Should we give Kat Zauhar another chance after the shaky but interesting "Actual People"? We're wary but game for the domestic slow burn, "This Closeness."
A documentary about the electronic-music pioneer and crossword-puzzle stalwart, "Eno."
We have a soft ban on dementia movies, but we're drawn to Baltasar Kormakur's wistful flashback story about lost love, "Touch."
I've always claimed that I could watch Isabelle Huppert read the phone book for an hour and a half, and that test may have arrived in the form of the one-person play "Marianne."
We're wary of this one, but a journalist embedded with Afghanistan's Taliban after the U.S. pullout in 2021, and the result is "Hollywoodgate."
In which we go back toward the beginning to reconsider the origins of the Mumblecore movement, which marks the transition from Generation X to Millennials, riffing on their parents' Cassavettes. We start with two collaborations between Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg.
HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS (2007) (A-minus) - I'll never understand the title, but I'll never forget my introduction to Greta Gerwig, who, in her early 20s, stars as Hannah, an impatient woman seeking a footing for a career as a writer and cycling through men who don't have the substance to match her desires.
This project is an Origin Story of sorts for the genre -- Joe Swanberg was the prolific hit-and-miss writer-director of that era; Gerwig would be the It Girl and would go on to co-direct with Swanberg (see below); Andrew Bujalski, a co-worker and love interest here, started this whole movement in 2002 with "Funny Ha-Ha"; and Mark Duplass, coming off "The Puffy Chair" (2005), co-stars as Hannah's manchild boyfriend Mike, who has quit his job without a Plan B, sparking Hannah's first relationship crisis.
Hannah has a chronic dissatisfaction that is rooted in her ambitions. She is interning at a production company in Chicago, and her two main co-workers -- Bujalski's Paul and Kent Osborne as Matt -- are lazy writers who goof off at work and awkwardly try to flirt with Hannah. She quickly dumps the unemployed Mike and takes up with Paul, an annoying nerd. It won't take long for her to tire of his wishy-washy antics. Soon Matt starts vying for her attention, and they have a cute connection when they discover that they both can play the trumpet.
"Hannah" captures that wonderful confusing time after college when you are technically an adult but you are more play-acting at the role than actually fully adulting. Hannah and her roommate, Rocco (a sly Ry Russo-Young), are hipster gals navigating Guyville -- smart, attractive but also nerdy. They are at that new-adult stage of eating out of orange plastic bowls and conveying clear-out signals when there is a potential for the other to have a makeout session.
The dialogue is breezy and mostly improvised. Swanberg has a cast that trusts each other, and they apparently trust him to mold these shaggy scenes into a cohesive movie, which he does well. Gerwig truly is a revelation. Her magnetism grabs your attention and dares you to ignore her. In one pivotal scene, Hannah deals with stress during a spat by grabbing an ice cube and crunching into it, a deadpan look on her face, creating yet another curious quirk of character. She is unpredictable and operating on a level or two above the others, who only occasionally rise to the challenge. Osborne is the best match for her improv skills, as Matt is the one who is the most flexible and the one most willing to patiently learn who Hannah truly is. (Gerwig and Osborne get co-writing credits with Swanberg.) Bujalski, true to the genre he birthed, mumbles quite a bit, and you might be well served by engaging the subtitles in order to catch every whimsical bon mot from the cast.
Gerwig is more than your run-of-the-mill manic pixie dream girl here, despite her peroxided pixie haircut. You can feel the waves of potential emanating from her. You can maybe even sense, in retrospect, that she would not be content to play the girlfriend in some guy's little indie films. Like Duplass, she had filmmaking skills and charisma to burn. It's not surprising that they carried the Mumblecore ethos into the mainstream in their own unique ways.
NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS (2008) (B+) - Going into this exercise, I remembered "Nights and Weekends" as superior to "Hannah Takes the Stairs." Not this time. Swap Gerwig's parade of love interests in "Hannah" with a whole lot of Joe Swanberg as her partner, and that's a lot of Joe to put up with. (He is like a poor man's Channing Tatum here.)
I wonder what Gerwig makes of these early films in her career. In both of these movies, which were released in succession, she is liberally naked. The nudity seems quite natural, but can it be considered excessive or exploitive in retrospect? That's not for me to judge. She is doing quality work here; but is she merely appeasing Swanberg and the boys to a certain extent?
The hook here is that Gerwig's Mattie and Swanberg's James are trying to make a long-distance relationship work, shuttling between Chicago and New York every few months. Their frustrations boil over in often passive-aggressive ways. Neither one can ever quite do the right thing in a given situation.
Gerwig has a natural awkwardness and vocal stammer that calls to mind the 1970s films of Woody Allen. She unleashes very real emotions at a moment's notice and she has a playful way of expressing her feelings. Mattie is frustrated by the era's blurring of irony versus sincerity. When James tries to make the best of a situation by acting goofy, Mattie is outraged; she scolds: "I don't respond to sarcastic fun!" All of this nuance takes place despite the fact that Swanberg is a bit of a cipher opposite her. (There is a reason that most of his quality work was behind the camera.)
You can watch the one-minute trailer and find five reasons to want to watch Gerwig in this film. One scene in particular cements her status as a major talent. Mattie is at a restaurant table, waiting for James, who can be seen in background, outside, making a phone call. She self-consciously primps her hair and touches up her lip gloss, like women used to do in movies. But she's also cycling through a stormfront of micro-emotions. There are so many things happening in that single moment, all captured in her eyes and her fidgety mannerisms.
You could build a whole movie around that acting exercise. Considering that this is the naissance of a cinematic movement, maybe that's just what these adventurous filmmakers did.
KIM'S VIDEO (B) - It was with trepidation that we went into
this adventurous documentary, which chronicles a New York video store
and follows its inventory on a random odyssey to a small Sicilian
village. It is often annoying but in the end wins you over with its
sheer determination.
David Redmon co-directs (with Ashley
Sabin) and narrates this ostensible detective story about the ultimate
fate of the tens of thousands of movie titles -- many of them bootleg,
obscure and cherished -- and their improbable transfer from the
mysterious video-store owner, Mr. Kim, to the random village of Salemi
in western Sicily. The narrative takes several odd twists and turns
(some caused by the narrator himself), and you get the feeling that
Redmon isn't telling you the whole story; but it's his movie, and he and
Sabin can tell their own version of the truth.
The first half is
dragged down by childish animated re-creations; Redmon's hushed,
faux-reverent narration (he sounds like an obscene caller); and his
constant strained references to movies -- both rare and popular ones
-- that just make him seem like an insufferable hipster braggart who
used to work in a video store. The overall style is off-putting, and
Redmon -- who apparently had money to burn, traveling all over the world
and running up production costs -- comes off like an entitled brat who
has nothing else to do for years but make his precious little
documentary.
But the second half hooks you with an old one-two and
a splash of water in the face as the tale gets knottier and the
impending resolution more intriguing. Redmon and Sabin develop the
colorful characters from Salemi and unspool an underworld tale in
tribute to Jules Dassin and the noir antecedents. They nest a few clever callbacks into the climax and wrap it up with a satisfying ending.
In what may be the latest ever recorded, we finally give out our first straight A grade of the year for a 2024 release, halfway through July.
FLIPSIDE (A) - I'm not the only one who wonders what would have happened if I had taken a more creative path in life. Never has a contemporary of mine captured that mix of regret and resignation until this urgent video essay. It's a friendly nudge but it comes with the resonance of a gut punch, right up until the final credits, as Paul Westerberg wails, "Look me in the eye and tell me ... that I'm satisfied."
Here we get another paean to a music store. (See also, "All Things Must Pass" and "Other Music.") At least ostensibly this one is a beloved Gen X hangout in suburban New Jersey, Flipside, but it, too, is about way more than trading in CDs and vinyl.
Chris Wilcha has assembled his collection of failed and stalled film projects by creating a pastiche about creativity, facing head-on a question that haunts our generation -- have we been sellouts? Wilcha made a minor splash with a documentary 30 years ago about his work experience at Columbia House, the onetime emporium of records, tapes and CDs. But he would go on to make commercials for the next 30 years to pay the bills. He had a number of false starts in the documentary world, but those stalled projects end up on hard drives that stack up on shelves.
Wilcha smoothly hopscotches along his themes here -- hoarding, career crossroads, roads not taken. He weaves in fascinating characters who each represents a touchstone in the narrative. He bookends the film with footage from a failed project profiling Herman Leonard, a photographer from jazz's classic era of the '40s, '50s and '60s. Wilcha was recruited to document Leonard's dying days by TV writer David Milch, who is more connective tissue, an example of someone at the other end of the spectrum, who was too devoted to the creative process, such that he ignored his family. Wilcha found Milch through Judd Apatow, who had given Wilcha a potential big break -- directing the making-of video for 2009 comedy "Funny People." (That project now languishes as an anachronistic DVD extra.)
Everything seems connected here, and that is the work of a journeyman in his craft who has finally assembled his masterpiece. The main character besides Wilcha is Dan, the disheveled proprietor of Flipside, a cluttered, rundown store stuffed with music -- vinyl and discs of all genres, from disparate eras. Wilcha figured he would make a film about Flipside (where he had worked as a teenager) and get it back on the map; but that project stalled, of course, and when Wilcha returns a decade later, Dan is still trapped in a bygone era, figuratively entombed amid his life's work; some months he doesn't make enough money to pay the rent or keep the lights on.
Wilcha must come to terms with Dan's decision to snub the modern world; improbably, there's another vintage record store that opens within walking distance, also owned by a person named Dan, but thriving with fresh young customers connected to the store through social media. (Grumpy other Dan refuses to develop a website, meaning he can't participate in the annual Record Store Day.) With those two goalposts set, Wilcha treats us to his own odyssey -- juggling his soul-sucking corporate career with his repeated documentary duds, all while supporting a family. Wilcha actually has an assured auteur style as he curates a lifetime of footage, both personal and professional.
More characters come and go. Flipside is a favorite of Uncle Floyd, the onetime host of an ironic local kiddie TV show (which fleetingly went national), who now, potbellied, serves up shlocky songs at conventions along the rubber-chicken circuit, and Tracy, Wilcha's former Flipside co-worker (and ex-girlfriend), a former punk who now, in middle age, dispenses wise koans while occasionally looking in on the old place. Wilcha also checks in with his father, who had a thoroughly satisfying and celebrated career in marketing; the son returns to his childhood home to finally clear out all of his old stuff (mostly music paraphernalia), under the watchful eye of his parents, and to confront footage of his brash teenage self. The emotional buildup in his childhood bedroom is nearly as suffocating as the physical one.
There is no way to convey how profound this all becomes. Leonard, the photographer in his 80s, also provides sage advice and perspective. His negatives sat for 40 years -- like Wilcha's hard drives -- before he finally became celebrated for his art. (We're also treated to glimpses of some of his celebrity visitors in his last days, including Lenny Kravitz and Quincy Jones.) Wilcha also introduces us to a would-be author, Starlee Kine, who is stricken with writer's block shortly after Wilcha thought it was a good idea to do a documentary about someone writing a book. (That all failed, naturally.) Both Kine and Leonard distill the essence of the artist here -- to be seen, to be validated, to leave a legacy. (NPR host Ira Glass provides additional "celebrity" cred here, but he has little to add while we watch footage of his midlife crisis.)
This all might hit you particularly deep if you are of a certain (middle) age. Not 10 minutes in Wilcha flashes a series of photographs of him and his teenage friends having fun in the old record store in the late 1980s, and I started to tear up a bit. By the end, when those credits rolled and that Replacements song kicked in, I had to shake off a blissful stupor while bobbing my head and remind myself that the name of that song is not "Satisfied," but "Unsatisfied."
Here's to the suggestion that it might never be too late for any of us to craft that masterpiece.
BONUS TRACKS
"Flipside," in a scene inside the record store, literally drops a needle on Tom Rush's 1966 take on Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love":
We get a clip of David Bowie singing a tribute to Uncle Floyd, called "Slip Away":
Going deep for a pair directed by film noir legend Nicholas Ray:
IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) (B+) - Humphrey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with anger management issues who is suffering through an extended dry spell. He lands in hot water when a hat-check girl he took home late one night ends up dead the next day, and police reluctantly have to treat their pal Dix as a suspect.
A sultry new neighbor, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), an aspiring actress, might be Dix's alibi as well as his new love interest. But Dix's friend, the police detective Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) sows doubts in Laurel's mind about her flinty beau, and this turns into a tight little psychological thriller.
Bogart is suitably gruff, and Grahame ("Crossfire") goes toe to toe with him. Nicholas Ray's camera is fascinated by her captivating looks. In one scene, as she gets a massage, her face is foregrounded, taking up most of the screen, and uplit to enchanting effect. Ray's pacing is efficient, and he is at ease capturing a car chase and road-rage incident as if shooting a documentary. And his sucker-punch of an ending -- the screenplay is by Andrew Solt and Edmund North, based on a novel by Dorothy Hughes -- hits square in the gut.
SPOTTED: Don't blink. Billy Gray, barely glimpsed as a child autograph seeker, would go on to play Bud on "Father Knows Best." James Arness (TV's "Gunsmoke") makes an uncredited appearance as a detective.
BORN TO BE BAD (1950) (B) - Joan Fontaine dominates the big screen as a free-spirited wannabe debutante whose reckless demeanor upends several lives. Fontaine mixes a prim, innocent look with crazy eyes as Christabel, who flirts with a friend's rich fiance and strings along a struggling author -- while serving as muse for a suave painter.
It must have been racy for its time, as Christabel beds multiple lovers and doesn't mirror the more ladylike Donna (Joan Leslie), whose engagement is endangered by the carpetbagging jezebel. Even when Christabel wrests the wealthy Curtis (Zachary Scott) away from Donna, she can't suppress her lingering feelings for the ruggedly handsome writer, Nick (Robert Ryan) -- until everyone ends up miserable.
Fontaine ("Beyond a Reasonable Doubt") is a force of nature as the manipulative floozy, and the others raise their game to keep up with her. Visually, it's blander and more traditional than "In a Lonely Place," which immediately preceded it in Ray's catalog. But Fontaine's all-out performance makes this a fun hour and a half.
SPOTTED: Mel Ferrer (no relation to Jose but once married to Audrey Hepburn), here playing the bohemian artist, would have a full career in television in the '70s and a regular gig on "Falcon Crest" in the early '80s.
We can't seem to get off the schneid with new releases lately ...
I USED TO BE FUNNY (C) - This infuriating comic downer positively crackles with indie possibilities in its first half hour full of snappy dialogue and interesting characters -- until it descends into a mundane story of obsession and depression.
Our gal Rachel Sennott carries the day as Sam, a sharp standup comic who has hit the skids after a nanny gig went sideways two years earlier. She is shunning the stage and freeloading in a Toronto flat with a couple of comic pals, Philip (Caleb Hearon) and Paige (Sabrina Jalees), and the three of them have a clever patter that I could have listened to all movie. Unfortunately, the plot from hell takes over.
Turns out Sam used to nanny for a 12-year-old (you read that correctly), Brooke (Olga Petsa), who is now a 14-year-old runaway who haunts Sam. Brooke has a creepy dad (yet another film where a youngster's mom dies), and if you can guess that he factors into the fracture between Sam and Brooke, you get no extra points, because that was way too obvious and easy to guess.
Before you know it, Philip and Paige fade into the background, and we get stuck with flashbacks to what went south between Sam, Brooke and that cardboard cutout of a dad. The problem here is: Who cares? So Sam doesn't get to hang out with a 14-year-old anymore. Good riddance; she's moody little brat anyway. Things get worse, as the second half is dominated by a law-enforcement procedural; it's like a dull episode of Canadian "Law & Order." A convenient ending comes too quickly, too late (after a flabby 105 minutes), and it is too pat.
Sennott ("Shiva Baby," "Bottoms") is a wonderful comic actor, and she probably is capable of reaching the necessary depths to pull off a dark story about a troubled stand-up comedian. But this feature debut from Ally Pankiw (who cut her teeth in TV and on music videos) is an infuriating waste of Sennott's talent, a film that takes a fatal left turn around the one-third mark and never recovers. It is one misstep after another for over an hour. (Try not to snicker when Sam's ex has the super-human ability to go from an unexpected kiss to full erection/penetration in about 8 seconds flat.) Don't be fooled by the trailer.
I SAW THE TV GLOW (D+) - Boy, what a couple of mopes this movie gives us. This meditation on .... having a favorite TV show, I guess ... is a complete mess, a Millennial wallow at the no-eye-contact end of the spectrum.
Owen (Justice Smith) is a painfully timid, sexually confused teen who befriends Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a depressed lesbian two years his senior, as they bond over their favorite show, "The Pink Opaque," in which two telepathically connected young women battle forces of evil. The film starts out in a refreshingly analog world of1996, when Owen is in seventh grade (and played by Ian Foreman) but it hop-skips into the 21st century after Maddy disappears and Owen must struggle alone with his otherness.
I'd love to summarize a coherent plot, but there isn't one. It treats Owen like a baby throughout -- in high school he has to ask his parents (of course there's a dying mom involved in a movie like this, married to an emotionally distant dad) if he can stay up until 10:30 on a Saturday to watch the TV show. It takes the film a half hour to wake up to the fact that VCRs existed then, and time-shifting had long been a thing. (To call it an idiot plot would be an insult to idiots.)
At some point, Maddy visits the realm of the TV show -- a cheap "Xena"-meets-"Buffy" knockoff -- and Owen and the viewers are expected to believe that Maddy can exist in a different dimension. The show involves its heroes battling a villain named Mr. Melancholy. (I supposed writer-director Jane Schoenbrun couldn't get the rights to "Captain Obvious.") In one scene of the show within a show, Mr. Melancholy makes one of the characters drink a magic potion that makes a white liquid dribble out of her mouth, and god help me, but it looked like a cum shot from a porno. That's an example of how cheap and poorly thought out this whole exercise is. (It's also the lazy kind of movie where two characters in a bar can just whisper back and forth even though a band is playing.)
The two leads plod around like bored ghosts, Owen all slow and slope-shouldered. They speak slowly, and their scenes together feel like they are slogging through molasses. You want to fill in the obvious dialogue for them before they can manage to finally spit it out. I know that their situations involve some social anxiety and maybe mental illness -- perhaps some gender dysphoria, which is mostly hinted at -- but still, a director either needs to zip this along or develop some actual plot points.
As it is, "I Saw the TV Glow" comes across as an unintentionally amusing cult film, like "The Room" or "Rocky Horror Picture Show." (But what do I know; the Guild Cinema was nearly full of young adults for the summer matinee screening.) Maybe 10 or 20 years from now this will pack them in on Friday nights, with fitted-out Pink Opaque brigades shouting out the dialogue and singing along to the sad songs.
BONUS TRACK
From a key scene in "Glow," Florist with "Riding Around in the Dark":
* - I borrow "I strain" from my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Narkis, who cautioned against overuse of the first-person in essay writing.
Two movies that promise an interesting premise but fail to deliver the goods.
HATE TO LOVE: NICKELBACK (B-minus) - Boy, hey, what a great bunch of guys these maligned Canadian rockers in Nickelback are. You have to give them credit for grinding it out over the years and enduring the universal sneers of music snobs accusing them of robotically crapping out corporate cookie-cutter MOR pabulum.
It's literally right there in the title of the movie -- this is the band everyone loves to hate (or maybe hates to admit to loving). But the documentary has little interest in exploring the cultural phenomenon of four guys suffering as improbable pariahs. We get a glancing recognition of it in the first half and brief reprise toward the end, but this is just not that movie. It feels like we wait for some kind of payoff that never comes.
Instead, we get a rote career overview of four super-nice guys -- three of whom grew up together in a small town called Hanna in Alberta -- who churn out radio-friendly power ballads like "Photograph" and quirky earworms like "Rockstar." No offense, but these guys are earnestly inoffensive. In other words, Canadian.
At times this plays like the Hallmark channel's counter-punch to the crazy Metallica documentary "Some Kind of Monster." It's like a VH-1 "Behind the Music" episode with the middle section (the inevitable descent into drugs and dissension) cut out and replaced with a feel-good story from the drummer. I'm thrilled for Chad and the boys, and I'm glad that they are happy and well-adjusted (and rich), but their story just isn't very compelling, especially when you whitewash the one plot point that would have provided at least a little tension.
Fans will probably love this (the fan I watched this with -- who took me to a fun Nickelback concert in 2017 -- did), but most others are likely to roll their eyes and possibly ratchet up a little hate for these talented choirboys. I'm sure Canada is proud of them.
QUEEN OF THE DEUCE (B-minus) - This messy biography of a tough old broad who reigned during the New York City era of X-rated cinema mostly skips its most interesting topic in favor of bland analysis from her family, who executive-produced the film.
Chelly Wilson was a gruff grandmother who had survived Holocaust-era Greece and, without speaking a word of English early on, went from selling bags of peanuts on the streets of New York to owning multiple porn palaces in Manhattan that thrived in the 1960s and '70s. You might be curious about the lurid details of that grimy underworld; this movie won't satisfy that curiosity. An exploration of the true seediness of 42nd Street in the '70s is literally reduced to about a minute of air time in the final 10 minutes.
Otherwise, a good 20 minutes of the first half follows Wilson's odyssey as a barely closeted lesbian fleeing both a loveless marriage and the pogrom against the Jews before World War II. Students of 20th century Greek history might have the stamina for the extended foray; I didn't. Throw in a ton of childish animated re-enactments, and the first half really suffers.
Wilson's two daughters are the main protagonists who recount their mother's unique lifestyle and life choices with enthusiasm and good humor, along with two grandchildren whose appreciation for the old lady are more tempered by a generational awareness of the ills of capitalism and pornography. The daughters participated in the porn empire, along with one's husband, and by the end of this 78-minute film you get a strong sense that these timeworn family tales have had their edges smoothed and details elided to the point of unreliability.
The clips from various adult films of the era (Wilson even got into producing films at one point with titles like "Scarf of Mist Thigh of Satin") are essentially PG-13 presentations (one talking head notes that some of the films could easily be shown on afternoon TV these days alongside soap operas). Now three decades after Wilson's death, enough (too much?) time has passed, such that her life is reduced to a bland gloss, a watered-down hero's journey by a determined grandma, all of it smothered in sepia.
BONUS TRACK
OK, I'm a sucker for Nickelback's "Rockstar," so here you go:
Julianne Nicholson looks strong in this debut feature about a mother-daughter relationship, "Janet Planet."
Ti West teams again with Mia Goth ("X," "Pearl") to conclude their cheeky horror trilogy, nudging it into the porn world of the 1980s, "MaXXXine."
Time to see what Catherine Breillat ("Romance," "36 Fillete") is up to with a prototypically French story about an older women and a barely legal stepson, "Late Summer."
Netflix has a documentary about the band everyone loves to hate, "Hate to Love: Nickelback."
At some point, as I sat watching Joe Jackson -- he was perched on a stool behind a modest electronic keyboard, alone on stage -- I marveled at the fact that there really was no one else who would want to go see a show like this with me. I literally could not give away my extra ticket. After I got over the initial wisp of depression, I felt liberated. I think Jackson also feels free to do whatever he wants.
Jackson was a big deal in the post-punk new-wave era, but he paid a stiff price for his adventurous eclecticism. His name barely registers with people anymore. I essentially gave up on him 40 years ago, after his histrionic take on classic cool jazz, "Body and Soul," which (beyond a few bangers) now feels awfully dated.
Jackson came to Santa Fe to play the historic Lensic Theater, hawking his latest shtick -- the music of an imagined British music-hall rascal he named Max Champion. Jackson recently wrote and recorded some faux rags in the style of the early 1900s, and he presented them with a nine-piece oompah band to a mildly appreciative audience.
But first, he came out solo and hopscotched backward in time through his pop catalogue. He started with "Dave," a clever Beatlesque jaunt from 2019:
It was a joy to watch Jackson perform. He really is a musical genius in some ways, and his songwriting is both sophisticated and bubble-gum. He knows a hook. And his keyboard work is wizardry. Songs came alive in his hands, even without a band. For me, Joe Jackson without bassist Graham Maby is like Townshend without Daltrey or Garfunkel without Simon. But Jackson did justice to some of his best songs; instead of Maby's bass, we settled for Jackson's left hand.
By the fourth song his reverse timeline already was at 1984's "Body and Soul," with the infectious "You Can't Get What You Want," and then two from "Night and Day," including the near-perfect "Steppin' Out." He finished with "Different for Girls" and an especially spirited "On the Radio" (which left him a tad winded at 7,000 feet above sea level). He then played a faithful version of one of his childhood favorites, the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," as a segue-way into the early 20th century (apparently Ray Davies was a music-hall aficionado too).
The 8-song skip through his catalog was fun but it served as a reminder of so many great songs skipped over. Maybe he knows that even if he had the energy to perform with a full band and tear through "I'm the Man" or "Sunday Papers" he wouldn't attract many more fans. (As it was, the Lensic was sold out, including my unclaimed second ticket.) So why not swap out your tailored suit for a ringmaster's jacket and bring out a bunch of young ringers to romp through cheeky retro songs like "What a Racket!" and "The Bishop and the Actress."
As I suspected, he had an ace up his sleeve to prevent a stampede to the exits during the second half of the show (there were a number of walkouts as the music-hall set dragged on). As he has in the past, he reimagined his signature hit "Is She Really Going Out With Him" in that music-hall style (like the doo-wop versions he did back in the day), and it was charming as hell.
A few years ago, I recounted the story of how back in the day I amused my friends in a public spectacle by accusing Jackson of turning into the shlock-meister Marvin Hamlisch. This past weekend, in a twisted bout of nostalgia, I thought it would be fun to lean into that memory and give Joe Jackson a clean slate, see where we each are at in our lives.
By the time the familiar hits kicked in during that opening set, I settled into a pleasant bath of appreciation, an empty seat next to me providing extra elbow room. I had a fond regard for what those songs once meant and how they held up now. I appreciated that Jackson was comfortable at his little keyboard, dazzling us with his skills and dashing off mini-masterpieces. He hit the high notes on "Real Men." And then he switched gears and ironically wallowed in shlock for the second half of the show.
Maybe Joe Jackson has morphed into our generation's Marvin Hamlisch. But then, I've morphed into my dad at this point. I'm glad I went to the show, and I was probably better off alone. I've got great friends, but this was a lark I was destined to explore on my own. I hung out with Joe instead, and we're cool now.
I'm tempted to give this a higher grade just for the ambitious home-run swing it takes at dramatic storytelling. But this bizarre tale of a dying girl being visited by death in the form of a macaw is so dumb and flatly executed that I have to withhold my desire to lash out in response.
Going in I figured, "Well, it stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so it will at least be tolerable for nearly two hours." But I've never been so repelled by Louis-Dreyfus, whom I consider to be one of the best actors of our generation. She looks lost as the mother who is in denial about the impending death of her teenage daughter. She is physically and emotionally unappealing.
Lola Petticrew plays the dying 15-year-old -- named Tuesday for no apparent reason. (She's also British but her mom isn't, just because.) When death comes for her, she is able to barter some time with the busy macaw so that she can make final amends with her mother, Zora (Louis-Dreyfus), who is in denial about the imminent demise. Tuesday is wheelchair-bound and uses oxygen, but she otherwise looks surprisingly perky for someone who is on death's door. I'm not sure if that is an intentional misdirection for dramatic effect or simply an oversight on the part of writer-director Daina Oniunas-Pusic, who makes her feature debut here.
The first problem with "Tuesday" is that it is at least twice as long as it should be. It really feels like a short story, but it slogs on for 110 minutes. That wouldn't be so bad if "Tuesday" had an original take on coping with death. It doesn't. It offers bland koans. It is yet another film in which the kid is much more insightful and brave than the parent is; let's move past that stale trope. The film also gives us a Death character that is simply an overworked and overwrought bureaucrat pinging from gig to gig. It's interesting that Death here pauses -- mainly getting comfort from Tuesday who magically teaches death to cope with the cacophony of voices in his head. Like Ralph Kramden, all he has to do is count to 10 and his nerves are magically calmed.
Even the visuals here are drab and uninspired. The movie opens with and later comes back to a shot of Earth as a blue marble, pulling back with clunky CGI tricks to become the eye of the bird in mid-flight, his head ringing with overlapping pleas for a visit that will provide merciful release. Death speaks in a muddled growl that's sometimes difficult to understand.
Petticrew is just way too zen, almost joyously so, and Louis-Dreyfus is beyond morbid, and somehow the imminent death of a teenage girl feels low-stakes and anti-climactic. Zora's outrageous reaction to the bird is bizarre and carried out in a crazy Tiger Mom metaphor. The narrative knits together a series of vignettes that don't always cohere. This is quite an attempt to tell a unique story. And it is out there. But in the end, it's a drab and oddly antiseptic film that is more annoying than moving in any real way.
A SIMPLE FAVOR (2018) (B) - Don't overthink this one. Just let Paul Feig ("The Heat," "Spy") do his pop-pulp thing with a juicy whodunit and a couple of stars who commit to the bit. This comic thriller feels like it's in everyone's wheelhouse, even if it's not the most cogent film to come along.
Anna Kendrick stars as Stephanie, a dweeby lifestyle mommy vlogger who gets mixed up with a sly and devious fellow mom, Emily (Blake Lively), who grooms Stephanie for some sort of plot she is cooking up. They establish a pecking order of alpha (Emily) and nerd (Stephanie), as if they were back in high school. Emily eventually asks for that one simple favor -- requesting that Stephanie pick up Emily's son after school. But then Emily disappears without a word.
As days go by, Stephanie quickly falls for Emily's drab hunky husband, Sean (Henry Golding), in such an improbable plot twist a viewer might bail out at that point. But feel free to roll your eyes and stick with it. Stephanie will eventually go on a hunt through Emily's past -- another silly diversion that provides the next exit ramp. This unsatisfying detour -- cooked up by writers Jessica Sharzer and Darcey Bell -- traffics in horror tropes and makes the final third drag. Throw in a soundtrack inexplicably filled with French pop tunes, and this whole production is a bit of a head-scratcher.
But Kendrick is a powerful lead here, and she plays off Lively's domineering character especially well. Lively, with her striking looks, savors her juicy bad-girl role so much that she practically drools through her scenes. This film shouldn't work, but it was clever enough that I couldn't turn it off.
MOVIEPASS, MOVIECRASH (B+) - An early entry for 2024's "Fyre"
Award -- a term we'll use for documentaries about entertaining tech-bro
hedge-fund stock-run scams that sound too good to be true -- is this
HBO-Max romp about the MoviePass craze of the late teens, in which the
company thought it could offer unlimited theater passes for only $9.99
per month and somehow not go out of business.
This is confident, workmanlike filmmaking from Muta'Ali ("Cassius X: Becoming Ali"), who does a great job of constructing the narrative and separating out his good guys from the bad guys. When looking for an explanation for the inexplicable, it comes down to Capitalism 101: Greed is good (for some). Of course, there was no way that MoviePass could survive very long by allowing people to see a movie a day each month for barely the cost of one movie.
The company's founder, Stacey Spikes, and his main ally on the board, Hamet Watt, were following the drug dealer's business model -- get people hooked and then start raising the price. But the board brought in a couple of veteran venture capitalists who voraciously pumped the stock price with exponential growth of the customer base (at that unsustainable bargain-basement rate). That would be Mitch Lowe, a former Netflix vulture, and Ted Farnsworth, a cunning stock manipulator, both of whom refused to yield on the monthly fee, insisting that they could make up the revenue elsewhere, through marketing deals with cinema operators and through the sale of users' data. Essential color is added by another key board member -- who enabled the tragic situation -- and a MoviePass user (who revels in the glory days of essentially free unlimited movies).
As you'd expect (or perhaps remember), the new guys burned through millions and took over the company from Spikes and Watt. It just so happens that the founding guys are black and the interlopers were old-boy white guys, so Muta'Ali's film has a built-in plot conflict to exploit. He unpeels the layers of the story like a pro, and the narrative is fascinating from beginning to end.
* - Update, 9/16/23: Lowe pleaded guilty to security fraud, facing a sentence of up to five years.
BONUS TRACK
From the closing credits of "Favor," No Small Children with the "Munsters" romp "Laisse Tomber Les Filles":
Finally catching up with the films of Don Hertzfeldt, courtesy of the Guild Cinema.
ME (A-minus) - The latest from animation provocateur Don Hertzfeldt is a throbbing meditation on humanity, capitalism and technology. It is described as "a 22-minute musical odyssey about trauma, technology, and the retreat of humanity into itself."
It's a dizzying assault on the senses, in a good way. Devoid of dialogue, it has a pounding score, which ranges from jazz to operatic aria to techno. The images touch on police brutality in a totalitarian apocalyptic society. It simply is too much to take in and be able to cogently assess.
It will take another viewing, but Hertzfeldt doesn't make it easy. There is not even a trailer online. He is retro in the best ways. In a stylistic leap from the crude black-and-white forms of his earlier work, "Me" flashes brilliant flourishes. Hertzfeldt loops scenes of technological dangers back upon each other. It peaks with an aria that soars visually. It's a wonder to absorb.
IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY (2012) (B+) - This is actually a mashup of three shorts. Hertzfeldt goes old school to create a multiple-screen effect to capture is crude stick-figure drawings to chronicle the ordinary life of a man named Bill.
Hertzfeldt narrates in a measured but urgent voice, apparently from inside Bill's mind, which fuels the idea that Bill is an unreliable narrator because of mental illness brought about by trauma. It reminded me of something I read recently about how the mind can shut down in the elderly as a way to stave off rational thoughts of our physical decline.
Bill suffers from some serious maladies, but he learns to appreciate the beauty of the world around him. He lives more in the moment. And he may have found the secret to eternal life. It throbs with the passion of a filmmaker perfecting his career's defining opus.
BONUS TRACK
The melancholy closer for "Me," Jelly Roll Morton with "Sweet Jazz Music":
Our gal Rachel Sennott ("Shiva Baby," "Bottoms") is back with a tale of a depressed standup comic, "I Used to Be Funny."
A diary, a collage, a Gen X story about career choices -- whatever it is, we're interested in "Flipside."
Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars in a fantastical debut feature about a mom coping with the impending death of her young daughter, "Tuesday."
We'll give Kit Zauhar ("Actual People") another chance; for her sophomore effort, she follows a couple spending an awkward weekend with a creepy Airbnb host, "This Closeness."
TERRESTRIAL VERSES (A-minus) - This collection of simple vignettes has a quiet power as Iranians do battle with an entrenched system that leaves ordinary folks vulnerable to the religious zealots running Tehran. And power is the key word: every person depicted in each scene has to endure the humility of being less powerful than the person they are dealing with.
Filmmakers Alireza Khatami and Ali Asgari execute a simple concept: They set up the camera from the point of view of the unseen clerk or apparatchik and train it on the character who needs something and must submit to generally degrading treatment in order to accomplish a task. Long takes create a sense of dread as the scenes play out. A man wants to register his son's name as David and is rebuffed; a teenage girl is grilled by the school dean for associating with a boy on a motorcycle; a man applying for a driver's license is forced to gradually strip off his clothes to reveal his tattoos; a young woman with short hair is being questioned as a suspect in a traffic incident caught on video while she was working as a rideshare driver; a female job applicant is creeped on by a predatory old man interviewing her; and, in a meta moment, a filmmaker meets with a censor and succumbs to the censor's relentless suggestions of edits to the script.
In one of the most moving pieces, a child is the center of attention, and you cringe watching what happens to her. A woman wrangles off-camera with a sales clerk while the woman's daughter is on camera, and we watch the girl go from dancing gaily in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt to being gradually swathed in layers of hijab and draped cloaks -- and being drained of joy in the process.
The simplicity of the visuals and the straightforward polemic about power dynamics in a theocracy make for riveting cinema at times. It borrows more than a little from Asghar Farhadi's similar stories of bureaucratic frustrations in Iran, such as "A Separation." Each vignette clocks in just under 10 minutes, and the entire exercise comes in at 77 minutes. The film ends with an urgent heavy-metal song over the closing credits, which serves as a slap in the face to all viewers -- whether living under theocratic rule or headed toward one -- a shocking reminder that follows all of those quiet, mundane interactions. Can you empathize before it's too late?
EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (Incomplete) - I gave it a half hour. There was absolutely no plot or story during the entire first quarter of this film ostensibly about a rural Japanese town fearing the invasion of a corporate development for a "glamping" site. I saw a guy chop wood and smoke a cigarette for five minutes. I saw two men ladle water from a brook and carry the plastic jugs to their vehicle (at least a five-minute scene). Those were after the first five minutes of the movie spent on one slow-motion tracking shot with the camera pointed skyward, peering through tall, bare trees.
There was a mention of a company planning to build a site geared to yuppies who prefer glamor with their camp outings. Eventually there was a community meeting. That meeting started with the introduction of two young people who in turn introduced a film for the residents, a film that started with a slow establishing shot -- and that was the last straw.
This apparently is supposed to be a slow-burn eco-horror story. I'll take everyone's word for it. This is our second attempt to watch a film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The first was "Drive My Car," a three-hour trudge. We made it through two hours of that one before bailing and promising to track down the final hour another time; we never did. In "Evil," Hamaguchi simply engages in lazy visual storytelling. He spends the first half hour trying to convey the joys and critical aspects of nature all around the villagers -- their trees, their water, their wasabi plants. Most filmmakers would be able to convey that with a few shorthand shots, in about 10 minutes, before finally introducing the meat of the plot. Hamaguchi can't be bothered. This is simply flat storytelling. Life is short. Get on with it.
DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (B+) - This sprawling, raunchy, rollicking black comedy, ostensibly about hyper-commercialization, captures the zeitgeist of our crude, unraveling modern culture. Writer-director Radu Jude ("Aferim") takes our ad-addled Tik-Tok gurglings and shoves them back down our throats.
Ilinca Manolache stars as Angela, a harried, overworked production assistant supporting a multinational company's making of a self-serving workplace-safety film. She spends most of her time driving, often alone, captured in a claustrophobic side shot from the passenger seat of her car. She is addicted to bubble gum -- popping bubbles like a schoolgirl -- and recording herself spewing raunchy misogynist rants, employing a cheap video filter that transforms her into "Bobito," a bald bro with a monobrow and patchy facial hair.
Angela is perpetually jaded and a model of practicality as she pinballs around Budapest and beyond to attend the shoots of victims of workplace accidents who are manipulated into portraying their stories in just the right way to satisfy the expectations of the filmmakers (and shift blame from the employers). The film climaxes -- if a half hour hunk toward the end of a 2-hour 43-minute movie can be called that -- with a degrading scene of an industrial worker, surrounded by his family, forced to repeat and tweak his horrific tale over and over outside the scene of his accident, even as rain spatters them and the sun eventually starts to set.
This might be Jude's self-loathing spilling out; he seems to be revealing the slimy truths of the filmmaking process in general and the unreliability of all narrators and witnesses. Angela's brute of an alter-ego represents the two ways of coping with the blurry crudeness of the modern, tech-tonic world. At times she'll wander just a few feet away from a shoot and we'll hear her wildly inappropriate MAGA-tinged rants while ordinary folks are trying to conduct business. Like many fame-seekers and online influencers she ironically has no app filter for her id.
Jude is a provocateur, an Eastern European Godard, smacking us across the face with a hand mirror. He splices in manipulated clips from an actual older film (Lucian Bratu’s 1981 drama "Angela merge mai departe"), about a cabdriver, also named Angela, who brings to mind Angie Dickinson's "Police Woman" -- all for no readily discernible reason.
Break this into two pieces in order to ingest the nearly three hours of egested fulminations. Manolache can be riveting, with her streetwise manic energy. Stay for Nina Hoss ("Transit," "Barbara") as the floating head in Zoom videos, the Big Sister from abroad directing the peons carrying out the project. This is a fine rebound for Jude, whose more recent effort, "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn," aired similar grievances about our online doom but in a much less acerbic and assured manner than he pulls off here.
BONUS TRACK
THE POTEMKINISTS (2022) (B-minus) - Jude knocked out this 18-minute short during COVID, a glib riff on Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," reduced here to a conversation about erecting a statue to memorialize Romania's role in the battle of Russian mariners. As the New Yorker critic Richard Brody summarizes, "a voluble sculptor (Alexandru Dabija) reveals to a cultural bureaucrat
(Cristina Draghici) the historical truth behind the fictional elements
of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic ... namely, that the real-life battleship’s rebellious sailors
didn’t return to tsarist Russia but, rather, demanded and received
asylum in Romania."
Brody sees a "sharp and sardonic discussion" that "touches on
Romania’s sufferings under Soviet rule, Russia’s latter-day aggression,
and the contentious politics of official commemoration." I saw a lot of clips from "Battleship Potemkin" distracting me from the meandering dialogue. Snippets of the conversation were engaging, especially the glib parts, but I wouldn't say this is must-see cinema.
BONUS TRACK
In his short, Jude takes a jab at our present-day horrors by quoting a poem from 100 years ago, "Century," the third in a troika of poems by Osip Mandelstam, from 1922:
You brute of a century, who could look into the centers of your eyes and with their blood glue back two centuries to a severed spine?
