Johann_Cat Reviews

The Regime (2024)

Stunning Acting and Direction

[8/10 · 24 April 2024]

I'll let viewers sort out their opinions of the script; I think as satire, this is still excellent, but a) it requires the attention that a good novel demands, and some concentrated commitments--"The Regime" isn't light entertainment, despite being absurd and often funny b) the plot takes some odd turns, especially near the end. Could the satire have been even better? Could some minor characters whom we root for have had bigger, more blossoming and significant roles? (I think so). If this film is your taste, find "Land of the Blind" (2006), also a dark, dystopic satire of a future European dictatorship with Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland as political prisoners and Tom Hollander as the bent-twit, narcissistic autocrat. For fun, measure that film's twists and climax against this film's. Anyway: the acting in Regime is not just good, it is "heavyweight champion on a crisp, fun day of excellence" good. That Kate Winslet imbues such an on-paper silly, flimsy, flighty character with such vitality, rigidity, complexity and weird humor is masterful, and the supporting cast is often matching her, as though she is the first violin in an excellent orchestra. The directing and cinematography are also a cut above most miniseries nowadays. Absolutely worth seeing, but, like some odd beverages, may be too odd a mixture of the bitter and the sweet for some.

Dream Scenario (2023)

As if the NBA began rating Air-balls

[4/10 · 1 April 2024]

Humor in our moment may be dominated, as this movie is, by cringe-lines. "Need a laugh? Let's go for the cringe-it's the soup de jour in 2024," one imagines directors and writers thinking. I'm not sure how we got here (I find the development largely uninteresting and some large scale irresponsibility for keeping the airship of sanity, fueled by laughter, afloat) but one theory I have is that cringe humor is based on the image of someone failing to meet a known standard of comportment, usually social. The nattily dressed architect sounds a 60dB three-second raspberry of passed gas during the explanation of his cathedral model. Etc. The ineptitude or loss of control is so obvious that a) we cringe b) a ten year old could offer a fairly thorough analysis of how the effect was generated. The obviousness is re-imagined as spiritual comfort. Humor is more complicated than this, and usually requires other ironies to come into play than social embarrassment-it can show that we are technically sophisticated but spiritually or interpersonally far from expert, e.g.

So why are we being shown, as in this movie, scene upon dull scene of cringe effects? My theory is that movie makers are so embarrassed at not explaining why the west is two clicks of the dial from fascism again, or what capitalism has done to peoples' imaginations and to our educations (the trends are related, I think), that in their own shame, befuddlement, and half-conscious despair, the industry has defaulted to cringe humor. Yeh, that's grandiose and vague, but I wanted to risk some large explanation for this trend, because I haven't seen one yet.

What is non-debatable is that this film does not simply leave its mixed-genre (it's a comediorror! Its a horroredy!) labels unfulfilled, it willfully fails at them by using cringe scenes. This is as though the NBA began to score air balls and gave extra points if the ball bounced after the missed goal and hit the edge of the backboard. "That was a lofty and poetic air ball, Jim." "Yes, Robert, Dallas really has really brought its helium vision tonight. Those balls just don't get near the goal. Magnificent."

Ticket to Write: The Golden Age of Rock Music Journalism (2016)

Edited by Dogs on Dexedrine?

[4/10 · 28 March 2024]

This amateurish (not in a good way) docu still gathers an impressive mix of odd and famous rock writers, many from Creem magazine and other "underground" mags from the 60s and 70s, but has distracted and historically incoherent production values. It is a bad sign that a documentary about music writers who all had fierce criteria for "authentic" rocknroll has a chronic background of generic, instrumental guitar rock of the sort that high school football videos or a corporate "hold please" might have used in 1988. Somehow the director/ editor (this seems to be the academic exercise of one person with novice computer skills) gives the impression of trying to learn rock history on the job, as though they got this commission from another planet, because they miss any opportunity for narrative connections or thematic momentum. The result is mind-bogglingly haphazard, with dozens of jarringly inapt transitions and baffling combinations of image (a picture the band Television, the most ornate and baroque the 70s New York bands) and claim ("things were getting back to teen-aged simplicity!"). A promising narrative thread will be introduced by one of the rock writers and in the next moment another writer, obviously in the middle of a wildly different conversation, relates a completely new topic. Seconds later, a jump cut to a different writer saying something about having drinks with the Faces backstage in 1973. Cut! And "we'd play 'Metal Machine Music' as crowd noise to our office trashcan paper-wad basketball." Cut! Images of Creem covers from 1982 with the insufferable "please hold" generic instrumental rock chugging in the background behind all of this, as indifferent to history as a coma victim, oblivious to mood or nuance, the things that made Lester Bangs get up and do speed to greet the day. What do we learn of him? And "Lester Bangs was oft-photographed and a real star himself!" This platitude is repeated a half-dozen times without the substance of his work, or any other writer's soul or style, coming into focus. Most of these writers were, intermittently at least, witty, terse, and clever *writers*--nothing of this comes through--rather, they were fans who got satellite status around stars--an evanescent, unimportant, and often rejected part of the "writing about music" job. The sad part is some of these critics, gamely set up for interviews (the logistics of this were impressive--the film's budget must have been 85% travel expenses?), are now literally grey-bearded and in one bewildering case, toothless (!), and may not be around for long, so the opportunity to interview them was often squandered in this collage of fragments that could be bested by someone with modest interest in the history of rock writing surfing Youtube improvisationally for an hour. A mystifyingly wasted opportunity.

In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 (2022)

More backstage Tour than Band-history

[6/10 · 22 March 2024]

This promises to be much more (a clever history) than it is (a fawning backstage tour of a current show), and had opportunities to be a) a deeper history of the band and b) wittier. Anybody who has watched Robert Fripp's home videos (of him and his wife covering a wild assortment of rock and pop tunes) knows he has a sense of humor, likes rocknroll music, and can be quite amusing and self-deprecating. The documentary focuses (much of this is connoted by editorial choices, as we frequently see Fripp walking away to do something more important) on the peeved, obsessive Latin-professor aspect of Fripp, which, while real, isn't the whole enchilada, and without being complicated by the rest of his experience and personality, the impatient-professor schtick is interesting for about 70 seconds. The film-makers lined up most of the surviving members of King Crimson from the last 50 years and got them narrate about 1.2% of their experience of the history of the band. The film spends more time lavishing its camera's eye on, I am not kidding, roadies and tech-men tinkering with equipment backstage for a current show, as they field inane questions, and mutter responses as good-naturedly as they can in the circumstances, rather than on any sort of evolutionary (or crisis-based) story of the bands called "King Crimson." About 30% of the film is such backstage or empty-house tedium--this doesn't develop into a concert movie. So there are at least two main categories of "lost opportunity" here: this isn't a concert film; this isn't a history of the band. Yet the film-makers also lined up, among many members of Crimson over the years, Ian McDonald and Michael Giles, the original reed and drum section of the band--their appearance gives hope that origins and musical anecdotes (how was tune that gave the film its title made, e.g.?) are forthcoming. McDonald and Giles may not have another opportunity to narrate the early history of the band. They left the band after its first two Lps to make a funky, major-key (in contrast to Crimson's dark heft) record (still famous; its frequently sampled in hip-hop), a classic of its 1970-moment, and unmentioned here. Pete Sinfield, the band's original lyricist is on camera for about 30 seconds and obviously could have been a trove of witty history; after a funny note on Greg Lake (the band's original singer, pre-"Emerson, Lake, and Palmer") as a young man (the only mention of Lake in the whole documentary, though the band's current singer was obviously hired largely because he can do a spot-on Lake imitation), Sinfield vanishes; John Wetton, the singer and bassist of what I think is the most interesting (mid-1970s) version of the band, is not mentioned. Bill Bruford and Adrian Belew (former long-term band members), are, gratefully, allowed to speak at some intelligent length, but again, in bits that convey the quality of working with Fripp, not how their versions of the band came together. I have yet to see any film that explained how this band evolved, somewhat like a transformer toy, throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In 1972, e.g., there were two completely different versions of Crimson (one in the spring, on tour in the USA, and another, the Bruford-Wetton version, that toured England in the fall) of the band, both quite good, and both entirely different, though they played many (not all) of the same songs. The documentary lavished too much attention on the stage-preparations of this current, grandiose cover-band version of Crimson (a three-drummer, + keyboard, + etc. Version of the band) as though it were a church of Fripp service, while it could have narrated more history about each significant version of the band.

The Velvet Underground (2021)

16mm on Speed Made Me Long for a Ken Burns Version

[4/10 · 28 November 2023]

What may most recommend this are the photos and film clips that are shown through the film, but many of the stills are shown only in "hectic collage" mode, at about 16 images a second, each frame a *different* photo. One can pause the show to study a photo, but that shouldn't be a requirement for enjoying this film. It nearly is, as the editing is chaotic and filled with vertiginous, bad ferry-ride weaving and bobbing. After awhile, I began to get the sense that the filmmakers hoped this technique could stand for some effect they hoped the band had but couldn't define. No, it doesn't work. It adds hectic busyness to a dull vision of the band. The emphasis on the fusion of Cale's violin music and Reed's early-60s rocknroll in the first 30 minutes of this is the best part of this. Parts of this do the band no favors; it tries to argue they were too cool for California and that they "hated" the Mothers (Frank Zappa's band, stable mates on MGM and on the same bill with VU in some --doubtless odd, probably interesting-- California shows) because they were sunshiney "hippies" (this rumor is delivered second hand). Huh? Did this person ever actually meet Frank Zappa, let alone listen to his music? Ironic self-awareness is not an inherent grace of the film: within minutes of this put down of "California music," the documentary is tenderly recounting how the band shifted from Cale's weirdness to . . . The Cale-less VU's slightly treacly, atonal versions of pop songs in their middle period, like "After Hours." Yeh! Out-of-key singing! So hip and real, man, unlike those Californians, who, uh, nail 4-part harmony. All to say that the film's attempt to cast this band as cooler than their peers is bound to fail, and a mission only a 16 year old fanatic could endorse, as it depends on narrow, cramped views of music. The sea-sickness inducing (for me this is not a metaphor) editing made me wonder what the classic Ken Burns technique of slow-pans across still photos and very patiently developed transitions could have done for this, and if a slower, broader consideration of the Cale/ Warhol VU period could have sufficed to better display the New York culture around VU in 1966-67. Speeding up 16mm film (literally a technique here) and putting it in a blender with a bunch of band stills did not work.

Passages (2023)

An Implausible and Self-parodic Melodrama

[5/10 · 7 October 2023]

This movie's faint appeal as a post-modern take on a love triangle seems exhausted by the implausible image, featured in many promotional cards, of Franz Rogowski's sneering Tomas jazz-snuggling up to Adèle Exarchopoulos' Agathe on a dance floor. Tantalizing, but no, the film does not explain how this pair makes any chemical, emotional, or even symbolic sense. Franz Rogowski has a convincing restraint and charisma as an outsider in films like "In den Gängen" or "Transit," but here, cast in a sexual melodrama (between characters Tomas, Martin, and Agathe) as a self-obsessed bourgeois, he acts as if he were a guy who manages a cable company by day and was hired for this film because of his eyebrows. That said, Rogowski has little in the script to work with: why any character should care about this selfish oaf is head-ache-making opaque. The script tempts Rogowski into an egotistical flatness, his voice a monotonous whine, whose musical equivalent is a beginner's huffing atonally on a saxophone, alone. The character knows no boundaries. Part demon-child, part mindless fungus, he one minute halts ordinary conversations imperiously and the next shows up uninvited (opening doors himself), babbling needy demands in somebody's dwelling or workplace. Aiming for the top edge of the goal, the filmmakers instead deliver Tomas as a kind of compound of all the silly-shirt, night-scene poseurs in the history of Saturday Night Live, going back to Dan Ackroyd's "wild and crazy guy," Bill Hader's Stefon, and the Roxbury Guys of Ferrell and Kattan. However, Tomas's nylon tank and midriff-baring macrame-top collection beats all of these SNL figures in a race to "ridiculous." We are supposed to believe that a woman, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, who recalls Monica Vitti and Anna Karina in her voluptuous elegance, toughness, and vulnerability, is obsessed with a sniveling, narcissistic twit, a dying fire-pit of acrid banalities. Unsurprisingly, after about five minutes of film time, Exarchopoulos resonates an odd fatigue incompatible with Agathe's allegedly incandescent fascination with Tomas, and she betrays a glowing concern that the actress, not the character, is in a bad dream: this movie. Ben Whishaw as Martin is such a maestro that he is the only one of the three (in other work excellent) principal actors who can bring himself fully to the script with a believable, developing, pained realization, but the film at large is so full of abrupt, nonsensical leaps of mood and commitment that the whole exercise could be a workshop in which the players were challenged to vitalize premises that make scant sense. Another film that much more convincingly allows the wonderful Adèle Exarchopoulos to play on a plane of "nothing left to lose" is Rien à foutre (2021).

She Said (2022)

Technically Stilted, Pacing Awkward

[5/10 · 17 September 2023]

I was fully prepared to be swept along by a painful and dramatic docudrama, but the film often pushed me into an uncomfortable awareness of its artifice. This movie seemed stilted and uncomfortable--with its script, its actors, and even the technology of filmmaking, somewhat in the way that early talkies often had strained, wooden performances and mixed new awkwardness with old melodrama. The direction of the film, its awkward shifts between busy city-scenes and stiff shots of people talking at tables, as well as the pace of the drama and dialogue, betrayed a technical uncertainty about how to dramatize a story that would seem hard to mess up .

In sympathy with its tragic, factual basis, most reviews of this film describe an experience that could be readerly; the facts of this are indeed traumatic, dramatic, and affecting--but the film is not. As a film, the cinematography tends to swing, as if in a beginners' experiment in how to create drama, between very wide establishing shots that are meant to suggest that "the story is big" and that "much of society is careless" and "the key figures, the journalists, labor in a vast and indifferent landscape," etc and tedious office scenes. One such early contrast of the "vast" and the "confined" might work, but as a recurrent conceit in the film, it becomes tedious and drama-diffusing; these contrasts of the big and small didn't make me care more about the figures at the heart of this; the tactic felt crass. The script also was filled with clichés of family life meant to emphasize the personal, empathetic sides of these characters (as they must be stoical and resilient in their work) in ways that seemed so stale and second-hand, as if the conceits were dictated by AI. Sometimes the actors themselves seemed to struggle with the frozen-dinner conventionalities of the script.

On top of the clichéd nature of the storytelling and cinematography, the actors' interactions often seemed drugged and unreal. I think this "difficult pace" was a directorial choice to emphasize that the full scope of Weinstein's abuse was hard to reveal, for a variety of systemic, sometimes violent, defense systems in Hollywood and beyond. True, but ironically, this violence and its system wasn't made vivid, and its burden doesn't mean that the pace of conversations should sound like the actors, or the director setting the pace, are woolly from an accidental afternoon sleep or, at times, on barbiturates. The drama of this story that this movie frequently muffles in its artificiality is to the veritable fore in Ronan Farrow's podcast "Catch and Kill."

White House Plumbers (2023)

Worth Seeing for Justin Theroux; Dissonant mix of Melodrama and Silliness

[6/10 · 27 May 2023]

Some reviewers have claimed this film is redundant, but I don't think I have seen a depiction of the "plumbers" (the White House code for the actual culprits of the Watergate Hotel offices of the 1972 Democratic National Committee break-in) in anything like this detail. But like many miniseries that stretch over many hours, the show experiments with broad changes in style; here we have willy-nilly shifts from family melodrama to broad-stroke satire. I think the series would be stronger if it committed to satire. The actor who seems to get it is Justin Theroux, whose Liddy is close to spot-on as an imitation (one only has to watch interviews with him) but has an added Tabasco-like zing of amplified absurdity that lifts the performance into a larger comment on the history of paranoiac conservatism at that time. Hunt, meanwhile, was a fascinating, flawed figure in reality. Watergate was not the first comedy of errors for this figure with delusions of spy grandeur. His obituary in the New York Times characterizes him as at once "intelligent, erudite, suave" yet was also described by Samuel F. Hart, a retired United States ambassador who first met him in Uruguay in the 1950s, as "totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him." This character is ripe for an understated, slow-burning satire. Instead, we have Woody Harrelson as Hunt, and he transforms the demur, deluded New York State native (and Brown U graduate) into what appears to be a frantic, flustered, renegade Texan (?! Huh?) who often shifts into one of Harrelson's oddest acting clichés: simultaneously clinching and jutting his lower jaw and trying to shout through the resultant mask, like Foghorn Leghorn with a muzzle. This schtick would be dialed back as "too hokey" in a community theater version of this script. "White House Plumbers" is worth seeing for its take on history, and especially for Theorux's great turn as Liddy--he knows how to balance satire and straight documentary styles--but on the whole, the incoherent tonal oscillations between melodrama (especially in the Hunt house) and satire, and Harrelson's unbelievably tense, histrionic rendering of Hunt, utterly unlike the man himself (observe him in the Watergate hearings, e.g.) debase the promise of this take on the Watergate burglary.

The Curse of Edgar (2013 TV Movie)

Great Cast; Weird, Filtered-seeming Script

[5/10 · 10 May 2023]

I note this movie, despite starring Brian Cox, is not available for streaming in the USA in 2023, and a DVD needs to be ordered from France (this is how I got it). Is it restricted from some major markets for some political reasons? This film's script itself plays out as if under the over-sight or governance of some outside parties with legal power who told Dugain what he could say in this film about Hoover. That is, despite its hints at Hoover's general nefariousness and odd contradictions, the movie lacks a real, vivid argument about Hoover's antagonistic relationship to the Kennedys and so no real, vivid drama or tragedy comes into focus. We're left with a portrait of Hoover as a crank and impediment, but not as an major player in several calamities--though it implies that he was. I still prefer Cox's believable characterization of Hoover to the squinting mask that DiCaprio affects in his stagey attempt at embodying Hoover in the even more tepid and inconclusive Clint Eastwood-directed bio-pic "Edgar." Stay til the end of Dugain's alternative, because the acting in this is quite good, but you may, like me, puzzle over the punches pulled--the whole thing lacks the focus, drama, and power that its outline promises. If somebody didn't tell them what they could-and-couldn't say, it feels as if the script were edited by a redactor's pen.

Halston (2021)

Fascinating History of a Designer of Floor-Mopping Togas

[7/10 · 19 October 2022]

Kudos to the actors: Ewan McGregor makes this self-doubting, vulnerable designer utterly believable and sympathetic while Krysta Rodriguez steals the film as his #1 cheerleader and advocate, a sensitive and ebullient Liza Minelli. Absolutely worth seeing, but if you actually like clothes, be warned: this dramatizes a floppy, puzzling period in women's fashion. What I most learned from this is that Halston helped usher in a bleak period of baggy, ill-fitting women's wear and evening dresses that looked like (and many scenes of design-in-progress prove this theory) bed-sheet sized pieces of fabric turned into dresses with a neck slot chopped by a pair of scissors with little attention to the woman's body below the sternum--and certainly not the legs in any artful way. The real innovator in the room is Halston's speed-freak assistant who designed, at the poignant end of the Woodstock period (i.e., c. 1972), some great, psychedelic dye-prints for a few of these toga-like dresses. This thus could have been called "The Emperor's New Dress Designer." I have a near complete blind spot for this guy's aesthetic, though I like clothes of the previous decade, to which Halston's heyday called a over-draped, billowing halt.

--- Unrelated criticism: this film, among other mid-20th century docudramas, has characters smoke in a chronic obsessiveness that makes Humphrey Bogart look like a man who successfully cut down. McGregor's version of Halston literally lights a cigarette every 90 seconds for many stretches of this film, and usually has a freshly lit, 95% complete cig (rarely half-smoked) in his face (the 95% cig is a sure sign of the *stage prop cig*, analogous to the fake eyeglasses that were common in old TV shows ["they won't notice!"] that were made of flat, clear glass). This finicky obsession with smoke and, especially, the lighting of cigs, is far too repetitious to be a key to his character, but is a distraction that short-circuits other, more meaningful acting and directing choices. Some people c. 1970 smoked a lot; we get it. What was he about? It is ironic that no bio-pic made c. 1970 would fret so much about whether the protagonist begins every scene with a freshly lit cig.

Endeavour: Striker (2021) Season 8, Episode 1

Did they lose their Tech Budget?

[5/10 · 20 June 2022]

Something strange happened to this show in a technical/ aesthetic sense that is visible almost immediately; the effect was so striking I had to wonder if it were somehow intentional. That is, the interior lighting now looks like a soap opera from the 1970s--with many odd patches of brightness, and the overall contrast looking flat and with the garish "verité" of a consumer-level digital camera's video. The resolution is high, but the color tone and white balance are very like pre-digital video-tape. Also all cameras seem hand-held; this could almost be a second crew's work with phones filming what the main crew did.

Others here note other serious lapses in staging (the football stadium is tiny and barely populated; some police uniform insignia are upside-down, etc.) that suggest this was done on a showstring and/or with a minimalist crew. Very strange, uncanny visual tone to this, based on my experience of other seasons.

Inventing Anna (2022)

Was the Culprit Narcissist a Co-Producer/ Editor?

[3/10 · 22 February 2022]

Julia Garner is remarkable, balancing dark satire and grim malignance, but everything else about this is degenerate and confused. It features histrionic acting, a fantastically over-written, incoherent script, chronic dance music meant to animate ice-stiff banality in a film with no dancing, and a fundamental refusal to judge a character who is clearly, in many scenes, dangerous and delusional. Thus the film's dance music seems to pump the irony that the movie is inflating the speculative value of this shady, endlessly manipulative goof: this representation works for Delvey herself. It just picked up her con-artist tab. Did the directors start to use aromatic drugs as this went on? Especially in its poison-long final third, the film shifts into a reading of the protagonist that sounds like an 8th grader's platitudes about the Great Gatsby and "the American Dream" based not on a reading of the novel but of an on-line summary that the sleepless 13-year old essayist misunderstood (that is, that Delvey is just an idealistic go-getter--what is to deny in such enthusiasms?). The film's incidental agenda to depict men as some variation of nebbishy, brutal, credulous, and silly (change the order to define any man in the miniseries; e.g., x = "a brutally silly, credulous nebbish" or y = "a nebbishly silly, credulous brute") is a tedious distraction that further dilutes the drama of this story. The story behind this travesty could have have made for a great 2 hour movie with Garner as the star and almost no other bug-eyed, foggy hysteric in this cast. A waste of time.

The Meaning of Hitler (2020)

Commits the Sins it Would Save us From

[4/10 · 29 December 2021]

This is an odd enterprise that seems to be an endless series of prefaces without a main analytical claim or narrative. Initially, it purports to shine new light on the relevance of the myth of Hitler and the fissures or wounds in a social culture that make fascism seductive for many people, but despite lining up some famous historians, these experts are never allowed to shape a coherent argument or narrative, but are often edited to speak in gnomic, mysterious sound-bytes that the documentarians use to launch, free-associationally, to literally some other person, place and a new set of observations. The documentary also clutters its path with the voguish but already tedious convention of lavishing screen-time on the clap-board apparatus of each interview. This is telling, as the documentary is more obsessed with its appearances and its mechanics than in being insightful or explanatory. It changes locales and interviewees about every 90 seconds, yet the film spends over ten minutes with a dull, clownish anti-historian notorious for claiming Hitler had no role in the Holocaust and was a "friend to the Jews." The documentarian says "how could we make a documentary about Hitler and not talk to" this guy? Uh, they could/ should have, and stuck to their original claim. Due to the experts it does allow to speak, the whole film is still interesting, but it tantalizes and torments more than it informs and spends too much time recycling known iconography, film clips (I bet you never saw clips of "Triumph of the Will" before), and familiar biographical and historical material, thus evading the promise of the film, which was to explain the appeal of fascism, which is now tormenting the West again, as many politicians in the first decade after the war were terrified it eventually might. They merely needed to live long enough to see a culture filled with apocalypse-courting, nationalistic, conspiracy-minded, half-educated truth-deniers with cheap, online broadcast opportunities. The moment 1940s experts feared is here. How our moment apparently resembles the 1930s in key ways, despite obvious economic differences, and how and why Hitler, a failure at everything but hypnotizing a nation of 80 million people into joining him in a suicide pact, appealed to Germans in the 1930s, is not made a coherent argument. The best thing the film may do is advertise the 1978 book by Sebastian Haffner, "The Meaning of Hitler"--that is a compact book-length argument. Though the film borrows some chapter titles from the book, it doesn't really reveal Haffner's analysis.

Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel (2004)

Amazing Access to Parsons' Past; Raw Cinema

[7/10 · 24 October 2021]

This film is a wealth of weird and sad detail narrated directly into the camera by Parsons' then (c. 2004) still-living relatives and cohorts, including Chris Hillman, Emmy Lou Harris, and Parson's siblings, managers, and, starring prominently *his academic advisor (a Baptist minister) from his single year at Harvard* ?!, etc.

Parsons was set to be the heir to a citrus plantation in Florida, and his family had tensions out of F. Scott Fitzgerald: a patrician, strong-but-doomed mother, and two fathers who were "merely" middle class and who fought to fit in to the mother's Florida oligarchy. Much of this story is handled in a way that is crushingly sad and strange but at times also funny and sweet, apparently like Parsons himself, especially onstage. But the movie itself is raw photographically and edited in a way that that makes Parsons' family history (his natural father died when he was 12; mom remarried; his mother died, the stepfather remarried; there are a half-sister and a cousin who complicate the narration) a bit more confusing than it needed to be. An interesting artifact, as its assembly seems like local news footage, intuitively assembled, thus raw; certain more elegant transitions, labeling and curating techniques for managing large casts of interviewees seem to have become standard documentary practice, even schooled, since this was made. Maybe any roughness, jumble, or loose ends in this are apt to the subject.

RKO 281 (1999 TV Movie)

Great Script, Cast; Rec.: Turn off the Color

[9/10 · 6 October 2021]

Like a number of people, I followed a trail here after watching "Mank"--which is not a bad picture, but which is myopic, strained, and uncertainly (not creatively) jumbled with flashbacks. "Mank" makes Welles a loon-sidekick in the making of Citizen Kane, the onion in an omelet made by Mank in a sick bed--a bed (a constant conceit of "Mank") which gratefully doesn't appear in this version. This little movie, RKO281 is about the whole genesis of Kane and is ten times the film "Mank" is--the cast and script are terrific here. The biggest surprise is how good Liev Schreiber is as Welles. He's not just good, he's excellent, especially in getting at the mix of incandescent creativity, slightly self-parodic grandiosity, and uncertainty that Welles had. The whole cast has a compelling chemistry, especially in dyadic scenes (Welles/ Mankiewicz--far more believable here than in "Mank;" Welles/ Hearst; Welles/ RKO head George Schaefer (Roy Scheider is excellent) ; Welles/ Carole Lombard all have great scenes together). Everybody is intense, in a confident groove of credibility, and with scarcely a whiff of exaggeration. (I recommend turning off the color and turning up the contrast a bit--the movie looks/ feels far better in black and white than in its original, gauzy, red-heavy 90s color; the basic photography is excellent and tolerates this change to B & W very well.) This movie will also tell you key things about W. R. Hearst that the 2021 Hearst docu buffs out of its sketchy, sanitized account of WRH's responses to the film "Citizen Kane."

Dirty John (2018–2020)

Good Acting; Script Padded & Tone Deaf to Income Scales

[6/10 · 12 September 2021]

The acting in this is good, but unlike the great first season on the con man John Meehan, which had an uncanny pressure cooker of suspense until the last episode, this has the meandering-in-flash-backs at taffy-stretching pacing common to many docudrama mini-series. The character development is good, but not always convincingly handled. Betty, in early scenes about the end of the marriage, is not just frazzled, but maniacal and violent. Peet is great at a believable level of crazy in these scenes. After the murder, her character is cheery, confident, and like somebody in a rom com about a realty lawsuit. Maybe this is accurate, but her character's abrupt descent into, and re-emergence from, homicidal mania seems too fantastic and easy. Her husband, played by Slater, is eventually fully Mephistopheles-like in his smirking mask of satisfaction and his chilly fantasies of control, most fully undergirded by state laws. He is monotonous & dull, but believable. One oddity deserves scrutiny, though: when Betty and Don get a property settlement in court, the lighting, staging, music, etc treat this as an impoverishing, bafflingly cruel event for Betty. It concludes with the melodramatic touch of Betty alone in the court room as someone turns off the overhead fluorescents. Dark, sad music. She must be destitute and is headed for custodial work to make ends meet, apparently. Uh, no. The settlement, in 1989, was significantly less (40% less) than her requested support of 28k per month. She got 16k per month. The series plays this as though she got $160 per month from her husband, whom she had supported economically in his graduate training, and for whom she had suffered enormously to bear four children--she was owed, I do not dispute. The husband is guilty of many manipulative cruelties, but the support offer approved by the court, let's be clear, was for $16k *per month* in 1989. That's 35k/ month in today's money, or more than the annual income that the California minimum wage would provide *now*. This series isn't unusual in this, in that mainstream American entertainment often treats people with plutocratic levels of wealth as though they are fragile middle class types on the edge of poverty. Betty had problems in 1989, but money, with an income of 420k a year (post property-settlement) in current 2021 terms, was not one of them.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

Cool Movie, But More Talk than Festival Music

[5/10 · 3 July 2021]

This could have been a great concert movie, and I am not wholly against the idea of parallel commentary to music. What I have never liked, in clubs, concerts, or films, is people yakking during performances. This film is like going to a club and having a long-winded buddy describe the significance and history of each piece as it plays--in effusive detail. This movie interrupts nearly every performance with retrospective blah-blah. Thus this was a lost opportunity. A typical reaction I had was digging Hugh Masekala beginning to get into a trumpet solo. He plays for about five seconds before the film cuts to "historical context" comments. Only a handful of performances are allowed to unfold without over-dubbed comments; a bare subset of those, like Sly Stone's set, are allowed to be played in full. I think this would have been a more meaningful experience if 90% of the performances were allowed to be full length. "Monterey Pop" (1967) is one of the great concert movies because it features full-performances, is *music first* and almost zero "commentary."

The Serpent (2021)

Slow, Dull; Lots of Fidgety, Bogus Smoking

[5/10 · 3 April 2021]

Shocking for short bursts, but crushingly monotonous long term, and lacking the convincing character development to sustain a mini-series. The acting overall is reminiscent of the stiff, oddly-timed style of the supporting cast in a Hammer Studios horror film from the early 70s, but there is no Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing in sight. Sometimes the actors seem dubbed, although they apparently are not; many deliveries and/ or accents seem stilted. Thus, if you go in expecting camp and a corny travesty of the early 70s, The Serpent could be entertaining. To avoid issuing spoilers, I will refrain from saying what is repeated in this mini-series, but several plot elements are re-delivered with the surprise factor of shampoo instructions. Several actors (including the lead diplomat) are chronically, artificially tense and fidgety in a superficial, un-convincing way that includes lots of robotic, I'm-not-really-a-smoker faux-nervous smoking. (Often they make the facial gestures of deep, lung-filling draughts of smoke and exhale nothing). Either have your actors smoke or don't, director-man. The actor who plays the Dutch diplomat who investigates the crimes has two gears: an oddly juvenile "I forgot that chapter six was on the Chem 202 final exam" nervousness and an equally out-of-key, shouting anger. This series could be useful for people who design drinking games around bad acting commonplaces.

Heaven's Gate (2020)

Overlong, Repetitious, and Sentimental

[5/10 · 6 January 2021]

One of many "mini-series" that makes one ask: "uh, why is this padded, stretched, and larded with repetition to get to four episodes?!" I found this added little to what I learned about this group from reading major newspapers at the time. It relied too much on interviews with people who say banal or predictable things; far too much time is taken by uninteresting, shaky home video shot by the group in the 90s. If you know little about this group going in, the story may have a macabre fascination, but otherwise this documentary will likely register as a missed opportunity to better explain, with more wit and insight, the original motives for and influences on the group, apart from the psychology of the ex-music teacher at its center. Why did this cult emerge in the early 70s ( a low point for Hollywood and TV sci-fi) and extinguish itself in the mid 90s? The sentimental, indicative music and clunky editing adds to its tedium and the sense the film-makers are masking a lack of analysis. This film would have been better if the more historical approach of the first episode were extended, smartly edited, and left at 120 minutes (ep. one is by far the best of the four--as it reflects, yet still doesn't detail, that the group was analyzed and widely reported on in the mid 1970s, including a cover feature in Psychology Today: what did that author argue? Despite having the author on camera, this film doesn't specify).

Escapes (2017)

Fascinating and Funny Interweaving of Life and Pop Art

[9/10 · 8 December 2020]

Hampton Fancher was, after a first-act career as a Flamenco dancer, a supporting-cast actor in dozens of TV shows like Mannix and Bonanza in the 1960s, frequently playing a kind of graceful punk or handsome misfit. By his own admission, he didn't take acting too seriously, but he frankly seemed pretty lively and unpretentious for the era's TV-acting style. He had repressed dreams of being a screenwriter, and brought them to unexpected fruition when Ridley Scott took up his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*, which became *Blade Runner* in 1982. This minimalist documentary (the only person interviewed is Fancher) was directed by Michael Almereyda (who also directed the Ethan Hawke starring Hamlet and Tesla films, both, like this film, also mischievous and magical). Fancher is a broadly appealing, often funny guy, as he has lots of humility and self-understanding despite some fairly serious cracks in his personality (some seem to have been healed over the years). He also has an unaffected youthfulness, despite being in his 80s; actually, it is nuts how youthful he seems, in body and spirit. Because Fancher acted in so many different genres of films and TV shows, Almareyda uses, as if from a library designed for the purpose, footage from Fancher's career as surreal illustrations of a wild assortment of situations from his own life as Fancher improvisationally verbalizes them. The crisp, verge-of-satire film-making style almost dates from the 1920s in its mix of dialogue-free illustrative footage and simple cards with bits of narrative on them, which usually add new information to the whole. (I know of most of the people Fancher mentions, his co-stars, partners like Sue Lyon, Terri Garr, and Barbara Hershey (?!) --if one has limited knowledge of 60s pop culture and of the Dick novel, this may be harder to follow?). A tale of persistence, tragedy, and almost infinite good humor; the film itself should be studied for how to make a dynamic, effervescent film-narrative out of materials that could have been static or flat.

American Dharma (2018)

A Description, not an Analysis, of a Pathology

[6/10 · 8 December 2020]

As somebody who read the news during the Trump administration, nothing here surprised me, unfortunately. Apart from Morris' occasional polite interjections that Bannon seemed incoherent or self-contradictory, there were few breaks in the progress of Bannon's grandiose self-identifications with film characters played by Gregory Peck and John Wayne. These slow-moving bloviations, made unsuitably elegant by Morris' editing and use of famous film clips, take up much of the film. Morris does say, a few times, that Bannon's use of terms like "populism" and professed sympathy with "working people" make no good sense, considered alongside his endorsements of an unregulated marketplace, the absolute liberty of corporations to profit and pollute, and no clear vision of how breaking the American rule of law at the highest levels (to embolden an autocrat, in this case a delusional, brat-like one) helps "working people." In Bannon, we have an unusually complete personification of a desire to break American democracy, as if one were smashing a clock with a hammer in order to fix it. Bannon fuses a wounded egotism and a mythic nationalism, a reaction fired by a seething assumption that some apocalyptic, world-scale disaster could restore this small, individual blow-hard's lost dignity. The biggest defect of the film is that Morris didn't use his talent to imply or illustrate the perceived losses that motivate Bannon. Bannon obviously functions by mapping a personal or familial trauma onto a knight-vs.-dragon romance featuring "globalism" as the dragon (no explanation of any loss or disappointment of Bannon's is provided, but such a loss is a tacit theme of the whole). Morris could have done much more than assemble a film that remains a dramatic stage (featuring the set of a WWII airplane hangar that goes up in flames) for Bannon's ramblings, but to *analyze* a key psychopathy in current history. Because America, based largely on the luck of our geographical isolation from the full reach of other belligerents, came out of the disaster of World War II with three decades of prosperity, he maniacally dreams of a WWIII rather than having a coherent plan for making anything. None of Bannon's notorious scams come to light in the film; Morris overlooks the bizarre irony that Bannon earned considerable seed money for his current career by dealing (out of Hong Kong) illegal video game accessories and cheats in the 2000s. His vague fantasies of remaking America by burning it down not only appeal to many wounded egos but create a thick smokescreen against realities--like his (and Trump's) scams. The machine that is broken seems to be Bannon, not America, but Morris failed to put together a vivid analysis of why Bannon doesn't run right, but merely puzzled at the spectacle of the bound, grinding gears. The stakes are higher than the film implied. That thing could blow up.

Irrational Man (2015)

in Unbelievable Land

[7/10 · 18 September 2016]

Woody Allen has made this movie at least three times before, but in slightly different circumstances. This film is a variant of a now typical Woody Allen murder mystery (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, etc.). It invites being viewed, due to its lurid obsession with lying, violence, and young women, as a psychodrama reflecting the director's torments and desires (even if one knows only a sketch of Allen's biography). The plot of the film concerns an adolescent-acting, middle aged, self-loathing, pudgy philosophy professor who begins to recast the existential thrill of the "Leopold Loeb" murder case of 1924 as a solution to his depression. Leopold and Loeb were two Chicago teenagers (sons of extremely rich parents) who tried to stage a "perfect" crime. The possibility that such a "thrill" could be imagined as a mood tonic is more believable for such twisted teens than for a scholar of ethics (played by Phoenix), but this is supposed to be a dark comic melodrama.

The characters in the film are studiously unreal, and all speak in a stilted idiom that is Allen's 1970s-sounding fantasy of how academics or "intellectuals" speak, in little maxims that seem to come from encyclopedia articles.

To watch an Allen movie is to wander into his head, and the effect is still magical, if claustrophobic and weird, as he is able to project the never-land of his wishes into an aesthetically coherent visual and textual reality.

In Allen-land, we find it is still 1979, mostly, and there are:

Beautiful neurotic women, old and young, who exist not just to minister to a seriously bleeped- up, surly, drunken man, but to seduce him with irresistible maternal solicitousness and a cozy, insatiable lust that needs no obvious encouragement from the man. The younger woman-nymph (played by Stone) is simultaneously led about by her autonomous lust while remaining unusually mature, consoling and profoundly interested in what makes the prof suffer so. The younger women often wear short, waist-less cotton dresses that look like summer nightgowns.

A New England school with Gothic classrooms that seems stuck in an early 80s promotional magazine fantasyland of some pricey liberal arts school's college life, i.e., a double-lensed nostalgia, so the campus looks like the 1920s of the patrician class. 90% of the brown-and-pastel palette clothes seem selected from New Yorker ads from the late 1970s, or from one of Allen's movies from that period. The professor drives an early 80s Volvo. I had to wait for a cell phone to appear for confirmation that this wasn't a strange period piece.

The WASPY, lost-in-the-20th-century setting where everything depends on hefty sums of cash that allow people to live in a kind of dressed down leisure (the characters frequent a sublime beach) is a tad bizarre, but such unexplained luxury is common in American films about people who carry themselves as middle class. Film-makers assume (?) people like to spy on characters whose real sources of income are hidden, who very rarely work, and who have sex, go to parties and to restaurants for 65% of a film. (Our moment must be a high point of such economic obscurity in movies about the middle class.) At the outset the visiting prof is apologetically introduced to a "small" house (part of his employment package) that is a two-story early 20th century stone bungalow that probably retails for 1.2m nowadays. Such tacitly accepted, unmentioned structural support gives the prof more time to agonize about his neuroses.

Still, this film is well made, with clever modulations of absurdity and banal horror, and the last third, especially, is riveting and funny, and the actors all do remarkable things with this tight script. Actors plainly love to act for Allen. The ultimate crisis, even if it is melodramatic and the "ethical" issues are reduced to "existentialist" clichés (again, many come from the Leoplold Loeb case) is still startling.

But overall, the film's many unrealities make it hard to *care* about any of these people, as they seem card-board figures for Allen's neuroses. The puzzle that compels one to stay with the film is not, what will happen to these people, but how Allen will manipulate his materials and resolve the plot?

Beyond the Law (1968)

I Second the Vote on the Bad Sound

[5/10 · 7 June 2016]

While I am sympathetic to this project, and the actors appear to be doing interesting things, this sounds like it was recorded on a < $100 small tape machine with a cheap microphone located (and its location was the most crucial variable), for inexplicable reasons, in the back of the room. It boggles my mind how Mailer can be so savvy and perfectionistic about some things (he was a trained engineer, and discoursed easily in technical matters--see his book on Apollo 11) could oversee such horrible sound. If I listen with headphones and jack the treble up, I still can only occasionally understand the dialogue in this strange film. Maybe it is "supposed" exist in some borderland of intelligibility.

Listen to Me Marlon (2015)

Fascinating Tapes; Music, less so

[7/10 · 19 November 2015]

This makes largely creative use of Brando's career-long tendency to create diaries on audio tape. He also made self-hypnosis or relaxation tapes that are used here to very interesting effect; these are poignant, funny, and profound at once. Brando was shrewd and insightful, but the tapes also demonstrate the difficulty of healing private wounds through introspection alone. He resisted anyone who tried to be close to him; if they succeeded, as Bertolucci seemed to, he felt betrayed. These monologues are occasionally the stuff of Sophocles or Samuel Becket--but overall like some involuted, existentialist novel. I am less enthusiastic about the editing, which is often abrupt and involves oscillatory panning or camera movements that suggest a rough ferry ride. His words are often dynamic enough. A holographic computer image of Brando's head, seeming to date from around 1998, is made to animate many of his words, about once every ten minutes or so. This is at once spooky and quaint (if the 1990s are now quaint) but it recurs so much that it's like a child in a mask over-doing a joke at a party. The photographic choices from Brando's career are often good, but Brando's childhood home (suggested in a fantasy sequence) is furnished like some impoverished house from 1980, among a few such anachronisms. My strongest criticism of this still engaging movie is for its use of music. It is needlessly chronic--it never shuts up-- serving as a constant, indicative background, when Brando's voice would often suffice. And this soundtrack music itself is not great--at its best, it is Philip Glassy stuff, but often it sounds like a melodramatic "dark" variety of 1980s "new age" music. The music is extremely high in the soundtrack mix, and strangest of all, the director/ sound editors chose to let this new-agey soundtrack compete obnoxiously with any original music that may have been part of any film clip. So when we see famous clips from his major movies, like "Streetcar," the original music mixes dissonantly with the faux-Glass music. I found the sound editing a real distraction that shouldn't have passed the draft stage.

The Master (2012)

An American Struggle of Brute Desire and Dreams of Control

[10/10 · 3 March 2013]

This film plays more like a fevered dream than like realist history, so people expecting some sort of conventional narrative may quickly lose patience with this movie. They may also be missing something special. In addition to being glowing symbols more than they are conventional characters, neither Freddie Quell (Jochain Phoenix) or Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) is especially likable. But the performances suggest emotional and historical truth in ways that are often moving, without pretension or sentimentality. Freddie Quell is a figure of the American male id, post World War II: violent, sensuous, insatiable. He's driven to drink drafts of American industry to quench his burning: the fuel of torpedoes, the fluids of photography, institutional cleaners, all mixed with the fruits of the earth. Dodd, "The Master," is a new-model super ego who might tame and direct Quell. Dodd is smug as a baronial magnate, as full of literary pretensions as Tom Sawyer; his resolve is borrowed from his steely wife (Amy Adams). Hoffman's Dodd, contrary to rumors about the film, is not a charismatic, psychological autocrat, but is wounded, defensive, and dreamy. He lives out a fantasy of priestly insight and command, but few people really believe him; he gets the benefit of many doubts. As Quell is drawn to Dodd's fantasies of mind over history, Dodd is drawn to Quell's energy and chemical inventiveness. Together they suggest different means of achieving atomic-age versions of the old American goal of obliterating the past and standing alone in a new present. They also suggest the polar tensions of raw animal desire and magisterial fantasies of triumph present in many American men. Quell's desire to consume, dominate and love the earth (Quell is obsessed with a woman sculpted in sand) meets a rhetoric of platonic self-mastery in Dodd. The preposterous incongruity of the men and their desires does not result in a drama of control and exploitation, which audiences may expect, but in inchoate attempts at mutual understanding in several scenes that are more humanly intimate and dramatically resonant than most sexual episodes in movies. The 70mm "real film" photography in this movie is amazing; many of the film's strongest moments, including those with people, are wordless. An irony of the film is that lush and magnificent nature (the Pacific ocean, the Arizona desert, the San Francisco Bay) is often overlooked by Quell and Dodd in their self involutions. Nature in American writing often becomes a symbol of self; the oceanic and desert shots sometimes suggest the roiling interior energies and ideal spaces of these two men, but they never acknowledge these colossal, external realities. But lived, human nature may have the last word, in an ending that is unexpectedly funny and tender. I rate this as one of the best American movies.