew doesn't fit in anymore. (It's hard to tell whether he is bad at keyboards or he's just the odd man out.) He almost immediately starts scheming to get his job back in amusing inept ways. A last-reel twist aims for a Big Message about a potential rise of the office drones against mind-numbing capitalist servitude. First-time writer-director Ryan Martin Brown gets in and out of this diversion before it can fall flat, and he zips along to a tidy denouement.

You won't fall out of your seat guffawing, but I did laugh a lot, consistently throughout at the characterizations and the arch one-liners. It's a deceptively clever script -- it has something to say about office drudgery and that wall we hit in our late 20s careerwise -- and the cast finds the right tone of Millennial ennui. "Free Time" is a good use of your free time.

WAITING FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE (C-minus) - There's Mumblecore and then there's just mopey. In this case, we're toward the Gen Z end of the spectrum, the kind of film in which a 25-year-old moans about how old she is and scoffs at the idea of sleeping with a 20-year-old. Add in a heavy accent to the mumbling and grumbling, and this aimless story from first-time director Linh Tran becomes nearly unwatchable.

The movie is ostensibly about a reunion of sorts for two young women at the Michigan lake house of one of their boyfriends whose father has recently died, not that the plot point is developed at all, besides making the boyfriend a stoned, drunken, passive-aggressive jerk. The key pairing here is between Kim (Joyce Ha) and Amy (Jin Park), estranged friends walking on eggshells around each other. It's obvious that Amy used to have feelings for the lakehouse host, Jay (Sam Straley), but Kim swooped in after Amy introduced the pair. 

Also on hand is Lin (Qun Chi), a foreign traveler with a tenuous connection to the group. She seems to have little to offer the narrative, although she does pontificate about love and relationships during a fulcrum point of the film. Rounding out the quintet is Alex (Erik Barrientos), who is that quintessential lake house guy who supplies the drugs and acoustic guitar. 

It's all a pretty decent set-up, but Tran just does nothing with a spare script full of dull, whiny (sparse) dialogue that reveals little about the characters. Besides peeing outdoors in the opening scene, Amy is pretty much a cipher who coddles her insecurities and grudges. Kim continually tries to have an honest dialogue with her friend, but is rebuffed at every turn. Otherwise, their excessive quibbling over the two male ciphers pegs the Bechdel needle into the red zone.

Only occasionally do things come to life, as when Amy, out for a run with mop-topped Alex, gets instantly turned on by his admission that he had thought about how cute she was when they had met once before. But little else justifies an hour-and-a-half of post-teen angst dispensed by a bunch of drips.

Ted Mack's Amateur Hour

 

UNFROSTED (C-minus) - Rarely will you find a comedy with this many clunkers throughout. Jerry Seinfeld, who decided not to go way or just stick to the occasional standup tour charging $400 per ticket, instead blew tens of millions of dollars as director on his star-studded sop to the breakfast industry, a paean to the Pop Tart. He and his team of out-of-touch writers set the story in 1963, and they also time travel to the 1990s to dig up some hoary jokes.

This Netflix cheapie doesn't really know what it wants to be. At its core it is one in a line of capitalist origin-story reveries, like "Air" or the superior example of the genre, "BlackBerry." On the screen, it is a comedy by committee, a series of gags that would not be out of place on an episode of "The Monkees."  Even though it is set in the Kennedy era (props to Bill Burr for being one of the few to salvage their reputation, with a winning JFK impersonation), it features songs from the late '60s and riffs on future cultural touchstones like "The Godfather" and other parodic flourishes that Mel Brooks beat to death in the 1980s.

While the cast list is impressive, the two main parts go to the heads of the bitter-rival Kellogg and Post families, played by Jim Gaffigan and Amy Schumer, two funny enough people who just are not meant for the big screen. Their acting deficiencies, combined with Seinfeld's notorious wooden delivery, are toxic here. And they cannot be rescued by an underused Melissa McCarthy, or a laundry list of cameos: Peter Dinklage, Christian Slater, Jack McBrayer, Dan Levy, Thomas Lennon, Kyle Mooney, Tony Hale, Cedric the Entertainer, and a bunch of "SNL" cast-offs. Only a few casting choices click: Fred Armisen as an FDA inspector; Hugh Grant as the snooty real-life actor who played Tony the Tiger; and Jon Hamm and John Slattery in an inspired set piece in which they revive mean-spirited versions of their era-appropriate "Mad Men" ad men. 

The first 20 minutes of set-up was promising, and there are some laughs to be had, even if the batting average is awfully low. But by the final reel, it all turns ridiculous. The writing crew probably thought it would be cutting edge or downright subversive to spoof the January 6th Insurrection, but it's just tin-eared, childish and pretty much offensive in this context. Meantime, Seinfeld cavorts with his comic buddies in a candy-colored sitcom world and gets to drive around in classic cars, just as he likes to do, so at least he got to have fun with a big budget. But the film he created is shockingly amateurish.

Soundtrack of Your Life: RIP, Steve Albini

 

This one is personal. No one defined the Soundtrack of My Life more prodigiously or aggressively than Steve Albini, the Chicago recording engineer who died Tuesday at age 61. Born in the same year, we both hit our strides in the '90s, he helping create music, me gobbling it all up at Tower Records with the big-newspaper wages in my pocket.

 

Most people of our generation know the foundational albums he engineered (he shunned the term "producer," because he was just that way) -- such as the Pixies' debut "Surfer Rosa" and Nirvana's finale "In Utero," two albums that almost perfectly bookend the Heyday of the Planet of Sound. There was also P.J. Harvey's urgent "Rid of Me"; the Breeders debut "Pod"; and hardcore albums by Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard.

But Albini considered himself a craftsman, a technician, a hired gun, and he worked with a wide range of bands and artists. That includes some of my favorite, more obscure, albums from the '90s, such as the Poster Children's "Flower Plower"; the Wedding Present's "Seamonsters" (and a lot of David Gedge's subsequent output); Man or Astro-Man's "Project Infinity": "Fresh Gasoline" by Phono-Comb; "Sport Fishin'" by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet; and the Bottletones' "Adult Time." He even contributed to peak Guided by Voices, with two tracks on 1996's "Under the Bushes, Under the Stars." The list goes on.

I could link to dozens of songs below. Better yet, seek out those albums and experience them in full. Albini's passing earned an outpouring of respect. Christopher Borrelli at the Chicago Tribune penned a thoughtful appreciation. Consequence of Sound did a nice job putting together this compilation of essential tracks. And the New Yorker's music critic, Amanda Petrusich, weighed in at the end of the week. As next-gen Petrusich put it: "When I was a teenager coming of age, in the late nineties, 'Steve Albini' was more of an idea than a person, a pair of words—melodious, mysterious—stamped onto every other record I loved or was terrified by."

It's not just nostalgia -- or the fact that Albini was about four months older than me -- that jolted me upon hearing of his unexpected death. He was a workhorse who dedicated himself to assisting artists in realizing their potential. He was a perfectionist, a meticulous craftsman, a clever writer, and an intellectual. I admired all of his qualities, as well as his measured humility.

I also simply dug his output. Here is a list of the bands whose Albini-led albums I have owned (in addition to his own bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac), a beefy 33:

• Pixies
• Nirvana
• Slint
• Urge Overkill
• Helmet
• Poster Children (the pride of Champaign, Ill.)
• Breeders
• Amps
  
• Jesus Lizard
• Pigface
• Wedding Present
• Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet
  
• Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
• Fugazi
• P.J. Harvey
• Melt-Banana
• Gaunt
• Superchunk
• Fleshtones
• Man or Astro-Man?
• Robbie Fulks
• Phono-Comb
• Guided by Voices (2 tracks from Under the Bushes, Under the Stars)
• Veruca Salt
• Sadies
• Cinerama
• Bottletones
• Mclusky
• Frames
• Desert Fathers
• Electrelane
• Joanna Newsom
• Cloud Nothings
  

I'll see the Cloud Nothings in June in Chicago, and before that, the Sadies in Santa Fe in late May. We'll catch the Pixies in Denver in late June. And we'll see GBV for the umpteenth tour, this time in Austin in late October. Those were all planned before the news of Albini's sudden demise. But it speaks to how indelible his impact on me has been across the decades, and endures.

Albini was a brash young man, who said and did things he later regretted and atoned for. He grew as a man. (In my 20s I once made a co-worker seek refuge in her car for a good cry. I got to apologize to her a decade or so later. And I corrected my behavior.) He could be devastatingly acerbic, such as when he penned the ultimate public fuck-you to a Chicago music critic whose year-end list hyped the record-company darlings of the day, the passing fads Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair and Urge Overkill (the latter one of Albini's clients). See his letter to the Reader alt-weekly, titled "Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge." He later was a professional poker player. He was a multi-dimensional guy. No one is one thing.

Neil Steinberg, a longtime writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, visited with his old J-school classmate Albini in a 2021 story. Albini, a working-class hero to the end, demystified the secret of getting through life: "You can’t say, ‘I want a long and important career.’ What you can do is keep plugging away doing what you think is valuable, in a way that you’re comfortable with." And that's what he did.

Steinberg asked him to define success. Albini gave a zen-like answer: "I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success."  He then added "And success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”

I've always shared that self-declared working-class persona, even as a privileged daily newspaperman and a labor lawyer. I get to go punch a clock tomorrow and the next day. Albini's work is done.

BONUS TRACKS
We featured a couple of Shellac tracks at the end of this review.  

Check out the glorious, shimmery guitar solo in Guided by Voices' "Sheetkickers" from 1996:

Albini gave an extended tour of his studio about five years ago to EarthQuaker Devices, which produced this half-hour video:

And not an editorial statement, merely one of Albini's earliest and best productions, Kim Deal and the Breeders with "Hellbound":

Godard Lives: Torn

 

A MARRIED WOMAN (1964) (B+) - Godard luxuriates in silky black and white as he trains his camera on his star, Macha Meril, and often on her isolated body parts as he delicately explores the psyche of a woman, Charlotte, who is juggling a husband and a lover as if coordinating two book groups. The body parts are never R-rated, as Godard seems more fascinated by Charlotte's wedding ring as he is by her private parts, which are always discreetly covered.

Maybe I'm just a pedantic older man who cuts the French director too much slack, but I've always admired the way he portrayed female characters in the 1960s. He exhibits an odd combination of male chauvinism (Charlotte and her husband's fights can get physical) and curiosity about the minds of first-wave feminists, especially the pretty ones. Charlotte is a step-mom and bored with her husband, who seems to love the small planes he flies more than her. 

The first act focuses instead on Charlotte and Robert (Bernard Noel), an actor who is smitten with her and with whom she has strong chemistry. But Charlotte also has a life of her own, bopping around Paris as a woman of leisure. Godard challenges the male gaze and picks apart blatant commercialism, especially the capitalist industry fueled by the objectification of women (there's a particular obsession here with brassiere advertisements). In one key scene, Charlotte eavesdrops on two teenage girls naively sharing their rudimentary knowledge of how they think sex works. 

Charlotte will be faced with an important life decision in the final reel, though Godard refuses to wrap up any of this neatly. It's fascinating to watch Charlotte live her life rather independently, taking challenges, both big and small, in stride. She doesn't seem to need either man, but she gets something from both of them. It wouldn't be a surprise if she continued to rotate men through her life.

FOR EVER MOZART (1995) (C-minus) - Even Godard's most inscrutable later works can be visually arresting and intellectually challenging. This mid-'90s toss-off is flat on the screen in multiple ways. It is also a derisive, almost borderline offensive shoulder shrug at the very real Bosnian war going on at that time. 

Godard, whose reverence for the horrors of World War II drench his films of every era, is more mocking than horrified, turning the events of Sarajevo into a coked-up sex farce, as if the slaughter of Slavs means less than the decimation of western populations earlier in the century.

His wordplay is muted, and some of his set pieces are amateurish, particularly the "bombs" dropping on a camp where some actors are being held hostage. If Godard was going for campiness, he missed by a mile. And the story is a drip: a theater troupe endeavors to stage a play in war-ravaged Sarajevo. But the first of four sections of the film is so leaden and crowded that it's hard to care about the characters who hit the road and get ensnared in peril. 

Godard's pontifications, channeled through his characters, feel forced and half-hearted. This feels like a mid-career slump, a toss-off that comes across as a lazy imitation of a cinematic genius.

BONUS TRACKS 

From "A Married Woman," this French girl-group lilt, "Sad Movies":

Previous takes on Godard's oeuvre:

• Contempt
• Band of Outsiders
• Masculin Feminin
• 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
• Made in U.S.A.
• Le Petit Soldat 
  
• Goodbye to Language
  
• Film Socialisme
• The Image Book
• Hail Mary
• Histoire(s) du Cinema
  

New to the Queue

 It's a right smart o' wind that's whipping things around these days ...

A series of vignettes tracks ordinary Iranians navigating their administrative processes, "Terrestrial Verses." 

Michael Showalter ("Hello, My Name Is Doris," "The Big Sick," "The Eyes of Tammy Faye") directs Anne Hathaway as a 40-year-old woman romancing a boy toy from a boy band, "The Idea of You."

We never made it through the three-hour "Drive My Car," but we'll take a chance on Ryusuke Hamaguchi's shorter follow-up, a slow burn about a town under siege by developers, "Evil Does Not Exist."

From Lithuania, a dancer falls for a great guy who happens to be asexual, leading to expected problems,  "Slow."