R.I.P, Monte Hellman

 

It's been nearly five years since I re-watched "Two-Lane Blacktop," the iconic (there, I said it) American New Wave road film from 1971. As that film turns 50, its director, Monte Hellman (below right) has died -- last month; he was 91. 

I first saw "Two-Lane Blacktop" when it was only about 30 years old at the old location of the Gene Siskel Film Center near downtown Chicago. It immediately captivated me, and it haunts me to this day. It is the obvious pinnacle of Hellman's spotty career as one of the many descendants of Roger Corman on the pulpy side of the '60-'70s New Wave.

In tribute, I ordered up Hellman's preceding movie release:

THE SHOOTING (1966) (C-minus) - Meh. This one is a laconic would-be Spaghetti Western, but it mostly sits flat on the screen. If you want to see Jack Nicholson on a horse, this a good opportunity to do that.

But if you want an Old World revenge morality play, you have plenty of options (such as "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"). Here, we are treated to Warren Oates, the only truly compelling part of the film. (He would go on to star in Hellman's next two films, including 1974's "Cockfighter.") He is joined by the arresting Millie Perkins as a woman who hires Oates' character to join her on a journey to track a mysterious rider (Nicholson). 

Like "Blacktop," the dialogue is spare. (It was written by Carole Eastman (as Adrien Joyce), who would go on to pen her masterpiece, "Five Easy Pieces" starring Nicholson.) It might help if you are a fan of westerns, especially of the more modern variety, but this one just dragged too often.

Life Is Short: We'll Always Have Paris

 

We went into "Paris Calligrammes" with perhaps misguided expectations. We were expecting a romp with artists through the French capital during the heady '60s culminating in the May 1968 protests and some thoughts on how that shaped the era. We never made it past 1966.

This is a memoir from German artist Ulrike Ottinger, who parachuted into the Paris literary and art scene in the early '60s, joining a circle of artistes, writers and poets who orbited around the Calligrammes bookstore. However, the production here is leaden, the pace is slow, her narration is dull, and the names she drops fly by quickly, few of them recognizable. At least to me. Here's a good litmus test. At one point, Ottinger references the staging of a Jean Genet play and notes that it featured three "famous" actors, and then she names Madeleine Renaud, Maria Casares and Jean-Pierre Granval. If none of those names ring a bell, then the rest of this won't resonate, I'm afraid. 

There's an audience for this, certainly. But you'd have to appreciate the extreme inside baseball to devote more than two hours to Ottinger's valentine to her youth.

Title: PARIS CALLIGRAMMES

Running Time: 130 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  50 MIN

Portion Watched: 38%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 58 YRS, 5 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.5 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went to bed to read myself to sleep.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 88-1

Noir Chronicles: Femmes Fatales

 A pair of barn-burners with two strong female leads in undercooked roles:

KEEPER OF THE FLAME (1942) (B-minus) - Celebrated war correspondent Steve O'Malley (Spencer Tracy) returns stateside during the middle of the war to pursue a biography of a beloved national hero who died in a car crash, and that means finding access to his widow, Christine Forrest (Katharine Hepburn). Yes, it's Hepburn and Tracy, but there is no flame between them.

Competing with his fellow news hounds and verbally sparring with the locals, O'Malley lands his prey and soon has access to the great man's archives, though you can tell off the bat that something's not adding up here. Ol' Steve surely will dig up the truth. Tracy is likeable but Hepburn is cold and melodramatic, a little out of touch with the loose cast around her. The supporting cast includes a wonderful turn by Audrie Christie as Jane Harding, a journalistic colleague of O'Malley's who is sharp and sassy and the life of the party here. She and Percy Kilbride as a wisecracking cabdriver leaven this with some sideways screwball comedy amid the gloom and glory.

This one from George Cuckor ("Gaslight," "The Philadelphia Story"), which landed in theaters a year after Pearl Harbor, lays the patriotism on awfully thick. And it's one of those old-fashioned creaky scripts in which a character uses most of the final 10 minutes to reveal everything in one long monologue just to wrap it all up. 

Spotted: A trio of familiar faces: Forrest Tucker (TV's "F Troop") as the widow's surly cousin; future blacklist victim Howard Da Silva as the widow's grumpy gatekeeper; and Pa Kettle himself, Percy Kilbride, as the cranky cabbie full of practical advice and putdowns.

THE FURIES (1950) (C+) - Barbara Stanwyck is constantly forced to be lady-like as a frustrated heiress in this western about a vain rancher who is just begging for a comeuppance. This has just too much bellowing by Walter Huston as T.C. Jeffords, the father of Stanwyck's Vance Jeffords, who is appalled by her father jeopardizing his empire by passing out IOUs all over the New Mexico territory and beyond, not to mention the gold-digging bride he brings home one day.

Vance is sympathetic to the Mexican homesteaders who camp out on the vast property, and she has a more business affinity than romantic interest in rival Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), who not only asserts a claim to part of the property but is too much of a cad for her to take seriously. This would-be epic from Anthony Mann meanders too much in the first half and struggles in the second half to make the intrigue jell. It doesn't help that Mann's reins on Stanwyck (the Parker Posey of her time) are way too tight. The movie finally does come through with a pretty clever payoff -- and some redemption for Vance -- but it takes nearly two hours to get there. And if you're not a regular fan of westerns, that can be an awfully dusty trail to wander down.

Spotted: Prolific TV character actor Frank Ferguson ("Lassie," "My Friend Flicka") in the familiar role of a doctor.

By Any Means Necessary

 

SLALOM (B) - This French production avoids the trap of presenting another repulsive take on the stale narrative of an older man exploiting a younger woman, or in this case, a skiing coach abusing his 15-year-old student. It's a scenario we don't need to seek out.

However, this debut feature from writer-director Charlene Favier pulses with dread and sadness, as young doe-eyed Lyz (Noee Abita) has been cast adrift by distracted divorced parents, and coach Fred (Jeremie Renier from Francois Ozon's "Double Lover") fills the void. A nuanced character, he comes across as someone with more of an uncontrollable compulsion than just some evil predator. Still, a rape scene two-thirds of the way through is shocking and disturbing; yet, Favier trains her camera on Lyz's face, those frightened eyes searching not so much for rescue but for a way to instantly process the attack and find a drawer in her mind to instantly shelve it away in her psyche.

Abita is fascinating to watch. She just turned 22, but she looks like an awkward teenager, with small hands but full lips, as if she's still growing into her body, which gets inspected and measured regularly to assess her progress as an athlete. But it is her eyes that constantly scan her surroundings (mostly teen social and competitive dynamics at the remote school in the mountains) and assess situations for survival options, whether Fred is stalking her or her best friend in the group, Justine (Maira Schmitt), gets a little too chummy.

Favier hints at the idea that Fred is just working every angle he can in order to motivate this future champion to maximize her talents. (He often uses "we" to describe Lyz's athletic accomplishments.) The filmmaker refuses to outright demonize Fred but rather provides just a few shades of grey to keep the viewer off balance.

Favier shows a strong visual flair in this resort setting (she is particularly adept at capturing the flurry of snowflakes, whether natural or machine-produced), but she lapses into conventional choices; there must be at least a dozen establishing shots of the snow-covered mountains, a technique intended to perhaps suggest emotional impediments involved here, but which eventually comes off as repetitive, if not nearly Pythonesque ("forbidding, aloof, terrifying ..."). And Lyz's ascent -- from budding phenom to world's greatest skier -- is a little too shorthand to be fully believable.

But this is Abita's movie, and Favier, like Celine Sciamma ("Girlhood"), has a distinctive connection with the adolescent experience, which allows her young actress to add layers and subtlety to what otherwise could have been a shallow, exploitive movie.

Renegades

 From the archives ...

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960) (B+) - Marlon Brando ends his first decade as a movie star by mixing "A Streetcar Named Desire" with "The Wild One" to flex his chops as a lone-wolf drifter named Valentine Xavier trying to stay out of trouble with the women of the Deep South and their feral male protectors. 

Tennessee Williams, adapting some of his earlier work, lays the groundwork for the beautiful Brando to smolder his way through this dark story of longing and regret. Anna Magnani plays Lady Torrance, the wife of a miserable cur (Victor Jory) who lies in bed dying in a room above the mercantile store she runs and where Brando's Valentine comes to work after giving up his life as a guitar player. Joanne Woodward is on hand as Carol Cutrere, the town floozy who is frustrated that her come-ons to Valentine don't work. He is drawn more to the older woman. 

Sidney Lumet, behind the camera, doesn't seem to connect much with the southern culture (he's prone to depicting the men as parts of snarling racist mobs), but, like Williams, he seems to have a natural connection to Brando, who carries the story along in the trail of his animal musk. Valentine and Lady Torrance form a genuine bond, and when it all comes to a head, there's real heartbreak and tragedy involved. This feels like adult storytelling despite the period melodrama.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964) (B) - This philosophical psychological horror film from Japan has style to burn, not to mention grains of sand in every crack and crevice you can imagine. A Tokyo teacher indulging his love of entomology while on vacation near a small sea village is tricked into staying overnight with a woman who lives in a sand it accessible only by a rope ladder. He soon finds that he can't escape and is trapped in this sandy purgatory, perhaps indefinitely.

The dread and drudgery of shoveling sand for the villagers above is sharply rendered -- though the depiction of mind-numbing servitude might weigh on viewers over the course of two and a half hours. (We admit to some strategic fast-forwarding in a few spots, but not enough to qualify this for Fast Forward Theater.) The man (Eiji Okada from "Hiroshima Mon Amour") eventually falls into the arms of the coquettish but practical woman (Kyoko Kishida).

Director Hiroshi Teshigahara develops a captivating visual palette, offsetting the suffocating amounts of sand with geometric patterns and extreme close-ups, including of the couple's bodies. At times the artistic flourishes are mesmerizing. The story itself soon devolves into a slow-burn tale of survival, one of Sisyphean proportions, suggesting that the repetitive days in a sand pit are a metaphor for the daily rat race in the big city. Your mileage may vary.

Where in the World Have We Gone?

 

QUO VADIS, AIDA? (A) - In 1998, in the raw days following the rough truce that ended the war in the former Yugoslavia, I visited Croatia, the land of my maternal ancestors. I found the hillside town overlooking the Adriatic, Hreljin, where my grandfather John (nee Ivan) grew up, and I found relatives there who spoke English and had a direct connection to the kin who had once visited the Chicago area of my family after World War II. I would return in 2000 with my mother in tow to visit those same relatives.  I took her inside her father's boyhood home, where she claimed some artwork left behind from an aunt who had died many years earlier around age 21. I grabbed a crystal shot glass.

In 1998, taking a detour on our way to see the World Cup tournament in France, my ex and I traveled the Dalmatian coast. She had always wanted to see Dubrovnik, and she was relieved to find that it had survived the Serbian siege, albeit with a marble plaza of the old city pockmarked from shelling. Fledgling restaurateurs lured us into side alleys to sample their fare. It was an entrepreneurship we had noticed on the drive down, including the determined rebuilding of the ivory-colored homes with their refurbished terra-cotta roofs -- those earth-tone hues framed by the backdrop of the marble-blue Adriatic.  

This was a mere three years after the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the neighboring republic to the east, perhaps the darkest, most chilling moment of the horrific war that marked the breakup of Yugoslavia. We were modestly surprised to run across few hallmarks of that genocidal bloodbath across the region. If there was enmity being harbored, we didn't detect it.

During the war, in the early '90s, I had taken a marked interest in the day-to-day dispatches from the homeland's front lines, from my safe perch at a privileged remove on the wire desk of the Chicago Sun-Times. Now, breathing in the warm seaside air of mid-June 1998, I was on a mission connecting with both branches of my family tree. Having spent a week in Italy, we had ferried from Ancona to Split and now were traveling down Croatia's version of Highway 1, soaking up the history, both recent and ancient. 

The Croatians seemed like a practical and resilient people. Life was going on. 

"Quo Vadis, Aida?" is a harsh reminder of the centuries-long ethnic hostilities that had reignited violently and the evil that descended on Srebrenica in July 1995. It chronicles the terrifying hours that led to the massacre of about 8,000 men and boys at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs under the banner of Republika Srpska

Aida (Jasna Djuricic) is a local translator at a United Nations base. On this day, the UN camp is overwhelmed by Srebrenican refugees fleeing after the takeover of the city by the Bosnian Serb army. Most of the residents, with only the clothes on their backs, are trapped both inside and just outside the compound, which is staffed by a skeleton crew of blue helmets who have no rational hope of evacuating everyone safely or repelling the Serbs or defusing the volatile situation.

Aida's husband and two young-adult sons are among the mass of people, and her maternal instincts compel her to try to pull strings to get her family out safely. Her husband participates in some sham negotiations in which the Serbs vow the safe transfer of the thousands of residents to a nearby haven. It is obvious that the Serbs are lying. And it only makes her husband more of a target. As the drama builds the tension never relents.

When some Bosnian Serb soldiers arrive at the camp and start separating out the boys and men, Aida's sense of urgency multiplies. The UN military personnel are essentially useless or clueless or both. The swagger of the Bosnian Serbs is terrifying (especially the quiet menace of a commander named Joka, played by Emir Hadzihafizbegovic, from "Fuse"). The film, written and directed by Jasmila Zbanic ("Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams"), is 100 minutes of nonstop suspense masquerading under the banality of evil. The ending and coda are alternatively shocking and bittersweet. 

The final scene is a reminder that life went on, and factions melted back together side by side. 

The seeds of Yugoslavia's collapse into battle and genocide were planted in a divisive speech by Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic in June 1989 intended to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which gives you an idea of how long the people of the region have been feuding and have been susceptible to nationalist imprecations. One point of "Quo Vadis" is that it is virtually impossible to casually distinguish between Serbs and Croatians, or Orthodox and Muslims. The people of Srebrenica went to school together, lived among each other, looked alike.

I glimpsed a lot of familiar faces among the strangers during our trip up and down the Dalmatian coast. They were the faces I saw as a kid at cousins' birthday parties and as an adult at family reunions or at the funerals for great-aunts and -uncles. They had bright blue eyes and tender smiles. So do the characters, on both sides, in "Quo Vadis." When I went to the cemetery in Hreljin, half the names on the tombstones were the same as my mother's maiden name. They were the Kucans and Blazinas that would intermarry and settle in the Chicago suburb of Lyons in the 20th century, far away from the troubled homeland, that coiled mousetrap of a country.

A few years after our trip to Croatia, my ex and I broke up, and I would move away from the Chicago suburbs and my family. Before I left, I saw an entry in my ex's diary from that trip to Dubrovnik. She had been heartened to see me connect with my roots. It provided her an insight into a dimension of me that perhaps even I was still in the process of realizing. She ended the entry with this observation: "Now I know where those blue eyes of his come from. That is the color I see when I gaze out into the Adriatic."

Outside the System

 

BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS (A-minus) - This is a low-key but quietly poignant examination of the outsider artist Bill Traylor, who had been born into slavery but emerged late in life with his crude artwork while living on the streets of Montgomery, Ala. This collaboration between director Jeffrey Wolf (known more as an editor) and veteran sitcom writer Fred Barron takes a playful yet respectful tone with Traylor's art and legacy. They employ a style that brings a visual flair suitable to the subject matter.

Traylor, former sharecropper, had a rather childlike sensibility, partial to bickering couples, booze guzzlers, prancing cats and snarling dogs. The artwork would not be out of place displayed on a refrigerator. But art critics and historians are on hand to place the work in perspective. Descendants tell family stories. (He was prolific in his paternity.) Dual narrators (Russell G. Jones and Sharon Washington) are shown on-screen, sometimes together, enunciating the thoughtful prose put together by Barron. Other actors give voice to anecdotes from written histories. Jason Samuels Smith is on hand for tap-dancing interludes.

What's conveyed is a deep study of a self-taught folk artist who was often a postwar after-thought. The repetition of images from Traylor's primitive drawings has a hypnotic effect and enhances your appreciation of art that you might otherwise quickly dismiss. 

JOSHUA: TEENAGER VS. SUPERPOWER (2017) (B+) - This is an uplifting and technically impressive documentary about the Hong Kong teen who took on China and fought for democratic rights. Joe Piscatella trains his camera on Joshua Wong, a smart, brave young man who inspired a movement against China's attempts to control Hong Kong, initially through its school curricula. 

It covers roughly 2012 to 2016, by which time Joshua and some of his colleagues are coming of age and making moves toward running for office themselves. What stands out here is Piscatella's camera, there from the beginning, embedded in the nascent movement. Joshua and his colleagues also sit for interviews, looking back on their accomplishments that stemmed from a protest that seemed to be little more than a school project at the time.

Joshua is an appealing character, as much a nerdy wonk as he is a fiery leader. The narrative here zips along clearly, building momentum as the stakes are raised. The story anticipates the more recent protests in 2019 and 2020 against forced extraditions from Hong Kong to Taiwan and mainland China. The film provides a helpful primer on the tensions between Hong Kong and China, with a strong personal touch.

BONUS TRACK

The "Traylor" trailer:

Singing the Delta

It's been so long since we've been to a proper concert that we're starting to forget the sensation. The last show we saw before the shutdown was the Growlers at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe on March 9, 2020. We dug up this unfinished piece celebrating the December 19, 2019, appearance of Iris Dement at the South Broadway Cultural Center. While we await the re-emergence of real live concerts, let's pretend this was more recent.

Iris Dement wandered onstage at the South Broadway Cultural Center the other day and did not have a panic attack. Thus, she played 90 minutes of passionate Americana, tapping mainly into her two best-known albums, 1992's "Infamous Angel" and 2012's "Sing the Delta."

She certainly knows how to turn a phrase that evokes the simple profundity of Hank Williams.  Example: "Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day":

Her gospel songs have the lilting pop-folk of Bob Dylan's Christian period. Example: "The Kingdom Has Already Come":

And our title track, "Sing the Delta," so heartfelt, with the stinging punchline, "A love song for me":

New to the Queue

 In the sun, in the sun ...

Argyris Papadimitropoulos goes back to the beaches of Greece in his follow-up to "Suntan" for another sybaritic tale, "Monday."

A documentary about an early-20th-century outsider artist, "Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts."

A German artist/filmmaker looks back at her youth during the hippies' French revolution of the 1960s, "Paris Calligrammes."

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison (HBO's "Made for Love") make an appealing platonic odd couple in "Together Together."

The comic story of mother-daughter grifters in Spain, "El Planeta."

That's a Rap

 

THIS IS THE LIFE (2008) (B+) - The debut of Ava Duvernay ("13th," "Selma") is a loving tribute to Good Life, a southern California cafe that promoted clean living and hip-hop and which launched a few careers. Duvernay stuffs this documentary with more people than you can keep track of, especially considering that most of them are not household names (especially by their rap monikers).

Coming a little more than a decade after Good Life's brief heyday, the film allows just enough time to give the alumni some distance from the community they created but not too much time such that we're subjected to a bunch of droning nostalgic greybeards. The health-food venue, which launched an open-mic program in 1989, started to flourish in 1993 while retaining a true underground vibe. Swearing was not allowed, but MC battles still got hot and heavy. Duvernay makes good use of the extensive videotape archives from the camera that seemed to be constantly fixed on the stage. 

The talking heads -- really, there are a ton of them, including Duvernay herself, who performed in Figures of Speech with her partner Jyant -- are mostly laid-back and chill, still emanating happy thoughts regarding the collective karma of the place. It seemed like a truly nurturing scene in which the participants were genuinely more interested in creating art than in becoming music stars (though a few, like Jurassic 5, did break out). It's fun to watch a tight-knit group strive to pursue their best life.

SAMPLE THIS (2013) (B-minus) - This bizarre pastiche is a storytelling train-wreck, but it has an interesting premise at its core, and it's entertaining enough to justify 85 minutes of screen time with this documentary about the most sampled and admired riff from the early days of rap music.  The song is an early '70s update of the surf rock anthem "Apache," recorded by a bunch of studio musicians under the name the Incredible Bongo Band. 

This one-off from a guy named Dan Forrer starts out in disorienting fashion with former NFL star Rosie Grier and others waxing nostalgic about Bobby Kennedy's ill-fated run for president in 1968. You might think you are watching the wrong movie, until the connection is made, 10 or 15 minutes in, to Michael Viner, a Kennedy campaign worker who went on to produce pulpy movies and records. In a post-Monkees/Archies world, it was common to cobble together studio musicians or unreleased recordings to create a "band" and try to catch fire with a hit song.

This documentary, with somewhat annoying narration by Gene Simmons from Kiss, meanders down a few rabbit holes (including a long detour into the seedy story of one of the drummers who abused drugs and went crazy) and feels oddly detached from the rap community that seized on "Apache" and that addictive percussion ("Hear the drummer get wicked!"). For every Questlove and Afrika Bambaataa who weigh in, we also hear from old-school R&Bers Jerry Butler and Freda Payne (who happened to have dated Viner), as well as Viner's kin, who just aren't that interesting. But this is a nugget of rock/rap history, and this tale fills in a few more blanks that "The Wrecking Crew" might have missed.

BONUS TRACK

The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache," the percussion beat that launched a thousand rap songs:

The Cruelest Month

 It's not you. Even the Onion's AV Club (no relation) has noticed a run of mediocre movies in the past two weeks, with only one film ranking as high as a B. Here's the parade of miserables:

• Some horror film called "Jakob's Wife" - C+
• An "eco-thriller," "In the Earth" - C
• Nazis and time travel? Oy. "The Banishing" - C+
• Melissa McCarthy tosses off another broad comedy, "Thunder Force" - C-minus
• Lord of the Flies but in space! "Voyagers" - B-minus
• A "crime epic," "Night in Paradise" - C+
• What looks like a hateful exercise, "Moffie" - B
• Hey, another horror movie with a generic title, "The Power" - C
• A Romanian talker based around the turn of the 20th century, "Malmkrog" - C+
• Oh, look, a Catholic horror film, "The Unholy" - D+
  

Awk-ward

 

SHIVA BABY (A-minus) - This claustrophobic and compelling debut feature from Emma Seligman follows a college senior facing a meltdown amid family, friends and lovers at a post-funeral shiva. It's facile to suggest that this young woman is grappling with her sexuality, but -- refreshingly -- this is a much more nuanced comic drama about a person coming to terms with the consequences of the sexual choices she has made as she blazes her own path forward.

Rachel Sennott is captivating as Danielle, who is hectored by her worried and overprotective parents (Fred Melamed and Polly Draper) while being confronted with the presence at the deceased's home of her childhood friend (and recent slam), Maya (Molly Gordon), as well as the sugar daddy whom Danielle has been secretly banging while claiming to have been earning money baby-sitting. (Turns out he worked with her father.)

This production has the manic energy of a bottle episode of a TV series (here more of a tightly packed ketchup bottle) and at times unfolds like a flat-out horror movie. Danielle is frequently cornered by her parents' friends and other nosy yentas, and she believably seems trapped in a nightmare scenario. Things spill, glass breaks, Danielle alternately binge-eats and shuns food, the baby wails, and the intrigue slowly heats to a boil, with not only the presence of sugar daddy, Max (a Jay Duplass-like Danny Deferrari), but the appearance of his gorgeous, super-successful shiksa wife (Diana Agron) and their baby.

Seligman wisely makes this less about binary concepts of sexuality and more about a budding young woman's confusion and frustration with relationships and what it means to be a successful, happy person. Sennott flawlessly imbues Danielle with a complex mix of thoughts and feelings -- sometimes sensibly challenging convention, and other times acting out like an impetuous child still on mommy and daddy's payroll. All along the way, this is both bitingly funny and disturbingly real and jangling to the nerves, as if we, too, are battling for oxygen in that very same cloistered house of horrors. (A half point off for the only flaw here: the caricature of the mom, whose lines are overstuffed with hoary signifying yiddishisms borrowed from the Borscht Belt era.)

KEEP AN EYE OUT (C+) - It's difficult to recommend this beyond-absurd exercise in silliness, though it does have its moments. This nonsensical police-interrogation film from Quentin Dupieux ("Rubber," "Deerskin") pits gruff police detective Buron (Benoit Poelvoorde) against Louis Fugain (Gregoire Ludig), an ordinary Joe who found a dead body and called it in -- and now finds himself trapped in police-procedural hell. 

It's pointless to explain most of the gags. The title comes from a police colleague who is missing an eye (in a "wink" to the audience, the missing eye is obviously rendered through cheap CGI) and who at some point is called on to ... keep an eye on Fugain, only to fall victim to a freak accident, ratcheting up the pressure on the seemingly innocent man. 

Fugain tells his story through flashbacks, but these flashbacks are infiltrated by his own present self-awareness of them and at times by the detective himself. The dialogue is oxygenated by non-sequiturs and babble. Tropes are nodded to (there is a hokey scene of a clueless character opening a locker that contains a dead body only to not notice the stiff, though later, a lifeless arm will spill out of that locker like in an old movie or a modern spoof). Dupieux bails out of his whole scenario with a Pythonesque deus ex machina theater trick. And speaking of Monty Python's shtick, the writer-director begins the film with an unrelated scene of a conductor in his underwear eventually fleeing police, Keystone Kops-style -- which might be equal parts Benny Hill, come to think of it.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

New to the Queue

 It used to go like that ...

An intriguing look at how a young woman's emergent sexuality plays out among a religious gathering of the old guard, "Shiva Baby."

A visually arresting documentary about indigenous culture, "Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore."

We're hesitant to indulge another example of a man abusing a young woman he holds power over, but "Slalom" looks like a nuanced, visually riveting take on the subject.

A self-explanatory documentary about the foundational children's series, "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street."

Best of Ever, Vol. 4: Unusual Pairings

 

LOCAL HERO (1983) (A) - Bill Forsyth kicked off the fleeting heyday of low-key Scottish cinema with this sweet fish-out-of-water story about a Texas oilman going across the ocean to woo a small town's residents into selling their beachfront property. Forsyth, coming off his UK hit "Gregory's Girl," crafts a minor key classic, putting Peter Riegert out front as the fish out of water, backed by Burt Lancaster as his boss, the eccentric oil tycoon.

Forsyth, who has not made a film since the early '90s, just had an ear for the daily patter in the lives of common people of his native land. Here, the townsfolk -- fueled mostly by pints in the bar -- are a motley collection of merchants and oddballs (including the singular punk-rock girl in town) who each stand to become instant millionaires. Riegert's Mac bonds with Gordon (Denis Lawson), the hotel/bar owner, and is attracted to Gordon's wife, Stella (Jennifer Black), while Mac's assistant, Danny (Peter Capaldi), falls for the lovely oceanographer Marina (Jenny Seagrove). 

Mac's mission falls to the wayside as he gets seduced by the languid lifestyle surrounded by natural beauty. He reports back regularly to Lancaster's Felix Happer, an amateur astronomer who is more interested in the Northern Lights than in the closing of a deal. Eventually Happer will helicopter in to try to seal the deal. Meantime, Mac is feeling guilty about using blood money to steal this slice of heaven from the inhabitants.

The humor is dry and witty. The cast members bounce their quirks off of each other. Forsyth subtly draws out the pathos while reveling in a quaint way of life. Mark Knopfler's soundtrack is sweet and wistful. There are few films that so ably capture a time and place and mood. 

THE ODD COUPLE (1968) (A-minus) - Neil Simon's foundational screenplay launched his film career and imprinted the epic pairing of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon as Oscar and Felix, the beta buddy-movie foils.

Before it morphed into a cozy sitcom, the concept that drives the film is darker and grittier than its small-screen yukfest. There are serious concerns that Felix, crushed by the collapse of his marriage, might actually kill himself. In fact, Felix's opening scene places him on a top floor of a fleabag hotel, where his attempt to off himself will be comically foiled. 

Lemmon's fussy Felix grounds the film, while Matthau seems to riff off that quirkiness with his trademark exasperation. (It is a template he'll adapt for Simon's "Sunshine Boys" a few years later.) It all comes together with a climactic visit from the neighboring Pigeon sisters, Cecily and Gwendolyn (Monica Evans and Carole Shelley) (or is it Gwendolyn and Cecily?), who end up swooning over poor pitiful Felix.

Simon's screenplay snaps with one-liners, both broad and subtle. The poker buddies are a delightful Greek chorus. And Matthau and Lemmon are a match for the ages.

BONUS TRACKS

Knopfler's "Local Hero" theme song:

And the Mekons (with Robbie Fulks) with "The Last Fish in the Sea," recorded on the island of Jura off the coast of Scotland.

Past Indiscretions

 

KAWASAKI'S ROSE (2010) (A-minus) - This gorgeous, delightfully meandering drama explores the idea of complicity with the Communist system and possibility of repentance ... and forgetting. It proffers the theory that just because one man sold out another to the Czech secret police back in the '70s or '80s, it doesn't mean that (1) the victim who ended up an exile didn't end up with a better life after all or (2) the informant should be exposed and punished or couldn't have made amends many times over.

Director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky, working a few years after the epic Stasi drama "The Lives of Others," subvert the genre's expectations and nuzzle into the grey areas of individual personal lives. They are blessed with a stellar multi-generational cast, with no weak links. Martin Huba takes the lead as Pavel, a revered psychiatrist about to receive national honors for his vocal actions as a dissident during the Communist reign. But Ludek, Pavel's son-in-law (Milan Mikulcik) -- who is shooting a film about Pavel and cheating on Pavel's daughter with a fellow crew member, Radka (an organic Petra Hrebickova) -- digs deep into Pavel's files and finds that his father-in-law actually long ago ratted on his patients, helping the government weed out the troublesome citizens. One of those was a drunken artist, whose relationship was destroyed, with Pavel swooping in to marry the woman and live happily ever after with her and the daughter.

The film-crew technique is a wise choice here, as Ludek and Radka track down the Stasi official who worked with (blackmailed?) Pavel and then travel to Sweden to find Borek (Antonin Kratochvil), who seems untraumatized by the events of the past. In fact, it is mainly the daughter, Lucie (Lenka Vlasakova), and Ludek (who always resented his in-laws) who are most upset about the treachery that happened long ago. Hrebejk allows room for the ramifications to unfold and either explode or disperse. Life can be messy, but as time goes by, it doesn't have to seem that way.

NAKED (1994) (Incomplete) - With the dearth of enticing new releases, we continue to burrow backward into the catalog of notable landmarks in cinema, and so we went back to the early '90s for Mike Leigh's celebrated Cannes breakthrough from London. He'd had a critical hit the outing before with "Life Is Sweet," and he continued his depiction of the gritty life of the working class with "Naked." (He would go on to a career of mixed results, nailing the genre most successfully in the aughts with "Vera Drake" and "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Unfortunately, this one has not aged well. We watched the first 15 minutes, which were filled with clever repartee that even the actors struggled to keep up with and pawn off convincingly as anything but the showing off of a screenwriter (Leigh). And then there were three rapes by two different men in that opening reel, and we just didn't have the patience to see if either or both of these brutes overcame their demons and grew as a human being to the extent that they managed to stop defiling anything that moved. File another one under "Life Is Short."

BONUS TRACK
The trailer for "Kawasaki's Rose": Here.