Life Is Short: You're Killing Me

 

PAVEMENTS (C+/Incomplete)  - Call me pedantic, but I don't need much flash or contemplation out of a rock doc, and certainly not a notion wrapped in a concept, swaddled in an idea, nested in a scheme -- which is what Alex Ross Perry has put together, running longer than two hours, as an homage to the '90s indie darlings Pavement.

 

The oh-so-clever idea here is that Perry is not just assembling a documentary about the members of Pavement; rather, he is obscuring that typical documentary presentation with three other fictional fake-outs. He intersperses real footage with scripted material purporting to show the making of a biographical feature about the band (starring Joe Keery as singer Stephen Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as a Matador Records executive); the staging of a musical "Slanted! Enchanted!" interpreting the band's debut album; and a museum exhibit featuring artifacts from the band, either real or imagined, like Malkmus' lyric notebooks and drummer Gary Young's toenail clipping.

It's all ironic -- get it?! Because, like, the band was never that good or popular or deserving of exalted status or serious reconsideration, but wouldn't it be hilarious if we pretended that they were? Pavement's generation might have slung a lot of slacker shit back in the day, but what is this next level Perry's Millennial generation is playing at? Where's the nuance? Is a wink all you need?

Perry rotates his memes continuously, and in the absence of much actual footage of the band (then and now), you can quickly grow tired of the fake stories. It is not interesting to see Keery (yet another "Stranger Things" alum graduating to the big leagues) pretend that his method-acting obsession has him subsumed into the Malkmus "character," akin to Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan or Austin Butler as Elvis Presley. The whole biopic storyline could have been done better -- and clocked in under five minutes -- as a sketch on "The Ben Stiller Show," which splashed on Fox television around the time that Pavement broke out with "Slanted and Enchanted." And the musical mockumentary has nothing on Christopher Guest's exhausted oeuvre. A much more straightforward and satisfying documentary about the band's origins is the recent "Louder Than You Think," which focuses on the band's original drummer Gary Young but covers most of the group's origin story.

"Pavements" held our attention for only a little over an hour -- when the shtick became tiring and the band's heyday had faded (most notably with an atrocious performance at the fifth Lollapalooza). That was the year of the band's dud of an album, "Wowee Zowee," which I got to pan at the time in the Chicago Sun-Times. That was a year after Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the alt/indie/lo-fi scene was starting to curdle. (This comprehensive analysis of Pavement's top-40 songs per Uproxx notes that one of Guided By Voices' masterpieces, "Alien Lanes," came out a week before "Wowee Zowee," which didn't do it any favors.) To Perry's credit, he includes a clip of Beavis and Butt-head mercilessly mocking a "Wowee" track on MTV, urging the band members "to try harder." It wasn't an invalid criticism at the time.

You can make the argument that Perry ("Listen Up Philip," "Queen of Earth") hasn't made a great feature film in a decade. We walked out of his last music-based experiment, "Her Smell," after an hour, in 2019. He's still an interesting filmmaker, and his willingness to play with ideas and to experiment is admirable. But "Pavements" is a mess. If you didn't like the band members, this might be the movie you would make. Much of the time Perry seems to be mocking them as much as he is skewering music biopics or jukebox musicals. They seem to be good sports about the whole thing.

There are some insightful moments buried under the clutter. Tim Heidecker, who participates as a Matador executive, calls the band "the slacker Rolling Stones for the '90s" (to GBV's Beatles?). Another suggests that they were the band for people who thought "everything sucks and everything is stupid." It is fun to watch the band gather and rehearse for a 2022 reunion tour, straining to remember chords and lyrics, and looking back on their career. But digging out the nuggets here is a chore.

Perry's biggest crime is that nearly all of the archival footage he uses is from "Slow Century," a 2002 documentary shot and curated by Lance Bangs. Perry essentially grave-robs Bangs' film, slices and dices the footage, and then drags it out to 128 minutes by injecting his cute gimmicks. File this under "Life Is Short."

Title: Pavements

Running Time: 128 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  70 MIN

Portion Watched: 55%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 62 YRS, 6 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and listened to some early Pavement and started writing this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 2-1 (I'll probably check out the last hour someday; I just couldn't handle the wankery in one sitting. It's coming to Mubi next month.)

 

BONUS TRACKS

The band got together last month to promote the film. Here they are with "Harness Your Hopes," an old B-side that gained popularity in recent years due to an algorithm glitch at a streaming service:

 

Here is the 84-minute documentary "Slow Century," from 2002, available (for now) on YouTube. Check out a raggedy live version of "Cut Your Hair" at the 57-minute mark.

 

Beavis and Butt-head trashing "Rattled by the Rush":

 

Our title track, from the band's first release:

Life Is Short: Married to the Mob

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries can be found here.

It has been 20 years since Martin Scorsese has made a fresh, compelling feature film ("Bringing Out the Dead"). He returns to familiar ground now with what may be his final mafia movie, "The Irishman." Please, let it be not only his swan song but also the last one for the storied quartet of over-the-hill wise guys, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci.

The main problem is that the movie is dull. De Niro's main character, like De Niro himself, is not too bright or interesting. Who cares about some low-level hitman whose path will eventually intersect with Jimmy Hoffa's? And what is Pacino trying to capture here with his sloppy inconsistent "accent" as Hoffa (who was from Indiana).

Scorsese's use of de-aging CGI is not as distracting as feared, though it's odd to see 70-year-old men lurching around with young faces. (The signature obtrusive soundtrack is a sloppy pastiche of oldies, kicking off with an uninspiring "In the Still of the Night.") Pesci and Keitel manage to eke out a few memorable moments (in the first third, at least). Few actors other than Keitel can spit out a line like "Now is not the time to not say." Pesci is a quiet gem, and maybe that is because he has been semi-retired for 20 years and hasn't worn out his welcome. Ray Romano has a couple of fine understated scenes as a mob lawyer. Bobby Cannavale eats steak.

This thing of ours, the mob movie, has been played out, it's safe to say. If "Goodfellas" came along now, I probably wouldn't bother. The golden era began with "The Godfather" and ended with "The Sopranos," and both of those projects were about family, not about randomly "painting houses" (blowing out someone's brains on a wall). What's the point of "The Irishman"? An elegy for what once was? And why such a downer? There are movies that sound in a minor key and then there are risible dirges like this. And it all moves at a numbing snail's pace.

Shall we all move on, gentlemen?

Title: THE IRISHMAN
Running Time: 210 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  70 MIN
Portion Watched: 33%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 56 YRS, 11 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 78.7 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Watched a repeat of Weekend Update on "SNL" and went to bed.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 75-1

Life Is Short: Get On With It

 If you can't grab us by the one-third mark, you take your chances of getting the plug pulled on you. Here are two streamers that just went nowhere slowly.

Title: MAY DECEMBER

Running Time: 117 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  48 MIN

Portion Watched: 41%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 0 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Wrote this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 22-1

Comment: I gave this until past the one-third mark to allow Todd Haynes ("Carol") to introduce some sort of hook to keep me watching the fictionalized account of the Mary Kay LeTourneau story -- framed as a pompous actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visiting the disgraced former teacher, here called Gracie (Haynes regular Julianne Moore), in order to study for a movie about the woman's life. Very little happens as Portman's character methodically interviews the people in Gracie's life and observes the passive-aggressive family dynamics Gracie created with the person she seduced when he was 13 but is now 36, Joe (a dull Charles Melton).  This all plays out like the made-for-TV film that seems to be in the works in the movie. And the score is glaringly out of place. It kept reminding me of a cheesy '70s TV show or film -- and what do you know, it is a reworking of the score from the 1971 British film "The Go-Between." So I'm not crazy; Haynes is. Portman is all breathy affect, and there's just not enough attention paid to Gracie or Joe. I finally bailed when the middle third started with a visit to Gracie's lawyer and Gracie's son from her first marriage (a former classmate of Joe's), who is a complete asshole and whose band plays songs that 62-year-old Haynes thinks a Millennial would think are cool to cover: Peter Frampton's "Baby I Love Your Way" and Leon Russell's "Tight Rope." It wasn't worth going on and waiting for the inevitable sex scene between Elizabeth and Joe and whatever fallout, if any, results from it. That's not a spoiler, just an assumption.

 

 

Title: INVISIBLE LIFE (2019)

Running Time: 139 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  35 MIN

Portion Watched: 25%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 0 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Moved on to another title on Amazon Prime before the free month expired.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 14-1

Comment: Speaking of made-for-TV movies, this Amazon original is a melodramatic period piece about two sisters in Rio de Janeiro whose lives take different paths when they are teenagers back in the repressed 1950s and who apparently spend the rest of the movie headed toward some sort of reunion. I did not make it that far. This is about as melodramatic as a modern movie gets. The two girls (Julia Stockler and Carol Duarte) fall under the thumb of their macho working-class father. One of them runs off to Greece with a sailor but eventually returns home pregnant. But meantime, the other has gone off to pursue a music career (but not before getting date-raped on her wedding night). There is nothing compelling about their personalities. The storytelling is strictly by-the-numbers. It is not only initially set in the '50s but it has an old-fashioned sensibility about it that is downright corny. No offense to Karim Ainouz, but lush melodramas just don't fly these days.

BONUS TRACK

I've always loved "Tight Rope." But then, I'm 61 now and remember when it came out. My affinity for this and Cat Stevens' "Morning Is Broken" got me mocked a lot as a sensitive tween.

Life Is Short: That Baby Goat Won't Milk

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, here, here, here, here here, here and here.

Milking goats and riding bulls. This story of devout Christians living a boring life somewhere in Texas is as dreadfully boring as depicted in this semi-dramatic rendering of non-actors mumbling their way through the dull days. Cinema verite has never suffered so much.

This is an enticing description of the film: "When Sara meets Colby, a young amateur bull rider, she is thrown into crisis, questioning the only way of life she has ever known. ... 'Stop the Pounding Heart' is an exploration of adolescence, family and social values, gender roles, and religion in the rural American South."

That would be intriguing if true. Here, adolescent Sara and amateur bullrider Colby have hardly laid eyes on each other or had an actual conversation for more than the first half of the film. Instead, we get tedious, repetitive depictions of goat milking, milk selling, Bible reading, religious lectures, bullriding and practice bullriding. There are two scenes of hair combing.

I was waiting for something to sizzle here, but I couldn't even get a simmer. I'm growing more impatient with filmmakers trying to find something significant in the lives of teenagers. I understand low-fi realism, and I have the patience for a slack pace in search of subtle insight. And I'm sorry these humble, well-meaning folks are trapped in West Texas under the yoke of Jesus. But if I'm going to be a fly on the wall, somewhere, at some point, there needs to be some shit for me to land on.

Title: STOP THE POUNDING HEART
Running Time: 101 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  51 MIN
Portion Watched: 50.5%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 52 YRS, 11 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 76.4 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Put on the classical music and did chores
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 100-1
  

Life Is Short: Oh, for Two

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries can be found here. 

We love Claire Denis, and we have patience for her brand of storytelling (back to "Beau Travail" in 1999 and "White Material" in 2009). As recently as last year, we were enthralled by her relationship drama with Juliette Binoche, "Let the Sunshine In."  With her newest, "High Life," she re-teams with Binoche, who is subjected to a graphic sex scene with a machine, but unfortunately this one is a threesome, including Robert Pattinson. A foursome if you include the crying baby who dominates the first half hour of this story about criminals sent into space as guinea pigs with no hopes of returning to Earth.

Or something like that. Pattinson mumbles and the baby girl screams a lot as Denis takes forever to press "start." Very little happens. It's hard to care about Pattinson's character or the others who, we see from the opening scene, will be carelessly jettisoned from the space ship. This may eventually stumble into fascinating sci-fi territory and a philosophical exploration of human existence. We'll never know.

Title: HIGH LIFE

Running Time: 113 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  33 MIN

Portion Watched: 29%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 56 YRS, 10 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.7 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Read the news online.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 55-1

And now for something completely different ...

Maybe you like watching professional wrestling. I did when I was 9. I grew out of that phase. "Fighting With My Family" was a pretty quick and easy pull at the 20-minute mark. You might be able to survive this one if you enjoy the "sport" and get the references. An obese Nick Frost heads the family that is gaga about pro wrestling, dreams of WWE glory, and wears its vulgarities on its collective sleeves. 

God bless Stephen Merchant, who wrote and directed (and does a wacky turn as a prudish twit appalled by the family), but this is pretty thin gruel. Maybe things pick up when Vince Vaughn shows up (they usually do), but I immediately realized I was not the target audience here. 

Title: FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY

Running Time: 108 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  20 MIN

Portion Watched: 18.5%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 56 YRS, 10 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.7 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Watched another video.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 100-1

  

Now and Then: Parenting 101

 We catch up with the latest from Andrea Arnold and a short she made 22 years ago.

BIRD (A) - Andrea Arnold -- returning to her working-class roots and a coming-of-age theme she has patented -- comes into her own as a visual storyteller with this crushingly authentic tale of a week in the life of a 12-year-old girl navigating poverty and finding her path. 

Nykiya Adams stars as the adolescent Bailey, who is told that her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), barely an adult himself, plans to marry his girlfriend of three months, Kayleigh (Frankie Box), in exactly a week. Bug also has a teenage son that he had at 14 from another mother. That half-brother of Bailey's, Hunter (Jason Buda), is pining for his girlfriend, Moon, who will end up pregnant, pitting Hunter against her parents. 

But it is Bailey who is the center of the story. She is frustrated living in squalor with Bug along with Kayleigh and Kayleigh's toddler daughter, and she defiantly resists committing to wearing the ugly bridesmaid outfit picked out for her and impetuously cuts her beautiful locks short. She also meets an odd duck named Bird (Franz Rogowski), whose gentle qualities could be considered spiritual, if not magical. Early on he spends days perched on the roof of a nearby building, birdlike. 

Bailey is a caretaker -- she looks out for another set of three half-siblings that live nearby with their mother -- and an explorer who strives toward adult adventures. She also helps the naive Bird hunt down the parents who abandoned him when he was young. 

Arnold grounds this in the grimy world of the British underclass. Bug is a dreamer whose latest get-rich scheme is to sell the slime from a toad as a hallucinogenic. He discovers that the creature is more likely to produce the valuable slime if Bug plays mainstream music as opposed to the punk that he and his pals grew up on. It makes for a wonderful soundtrack, ranging from the urgent Fontaines D.C. to the elevator calm of Coldplay, with many singalongs featuring his bro pals. 

Arnold is in command of the visuals at every turn. You may shudder at how genuine the enveloping poverty and menace is. She invents unforgettable images -- whether it's Bird perched on that roof or Kayleigh curled up in bed assuring Bailey that she'll survive her first period or the handheld camera that races along with Bailey and Bug on their adventures. And then there is the fantasy and whimsy that comes out of nowhere, a stark contrast to Bailey's reality, as Bird eventually lives up to his name. 

It's hard to catalog all the elements that Arnold juggles and mixes into a moving narrative about human connection grounded in the natural and supernatural worlds. I wanted to knock a half-grade off for the fantasy elements, but I have to admit that Arnold is working at an elevated level. "Bird" is a wonder.

WASP (2003) (B+) - Zoe is a harried mother of four young children, including a baby, who yearns for a love life. is gruff and broke, prone to conflicts with the neighbors; several times her daughters complain that they haven't eaten a meal in days.

When Zoe (Natalie Press) meets an old beau, Dave (Danny Dyer), on the street, four little ones in tow, she lies and tells him that she is just babysitting, and she makes a date at the pub that night. She drags the kids along to the date, making them kill time outside while she flirts inside with Dave.

Twenty-six minutes is a perfect amount of time to play out this arc, as if it were an episode of a dark sitcom. The wasp of the title shows up to bookend the film. In the first instance, Zoe frees it out a window of their flat; the second appearance presents a bit of peril that brings events to the boiling point. 

Press is compelling as the overburdened still-too-young mum who cleans up super-cute for her date at the pub, and while you yearn along with her in sympathy, her recklessness is alarming, and you might tsk along with the neighbors. Arnold's camera nervously flits about her and the kids, jangling the viewers' nerves along with Zoe's. 

BONUS TRACKS

Let's delve into "Bird's" soundtrack. Here is "A Hero's Death" from Fontaines D.C.:

 

Coldplay's "Yellow" recurs during multiple karaoke scenes as a sort of anthem for the toad crew:

 

And, from a pivotal point near the film's climax, "Lucky Man" by the Verve:

Life Is Short / Soundtrack of Your Life

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

My kingdom for some subtitles. We might revisit the second half of "Sunset Song," Terence Davies' ode to Scottish husbandry if we had an easier way to decipher the thick Scottish brogues of its characters. (Apparently some theatrical releases do have subtitles.) Shooting for an epic flair in between "Gone With the Wind" and a John Mellencamp Farm Aid performance, Davies' dreary, plodding family saga has the dour demeanor of "The Turin Horse" mixed with the bleakness of "Meek's Cutoff."

We get a gruff old man who treats his wife, son and daughter like cattle, just an unredeeming bastard who gets a send-off he deserves. This story hangs on the narrow shoulders of that daughter, Chris, played by Agyness Deyn, who has the angular features and the blank stare of a muppet. It takes half the film for her to finally inherit the family farm in rural Scotland in the days leading up to World War I and get this narrative chugging along. Little seems at stake, and it feels not so much retro as embarrassingly old-fashioned, an overly reverent adaptation of a beloved novel.

Davies, the master behind the whispery period pieces like "Distant Voices, Still Lives" and "The Deep Blue Sea," is the wrong fit for this project. Rather than his trademarked urban grit, he traffics in sweeping landscapes, such as glistening lakes and undulating amber waves of grain. As Ignatiy Vishnevetsky puts it succinctly for the Onion AV Club: "The result is awkward, sometimes corny, occasionally boring, but still elegantly composed and peppered with grace notes of sensuality and despair." And he sat through the whole thing.

Title: SUNSET SONG
Running Time: 135 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  65 MIN
Portion Watched: 48%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 53 YRS, 8 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 76.4 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Walked home, stopping off for a slice and a beer.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 5-1 (with subtitles)

BONUS TRACK: SOUNDTRACK OF YOUR LIFE
An occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems. 

Date: 3 July 2016, 7 p.m.
Place: Central Avenue at Stanford, Albuquerque, NM
Song:  "Mendocino"
Artist: Sir Douglas Quintet
Irony Matrix: 4.6 out of 10
Comment: On the walk home from "Sunset Song," I stuck along the main drag, Route 66, and sitting at a traffic light was a dude on a chopper, lady on the back, blasting his stereo with this all-time favorite from Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and the boys. If I hadn't left the movie early, I would have never experienced that moment in time.


 

Life Is Short:

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries can be found here.

Title: IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

Running Time: 119 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 75 MIN

Portion Watched: 63%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 56 YRS, 1 MO.

Average Male American Lifespan: 76.7 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and eventually did a jigsaw puzzle.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 98-1

About two years ago, we reviewed "I Am Not Your Negro" by observing that, halfway through the documentary based on James Baldwin's essays, we wanted to leave the theater and go read one of Baldwin's books instead. Oh, was that painfully evident during the screening of "If Beale Street Could Talk," Baldwin's '70s tale of a young couple dealing with her pregnancy and his incarceration. And so we walked out of the theater after more than an hour of squirming.

Barry Jenkins, whose "Moonlight" was really good but not great, offers up Hallmark Channel fluff, one of the most cloying loves stories you can find. The giddy couple, Tish and Fonny (the physically perfect pair KiKi Layne and Stephan James), make tender first-time love and repeatedly -- repeatedly -- exchange vows of undying love. Supporting characters are paper cut-outs -- the rascally fathers who are going to run a scam to help out the lovebirds; the Jewish landlord in the slums; and the sneering racist cop who almost certainly is railroading Fonny on a rape charge. Regina King, as Tish's mother, gets zero to work with. Narrative twists sometimes don't quite make sense. A scene filled with trash talk stands out as vulgar but refreshing.

This fairytale storybook narration is for the birds. The pace is agonizingly slow. Maybe Baldwin's prose just doesn't translate to the big screen. Maybe Jenkins is just an old-fashioned softie who is out of step with reality. Either way, this treacly melodrama about two absolute angels falls disappointingly flat.

GRADE: C-minus

BONUS TRACK
One redeeming factor was a couple of the tracks on the soundtrack by Nicholas Britell. Here's the lovely "Eros":



... and "Encomium":


  

Young at Art

 

JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE (B+) - I've led a fairly charmed life, free from trauma or even much struggle. But one of the toughest years of my life fell during the lonely existence of junior year of high school -- brooding over how long it would take before I kissed a girl or had a close friend. At 17.

I was a sucker in the 1970s for sensitive singer-songwriters, like Jim Croce and Paul Simon. And I learned from watching this documentary about their cohort Janis Ian that her most famous song can still feel like a sock in the gut, stirring feelings that to this day bring a tear to my eye -- "At Seventeen." As one talking head here observes, just about any one of us has moments of darkness and doubt. No song has captured that human vulnerability like Ian's 1975 smash. It was from "At Seventeen" that I learned the truth.

 

I watched her perform it on the first episode of "Saturday Night Live," when I was about 13. and it hit home four years later, an anthem for social outcasts. But Ian, of course, was much more than that one song. 

She was an accomplished songwriter in her early teens, and had a hit in 1966 at 15 with "Society's Child," a sophisticated song about race relations ("She called you 'boy' instead of your name"). And this documentary certainly allows her story to unfold, mostly through archival footage and narration by Ian, now in her 70s, who is mostly heard and not seen in present form. We also visit with talking heads, including contemporaries Joan Baez, Lily Tomlin and Arlo Guthrie; fans like actors Laurie Metcalf and Jean Smart; and fatherly former producers, George "Shadow" Martin and Brooks Arthur, all of whom put Ian's long career in perspective.

Ian comes off as a dynamo and a survivor during her various life cycles and musical phases (which, unfortunately, included a disco-era collaboration with Giorgio Moroder). Her first adult relationship was with a willowy woman who broke her heart. She would then marry an abusive alcoholic, a brute who once held her at gunpoint, before late in life finding her true life partner. Her longtime accountant left her broke in the 1980s and in debt to the IRS. She eventually reinvented herself by moving to Nashville, where she rediscovered the roots of songwriting and collaboration, penning hits for others.

Throughout, her deeply personal compositions -- she would have a career revival and fully come out of the closet in 1992 with her dark, layered album "Breaking Silence -- provide the through-line from teenager to senior citizen. (She had to cut short a farewell tour a few years ago when she lost her singing voice.) There are joyful stories throughout. She recalls getting upstaged in the late '70s, at her peak, by her opening act, an up-and-coming Billy Joel, after which she vowed never to phone in a performance again. 

The main problem with the movie is the oppressive use of re-enactments. Director Varda Bar-Kar, who styles herself as an "activist" filmmaker, assembles an entire cast of players to portray Ian and others throughout her life, and at least half the movie involves scenes scuffed up to resemble archival footage. It is amateurish and distracting. It almost ruined the film for me at several points. It was only the power of the songs and the charming tenacity of Ian that got me through the nearly two-hour running time. 

The re-enactments are especially annoying because we rarely get to view a contemporary Ian -- only at the very beginning and very end. Otherwise, she is the unseen narrator. Maybe that was Ian's choice -- why distract from the story being told with repeated visuals of a 70-something white-haired woman. I'm not a fan of biopics, especially of musicians, but Bar-Kar certainly had the material that would justify scrapping the documentary and going full tilt into historical fiction; instead, she slaps together a mixture and does neither genre justice. (She also has a curious habit of pulling back from her talking-head interviews to show the microphones, cameras and fake backgrounds, taking the viewer out of the moment.)

It is to Ian's credit that her life story weathers this artistic assault. She displays a knack for withstanding life's challenges and making a meaningful impact with her music decade after decade. It unmoors her from the gritty '70s -- and those ugly-duckling teen years -- and fleshes out her catalog. In the end, she is the star of her own biopic.

BONUS TRACKS

Ian's breakthrough, at age 15, "Society's Child," got the stamp of approval on TV from Leonard Bernstein:

 

She was influenced by English folk songs, in the era of Fairport Convention. An example is "Tea and Sympathy":

 

Ian wrote "Stars," which we previously featured in this review of a documentary about Nina Simone, after being inspired by Don McLean's "Vincent," one of those perfect compositions:

 

"Stars" plays over the closing credits, in a version by Bettye Lavette, but I couldn't find a version online.

Ian always had a jazzy side to her. Here's is a duet with Mel Torme on her song "Silly Habits"

 

Here is a song Ian wrote for a Nashville waitress who thought her average life didn't have an impact on the world. It is the lovely "Some People's Lives" (which Bette Midler covered as the title track to her 1990 album):

Life Is Short: British Whimsy

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, here, here, here, here here, here, here and here.

This is a cutesy slice of cheese, a quaint but melancholy story of an old woman who parks the van she lives in at various places along a street in a haughty neighborhood of London in the early 1970s. Maggie Smith plays the bug-eyed eccentric. Alex Jennings (calling to mind a young Ronnie Corbett) portrays the playwright who is telling the story, Alan Bennett, and for some reason the writer appears in duplicate -- one who lives the life, one who chronicles it -- both played by Jennings.

If Bennett (through director Nicholas Hytner, nine years from "The History Boys") has a point to make, he doesn't adequately convey it in the first third of the movie. Alas, it was there that I bailed. Perhaps the soothing subtleties were lost on me, but this retro quirk don't work.

Title: THE LADY IN THE VAN
Running Time: 104 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  47 MIN
Portion Watched: 45%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 53 YRS, 5 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 76.4 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Blogged about movies and went to bed.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 40-1
 

Life Is Short

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, and here.

TWO THIS WEEK:

I couldn't handle "12 Years a Slave." I just couldn't sit in a theater with about a half dozen other middle-aged white people watching snarling white actors (an embarrassment for Pauls Giamatti and Dano) beat, denigrate and dehumanize black actors, all under the stylish gaze of a flashy British director.

Maybe I'm unable to properly empathize with people who don't look like me; perhaps I'm more comfortable with indie sagas of middle-class angst. Maybe I'm a coward, unable to face up to a painful, horrifying history. But I'm tired of wallowing in the old order -- at least the dramatizing of it. I'll watch a documentary about slavery. But I see no reason to put Chiwetel Ejiofor through such a spectacle.

Title: 12 YEARS A SLAVE
Running Time: 134 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 60 MIN
Portion Watched: 45%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 51 YRS, 1 MO.
Average Male American Lifespan: 81.2 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Sampled about 20 minutes  of two other films at the cineplex and then went home and watched a documentary
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: The first half: 100-1; the second half: 5-1.

***


As a fan of  Frederick Wiseman's documentaries, I was prepared to commit more than four hours to his latest fly-on-the-wall examination of life, this one at the University of California's hardcore liberal enclave. Unfortunately, his style is all wrong for this project -- at least what I saw of it.

Much of the first half hour is taken up by one class's droning discussion of poverty, where students are given minutes at a time to make their points, which are often, in the style of the young, poorly articulated and repetitive. A good chunk of the rest of the hour involves faculty and staff rambling on and on about the budget crisis at the school.

Perhaps I'm just a grumpy geezer, but I can't imagine wanting to sit in a classroom with earnest, naive college students purporting to solve the world's problems. This whole project cries out for editing. Massive editing. Maybe I'm missing a masterpiece, but I'll get on just fine.

Title: AT BERKELEY
Running Time: 244MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 60 MIN
Portion Watched: 24.6%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 51 YRS, 1 MO.
Average Male American Lifespan: 81.2 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Watched some of "Saturday Night Live" and went to bed
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 40-1

Nevertheless, She Persisted

 

I'M STILL HERE (A-minus) - It was a heavy weekend. There was a memorial service for a colleague and friend who died in November. And then there was Walter Salles' paean to perseverance, a drama drenched in Brazil's military dictatorship of the early 1970s, "I'm Still Here." 

 

It is an emotionally challenging movie, but it is full of heart and humanity. Based on a true story, it follows Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her five children after her husband, Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman in the days before a military coup six years earlier, is snatched by government thugs, never to return. It is Torres' movie from beginning to end, a performance so intense and moving that you often ache for both her and her character.

Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries") grounds this is an authentic family life in a seaside neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. The Paiva household buzzes with activity -- kids, a housekeeper, a dog and numerous friends, parties filled with food and fun. Record needles drop on vinyl, a 16 mm camera shudders as it captures memories, photographs from these happy days pile up. I was transported to the '70s watching the kids come and go, often barefoot on their way to or from the beach or a street soccer match. The first half hour is a master class in narrative table-setting, as Rubens and Eunice provide a family sanctuary that we know will be invaded and forever changed.

Meanwhile, street scenes and news reports cast a pall over the charmed life the family leads. The parents send their oldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage) to London with friends going into exile, and Eunice and Rubens hunker down, knowing that Rubens is a target. We are aware that he is surreptitiously volunteering as a drop-source for communications among the resistance. Not only does he get escorted out of this happy home, but a day or two later so do Eunice and another daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski). Few horror movies can match the banality of evil imposed on Eunice for two weeks in a small cell, subjected to the inquisitions of apparatchiks, finding only a sliver of humanity in the occasional apologies of a sympathetic but powerless guard.

The film then becomes a tale of bravery and endurance. Eunice will get unofficial word of Rubens' death, but she will pick and choose how she confides in each child, eventually uprooting them from that tainted dwelling and moving them to Sao Paulo. Eunice stays active in the resistance network, keeping Rubens' story alive. In a memorable scene, when posing the kids for a news photographer, she resists the journalists' request to appear stoic, and she insists that the kids smile for the photo, and they happily oblige. That bravado in the face of tyranny will become a rallying cry that will echo through the years as the family's rallying cries. Torres, throughout, is never short of riveting.

Salles jumps ahead 25 years, to the mid-'90s, when the democratic government, in its reconciliation phase, finally provides Eunice, now a lawyer and activist in her own right, with Rubens' death certificate. She is accompanied by her son, Marcello (Antonio Saboia as an adult; Guilherme Silveira as a spunky child), whose real-life memoirs formed the basis for the movie. The film then transitions to Eunice's late-in-life work; another jump, to 2014, will find her infirm and wracked by Alzheimer's, as her children and grandchildren carry on the tradition of joyful gatherings.

The film embarks on a journey that goes from heart-warming to heart-pounding to heart-breaking. It is a profound rumination on the determination of individuals in the face of authoritarianism, and you can't help but feel uneasy watching it in an era in which 20th-century fascism is returning to fashion. The only criticism is that Salles overstays his welcome here. He doesn't need the 18 minutes beyond the two-hour mark. It's as if he wasn't confident enough to end it in an earlier era and perhaps he was being too faithful to Marcello's memoirs. The scenes with subsequent generations lack the spark of 1970-71, and there are too many interchangeable characters by that point, dragging down the narrative. A quick flash-forward is all that was needed, and the diminishing returns are the only barrier between Salles and a masterpiece.

BONUS TRACKS

Salles' characters bask in the pop music of the day, and while there are understandable nods in dialogue to the Beatles in the wake of their breakup, he resists the lure of obvious needle-drops and instead celebrates some catchy Brazilian hits of the era. Here is "E Preciso Dar Um Jeito, Meu Amigo" by Erasmo Carlos:

 

Caetano Veloso is name-checked in the film along with John Lennon by Veroca, who is besotted with London. Here is "Baby" by Os Mutantes":

 

Tom Ze with "Jimmy, Renda-se":

 

And a rollicking Tex-Mex-style number, "A Festa Do Santo Reis" by Tim Maia:

Life Is Short: Loudmouth

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries can be found here. 

Title: WE WON'T GROW OLD TOGETHER
Running Time: 106 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  23MIN
Portion Watched: 22%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 54 YRS, 9 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 76.7 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Watched some classic Kubrick (watch this space)
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 100-1

The first few scenes of this 1972 French film by Maurice Pialat feature Jean (Jean Yanne) repeatedly belittling his young working-class girlfriend, Catherine (Marlene Jobert), her leaving him, but at the last minute returning to him. Jean also treats his wife, who has returned from a trip to Russia, like trash. This apparently is the entire plot of the film. Jean and Catherine are doomed. The blurb on the DVD jacket says that the film "is hard to look at but even harder to look away." (Time Out N.Y.)

Not really. It was really easy to turn off. After watching the boorish Jean go on yet another rant, making it clear to Catherine that she's a common bitch, I pulled the plug. There is little redeeming value here. Just the dregs of '70s French cinema.

Life Is Short: The New Slackers

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, here, here, here, here here and here.

Two immigrants, a young man and a woman (Axl and Vera), cross paths in a London flat with a transitory nature. Very little happens. The guy goes to a club and gets snockered a lot, as bad music plays. This is one of the worst soundtracks, much of it sounding as if the Shaggs and Ween formed a super-group to sing discordant discarded Stephen Malkmus demos. Some of the offenders: Plaster of Paris, (We Are) Performance, and Kimya Dawson.

The 20-year-olds are not interesting, especially when they are drunk or high. This is the sophomore effort from Alexis Dos Santos, a 40-year-old from Argentina, and she hasn't made a follow-up. This one's a mess. Maybe she is still regrouping, or perhaps she gave up.

Title: UNMADE BEDS (feature, 2009)
Running Time: 97 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 38 MIN (including some fast-forwarding)
Portion Watched: 39%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 52 YRS, 9 MO.
Average Male American Lifespan: 81.2 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Cleansed the palate with a PBS "Austin City Limits" with Sarah Jarosz (see below)
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 100-1.

BONUS TRACKS
First, some of the worst offenders on the "Unmade Beds" soundtrack:

Mary and the Boy, "Fuck Me":



Kimya Dawson, "Underground":



Connan Mockasin, "Hello View":




Plaster of Paris, "Beat a New Heartbeat":



 OK, that was enough. Here's the palate cleanser, the talented Sarah Jarosz with "Come On Up to the House":



Jarosz, "Over the Edge":


 

Life Is Short: July 2013

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." A previous entry is here. 

SOME FILMS require an inordinate amount of attention -- multiple characters, complicated historical touchstones, flashbacks, subtitles. "Il Divo" (2008) has all of that. This pulpy biopic of seven-time Italy leader Giulio Andreotti, a legend in the nation's post-war politics, is lavishly filmed and smartly acted.

But right around the one-third mark, I was adrift and hopelessly outmatched. In the first 10 minutes or so, writer/director Paolo Sorrentino (who more recently presented Sean Penn as a washed-up goth rocker) introduces about a dozen characters in succession, with screen titles providing their names, nicknames and titles. Andreotti himself, we're told, has about a half-dozen nicknames.

At that critical 38-minute mark, three of those men have a dense conversation about the inside politics of the day, and I realized that I didn't remember who they were, and I couldn't recall whether the Christian Democrats were Andreotti's party or not. Throw in some flashbacks and star Toni Sevillo's distracting makeup, and my breaking point was reached.

The film (at least the first third of it) is elegantly rendered, especially a scene of Il Divo striding regally across a vast black-and-white checkerboard entryway and encountering a fluffy white cat, which has one green eye and one blue eye. In other scenes, Sorrentino's camera swirls and swoops with flair. He has a touch like that of Martin Scorsese or Guy Ritchie.

I admit, I have my limitations when it comes to intellect and attention span. Alas, ciao, Il divo.

Title: IL DIVO
Running Time: 117 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 38 MIN
Portion Watched: 32%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 50 YRS, 7.5 MO.
Average Male American Lifespan: 81.2 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: "... And Justice for All" (1979) on THIS-TV
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 4-1

Life Is Short: Guardians of the Galaxy

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, here, here, here, here and here.

Maybe it's a knockout on the big screen. But on my TV this was a bunch of sloppy CGI with limp humor and a hero lacking charisma. The plot is convoluted, the good guys and bad guys hard to sort out. Characters often carry out the dreaded trope of fending off multiple attackers, even if they have futuristic lasers.

The Walkman gag was charming the first few times. The talking raccoon is quaint. Maybe the second half starts to make more sense and would evoke actual laughter. "The Lego Movie" was sharper and more clever. Here, I never found an opening. If this was intended as satire, it failed.

And I grew up with those songs. The soundtrack is lazy.

Title: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Running Time: 121 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 63 MIN (with some dozing before the end of the first hour)
Portion Watched: 52%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 52 YRS, 1 MO.
Average Male American Lifespan: 81.2 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Half-watched a bad Amazon sitcom and then headed off to bed.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 20-1.

Past Indiscretions

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Is Short: "Nymphomaniac: Part I"

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries are here , here, here, here and here.

There will be no "Nymphomaniac: Part II" for me. One-third of the first one was enough. I can't recall a more clunky, ridiculously written film in recent memory.

Lars von Trier's treatise on fly fishing and casual sex (he may really think they are the same thing) is difficult to watch, not so much for Charlotte Gainsbourg's bruised face as she recalls her rascally youth but for von Trier's hilarious intercutting of discussions of sex and fishing. And for his exploitation of young flesh.

I started fast-forwarding fairly early and pulled the plug after a ham-handed montage of sex scenes featuring skinny little Stacy Martin as young Joe. Would you believe the viewer must endure Christian Slater mumbling in a British accent (an extreme fast-forward reveals him thrashing about in a hospital bed)? Shia LeBeouf mopes around as the love of Joe's life.

This isn't daring or controversial; it's a joke.

Title: NYMPHOMANIAC: PART I
Running Time: 118 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 43 MIN
Portion Watched: 36%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 51 YRS, 7 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 81.2 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: The New York Times crossword puzzle.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 25-1. 
 

Americana Archives

 

MY BROTHER'S WEDDING (1983) (C) - This is the follow-up to Charles Burnett's obscure classic "Killer of Sheep." Whereas that first film (his UCLA thesis) used nonprofessional actors to underscore the travails of the working class, this follow-up is undercut by wooden performances and a script (by Burnett) that goes nowhere. 

Characters are difficult to follow, and there is no hint of a plot during the first half of the film, which follows Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) as he rejects his brother's lawyerly life of privilege for the grittier life of his buddy Soldier and the street life of Inglewood, Calif. It isn't until nearly the end that Pierce is faced with a dilemma, having to choose between those two worlds.

Most of this makes little sense. Minor characters pass through with no purpose other than to provide a little quirk. This is the kind of movie where multiple characters are told of the death of a central character and no one asks how or why that person died, like people do in real life. In that way, this exercise is more artificial than it would have been had Burnett hired professional actors and collaborated with another screenwriter. 

This film was withheld from distribution after its initial tepid review. We watched the director's cut (thankfully a half hour shorter than the original) that he released in 2007. A classic example of a sophomore slump.

THE EXILES (1961) (C) - More artifact than art, this fictionalized documentary about Native Americans in late '50s Los Angeles endures as a curiosity about a certain place and time. This is a day (more like a night) in the life of actual Angelenos, transplants from Arizona, as they smoke and booze and roughhouse. It was shot by Kent Mackenzie, himself a British exile, in 1958 and released three years later; he had previously made a short student film (included on the DVD) about the same neighborhood, Bunker Hill, which was undergoing urban renewal in the '50s.

The problem here is the artifice of the production. It seems almost entirely dubbed. While that is not unusual for the era and can be overcome (see "Spring Night, Summer Night"), it is a distraction here. Admirably restored at UCLA in 2008, this film still feels undercooked and unfocused. Mackenzie hopscotches between his subjects, goosing their situations and dialogue in an attempt to pump up the action or drama. Yet, he is left with scattershot stories and underdeveloped characters. It feels repetitive despite a slim 72-minute running time. The story of Yvonne, pregnant and disappointed in her mate's uncaring attitude, goes nowhere. The rest of the action is essentially a night of partying, ending in some whooping and braying on the hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles. Those howls feel unearned here.

BONUS TRACKS

"Wedding" features a couple of songs by our favorite melancholy crooner Johnny Ace, "Anymore" and "Never Let Me Go":

 

Life Is Short: The Twilight of Twee

 

We can mark for history the moment when we finally gave up on Wes Anderson. It was during the suggested intermission in his latest fragile confection, "Asteroid City," a movie without a plot or a point, a $25 million cupcake that struggles to make you laugh or care. It followed a really cute scene of a space alien interrupting a midnight astronomy event to steal the small boulder that gave the town its name. It featured one of the best sight gags of the movie. That, in turn, followed a turgid scene of genius adolescents playing a game of memorization, apparently so Anderson could show off.

Anderson made two-thirds of a mediocre movie last time out ("The French Dispatch"), and this one is all bad. I didn't think it would be possible for a director or a movie to make Steve Carell seem funnier than Jason Schwartzman. Even by Wes Anderson standards, this movie is fussier than you can imagine. He flattens backgrounds to make them look 2-D cartoonish -- as if they are flat backdrops, inspired by '50s postcards. He drops modern vending machines into the lobby of a 1955 inn. He incorporates a CGI roadrunner who beeps like in a Warner Bros. short. He assembles one of his trademark stellar casts, and no one looks like they are having a bit of fun. They speak robotically and draw attention to it. It looks like it was as painful to produce and take part in as it was to sit through.

Anderson nests this technicolor town (famous for being hit by an asteroid) into a black-and-white teleplay with some of the same actors and hosted by Bryan Cranston, channeling Rod Serling. I didn't care enough to figure out which story was nested inside which story, and I didn't stick around to find out. I walked out on Wes Anderson. I had zero qualms that I would be missing anything cool or entertaining.

I felt bad for the cast. Schwartzman's newly widowed dad talks through gritted teeth, even when he's not clenching a pipe. Scarlett Johansson mopes as a depressed starlet. Tom Hanks gets outplayed by little girls as the widower's father-in-law. People like Jeffrey Wright, Hope Davis, and Liev Schreiber stand around like furniture. The annoying kids talk a mile a minute. Jokes crash to the ground. Sight gags earn shrugs.

We might want to reconcile the fact that, while he has made some good movies since then, Anderson peaked about 20 years ago as the creator of clever little universes. The epitome of that is "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," from 2004, where the filmmaker committed to a unique vision. But that movie came with fully fleshed-out (if quirky) characters and a compelling narrative. And genuinely talented actors were allowed to bring it all to life.

All of that is stripped away in "Asteroid City," which is as joyless as a planet-threatening impact event.  This project is a devastating blow to the world of Wes Anderson, who might just have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Title: ASTEROID CITY

Running Time: 104 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  50 MIN

Portion Watched: 48%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 6 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Had a chat in the lobby and went for a swim.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 14-1

BONUS TRACK

A (final?) update on the ranking of Anderson's films.

1. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
2. The Royal Tenenbaums
3. Rushmore
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel
5. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
6. The Darjeeling Limited
7. Bottle Rocket
   
8. The French Dispatch
   
9. Moonrise Kingdom
10. Isle of Dogs
11. Asteroid City