Soundtrack of Your Life is an occasional feature in which we mark
the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.
Thefirst time I heard the full version of John Lennon performing live with Elton John recorded on Thanksgiving 1974, it gave me chills. It was on a 10-inch single released after Lennon died in 1980. It is the introduction of Lennon -- to a stunned, thunderous crowd at Madison Square Garden -- that does itto me. ("Seeing as it's Thanksgiving ...").
Lennon had promised Elton that if the song they collaborated on -- "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" -- went to No. 1, he would join the superstar on stage and sing it with him. The song did, in fact, hit the top of the charts, Elton visited MSG, and Lennon, a bundle of nerves, jumped onstage for three songs. They played Lennon's recent No. 1; Elton's same-year hit cover of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds"; and an old chestnut (from "an old, estranged fiance of mine, called Paul ... one I never sang"), "I Saw Her Standing There" ("a number to finish up with so that I can get out of here and be sick"). They brought the house down. (That was also the night that Lennon began his reunion with Yoko Ono, who was also invited backstage.)
"Whatever Gets You Through the Night" is not just another peppy track on one of my favorite albums, "Walls & Bridges," released when I was 11. So when I walk into a hardware store and it's spilling from the speakers, I still get that Thanksgiving buzz. (The small-town Ace Hardware was big enough to have two sound systems playing, one in each half of the store. The other side was spinning Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4.")
In 1974, Elton John was approaching the height of his powers and fame. This fluke of a concert appearance would be Lennon's last, which would not become apparent for six years. The live recording -- teased first with the 1975 "Philadelphia Freedom" single, which features "I Saw Her Standing There" on the B-side -- is 14 minutes of pure joy. Imagine having been there that night. (Instead, I went to see Elton with family in 1976 at Chicago Stadium and was treated to Billy Connolly as an opening act singing "The Shitkickers Waltz." But Kiki Dee was there, too, so ...)
If it's July, it's the annual Guild Cinema
festival of film noir. We managed to catch well more than half of this
year's 10 entries present in double features over 10 days.
MURDER IS MY BEAT (1955) (B-minus) - Part of an Edgar Ulmer double feature (see "Ruthless" in Part 2), this peppy whodunit wrings manic energy from journeyman Paul Langton (TV's "Peyton Place") as a cop who has second thoughts about his role in the conviction of a woman for murder and who spends a crazed week trying to clear her name and make amends.
Langton stars as Det. Patrick, who seems to have an open-and-shut case when a businessman is found face-down in the fireplace, clubbed with a statuette, almost certainly by his young girlfriend, the blond bombshell Eden (Barbara Payton). After her conviction, he accompanies her on the train to prison when she suddenly exclaims that she saw the purportedly murdered ex standing on a train platform, alive and well. Has she been railroaded? Patrick will get slugged as he noses around, and of course, he'll fall for the dame.
Ulmer shakes up the narrative with flashbacks, and he employs a few misdirections, one of which involves Eden's nightclub co-worker Patsy (a simmering Tracy Roberts). The dialogue is set at full ham, and the cast chews the gristle with delight. It was, quaintly, a time when cops described female suspects by their girlish figures. The ending comes along too quickly and is awfully pat, but you should walk away entertained.
SPOTTED: Hank Patterson gets barely a glimpse as a medical examiner at the scene of the murder. He would go on to star as grumpy Fred Ziffel ("father" of Arnold the pig) in "Green Acres."
NAKED ALIBI (1954) (B+) - A boffo cast powers a cynical manhunt drama based on a hunch about a suspected cop killer. Sterling Hayden and the combustible Gloria Grahame light a flame under this slow burn that crescendos along the Mexican border (in a town creatively called Border City).
Hayden plays Joe Conroy, a chief of detectives who gets fired for blowing his top after three of his men are killed, and he suspects local baker Al Willis (Gene Barry) of carrying out the hits, but can't prove it. Conroy yields his badge and follows Willis to the border, where the married suspect shacks up with a local pub singer, Marianna (Grahame), the kind of tough-luck gal who gets turned on by a slap but who also has a generous heart, which comes in handy after Conroy lands in her lap after getting stabbed by thugs.
It's quite a tight knot tied by three screenwriters and journeyman director Jerry Hopper. Hayden (above right) is understated as the possibly delusional lug, and Grahame torches the screen with a mere arch of an eyebrow and a knowing pout. Barry -- who would go on to hit the TV hat trick with "Bat Masterson," "Burke's Law" and "The Name of the Game" -- works from the James Cagney "Come and get me, coppers" school of (over)acting. (An alternative title for the film is "Cry Copper," sans comma.) He is manic from the start, complaining of false accusations.
But the narrative evolves, and the characters' motivations morph once the film picks up after a slow half hour of set-up and heads to the border, where intrigue lurks in the shadows. Grahame -- endlessly appealing in "In a Lonely Place," "Crossfire" and "Odds Against Tomorrow" (and the subject of "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool") -- brings layers to Marianna, who turns both men on and sets both of them right. She will put herself in peril as the menace around her swells and this builds to a satisfying climax.
SPOTTED: The glowering detective captain in the first act of the film is played by Chuck Connors, from TV's "Rifleman." ... The police lieutenant offed in the first five minutes is played by familiar character actor Max Showalter, who was Ward Cleaver in the pilot for "Leave It to Beaver" and whose career culminated as Grandpa Fred in John Hughes' "Sixteen Candles."
STRANGER ON THE PROWL (1952) (C) - Even if you could understand the dialogue in this Italian production from an exiled Joseph Losey, the plot of this manhunt thriller might perplex and confound even the most patient viewer. An overwrought performance by Paul Muni as a drifter stranded in an Italian port town doesn't help.
This one is occasionally unintentionally funny. But mostly it is a melodramatic tale of The Man (Muni) as a stowaway who shows up broke and needs to raise money to pay off his smuggler -- and to eat. However, he is immediately targeted by residents as a vagrant, and when he accidentally kills someone out of desperation, he becomes a wanted man. In tow he has a willing local 8-year-old boy who empathizes with him and helps the Man pass as a father taking his son to the circus.
The film -- Losey's first after being drummed out of the U.S. during the red panic of the '50s -- makes a pretty cogent case for treating poor people with dignity. But the sketchy sound quality and incongruent performances -- including Joan Lorring as a sexually harassed young woman -- drag this into B-movie territory. Muni, 20 years from his career defining role in "Scarface," comes off as more grumpy than desperate.
SPOTTED: This is tough, considering it's an all-Italian cast. The police inspector is played by ArnoldoFoa, whose credits include such racy titles as "The King's Whore," "All the Moron's Men" and "Do You Mind if I Kiss Mommy?"
BRICK (2006) (B+) - The modern ringer in the group is the debut of writer-director Rian Johnson, who went on to bring you "Looper," the "Knives Out" trilogy and the penultimate "Star Wars" movie. This one hits differently than it did upon its refreshing splash 20 years ago.
The idea here -- setting a classic gumshoe noir at a modern high school -- felt fresh and clever at the time of the movie's release (I gave it an honorable mention in 2006), but now it comes off as more of a flimsy, cloying gimmick. Star Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the perfect brooding Sam Spade stand-in, spitting out glib one-liners in a gangland patois that would never exist in the head of even the brightest high school kid at the turn of the millennium. The dialogue comes at you rapid-fire and is so squirrelly and off-kilter that I had a lot of trouble understanding some of the key lines. (I surrendered to subtitles at some point.) That's not a way to keep a viewer immersed in your narrative.
The plot is also fairly dense, but unpacking it along with Gordon-Levitt's persistent Brandon is part of the fun here. Brandon traipses through a sunny California suburb as he investigates the death of an ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), whose frantic phone call drops clues about a missing brick of heroin not long before he discovers her body in a drainage ditch. He and his pal The Brain (Matt O'Leary) game this out, frequently deploying phone-booth communications, and Brandon slowly sinks into the muck of the local drug trade and its creeps. He's got a femme fatale, the prissy Laura (Nora Zehetner) ostensibly on his side (at least she's handy for car rides so he doesn't have to borrow his mom's vehicle).
Brandon gets knocked around a lot -- but of course he has superhero strength somehow and manages to plod on despite a hacking cough that suggests some internal bleeding. In a nod more to "Charlie Brown" cartoons than to "Chinatown," police are only hinted at -- we occasionally hear sirens but they are never seen. This is a sealed world of teens role-playing as adults. It's amusing for a while, and it wraps up well, but your mileage may vary depending on your age group.
SPOTTED: Richard Roundtree, the original "Shaft," plays the vice principal who nags Brandon like a police captain would a rogue detective.
BONUS TRACK
An edited version of Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" serves as the outro for "Brick":
The trailer for "Naked Alibi," with a snippet of Gloria Grahame singing Cole Porter's "Ace in the Hole":
We hand out our first straight A to a feature film in 2026, and only our second straight A overall.
THE INVITE (A) - Every so often a movie is so good that it feels rude to write about it and reduce it to standard two-dimensional criticism. Here we have four people, one setting and a juicy script, all corralled with manic skill by director Olivia Wilde, who also sandblasts the screen with a memorable performance.
Wilde plays Angela, a hornet's nest of anxieties who lives with under-achieving musician Joe (Seth Rogan) and spends most of her tedious days decorating the San Francisco apartment they inherited from his parents. The latest crisis in their tense relationship is the impending arrival of their neighbors for dinner, not long after Joe has slogged home on his collapsible bicycle across the hilly city from his dead-end job as a college music teacher.
Pina and Hawk, the neighbors, are on Joe's shit list, because they have loud sex, often. (As you might expect, Joe and Angela, who have a tween daughter, don't have a intimacy to flaunt like that.) Angela is desperate to impress the neighbors and to offer her own mea culpa for the noise generated by their recent apartment renovation. She tosses a souffle into the oven, splays out some cheese and jamon, and insists on opening a rare bottle of wine they had been saving for a special occasion.
Pina (a bleach-blond Penelope Cruz), a therapist, swans into the room with swagger and skepticism. Her partner is Hawk (Edward Norton), a touchy-feely kind-bro who -- upon entering the apartment where Angela and Joe had obviously just been fighting -- announces to the room, "It's OK. We love a contentious environment." Rogan's Joe has a field day mocking the other couple's whole New Age vibe (if "New Age" could be said to encompass a lifestyle that involves open marriages and orgies). Cruz lends gravitas as the educated voice of reason; Pina is genuinely appalled that her neighbors are squandering their life together by smothering the pleasure out of it.
This simple yet combustible set-up is arranged by screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (remaking a script by Spanish writer Cesc Gay). They stuff this powderkeg with enough dry powder to demolish the entire building complex in one take. It is imbued with both high-stakes emotion and razor-sharp comedy by Wilde, whose facial reactions range from horrified to ecstatic, sometimes in the same breath.
The proceedings take off when it becomes apparent that Pina and Hawk have designs on Joe and Angela, eager to initiate them into the world of spouse-swapping and group sex. What follows is about as believable a depiction of such a situation as you could hope for in a movie. At first, Angela and Joe are super-curious, asking all kinds of questions about the logistics and mechanics of marital hook-up culture. In a fascinating insight into her character, Angela instinctively throws out the phrase DP (double-penetration), betraying a deep-seated hunger to explore and probably a decent history of watching porn during her relationship drought.
To say that Wilde stands out here is high praise, because Rogen is wonderful as he goes way beyond his usual smart-ass banter; Cruz gives a master class in restraint; and Norton digs deep into the psyche of a well-drawn (and annoying) character. Besides an opening montage with incidental extras, the only actors are these four, and it would be difficult to imagine any other actor subbing in for any one of them. You don't get ensemble performances (let along within a modern chamber drama) at this level. "The Invite" makes a classic like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" look stagey. It makes Mike Nichols' "Closer" seem forced.
Instead, this is Wilde's masterpiece, a welcome recovery from her universally panned previous effort, 2022's "Don't Worry Darling" and a leap in style from her fine debut, "Booksmart." Jones and McCormack (like Wilde known more as actors) teamed up in 2012 for a more uneven look at a relationship, "Celeste & Jesse Forever." They almost certainly were assisted here by extensive work-shopping and improvising by the cast, but the one-liners (sometimes rapid-fire during overlapping dialogue) are precise and insightful. The bawdiness can be belligerent. When Pina and Hawk reveal that one of their shared lovers is an older woman, but they don't know her age, Joe advises them, "Next time you're in there, count the rings." Joe can't believe Hawk used to be a firefighter, because firefighters are brawny and have mustaches. (He's not entirely incorrect.)
My favorite scene might be a quiet one between Angela and Hawk, who shows an interest in her decor, especially the rugs. Angela shows him three huge paint swatches on a wall, and Hawk analyzes the three virtually indistinguishable shades of blue-green deeply before landing on the choice that she'd hoped he would. When she tells him that Joe -- like most of us -- considered the colors to be essentially the same, Hawk intones earnestly, "Is he colorblind?"
That's an example of why writing about the movie feels pointless. It's hard to convey why that last line is so funny. You have to invest in the film and sync with its rhythms, settle in with the characters. You'll either buy it (and what do I know; I've never been invited to have group sex) or you won't from the start. (I have experienceda "contentious environment" or two during marriages.) I could pick a couple of nits here -- there is the cliche of the unplayed instrument in the house shunned by the failed musician; Pina's turn against Hawk at one point feels a little contrived -- but I went to see this a second time and appreciated it even more.
Perhaps the third time will be a charm.
BONUS TRACKS
Wilde charges out of the gates confidently in the opening scenes with this dollop of faux '60s Britpop, "I'm Confessin'" by Fabienne Delsol from 2007:
And over the closing credits, the demo for "Our House," where Joni Mitchell joins Graham Nash:
PROJECT HAIL MARY (C+) - I tried to refrain from rolling my eyes during the first hour of this naive space opera about a bumbling American on a remote -- and presumably doomed -- mission to rescue the stars in the solar system. It is mainly a vehicle for Ryan Gosling to be silly and charming while surrounded by neat CGI tricks and master puppetry.
It takes nearly an hour -- of this 2-hour, 36-minute spectacle -- for Gosling's astronaut Ryland Grace to coincidentally run into a another spacecraft and life form (small world!) and, like a kindergarten teacher, find ways to communicate with it. (The creature resembles a spindly rock, so Grace calls it Rocky. Kute!)
As my partner pointed out, this earnest production seems like a film for children, or maybe adults who have given up on the idea of fending off even the slightest challenges to their intellect. The first hour is mostly set-up, with Grace plucked from his lowly gig as a middle-school science teacher to help the government(s) figure out the substance that is implanting itself between Venus and the sun (and happening to all but one of the other stars in the solar system), such that the cooling of Earth in the coming decades will render the planet mostly uninhabitable. Clever idea, but it plays out in ridiculous fashion, with Grace, in flashbacks, plopped into a remote lab to do science experiments while bureaucrats look on and their ringleader, the sarcastic Eva Stratt (Sandra Hueller), mocks him and treats the whole project like goofy game show.
None of that works well. It is a mess brought to you by filmmakers who dabble in wacky animation (Meatballs and Legos) and the Spider-man franchise (co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller), or the universe that encompasses "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Cloverfield" and "World War Z" (co-writer Drew Goddard, a Los Alamos, N.M., native), all based on a novel by Andy Weir ("The Martian"). That's quite a creative soup, but then again, too many cooks ...
Gosling is amusing enough, as he can't help but be. I guess we're supposed to laugh at all the tools and tricks he has on board his spaceship, which is light-years from civilization and on a mission designed for no possible return flight. (Though I suspected late in the first hour that Grace and Rocky might have a hack up their sleeve. We'll see.) It's not just improbably but virtually impossible that this shlubby science teacher would master all the controls of the massive spaceship and have the wherewithal -- with no training -- to blithely traipse through spacewalks. (But it's just a movie!)
We paused 45% of the way to save the rest for a second night. We agreed that we could fast forward through much of it to just get to the ending. Except we didn't deploy the remote, and I kind of half-watched a lot of the rest of it. I had no desire to sit through more of Grace and Rocky's child-play
that resulted from their interstellar meet-cute. (At one point they tap out the theme from "Close Encounters" to each other. Huh?) There were a few audible sighs during the final 90 minutes.
And so, this goes on and on. The flashbacks pile up, but the dribs and drabs of backstory can be tedious. Meanwhile, Grace and Rocky develop a relationship with the depth and banter of a mid-level sitcom. Somehow they find the time to pursue a solution to the problem they were both tasked with solving. They develop a computerized method to translate each other's voices into their own language, so they can chat. Thus, Rocky talk like Tarzan. Or maybe Mork from Ork. In fact, brace yourself: Whenever the music swells and talk gets serious (about their survival), the depth of emotion rivals that of a Very Special Episode of "Mork & Mindy."
I suppose this is just what the Hollywood doctor ordered for a populace that wants to pretend it can rise to the challenge when fate plucks one of us from obscurity to save the universe. Our Prime Video training will have served us well.
BONUS TRACK
Would you believe the filmmakers and Paul McCartney stoop to including the Beatles' "Two of Us" on the soundtrack? Yes, things get that treacly. Much better was an opening sequence in which a Manson-bearded Grace is roused from his induced coma, and he flails around the cabin to the tune of Kris Kristofferson's hangover anthem "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down."
EARTH, WIND & FIRE (B-minus) - Here comes the documentary about Earth, Wind & Fire that you didn't know you needed. And it's still questionable whether this two-hour effort -- subtitled "to Be Celestial and That's the Weight of the World" -- was essential filmmaking.
Helmed by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson of the Roots -- and the man behind the impeccable "Summer of Soul" -- this exercise follows music guru Maurice White, who left the Ramsey Lewis trio's drum kit to explore his "Afrofuturism" and Zen philosophies to create Earth, Wind & Fire, one of the most popular bands of the 1970s. White, of course, is a complicated and flawed hero in this story (mainly tyranny and infidelity), lending this a VH-1 "Behind the Music" narrative arc.
Shortly after the band left Chicago and headed to Southern California around 1970 -- and after White overhauled the fledgling group -- the songs started to click, culminating in the No. 1 hit "Shining Star" from the 1975 album "That's the Way of the World." (Thompson is more coy with the group's most enduring hit song, dropping a ghost of a sample at the very beginning of the film and then using it at the end to punctuate Earth, Wind & Fire's universal acclaim.)
White was abandoned as a 5-year-old boy in the South -- his father died, and his mother left him with a neighbor so she could go off to Chicago and start a big family with a physician husband. That trauma is revisited repeatedly during the documentary, a way to explain and forgive White's aversion to marriage and his distant relationship with the children he fathered with multiple women. Thompson employs crude animation and stale stock footage to go back in time and try to juice up what is an average story of a famous band. (A few clips click, like the fun Afro Sheen commercial from the Black is Beautiful era.)
The director does assemble an impressive array of talking heads (White, who died in 2016 from Parkinson's, is seen in archival clips), including bandmates Philip Bailey and Ralph Johnson; contemporary Booker T. Jones; Stevie Wonder (who admits that he cribbed from "Shining Star" to write "I Wish"); recent artists H.E.R. and Anderson Paak; White's longtime partner Marilyn and two of his sons; and the Obamas, who refuse to mask their joy and nostalgia over the joy's of Earth, Wind & Fire's music. (One demerit for Thompson is the way he races through screen IDs and other critical information, too quickly for the average reader.) We get a solid sense of the passion behind the band, including the stage presentations and elaborate costumes during the heyday.
Some talking heads dance around White's infirmities (there was a battle over royalties). As an example, when White broke up the group in 1983, he had others break the news to his brothers in soul. As one person puts it: "Maurice did not like confrontation." Another counters: "He was chicken-shit." White would soon be humbled by his solo-release face-plant (please, do not subject your ears to his limp cover of "Stand by Me") and Bailey's uber-smash with Phil Collins, "Easy Lover" (accompanied by the horn section that Collins had poached from the bickering band).
There is no doubting White's talent, and the way the band cruised for a solid decade of hits. (White also produced and co-wrote a hit for the Emotions, "Best of My Love.") And Thompson certainly has established himself as an expert archivist and chronicler of culture. But you'd have to appreciate the music to fully enjoy this documentary.
BANG MY BOX: THE ROBIN BYRD STORY (B) - Remember the glory days of community cable television? In New York, the queen of R-rated late-night local content in New York City was the gal in the crocheted bikini, Robin Byrd. This 79-minute documentary does justice to that specific moment in time.
A tag team of directors weaves several story lines into the tight format. There is the launch of the show -- hosted by Byrd (with her girl-next-door blond shag) and featuring many performers from the porn industry -- and its initial popularity in the late '70s and into the 1980s. The middle portion pays tribute to the show's support of gay rights during the AIDS crisis, albeit in a formulaic way. One through line involves Byrd's videotaped archives, and the debate over whether to turn them over to academia. A coda emphasizes the legal challenges she was involved in and the fight to protect the First Amendment.
Byrd turns 70 during filming, and she has gained a lot of weight, no longer confident enough to don a skimpy swimsuit. And she is coping with her longtime partner, Shelby (more than a decade older than her), who is declining due to dementia. Extra credit to the filmmakers (Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam) for dealing with it matter-of-factly rather than mawkishly. He was tolerant of her bisexual adventures, and their scenes together here are sweet instead of sappy.
There is not much at stake here, and the production values are fairly humdrum, but there is an inherent charm in the lo-fi DIY ethic that gets celebrated, and Byrd herself is a bittersweet leading character.
TIGUEX (A-minus) - What a wonderful ode to an American city.
Albuquerque resident Raven Chacon, originally from the Navajo Nation across the Arizona border, has a worldwide reputation for his musical work. In 2022, Chacon won a Pulitzer Prize for his composition "Voiceless Mass," for organ and ensemble.
In September last year, he took on an epic task. Across 10 hours, he and hundreds of collaborators fanned out across Albuquerque to perform the multi-faceted "Tiguex," a sprawling composition made up of 20 movements performed sequentially from dawn to dusk, from the peak of the Sandia Mountains to the banks of the Rio Grande. It involved more than 200 musicians and vocalists.
The movement called "Tiguex" was exhaustively documented, and Chacon now gets credit as director of the 85-minute film presentation of his work. If a film could be both stunning and low-key at the same time, this is it. It shares some DNA with the genre of mostly wordless quasi-documentaries, usually about rural areas, such as Michelangelo Frammartino's "Le Quattro Volte."
The genius of the film -- and the individual pieces crafted by Chacon -- comes in the clear-eyed view of Albuquerque as a city. The depiction is neither fawning nor dismissive. It highlights the simple pleasures of the city -- its gritty landscape, the modest downtown, its Latin traditions, its pioneering role in ballooning -- and finds the heartfelt beauty in all of it, turning the pillars under an interstate into an echo chamber for a soaring cantata.
There is minimal narration -- from a British-accented host at public radio KUNM-FM, which chronicled the whole day -- as the images unfold. These are some of the scenes we are treated to:
A cellist performs along the banks of the Rio Grande in a "Ballad for Two Cellos"; one of the instruments simply floats lazily down the river. Horseback riders lope along the bosque trail. A lone trumpet bookends the film from atop Sandia Peak. A ragtag procession snakes through Old Town. Guitarists and singers jam on a rooftop. Drummers and bassists perform "blast beats" outside a nuclear museum. A mariachi band performs merrily aboard a flatbed trailer. Eight low-riders rev engines and blare sirens along Route 66. A choir on the West Mesa. A trombonist performs solo as a hot-air balloon lifts off from a schoolyard.
It all culminates in eight singers wandering amid the pillars under I-40 at sunset intoning the ethereal sounds created by Chacon and co-writer Marisa Demarco. It is at this point that you might levitate in the cinema.
I have lived in Albuquerque for 24 years, and this is the adopted metro area I'm familiar with, and the film surely speaks to longtime natives. This ain't the "Breaking Bad" tour. It comes from the perspective of an artist who appreciates the ordinary loveliness of your average city, with its quirks and detours. It de-emphasizes the trite, myopic topics -- the tough weather, the perceived crime issues, the percentage of unused office space -- and merely walks its streets and trails. Many of the performances feature residents as audience in the mix, making this seem like just another day in the neighborhood. It's quite an understated accomplishment.
BONUS TRACK
Here is the raw video of the 10-hour presentation, which doesn't do justice to the 85-minute film:
IS GOD IS (A-minus) - This propulsive debut film -- about adult twin sisters seeking revenge on the father who set fire to them and their mother when the girls were little -- is marred only by its pulpy bloody final 20 minutes. Until then, its script is flawless and its depiction of sisterly bonds profound.
Aleshea Harris adapts her own play, exhibiting a sure hand, and carrying over some of the best elements of the stage (mostly the dialogue) without sacrificing a cinematic flair. She has an ear for patois -- the girls us "finna" in place of "gonna," and as one of them intones early on: "Dis destiny-type shit." The callbacks to literary stylings pair nicely with the hectic modern soundtrack (see below).
Kara Young (above left, as Racine) and Mallori Johnson (as Anaia) are believable out of the gate as sisters who share not only the fertilized egg that they came from but also an uncanny mind-meld, in which they complete each others' sentences and communicate telepathically (through words splayed on the screen). After their father torched their mother in a bathtub, leaving Racine with scars on her arm and Anaia facially disfigured, the girls were abandoned to the foster-care system, told that their mother had died.
But, no, their mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox, below) -- whom they refer to as God (because Ruby made them) -- summons the girls, now adults, to her bed chamber with instructions to "Make your daddy dead. ... Real dead." While Anaia is reluctant to set out on a mission of vengeance (massaged as a mission from "god"), Racine is all-in, assuring her sister that she will take care of the dirty work.
The pair embark on a classic road trip through the South, meeting up with the crazed preacher named Divine (a delirious Erika Alexander) who took up with their dad after his arrest (and bore a son), the lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) who represented their dad back in the day (and was himself disfigured by his demonic client), and eventually their dad (Sterling K. Brown), who now lives in a mansion with a trophy wife (Janelle Monae) and another set of twins (aimless young-adult sons).
Along the way toward the climax, the girls' banter is sharp and incisive, and the set pieces with the preacher and the lawyer are laugh-out-loud funny. Harris cleverly skewers religious fundamentalism and the criminal-justice system, on a broader mission herself to explore the moral implications of exacting vengeance for an unspeakable act. Despite the heavy themes, the film is often loose and fun, with Racine and Anaia mostly having a blast. We get to peel the layers of each twin and learn that there are a lot more differences than we suspected -- and not just the obvious physical disparity that has given Anaia a lifetime of angst over her looks. Racine might have the pretty face, but she also exhibits a dark side, eager to lash out at the slightest provocations.
This all skates along effortlessly until the final reel, and the showdown with their father's family. I'm not familiar with Harris' original play or her first draft of a screenplay, but I have to believe that a Hollywood producer intervened, demanding a decidedly Tarantino tilt to the final 20 minutes. Like Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," the bloodbath veers off the rails, and a near-perfect movie turns into just another reckless action flick. Harris does wrap things up in a rational manner, and the denouement is a mere blip in a powerful film.
I LOVE BOOSTERS (Incomplete) - I guess Boots Riley just ain't my jam. I devoted a little over an hour to the latest provocation from the writer-director whose previous film, "Sorry to Bother You," also brought ham-handed lunacy to an anti-capitalist diatribe.
Candy-colored and slap-dash in production, "I Love Boosters" is an adolescent's idea of a polemic. It relies on a ridiculous mid-movie twist that is just as silly as the gimmicks Riley tossed out in "Sorry to Bother You." If you don't mind cartoons, contrived storytelling and far-fetched plot twists, then settle in. (And who am I to argue with a full house of millennials, who hooted and laughed throughout the screening this week.)
The Boosters, who steal couture clothes and resell them, are brash young women (depicted from left above), Sade (Naomie Ackie), Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Corvette (Keke Palmer), determined to outsmart the evil designer Christie Smith (a scrawny Demi Moore) and make rent money while dismantling the bourgeois system that exploits workers (in China) and brainwashes the masses. But the plot is almost beside the point; instead, the brash visuals dominate the proceedings. Riley seems to have taken his cues from childhood screenings of TV episodes of "The Monkees," both aesthetically and philosophically. Christie Smith works out of a high-rise apartment that is built on a slant, so it's difficult to keep one's footing at the 45-degree angle. Yes, it's that level of klever.
Perhaps Riley's worst offense involves the sound mix. He commissions a corny circus-like soundtrack of tuneless noises from Tune-Yards, much of which obscures the dialogue, some of which is mumbled. I must have missed half the "jokes" here. There was nearly an hour left to endure, and I just couldn't bear to sit through the rest. I peeked at the Wikipedia plot summary, and I'm glad I bailed; it gets goofier.
It's a shame, because Palmer and the rest of her co-stars (including Lakeith Stanfield and Eiza Gonzales from "Baby Driver") are animated and committed. But too often they are tripping over Riley's awkward dialogue. Some people won't mind the mess.
BONUS TRACKS
"Is God Is" uses music masterfully, with a wide range of genres and eras. A key car scene features Racine head-banging to Death Grip's "Guillotine":
The film shares an energy with "Miss Me" by Leikeli47:
The film reaches back for some '70s funk vibe, courtesy of the retro "Groovy Flute" by Manu Dibango:
Finally, a beautiful gospel song from the '60s, revived in 2012, Shirley Ann Lee with "There's a Light":
A PRIVATE LIFE (B-minus) - Jodie Foster is the perfect late-career star to shepherd this off-kilter light-hearted dramedy about a psychiatrist in Paris who feels compelled to investigate the suicide of one of her patients, with frustrating results.
The movie is corny and derivative, but it is somehow held together by Foster -- speaking passable French as Dr. Lilian Steiner -- and by a weird puzzle-like structure that manages to cohere until its droll ending. It's almost an obsessive homage to not only old film noirs but also 1970s cop/private-eye TV shows like "Columbo," "Rockford Files," or "Police Woman."
Foster's Lilian struggles to connect with or pay close attention to her clients. She insists on recording her sessions on digital tapes, despite the long-outdated nature of the technology. She reconnects with her ex-husband (a wonderfully wry Daniel Auteuil) and feuds with the dead patient's husband and daughter, played by the impeccable Mathieu Amalric ("If You Don't, I Will" and Wes Anderson ensembles) and wide-eyed Luanna Bajrami. The father and daughter understandably have issues with Lilian's treatment of a woman who was driven to suicide; Lilian doesn't buy the suicide story (an overdose from a prescription penned by Lilian) and suspects the father and/or daughter of murder.
Virginia Efira ("Madeleine Collins") is seen in flashbacks as the dead woman, Paula. The scenes from her therapy sessions have a dream-like quality, often including voice-overs, as if she is speaking from the grave. The tape of her final session goes missing, and the husband might be involved in a break-in at Lilian's office. There is also a disgruntled patient of Lilian's (Noam Morgensztern), who is suing her for years of pricey sessions wasted, when all it took for him to quit smoking was one session with a hypnotist.
Lilian goes to visit the hypnotist, to be put under a spell (she is trying to cure the inexplicable onset of tears that beset her), and this is where the film wanders into the territory of a Woody Allen farce. Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski is on thin ice with this and other trite touches that occasionally pop up along the way. (We get the requisite scene of Lilian distracting a worker in order to sneak into the files that include the name of Paula's aunt (the arresting Aurore Clement ("The New Girlfriend") in a cameo. Then she does a similar thing late in the film.) We also see Lilian, during her hypnotic trance, flashing back to Nazi-occupied Paris, where she and Paula play together in an orchestra and are lovers. Visually, Zlotowski is fond of shooting up at or down from spiral staircases, in a lazy wink at Hitchcock.
In anticipation of this current release, we sampled the previous film by Zlotowski, "Other People's Children," which was watchable but which we found to be "tripping over the line between legitimate drama and Hallmark shmaltz." Here she has two co-writers. And most important, she has a game Foster, who does a fantastic job of rolling out a world-weary ennui disrupted by a genuine desire to prove her hunch (and to essentially uphold Lilian's professional reputation). Lilian also has a strained relationship with her son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), and a Freudian aversion to her own grandchild.
It helps if you don't take this too seriously. It is an airy caper that doesn't always make sense. (The final reveal didn't need to be as confusing as it plays out, either.) But the puzzle does eventually come together, like a satisfying two-part episode of "Murder, She Wrote."
BONUS TRACKS
From the film's climax, a little ditty from J.J. Cale, "Don't Go to Strangers":
And this snippet from the closing credits, "Wander 12" by Rob Lahana:
