It's Complicated

 

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) (A-minus) - Frank Capra directs Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in the granddaddy of all romantic comedies, and a classic newspaper picture, to boot. He's Peter, a reporter on the skids, and she's Ellie, an heiress running away from an arranged marriage. She's sassy and he's incorrigible, and they are thrown together when Peter runs across Ellie on the lam and realizes she is his ticket back to the big leagues.

The screenplay by Capra regular Robert Riskin (based on a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams) is clever and charming. Colbert has a looseness with the comedy, an underdog appeal that reminded me of Anna Faris. I must admit, I probably have never seen Clark Gable in a movie, besides clips from "Gone With the Wind"; my whole lifetime has involved watching imitations of him. Here, he is understated, quietly strong in his portrayal of a man torn between career and the heart.

The film still has a modern feel to it, 90 years later. (Circumstances require the pair to share hotel rooms, and they keep it kosher by stringing up a blanket between their beds -- they call it their Wall of Jericho.) Capra -- the feel-good legend behind "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," among other touchstones -- wields a light touch, but he keeps the story moving. The final third is just a little too long in wrapping things up. But you have to love that ending, which had to have inspired Mike Nichols and "The Graduate."

SPOTTED: Alan Hale Sr. (father of Gilligan's Skipper) as a singing driver who picks up the hitchhiking couple.

THERE'S ALWAYS VANILLA (THE AFFAIR) (1971) (A-minus) - Random algorithms led us to one of George A. Romero's non-zombie films, this surprisingly thoughtful slice of life about two opposites who try to make a random relationship work. Raymond Laine plays Chris, our narrator, a college dropout and Army veteran who is drifting through life for the moment. (His look here is preppy bohemian.) He meets-cute Lynn (Judith Ridley), a model who slums through shlocky TV commercial shoots. 

This has the loose tone of TV shows of the time, a shambling narrative and a vignette format not far removed from "Love, American Style." But it also has the maturity of a Mike Nichols drama from the era, even if the vibe throughout is B-movie and based in Pittsburgh. We follow Chris as he runs into his estranged father, takes the old man to a strip club and then takes him to meet Chris' ex-stripper ex-wife, whose son may or may not be Chris'.

Once he meets the beautiful Lynn, he has the chance to level out his life, but he seems determined to sabotage the opportunity, mainly by being lazy and indecisive. You never get a good sense of chemistry between him and Lynn, and it will come as no surprise that there isn't much in the way of a happy ending in the cards for a serious woman marking time with a manchild.

Laine is a strong lead. He would not have much of a career; his IMDb profile lists such roles as desk sergeant, bus driver and "harmless man" and titles like the Romero follow-up "Hungry Wives" (tagline: "Caviar in the kitchen, nothing in the bedroom"), where he played another boy-toy. He's got just a hint of Duplass in his demeanor. He was a few decades too early to be appreciated as a Mumblecore mainstay.

Fast-Forward Theater: Godforsaken

 A couple of valiant but off-key efforts that require some skipping through.

 

GODLAND (C+) - Life can seem like endless drudgery. Movies should be an escape from that. Or if you must present us with a humorless slog, go all in -- like Bela Tarr did with "The Turin Horse." Otherwise, get on with it!

Hlynur Palmason follows up his sharp and acerbic 2019 effort "A White White Day" with this dreary tale of a priest at the end of the 19th century trudging from Denmark to a remote part of Iceland to oversee construction of a church. It clocks in at a rubenesque 2 hours 23 minutes, and you'll miss nearly nothing if you fast-forward through these plodding (at times literally) scenes. Sure, you'll miss some amazing scenery, but then you're probably watching it on a small screen. (If you find it somewhere on the big screen, instead of fast-forwarding, you can periodically nap.)

Elliott Crosset Hove has the limp charisma of a bygone British stockbroker in his portrayal of Lucas, the priest who apparently drew the short straw and must trek from Denmark by sea and then across the forbidding Icelandic landscape, all while toting a newfangled tripod-mount camera that he will use to create portraits of those he meets along the way. The film apparently was inspired by the recent discovery on the coast of Iceland of some old wet-plate photographs. Now that might have made for an interesting documentary.

 

Instead, we follow the pale-skinned, soft-boned Lucas put through the paces of a rugged journey, even after camp is set up in the middle of nowhere. One man dies along the way. Lucas is then overseen by a gruff older man, Ragnar, played by Ingvar Sigurdsson, the catalyst of "A White White Day," who nearly rescues the film with his character's rough interpersonal skills. The second half of the film brightens, as Lucas falls for a local man's daughter, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), the older of two sisters who are on the market for a husband.

But this is all destined to end in gloom. I appreciated Palmason's nod to nature throughout. A time-lapse shot of a horse decomposing over winter and into spring brought to mind Michelangelo Frammartino's elegiac seasonal ode "Le Quatro Volte." And the depiction of the photography sessions are quaint and touching. But there's not enough story here to constitute anything more than a slide show or warrant spending this much time questioning whether God would put any of us through this dirge called life.

DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY (C+) - This is a sloppy, maniacally edited homage to the notorious and beloved X-rated film from 1969, John Schlesinger's gritty "Midnight Cowboy." Its critical flaw is a failure to convey a true sense of the film itself while employing a visual style that may induce nausea.

Nancy Buirski, who has a sketchy track record ("The Loving Story," "Afternoon of a Faun," "The Rape of Recy Taylor"), is all about mood and quick hits and less about thoughtful examinations of the subject film and the story behind it. You might come away knowing as little about the movie -- controversial at the time for its realistic depictions of a grimy New York and for a storyline that involves a hustler who engages in gay sex -- as you ever have been. The choice of talking heads can be curious, too. She lets writer Lucy Sante ramble on, to the extent that Sante at one point pauses a monologue and asks the camera, "So, where was I going with this story?"

Buirski is fond of showing clips from the movie and from its predecessors but without sound and with the talking heads prattling on over the images. And she insists on providing added perspective through a blizzard of nonstop stock images from the '50s and '60s, many you've seen before. They come in such short, quick bursts that the effect is dizzying. For no apparent reason there is a fraction of a second glimpse of comedian Mort Sahl onstage and then on to dozens more images in the next minute. The interview of talking heads is equally odd -- shaky extreme close-ups that often go in and out of focus. 

We get a lot of Jon Voight here but no Dustin Hoffman, except (like with the director, Schlesinger) excerpts from previous interviews, all poorly recorded on tape. I was tempted to suggest that you just go back and watch the movie instead of this mish-mash, but when I viewed the scenes of Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo, I wonder if I can handle such a hammy Method performance a half century later. Maybe this whole exercise should remain in its Boomer crypt.

Word to Your Moms

 

A THOUSAND AND ONE (A-minus) - This elegant and assured debut from writer A.V. Rockwell is a period piece from the '90s and '00s that tracks an ex-con mother who kidnaps her son from the foster-care system when he is 6 and raises him to the brink of college. A bunch of potential cliches probably just popped into your mind; don't worry, though, because this smart film dodges every trope and pitfall of poverty porn you might fear.

 

Teyana Taylor, known for her work in the music industry, grounds this film as Inez, who monitors little Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), a shy, quiet boy who not only languishes in the foster-care system but ends up physically abused. Inez, with the help of a straight-arrow friend (Terri Abney), finds temporary shelter and then finds a job and an apartment for her and Terry, then enrolling him in school under a pseudonym. She eventually reconciles with an ex, Lucky (William Catlett), who is not Terry's biological father, but who raises the boy as his own.

Rockwell goes deep into his characters and crafts soulful dialogue. Time jumps forward to Terry on the brink of high school, where he copes with stop-and-frisk cops and benefits when a counselor helps get him into a prestige school. A final time jump finds Terry preparing for college. At this age he is played by Josiah Cross, still dealing with his early trauma, often struggling to find his words, especially when manning up to ask a girl out. He and Inez are battling their slumlord, and Inez and Lucky are often on the outs (he has a wandering eye). 

Inez is a devoted mother (she slogs away at a cleaning job instead of pursuing her dream of styling hair), so a twist in the final reel packs a powerful punch. It is believable and wrenching, leading to an emotional breakthrough between Inez and the wounded Terry. Rockwell subverts our lazy expectations at every turn. Taylor carries every scene, and she is surrounded by a supporting cast that creates a fascinating world, carved out of the recent past.

THE FIVE DEVILS (A-minus) - Lea Mysius follows up 2017's "Ava" with another focus on an exceptional girl, this one a child with post-cognition, the ability to see events from the past. Newcomer Sally Drame is quite the find as Vicky, the wild-haired girl whose journeys to the past are triggered after her aunt comes to visit her parents, an event that triggers the three adults whose histories are inextricably linked.

In a well-executed sci-fi maneuver, little Vicky can travel back in time to witness the unique teenage relationship between her mother, Joanne (Adele Exarchopoulos) and future husband Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), as well as Jimmy's sister Julia (Swala Emati), who was romantically involved with Joanne before Joanne would go on to marry Jimmy. A tragedy at that time had sent Julia off to prison, and the film opens in the present day with her returning to Joanne and Jimmy's home upon her release from jail. The tension is palpable for the full 103 minutes of running time.

Vicky collects objects and labels them by their scents, and those scents send her reeling back to the past. She gets to be a stoic observer, and in this way she can learn about her mother's past while finally getting an understanding of the aunt she had never met. Mysius captures a loveless marriage; a romantic spark that had been dormant for years; and the fascinating curiosity of a sharp girl. Exarchopoulos, as usual, brings depth to her understanding of Joanne's desires, and Emati and Mbengue well with emotion as the traumatized grown-up siblings. Young Drame often steals the show with her cheeky look and a whole Greek chorus bristling behind her big eyes. 

It can all be a rather odd stew of storytelling -- there are a few trippy psychedelic freakouts to keep things lively, and I swooned to a karaoke duet of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" -- but Mysius and her cast manage to offer a nuanced and provocative tale of hauntings from one's past.

Stumblecore

 

FREE TIME (B+) - Every generation gets the Mumblecore it deserves. It's just a matter of placing the characters properly on the autism spectrum. This debut feature, a minor-key Millennial riff on "Office Space," is well served by a short running time (just 74 minutes) and a winning no-name cast.

Colin Burgess (below left) stars as nerdy Drew, an office drone who, approaching his 30s, impetuously quits his soulless job as a data analyst (almost as an after-thought during a check-in with his manager) and sees an opportunity to make more fulfilling use of his free time. But he woefully miscalculates the allure of retiring in your late 20s and trying to live your modest dreams. Burgess, behind a silly porn 'stache and spectacles, is a perfect aimless dweeb. He is surrounded by a sharp cast, including a manic Rajat Suresh as Drew's roommate Rajat; the one-named Holmes as Rajat's bossy girlfriend who has no patience for Drew lazing around the apartment; Jessie Pinnick as a would-be love interest; and veteran James Webb (below right) as the exasperated boss.

 

Drew quickly realizes that he made a big mistake. First, he's broke. (As a former co-worker tells him at a party, the point of working for a living is being able to buy things, "products.") Second, the band he plays keyboards for has morphed into a country outfit since the return of its leader from a life-altering retreat with a guru, and Drew doesn't fit in anymore. (It's hard to tell whether he is bad at keyboards or he's just the odd man out.) He almost immediately starts scheming to get his job back in amusing inept ways. A last-reel twist aims for a Big Message about a potential rise of the office drones against mind-numbing capitalist servitude. First-time writer-director Ryan Martin Brown gets in and out of this diversion before it can fall flat, and he zips along to a tidy denouement.

You won't fall out of your seat guffawing, but I did laugh a lot, consistently throughout at the characterizations and the arch one-liners. It's a deceptively clever script -- it has something to say about office drudgery and that wall we hit in our late 20s careerwise -- and the cast finds the right tone of Millennial ennui. "Free Time" is a good use of your free time.

WAITING FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE (C-minus) - There's Mumblecore and then there's just mopey. In this case, we're toward the Gen Z end of the spectrum, the kind of film in which a 25-year-old moans about how old she is and scoffs at the idea of sleeping with a 20-year-old. Add in a heavy accent to the mumbling and grumbling, and this aimless story from first-time director Linh Tran becomes nearly unwatchable.

The movie is ostensibly about a reunion of sorts for two young women at the Michigan lake house of one of their boyfriends whose father has recently died, not that the plot point is developed at all, besides making the boyfriend a stoned, drunken, passive-aggressive jerk. The key pairing here is between Kim (Joyce Ha) and Amy (Jin Park), estranged friends walking on eggshells around each other. It's obvious that Amy used to have feelings for the lakehouse host, Jay (Sam Straley), but Kim swooped in after Amy introduced the pair. 

Also on hand is Lin (Qun Chi), a foreign traveler with a tenuous connection to the group. She seems to have little to offer the narrative, although she does pontificate about love and relationships during a fulcrum point of the film. Rounding out the quintet is Alex (Erik Barrientos), who is that quintessential lake house guy who supplies the drugs and acoustic guitar. 

It's all a pretty decent set-up, but Tran just does nothing with a spare script full of dull, whiny (sparse) dialogue that reveals little about the characters. Besides peeing outdoors in the opening scene, Amy is pretty much a cipher who coddles her insecurities and grudges. Kim continually tries to have an honest dialogue with her friend, but is rebuffed at every turn. Otherwise, their excessive quibbling over the two male ciphers pegs the Bechdel needle into the red zone.

Only occasionally do things come to life, as when Amy, out for a run with mop-topped Alex, gets instantly turned on by his admission that he had thought about how cute she was when they had met once before. But little else justifies an hour-and-a-half of post-teen angst dispensed by a bunch of drips.

Ted Mack's Amateur Hour

 

UNFROSTED (C-minus) - Rarely will you find a comedy with this many clunkers throughout. Jerry Seinfeld, who decided not to go way or just stick to the occasional standup tour charging $400 per ticket, instead blew tens of millions of dollars as director on his star-studded sop to the breakfast industry, a paean to the Pop Tart. He and his team of out-of-touch writers set the story in 1963, and they also time travel to the 1990s to dig up some hoary jokes.

This Netflix cheapie doesn't really know what it wants to be. At its core it is one in a line of capitalist origin-story reveries, like "Air" or the superior example of the genre, "BlackBerry." On the screen, it is a comedy by committee, a series of gags that would not be out of place on an episode of "The Monkees."  Even though it is set in the Kennedy era (props to Bill Burr for being one of the few to salvage their reputation, with a winning JFK impersonation), it features songs from the late '60s and riffs on future cultural touchstones like "The Godfather" and other parodic flourishes that Mel Brooks beat to death in the 1980s.

While the cast list is impressive, the two main parts go to the heads of the bitter-rival Kellogg and Post families, played by Jim Gaffigan and Amy Schumer, two funny enough people who just are not meant for the big screen. Their acting deficiencies, combined with Seinfeld's notorious wooden delivery, are toxic here. And they cannot be rescued by an underused Melissa McCarthy, or a laundry list of cameos: Peter Dinklage, Christian Slater, Jack McBrayer, Dan Levy, Thomas Lennon, Kyle Mooney, Tony Hale, Cedric the Entertainer, and a bunch of "SNL" cast-offs. Only a few casting choices click: Fred Armisen as an FDA inspector; Hugh Grant as the snooty real-life actor who played Tony the Tiger; and Jon Hamm and John Slattery in an inspired set piece in which they revive mean-spirited versions of their era-appropriate "Mad Men" ad men. 

The first 20 minutes of set-up was promising, and there are some laughs to be had, even if the batting average is awfully low. But by the final reel, it all turns ridiculous. The writing crew probably thought it would be cutting edge or downright subversive to spoof the January 6th Insurrection, but it's just tin-eared, childish and pretty much offensive in this context. Meantime, Seinfeld cavorts with his comic buddies in a candy-colored sitcom world and gets to drive around in classic cars, just as he likes to do, so at least he got to have fun with a big budget. But the film he created is shockingly amateurish.

Soundtrack of Your Life: RIP, Steve Albini

 

This one is personal. No one defined the Soundtrack of My Life more prodigiously or aggressively than Steve Albini, the Chicago recording engineer who died Tuesday at age 61. Born in the same year, we both hit our strides in the '90s, he helping create music, me gobbling it all up at Tower Records with the big-newspaper wages in my pocket.

 

Most people of our generation know the foundational albums he engineered (he shunned the term "producer," because he was just that way) -- such as the Pixies' debut "Surfer Rosa" and Nirvana's finale "In Utero," two albums that almost perfectly bookend the Heyday of the Planet of Sound. There was also P.J. Harvey's urgent "Rid of Me"; the Breeders debut "Pod"; and hardcore albums by Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard.

But Albini considered himself a craftsman, a technician, a hired gun, and he worked with a wide range of bands and artists. That includes some of my favorite, more obscure, albums from the '90s, such as the Poster Children's "Flower Plower"; the Wedding Present's "Seamonsters" (and a lot of David Gedge's subsequent output); Man or Astro-Man's "Project Infinity": "Fresh Gasoline" by Phono-Comb; "Sport Fishin'" by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet; and the Bottletones' "Adult Time." He even contributed to peak Guided by Voices, with two tracks on 1996's "Under the Bushes, Under the Stars." The list goes on.

I could link to dozens of songs below. Better yet, seek out those albums and experience them in full. Albini's passing earned an outpouring of respect. Christopher Borrelli at the Chicago Tribune penned a thoughtful appreciation. Consequence of Sound did a nice job putting together this compilation of essential tracks. And the New Yorker's music critic, Amanda Petrusich, weighed in at the end of the week. As next-gen Petrusich put it: "When I was a teenager coming of age, in the late nineties, 'Steve Albini' was more of an idea than a person, a pair of words—melodious, mysterious—stamped onto every other record I loved or was terrified by."

It's not just nostalgia -- or the fact that Albini was about four months older than me -- that jolted me upon hearing of his unexpected death. He was a workhorse who dedicated himself to assisting artists in realizing their potential. He was a perfectionist, a meticulous craftsman, a clever writer, and an intellectual. I admired all of his qualities, as well as his measured humility.

I also simply dug his output. Here is a list of the bands whose Albini-led albums I have owned (in addition to his own bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac), a beefy 33:

• Pixies
• Nirvana
• Slint
• Urge Overkill
• Helmet
• Poster Children (the pride of Champaign, Ill.)
• Breeders
• Amps
  
• Jesus Lizard
• Pigface
• Wedding Present
• Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet
  
• Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
• Fugazi
• P.J. Harvey
• Melt-Banana
• Gaunt
• Superchunk
• Fleshtones
• Man or Astro-Man?
• Robbie Fulks
• Phono-Comb
• Guided by Voices (2 tracks from Under the Bushes, Under the Stars)
• Veruca Salt
• Sadies
• Cinerama
• Bottletones
• Mclusky
• Frames
• Desert Fathers
• Electrelane
• Joanna Newsom
• Cloud Nothings
  

I'll see the Cloud Nothings in June in Chicago, and before that, the Sadies in Santa Fe in late May. We'll catch the Pixies in Denver in late June. And we'll see GBV for the umpteenth tour, this time in Austin in late October. Those were all planned before the news of Albini's sudden demise. But it speaks to how indelible his impact on me has been across the decades, and endures.

Albini was a brash young man, who said and did things he later regretted and atoned for. He grew as a man. (In my 20s I once made a co-worker seek refuge in her car for a good cry. I got to apologize to her a decade or so later. And I corrected my behavior.) He could be devastatingly acerbic, such as when he penned the ultimate public fuck-you to a Chicago music critic whose year-end list hyped the record-company darlings of the day, the passing fads Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair and Urge Overkill (the latter one of Albini's clients). See his letter to the Reader alt-weekly, titled "Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge." He later was a professional poker player. He was a multi-dimensional guy. No one is one thing.

Neil Steinberg, a longtime writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, visited with his old J-school classmate Albini in a 2021 story. Albini, a working-class hero to the end, demystified the secret of getting through life: "You can’t say, ‘I want a long and important career.’ What you can do is keep plugging away doing what you think is valuable, in a way that you’re comfortable with." And that's what he did.

Steinberg asked him to define success. Albini gave a zen-like answer: "I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success."  He then added "And success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”

I've always shared that self-declared working-class persona, even as a privileged daily newspaperman and a labor lawyer. I get to go punch a clock tomorrow and the next day. Albini's work is done.

BONUS TRACKS
We featured a couple of Shellac tracks at the end of this review.  

Check out the glorious, shimmery guitar solo in Guided by Voices' "Sheetkickers" from 1996:

Albini gave an extended tour of his studio about five years ago to EarthQuaker Devices, which produced this half-hour video:

And not an editorial statement, merely one of Albini's earliest and best productions, Kim Deal and the Breeders with "Hellbound":

Godard Lives: Torn

 

A MARRIED WOMAN (1964) (B+) - Godard luxuriates in silky black and white as he trains his camera on his star, Macha Meril, and often on her isolated body parts as he delicately explores the psyche of a woman, Charlotte, who is juggling a husband and a lover as if coordinating two book groups. The body parts are never R-rated, as Godard seems more fascinated by Charlotte's wedding ring as he is by her private parts, which are always discreetly covered.

Maybe I'm just a pedantic older man who cuts the French director too much slack, but I've always admired the way he portrayed female characters in the 1960s. He exhibits an odd combination of male chauvinism (Charlotte and her husband's fights can get physical) and curiosity about the minds of first-wave feminists, especially the pretty ones. Charlotte is a step-mom and bored with her husband, who seems to love the small planes he flies more than her. 

The first act focuses instead on Charlotte and Robert (Bernard Noel), an actor who is smitten with her and with whom she has strong chemistry. But Charlotte also has a life of her own, bopping around Paris as a woman of leisure. Godard challenges the male gaze and picks apart blatant commercialism, especially the capitalist industry fueled by the objectification of women (there's a particular obsession here with brassiere advertisements). In one key scene, Charlotte eavesdrops on two teenage girls naively sharing their rudimentary knowledge of how they think sex works. 

Charlotte will be faced with an important life decision in the final reel, though Godard refuses to wrap up any of this neatly. It's fascinating to watch Charlotte live her life rather independently, taking challenges, both big and small, in stride. She doesn't seem to need either man, but she gets something from both of them. It wouldn't be a surprise if she continued to rotate men through her life.

FOR EVER MOZART (1995) (C-minus) - Even Godard's most inscrutable later works can be visually arresting and intellectually challenging. This mid-'90s toss-off is flat on the screen in multiple ways. It is also a derisive, almost borderline offensive shoulder shrug at the very real Bosnian war going on at that time. 

Godard, whose reverence for the horrors of World War II drench his films of every era, is more mocking than horrified, turning the events of Sarajevo into a coked-up sex farce, as if the slaughter of Slavs means less than the decimation of western populations earlier in the century.

His wordplay is muted, and some of his set pieces are amateurish, particularly the "bombs" dropping on a camp where some actors are being held hostage. If Godard was going for campiness, he missed by a mile. And the story is a drip: a theater troupe endeavors to stage a play in war-ravaged Sarajevo. But the first of four sections of the film is so leaden and crowded that it's hard to care about the characters who hit the road and get ensnared in peril. 

Godard's pontifications, channeled through his characters, feel forced and half-hearted. This feels like a mid-career slump, a toss-off that comes across as a lazy imitation of a cinematic genius.

BONUS TRACKS 

From "A Married Woman," this French girl-group lilt, "Sad Movies":

Previous takes on Godard's oeuvre:

• Contempt
• Band of Outsiders
• Masculin Feminin
• 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
• Made in U.S.A.
• Le Petit Soldat 
  
• Goodbye to Language
  
• Film Socialisme
• The Image Book
• Hail Mary
• Histoire(s) du Cinema
  

New to the Queue

 It's a right smart o' wind that's whipping things around these days ...

A series of vignettes tracks ordinary Iranians navigating their administrative processes, "Terrestrial Verses." 

Michael Showalter ("Hello, My Name Is Doris," "The Big Sick," "The Eyes of Tammy Faye") directs Anne Hathaway as a 40-year-old woman romancing a boy toy from a boy band, "The Idea of You."

We never made it through the three-hour "Drive My Car," but we'll take a chance on Ryusuke Hamaguchi's shorter follow-up, a slow burn about a town under siege by developers, "Evil Does Not Exist."

From Lithuania, a dancer falls for a great guy who happens to be asexual, leading to expected problems,  "Slow."

Experimental Explorations

 Every April, Basement Films in Albuquerque presents Experiments in Cinema, films from all over the globe that push the boundaries of the art form. Here are some samples from the 19th season.

Our introduction to this year's festival was a midweek midday visit to the Sanitary Tortilla Factory to view the weeklong exhibition "Work," described as a "documentary public-art project." Zoe Beloff, with the assistance of Eric Muzzy, interviewed blue-collar workers on camera and painted their full-body portraits on banners that are easily portable from venue to venue. There also is a mural component taking shape at the IBEW electrical workers' training center on New York's Long Island. (Here is a short film about the project.)

The workers get about 10 or 15 minutes each to talk about their job or craft (and lives). I saw a respiratory therapist, dockworker, and a home-health-care aide. There also was an elderly Chinese man who had come to America and learned how to sharpen knives. The latter interview was wistful, analyzing two cultures and emphasizing the importance of hard work and determination in the face of hurdles. 

Beloff and Muzzy discussed their work surrounded by about 14 murals and video of the interviews running on a loop. See more at www.theworkerswall.com. 

***

Milan Milosavljevic and Greg de Cuir Jr. presented recent works from the 40-year-old Academic Film Center in Belgrade, Serbia. All short films were from the former Yugoslavia. Highlights, all three from Serbia, include:

"A Line Is Not a Line" (Miljana Nikovic) is a 5:30 think piece leaning on clever word play. Most things we call "lines" are not true lines in the mathematical/geometrical sense of a series of connected dots that theoretically extend forever in each direction. So, it asks, is a line a lie? Literal modern images are interspersed with clips from Belgrade's 1961 conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, deep in the early years of the Cold War.

"Surplus" (Isidora Ilic and Bosko Prostrani, collectively as Doplgenger), from 2008, takes straightforward aim at consumerism, more pointedly the classic postwar expectations of domesticated women keeping their homes clean and shiny. The film begins and ends with shots of a gleaming toilet, in case you need an elbow to the ribs for effect. The filmmakers slow down reaction shots of women and girls from vintage clips, betraying the horror or anger behind the polite smiles. 

"Melancholic Drone" (Igor Simic, 2015). In which a drone flies over Belgrade and narrates in a distorted sing-song voice his lament at having to eventually rain destruction. The drone, however, has developed an artificial illusion of a wistful melancholy and nostalgia regarding all those buildings and residents he has been surveying. It's a short jump from this back to HAL in "2001" winding down by singing a hoary standard. The dialogue here is clever, and the concept is provocative. And Simic sticks the landing perfectly. (There is a version on Vimeo and below.)

***

Chicago artist Lisa Barcy, who works in stop-motion and experimental animation, curated a 70-minute evening program. Some of the shorts were a little too visually hectic without enough return ("Family Vacation Photos," "High Street Repeat"), and others prattled on with uninspiring collage work or stick-figure animation on trite themes (drug culture, getting your first period). Three stood out:

"Cricket" is an intense 8-minute wood-cut-style animation about a peasant household that finally has a son, in the form of a cricket. Russian filmmaker Natalia Ryss (who now lives in Israel) creates a visual urgency through the flowing images and harrowing strings punctuated by fraught piano chords. It might require another viewing or two to fully drink in the imagery and to comprehend the story line.

"Landline" is a 2:22 barrage of images accompanying a dreary narration, about the death of the filmmaker's mother. A true assault on the senses, but its somewhat Buddhist message seeps through somehow. 

BONUS TRACK

"Hallowstide" by Steve Socki (U.S., 2017), another Chicagoan, is elegant. Check it out here on Vimeo.

 

And here is "Melancholic Drone":

Melancholic Drone from IGOR SIMIC on Vimeo.

A Mild and Lazy Bio

 

STEVE! (MARTIN) (B-minus) - One of the great wits of our time, Steve Martin, gets the documentary biographical treatment in this tepid, extended film from the talented Morgan Neville.  The film is divided into two parts ("Then" and "Now"), and both halves tick past the 90-minute mark, creating an end product that feels both bloated and rushed as it shifts tones while ranging across Martin's 60-year career.

The first part focuses on Martin's early struggles as an anti-comedian through his breakthrough as a rock-star goofball selling out stadiums. It plants the seeds of a cold-hearted upbringing and an insistent loneliness as success and fame showered on him. The second half brings us to the present and examines the psyche of a man who walked away from runaway success in favor of a respectable movie career, eventually growing comfortable enough in his skin to open his heart to a partner and a family late in life.

There is a tension between the two halves that never really gets resolved. Too much time is spent on Martin's early life and career (even while giving short shrift to his work with the Smothers Brothers and other TV shows of the late '60s and early '70s), padded out merely because there is quite a trove of home movies from Martin's personal archive. One remarkable result of this granular indulgence is the realization that Martin's comedy often was quite bad before he discovered the tipping point between stupid and artfully buffoonish. (Sometimes all that takes is a simple prop, like a gag arrow through the head.) Martin had the luxury of time and resources to hammer away for years until he hit on better ideas (like leading the audience outside of the venue after his shows, which created an almost literal cult following).

Neville has made some of our favorite documentaries in recent years, including "20 Feet From Stardom" and "Won't You Be My Neighbor." But he might be going a little too fast these days. His last film, "The Saint of Second Chances," was a mess. In this case, he might have taken a step back and decided how to do justice to Martin's life and career in a simple two-hour format, without the indulgence of time offered by Apple.

The second part has its moments -- occasionally we get true psychological insights into a thoughtful artist -- but they are weighed down in the muck of his boring family life. He found lasting love in middle age and became a father at 67, but who really cares? We get no insight from the likes of Tina Fey, Eric Idle and Lorne Michaels, or from a knock-off "Comedians in Cars" appearance with the ubiquitous Jerry Seinfeld, who big-foots the proceedings and distracts with his tired shtick. We spend a lot of time with Martin's latest collaborator, Martin Short, but again, the truly funny moments (including their workshopping material for their stage act) are few and far between. Instead we are subjected to abiding Martin's manufactured self-deprecation, often as he and Short swap dad jokes while running errands or, for no apparent reason, going for a bike ride.

Besides some keen observations from a couple of longtime female friends, only Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker, a close friend, provides meaningful analysis, including a gloss on the contents of Martin's expansive art collection as a proxy for inkblots that help define a lifelong loner who finally learned to collaborate and open his heart. Deep into the second part Martin fully opens up about his tough nut of a dad (who responded to a screening of "The Jerk" by noting that his son was "no Charlie Chaplin"), and the emotion is real and affecting.

But rather than synthesize the various aspects of Martin's career and life into an expertly edited two-hour film, Neville dodges that more difficult task and instead dumps more than three hours onto the screen, leaving it for us to sort out. Fans of Martin will appreciate the overview of an impressive career (even if the comedy bits and the movie clips are way too clipped to be satisfying), and they'll probably gain some insight into one of the all-time great entertainers, a sly and exacting comedian who deserved a little better than this straight-to-streaming knockoff.

BONUS TRACK

Martin's meta-comedy started to take shape on "The Smothers Brothers Show," here circa 1968:

And one of my favorite jokes from the height of Martin's celebrity:

Poor Things

 

PROBLEMISTA (A-minus) - Julio Torres is a delightful, unique comedian, whose arch observations mix whimsy with left-field emotional depth, a millennial descendant of Charlie Chaplin, if you dare. He is known for writing wry, melancholy sketches for "Saturday Night Live" ("Wells for Boys") and for portraying a sensitive chocolate-empire heir on "Los Espookys." He is an amusing manic-pixie dream boy. Here he spins a semi-autobiographical story of an El Salvador immigrant in grimy New York City striving to maintain a work visa as he angles for his dream job at toymaker Hasbro. 

 

Torres wrote, directed and stars as Alejandro, a precious young man, who is so dainty that he prances on tiptoe wherever he goes. It might be improper to use the word "stars" in this context, because Torres is up against Tilda Swinton, who is maniacally entertaining as Alejandro's eccentric would-be sponsor, Elizabeth, who is obsessed with cataloging the egg-themed legacy paintings of her late spouse, Bobby (RZA in flashbacks). Elizabeth is a narcissistic, technologically challenged whirlwind, with hair dyed purple but with roots betraying her perpetual discombobulation.

Silliness ensues as obstacles stack up against Alejandro. Torres indulges his obsession with quirky objects -- his HBO special "My Favorite Shapes" is perhaps the finest hour of comedy to come along in the past decade -- through Alejandro's unorthodox toy designs (such as a Barbie who crosses her fingers behind her back). There is a gravity to his lightweight larks, but there also is a serious undercurrent at play here, especially in conveying the real-life challenges that poverty imposes on the working class.

Torres' style is quite an amalgam that draws from varying archives of whimsy -- there is the magical realism of Michel Gondry, the curatorial world-making of Wes Anderson, and the steam-punk silliness of Terry Gilliam. Perhaps even the incisive absurdism of early Woody Allen. Yet his voice is unique, and his touch here in his feature debut is assured. Torres certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you are able to tune into his frequency, you are likely to be both buoyed and charmed by his brand of storytelling.

THE OLD OAK (A-minus) - On Saturday morning, I had breakfast with some former newspaper colleagues, and one of them waxed philosophical about the need for a late wave of collectivism to save our society. I later went to a matinee at the Guild Cinema to experience this possible swan song of the old British lefty Ken Loach, itself a quiet, bittersweet plea for us to come together before it is too late. 

Here Loach ("Kes," "The Angels' Share," "I, Daniel Blake") dials in once again on the struggles of the working class in Britain. Our hero, TJ, runs a pub in an old seaside mining town in Northeast England. His regulars are grumbling about the arrival of war refugees from Syria, and TJ, through a random act of kindness, makes a connection with a young photographer among the newcomers, Yara, whose mother and siblings are adrift while her father is imprisoned back home. 

Loach's longtime collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty, crafts a nuanced portrait of the community, showing an understanding of all sides of the immigration debate in this dirt-poor village, even if it's apparent that the filmmakers' sympathies lie with TJ and Yara. When a volunteer brings a donated bike to one of the refugee girls, a trio of local boys looks on, and one wonders aloud why he can't have a bike too. One adult, who has a handicapped wife, complains that outside speculators are buying up flats sight unseen at bargain-basement rates, jeopardizing his own longtime investment.

TJ, prompted by Yara's exploration of the demise of the town's mining past (and the devastating union strikes of Maggie Thatcher's 1980s), spruces up the back room of the pub in order to create a space for communal meals. Of course, nothing comes easy to him or the unlucky residents of this snake-bitten village, and as challenges persist, Loach and Laverty take us deeper into TJ's backstory, which at times can seem as harrowing as those of the refugees from Syria. 

 

Dave Turner is powerfully emotional as TJ, and Ebla Mari is understated but moving as Yara, an assertive and compassionate young woman, who walks a fine line between standing up for the refugees and respecting the locals who are hosting them. Her penetrating eyes and calm demeanor counteract his hangdog look and dour outlook. 

The humanistic film never turns maudlin, even if it threatens to do so around several turns. The final scene is deeply moving, even if the viewer is well aware that genuine acts of kindness will always be offset by the deep-rooted prejudices and nativism that might well do us all in someday. 

BONUS TRACK

COUSIN JULES (B+) - This foundational documentary from France in the early 1970s is at this point more of a curiosity. It depicts the hardscrabble life of a blacksmith toiling away on a country farm. It could very well take place in the 1870s, considering the lack of modern conveniences on display.

From the classic era of fly-on-the-wall documentary filmmaking -- see also, the Maysles brothers, D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman -- Dominique Benicheti spent about five years observing elderly Jules Guiteaux, whether slogging away forging tools or carrying out mundane household chores. There is little to no dialogue, and I felt a connection between this film and the later fictionalized works of Michelangelo Frammartino ("Le Quattro Volte") two generations hence.

We see Jules shave with a straight razor and observe him and his wife peel potatoes and chop vegetables in drawn-out sequences that set the table for "Jeanne Dielman" a few years later. While there is no discernible plot that seems obvious, we do note that Jules' wife, Felicie, disappears from the picture at some point, and our viewpoint shifts toward a deeper empathy with this hard-working Everyman.

You Were Here

 

THE ARC OF OBLIVION (A-minus) - Writer-director Ian Cheney has a lot on his mind, and he unloads his thoughts in scattered fashion into this engaging documentary ostensibly about how we preserve human history. His heavily curated film is also one big McGuffin: He commissions the building of an ark on his parents' property, intending to fill it with objects, documents, ephemera -- anything that he thinks might mark our time here on Earth and which might be useful to future nerds.

That shtick -- the creation of a noble wooden vessel -- can wear thin at times, and Cheney inserts himself way too often in the proceedings. But those questionable choices are more than compensated for by his inclusion of a parade of talking heads, all of whom provide fascinating insights on a wide variety of topics. 

 

We meet filmmaker Kristen Johnson ("Cameraperson") and, even better, her brother, a paleontologist who waxes poetic about how fossils are formed and discovered. There is an expert on limestone, David Hoch, who taught me during the movie how the method of heating limestone creates a glow that accommodates wall-shadow projections (it's where we get the phrase "in the limelight"). We meet cave specialist Bogdan Onac, who lectures extensively about bat guano. There is also an artist whose house was destroyed in a hurricane; a couple who photograph old cemeteries from the Jim Crow era; and the sawyer lovingly plying his craft as the ark slowly takes shape. Even documentary legend Werner Herzog (an executive producer) stops by to put an exclamation point on a film that clearly was inspired by his lifelong pursuit of truth and quirk. ("Fitzcarraldo" is a natural point of comparison.)

The surface topic involves the preservation of our digital world, but as Cheney meanders off the beaten path, he excavates ideas about humans and nature and how lives and concepts are preserved over centuries and even millennia. This might be a pop-philosophical exercise that could tick off some intellectual aficionados who could dismiss this as undisciplined surface-scratching noodling. 

But don't overthink it. Cheney certainly doesn't. His technique is not so much HD as it is ADHD. He's all over the map, literally and figuratively, as he follows his nose to whatever places interest him. He then dumps it all into this 105-minute hodgepodge. This is a random movie by a filmmaker who tossed together a chopped salad of brain droppings and visual whims. Not everything has to be neatly packaged.

Vacation Adventures

 

HOW TO HAVE SEX (B+) - Cinematographer Molly Manning Walker makes her writing-directing debut with this deceptively smart story of a teenage virgin's awkward transition to hook-up culture during a wild spring break with her two London pals on a Greek island. Mia McKenna-Bruce is understated but powerful as Tara as the afterthought of the friend zone with her two alpha female pals. 

 

Tara is wide-eyed and inexperienced, but she has that yearning you might remember from your teen years, the ache to be cooler than you are. She starts a flirtation with a boy from the next hotel balcony over, Badger (Shaun Thomas), who also plays second fiddle to his handsomer mate, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). At the halfway point of this bacchanal, Tara goes off with Paddy, and they have sex, but it's a bit vague just how consensual it was and whether Tara feels more violated or just more underwhelmed by the overhyped moment.

Newcomer Molly Manning Walker, a veteran cinematographer, pens a deceivingly intelligent script. She keeps the dread level elevated, but we never feel like any sort of tragedy has occurred. She also, interestingly, shuns nudity -- there is plenty of young flesh on display, but not a breast or a penis to be spotted, making this oddly but satisfyingly chaste in a way. The kids have thick working-class London accents, and this was screened with subtitles, which detracts a bit from the appreciation of the agile banter Tara engages in with her randier besties, the controlling Skye (Laura Peake) and the empathetic Em (Enva Lewis). 

At the end of the trip, McKenna-Bruce conveys a range of emotions, as you wonder whether Tara is traumatized or just different, her eyes and mind opened to the pitfalls of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood. Along the way, it's fun to watch these young adults carouse and catcall each other as their immature bodies indulge in adult substances during a memorable weekend. This shares DNA with other wild-weekend entries like "Monday" and "Suntan," all sharper than you'd expect.

FLY WITH ME (B) - From PBS' "American Experience" comes this by-the-numbers history of women in the air industry, from World War II-era nurses to the assembly line stewardess of the early jet age to the flight attendants organizing into what is now one of the strongest unions in the country.

 

At 112 minutes, this feels bulky. Most of the first third is taken up with archival footage of the early days of flight and airline service, and then there is a detour near the halfway mark to explore civil-rights issues for African-American pioneers in the industry, which feels like a shallow gloss. That leads to the the Title VII protections against sex discrimination. The actual feminist and labor movements don't congeal  until the final third.  

But the pioneering women are fun to hang out with. Their stories are engaging, and it's encouraging to know that they survived decades of sexism. You get the sense that some of the fun stuff about being a swinin' stewardess in the '60s and '70s might have ended up on the cutting-room floor in order to maintain a sobriety and sense of decorum for this by-the-books documentary.

BONUS TRACK

From the closing credits of "How to Have Sex," Romy with "Strong":

Adobe Underground

 

The London hipsters Bar Italia stopped in town on a school night this week. They are much more engaging live than on record. I should say that their music is much more engaging live; the band members are not engaging at all. They have this shtick where they ignore the audience, which is an odd affectation.

The band seemed to strive for a Velvet Underground hipness -- icy, ironically detached, backlit. But their music is squarely '90s-derivative, in the best sense of the concept of borrowing and molding sounds. They offer a strain of shoegaze like "Lush," but also atonal post-punk like the Mekons. You can also hear the Pixies and Pavement in their song structures. Guitars occasionally ring like they did in Guided by Voices songs in the late '90s. What sometimes feels limp on their recordings pops with more edge in person.

 

The three main players all share vocals -- Sam Fenton and Jezmi Fehmi on guitars, and Nina Cristante, the ostensible front person. I wondered at first why her vocals were buried most of the night, but it became apparent that she is thin in both body and voice -- more Liz Phair than Kim Gordon. But the band was tight. Their rhythm section is apparently the province of hired guns. Whoever their drummer was stole the show at times, with tight timekeeping and muscular fills.

When they came out for an encore, the audience needled them to the point of finally responding. Cristante muttered "You're ruining it," which came off more like an admission that the band is trapped in a somewhat paralyzing routine. Maybe we helped them find an exit ramp from the stifling purview of dilettantes to a warmer live experience. 

BONUS TRACKS

One of their best songs, "Punkt," has a bit of a "Bull in the Heather" vibe:

 

A two-song encore ended with the trippy "Skylinny":

 

They closed their main set with the anthemic "Worlds Greatest Emoter." Look closely at the beginning of this live version, and you can see Cristante actually break character and acknowledge the crowd:

 

 Here they are at a place actually called the Velvet Underground, in Toronto, with the hypnotic "Nurse!":

 

Here's a full live set from Los Angeles last June:

New to the Queue

 Bracing for the winds of spare change ...

We will honor Ken Loach ("Kes," "I, Daniel Blake") by watching his final film, about a gruff northern England town dealing with an influx of Syrian refugees, "The Old Oak."

Radu Jude ("Aferim," "Uppercase Print," "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn") is inconsistent among the Romanian directors, so we'll be a bit trepidatious over his nearly three-hour hectic romp, "Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World."

Quirky storyteller Bob Byington ("7 Chinese Brothers," "Somebody Up There Likes Me") is back with a dark comedy, "Lousy Carter."

An Australian noir, with Simon Baker chasing a cold case, "Limbo."

Teenage girls take part in an immersive exercise in democracy, the documentary "Girls State."