A pair of entries from Steve McQueen's series of "Small Axe" films, focusing on the experiences of West Indian immigrants in England from the 1960s to the '80s.
LOVERS ROCK (A-minus) - A reverie about one night in the lives of young party-goers, this qualifies as a true slice of life, or even just a vivid memory from the 1970s. Steve McQueen gets his fingernails dirty re-creating a neighborhood house party, from the cooking of the food and the setting up of the turntables and amps to the arrival of the crowd stomping and swaying to the songs we now call dusties.
We experience this through the eyes of Amarah-Jae St. Aubin as Martha, who has a meet-cute with Franklyn (Michael Ward) that leads to the inevitable slow-dance and the threat of staying out till dawn. (For whatever reason, Martha had to sneak out of her house.) Circulating around them are a vague cast of characters who are either spinning music, tearing up the dance floor or making their move on the opposite sex.
With this and "Red, White and Blue," I had to use subtitles to keep up with the patois of the West Indian immigrants, and even then some of the jargon went over my head. But that's not really a flaw. This film, barely longer than an hour, is about mood and style. The swirl of sensations culminates in the middle of the film when the crowd grinds of an obscure R&B classic "Silly Games," singing along with fervor as the recording eventually cuts out but the singing continues a cappella for minutes, until we can hear shoes scraping on the wood floor, as if no one wants the song or the night to ever end. You could say the same about the movie itself.
RED, WHITE AND BLUE (B) - McQueen didn't interest us with "Hunger" in 2008, and we walked out of his brutal "12 Years a Slave," but, as indicated above, he has found a groove and a distinct voice mining the fertile period of his youth. Here he is blessed with John Boyega ("Star Wars") as Leroy Logan, a young immigrant in London who vows to respond to police mistreatment of his people by becoming a cop himself. This comes as an outrage to his father, Ken (a stern Steve Toussaint), who recently got an undue roughing up from the men in blue (and who is pursuing the matter in court).
Leroy excels at the academy, but once on the beat, he and an East Asian rookie experience racist taunts and cold shoulders from the overwhelmingly white crew, while also drawing sneers from those in the immigrant community who consider the men sell-outs to the system. Leroy, determined to plant the seed of change (while also providing for his wife and baby), perseveres, and McQueen strips the stories to simple essentials, as if producing an "Afterschool Special."
Leroy is practical, whereas his father is hard-headed and prideful. Will the son engender a generational shift that will change British society? We don't have enough time here for such a sweeping dramatic wringing out of history. Instead, we get an earnest portrayal of one man trying to make a difference. This one is a little flat, but it's effective.
BONUS TRACKS
"Lovers Rock" seethes with deep cuts from someone's R&B and dub collections. A central scene involves "Silly Games" by Janet Kay:
And then there is the mesmerizing "More Warning" from King Tubby & the Aggrovators:
ATTICA (B+) - The first three-quarters of this two-hour documentary -- about the September 1971 inmate uprising at the infamous prison in upstate New York -- might lull you into thinking that this is a fairly rose-colored nostalgia trip. Don't be fooled. Whether intentional or not, the film can lure you into letting your guard down. If you do so, you might not be prepared for the horrific resolution to the conflict.
Don't go googling the event. Watch these two hours and let it unfold. The talented Stanley Nelson -- with some solid work under his belt, including 2015's "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution"; a 2006 documentary about the Jim Jones cult; and recent pieces on the Tulsa race riots and the crack cocaine epidemic -- pairs with newcomer Traci Curry to create time capsule of unrest in the prison-industrial complex of Nixon's America.
The filmmakers assemble some of the men who survived the crisis, along with family members of inmates and guards who died when authorities finally stormed the prison to end the standoff. Like with his "Black Panthers" retrospective, Nelson refuses to sugarcoat events or glorify the prisoners as heroes standing up to the Man.
There certainly are some villains here. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, heard in telephone recordings sucking up to President Nixon during the standoff, uses the crisis to burnish his law-and-order bona fides and takes a hard-line stance, refusing to give an inch to the rioters. The prisoners who survived are clear-eyed about the protest against inhumane conditions at the time. Extensive file footage from inside the prison shows inmates celebrating this sliver of freedom and power, even if they knew at the time that it probably would not end well. We get extensive footage of the ambassadors, like attorney William Kuntsler, who tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement (a release of hostage guards and immunity for the death of one guard who died early on), and TV reporter John Johnson, who was on the front lines for most of those four days of tense developments.
And then comes the bloodbath. The filmmakers are not shy about showing dead bodies or the humiliation of the survivors who were forced to crawl naked through filth back to their cells. It is shocking but necessary. In some ways we've come a long way since those times, but in other ways, law enforcement's brutal crackdown on a group of men, mostly black and Puerto Rican, feels eerily familiar more than 50 years later. The first half of this film could have been streamlined, but the storytelling overall remains powerful.
BONUS TRACKS
Speaking of the rancor of generational and racial divides from 50+ years ago, HBO is providing a home for a trove of raw footage from turbulent Chicago in the late 1960s. The short films come courtesy of the Chicago Film Archives. Most of the films deal with the riots at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention, including a stunning reminder of how brutal the Chicago police pounded on demonstrators.
The first short film I sampled, 8 minutes long, was "Cicero March." Like the others, there is no narration, just crude footage shot with handheld cameras picking up scraps of dialogue and ambient noise. It is a snippet of a civil rights march cutting through the notoriously racist near-west suburb of Cicero, just a stone's throw from where I grew up (and where I started my journalism career in 1986).
The Democratic Convention series includes the 11-minute "Law and Order vs. Dissent," which features news conferences by Mayor Daley (barely able to read a simple statement) and the spokesman for the Police Department, who comes out of the blocks with a chip on his shoulder, apparently convinced that his hard-ass demeanor and his demeaning of "communists" and "revolutionaries" will be eaten up across America's heartland. By contrast, "A Right to Dissent" gives us 9 minutes of mostly David Dellinger and Rennie Davis meeting the fairly hostile press from the left side. "Social Confrontation" (11 minutes) includes some classic footage from the floor of the convention, such as Abraham Ribicoff's denunciation of Mayor Daley's "gestapo" tactics.
"Black Moderates and Black Militants" is a 9-minute conversation between a Chicago Black Panther leader and a middle-age teacher, as Bobby Rush (only this year stepping down as a Congressman from the South Side after 30 years) mostly lurks in the background. It's not the polemics that hit home so much as the earnest effort on both sides to have a dialogue, which now seems downright quaint.
Some of all of the above makes up the 75-minute "American Revolution 2," melding the stories of the Black Panthers and the Yippies into one narrative. You can close out the decade (December 1969) with the powerful full-length documentary "The Murder of Fred Hampton."
THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (B) - Joel Coen (taking a break from brother Ethan) plays with shadows and light in his spare, faithful rendition of the Shakespeare tragedy, coasting a bit on the backs of his impressive stars, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the lord and lady of Dunsinane. There is plenty of gloom and drudgery in Coen's black-and-white depiction that looks like could have aired on "Playhouse 90" in 1958.
Screeching birds and an eerie hag open the proceedings heavy with premonition. Coen has a few cool camera tricks up his sleeves, especially war-hero's Macbeth's initial meeting with a witch who splits into three images. Washington still brings a modern everyman sensibility to 400-year role, and McDormand avidly chews her lines as the scheming wife. Stephen Root pops up in a cameo as the frantic Porter, and while I barely understood a word he spewed, his appearance was a hoot.
This doesn't have the zip or narrative discipline of Joss Whedon's tart "Much Ado About Nothing" from 2012 (shot in a snappier black-and-white). But it gets the job done and might even leave you a bit jangled by the end.
EDGE OF THE CITY (1957) (A-minus) - This debut big-screen feature from Martin Ritt ("Hud," "Norma Rae") has a jangly, jazzy feel to it, as he juggles three fine lead performances in a tale of racial animosity and brotherhood. Sidney Poitier is loose-limbed and charming as Tommy, a loading-dock foreman who befriends a troubled newcomer on the run from the law. John Cassavetes, giving off a strong Travolta vibe, plays Axel Nordmann, the outlaw who is under the thumb of the mobbed up foreman who got him the stevedore job, racist Charlie, played with blue-collar swagger by Jack Warden.
It's refreshing to see Poitier's character exude confidence and flaunt a loving nuclear family as he seeks genuine friendship with Axel, who is shy around women, flinty at work, and emotionally impaired. The two actors have an improv ease with each other. Tommy encourages Axel to open up, which only make Axel more vulnerable when the inevitable reckoning comes. That reckoning involves a racially motivated violent act by Charlie, and Axel will be put to the test, required to choose between his loyalty to a friend and self-preservation, namely avoiding 20 years in a federal penitentiary.
Ruby Dee is critical as Tommy's loving but frustrated wife. In less than 90 minutes, Ritt, showing an eye and ear for the cadences of working-class life, builds a potboiler to a series of compelling crescendos that can leave a viewer drained by the final tragic images.
ROOM AT THE TOP (1959) (B+) - This smart, moody love triangle stars Laurence Harvey as an ambitious small-town transplant looking to work his way to the top but tripping over an entanglement with two different women. Harvey's Joe Lampton is quite the lecherous wolf who feels right at home in the corporate world's sexist culture. He joins a theater troupe in order to pursue Susan (Heather Sears), the daughter of a captain of industry, but he falls hard instead for Alice, an older married woman played with a perpetual smolder by Simone Signoret.
Bold for its day, the film by journeyman director Jack Clayton explores such issues as adultery, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and class distinctions. Glum Joe struggles to overcome his bumpkin roots and the fact that his parents were killed in a bombing during World War II; he wallows in anguish when he revisits the rubble. Signoret and her modern look jolt this production above the cliches of its day and make the film seem less dated. A key scene of one of the breakups between Joe and Alice takes a petty disagreement and blows it out of proportion in a thoughtful, believable manner that will be familiar to any couple of any era.
At times this feels like a beta-test version of "The Graduate," and it continually manages to rise above conventions. With Harvey and Signoret carrying the load, this one never feels like it is overstaying its welcome in a nearly two-hour run.
THE ONE AND ONLY DICK GREGORY (B) - The family of the stand-up comic, civil rights activist and healthy-living guru backs this loving overview of the life of Dick Gregory. The archival footage is fascinating, as we watch him break big in Chicago in the late 1950s and early '60s. Gregory is an engaging figure, with a stand-up style that influenced Dave Chappelle, who appears here as a talking head alongside other modern comics like Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes and Kevin Hart.
The film is thorough in its chronicle of Gregory's awakening of conscious around 1963 and The Rev. Martin Luther King's March on Washington. Gregory was patently outspoken (his first autobiography, from 1964 was titled with a racial epithet), and he used fasting as a method of drawing attention to causes. He was a noted vegan who sought to improve Americans' diet to fend off obesity and diabetes. (Alas, he didn't succeed.)
Andre Gaines, debuting as a writer-director, does a workmanlike job juggling the video archives with current interviews, including Gregory's wife and a few of his kids, plus the widow of Medgar Evers, Myrlie. The visuals, at least in the first 15 minutes, can be dizzying and distracting, with needless razzle-dazzle added to the old black-and-white footage. While not a hagiography, it is rather protective of its subject, and while some of Gregory's faults are mentioned, you might get the feeling that a few things are glossed over. Still, this is a valuable biography that does justice to a truly driven performer and activist, never forgetting to remind us how funny Gregory was.
BLACK WAX (1983) (B) - This documentary from blues archivist Robert Mugge spends time with self-proclaimed "bluesologist" Gil Scott-Heron, whose jazzy compositions presaged rap. This is a choppy visit with the musician, alternating between his performances and musings in concert with a separate traipse through Washington, D.C., neighborhoods, with Scott-Heron offering philosophical musings in opposition to the Reaganism of the day.
The music in concert has a heavily jazz tilt. Highlights include "Waiting for the Axe to Fall" and "Johannesburg." Scott-Heron traipses through a cheesy museum of American history, having fun mocking poorly constructed replicas of presidents like Nixon and Ford. He was a key political voice for urban America, and many of his takes would not seem out of place in our current climate, which is a sad commentary. Here, the music and the monologues have a simple power to them, with Scott-Heron sharp and insightful, before drugs would drag down his career and his life.
BONUS TRACK
Gil Scott-Heron with "B Movie," his diatribe about Ronald Ray Gun:
A HERO (B+) - No good deed goes unpunished. This is the moral of Asghar Farhadi's brilliantly intricate morality play about an inmate on furlough who comes across a bag of gold coins and eventually decides to give it back.
A second viewing might raise the grade, but as good as this story was, it occasionally crossed the line from meticulously plotted to confusing. The dialogue is quick (and hard to read via subtitles) and there are a lot of characters to keep track of; during the climax, one character returns from early in the film and I frankly couldn't remember exactly what his connection to everything was.
Farhadi returns to the bumblings of the bureaucratic state in Iran that he explored in his earlier masterpiece, "A Separation," a film that echoes often here. Rahim (Amir Jadidi) plots with his fiancee (Sahar Goldust) when a handbag containing 17 gold coins comes into her possession (I was never sure how that happened). While on a weekend leave from prison -- where he is serving time for failing to pay a business debt -- he meets up with his fiancee to cash out the coins and pay off about half his debt, which would spring him from prison. But he develops second thoughts, and given time, he decides instead to do the right thing and seek out the owner of the handbag.
Ironically, that's where his problems start. Jadidi is quietly effective in the lead role. Rahim is accused of having a hangdog look, and his sly smile can appear both innocent and mischievous at the same time. His frustration is palpable as his attempt at a simple good deed begins to boomerang and backfire, until he starts to look more like a villain than a hero. To explain more would ruin the intricate nesting that Farhadi relies on here to build momentum toward a damning conclusion. It's difficult to discern whether the writer-director is getting too clever for his own good, or if I wasn't patient enough to let him work his magic. Either way, this is still a thoroughly satisfying movie.
THE LOST DAUGHTER (B) - I'm sure this story of inter-generational feminine warfare means a great deal to Maggie Gyllenhaal, but her debut as a writer-director fails to communicate the gravity of the story clearly and forcefully enough. Throughout its two-hour running time, this slow-burn of a film constantly feels like it is going to break out into full-blown suspense, but it never does.
Three fine actresses show up ready to give it their all, but none of their storylines feels weighty enough to carry the film. Olivia Coleman is Leda, an academic who wants to have a quiet holiday on a Greek island. Dakota Johnson's Nina is part of an extended Greek-American family that big-foots the beach, leading Leda to seek petty revenge against them. Jessie Buckley, showing the most promise here, plays a young version of Leda, struggling to raise two high-energy girls while pursuing her academic future and falling into the clutches of a suave older professor (a bushy-bearded Peter Sarsgaard).
Leda and Nina connect through their marital/parental ennui. But their stories don't quite click, and the Young Leda backstory competes too much with the present day. So little happens between Leda and Nina (besides the brief disappearance of Nina's daughter and the girl's doll) that Buckley's flashback scenes become more appealing but still elusive. You wonder what a whole movie about Young Leda would be like.
Leda's petty actions on the Greek island are fascinating at first -- what is motivating her, you wonder -- but the repetition can get tedious. The three women are awfully appealing (as is Dagmara Dominczyk as Nina's sister(in-law?)) but too often the story just sits on the screen. Gyllenhaal finds interesting ways to visualize the frustrations and longings of mothers -- those insights, often conveyed with glances and layered with interesting soundtrack choices, are the best part of the movie -- but you just wish that the narrative (based on a novel by Elena Ferrante) could snap out of its own doldrums.
BONUS TRACK
Leda, driving along the open road as if she doesn't have a care (spoiler alert: she does), sings along to the car stereo to Talking Heads' "People Like Us":
A debut film centered around a teenage girl coping with the aftermath of a shooting at her school, "The Fallout."
Tim Roth (with an assist from Charlotte Gainsbourg) does a slow burn in Acapulco in "Sundown."
A daughter's perspective of her troubled punk-rock mother, "Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche."
From Joachim Trier ("Oslo, August 31st," "Louder Than Bombs"), a woman juggles relationships and seeks her path forward in "The Worst Person in the World."
From Chad, a follow-up to "A Screaming Man," the story of a mother and her pregnant teen daughter, "Lingui, the Sacred Bonds."
In place of an essay this year, let's crunch some numbers.
It didn't seem like a particularly good year for movies, but I've never given out so many high grades in the 9 years we've been reviewing movies here full-time. I don't know if I can explain that. Grade inflation? Laziness or resignation on my part? A soft spot for small movies that try hard? A tiny rip in the fabric of space and time?
Over the past 5 years, I have given out, on average, about 4 perfect A-grades each year (only 3 in 2020). In 2021, by contrast, I gave out 9 top grades. And in the past 5 years, I have given out, on average, about 8 A-minuses per year. This year it was 12.
In other words, I can fill out a top 20 this year without resorting to one B-plus. (Those B-plus movies will land in the honorable-mention section.) Let's just make it a Top 21 for 2021. That includes 9 documentaries, another record.
I'll skip the ranking this time, mainly because my mind changes on any given day as to which one was the best or which ones belong in, say, the top 5. The top 9 are so varied, and their releases were spread out over the year, that it doesn't feel right to impose a firm ranking system on them.
You might have a tough time finding some of these on streaming sites. I still get DVDs through Netflix and the library for that very reason. Vudu is a handy service, sort of a modern Blockbuster, where you can rent films, often for $3 or $4. Luckily, I saw one-third of the top 21 on the big screen, back where they belong.
This site has always been intended, in part, to help out all of you who feel inundated by algorithms and waves of new releases, seemingly hundreds of new ones each week. Just stop by here and cut through the clutter. Trust us, we're trained. Just this past month we reviewed 25 films, ranging from Pee-wee Herman (twinned with Wes Anderson) to Tsai Ming-Liang (paired with a debut Native-American filmmaker). There are films on Netflix ("Passing") and in theaters ("Licorice Pizza"), offerings from Romania and Argentina. Or just google any title and "streaming" to see if it's available online. We cover just about everything we need among HBO, Netflix, Vudu, Mubi and DVD. And the most reliable guide to critics' reviews is the aggregation/averaging site Metacritic.
There's no excuse not to watch exactly what you want and intend to watch, and be pleasantly rewarded for it. Just my 2 cents.
THE TOP 21 of '21
The straight A's, in alphabetical order:
Acasa, My Home: A fascinating sociological study of a family living off the grid.
The Macaluso Sisters: From Italy, a haunting but gorgeous elegy about sisters across the decades.
Monday: A roller-coaster romp of a tumultuous relationship between two ex-pats hanging out in Greece.
Nine Days: The Best Screenplay of the year examines souls in limbo, thirsting for the human experience.
Procession: The best experimental documentarian out there, Robert Greene, brings fresh insight to the plight of six middle-aged men coping with their abuse as boys at the hands of Catholic priests.
Quo Vadis, Aida?: A devastating drama, told through the eyes of a tough woman, about the horrific massacre at Srebrenica in the 1990s. This one had 2021's highest aggregated critic score, 97 out of 100, at Metacritic, and it might end up being my favorite, too.
Red Rocket: Sean Baker is back to claim another Best Director trophy with his latest race around town with the underclass.
Summer of Soul: A joyous burst of life, found footage from 1969 brought back to relevance and context. A true curatorial labor of love that was so vibrant on the big screen.
The Velvet Underground: Another music doc to be seen in a theater, Todd Haynes presents a heady, dazzling biography worthy of the niche art-rockers of the '60s era.
And the A-minus crowd:
All Light, Everywhere: An intelligent, high-concept examination of human perception and how it plays out in surveillance and policing.
Bergman Island: Another fine tale of female yearning from Mia Hansen-Love.
Gunda: A remarkably human rendering, bereft of dialogue, of a big sow and her piglets.
Lamb: Bizarre and captivating, the touching tale of a couple and their half-human/half-ovine bundle of joy.
Passing: Rebecca Hall writes and directs a poetic interpretation of two women straddling opposite sides of the racial divide in the 1920s.
El Planeta: From Spain, a quirky, touching mother-daughter story.
Shiva Baby: A young woman riddled with anxiety. Full of tension and cutting humor. On second viewing, it probably deserved an A.
Wojnarowicz: A daring and fascinating warts-and-all biography of a memorable artist.
Zola: A razzle-dazzle blast of a road/buddy picture, full of exhilarating sights and sounds.
JUST MISSED THE LIST
The Beatles: Get Back -- A special shout-out to Peter Jackson's meticulous curation of the "Let It Be" footage for his nearly eight-hour fly-on-the-wall celebration of a great band in the studio creating magical music.
The uplifting and inspirational origin story of tennis' Williams sisters, King Richard.
Jessica Chastain, riveting and all-in as televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" (which she also produced).
Rachel Sennott, captivating in "Shiva Baby."
Denise Gough, emotionally naked in "Monday."
Simon Rex, racing 99 mph through "Red Rocket," along with his co-star Brittney Rodriguez.
Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis raising two tennis stars in "King Richard."
Alana Haim, a revelation in her debut, holding the center together in "Licorice Pizza," while Bradley Cooper is simply nuts in a cameo as Barbra Streisand's gonzo boyfriend.
Lee Kang-sheng, stone-faced and pining for a connection in "Days."
Chaske Spencer bursting with pent-up rage in "Wild Indian."
Stephanie Cleau, smoldering as the loyal business wife in "Azor."
Winston Duke, poignant as the docent of yearning souls, in "Nine Days."
Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales clicking in the two-person "Language Lessons."
Alba Rohrwacher as the town drunk and bad mother in "Daughter of Mine."
Noee Abita, fascinating to watch as a young athlete in peril in "Slalom."
Jim Cummings, bat-shit crazy, as usual, in "The Beta Test."
THE LEFTOVERS
Some 2020 films we caught up with: It's debatable whether "Nomadland" was a 2020 or 2021 release, but we'll give in to those who placed it in the earlier category. It was another beautiful, soulful story from Chloe Zhao. ... Meantime, Rashida Jones and Bill Murray were touching and quietly funny in Sofia Coppola's "On the Rocks." ... "Martin Eden" was interesting but rather flat. ... Next month we will finally get to Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" series, including "Red, White and Blue" and "Lovers Rock."
Wayback Machine: We ventured to 1973 to luxuriate in yet another nuanced performance by Jack Lemmon, this time in "Save the Tiger." ... We finally watched "Casablanca," and it's everything everyone has always said it was. ... We filed volumes 2 through 7 of "Best of Ever," our occasional series revisiting some of the greatest films ever made, from foreign classics to the silly romps of our relative youth. ... We paid tribute to Mike Nichols. ... We revived our annual pilgrimage to the summer film noir festival at the Guild Cinema. ... And we made progress going through deep cuts that had long lingered in our Netflix DVD queue; the two best were 2009's "California Dreamin'" and 2011's "Carancho."
IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME
(Well, maybe this time it is you)
Licorice Pizza: Paul Thomas Anderson's childhood reverie is a delight but it meanders just a little too much. It could have been great.
The French Dispatch: We gawped and laughed a lot, but Wes Anderson forgot that he was supposed to tell a coherent story.
Last Night in Soho: Edgar Wright careens over the edge and fails to entertain while he's assaulting our senses.
RED ROCKET (A) - No one has been on a roll like our guy Sean Baker. This is his third perfect movie in a row, counting "Tangerine" (our fourth favorite film of 2015) and "The Florida Project" (No. 1 in 2017). He has the unparalleled ability to bring to life the joys and travails of the underclass.
For the first time he focuses on a charismatic, somewhat experienced actor -- here it's Simon Rex -- to tell the story of the childishly named Mikey, an aging discarded porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown to try to plot and scam his way back to L.A. Rex is a feverish ball of energy as Mikey, who makes nice with his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), while plying his snake oil to seduce a 17-year-old doughnut-shop worker who likes to be called Strawberry (Suzanna Son). Those are the only three actors with any experience, as Baker, like he often does, leans on non-actors to capture an impressive level of realism. Some of the newcomers are revelations, including Brittney Rodriguez as June, a menacing enforcer for her family's drug operation, and Ethan Darbone as Mikey's sad-sack neighbor and foil, Lonnie.
Mikey moves in with Lexi and her mom while reconnecting with June's mom to sell weed as a way to reboot his finances. He re-seduces the skeptical Lexi, giving her false hope about a future together, while going rogue with his weed sales by targeting oil-field workers who patronize the doughnut shop, pocketing those extra proceeds. (At least the third film in a row that Baker centers around a doughnut establishment.) Mikey sees the soon-to-be barely-legal Strawberry as his ticket back to porn stardom back on the west coast.
Baker locks this plot together like a jeweler and then picks it apart like a safecracker. Two hours fly by as he unleashes Mikey, who can barely mask his massive insecurities, to maraud through this fictional depressed town, headed for an inevitable crash that is well earned and deliciously delivered. This is a thrill ride masterfully executed by a director that no other can come close to these days.
THE BETA TEST (B) - Our other guy, Jim Cummings, is Sean Baker and Simon Rex rolled into one, presenting here as another high-strung man this/close to completely losing his shit. Here he plays Jordan, a C-list Hollywood agent who is lured by a mysterious purple invitation to a one-night-only, no-strings-attached hotel-room fling with a stranger. He spends the rest of the movie unraveling before our eyes in the weeks leading up to his wedding day.
Cummings has been down this path before. He broke through in 2018 with "Thunder Road" and dialed it up a notch in 2020 with "The Wolf of Snow Hollow," both times playing a law enforcement officer having a major meltdown. Here we have a different career choice, but the main character is yet again battling sobriety and sanity. Cummings writes, directs and stars with pal P.J. McCabe who plays his business partner.
But it's Cummings' show, and his impeccable timing turns incredulity into an art. There's a hint of diminishing returns with this unstable type, and this time, like with "Snow Hollow," Cummings leans into fantasy and horror sequences, mostly to show Jordan's mind breaking apart. He can still stick the landing of his shtick, but you have to wonder where he goes next.
PROCESSION (A) - Robert Greene scores again with this unique perspective on victims of abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. The gimmick here is that Greene assembles five such men (with an assist from a sixth) to collaborate and tell their individual stories by creating their own short dramatic films. If ever a gimmick was justified it is here, and not just because it pays off.
The men, now in middle age, experience therapeutic moments of emotional release while performing the mundane tasks of writing and laying out the visuals for the particular stories they want to tell. The sixth member stands in as a priest, and one young boy plays the victim in every version.
Greene is a bold filmmaker, with hits and misses. In his last effort, "Bisbee '17," he similarly staged a centennial anniversary performance to tell the story of the union-busting at the mines in Bisbee, Ariz., in 1917. Greene is good at embedding himself in a situation such that you forget about his own presence and feel embedded yourself. He gains the trust of his subjects, who open up here in a rather matter-of-fact manner, without any faux dramatics, and genuinely bond and empathize with each other. Greene's tactic is truly effective and brings a fresh perspective on the banal evil visited upon these men when they were vulnerable boys.
ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (A-minus) - "Who're you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" -- Chico Marx.
This fascinating documentary launches from the idea that the human eye is not perfect (it has a literal blind spot) and then explores the concepts of perception in an age of digital electronic surveillance, most notably police body cameras. It is an ambitious examination of the human gaze, a variation on Bentham's Panopticon.
Theo Anthony -- who struggled in a previous attempt at high-concept storytelling (the tedious "Rat Film") -- shows a stronger command of the subject from start to finish. He delves into the history of the moving image captured by devices, including the 19th century Venus transit across the sun and early 20th century pigeon-cams, linking them to coincidental military applications. Anthony more narrowly focuses on Axon, the company that makes body cameras and tasers, and its use by police in Baltimore in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.
A flat female narration adds an ominous overall tone to the production. A cocky Axon executive probably thought he and his company would come off as cool and cutting edge. The bottom line is that the eye sees what it wants to see. There is built-in bias in every observational tool, whether natural or manufactured. It's surprising to have that presented to us in this way.
PAPER & GLUE (B+) - This egregiously upbeat documentary follows J.R., whom we met when he teamed with Agnes Varda in "Faces Places," as he spreads his positivity through his grand-scale photography and art installations around the world. This is a feel-good movie in just about every sense, even if it mainly consists of J.R. tooting his own horn for an hour and a half.
This is another production from the Ron Howard stable of smarm (see also "Rebuilding Paradise"), so it can be a bit too sugary sweet at times. But J.R. is a truly engaging character, and he dreams big, so it's fun to follow him around and join in his projects. His shtick of blowing up portraits to monumental size has a primal appeal -- we all want to be seen, and having your mug on the side of a building or on a border wall certainly does that.
J.R. acts as an ambassador, as he unites people on both sides of the border between California and Mexico with an installation that bleeds across the boundary. He embeds in a prison full of hardened criminals (including one with a swastika on his cheek) to capture their portraits and then cover the prison yard with their images. Like with the border residents, J.R. works closely with the prisoners, giving them buy-in to the artistic endeavor. The artist also delves back into his own origins, explaining how a directionless street punk's life was changed by randomly finding a camera lying around. This film shows him paying that moment of grace forward to those who usually go unseen by the rest of us.
A COP MOVIE (incomplete) - We made it through only a half hour of this enhanced (fictionalized? who knows?) documentary that follows a couple of police officers in Mexico. It starts off on the wrong foot by blaring a droning siren for about the first five minutes. That's followed by five or ten minutes of jabbering police radio jargon narrating a distress call, just letters and numbers being rattled off, in Spanish with subtitles. It all seems rather meaningless.
When we finally get to meet and follow one of the officers, her narration tends to drone on. At times that narration plays over random scenes; at other times she speaks the words to another person in the film. Eventually, at the half-hour mark, it becomes evident that this exercise seems to be nothing more than a stylized episode of "Cops," only less real and with subtitles whizzing by. Nothing suggested that this was anything more than a routine profile of police officers doing their jobs, and the world isn't clamoring for more of those.
DAYS (B+) - Tsai Ming-Liang, the Taiwan-based master of slow cinema, returns to his turn-of-the-century roots for a spare tale of loneliness and bonding among two souls across a distance. And he leans on his regular muse, Lee Kang-Sheng, for the charisma to pull off what is essentially a short story expanded to feature length (a full two hours).
Lee plays Kang, who lives alone in a sprawling house in Taiwan and suffers from neck pain. We meet him in long static takes -- Tsai likes to put his camera in the corner of a room, usually at a low angle, and just let it run -- where Kang smokes or broods. We see him get a fiery acupuncture treatment in town. Meantime, in Bangkok, Thailand, Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) lives a spartan existence in a rundown apartment. He usually is seen preparing vegetables and cooking dinner. (Jeanne Dielman's meat loaf has nothing on this movie.)
Eventually, the two men will meet when Kang seeks out massage therapy to treat his chronic pain. Finally, the film bursts to life, as Tsai shows us what can happen when pain and alienation meet the simple touch of another human being. The pivotal scene at first might seem shocking, or it might seem wholly natural.
Kang pays Non not only with money but with a token gift, a tiny music box. That trinket won't leave Non's backpack, and it will appear again in a heartbreaking/heartwarming final scene that, like the other images, is both routine and profound. If you have the patience for slow-motion storytelling, you'll appreciate a masterful tale of fundamental human connection.
WILD INDIAN (B) - This debut feature from writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. is powerful stuff, but too often it stumbles into TV movie-of-the-week territory albeit while usually avoiding the pitfalls of horror-revenge tropes.
Two cousins growing up on the reservation in Wisconsin share a secret tragedy: out in the woods, troubled, abused Makwa takes the rifle that Teddo grabbed from his father's closet and randomly shoots a classmate out of jealousy. The boys bury the body and carry the secret into adulthood. Flash forward, and we see Makwa, now Michael, succeeding in a white world with an executive position and the Nordic wife he always coveted, and it is Teddo, who abetted but did not kill, emerging from prison after a 10-year stint for selling drugs, his own life having collapsed.
This twist on the fates of the two men is a fascinating premise. Teddo (Chaske Spencer, brimming with passion and emotion) needs to exorcise this demon, and he endeavors to track down Makwa (Michael Greyeyes) who is now a block of granite, resentful of his upbringing and heritage. This showdown doesn't come until the final third, after Corbine meticulously establishes the characters in their own right. The two men are such complete opposites -- self-hating Makwa is beyond stoic, while tortured Teddo might burst at any moment -- that the whole production teeters on the edge of caricature.
But it never crashes over into pathos. Instead, Corbine and his two stars (aided with some B-level movie names, Jesse Eisenberg and Kate Bosworth) delve into the twin themes of guilt and culture, crafting this thoughtful suspense film.
BONUS TRACK
A simple melody central to "Days" is the delicate "Terry's Theme" from Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight":
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001) (A) - An absolute delight of storytelling features a killer cast and the coming of age of Wes Anderson as our quirky creator of new realities. Anderson creates one of those classic Manhattan families -- upper crust but awfully crusty -- full of fascinating oddballs descended from acting royalty, Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum and Anjelica Huston as his long-suffering wife Etheline.
Royal is an inveterate scam artist, once stripped of his law license, and now so broke he's getting kicked out of his hotel, and so he feigns a terminal illness to move back into the family home he long abandoned. The house is full because a series of setbacks have landed his three children back under the same roof -- depressed former tennis star Richie (Luke Wilson), depressed young widower Chas (Ben Stiller), and melancholy (and depressed) would-be playwright Margot (a perfectly emo Gwyneth Paltrow). Margot is being pursued by coked-up childhood friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) who has to compete for her affections with Richie, who has long crushed on his adopted sister but never acted on it. (Instead, he suffered a nervous breakdown after she married the stuffy neurologist Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray at his most deadpan).
Anderson fleshes out these rich characters with deep back stories, and he intertwines them all in a meticulous narrative that never feels like it's going to veer off-track. Each talented actor goes all-in, and the memorable lines fly by nonstop. Royal is a cad, but he has been so defanged past his prime that he is a pitiable and even sympathetic character. He surreptitiously befriends Chas' two curly-haired boys and schemes with the household's longtime loyal servant Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), who has a penchant for stabbing his old boss. (The two best lines: "That's the last time you put a knife in me, y'hear?" and "She smokes.")
Pathos abounds, even for Etheline, who is finally finding the gumption to get on with her life and give in to the courting of nerdy Henry (Danny Glover), the family's veteran accountant. Both sad and brimming with life, the story comes across as one that Anderson had been plotting since childhood. His third feature is his first masterpiece and would set the template for he and his creative partners creating unique detailed worlds that we can happily disappear into for two hours.
PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985) (A) - If you don't get Pee-wee Herman -- or didn't at the time -- I don't know how to explain it to you. This complex man-child just strikes an ulnar nerve as a brilliant, layered send-up of pretty much all of 20th century pop culture and social customs. This avant-garde spoof of kiddie entertainment was peaking at the moment Tim Burton was ready to direct his first big-screen feature film, and the combination of talents is intoxicating.
Pee-wee evolved from the mind of Paul Reubens when he was with the Groundlings alongside people like Phil Hartman, who co-wrote this tale of a boy and his beloved bike. The hero's journey takes the manchild on a mission to find his stolen bike, even if he has to scour the basement of the Alamo to find it. The movie stands as the culmination of Reubens' honing of the character, with all of his quirks and catchphrases landing just so.
From the opening scenes, his home full of toys and a Rube Goldberg cooking device, we are ensconced in Pee-wee's fantasy world stuffed with kitschy Americana. When his beloved bicycle is stolen -- the number-one suspect is grubby rich kid, Francis (Mark Holton) -- Pee-wee is inconsolable and will not be stopped before he gets it back. This launches a truly Big Adventure, introducing a calliope of characters buoyed by Burton's giddy storytelling techniques. The narrative incorporates a mix of concepts high and low, drawing in vaudevillian shtick, exploring childhood psychological trauma, and flirting with queer culture.
But deep down it is riotously silly and raunchy. Indelible scenes abound: Pee-wee winning over gruff bikers by doing his big-shoe dance to "Tequilla"; him saving animals from a burning pet store while constantly fearful of the snakes; Jan Hooks' sassy gum-snapping tour guide at the Alamo ("Did I hear someone's stomach growl?"); James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild, a Ken and Barbie of their day, playing the film version of Pee-wee and his would-be galpal Dottie (voice actress Elizabeth Daily); Diane Salinger as a wistful, abused woman dreaming of Paris.
While the Pee-wee Herman phenomenon would burn fairly hot and quickly -- his Saturday morning TV show took off in the '80s before Reubens crashed his career in a Florida porn theater -- this big-screen gem feels timeless. Maybe younger generations won't be charmed by retro putdowns like "I know you are, but what am I?", but Pee-wee's freaky Peter Pan persona can fit in comfortably in any setting, from Punch & Judy to Key & Peele. The film celebrates classic cinema, and its narrative arc is a thrill ride.
BONUS TRACK
BIG-TOP PEE-WEE (1988) (C+) - Paul Reubens' follow-up could never be as fresh and inventive as the first big-screen adventure. And,alas, there's not nearly enough to laugh at in this second go-round as our boy wonder welcomes the circus to his mythical bygone town.
Without the inspiration that infused the first film, this sequel too often comes off as either knockoffs of the "Big Adventure" or pale attempts to recapture the lightning. We also get an oddly sexed-up Pee-wee, who is frustrated by the chastity of his fiancee, Winnie (an unfunny Penelope Ann Miller) and thus openly lusts after the gorgeous Italian trapeze artist, Gina (Valeria Golino, most recently of "Daughter of Mine" and "Portrait of a Lady on Fire"). It is unsettling to see the manchild jump women's bones, a jarring rebuke his asexual persona in "Big Adventure" and his Saturday morning TV show.
There also is little fresh humor to be mined from Pee-wee having turned into a farmer who is creating a secret concoction to better grow plants and whose assistant is a talking pig. "Green Acres" this ain't. Kris Kristofferson is on hand to play the straight man, the head of the circus troupe, and he's fairly game, but the gags he's playing off just don't have the necessary zing. Then there's the passage of time and the slight unease in watching people portray circus "freaks" (including Benicio del Toro in his film debut, made up as a dog-faced boy, or Reubens regular Lynne Marie Stewart as (groan) a bearded lady) and the circus animals being put through their paces. Time has not been kind to Pee-wee's sophomore effort.
***
And just one of the classic scenes from "Big Adventure" -- "I'm trying to use the phone!"
LICORICE PIZZA (B+) - Paul Thomas Anderson rights his comeback with another time travel back five decades, this time a sweet old-fashioned love story about an improbably odd couple. The charm of its two stars carries it far, despite the absence of a coherent full-length story.
The shaggy-dog L.A. story here -- reminiscent of 2015's "Inherent Vice" and Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" -- focuses on 15-year-old child actor Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and 25-year-old photography assistant Alana (pop star Alana Haim), who develop a mostly platonic arms-length relationship, mostly because she is wary of dating a child, despite the pimple-faced boy's suavity and worldly charms. Anderson places the pair in a series of escapades -- Gary, somehow, back in simpler times, has the means to open his own businesses, including a water-bed emporium -- and lets their energy buoy the screenplay for two-and-a-quarter hours.
Hoffman (the son of Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a natural as the glib Gary, and Haim (whose family plays her family here) makes an assured film debut as the self-doubting but eminently capable Alana. In one memorable scene, she captains a box truck that has run out of gas and maneuvers it backward down a winding hill and then coasts forward through traffic to a service station -- quite a feat of Anderson's camera crew, too. It's Haim's movie, for better and for worse; she snaps off putdowns and zingers, but she's also used as a sexist prop at times, at one point paraded around in a bikini and high heels while pining for a boy 10 years her junior.
Like Tarantino, Anderson here feels the need to drop in cameos of his friends camping it up as thinly veiled celebrities of the era; they contribute little to the movie and distract more than enlighten. He sends up Lucille Ball (Christine Ebersole), William Holden (Sean Penn) and, most effectively, Jon Peters, the horndog boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, a status Peters is quick to remind everyone of, even women he's trying to pick up. As Peters, Bradley Cooper steals the middle of the movie with his coked-up hilarity. And like in "Hollywood," Other dead-end distractions include John Michael Higgins as a racially insensitive owner of a Japanese restaurant and Benny Safdie as a closeted politician. Meantime, Anderson pays microscopic attention to period details, from the fashions
to the AM-radio sound drops (along with a heavy-handed soundtrack).
But it's the meandering interactions between Gary and Alana that keep us bouncing along with the movie, trusting the filmmaker to guide us to a satisfying conclusion. Anderson certainly retains his quirks -- for some reason each of the main characters is filmed multiple times running through streets -- but the baggy storytelling fits the mood, like it did in "Inherent Vice," and there isn't the fussiness of the director's other period pieces, like "The Master." Anderson also works in extreme close-up often, with whole faces filling the screen at times, most notably Harriet Sansom Harris in a delectable scene as Gary's agent interviewing Alana for possible acting work.
"Licorice Pizza" (the title is never explained; just go with it) exists because Anderson had a particular vision -- and perhaps some old axes to grind from his adolescence. There's not much more to it, but it's funny, touching and entertaining, and that's enough.
BONUS TRACKS
A critical scene midway through the movie cements the innocence of the relationship between Alana and Gary, to the strains of Paul McCartney and Wings' plaintive "Let Me Roll It":
Every generation gets the Fleetwood Mac it deserves. Here are the Haim sisters going old school with "Oh, Well" and ripping it up:
THE LIST
"Licorice Pizza" was our traditional Christmas Day Mainstream Movie. It slots into the eighth spot among the 17 films we've scored at our annual holiday
outing:
THE CARD COUNTER (C-minus) - It may be the case that Paul Schrader's story line of brooding men seeking redemption for two hours has run its course. Here he shows kinship with the likes of David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin by offering to teach us how to play poker and blackjack via a character who participated in the Abu Ghraib atrocities in Iraq and did time in prison for it, coping by playing cards 24/7 to the exclusion of having a life.
Oscar Isaac's eyelids are particularly heavy -- though his hair is always perfect -- as William Tell (klever!), a world-weary soul who exhibits quirks that you'll only find in a movie: in the dive hotels he inhabits along the road, he wraps all the furniture in sheets and at nights, aided by a desk light and a bottle of booze, he scribbles stray philosophical thoughts in a diary using (of course) an old-timey fountain pen. The horrors of war and jail have made him quirky.
For no real good reason, he accepts the friendship of a much younger man (Tye Sheridan), whose father also was traumatized at Abu Ghraib under the directives of the brutal military contractor who goes by Gordo (Willem Dafoe). Because this is a movie, Sheridan's character is named Cirk, which often gets pointed out as "Cirk with a C," ad nauseam. You can also tell it's an outre film, because it's one of those annoying movies where a character orders a drink and the other person will decide to have the same drink; for some reason, that happens three times in a row.
You start to feel bad for Isaac, a good actor searching for some way to bust through these cliches. Tell meets an agent, La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who draws him in with a sponsorship that can put the low-stakes gambler on the map, if he wants it. Isaac and Haddish have little chemistry; it's actually refreshing that they are just friendly business partners, until, of course, they suddenly and improbably hop into bed. Tell's main rival is a red-white-and-blue-clad character named Mr. USA, who wins a lot and is followed everywhere by flunkies who chant "USA! USA!" after every victor. Gee, who's the real patriot at the poker table, I wonder ... yadda, yadda, yadda. The kid wants to exact revenge against Gordo, but Tell resists. Does he want fame and fortune, or does he want to exorcise his ghosts?
This movie plods from scene to scene; Isaac has never been the most dynamic screen presence. Considering the stakes (both literally and psychologically), little seems to be at stake, in the end. From "Taxi Driver" to 2017's "First Reformed," Schrader's earnest examination of manhood, religion and patriotism has yielded some powerful drama. But after five decades, this brand of masculinity feels stale, if not always toxic.
FREELAND (C+) - It's difficult to feel sympathy for Devi, the aging boomer and former idealist hippie whose 30-year underground weed business is getting aced out by the legalization of pot and those who decide to follow the rules. This maudlin slice-of-life character study, even at a slim 80 minutes, struggles to draw us in to the tale of a longtime freeloader, living the high life tax-free but now facing a reckoning in the real world.
Devi, played by Krisha Fairchild (who splashed memorably in the jagged "Krisha"), leads a crew of millennials, who mostly get high all day while they work the harvest on the lush California farm. They smoke so much pot that the viewer might feel like someone late to the party who then doesn't get the joint passed to them. Meanwhile, doom hangs in the air, as Devi's jig is up, and she doesn't seem to have the funds or the wherewithal to transition to legitimacy.
The crew that she is stringing along (Frank Mosley is refreshing, but Lily Gladstone ("Certain Women") is underused) don't seem fully invested in this outdated utopia of communal living. Some of Devi's fellow boomers from her past occasionally stop by to reminisce and to rue the loss of their Sixties innocence, but they come off mostly as mewling about an outmoded rose-colored view of lost idealism. Filmmakers Mario Furloni and Kate McLean -- who come from the documentary world -- get stuck in repetitive images, whether it's establishing shots from nature or Devi agonizing over her financial books.
Here, too, little seems at stake, and another fine actor's talents are mostly wasted.
BONUS TRACK
The closing credits to "The Card Counter," when they finally arrive, feel like a blessed end to nearly two hours of misguided drama. The soundtrack is generally "Garden State" moody, but the final song stands out, "Mercy of Man" by Robert Levon Been featuring S.G. Goodman:
WOJNAROWICZ (A-minus) - This documentary about a true insurgent, outsider artist follows David Wojnarowicz as an East Village pioneer and leading provocateur during the AIDS crisis. It is urgent filmmaking, delving deep into an important era in 20th century art.
Wojnarowicz, who came from an abusive household and escaped in his mid-teens to turn tricks on the streets of Manhattan, was a purist who never relinquished his grievances. He was passionate about bucking the system in the late 1970s and was a driving force in the underground art movement that included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and which exploded in the early '80s. He was skeptical of the mainstream art world, even though he eventually made the cut of the Whitney Biennial. He led the surreptitious takeover of abandoned Hudson River piers -- the former scene of some of his sexual trysts -- by outsider artists ... until the City caught up with them and demolished the buildings. When rich benefactors commissioned a new work for their house, Wojnarowicz, repulsed by their wealth, created an installation full of garbage and bugs.
The artist left behind a trove of recordings that were part diary and part polemics, and his deep haunting voice narrates Chris McKim's faithful, exhaustive biography. We also hear pithy answering-machine messages from his former lover, the portrait photographer Peter Hujar, as well as present-day interviews with Wojnarowicz's siblings and surviving partner; mother-hen gallerist Gracie Mansion; and fellow traveler Fran Lebowitz, the writer who knew him.
A key scene near the climax of the documentary involves Wojnarowicz -- finally diagnosed with AIDS -- explaining the fascinating thought-process behind one of his final pieces, how circles could represent both microscopic images and telescoped views of much larger images, all positioned within or near squares. It's one of the most compelling examples of an artist's mind that I've ever heard. It elevates Wojnarowicz far above the cliched image of an artist as an angry young man and makes you wonder why more of us had never heard of him before.
WHO IS HARRY NILSSON (AND WHY IS EVERYBODY TALKIN' ABOUT HIM)? (2010) (B) - I doubt the parenthetical part of this title was relevant even back when this film was released about 16 years after Harry Nilsson's death, and decades after he was a relevant singer-songwriter. But the first question is pertinent, and it's worth getting to know the man whose two biggest songs were written by others and who then became known for his epic drug- and alcohol-fueled benders in the 1970s.
Nilsson left a broken home as a teenager and was recognized in the '60s for his smart songwriting and an impressive full-range voice. He broke big with "Everybody's Talkin'" from the award-winning 1969 film "Midnight Cowboy," and he soared to number one two years later with "Without You." Both songs were written by others. (And the big hit song he did write -- "One" -- was a hit for "Three Dog Night.") He probably peaked in 1971 with the "Nilsson Schmilsson" album, which featured that "lime and the coconut" song. By this time he had caught the ear of the Beatles, and he became particularly close friends with John Lennon and Ringo Starr.
This documentary fills in a lot of the early years and the run-up to Nilsson's stardom. It saves for the final third his descent into debauchery, including the infamous "lost weekend" with Lennon and May Pang, which included the heckling of the Smothers Brothers, who recall that meltdown here. Also on hand are some of Nilsson's friends and co-conspirators, including Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, Gerry Beckley of America, Pythons Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, Robin Williams, producer Richard Perry and percussionist Ray Cooper, who calls Nilsson "a wonderful perpetrator" famous for his days-long benders. Nilsson's contemporaries as songwriters Jimmy Webb and Randy Newman weigh in.
Nilsson's attempts at career suicide and his apparent death wish are examined. Pals have fun recounting his colossal appetite for substances and a lifestyle that wore out his heart by age 52.
BONUS TRACKS
Nilsson was in full voice for his cover of Badfinger's "Without You" from 1971. It was three years later, while recklessly recording an album with Lennon (originally to be titled "Strange Pussies"), that he blew out his vocal cords and never really recovered.
David Wojnarowicz was quite the renaissance man. He fronted a post-punk band called 3 Teens Kill 4:
