One-Liners: Odd Couples

BEATRIZ AT DINNER (B) - Writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta re-team for another of their stories about a flawed, determined woman battling her own demons as well as the powers that be.

Here, Salma Hayek is the earnest striver, Beatriz, a physical therapist and new-age healer who falls into the orbit of the well-to-do by virtue of helping treat a couple's daughter who suffered from cancer. When we meet Beatriz, she is massaging Cathy (Connie Britton from TV's "Nashville"), and afterward, when Beatriz's beater won't start, Cathy invites her to dinner, which is a snooty business affair with two other couples.

The center of attention is Doug Strutt (John Lithgow), a Trump-like developer who has no guilt about his ravaging of the environment and local economies. Beatriz, as the fish out of water, becomes the truth-teller at this gathering of boorish elites. Lithgow digs his fangs into the role without playing it broad or farcical. He and Hayek perform a fascinating pas de deux, as actors and through their characters.

White and Arteta first teamed for "Chuck & Buck" (2002) and followed it two years later with "The Good Girl," with Jennifer Aniston in the familiar role of snakebit striver. The pair reunited a few years ago for one of the best TV shows of the past decade, HBO's "Enlightened" (starring Laura Dern as a bumbling force of nature). Here, Hayek digs deep into the soul of Beatriz, creating layers that keep this from descending into a Stooges-like pie fight between the snobs and the hoi polloi.

The supporting cast, corralled by Britton's subtle effort, lights up the edges of the screen. Chloe Sevigny and Jay Duplass are a delight as an airhead couple who have stumbled into riches. (Her entrance -- scoffing at the gravel in the driveway -- sets a snippy tone early.) Amy Landecker ("Enough Said," "A Serious Man") lags a bit as Doug's tolerably middle-aged trophy wife.

A narrative trick near the movie's climax feels like a bit of a cheat, but by that point the film has earned respect, and the point of this polemic has already been made. Enjoy Hayek and the gang as they toss around White's intellectual football.

HATESHIP LOVESHIP (2014) (C+) - Kristen Wiig is a bizarre curiosity in this trifle about a wallflower striving to make something of her life, despite the obviously poor choices she has made over the years and the obstacles others create for her.

Wiig is sad sack Johanna Parry, a home health-care aide who dutifully sees to the final moments of her longtime elderly ward in the opening scene. Her next assignment is to take care of snotty teen Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld), who lives with her gruff grandfather (Nick Nolte, particularly gruff) after her mother dies and her father, Ken (Guy Pearce), struggles with a drug addiction back in Chicago. Sabitha and her androgynous pal, Edith (Sami Gayle, TV's "Blue Bloods"), think it would be a hoot to trick Johanna into thinking that Ken has a crush on Johanna and is wooing her via email.

Johanna falls for the ruse and lands on the doorstep of Ken, who is supposed to be rehabbing a motel but is merely flopping in it and whoring around with the despicable enabler Chloe (a nicely understated Jennifer Jason Leigh). Johanna, embarrassed and appalled, is determined to try to make a go of things anyway. She dutifully tends to Ken and the rundown digs, with a simplistic obsequiousness somewhere in the range of Rain Man and Forrest Gump.

You might not make it that far in this undercooked drama from director Liza Johnson, based on an Alice Munro short story. Wiig shows little range in a zombie-like performance. She was delightfully quirky in "Welcome to Me," pointedly dour in "The Skeleton Twins," and sharp and complex in "Nasty Baby" and "The Diary of a Teenage Girl." But here she struggles to find a compelling voice, and Johnson seems to be of no assistance. The tone seems off throughout.

Nolte and Pearce are workmanlike, and Christine Lahti is a sight for sore eyes in a minor role. Steinfeld and Gayle bring little to the proceedings, fumbling the tension between the teens that feels forced. This one has a payoff at the end, but it's a chore to sit through its 104-minute length.

BONUS TRACKS
"Hateship Loveship" boasts a fine classic-country soundtrack, including nuggets old (George Jones' "Why Baby Why") and more recent ("I'm Getting Known (For All the Wrong Reasons" by Larry Dean), blaring from a rattle-trap radio. The best of the lot comes at the end, from Tammy Wynette, "Til I Get It Right":


 

Now & Then

For our occasional series, we change it up a bit and consider "The Beguiled" -- Sofia Coppola's latest -- and the 1971 original from Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood. Previous "Now & Then" entries may be found here.

THE BEGUILED (B-minus) - A surprisingly un-suspenseful and undercooked Civil War period piece about a prim school for girls in the South that takes in a handsome injured Yankee soldier for some psycho-sexual intrigue.

A fine cast can't really lift Sofia Coppola's limp script and direction. Nicole Kidman is the stern headmistress, Kirsten Dunst is the aging spinster (she must be over 30!), and Elle Fanning plays a willing young seductress -- all vying for the attention of Cpl. McBurney (the too handsome and polite Colin Farrell).

Coppola, one of the best modern storytellers of the new millennium (see our list below), has grown less adventurous in recent outings. "The Bling Ring" was exciting but felt a bit shallow; other efforts, such as "Somewhere," have depth but can drag. You could make an argument that, with maybe an exception here or there, that each film has been slightly weaker than the previous one.

Here, there just isn't enough intrigue, suspense or sexual tension to make for a riveting story. The women and girls underplay their roles to the point of sleepwalking through the movie. A great storyteller is getting lost in the mist.

THE BEGUILED (1971) (B+) - From the '70s male perspective, we give you a much pulpier version that delivers more on its era's calling cards -- sex, gore, and psychological games.

Clint Eastwood's Cpl. McBurney is much more wolfish and direct than poor Colin Ferrell's; here, McBurney makes no bones about his ardor for each woman, overtly seducing the headmistress (Geraldine Page), the virginal wallflower (Elizabeth Hartman, playing 22 here, much younger than Dunst), and the randy teenager (a spicy Jo Ann Harris). It's clear that he's a player when, in the opening scene, he kisses 12-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin, familiar to '70s TV watchers). Everyone here is better than in the remake. It is much clearer that all of the women, even little Amy -- and, in the background quiet Doris (Darleen Carr, another TV regular of the time) -- are crushing on Cpl. McDreamy, and the sexual sparks are readily apparent. Page, as the matron (in this version, with a saucy family secret), is a much more believable dowager type than Kidman, who comes with that modern, sculpted age-defying beauty.

Director Don Siegel forgoes oblique mood-setting for more in-your-face drama and intrigue. Some of his choices are cheesy and outdated -- an omnipresent black crow offering foreshadowing; voice-overs to convey characters' thoughts and motivations; unnecessary camera flourishes -- but he remembers to do what Coppola chose not to: sell the story. Sure, Siegel is crude where Coppola is subtle, stylish and tasteful, but this ain't beanbag here. It's intended as a riveting tale of loneliness, Southern traditions, war & slavery, human compassion and carnal desire. Siegel, faults and all, gets that. Coppola wanted to make a different film (one that makes the Civil War an afterthought and eliminates the one slave character at the school), and that's her choice. Her product is prim and moody; Siegel's gets its fingernails dirty.

Pick your poison, so to speak.

BONUS TRACK
A cataloging of our favorite Sofia Coppola movies, from our favorite to the least liked. Others might make a list that more clearly shows diminishing returns with each release, putting her debut film first and her most recent one last.

• Lost in Translation (2003)
• The Virgin Suicides (1999)
• Somewhere (2010)
• The Bling Ring (2013)
• The Beguiled (2017)
• Marie Antoinette (2006)

And we would drop her 2015 TV special "A Very Murray Christmas" smack dab in the middle of that list.

  

Seriously?!

GET OUT (C) - Neither funny nor suspenseful, this genre mashup must have seemed like a great idea on paper. But in the hands of a first-time director, and with a dull cast, this morality play about how blacks are treated in a white world is just slow-paced and confounding.

Maybe I missed the wink to black viewers and to sensitive liberals about how Important this film is. And it certainly has a worthwhile message to convey -- everyday life inside the white power structure can seem like a literal horror story for even the most mild and acquiescent of black men. In the end, they are deemed less than human.

Got it. But "Get Out" is not the vehicle for successfully conveying that message. Here, very funny Jordan Peele ("Keanu," TV's "Key & Peele") debuts as writer-director, with clunky results. He follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend Rose (a tedious Allison Williams from HBO's "Girls") as they head upstate to meet her parents and brother. Leave it to Peele to misuse Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford as Rose's parents. Most of the actors here are either miscast or wasted, with little sense of an ensemble effort. No one expects Williams to bring much to the show, but Keener is an alchemist, and she looks almost embarrassed to be a part of this.

The gimmick here is Peele's use of horror and zombie tropes to turn Chris' experience into a hellish nightmare. Seemingly innocuous or familiar standard-issue-polite racism, delivered by a smiling Obama voter, turns horrific. The problem is that Peele has the white actors deliver all of their lines in a way that is ham-handed and clunky. I know he is going for an automaton effect at some point, but it doesn't work. He is a rookie trying to produce a modern "Rosemary's Baby," building dread minute by minute, but he ends up in "Scary Movie" territory. He wants to be an auteur, but he doesn't have the voice or the chops yet.

You see, all is not as it seems at first. Or maybe it is. The first half hour of set up is dreadfully slow. An opening scene involves a young black man (Lakeith Stanfield from "Short Term 12") being plucked from the streets for Walking While Black; he'll turn up later. Cut to the cozy urban apartment of Chris and Rose, two people devoid of chemistry, which makes you wonder why Chris would agree to visit her parents or put up with them and her overtly racist brother for more than an hour before exiting gracefully back to the city.

But this is a movie, so we go along with it. At a party, each of the family's white friends is issued a preciously awkward line to throw at Chris, in order to exhibit their obvious latent racism. We won't spoil the rest of the gimmicky plot, but rest assured that inherent evil lurks in the hearts of Chris' jovial tormentors. When true torment eventually ensues, it comes out of left field and has a B-movie gore that would make Vincent Price roll his eyes.

The saving grace here is LilRel Howery (TV's "The Carmichael Show") as Chris' pal Rod, an uber-proud TSA apparatchik who is constantly warning his buddy by phone about the obvious trap that has been set up. Howery brings actual energy and genuine comedic skills to a surprisingly underwhelming farce, playing the ironic role of the black observer yelling at the hero to "Get Out." It's the only clever bit in the film. (As a whole, there is a shocking dearth of funny lines.)

Not as lucky are Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel as the family's servants, seemingly lobotomized, docile domestics whose characterizations are more odd and confusing than, as intended, ominous. Like Chris, they are victims here of an errant production and a poorly thought-out polemic.
  

Awkward Reunions

DONALD CRIED (A-minus) - Add to the pantheon of all-time indie-film freaks and geeks Kris Avedisian's obnoxious Donald, a man-child who can't contain his giddiness when his former high school pal, Peter, returns to their Rhode Island hometown to settle his grandmother's affairs.

Avedisian wrote and directed the screenplay and stars as Donald, the epitome of arrested development, a man who probably still sports the same haircut (a self-chopped mullet) and wire-rimmed glasses from the '90s. Peter (Jesse Wakeman, who helped develop the story) has cleaned up in the 20 or so years since high school, and he now thrives in the banking industry in Manhattan. Having lost his wallet on the bus ride up to Rhode Island, he ventures across from his grandmother's house to bum a ride and a few bucks from the pal he used to share dope-smoking and heavy-metal music with back in the day.

And there is Donald, on cue, emerging from his home into the bitter January cold, amid piles of shoveled snow, wearing a cheap bathrobe to toss a bag of trash into the garbage can at the curb. Soon he is chauffeuring Peter around town, desperately trying to rekindle the flame with his old bud, who acts like he wishes he were anyplace else on Earth. Donald exhibits classic Asperger symptoms, not even remotely perceiving the massive cold shoulder being turned his way. He seems oblivious to social cues and the fact that most adults evolve over the course of a couple of decades. Peter, meantime, is clearly freaked out by the memories of his hometown and the young man he used to be.

Avedisian the actor creates a frightening character, as if he'd been work-shopping Donald for years (the film began as a short in 2012); Avedisian the director has a natural affinity for the verite style, mixing modern Duplass sensibilities with Cassavetes '70s creepiness. He shoots in the dead of winter in small-town Rhode Island in apparent natural ice and snow, taking full advantage of the soul-deadening setting, particularly during a hilarious impromptu game of touch football in which Donald and Peter work out deep-seated aggressions.

The journeys of these two men during their weekend interaction are equally compelling. No surprise that Donald will wear Peter down and get him to let down his guard a bit, engaging in some old-school bonding. A final-reel twist, combined with a stinging betrayal provides the perfect cap to this trainwreck of a reunion.

Bookending and triangulating events is Louisa Krause as Kristin, a realtor (and younger sister of another of the guys' old classmates) who flirts with Peter in the opening scene at his grandmother's house and then returns late in the film to lure him to a pathetic cancer benefit, the perfect spot for a morose drunken hookup attempt. Her manic energy masks an insecurity, and Krause nails each comic beat.

The title of the film comes from a story dating to the high school days, when Peter pulled a humiliating prank on Donald. Reunited, the two men fall into old habits and a familiar pecking order. Donald is just begging to be picked on, and Peter is haunted by the urge to indulge the easy target -- which laces the laughs with a bitter taste (like your very first sip of Old Style sophomore year). Those familiar twinges should be familiar to anyone who wasn't the star quarterback or point guard during high school but who instead battled through adolescence to become the adult they are today. You can look back and laugh, but don't be surprised if you flinch, and maybe well up a little, too.

HERMIA & HELENA (C) - This tone poem about 20-something Argentine women rotating through a fellowship in New York City suffers from a deadly combination -- it is difficult to follow, and no one character stands out enough to care about.

Writer-director Matias Piñeiro nods to Mumblecore with snippets of fleeting, mundane dialogue, and at some point in the film he begins tracking backward in time, creating more confusion than artful intrigue. It was all a jumble of soft-focus images, splashes of literary snippets flashing on the screen, and a bunch of slackers who were difficult to keep straight. 

Agustina Muñoz exhibits charm and presence as the ostensible star, playing a woman adrift among relationships who begins exploring her past while translating Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." A father-daughter reunion during the final third has a bit of punch to it, but too much of the narrative is scattered to the winds, making it near impossible to find a hook to hold onto.

But what do I know? Some other critics praised it. Here's a sampling:

• Richard Brody, New Yorker: "Filming cityscapes and intimate gestures with avid attention, adorning the dialogue with deep confessions and witty asides, Pineiro conjures a cogently realistic yet gloriously imaginative vision of youthful ardor in love and art alike."
• Slant Film: "In fact, it may be Piñeiro’s most inspired and thrilling work to date, exhaustive in its means of keeping the viewer off balance and yet rich in its emotional implications."
• Village Voice: "There are a few different potential films within Hermia & Helena — a Shakespeare adaptation, a tale of romantic relationships, a tale of family — but the totality proves a sunny and affable literary collage."

BONUS TRACKS

Speaking of high school reunions back in your old hometown, this humor piece from Shannon Reed in the New Yorker cleverly spoofs the New York Times' popular "36 Hours" travel feature: "Thirty-Six Hours in . . . YourHome Town!"

And the sad little cancer benefit in "Donald Cried" features a bunch of single women half-heartedly dancing to Wang Chung's "Dance Hall Days":

 

Obsessions

SUNTAN (A-minus) - This fascinating character study follows a sad-sack middle-aged doctor exiled on a Greek island where he comes alive during the summer tourist season, latching on to a group of free-spirited young adults who toy with his feelings.

Shlubby, balding Kostis (Makis Papadimitriou) is an emotional cripple, for reasons that are only barely hinted at. He melted down at his last residency, and now he is slumming as the sole physician treating locals and tourists. When Anna (Elli Tringou) and her randy pals show up in his office after her minor scooter accident, Kostis falls for her flip flirtations and accepts their half-serious invitation to hang out with them at the beach.

Ah, the beach. It is a hedonist's paradise. There is unabashedly full frontal nudity, with impossibly lean young bodies glistening in the island sun, as these young adults (they can't be much older than 20) frolic like horny high-schoolers on spring break, publicly exploring each others' bodies in various combinations. Kostis is smitten with Anna, who encourages his attention, from the moment she greets him topless on the beach (while he slathers on the sunblock, dons a floppy hat and lights up a cigarette).

This gang of three women and two men treat Kostis as a curiosity, but soon he is like a teenager himself, hustling patients out the door at 3 p.m. so that he can swing by the liquor store for beer to bring to his new pals at the beach and to stay out till the wee hours among the partying tourists and the wolfish local men. When Anna tells him she's bored with the public venue, he takes her to a more secluded retreat, where she immediately gets buck naked, plunges into the emerald waters and eventually emerges, goddess-like, with seduction on her mind -- though it's less a factor of attraction than of boredom. When his performance is less than desired, her ardor dissipates, and their relationship takes a dark turn. Soon he sees the adonises as bitter rivals, and he flips out at the most minor social snub, treating her like a straying spouse.

Kostis soon spirals into depression and a daily alcohol stupor that makes you wonder how he practices medicine during the day. The only clue to the source of his emotional instability is a music box that mournfully plays the wedding march. But it's essentially a mystery as to why he is so vulnerable to Anna's charms.

Some will be creeped out by this rather lurid tale -- the climax is violent and disturbing. But there is something strongly seductive about this sybaritic romp. The psychological struggle, like the vacationing bodies, is raw, and the carnage is distinctly carnal. The male psyche here takes a pummeling, and despite the Edenic setting, it's not a pretty picture.

MOKA (B+) - Emmanuelle Devos is riveting this tale of a mother's desire for revenge for the death of her son.

Devos and her sad eyes are never less than captivating -- check out "Violette," "Read My Lips" and "Gilles' Wife." Here, Devos plays Diane, a grieving mother who is frustrated with the pace of the investigation of the accident in which a couple in a coffee-colored vehicle (thus the title of the film) ran over her bicycling son and fled the scene. Armed with some inside information about the make of the vehicle and a description of the occupants -- including a blond female driver -- Diane travels to the city of Evian for some detective work.

She narrows down the likely suspects to an unmarried couple -- Marlene (Nathalie Baye), who runs a salon, and her hunky gym-rat boyfriend, Michel (David Clavel), who is advertising the car for sale. Diane deals with these two separately (posing as "Helene" during her makeover with Marlene), exploiting their solicitousness.

The film unfolds coolly over a tidy 89 minutes, expertly paced by director Frederic Mermoud (TV's "The Returned"), and Devos and Baye are brilliant as they go toe-to-toe, ratcheting up the tension. Diane has lost her sense of proportion, and so some of her actions are unforgivable (though understandable). The neat little twist at the end is a perfect ending to this quiet gem.
 

New to the Queue

In happier times ...

A mindless, raunchy romp through the Catholic Church in 14th Century Italy has some funny people in it (including Aubrey Plaza, Kate Micucci, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Nick Offerman and John C. Reilly), so we'll check out "The Little Hours."

Errol Morris goes deep for a profile of an old-school portrait artist in "The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography."

A little pulp is OK once in a while, especially in the hands of Edgar Wright ("Shaun of the Dead"), so we'll subject our senses to "Baby Driver."

We're on the fence about a return to yesteryear for a look at the reality-TV style of the proto-Trump presidency, "The Reagan Show."

A documentary about a '70s fugitive convicted of killing eight people, "The Skyjacker's Tale."

BONUS TRACK
Rolling Stone has an interesting breakdown of some of the songs in Edgar Wright's "Baby Driver." Here's a link.
  

The Odd Years

If you've sensed some ennui from this remote corner of the internet, it's not you. And it's not me. We just haven't seen very many decent, let alone good, releases in 2017. In fact, we have handed out exactly one A-minus -- for "Obit" -- and I wouldn't say it's anywhere near a great documentary.

In the coming days, we'll hand out another A-minus to the quirky indie comedy "Donald Cried," a standout on a slog of a holiday weekend. And next up in our rental queue is "Get Out," which holds out some promise.

But no, we're not thrilled with the year's releases as we hit the halfway mark. And as we scan the horizon beyond the dog days of summer and into autumn, we're not encouraged.

Quo vadimus? Is this thing on?

BONUS TRACK
A sneak preview of "Donald Cried":


 

One Liners: Quiet Rebellions

A QUIET PASSION (B) - Terence Davies bounces back from the interminably dreary "Sunset Song" for this dour but powerful biography of poet Emily Dickinson, starring Cynthia Nixon in a role she seems to have been born to play.

Davies crafts a gorgeous period piece, delicate and moving throughout. Nixon rattles everything around her as the rebellious poet and social dissident, with a firm assist from Jennifer Ehle as Emily's sister, Vinnie, and Catherine Bailey as their free-spirited friend.

Events unfold at a glacial pace, but so elegantly and passionately that it holds your attention for a full two hours. The lighting is often dim, and rooms claustrophobic, no surprise coming from Davies, the hand behind "Distant Voices, Still Lives" and "The Deep Blue Sea."

Nothing that he throws at Nixon is too much for her to handle. Even her suffering from Bright's Disease somehow rises above standard TV Movie of the Week fare. Meantime, Dickinson's poetry -- along with her quirky style (involving many dashes) -- are celebrated with on-screen graphics and reverent narration. (Right up to the inevitable "Because I could not stop for death ...")

"A Quiet Passion" is a slow-burning family drama, with a rare sighting of Keith Carradine as the stern patriarch. It is a powerful and enduring character study.

LITTLE MEN (B-minus) - A sober but occasionally twee little comic drama pits two families in a business dispute, with the two adolescent sons

From the Ira Sachs earnestness factory -- see also "Keep the Lights On" and "Love Is Strange" -- comes this low-key slice of life about small businesses and class distinctions. The Jardine family, led by Brian (Greg Kinnear), owns a building in Brooklyn that houses a mom-and-pop (without the pop) tailor shop run by Leonor Cavelli (eminent Chilean actress Paulina Garcia), who has a son, Tony, who has a strong Brooklyn accent and dreams of being an actor someday. When his father dies, Brian assumes control of the building and discovers that his dad had been letting Leonor slide on ridiculously low rent for years, something Brian intends to rectify in the now-hip neighborhood.

Tony befriends the Jardines' son, the sensitive budding artist Jake (Theo Taplitz), setting up a generational battle between the wise-beyond-their-years boys and the squabbling adults locked in a gentrification showdown. Expect the boys to teach the adults a lesson or two in human kindness.

Sachs fusses over his characters and their dialogue with mixed results; at times he finds some fundamental truths while occasionally coming off as stagy. (It doesn't help that Brian is a local theater director.) Like "Love Is Strange," this one can be a little too tidy at times, and its impact fades fairly quickly. This is another solidly entertaining slice of life.

With Jennifer Ehle, mostly in the background as the loyal wife, making this an inadvertent double feature.

Fast Forward Theater: Mumble Corps

This feature covers movies that we don't have the will to pull the plug on but are so dreadful, silly or boring that we grab the remote and start zipping through scenes just to get it over with:

THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (D+) - In this horror story, three young actress tragically fall victim to an over-eager first-time director who slashes through his obvious influences as if with a dull hunting knife.

Very little makes sense here in the story of a pair of monosyllabic girls stranded at their girls school when their parents fail to show up to pick them up on the last day before break, for various cryptic reasons. Poor Kiernan Shipka (little Sally on TV's "Mad Men") plays Kat, a brooding little freak who gives the creeps to her older classmate, Rose (Lucy Boynton), a raven-haired beauty about to break some bad news to her boyfriend. The Northeastern prep school comes complete with the avuncular headmaster and a few mean old-crone teachers, all of whom are just begging to be slaughtered in some hideous fashion.

Kat's behavior is unsettling, and the movie starts with her picturing her parents in a deadly car crash, a premonition that she comes back to repeatedly as her mental state deteriorates. Meantime, a third girl, who goes by Joan (Emma Roberts), has apparently been sprung from a mental institution and hitches a ride with an unsuspecting couple who, it turns out, claim to be the parents of a girl who looks just like Rose and who -- get this -- died nine years ago!

OK. We're catching on. This isn't going to end well. It's just a matter of which of these three mopes is going to out-crazy the others. Just a few minutes in, I turned on the subtitles, because I don't speak Depressed Millennial, and I could barely make out what these poor girls were saying.

In the hands of Oz Perkins (who made this in 2015 before he made "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House" last year), this cliche-ridden story -- complete with creaky doors in seemingly every room and swelling ominous background music -- is devoid of originality. The debts to "Twin Peaks" and the "Exorcist" are huge. (There's actually an exorcism scene toward the end.) Perkins also has a disturbing leer when he gazes through the camera. In one scene, Joan, who is crashing in a motel in a room separate from the couple she just met, for some inexplicable reason answers the door in just a towel when she knows it's the husband knocking -- and lets him in for a casual chat.

There's a reason we don't watch horror movies anymore. Once you've seen a few, you've seen them all. These films are big lately -- they are popular and cheap to make. These three young actresses have seen better scripts and done better work before; they shouldn't have to be this director's ghoulish playthings.
 

New to the Queue

Bringing the heat ...

Kumail Nanjiani (HBO's "Silicon Valley") co-wrote and stars in a biographical love story, aided by director Michael Showalter ("Hello, My Name Is Doris"), "The Big Sick."

Our gal Emmanuelle Devos ("Violette," "Gilles' Wife") stars as a grieving mother hunting down justice in "Moka."

A celluloid archivist tells the story of the discovery of a trove of film cans in the Yukon, "Dawson City: Frozen in Time."

Mike White ("The Good Girl," "Chuck & Buck," HBO's "Enlightened") re-teams with Miguel Arteta for the story of a progressive woman (Salma Hayek) battling with a conservative man (John Lithgow) during a soiree, "Beatriz at Dinner."

With trepidation (will it be more like "The Virgin Suicides" or "Marie Antoinette"?) we list Sofia Coppola's Civil War costume piece "The Beguiled." 

A documentary about the din of daily life, Patrick Shen's "In Pursuit of Silence."

The swan song from the legendary documentarian Albert Maysles, with an assist from three co-directors, takes place entirely on a passenger train, "In Transit."

And a documentary about a male nurse in Iraq over five years, "Nowhere to Hide."
 

Punk'd (Part 2)

AUTHOR: THE J.T. LEROY STORY (B-minus) - I can't help thinking that there is a powerhouse documentary to be made about the epic literary scam pulled off by Laura Albert, who at the turn of the millennium posed as a troubled teenage boy to burn up the best-seller lists and hoodwink a cadre of C-list celebrities. This is not it.

Jeff Feurzeig ("The Devil and Daniel Johnston," "The Real Rocky") has such an explosive story at his fingertips, but he fails to put it all together. He spends a lot of time with Albert, a chubby girl turned lean middle-aged punk, as she unfurls the story of how her creation got out of hand.

J.T. Leroy was a literary sensation, the supposed teenage son of a truck-stop prostitute, pushing all the buttons of the book world and attracting celebrities drawn to the optics of gender politics. But it was Albert doing the writing and her former sister-in-law eventually taking on the mysterious public persona of the androgynous young writer.

With most people knowing how this turns out, Feurzeig doesn't pretend to be unraveling a "Serial"-type mystery. But he engages in a few of those tropes, and this one too often drags along. Albert can be engaging, but she's a little too in love with her legacy. Publishing-world talking heads don't much insight.

If you enjoy knocking B-list celebrities down a notch, there might be some thrills in watching the likes of Winona Ryder and Tom Waits fawn over "J.T." as the second coming of William Burroughs.

This wasn't the most shocking of scams of the last generation, and in Feurzeig's hands, it has lost a bit of its pop.

GIMME DANGER (B-minus) - Speaking of pop, our Jim Jarmusch trilogy ends with this fond, occasionally engaging documentary about Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the Nixon-era bad boys who are credited with inventing the '70s punk rock movement.

Jarmusch is too much of a fan-boy to really dig deep into the crevices of the band's legacy, and his visual style is surprisingly corny.  This is a lot more fond than it is engaging.

Depending on your tolerance for Iggy Pop (ne James Osterberg), your mileage here will vary. My biggest revelation halfway through this film: Iggy is really only moderately talented -- as a singer, songwriter, performer. And his bandmates were not particularly interesting.

The Stooges pretty much stole their shtick from fellow Michiganders the MC5. Iggy's lyrics, as Jarmusch notes, were embarrassingly rudimentary. Ron Asheton imagined a few killer hooks and riffs, most notably the legendary power chords that drive "I Wanna Be Your Dog."

These slacker dudes from Ann Arbor were discovered by Danny Fields, the subject of the recent "Danny Says," and signed to Elektra Records, which released their little-noticed self-titled debut in 1969 and their even more shunned (but enduring) followup, "Fun House," the next year.

Iggy, a former drummer with the garage band the Iguanas, developed that spastic shirtless stage presence that must have seemed stale by 1972. By then, he and most of his bandmates were hooked on heroin and had lost that record deal. David Bowie rescued Iggy around that time, and they gathered the old band for one last gasp, "Raw Power," with such scorchers as "Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell" and "Search and Destroy."

Iggy would go on to redeem himself later in the decade with alt-classics like "The Passenger" (famously covered by Siouxsie and the Banshees) and "Lust for Life" (forever stamped on the culture by "Trainspotting" in 1996 and later dropped through the lookingglass in a cruise-ship commercial).

In the end, here, the band members just don't have a compelling story to tell. They may have had a profound impact on a teenage Jarmusch back in the day, but his adoration can't justify a 108-minute slog through the faded past.

BONUS TRACKS
Alejandro Escovedo and Peter Buck cover "I Wanna Be Your Dog" in Athens, Ga., a few years ago:



James Osterberg drumming with the Iguanas in 1965:


 

Punk'd (Part 1)

GET ME ROGER STONE (B-minus) - Too long by a good 20 minutes, this by-the-numbers study of the guttersnipe political strategist who connived to stick us with Richard Nixon and Donald Trump revels in the man's obnoxious rubber-neck value.

A year ago, this would have been more amusing; now, it's a little frightening and depressing. Only a sadist would enjoy being reminded that we, as a nation, have come full circle since the Nixon law-and-order era of racial dog whistles.

It takes three guys to write and direct this fawning documentary about Roger Stone, the amoral prick who came of age in the era of dirty tricks. He was there for the Southern Strategy of the '60s, the rise of Reagan and the Christian coalition in the '70s, Willie Horton in the '80s, his own raunchy Clintonian scandal in the '90s, and of course, with his former partner Paul Manafort, the nightmare that was the election of Trump. As one talking head notes, after Stone's entrenchment among the Republican elite, "Washington's been worse off for it ever since."

Stone welcomes the hatred of his detractors; he has no principles; and he shows a deviant need to win at all costs, without a thought given to the well-being of Republic. We get it -- politics ain't beanbag. But this provocateur oozes oil like my '74 Chevy Nova used to.

It would be one thing if the filmmakers didn't have a crush on their subject. Sure, they let talking heads criticize him, but Stone always gets the last word. (He also wears the wildest outfits. Whether clad in a cream-colored suit or dark pinstripes with a violet fedora, Stone plays quite the dandy.) And the filmmakers can't help but mention the tabloid headlines that outed him and his wife as swingers; but they soft-pedal it, leaving any questions about his disinformation and his deflections, or his sexuality, on the cutting room floor. Never addressed, either, is the way his hairline quickly recedes in the early footage but is miraculously restored in middle age.

At times this can be quite entertaining, but then Stone can be too -- when he's not leering at the camera or shown in clips cavorting with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And the chronology seems out of balance. The film zips through the '60s, '70s and '80s and glosses past the outcast days of the '90s, before the film is barely half over. The rest of the film is devoted to the Trump phenomenon, from Stone's early grooming of the barbaric mogul to his and Manafort's deft exploitation of the disconnect between voters and the two major parties.

Either there's nothing particular amusing or intriguing about those recent events, or it's just ... too soon.

It Girl

We've been meaning to return to the British comedy "The IT Crowd," but we're hopelessly adrift in the era of Peak TV.  We stumbled across this clip, which makes reference to our beloved guy band Guided by Voices.  The usual response to the name of that band is, "Never heard of them."  Here, the case is made that a vibrant young woman shouldn't be expected to know who GBV is -- unless she is being drawn against her will into the valley of the nerds.


 

Obit noir

OBIT (A-minus) - This surprisingly tender, smartly crafted documentary goes behind the scenes of the obituary desk and the team of writers at the New York Times, with entertaining results.

Native New Yorker Vanessa Gould, in her first full-length film as director, shows a deft touch with the topics of death, journalism, the creative process and the arc of history. She is blessed with a few irresistible characters who carry the film. And she shows an appreciation for the inner workings of a newsroom and its various traditions, from coffee addictions to gallows humor.

And the morgue. That's the cavernous room full of file cabinets bursting with yellowing paper clippings and fading photos. It is manned by Jeff Roth (above), who provides broad comic relief as the eccentric keeper of the brittle files. With severely rolled-up sleeves and a self-deprecating demeanor, he takes the camera on a manic, dizzying tour of the archives, conveying the joys and frustrations of inheriting an impossibly complicated, archaic organizing system. Roth snaps off one-liners as relief from the mostly sober self-analysis of the obit writers themselves. In a word, he's a hoot.

The other star of the film is Bruce Weber, an introspective veteran pushing 60, who allows the cameras intimate access to his reporting and writing process as he spends a day on deadline reporting the death of John F. Kennedy's pioneering television adviser who famously orchestrated the pivotal Kennedy-Nixon debate late in the 1960 campaign. We see Weber meticulously interview the widow, nailing down the nuts and bolts as well as digging deeper into conversation for the details that will make the obituary come alive. For the camera, Weber spins a few entertaining journalism stories as well as waxing philosophical about confronting death daily for a living. We observe his hunt-and-peck typing style as he agonizes over the lede (opening paragraph(s) of the story) while his editor pitches the story for some front-page play. Weber embodies the heart and soul of a career reporter and writer. (He called it a career at the Times in 2016.)

And then there's Margalit Fox, certainly a talented journalist and vivid interview subject. Fox has an unflagging devotion to the English language and the written word, for better and for worse. She deserves some credit for enlivening a long-moribund genre, but she doesn't know her limits, and neither do her editors. We first flagged Fox in 2011 when we were regularly contributing to the internet bulletin board Testy Copy Editors (now on Facebook). We coined the phrase "obit noir" to describe her flowery writing and penchant for ending her pieces with a flourish, resorting to film-noir scene setting and purple prose (she has "the best words," like lachrymose) to convey what often seemed to be apocryphal anecdotes as punchlines. (The posts are collected on this thread between 2011 and 2013. Exhibit A is her obit of Lawrence Eagleburger.) On camera, Fox alternates between frothy exaggerations and tedious statements of the obvious. (It takes her numerous sentences to explain the simple concept that an inordinate number of obituary subjects are white males merely because they made their reputations decades ago when white males dominated politics, industry and entertainment. Noted.) Her theatrics and thesaurus-rex verbosity will either evoke admiration or annoyance.

Gould, however, juggles these and other personalities well.  The filmmaker certainly did her homework; she pays attention to detail, getting much of the small stuff right. She has a nose for pithy coffee-mug slogans and bulletin board clippings (usually of the gallows variety) endemic in the workplace. She studies the pitfalls of fact-gathering and fact-checking. She explains how a lede works and the tradition of writing obituaries in advance to have a bunch in the can ready to go in case a famous celeb or politician dies. She has one of the writers conduct a dramatic reading from a ridiculously cheesy obit from the 1930s to show how the form has morphed from cringe-inducing over-the-top euphemisms about subjects passing into the next realm to be greeted by angels on high, to the matter-of-fact style of the present day (and the ban on unnecessary alternatives to the word "died").

She notes the famous yarn about the death of Farrah Fawcett, who normally would have gotten pretty good play in the next day's paper had she not been overwhelmed within hours by bombshell reports of the afternoon death of Michael Jackson, which set off a deadline frenzy. She brings in music writer Jon Pareles to talk about the appreciation he whipped up in a few hours.

The filmmaker also is wise enough to follow up with Weber the next day to see how his story turned out and how it was played. Wouldn't you know it, he got a fact wrong. (If you pay close attention, it is foreshadowed during his phone interview with the widow.) Then again she fails to show us the lede that Paul Vitello agonized over all day while working on the obit of '60s ad man Dick Rich; here's a link to it.

Gould expertly works in clips of many of the obituary subjects. (A highlight is John Fairfax [1937-2012], who was the first person to row across an ocean.) The footage -- mostly grainy black-and-white or ambered -- brought to mind the wistful late '80s "time machine" ABC News series "Our World" with Linda Ellerbee. Late in the film Gould reels off a roll call of famous recent obit subjects -- Prince, David Bowie, Maya Angelou -- with a grace that brings to mind an award show's "In Memoriam" segment and which elicited "aahs" from various enclaves of the audience as the subjects flashed on the screen.

Maybe I was just in the mood for this one and was watching it with rose-colored glasses; I'm a former newspaperman and undying fan and admirer of obituaries. I was also watching it with one of my former Albuquerque Tribune colleagues who had just penned the obituary of one of another of our former Trib alums. And "Obit" certainly is a bittersweet affair, keenly aware that all of the Times' obit writers are middle-aged and many of their readers probably older.

As newspapers die off -- and its inveterate former staffers do as well -- it's worth documenting the golden years of an age when a news organization devoted so much time, effort, and care to thoughtfully telling the life stories of those who made an impact in our culture. And to present that process so poetically on the big screen must warm the hearts not just of cranky old journalists but of others who care about the written word.

BONUS TRACK
The trailer:


 

New to the Queue

Hold on hope ...

Steve James ("Hoop Dreams," "The Interrupters") profiles a small bank run by Chinese immigrants, the only bank to be prosecuted after the 2008 meltdown, "Abacus: Small Enough to Jail."

Our gal Alia Shawkat and the great Janet McTeer star as the girlfriend and mom of a young man who has committed suicide, in Amber Tamblyn's debut behind the camera, "Paint It Black."

From Argentina, a drama set in an artist's residency as intrigue of Shakespearean proportions envelops two women there, "Hermia and Helena."

If we ever find ourselves with four hours with absolutely nothing to do, we'll have this definitive Grateful Dead documentary squirreled away in the queue, "Long Strange Trip."

A profile of a teenage dissident who rallied others into the streets of Hong Kong in 2014, "Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower."

Fred Armison, as the wacky neighbor, may be enough to draw us to Zoe Lister-Jones' twee-looking directorial debut about a couple who channel their arguments into songs, "Band Aid."

BONUS TRACK
Our title track, from Guided by Voices: