Purgatory

 

HONEYJOON (A-minus) - A vacation with your mom can be a challenge; when it's the first anniversary of your father's death, that's a steeper hill to climb. 

The feature debut of NYU grad Lillian T. Mehrel is a pristine, darkly comic character study of a randy daughter and her cynical grieving mother as they go to a spa retreat (a facility that caters to honeymooners) in the Azores with the goal of spreading the father's ashes on an island he had visited long ago and loved as a young man. Mehrel's script is understated and thoroughly amusing, while wringing true emotion from the situation she created.

Ayden Mayeri is appealing as June, the daughter, who chafes at her mother's nostalgia not just for her dead husband, but for the old era in Iran, her homeland, before the religious jihadists took over. June challenges her mother by flaunting her body at the hedonistic resort and flirting with the help. Amira Casar is moving as Lela, who has had the hopes and dreams knocked out of her, but who nonetheless has more than a little appeal to the young men that circle mother and daughter. She also has perfect comedic timing.

The genius here is in Mehrel's placement of mother-and-daughter into a fish-out-of-water milieu and watching how they react. She knows just how to pace the story, and she wisely gets in and out in 75 minutes.  She loops in several themes, some more subtle than the others. A print of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" hangs behind the concierge desk, and you associate it with June (and her flowing hair), perhaps seeing an opportunity for rebirth, or at least a reset. (And great casting of Antonio Maria as the deadpan concierge, always finding ways to gouge the women financially whenever they make a special request.) Mayeri calls to mind comedians like Jenny Slate, fueled in part by a sarcastic streak.

A minor blossoming love story provides a jolt of energy, but June's boy-crazy antics do not overshadow the dynamics between mother and daughter and their mission to pay homage to the dominant man in their lives. Instead, we get a heartfelt two-handed treatise on grief and coping.

FILIPIÑANA (B-minus) - This narrative slog takes an oddly fashionable, even glamorous, approach to the exploitation of workers in the Philippines, failing to build suspense amid the kindling of bone-dry comic set pieces. The lush golf course where it takes place is lovely to look at, and in the end the story comes across as thoughtful, but first-time filmmaker Raphael Manuel is too obsessed with aesthetics to bother crafting a compelling plot.

The film focuses on Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a 17-year-old golf-course "tee girl," whose main job is to place golf balls on the tee, machine-like, at the driving range for the golfers, many of whom are Filipino elites and Chinese visitors. Not only does this save the men from having to bend over and tee up the balls, but it places the young women in a subservient seated position facing them. Manuel shoots from behind the men's lower halves, so we see the females framed by the men's legs; if they were to look up, they'd see the golfer's crotch. Isabel is assigned to the country club's director, the revered Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), who, she is warned, is not the great guy he is made out to be. 

 

Another storyline follows Clara (Carmen Castellanos), who shoots with her uncle, who wants to lure her back to the Philippines from her stint in New York, hoping to stem or reverse the Asian nation's brain drain. Clara is not comfortable having her every whim served by the female caddies and others. Her stilted manner is difficult to read.

Manuel is partial to static shots and painfully lethargic scenes, perhaps influenced by Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Laing or other classic slow-burners. He elaborately stages every frame for maximum aesthetic value, favoring long shots in which the action takes place off-center or in the background. He choreographs some routines -- the synchronized swings of golfers at the driving range, the pas de deux of the cleaning staff, the welcoming performance of musicians and dancers, the prancing of the massive sprinklers -- as if he is conducting a musical, with the whimsy of Jacques Tati.

What he does not have is a compelling story. The MacGuffin here is that Isabel is assigned the task of returning a golf club to Dr. Palanca after he left it behind, and that task turns into an odyssey that takes Isabel through some of the ritzy country club's more off-limits areas. First, it makes little sense that she would be assigned such a task; how difficult would it be to ping the director and let him know his errant five-iron is at the front desk? Second, why must Isabel take a serpentine Family Circus route just to drop off an item? 

If you can get past those distractions, there is a bit of dread that builds as Isabel carries out her mission. But it's not much. While she is meandering all over, there is a side story involving a little girl who has run off and gone missing, though no one is going out of their way to hunt her down or even show concern. This is the main theme of "Filipiñana": The rich have all of their whims catered to, no matter the cost or resources required, while the rest of us are elbowed aside to fight over the remaining scraps. 

It would be a more powerful message if it were not styled in such artifice. Manuel fetishizes his tee girls and caddies, wrapping them in fashionable outfits -- white knee socks and short pale-blue stewardess dresses for the former, pink frocks with matching rice-paddy hats for the latter. Don't get me wrong -- the visuals can be intoxicating at times, the balletic moves a feast for the eyes. But the stakes can be confusing and the pacing is turgid. (The 100 minutes passed by so slowly and the dialogue was so intermittent that my mind would stray or my eyelids would droop, and I'd miss a line of dialogue here and there.) There is a tonal disconnect at play here, and I'm not sure Manuel intended to get in the way of his own story.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

 

Both films had interesting soundtracks. I could not track down the music from "Honeyjoon," scored by Retail Space. "Filipiñana" reached back for some retro and traditional tracks, including this instrumental, "Always in My Heart" by Los Indios Tabajaras:

Soundtrack of Your Life: Fall in to the Gap

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

 

Wow, it's been more than 20 years since Bright Eyes released "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning," a brilliant album that was perhaps his most Dylanesque, Emmylou Harris and all.

On Saturday, after a quick round of door-knocking in the morning, it was off to the gym, but first to the Gap, coupon in hand, hoping to score a deal on some jeans. As I walked through an alley-way to the main part of the outdoor mall in Uptown, I could hear the loud music that plays from speakers all around the stores and parking lot. 

I was greeted by Conor Oberst's "We Are Nowhere and It's Now," a sluggish waltz that captures the antsy ennui with which he greeted the millennium. (Why 2K?) Oberst, a wunderkind when he founded Bright Eyes, was as morose as they come then, with a facility for turning a phrase. Here is the centerpiece of "We Are Nowhere":

I got no plans and too much time
I feel too restless to unwind
I'm always lost in thought
As I walk a block to my favorite neon sign

 Here is the song:

Oberst would struggle with alcohol addiction. It's not a surprise when an artist with a tortured soul and gloomy outlook succumbs to substance abuse. The song drops a big hint about that: "She says these bars are filled with things that kill / By now you probably should have learned." Harris is there to back him up and pat him on the back, not quite assuring Oberst, but at least keeping him company for a while.

I bought three pairs of jeans for $100 and had a bounce in my step the rest of the day.

Date: September 19, 2026, noon

Place: Winrock outdoor mall, Uptown Albuquerque, N.M.

Song:  "We Are Nowhere and It's Now"

Artist: Bright Eyes

Irony Matrix: 4.75 out of 10 

Best of Ever, Vol. 14: Small World

 

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (A) - With Wes Anderson, it's all about the world-building and the balance between whimsy and true emotion. It all comes together with his tongue-in-cheek tale of an over-the-hill Jacques Cousteau-type deep-sea explorer whose personal life is crumbling as fast as his career is. It is Anderson's most complete and satisfying feature film, even if other movies have more memorable individual moments.

 

Bathed in bathos, the dull-edged comedy, mainly from Bill Murray's title hero, knits this epic saga together and shuts out any mawkish possibilities. There is a heavy dose of nostalgia, setting the template for Anderson's eventual headlong dive back in time in subsequent movies, to his fictitious apple-cheeked lost world of formalities, gadgets and quirky designs. We start to see the fussiness here in Team Zissou's powder blue uniforms (usually short pants) accented with red knit caps and a weapon strapped around the thigh. We also get random wonders, like the spectacle of bizarre little creatures scurrying about the beach and glowing in the dark after sunset. 

This is an airtight world, where Anderson is God to all the characters and serves as the hand that creates everything in this oddly curated universe. Zissou -- nervous on the eve of debuting his latest oceanography documentary in the wake of the death of a close member of his crew -- mopes around with a richly drawn cast of characters: Owen Wilson as the young man who might be his son; Cate Blanchett as a pregnant reporter embedded with the crew who might be angling to serve up a hit piece on Zissou; Willem Dafoe as German first mate Klaus, who is loyal to a fault and craves the boss' approval; Anjelica Huston as Zissou's estranged wife, who takes up with his pompous, well-funded rival, played to the hilt by Jeff Goldblum, who often threatens to steal the film from Murray. The crew's mission is to seek vengeance on the "jaguar shark" that killed Zissou's pal. First, they must battle dwindling resources and international pirates.

Murray's Zissou is acutely aware of the anachronism he has become, with quasi-suicidal tendencies that tend to jeopardize the crew through irrational, reckless decisions. He knows he won't succeed in seducing the reporter, but his ego insists on going through the motions, in quaint bid for chivalry. He doesn't deserve to get his wife back (or to continue depleting her financial resources), but he tugs at her heartstrings with his patented puppy-dog eyes anyway. Late in the film he sums up his lingering funk by acknowledging, "I know I haven't been my best this past decade." (His dolor is fueled by drink and pot.)

It all builds to a series of reckonings -- Zissou with his supposed offspring, with the ocean predator, and with his movie audience and critics -- all of which adds layers of depth compared with Anderson's preceding movie, the brilliant family romp "The Royal Tenenbaums." He evokes what is probably the greatest mixed comic-dramatic performance of Murray's career, and he interlaces multiple relationships and storylines. Toss in musical interludes based on Portuguese versions of David Bowie songs, and you have a sui generis big-screen adventure, a sentimental swashbuckler that is secure in its pristine time capsule.

BOTTLE ROCKET (A-minus) - Oh, those baby-faced Wilson boys. Owen Wilson co-wrote Wes Anderson's offbeat debut feature, and Luke Wilson takes the lead as the pretty face of a rag-tag wanna-be gangster trio, derailing their antics by falling in love with a hotel maid while on the lam.

This started as a flimsy short film that was adopted and nurtured by James L. Brooks ("Terms of Endearment"), who had seen it at Sundance and agreed to finance it. It has only a few of the cinematic touchstones that Anderson would become known for, but its loose-limbed deadpan humor carries a rather thin plot.

 

Owen Wilson is the bossy, uptight Dignan, who springs his pal Anthony (Luke Wilson) from a psychiatric unit (though it was a voluntary stint) to abet in a series of petty heists so that Dignan can prove himself to his former boss of a landscaping crew. Robert Musgrave is on hand as Robert Mapplethorpe, the deadpan getaway driver and conscience of the gang. 

The love story between Anthony and Inez (a charming Lumi Cavazos) is rather corny, but both actors sell it in the end. James Caan shows up as the big boss, conveying the sense that his mere presence is doing the no-name filmmaker a big favor. He could have tried a little harder and played it less broadly. Owen Wilson is the glue that holds it all together. The banter among the main trio has an offbeat tempo to it, but it coheres in the end.

The film was a dud at the time, but it was a quick hop, skip and a jump for Anderson, working every few years, to his breakthrough "Rushmore" and then "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Life Aquatic." It was just a hint of what was to come.

BONUS TRACKS

Clips of Seu Jorge covering Bowie tunes during "Life Aquatic":

 

One of the classic needle-drops in cinema, Bowie himself with "Queen Bitch" over the closing credits:

 

Viva Las Vegas

 

EPIC: ELVIS PRESLEY IN CONCERT (B-minus) - For me, 90 percent of the appeal of Elvis Presley comes from the Sun Studio sessions and his 1968 TV comeback special. A year after that TV special -- in which a group jam in the round reanimated many of those '50s standards -- Presley decamped to Las Vegas for six weeks of shows at the International Hotel, in what would become a five-year run. He not only went to Vegas, he Went Vegas, pioneering a brand of shlock entertainment that would stain his legacy before his death eight years later at 42.

This documentary from Baz Luhrmann (don't get us started on the "Moulin Rouge" monster) follows his subject to Las Vegas for rehearsals and the launch of the stage show that would define the final third of Presley's career, spent bumming around the country with bloated performances while his health and talent slowly deteriorated. He eventually became a joke in a jumpsuit. But before that drug-fueled slide, he was the toast of the town when he established a two-shows-a-night residency as the 1960s slouched toward an end.

Before heading to Sin City in summer of '69, Presley re-tuned his chops by recording the album "From Elvis in Memphis," which kick-started the hit machine ("In the Ghetto" and the single from that session, "Suspicious Minds") and sparked him creatively after a decade filming cheap movies, spitting out three per year. (In an interview clip, Presley can be heard complaining about the interchangeable scripts and the hackwork of the plots.) 

The most impressive part of Luhrmann's movie is the behind-the-scenes peek at the rehearsal process that preceded the Vegas residency. Presley left many of his regulars back in Memphis and assembled a powerful backing band, including lead guitarist James Burton, along with two sets of backup singers and a blaring horn section. It is a tight, muscular group that memorized at least 150 songs and could vamp with their star whenever he prattled on, called an audible or demanded a restart and change in tempo. The selection of tunes is a snapshot of the American songbook at a moment in time -- from Burt Bacharach to Hank Snow (there's a definite southern twang to the set list), from the Beatles to Ray Charles, from rockabilly to gospel, from his early recordings to the day's hits like "Bridge Over Troubled Water." An unexpected highlight is a spirited version of his early hit "A Big Hunk o' Love," which bursts with energy and joy, buoyed by instrumental solos and hand-claps. It's those flashes of brilliance -- Presley was an electrifying live entertainer at times -- that keep "EPIC" afloat.

But Luhrmann -- a kitschy performer himself as a flashy, vapid filmmaker -- is definitely stretching the soup here. In his defense, he doesn't really have the material and technology to work with that Peter Jackson had when reimagining the Beatles' "Let It Be" into an hours-long epic a few years ago. Luhrmann pads his 96-minute film with the first ten minutes of rote Elvis history that offers nothing new, and the centerpiece concert starts at the 20-minute mark after 10 minutes chronicling the rehearsals and logistics. He constantly interrupts the central 1969 Vegas performance with archival interviews that hopscotch eras (some in the '70s when Presley started packing on the pounds). He gives us montages of Elvis kissing swooning fans, of toddler Lisa Marie, of Colonel Parker (to the tune of "Devil in Disguise"). We watch an older Elvis complain that he has never performed abroad, but it ignores the reality of Parker's legal troubles that stymied any talk of a world tour. (I was reminded by the Dolly Parton obituaries that Parker and Presley also insisted on sharing in the rights to any song Elvis recorded -- sometimes as high as 50 percent -- which prevented him from recording "I Will Always Love You" after Parton told them to buzz off. A smart move, in hindsight.)

At times, Presley flashes the charisma that made him a global icon. In 1969, he still had the physique and the blazing eyes and a rapport with a crowd. His personality jumps off the screen during the clips of the playful rehearsals. But the die is cast here, with the ridiculous bejeweled jumpsuit, complete with a cartoonish collar that rivals the headgear of Sister Bertrille. (It was disheartening to learn that the costume was designed by the same man who, just a year earlier, had slathered him in sultry black leather for the comeback special.) Presley often half-asses his '50s chart-toppers (already injecting nonsense lyrics into "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"). He perfects that side-saddle karate stance that would inspire a thousand mutton-chopped Elvis impersonators. After the show he schmoozes with the Vegas regulars who ate up his shtick, including Sammy Davis Jr.

This is Elvis Presley, warts and all. For diehard fans, there's not much to keep them coming back. Newbies might wonder what all the fuss was about. Like his feature film "Elvis" from 2022, this is more about Baz Luhrmann's ego and excesses than the King of Rock's legacy.

BONUS TRACKS

A good flavor of a performance from that era (1970) is big-band-style version of "I Can't Stop Loving You," previously made popular by Ray Charles:

 

One of our favorites is used to accompany footage of adoring female fans, "Wearin' That Loved On Look"

 

The gospel-inflected "Power of My Love":

 

Another highlight, moves and all, "Believe Me":

New to the Queue

 It's not the heat, it's the humility ...

A feature debut about the lowly workers at a swank golf resort, "Filipiñana."

A documentary about the bottom-feeding alt-rockers from Texas, "Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt."

The latest from Joe Swanberg ("Hannah Takes the Stairs," "Digging for Fire," "Drinking Buddies") features Dakota Fanning as a woman caught between her current boyfriend and her ex, "The Sun Never Sets."

From Lithuania, a relationship drama with a self-explanatory title, "How to Divorce During the War."

A mix of documentary and fiction about an occult device that can visually reproduce the past, "Chronovisor."

Those Swingin' Sixties

 

I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! (1968) (B-minus) - This lumbering comedy has Peter Sellers to boast of, as mainstream Hollywood stepped up to co-opt hippie counter-culture and mine it for laughs in the era of the Summer of Love. As dated as it is, let's give it credit for getting in early on some of the movie tropes we continue to enjoy (tolerate) today.

 

The manic pixie dream girl? Allow us to introduce barefoot, wide-eyed Leigh Taylor-Young (coming off a stint on TV's "Peyton Place"). You want to see older squares accidentally eating pot brownies and getting all giggly and horny? Check. Even Sellers, playing broad within a stereotypical Jewish family, seems to be creating a template for Woody Allen's shlubby characters in the 1970s and beyond.

This is the film-writing debut of Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, who would fine-tune their shtick the following year with "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." The script has its moments, and Sellers does what he can with the occasional zinger. But the transformation of Sellers' Harold Fine -- from harried 35-year-old lawyer getting henpecked into marriage into a man tuning in and dropping out -- doesn't happen until the final third of the movie, and it all feels rushed. The best parts involve Sellers (under)reacting to the mayhem around him when his L.A. flat slowly evolves into a rundown commune.

Taylor-Young is bouncy and fun as the mischievous hippie chick. Herb Edelman is solid, as always, as the law partner who covets the free-love lifestyle. Louis Gottlieb (in one of his only two roles ever) brings the Jesus magic as a pontificating guru. Joyce Van Patten is flat as the insecure fiancee trying to reel in her prey. Jo Van Vleet emotes to the rafters as the nagging mother. All of the fakakta proceedings should be more ribald than they are. Veteran TV director Hy Averback just doesn't bring any zip here, and it feels like Sellers is underused much of the time. 

Still, it's an early run at the cultural sea-change of the Sixties, and it makes its point in only 92 minutes.

PLAYTIME (1967) (B-minus) - Jacques Tati was a pioneer in his day, but his day has long passed. What might have seemed revolutionary six decades ago comes off now as a mildly amusing visual playground and a timid slap at our soul-sucking consumerist society.

Working with a generous budget that would be the equivalent of about $34 million today, Tati created elaborate sets and choreographed scores of cast members to create a sense of discombobulation as we follow Tati's trademark character, M. Hulot, a bumbling Everyman who glides through the world as chaos swirls around him. He will repeatedly run into Barbara (Barbara Dennek), an American tourist, who is swept up in a whirlwind tour of Paris, starting out with the eye-popping modernism of Paris' slick airport. 

Tati plays out six extended scenes during a bloated two-hour running time. There is a byzantine office building, which houses an exposition of futuristic gadgets; a dull sequence looking in on the doings of a couple of apartments whose windows are open to the streets; an excruciatingly long scene at an upscale restaurant that has opened before construction was quite completed, and thus everything you can imagine goes wrong; and finally the signature closing scene, featured in the trailer, of an elaborately synchronized carousel of cars revolving around a huge traffic circle.

This must have been cutting-edge for its time, and the sharp colors and inventive angles (Tati shot it in high-res 70mm) make for rapturous viewing if you have the patience. The slapstick comedy can be charming, and it certainly can be inventive, especially the repeated gag of the doorman who insists on pantomiming opening and closing a glass door that had previously shattered. 

Hulot falls somewhere between Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp and Britain's Mr. Bean in both the continuum of silent physical comedians and the pantheon they inhabit. Maybe you had to be there at the time or be French to appreciate his comedic genius. These days, "Playtime" plays like a delightful little cinematic trinket.

BONUS TRACK

An analysis of the door shtick in "Playtime," giving a good flavor of the movie's droll humor:

That '90s Uplift: Radio Rascals

 

40 WATTS FROM NOWHERE (A-minus) - What a joy to behold. Before the internet took over and made every third person a DJ or a podcaster, it was a challenge to hunt down good music. This documentary -- about a low-wattage pirate radio station in Los Angeles -- celebrates the underground music scene of the mid-'90s and the creation of a community of amateur DJs who spun an exotic mix of records out of a modest apartment in Silver Lake.

Both the radio station (KBLT, like the sandwich) and this movie were the brainchild of Sue Carpenter (whose nom de air was Paige Jarrett, borrowed from a former high school classmate). Carpenter originally started a station called KPBJ (like the sandwich) in San Francisco, which she operated solo for about a year before heading down to the heart of hipsterville in L.A. to pump out a low-watt signal that didn't reach much beyond her neighborhood.

Carpenter -- a motorcycle-riding girl-next-door type back in the day who looks like a soccer mom now -- is a charismatic subject and storyteller. The documentary is stuffed with personalities, as dozens of volunteers manned the mic among a rotation that included a few local band celebrities, like Mike Watt of the Minutemen and Firehose, Don Bolles of the Germs, and Brandon Jay of Lutefisk. Known on air as Quazar, Jay was the Kevin Bacon of Silver lake who helped recruit much of the on-air talent through his music-scene network. Bolles is an eccentric personality, both then and now, who provides comic relief and some of the most obscure songs this side of Dr. Demento. (His on-air handle was DJ Kitten Sparkles.)

That footage fell into Carpenter's lap by accident while she was contemplating making the film. (She  related the KBLT story in her memoirs more than 20 years ago. She has long been a writer and public-radio personality.) The video archives provide a goldmine of lo-fi high-jinks, capturing faces and antics in the claustrophobic studio that Carpenter created in the hallway between the bedroom and bathroom of her apartment. So many personalities pop on the screen, many of them in recent interviews looking back on all the fun they had 30 years ago. (KCRW in L.A. did a nice piece with Carpenter in 2023, linked here.)

Carpenter, who was toiling as a legal secretary for a lawyer when she first got the idea, was inspired by Stephen Dunifer, the rebel who founded Free Radio Berkeley in 1993 and who scored a key early legal win against the FCC. (She also name-checks Radio Caroline, the 1960s pirate radio station that lurked off the coast of England for years.) Eventually, the Clinton administration's FCC would crack down on underground pirated signals, and Carpenter devotes much of the final third of the 90-minute film to the cat-and-mouse game between her and the feds. She was abetted by wily engineer Chris Wagganer, who figured out how to mount a relay antenna on a high rise at Sunset and Vine, vastly expanding the reach of KBLT (and raising its profile, sealing its doom). Wagganer tells a touching story about discovering the station while driving at night and hearing Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay," an eerie emotional moment that resonates for him to this day. (Another talking head, reminiscing about her experience, tells Carpenter on camera, "I just got chills.")

This might sound a bit like the feature film from that era, "Pump Up the Volume" (which had a great soundtrack), and there are parallels, though this tale is certainly not as dramatic. (Carpenter acknowledges the similarities but clarifies that she did not aspire to such anarchic glory: "I wanted to sleep with Christian Slater; I did not want to be Christian Slater.") And Carpenter is a confident storyteller, walking us through her origin story, deftly juggling clips with current-day interviews, and creating the suspense for the vast majority of us who had never heard of KBLT from back in the day. (The main reason the film does not get a perfect A grade is because of Carpenter's conflict of interest as director and subject, though I don't suspect her of airbrushing history.)

"40 Watts" reminded me a lot of the 2023 documentary "Elephant 6 Recording Co.," about the DIY scene in Athens, Ga., in the 1990s. The Elephant 6 collective and the movie about it bubbled with creative energy and analog fun. So we have here an almost random vortex of like-minded outsider types who bonded over a common goal. I'm trying not to be nostalgic here -- the '90s, especially the first half, is a hard decade to top when it comes to great music over a wide range of genres -- and this story could have played out in any decade, and it would be inspiring.

 

As you'd expect, the film is bursting with music samples; I counted 72 song titles during the credits. It ranges from alt-rock classics like the Breeders ("Cannonball"), Mudhoney, Spiritualized, Spoon, Bikini Kill and Jesus Lizard, to more obscure underground bands like Old Time Relijun, Bratmobile, and the Dils, to novelty songs like "Chocolate Cowboy." It was the era of Yo La Tengo covering Daniel Johnston's "Speeding Motorcycles," a version of which ended up in a Target commercial, of all places.

It was a heady time, and Carpenter some how corrals all of her material and conveys the giddiness and idiocy that she unleashed in her heyday. She employs clever interstitial graphics, using some of the logos and art pieces from that time. One talking head makes reference to "a weird moment that stuck with me forever," and it's natural to nod along knowingly. You didn't have to be in Silver Lake back then, but maybe you were somewhere else, creating your own scene. If you track down this film, you might have a 90-minute flashback that will stick with you forever. 

BONUS TRACKS

Many of the songs are difficult or impossible to find on YouTube. In some case, the credits list only a song title, without attribution to a songwriter or performer. We'll share just a few, starting with 1992's "Bloody Knuckles from Popdefect:

 

The film kicks into gear to the strains of Bikini Kill's post-Reagan screed "Reject All American":

 

Here is a band called Steel Pole Bathtub with their 1993 song "Train to Miami":

 

Here's the quirky "Chocolate Cowboy" song:

 

Elliott Smith's haunting "Needle in the Hay":