Doc Watch: That's Entertainment

 

SHARI AND LAMB CHOP (B-minus) - It is unclear why, at this moment in time, the world needed a profile of puppeteer and entertainer Shari Lewis, who died about 18 years ago, but good for her and her family that her talents have not been forgotten. And this by-the-numbers documentary at least does a good job of showing off her considerable voice talents.

 

The world of ventriloquism seems like it was eons ago, but it was still quite a thing when I was a kid. Lewis was one of the best. The best parts of this peppy documentary are the extended clips that exhibit Lewis' flawless technique and she banters and duets with the adorable Lamb Chop and pals Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy and Wing Ding. 

This is from Lisa D'Apolito, who turned in a similarly sympathetic appreciation of Gilda Radner with the doc "Love, Gilda" in 2018. She tracks Lewis from her breakthrough on Arthur Godfrey's talent show to a stint with Captain Kangaroo and then her own show on NBC in the early 1960s. Lewis also sang and danced, and she persevered into the 1990s, when she ended her career on PBS before her untimely death from cancer in 1998 at age 65. Maybe this involves an acquired taste, but D'Apolito fills in a puzzle piece in the story of 20th century entertainers.

MARTY, LIFE IS SHORT (B) - We skipped what looked like a sappy documentary about SCTV's John Candy last year, and there was no pressing need to screen this fawning appreciation of his former co-star, Martin Short, but it was a good excuse to watch some of Short's classic clips, which never fail to amuse.

Not much more than a glorified home movie, "Marty, Life Is Short" gathers his longtime inner circle -- Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Goldie Hawn, Steve Martin and the "Second City TV" alums -- to pay tribute to what seems like one of the nicest and funniest guys in showbiz the past 50 years. It is directed by another member of the club, director Lawrence Kasden ("Body Heat," "The Big Chill"), who does a great job of curating tons of VHS footage from home movies shot at Short's house and his summer home in Canada. This allows us to appreciate Short the family man and doting husband. 

It is obvious from the start that the film will build toward the 2010 death of Short's wife, Nancy Dolman, whom he met during a tour of "Godspell" in the early 1970s. Of course, this tight-knit group of Boomer stars, who all raised kids at the same time, will be effusive in their praise of Short and his devotion to his lovely wife and their fairy tale marriage. But when Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara call him the funniest man they've known, you can be assured they are not just blowing smoke for the cameras. That's quite an honor.

And Kasden has the clips to back up those claims. Short might not be everyone's cup of tea -- you either go along with his hysteria or you don't, I suppose -- but we get all the right highlights here, from Ed Grimley to Jiminy Glick, who will always crack me up. Chalk this up to a pal's homage to one man's persistence in making people laugh.

Life Is Short: Women on the Verge

 

We pulled the plug on two movies in a row -- the droll indie wank "Bunnylovr" and the annoying quasi-horror momcore pulp "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You." Both were aimless, apparent attempts to explore the psychology of a woman grasping for direction.

In each movie, very little happens, plotwise. We get a series of events in the life of the protagonists, but they lead nowhere. Similar events repeat day in and day out, and the men in the films tend to be creepy or abrasive. Each film spun its wheels for at least 44 minutes, without a satisfying plot development in sight. I bailed on each movie, coincidentally, right at the point of animal abuse.

"Bunnylovr" is probably the least sexy or interesting movie you can make about a cam girl. Katarina Zhu writes, directs and stars as Rebecca (her online name is the slinkier Teddi), who has a boring day job that she's bad at, and she makes money on the side performing online for creeps, though in the first 50 minutes, she flashed no forbidden flesh the whole time.

Instead, she holds lucrative private audiences with a well-off creep who sends her a live rabbit in the mail. Rather than run in the opposite direction at that disturbing provocation, she forsakes her other clients for face-to-face sessions with this dullard, who has an unsettling demeanor, to say the least. By the time he convinces her to pose lasciviously with the cute little bunny, this whole thing is going nowhere fast.

Meantime, Rebecca is straining to keep up a relationship with her estranged father (a charming Perry Yung), who is a chain-smoking card sharp with a pretty obvious health problem that I'm sure devolves into pathos in the final reel. The major crime here is that the story is flat-out boring. I can accept that it's not titillating (though why make the character an exhibitionist in the first place?), but I can't forgive a turgid script and a placid performance. Someone needed to step in and either direct Zhu or replace her.

Also stuck on one note -- and a pretty screachy one at that -- is Mary Bronstein's horror slog "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" (no, there's no point to that title). Poor Rose Byrne is trapped in Movie World, stuck at 11, amped up for no reason other than her writer-director wants to drag her through extreme acting exercises. Byrne is a talented actress (and comic actor), but here she's at the opposite end, craft-wise, from, say, Gena Rowlands in "A Woman Under the Influence."

 

Byrne's blandly named Linda is on her last nerve -- her daughter has a profound eating disorder (which requires a feeding tube), her husband is away a lot, and her roof has caved in from a plumbing debacle (which doesn't make sense logistically). Linda is mentally fried from the very first scene -- hectored by her needy child, whose face we don't see, so the girl's whining is especially annoying. Mother and daughter slum it at a low-rent motel while repairs are made, and it's clear that Linda is out of control, leaving her child (unnamed) alone often and falling into bad habits with recreational drugs and alcohol. The humiliations repeat in cycles, and even when Linda gets a break from her own kid, she has a therapy patient who is going through her own post-partum struggles. (Glimmers of life can be found in underused denizens of the hotel -- the front desk clerk played by Ivy Wolk ("Outcome") and a hip resident played by A$AP Rocky.)

This is supposed to be some profound treatise about the rigors of motherhood -- but how sympathetic a character is Linda, when she has the means to hire a nurse to help tend to the child and a crew of workers to repair the house, both of which would take the load off of her ... and thus let the air out of the artifice underpinning this pretentious genre exercise. Throw in Conan O'Brien wearing glasses and acting all serious, and you have quite a mess on your hands. 

Title: Bunnylovr

Running Time: 86 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  50 MIN

Portion Watched: 58%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 63 YRS, 5 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 76.5 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and went to bed.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 7-1

 

 

Title: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Running Time: 113 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  44 MIN

Portion Watched: 39%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 63 YRS, 5 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 76.5 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Started writing this review and then went off to read.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 14-1

 

BONUS TRACK 

Be grateful for small favors: At the 11-minute mark of "If I Had Legs," Rose Byrne's character is seen listening to classic Guided by Voices, the "Bee Thousand" track "Hot Freaks":

 

Con Artists

 

THE CHRISTOPHERS (B+) - Octogenarian Ian McKellan absolutely devours a sumptuous script as a grumpy old artist defending his legacy against his scheming children and the art forger they hire to embellish his hidden archives.

IMDb offers a concise plot summary: "The children of a once famous artist hire a forger to complete some unfinished, long ago abandoned canvases so they'll have an inheritance when he dies." Veteran screenwriter Ed Solomon ("Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," "Men in Black") dishes up a sunny noir that is lighthearted (even silly, at times) but grounded in the genuine emotions of artists defending their work. 

 

Michaela Coel ("Mother Mary," TV's "Chewing Gum") goes toe-to-toe with McKellan the rascally thespian in a clever pas de deux between two powerful personalities. It is not a mystery going in that Coel's Lori Butler divulges the ruse to McKellan's Julian Sklar fairly early on in the proceedings. But that does not derail the intrigue.

Lori seems to have a motive for undermining Julian -- late in his career he was a nasty judge on a reality-TV art-contest program -- and she has the knowledge and skills to pull off the caper, whether he tries to stop her or not. Coel is a cool customer, gradually shedding layers of her character as she goes. She offsets the heat coming from McKellan, who unleashes reams of dialogue as he walks the line between temperamental genius and washed-up jerk. When he challenges her skills and asks her why she is so presumptuous as to think she could mimic his paintings, she replies blankly, "I guess that's where the art of it comes in."

The weak spot comes from Julian's bumbling offspring, played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning as silly, petulant adults. You can also spot the seams at times in the script, and if you think too hard you might challenge some of its implausibilities. But the momentum of the film elbows all that aside, with one goal in mind: entertaining you. McKellan, especially, lavishes the opportunity to splay his character's id all over the screen. (One of several amusing traits of Julian's: He makes pocket money by recording Cameo messages for anyone who will hire him to do so; he is a geezer with just enough computer skills to be reckless.)

Director Steven Soderbergh lends his prodigious skills to keeping things taut and rollicking while wrapping it up in 100 locomotive minutes. This is old-fashioned story-telling, brought to you by a pair of heavyweight actors who know just how to bob and weave around each other.

NOTICE TO QUIT (B+) - Andy Singer is having a helluva day. It follows a helluva few months. He's a real estate broker in New York City who is about to get evicted from his apartment, and his daughter is about to move with her mother to Florida. It all comes to a head in this charming day-in-the-life of a man verging on a nervous breakdown.

 

This debut feature from writer-director Simon Hacker harks back to the New York films of the 1970s, as he chronicles the spiraling travails of his hapless hero on a muggy summer day. Andy is played by Michael Zegen (the husband in TV's "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel") as a scam artist who strips the appliances from the empty apartments he shows, which is not nearly enough money to cover his back rent, since he hasn't closed a deal in months and is broke.

Andy's 10-year-old daughter, Anna (Kasey Bella Suarez), lands in his lap that morning, and she will accompany her estranged dad on his odyssey through the streets and apartment buildings of New York, anxiously observing his spiral toward a rock bottom. She just wants to go to the zoo, but he is perpetually harried as he desperately tries to get any warm body to sign on the bottom line for one of the dumps he has on offer.

As Andy criss-crosses the city, you might develop a deep appreciation for Hacker's eye for locations. A producer on John Wilson's "How To" HBO series, he has an affinity for New York's sweaty underbelly, where an AC window unit is considered the gold standard of urban living. Several times Andy (with and without Anna) races through the streets. We get aerial shots looking down from walk-up units. It's less about the city's skyline than its unforgiving streets.

In addition to Andy's unraveling real estate career (he's also a has-been model/actor, often recognized for a toothpaste ad, with featured posters that have been defaced around town), there is the threat from the heavies who muscle him for appliances they can pilfer. That group is led by the boorish Jed, played with jabroni ferver by filmmaker Michael Angelo Cavino ("The Climb," "Splitsville"). We also get an extended cameo from comedian Robert Klein, who is in fine form as Andy's artist father who is reluctant to help bail out his flailing son.

Little Suarez keeps up well with Zegen as the doe-eyed daughter who is practical enough to recognize her father's failings, but emotionally vulnerable enough to try again to forge a connection with her dad, even if he has no custody rights and cannot fight her mother's move to Florida. It's debatable whether their final bonding moment late in the film earns the sentimental payoff Hacker is going for, but the characters do feel authentic by the end. 

There were times I seriously questioned the timeline and logistics of rushing all over Manhattan in one hectic day, but again, the film scores enough points across 90 minutes that it's easy to fall under its spell. (It's like a white-collar version of "Bunny," if that helps.) I was sold. (Streaming on Mubi.)

BONUS TRACK

The ubiquitous Jack Antonoff contributes a few songs to the "Notice to Quit" soundtrack, including a track from his band Bleachers, "Strange Behavior":

New to the Queue

 The sun has its own particular slant this time of year ...

Our guy John Magaro ("Past Lives," "Not Fade Away") stars as a father who takes his kids on a cross-country trip after a family tragedy, "Omaha."

Tony Leung ("In the Mood for Love") stars in a contemplative drama about our relationship with plants, "Silent Friend."

A pulpy debut feature about two sisters exacting family revenge, "Is God Is."

Perhaps we should give another shot to the provocateur Boots Riley ("Sorry to Bother You") and his latest swipe at capitalism's bourgoisie, "I Love Boosters."

To Whom It May Concern

 

REBEL WITH A CLAUSE (A-minus) - This DIY labor of love is an irresistible testament to a woman who has devoted her life to the parsing of language and grammar and to bringing that knowledge and passion to the masses. 

 

Ellen Jovin travels the country -- with the goal of hitting every state -- and sets up her Grammar Table, inviting conversations about dangling participles and Oxford commas, or whatever is on the minds of the folks who amble by.  She is armed with reference books, including a dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style, as she taps into the hidden grammatical pet peeves of ordinary citizens. (Her own 2022 book of the same title was a best-seller.)

Jovin's husband, Brandt Johnson, is listed as director, producer, cinematographer and editor -- essentially a one man crew. He also appears on camera at times, including during a few dash-cam scenes as the engaging couple banters along the highways. (They also banter in person, as they have been accompanying the film around the country.) Johnson has a sharp eye for clever establishing shots that lighten the mood. This was filmed over the course of more than six years (it was almost derailed by COVID), but it boils down to a seamless and delightful 86 minutes.

The secret here is in the couple's patience (they shot over 400 hours of footage) in capturing interesting bystanders who approach the Grammar Table. One after another is funny, charming, witty and/or emotionally giving. Jovin herself has a magnetic personality and a winning laugh. She is a liberal descriptivist who likes to shatter lazy linguistic myths and slay shibboleths. She is like a priest forgiving the sins of those who are trapped in the lessons of their stuff fifth-grade teacher. Bopping from topic to topic, the film has a high probability of touching on at least one of most people's personal bugbears. (Jovin's detour into pronunciations in particular gets her fans riled up.)

Jovin seems to genuinely believe in face-to-face interactions as the salvation of our society and culture. She seeks connections at her various stops, and some visitors are genuinely moved to have been solicited for their opinions on professorial topics. She finds fellowship at a conference of copy editors, creating a true nerd energy field.

The film strains a tad toward the end with an emphasis on Kumbaya moments, grasping for deep meaning in the big picture. A serendipitous meeting at the end is quite moving. But in the end, it's the joy -- and occasional silliness -- of the whole enterprise that wins you over. 

BONUS TRACK

The trailer: