Few people made me laugh more than Alan Arkin did. He died yesterday at 89, Variety reports. Just this month, we featured one of his most memorable roles, Sheldon Kornpett in the 1979 comedy "The In-Laws."
Some personal connections: It was Arkin I always had in mind to star in the TV pilot I wrote, "Splinters," a behind-the-scenes look at an aging comedian hosting a Saturday morning kiddies' show with a pair of bickering puppets. Arkin cut his comedy canines at Second City in Chicago, as one of the troupe's founding members.
About 20 years ago, I glimpsed him at the Santa Fe Film Festival. It was after a movie had let out, and people were kibitzing in the small lobby (probably the Screen at the College of Santa Fe). I eavesdropped as he and his wife chatted with another couple. I overheard him say, "Why don't you come over for tea?" I chuckled as I heard that indelible voice utter such a common phrase, conditioned to find him effortlessly funny.
Little-known facts: He made his debut as a stage director Off Broadway with "Eh?" in 1966, which was the debut of Dustin Hoffman. And he directed Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys" on Broadway over 538 performances.
BONUS TRACKS
Here is Christopher Guest as Alan Arkin from an "SNL" sketch spoofing "The Joe Franklin Show," with Billy Crystal as Franklin and Martin Short as Doug Henning, who annoys Arkin ("What are you doing?").
Here is Arkin re-creating a Second City bit, with Fred Katz, in 1974 (23:14 mark):
Wes Anderson (along with his all-star cast of players) is back -- and hopefully back on his game -- with an atomic-age romp, "Asteroid City."
A drama about a lesbian teacher navigating Margaret Thatcher's England, "Blue Jean."
Mark Duplass and Sterling K. Brown are the last two men on Earth in the claustrophobic sci-fi thinker "Biosphere."
We'll probably lower our guard and check out what Jennifer Lawrence is up to these days when her raunchy comedy comes to Netflix later in the year, "No Hard Feelings."
"It's not fun; it's art" -- more summer mindlessness, a romp in the Adirondacks with the sensitive kids at "Theater Camp."
From New Zealand, a debut feature about a young woman who panics, misses a flight to New York to start a new job, and instead creates online fakes to make it look like she went to New York, "Millie Lies Low."
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS? (B) - To enjoy this documentary it helps to be a passing fan of the brassy band "Blood, Sweat & Tears," which had its moment in the late 1960s -- and I'm sure that's a dwindling population -- but others might appreciate the hook of the film. It tells the tale of the band's downfall that followed its ill-advised tour, arranged by the U.S. State Department, to three nations behind the Iron Curtain in 1970.
That summer tour came just a few months after the band's second record elbowed out the Beatles' "Abbey Road" for the Grammy for album of the year. And, as the trailer suggests, the band was coerced into doing the tour (to Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia) as part of a quid pro quo. If you don't know the whole story (singer David Clayton-Thomas revealed the details in his autobiography), then save it for the entertaining unveiling here. It's the hook that makes this worth viewing.
It's a fine story, but the presentation here is distractingly hectic. Writer-director John Scheinfeld -- who specializes in music docs, such as "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" and "Who Is Harry Nilsson?" -- can't let the screen sit still for more than a second or two. Images and words flash by and disappear before we can comprehend it all. I don't get that tactic in a film targeted toward boomers.
Scheinfeld also employes a few tired tricks, including some unnecessary re-enactments. It's never clear how much archival footage he is using (it seems that only one hour survived) or whether the pristine soundtrack is from that footage (it appears to be so). You get the sense that he is stretching the soup or papering over the holes in the archive. But he gathers notable talking heads, including key band members Clayton-Thomas, drummer Bobby Colomby and guitarist Steve Katz. He tracks down Donn Cambern, who shot the original footage in 1970 and went on to have a career as a film editor, from "Easy Rider" to "The Bodyguard." (He died earlier this year at age 93.) Cambern is an entertaining storyteller.
The film takes a facile but passable approach to the Nixon years of the Cold War and digs into the State Department documents that reveal a few gems of insight. Cambern and the band have a good time contrasting iron-fisted Romania (the middle stop on the tour) with the relatively more enlightened communist regimes of Yugoslavia and Poland. As a snapshot of the world in 1970, it does the job.
BONUS TRACKS
From the debut album, led by Al Kooper, "I Can't Quit Her":
And a good example of the band's brass and Clayton-Thomas' pipes, doing Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "Hi-De-Ho":
ORGASM INC.: THE STORY OF OneTASTE (B-minus) - What should have been a slam dunk -- a documentary about yet another sex cult -- feels more like a wasted opportunity. Filmmakers pull their punches and are surprisingly chaste in their presentation of the group OneTaste, in which shlubby men were trained to stroke women to marathon orgasms. (Not to be confused with "Orgasm Inc.," a 2009 documentary about a Viagra-like pill for women.)
Three newcomers tell the story of a new-age grifter, Nicole Daedone, who -- a bit like Keith Reniere in Nexium -- convinced a bunch of vulnerable people to join her San Francisco sex club. A former sex worker, she spouted a Wikipedia-level melange of philosophical aphorisms and sought to cultivate tech bros and C-list celebrities.
While the filmmakers use video of some of the actual sessions -- women spreading wide in front of groups of gawkers -- they go out of their way to bowdlerize the activities. Nipples and genitalia are blurred, as are the faces of those who apparently didn't sign releases. In a documentary about explicit sex, you can't show upper-body nudity? On Netflix?
Not that I tuned in for the tits, mind you. It's just an odd choice -- to run video after video of women getting stroked off but presenting it like a rerun of an R-rated movie on some commercial antenna-TV station for old folks. In addition, the story gets repetitive, and the chosen talking heads -- mostly disgruntled former employees -- are not very riveting. Throw in some pointless re-enactments, and you've got a disappointing take on what could have been a fascinating hour or hour and a half.
BONUS TRACK: FAST-FORWARD THEATER
OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW (2010) (C) - This is about as dull as documentaries get, though it's at least a notch or two above watching grass grow. We do get to witness some avant-garde techniques of German industrial artist Anselm Kiefer, who moved to the south of France in the '90s to take over 35 acres that once housed a silk factory in order to transform it into a massive landscape art installation of tunnels and rugged structures.
Sophie Fiennes, who before and after this project hung out with Slavoj Zizek for two entertaining documentaries, tests the viewer's patience with painfully long takes of roaming camera shots of the tunnels and buildings. In fact, the first 18 minutes or so features no dialogue or narration -- rather, we get snail-pace camera glides (providing no context), often accompanied by harsh Hitchcockian music. It's a disorienting start.
In fact, you won't miss out if you watch much of this on fast-forward. The visuals will speed up to a normal pace, and you won't be annoyed by the music. But don't skip past some of the scenes depicting Kiefer's methods of creation. In one scene he uses a big wide brush to slap streaks of paint Pollock-like onto a massive canvas lying flat, which then gets covered in dirt and then raised to shake off the dust. But then get the remote ready again midway through during a tedious extended conversation with Kiefer.
At other times, Kiefer and his staff break huge panes of glass (I was never quite sure the point of that exercise) or use cranes to stack repurposed slabs of concrete on top of each other. Throughout, I couldn't get over the incredible indulgences at work here and the wild expenditure of resources to salve the ego of a gruff artist, rather than to, say, build affordable housing. It's difficult to celebrate (or criticize) someone for pursuing such an obscure obsession. It might be possible if this weren't so visually dull. I knocked this out in about half its run time.
THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS (A) - Felix Van Groeningen is in tune with the hum of human existence. He gets the subtleties of relationships, both platonic and romantic. We recently did a third watch of his 2013 masterpiece "The Broken Circle Breakdown" (which we listed among the top 15 of the previous decade), and we swooned and cried all over again.
Van Groeningen reunites with collaborator Charlotte Vandermeersch, and here they adapt a novel by Paolo Cognetti about two boys, one from the city and one from the country, who meet at junior-high age and then part ways before connecting again at various times in adulthood. Much of the action takes place in the Italian Alps, where Pietro takes summer vacations with his parents, including his engineer father who leads Pietro and local boy Bruno on hikes along mountain trails.
Pietro and Bruno form a strong bond -- they romp in nature, splash in a pristine lake on lazy summer days (whereas my experience was usually on an asphalt playground). But their friendship fractures when Pietro objects to Bruno -- who is being raised on a farm by an uncle -- coming to live in Turin to go to high school with Pietro. Bruno, stung, instead hangs behind and joins the construction crew of his estranged father. The boys will meet again, awkwardly, in their late teens, but they won't bond again until Pietro (now played by Luca Marinelli from "Martin Eden") returns to the countryside after the death of his father, who, unbeknownst to Pietro, had kept in touch all these years with Bruno (Allesandro Borghi) during those continued summer visits.
Bruno has a proposition for Pietro: Let's rebuild a dilapidated remote cabin high up the mountain as a tribute to Pietro's father, who coveted the property. That whole setup takes about half of the leisurely running time of 2 hours 27 minutes, none of which feels wasted. Van Groeningen follows a template similar to that in "Breakdown" -- a relationship spanning time and struggling to survive headwinds. He and Vandermeersch mix spare dialogue with well-placed needle drops of simple, plaintive songs by Daniel Norgren. (The soundtrack often evokes the "New Morning" nature hugs of Bob Dylan.)
I can't tell you how moved I was at this meditation on longing and male bonding. Pietro is 31 when his father dies at 62; I was half my dad's age when he died at 56. Pietro's father (Filippo Timi) is loving but distant. (Once, in therapy, I compared my father to a mountain -- imposing when you drink it in from a distance, but more welcoming when you get up close -- and I was chilled by the setting here, all peaks and glaciers, a rugged sanctuary for Pietro's middle-management father. Forgive me for getting wistful as I write this on Father's Day.)
Pietro as an adolescent and young adult lashes out at this father, irrationally at times; it's what we do, because no matter how noble or giving our fathers can be, there is an urge to reject their lifestyle so that we can "rebel" and strike out on our own path -- even if, like Pietro here, it involves dead-end jobs (until he finds his true calling as a writer in Nepal) and a crushing lack of appreciation for all the important things a father passes on to a son.
And then there was the bonding between boys growing into men. I, too, formed a foundational friendship during junior high, one that endures to this day, albeit long-distance, and at times estranged or at arm's length. I've always been intrigued by the fact that age 12 is around the time that a person's accent solidifies, and there must be something, too, to the idea that a friendship formed at that age burrows deeper and lasts longer than others. It defines me to this day.
It is fascinating to watch Pietro search out his path, while Bruno embraces the country life and pursues a more traditional lifestyle. It doesn't pay to keep score between the buddies -- who is up, who is down -- but as more time passes, and the men age deep into their 30s, you realize that you have followed along here as if floating down a river with no important deadlines in sight. (Marinelli and Borghi need little makeup or CGI assistance to mark the passage of time; they each give powerful, nuanced performances as searching, aching beings.)
As noted, the dialogue at times is barely there. Even some of Pietro's narration seems full of ellipses. The film invites you to insert yourself into the friendship to fill in those blanks -- creating a sort of illicit triangle with Pietro and Bruno. I recently rewatched a movie from my youth, "Four Friends," which also intermingled the sweep of history and its tension on the ties between friends. This film pares that idea down to just two boys and the men they become. Others come and go in their lives, and we might spy on them for two and a half hours, but from age 12 on, Pietro and Bruno feel the tug of a reciprocal link that seems unbreakable.
I got swept up in it. I was moved, and I was grateful to be able to share the feeling.
BONUS TRACKS
Throughout the movie I assumed I was listening to Jim James and My Morning Jacket, but I learned from the credits that the songs were by Daniel Norgren, who has a similar searching vocal style, with a Rick Danko yearning. The songs are woven into the film's nature theme. One of the best is "Everything You Know Melts Away Like Snow":
Early in the film we hear "Why May I Not Go Out and Climb Trees," another echo of Dylan (this time the "Basement Tapes"/Band sound), with the earnestness of John Denver:
Here's a live show in Brussels in 2016. It ends, appropriately, with a track called "Everlasting Friend":
In an occasional series, we are circling back to revisit a few films of the postwar Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu and to sample some we have never seen. Here are his final three:
THE END OF SUMMER (1961) (B+) - Ozu's penultimate film is wistful and bittersweet. Brewery magnate and widower Manbei (Nakamura Ganjirō II) has a sunny disposition but he is concerned about his two daughters, only one of whom is married, and his widowed daughter-in-law, who has not remarried (and whom Manbei is trying to set up with an eligible bachelor).
The daughters show concern for their father, but he has happily reconnected with his old mistress, understandably disliked by the daughters and whom he sees on the sly. (He treats the mistress' daughter, a free spirit, as his own, too.) Youngest daughter Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), an office drone, pines for a co-worker who is being transferred to Sapporo. The family travels for a memorial service for Manbei's wife, and he miraculously recovers from a heart attack.
Ozu shoots in soft colors and mostly from knee level, his calling card. Characters cope with a hot spell by vigorously deploying hand fans throughout. The first half hour can be challenging in keeping track of who is who and how everyone is related. Ganjiro is effective at adding layers to a character that is a successful businessman, a caring father but also a longtime adulterer. The glimpse into the lifestyles here can be fascinating, and the pace is leisurely but never slow or boring.
AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962) (B+) - Ozu goes out with a feast. This was his last film; he would die on his 60th birthday, December 12, 1962, the day I was born, 60 years ago. Numerous scenes here involve friends and family members eating and drinking, in a repetitive celebration of life.
This revolves around yet another widower, Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu, above), who has regular reunions with his childhood classmates at a restaurant owned by one of them. After a drunken visit from one of their old teachers, Shuhei is reminded that he may be a burden on his daughter, and so he arranges to get her married off so that she won't turn into a spinster.
Many themes are woven throughout. The death of Shuhei's wife still weighs on his adult children; the family's grief is not fully resolved. There are scenes that mock Japan's military might and the nation's postwar capitulation to American culture. That pop culture lends the backdrop for the burgeoning neon along the streets of Tokyo, which provides a visual zing to the typical formal presentation (you can see echoes in Wong Kar-Wai's elegent "In the Mood for Love").
There is a wistfulness and a playfulness threaded throughout what Ozu could not have expected to have been his final film. Perhaps he knew somehow that his run was coming to an end. Ryu, who appears in all three of Ozu's final films (and just about all of the others), is a kindly, elegiac vehicle to shepherd this last supper.
LATE AUTUMN (1960) (B) - This slow-paced story revisits a lot of common themes, and here those themes seem a little worn and undercooked. This time the focus is on a widow, Akiko (Setsuko Hara, above left), and the beautiful daughter she is apparently holding back, the prim Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa).
Ozu begins with a reunion of three friends of Akiko's late husband, about seven years after her death. With both women present, they speculate about Akiko retaining her looks and still being eligible for a second husband, a prospect that would also free Ayako from caring from her mother, so she, too, can go out and snag a husband. One member of the trio eventually emerges as a suitor for the widow.
However, both women are resistant to the idea of marriage. Ayako is a particularly stubborn modern young woman, and there is delightful interplay between her and another young friend, Yuriko (Mariko Okada), especially their pop-culture banter at the dawn of the '60s.
It is too bad that Ozu draws this out a little too much -- like most of his films it runs a tad over two hours -- because the set-up is intriguing, and the last reel provides a satisfying resolution. The bumbling of the three men could have been tightened up, with a deeper appreciation for the mother and daughter swimming against the current of postwar tradition.
Let's go back to the 1970s, the time of our relative youth, to see whether two hilarious movies still hold up.
SLAP SHOT (1977) (A) - Paul Newman did down-and-out particularly well -- see, Exhibit A, "The Verdict" -- and here he is Reg Dunlop, the player-coach of a lousy minor-league hockey team that is on the brink of folding. The humor is quick and dark and bawdy as hell.
Like the local Pennsylvania steel mill, the Charlestown Chiefs' days are numbered, and they are getting no help from the sleazy team president, Joe McGrath (a grouchy Strother Martin), who is cutting deals to arrange a fire sale. His bargain-basement mind-set results in three childish young players joining the team -- they are the Hanson brothers, and their specialty is violence over stick-handling. Soon, the team descends into cheap thuggery -- which leads to wins and revives the fan base.
One player -- college boy Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean) -- will have none of it. Ned is also having problems at home, dealing with a drunken and unfulfilled spouse (Lindsay Crouse). Reg, meantime, still pines for his ex, Francine (Jennifer Warren), while having occasional romps with other players' wives (one of them (played by Melinda Dillon) now a lesbian, to her ex's chagrin).
The script by Nancy Dowd ("Coming Home," "North Dallas Forty") has a precision and rhythm that evokes the vulgarity of minor-league sports in that long-ago era. And it's full of one-liners that I still recite 45 years later ("Down by the pool ...."; "Who owns the team ..."; "I'm listening to the fucking song!").
Newman reteams with director George Roy Hill ("Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Sting"), and the film has a cozy lived-in feel to it, that '70s drift, a middle-age spread. There's a melancholy heart to this ribald rip-snorter that would set the table for the likes of "North Dallas Forty" and "Major League."
THE IN-LAWS (1979) (A-minus) - Ah, the joy of Peter Falk and Alan Arkin romping around Manhattan and Central America in the service of screwball comedy. It's a comedy team for the ages.
With a sharp, vaudevillian script by Andrew Bergman ("Blazing Saddles" and "Fletch"), we follow Falk's Vince Ricardo, an apparently rogue CIA agent, and Arkin's Sheldon Kornpett, a mild-mannered dentist, who gets caught up in Vince's investigation of an international counterfeiting scheme. With just days to go until their children get married, Sheldon is forever getting shot at in service to Vince's hare-brained scheme, as they eventually end up in front of a firing squad loyal to a nutball dictator (Richard Libertini, spot-on looney-toons).
It's a close match between Falk's one-liners and Arkin's facial reactions for comedy honors here. Some of it is downright silly (Libertini's general wields a Senor Wences hand-puppet to greet his guests), but at other times, we are treated to some classic car chases (one, memorably, has Falk driving in reverse), courtesy of journeyman director Arthur Hiller ("The Out-of-Towners," "Love Story," "Silver Streak"). When in doubt, he cuts to another of Arkin's deadpan looks to drive a joke home.
The supporting cast has a ball, too -- Ed Begley Jr. as Vince's handler at the Agency; Nancy Dussault and Arlene Golonka as the wives; James Hong as the proprietor of the seat-of-the-pants Wong Airlines; a young David Paymer as a cabdriver. Hiller orchestrates Bergman's screenplay smoothly, right up until the final twist, as all the pieces finally fall into place.
The film shows its age in spots. It certainly depicts a simpler, cornier era. But its charms still come through, and its belly laughs endure.
BONUS TRACK
During the National Anthem, a twitchy referee tries to lay down the law with the Hanson brothers after a bloody pre-game melee:
We drift back to the '70s for a pair of sociological studies, one famous, one more obscure.
GREY GARDENS (1976) (A) - The gold standard of fly-on-the-wall filmmaking established the Maysles brothers -- Albert and David -- as the premier documentarians of the American New Wave and beyond. HBO Max is streaming this fascinating examination of the eccentric mother-daughter tandem -- cousins of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy living in squalor in a rundown mansion in the Hamptons. Edith Bouvier Beale (Big Edie), 80, and her middle-aged daughter, known as Little Edie, seem both skeptical of the film crew and a bit flattered by the attention.
It is easy to gloss over how cutting edge it was to let the cameras roll and let the two women spill their thoughts ad nauseam -- a true reality show decades before YouTube and TikTok made stars of ordinary people thirsting for attention and celebrity status. Yet, there is no sense that the Maysles are exploting the women or mocking them. They are merely presenting them.
Big Edie, mostly bed-ridden, is eccentric but not addled. She celebrates her former singing career, which featured operatic pop stylings once featured on 78-speed records. Little Edie likes to dance for the camera and bicker with her mother. She also tends to the many cats on the premises, and she even feeds the raccoons in the attic (Wonder Bread and Cat Chow). She indulges her mother's constant nostalgia trips.
Little Edie was a classic debutante who never married, and she still maintains her looks, albeit a bit weather-beaten. She wears unique fashions, especially the head coverings (we never see her hair -- or lack of hair), which sometimes are sweaters imaginatively fashioned into bandannas. She flirts with the young man who visits on occasion.
The Maysleses can't help but get caught up in the proceedings, and we sometimes see them (or their shadows or reflections) in a stray frame. (They share credit with Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke.) Little Edie addresses the brothers and curries favor with them, as if the presence of cameras have revived her reason to live. There is no real narrative arc, and when the cameras disappear, you wonder what will happen to the chattering mother and daughter.
GOD'S COUNTRY (1985) (B) - Famous French filmmaker Louis Malle ("Atlantic City," "Pretty Baby," "My Dinner With Andre") also made documentaries, including this study, for PBS, of a small town 60 miles west of Minneapolis and its heartland inhabitants. He shot it in 1979 and adds a coda, filmed six years later, for the final 20 minutes.
The era seems stuck in amber, mostly German descendants tending to their gardens, their farms and their families. Few of the subjects are very interesting, and Malle is overly sympathetic to their ordinary lives. One woman, in her 30s, stands out in a long dialogue about her comfort with living single in a community that emphasizes church and marriage.
A couple of farmers are doing pretty well in 1979, but when the film jumps to 1985 -- the year that Farm Aid debuted -- their struggles are more acute. One has a wife who takes a job to bring in more income; he has started a college fund for his three children, because he predicts no more than 10 years left as a business proposition on the farm. Another farmer tries to make peace with bachelorhood while inseminating thousands of cows per year.
Malle's reverence for these noble Americans can be a bit off-putting. While the lifestyle depicted seems simple and quaint, there is a tinge of sadness to this colorless community. The coda drives home the idea that very little has changed for these residents -- and nothing much likely will.
A pair from the HBO stable as it transitions to Max, ditching the tiffany label for a cruder one, for some reason. Here is a docudrama and a documentary.
REALITY (C) -As gimmicks go, this one pegs into the red zone on the Annoying Scale. The filmmakers rely exclusively word-for-word on transcripts of the initial interaction between FBI agents and National Security Agency translator Reality Winner when they raided her home in 2017. Mundane doesn't begin to capture the tedium on display here. This is really a docudrama, but it's worse than a dull documentary.
I'm sure the goal was to tap into the banality of evil, or some other Arendtian concept. (We previously played with the idea of the evil of banality.) Here we must wrestle with the banality of banality. Winner eventually pleaded guilty to one count of transmitting a classified document (a report on Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election) to the Intercept. She would serve about three years of a five-year sentence.
Sydney Sweeney (TV's "White Lotus") plays the wide-eyed, jittery Winner as she is confronted outside her home by two friendly FBI agents. Much dialogue involves the humdrum details of caging her dog and not letting the cat get out of the house, and which rooms will be swept in which order, and the cataloging of the weapons she owns (which, surprisingly, seem to be a low priority). The dialogue is stilted and limited by the unwarranted devotion to replicating every word and stammer.
There is a reason why we fictionalize stories. Real life is often boring and cluttered with pleasantries and throat-clearing. We pep things up, strip out the banalities, and strive to make it ... entertaining. There are times when the gimmick works, when the droll proceedings turn absurd in a way that's both amusing and chilling. But even at a brief 83 minutes, this one is a chore to get through, despite Sweeney's best efforts.
LOVE TO LOVE YOU, DONNA SUMMER
(C+) - Either Donna Summer wasn't a very exciting person, or her
daughter -- who made the film -- failed to capture a spirit deserving of
a full documentary. There are flashes of true personality of the former disco queen in the huge tranche of home movies she created over the decades; but this overview rarely coalesces into anything beyond a low-key greatest-hits package.
One hundred seven minutes is way too much time to devote to the career of the woman who broke disco into the mainstream and who had a solid run in the late '70s and early '80s. Her daughter Brooklyn Sudano (with an assist from veteran Roger Ross Williams ("The Apollo")) dutifully follows the early years (including a stint in "Hair" in Munich, where she lived for several years) and the breakthrough fame during the first half of the film.
However, the second half descends into mawkish family melodrama, with too much time devoted to Sudano, her sisters and Summer's exes. Summer (who died in 2012 at 63) seemed like a nice, interesting, talented woman, but nothing here scratches below the surface. One compelling scene, another home movie, features an older Summer breaking out into an a cappella version of "She Works Hard for the Money," and her natural beauty and vocal talent explode into the camera. Alas, such moments are few and far between.
Equally frustrating is the fact that most of the talking heads -- as well as the archival footage -- are sound only, with no video. Perhaps this was a limitation of Sudano's budget (or a COVID consideration), but we get a lot of static old photos accompanying disembodied voices -- including Summer's -- droning on. Too much of this is a missed opportunity.
BONUS TRACK
She did, indeed, work hard for the money. That voice ...
That a cappella snippet of the song is at the 1:20 mark of the trailer:
And the last call for the disco era, "Last Dance":
Nicole Holofcener ("Walking and Talking," "Please Give") re-teams with Julia Louis Dreyfus ("Enough Said") to study a fractured marriage, "You Hurt My Feelings."
With a documentary feel, a period piece about radicalized workers at a watch factory in 19th century Switzerland, "Unrest."
A stylish thriller about a woman who jeopardizes her bourgeois lifestyle by harboring a wounded enemy of the Pinochet regime, "Chile '76."
A drama about two childhood friends, separated when one moves from South Korea to New York, who meet up again two decades later, "Past Lives."
BLACKBERRY (A-minus) - Matt Johnson has established himself as the master of the flashback process movie. He previously imagined NASA in the late '60s faking the moon landing in "Operation Avalanche," and now he starts in the mid-'90s to tell the story of the BlackBerry device, the once-ubiquitous attachment to rich assholes everywhere before the company crashed and burned through malfeasance and a little device that came along called the iPhone.
Johnson stars as Doug, one of the co-founders of Canadian start-up Research In Motion, along with Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, the visionary behind the outfit. If Mike is an idiot-savant, Doug is more of an idiot. He sports a red headband at all times, even the one time he has to don a suit to impress other suits. Doug speaks almost exclusively in dialogue from classic movies. He lives for Movie Night at the office, quoting along with dialogue.
Their fledgling operation is soon taken over by an opportunistic and brazen CEO, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who immediately gets them in the door at Bell Atlantic, to pitch their PocketLink device, based on a crude prototype, slapped together literally overnight.
Throughout the film, RIM has to walk a fine line between flooding the market with BlackBerries and not overwhelming the systems they run on. In 2007, the iPhone came along -- building the keyboard into the screen instead of having a click keyboard -- and the downfall of BlackBerry was swift and messy.
Johnson -- writing with Matthew Miller -- borrows a little from HBO's "Silicon Valley" (the nerds often riding to the rescue of the reckless CEO) and a bit from "Wall Street" (Balsillie poached top techies from Google and elsewhere, using an accounting trick with stock options that caught the eye of the SEC). His visual style has a shaky documentary feel to it, but is not afraid of drone shots of skylines, either. Baruchel is dead-on as the spectrum-y tech whiz (he eventually morphs, not unlike Steve Jobs, into a Jim Jarmusch-like spiritual guru), and the bromance between Mike and Doug is touching.
Johnson's narrative hurtles along at break-neck speed, as one liners shoot out and land with ease. When reminded that "perfect is the enemy of the good," Mike claps back, "Well, good enough is the enemy of humanity." We already know that this is going to end in corporate tragedy, but that doesn't take away any of the entertainment value. Maybe it's the Canadian sensibility, the over-arching self-deprecation, that makes this all so delicious.
Some people are born storytellers. There's a Tarantino-esque DYI confidence to Johnson's filmmaking. It is a perfect match of this story that needed to be told, and done so without a heavy hand.
BONUS TRACKS
The film kicks off with the nervous energy of Elastica's "The Connection" over the opening credits:
When the film advances to 2003, the Strokes chime in with the infectious "Someday":
When things start to fall get out of control, the White Stripes charge in with "Hello Operator":
A pair from two talented writer-directors who broke through in the Aughts.
SHOWING UP (B-minus) - Kelly Reichardt re-teams with Michelle Williams (they go back to "Wendy and Lucy," from 2008) for this minor-key depiction of the week in the life of an artist. This is as slow and uneventful as a movie can be, so it's the little things that make this worth a view.
You know how we go on about Theater People? They can be a lot to take. Well so can art departments. Thankfully, Reichardt does not dwell on the quirks of artists or deify their pursuit of genius. On the contrary, this movie is about the tedious existence of a modest artist, bland Lizzy, who dresses in baggy clothes, wilts under a mop of soccer-mom hair, and lives to make lovely statuettes of female figures. She is hustling to finish her latest crop before her upcoming exhibition.
But life keeps getting in her way. Her landlord, Jo (Hong Chau from "The Menu" and "Inherent Vice"), won't fix the hot water and then saddles Lizzy with a wounded pigeon she found. (Lizzy feels guilty because it was her cat who wounded the bird and Lizzy who dumped it out the window, leaving it to die.) Yes, get ready for a giant Wounded Bird Metaphor. Meek Lizzy gets walked all over in the art department and is at her wit's end dealing with her bipolar brother.
All of this can be quite interesting at times. And Williams is a wizard at disappearing into a complex character. The deep supporting cast also includes engaging small turns by the likes of Judd Hirsh (Lizzy's father), Amanda Plummer, James Le Gros (I recognized his voice before I recognized his face), John Magaro as the brother, and Andre (3000) Benjamin as the kiln operator who could probably be better at his job.
There's a lot to like here. But there's a whole lot of nothin' goin' on, too. It's just ... too ... slow. At the one-hour mark, I thought to myself, "OK, time for the plot to start." Fifteen minutes later one of my friends ducked out; he reported later that he just didn't have the patience to find out what would happen to those two wounded birds -- Lizzy and the pigeon. It's a delightful ending that my friend missed; but for too many people, it will be a chore to wade through nearly two hours to get there. I made it OK.
EVERYTHING WENT FINE (B+) - Francois Ozon has been one of the great storytellers of the past 20 years. His edge has dulled a bit in recent years. Earlier work -- "Under the Sand" with Charlotte Rampling, "Time to Leave" and "5 X 2" -- includes flawless, unsettling character studies.
Here he takes on the story of a woman who assists her dying father with his final wish. Sophie Marceau is riveting as Emmanuele Bernheim. Apparently always her dad's favorite since childhood, she steps in to be at the side of Andre (Andre Dussollier), who has suffered a stroke and struggles to maintain his dignity or even care for himself. Dussollier, too, commands the screen in this emotionally draining pas de deux. Emmanuele's dour sister Pascale Geraldine Pailhas) can't work up the same amount of drive to accommodate the old man, but she offers support when she can.
Andre is cranky and petulant. He was a bad father and was an even worse husband to the traumatized and now-ailing Claude (a defeated Charlotte Rampling). Some might find him irredeemable; others might appreciate his candor. When he tells Emmanuele (whom we also see in childhood flashbacks) "you were such an ugly child," he delivers it as if he thinks it's a compliment about her current beauty. Marceau does make it difficult to look away as her face constantly fills the screen, even if the melodrama is painfully raw. (For one thing, she sports a shag haircut to end all shag haircuts.)
Dussollier's performance -- a raw depiction of a fallen, helpless man -- can be difficult to watch. And this could have been shorter than 113 minutes. But Marceau pours so much grit and nuance into her role of Everywoman that you are inclined to quietly cheer everyone on. Ozon teases us as to whether the old man might change his mind. Andre harbors a secret -- involving a pest called Gerard -- which unspools gradually until it completes the picture of a man hoping to go out on his own terms. The ending is near-perfect.
MISSING (B+) - Incredibly frenetic and a little frazzling, "Missing" follows a young adult using her phone and computer almost exclusively to solve the mystery of her mother's disappearance during a planned trip to Colombia with a new boyfriend. As gimmicks go, this one is pretty slick; you're not just watching someone play with a computer screen but rather getting sucked into her online world.
Storm Reid (from HBO's "The Last of Us" and "Euphoria") plays June, the snarky daughter of Grace (Nia Long), whom we also see in a videotaped flashback to when June was a toddler, just before the girl lost her father. When Grace doesn't return to LAX from Colombia, June starts sleuthing online. Through TaskRabbit she finds Javier (a delightful Joaquim de Almeida), who goes way above and beyond his usual handyman duties to provide key private-eye assistance.
The FBI also gets involved, and it's eye-opening to watch all of the tools June utilizes at her fingertips. She uses translation programs to talk to the hotel staff. She unearths key documents. She IMs and face-times; she tracks down public video-camera footage; and she hacks emails and social-media accounts. Soon the intrigue has built to a real-world climax.
Writer-directors Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick, in their feature debut, hurtle this story along for nearly two hours, never letting the plot sag. After peeling the onion with some engaging slow reveals, they pack the final reel with a couple of clever twists that turn this into a compelling mystery thriller. It all revolves around Reid, who has a grand command of the big screen, with beefy supporting roles from the likes of Ken Leung (TV's "Lost") as the creepy boyfriend. It all adds up to pleasing pulp.
MINDHORN (2015) (B-minus) - About as lightweight as they come, this British parody has the thinness of a sitcom as it follows a vain, washed-up TV actor who slips back into his old detective character to help police on the Isle of Man solve a murder and avoid more killings. It is silly and stupid, but it has enough gags to justify its feature length. It also has strong performances that lifts it above the riff-raff.
This comes from the minds of Julian Barratt, who stars as the hack actor Richard Thorncroft, and Simon Farnaby as Clive, who worked as Richard's stunt double on the '80s drama "Mindhorn," a poor man's "Matt Houston." A suspected killer is obsessed with the Mindhorn character, and so the local police ring up the balding, pot-bellied Thorncroft to once again don the cheesy orange leather jacket and his bionic eyepatch (which allows Mindhorn to see the truth) to revive his TV persona and lure the killer into custody.
Don't overthink this. Steve Coogan is on hand as Thorncroft's rival, Peter Easterman, who went on to become a movie star. Andrea Riseborough is amusing as a mousy detective. The eminent Kenneth Branagh and Simon Callow ("Room With a View," "Four Weddings and a Funeral") play themselves, dispensing some very British inside jokes. It all zings by in an hour and a half.
Barratt and Farnaby toss in some subtle comic flourishes -- for some reason, Thorncroft finds his inner Mindhorn only while wearing very specific footwear -- and the comedy is as deadpan as they come. Thorncroft is a blowhard and a buffoon, and while this has the feel of a show within a show, it never becomes too cartoonish. You can almost sense Quentin Tarantino taking notes for the washed-up TV action star he centers things around in "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," and you can still enjoy the simple send-ups of all the cop shows that came after "Mannix." (In turn, "Mindhorn" cops a few gags from the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" video.)
The hunt for the killer is almost an afterthought, but Barratt and Farnaby wrap things up nicely, and Mindhorn once again gets his day in the sun.
Two from the year I graduated high school: the first I've never seen, the second a rewatch to see if it still held up (it does).
MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (B) - This must have seemed ground-breaking at the time -- an overt thumbing of the nose in the era of "Jaws" and "Star Wars" -- to make a movie about two theater veterans having a discussion over a meal for two hours. I'm sure it was a refreshing intellectual exercise taking place while I was mainlining "Stripes" directly into my veins.
Forgive me for letting this one settle for four decades before testing my maturity, patience and stamina for dry fare. And the first half certainly can be a challenge. It is dominated by Andre Gregory, the director, spinning tales, a few of which are just not that interesting. Gregory had left the theater for a new-age adventure, doing a little soul-searching.
It isn't until the second half that Wallace Shawn moves beyond just reacting "Gee!" or "That's interesting!" during Gregory's stories. The discussion turns more philosophical, and the men offer sharp observations about modern society at the dawn of the Reagan era. You might not be surprised to learn that -- like observers for decades before then and since -- they often lament the accelerating speed of the culture and the dangers of losing our humanity.
The men caution about the rise of technology -- robots are a big theme -- and the loss of human connection. Sound familiar? They celebrate the simple things in life -- a cup of coffee while reading a newspaper (on paper, of course). They make references to mindfulness, citing a "need to cut out the noise." Back then, careerism was a big culprit. It's not clear which more peaceful era they would go back to; like Godard, they have a decidedly post-WWII traumatized mindset, and Nazism still infiltrates their thinking
Director Louis Malle films this with no frills. Besides bookended scenes of Shawn sharing his thoughts as he arrives at the restaurant and then again as he cabs home, this is literally a movie about two men talking while eating dinner. There are a few interactions with waiters. But other than that, this is old-fashioned analog storytelling. Be patient during the first half -- turn your other screens off -- and follow along as two old friends try to solve the world's problems. As I look around, I see that Shawn and Gregory did not succeed in their mission, but neither have my friends and I. That doesn't mean these meals have been a waste of our precious time.
FOUR FRIENDS (B+) - Written by Steve Tesich (following his breakthrough "Breaking Away"), this earnest drama follows the lives of four friends as they pine for a girl while navigating the turbulent cultural changes of the 1960s. It struck a powerful chord with my young self. Does it still?
Craig Wasson (always, to me, a poor man's Bill Maher) stars as Danilo, the wide-eyed son of gruff immigrants who craves both stability and a livelier world. He and two childhood pals -- David (Michael Huddleston), and Tom (Jim Metzler) -- all have crushes on the free-spirited OG Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Georgia (Jodie Thelan), who flatters herself by thinking she's the reincarnation of dancer Isadora Duncan. When Danilo gets to college, his roommate Louie (a young Reed Birney) will join the Georgia fan club (its members are fond of singing along with Ray Charles to her theme song and they are rewarded by being called "Kiddo" by her).
Wasson is the perfect butt-hurt thespian to imbue Danilo with a solemn and prudish devotion to both woman and country. His education and musical talent will at first rescue him from the fate of his father (Miklos Simon), who toils at the East Chicago iron foundry and takes out his immigrant frustrations on his son, including the occasional back-hand across Danilo's jaw. Thelan hams it up as a young woman eager to shed the pre-Beatles era of repression for expressions of free love later in the Sixties.
Their lives get complicated. The two other friends fade more into the background -- one goes off to Vietnam, the other takes over his father's mortuary business. The hippie uprising challenges Danilo's dewy-eyed love of the America that took him in as a boy, and Tesich's screenplay offers a sweep of history through one man's personal journey.
Tesich balances maudlin nostalgia with a few sharp insights into the culture, while peppering the script with wholesome humor. The film has the whiff of the soap operas of the early '80s -- there is a tragic arc of Danilo seeking to marry into a rich family (catch Lois Smith as his impending mother-in-law) -- and the gravitas of a page-flipping historical novel. Like with "My Dinner With Andre," this movie digs for universal truths in a way that can still resonate more than 40 years later.
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (B) - Overlong and sluggish, this appreciation of avant-garde photographer Nan Goldin and her crusade against the Sackler family's Oxycontin empire suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. It is torn between homage and polemic.
Laura Poitras ("Citizenfour") takes an unusually solemn tone, dwelling on Goldin's early family tragedy and rough upbringing to bathe this biography in pathos. This is sophisticated filmmaking, but it creaks under the weight of a full two hours.
Half the movie is about Goldin's groundbreaking photography from New York's punk era and her work within the alternative scene. The other half is about Goldin, a former junkie herself, leading protests against the Sackler family and their art philanthropy. Poitras uses the 1980s AIDS epidemic as a bridge between those worlds. However, each of the stories here keeps getting interrupted. It's as if she has two (maybe even three) good hour-long films here, but the stories detract from and trip over each other too often. It's a simple lack of focus.
Poitras doesn't do herself any favors when she allows the film to be hijacked by an extended detour featuring activist artist David Wojnarowicz, a relentless AIDS activist who just a year ago was the subject of a much sharper documentary. His presence reminds us of how raw and insurgent both activism and filmmaking can be. By contrast, Poitras seems overly reverent toward someone who survived a wild youth and now is placated with a prim retrospective in old age.
Poitras takes on a lot here, and much of it is impressive. If only it congealed into something a little more urgent or compelling.
TAKE YOUR PILLS: XANAX (B+) - Here's another surprisingly solid documentary from Netflix (see also "Money Shot" about Pornhub), a level-headed look at anxiety in the modern digital world and how Big Pharma offers an enticing solution.
Director Blair Foster and writer Claire Gordon keep this at a healthy pace as they alternate between psychologists delving into the pluses and minuses of Xanax and regular folk who both sing the drug's praises but also warn of its deleterious effects. One man in particular conveys the horrors trying to withdraw after building up his tolerance for decades (suicidal thoughts can be a serious consequence). Another, journalist Scott Stossel, describes anxiety in terms of any other physical condition that must be regulated with well-regulated meds. One young woman discusses the shame that Xanax users face.
Foster and Gordon keep the science simple and straightforward. They explore the ills of a society driven to the edge by social media and other pressures. But they never settle for facile arguments or shoot at easy targets. This is not a hit job Pfizer or any other drug company. The film is thoughtful and considerate of all sides of the debate.
