Inexperienced

Jimi: All Is by My Side

(2014)

Behind every great man . . .

Hayley Atwell (as Kathy Etchingham), Imogen Poots (as Linda Keith), and Ruth Negga (as a groupie identified only as Ida) perform serviceable backup as the women behind the embryonic genius, but André Benjamin is positively electric as Jimi Hendrix en route from Seattle to Manhattan to London to Monterrey. John Ridley wrote and directed this underrated biopic.

Ahead of the curve

Frank

(2014)

OK, let's compare that perfectly adequate biopic with this ambitious, weird, ambitiously weird, weirdly ambitious not-really-a-biopic-but-not-altogether-not-not-either, about a different sort of afflicted genius with an extra load above the neck.

Frank, too, seems in search of a theory of everything, but in the music of the spheres rather than in the spheres themselves. The oddness takes an unfortunately conventional turn late in the game, but until then this is as uncomfortable as anyone could wish.

Anarchy in the KS

Vi är bäst! (We are the best!)

(2013)

This puts me in mind of Those Glory Glory Days, another film about teenage girls devoted to a "boys' pastime." There it was football (aka soccer), here it's punk, in the early '80s, when it was rumored to be dead, but 13-year-olds in Stockholm and 29-year-olds in Grafton, W.Va., were struggling to disprove that canard.

Bobo and Klara, with no skill but plenty of angst (i.e., the perfect punk DNA), recruit the Christian classical guitarist Hedvig--who has in common with them only the sine qua non: unpopularity--to join their nascent band. They survive parental repression and a Yoko Ono moment in an exhilaratingly empowering narrative. Loved loved loved it.

Wise blood

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

(2012)

I'm sure I'd seen the guy in a dozen movies before then (well, no: a quick scan of IMDb suggests that the number was only about a half-dozen, though supplemented by lots of TV appearances), but the first time I was ever really aware of Harry Dean Stanton was in Repo Man, of whose place in my cinepsyche I have given a fragmented account. Since then, I've never seen enough of him, notwithstanding his ubiquity, never gotten enough of that cracked-desert-earth face and the weird, sad stories it tells, even when the just-a-couple-more-cigarettes voice is silent.

This is a documentary, I suppose, 'cause what else are you going to call it, but really it's a conversation, with song--an extension of a featurette on the Criterion Collection's Repo Man. Harry Dean remembers, Harry Dean philosophizes, Harry Dean dismisses the interviewer's interpretations, and Harry Dean sings another old song, beautifully (in the same way Harry Dean's face is beautiful). And again, at < 80 minutes, not enough.

Strike another match, go start anew

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival

(1963)

This is not a documentary about Bob Dylan being booed at Newport in 1965 for going electric. It is a documentary about the lovefest Dylan enjoyed at the festival in 1963, '64, and '65 (mostly). But tell you what--when he finishes that aggressively electrified "Maggie's Farm," even though you know what's coming, it's a shock. And I wonder how many people were booing Dylan--especially given that when they're asked whether they'd like him to come back out for another song, specifically an acoustic one, there's as much love as there was for the babyfaced Minnesota boy two years earlier, alone with his guitar, or sometimes joined by Joan Baez. Frankly, I think most people were probably booing Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and it's easy to understand why. There's electric and there's electric, and Bloomfield's guitar and Kooper's keyboard were taking the sound far away from anything that anybody might expect to hear at a folk festival--and far away from any recording Dylan was doing in the studio at the time (or, I think it might fairly be said, has done in the studio ever). In any case, for all the mythic notoriety of the event, all seems to have been forgiven quickly. And why not: damn, that guy could (and, I've heard, still can) entertain.

Vincent Gallo ate my soul

2 Days in New York

(2012)

Oh, my. I really liked Julie Delpy's previous Woody Allenesque directorial effort, 2 Days in Paris, but I was totally unprepared to be so tickled by slapstick as I was tonight--and I would not describe myself as someone who generally responds happily to slapstick. The lunatic script, mostly by Delpy and Alexia Landeau, who plays Marion's lunatic sister Rose, is consistently hilarious, and somehow manages to stay tethered just enough to a recognizable reality.

Chris Rock is perfect as Marion's boyfriend Mingus, whose blackness contributes less to his sudden maddening outsider status than does his Americanness, in the face of visiting in-laws from what is apparently the strangest land on Earth. As was the case in the Paris flick, Delpy's father, Albert Delpy, plays Marion's endearingly goofy father; sadly, her mother, Marie Pillet, was not around for this one.

Just an unbelievable delight.

Sangrigia, house specialty

Lola Versus

(2012)

Had to have this tonight 'cause I knew Frances Ha wasn't opening locally this weekend, and I needed a Greta Gerwig fix, ideally in a film whose title consists of her character's name followed by a non-sequitur, and whose title character is concerned about being old because she is a certain late-20s age, and she takes a pratfall, and she needs to learn to love herself before she can love anyone else.

The longer I watched, in fact, the more it seemed to me that, if what I've read about Frances is accurate, Gerwig and director/writing-and-life partner Noah Baumbach intended their film as an edit of this one. Which is fine--this one, though it has some wonderfully written moments (such as the best extended Brando take by a woman since Diane Keaton's in Sleeper), depends a little too much on the perfectly reasonable expectation that spending 85 minutes with Gerwig is enough entertainment for most of us. And if it's significantly better than this--which all the buzz suggests is the case--then it's pretty damned good.

Spin-free zone

Knuckleball!

(2012)

Even if I didn't owe R. A. Dickey some of my best days at the ballpark the past couple of years, this documentary--starring Dickey, Tim Wakefield, Phil Niekro, and Charlie Hough, with a solid supporting performance by Jim Bouton--would be a delight.

If I had a complaint, it would be that the physics of the "circus pitch" gets short shrift, but the filmmakers are more interested in getting inside the heads of the keepers of the fluttering flame, and they accomplish that beautifully, following Wakefield on his agonizing quest for win number 200 and Dickey through the season that established him as a star, ahead of his Cy Young Award season, and relying on the retired knuckleballers for the long view.

Serpent's tooth

Make Way for Tomorrow

(1937)

Wow! I had read about this--Anthony Lane's book, maybe?--some time ago, but it was a colleague's recent recommendation that got it to the top of my queue, and thanks to her. This is, in my experience, a unique film, and a quietly great one.

Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play Mr. and Mrs. Lear, essentially, and while none of their five children is quite Regan-or-Gonerilesque, neither is any of them remotely Cordelia-like. The septuagenarian parents are rendered homeless by the Depression, and while most of the kids have reasonably good intentions, they also all have their own lives and their own families, and screenwriter Viña Delmar and director Leo McCarey are honest enough to depict the old folks as . . . well, as difficult to be around as even old folks we love can be.

Not sure how I'd have reacted to this had I seen it when I was in my 30s or 40s, but, barely a decade from my own 70s, I found it sobering. During the couple's final evening in Manhattan before Bart has to board a train to California to stay with the child who is perhaps least willing (though it's a tight race) to house one parent and is--like all her siblings--adamant that she can't handle both, strangers are more hospitable to them than are their own children, and the sequence defines "bittersweet." And the ending would have been a slap in the face to any audience, but I can barely imagine how it would have been greeted during the same era when Fred and Ginger were kicking up their feet--always in unison at the fadeout.

I'm not naïve enough not to realize that there are many great films I still haven't seen, but it's always gratifying to discover one. If you're unfamiliar with this, familiarize yourself.

Nowhere fast

Streets of Fire

(1984)

A rock & roll fable, per the subtitle--a fable set in whatever American city has the densest network of the least-crowded elevated trains. There's a Battery, but it's not that Battery, and there's a Richmond, but it's "the Richmond," and the trains go there, so it ain't Staten Island. Wherever it is (unsurprisingly, Chicago is the location for the els, Los Angeles for most everything else) and whenever it is, it's a rock & roll city of '50s hairstyles and a late-'70s-early-'80s tough chick singer (Diane Lane, whose numbers are so strong that it was a real disappointment to see in the end credits that she was lip-syncing) whose kidnapping by a motorcycle gang led by Willem Dafoe--setting the visual style precedent for the Twilight vampire dude--incites the action. No, really.

A pretty bad film, directed by Walter Hill between 48 Hrs. and Brewster's Millions. Pretty bad, but not boring, and probably not forgettable.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

(2012)

If the world were about to end, I

• would continue to floss, if only because what if someone who looked like Melanie Lynskey
or Connie Britton or Keira Knightley wanted to kiss me?
• would shoot heroin, duh
• would accept all offered cannabis--let's just stipulate would use virtually any drug available
• would not turn down anyone who looked like Melanie Lynskey unless her personal attributes were extremely annoying
• would not turn down anyone who looked like Connie Britton even if she used impact as a verb and thought irregardless is a word

When this was approaching the theaters, I wanted it to be good, but then it got soft reviews, and I let it pass, and I can see why critics were lukewarm, and it's a fair question whether, if it had not later been recommended by the person in the world I love the most, I would have let it get me as goopy as it did, but it did, and there's no point denying it. Hey, what's so great about "objective"?

One way I'd improve it: have him play something from 69 Love Songs (didn't even know it exists on vinyl!) rather than that lame Hollies song.

Strange bedfellows

Coriolanus

(2011)

Ralph Fiennes directed and starred in Shakepeare's story of the worst and angriest politician ever, whose war heroics could have made him a god in Rome at the price of a little humility toward the people. Instead, his pride earns him banishment that deepens his contempt and turns him traitor. An adamantine portrayal of the adamantine general, with Vanessa Redgrave scarily intense as Volumnia, his mother and primary love interest; Gerard Butler as Aufidius, his sworn enemy and secondary love interest; and the beautiful and ubiquitous Jessica Chastain as Virginius, his wife and tertiary love interest. Filmed mostly in Serbia and Montenegro.

And an island never cries

Trolljegeren (Trollhunter)

(2010)

Saturday morning tweak. Why no Friday night deaccesssion? Well, look, I didn't want to watch this last night--I wanted to watch it, of course, but Netflix inaccessibility screwed me midweek when I wanted to adjust my queue to get my next Big Love disc. And let me ask people who still use Netflix for disc rental: do they seem to be dragging their feet on turnarounds of late? I used to routinely get a new disc on day 2 after mailing the old one; now it's always day 3. I know they want to encourage the move to streaming--and I'd gladly go that way if everything I want were available--but would they really do it so hamhandedly?

A Norwegian entry in the low-budget faux-documentary tradition of The Blair Witch Project, cynical college filmmakers get in way over their heads--literally, in this case. Silly but delightful, and major props for having the gumption to show us a lot of trolls, and a wide variety.

Live your dash

Into the Abyss

(2011)

Readers as obsessive as I (so this will be a test of your level of obsessiveness: if both elements apply, seek help immediately) will (1) notice that I'm departing from my usual Friday night deaccession project, wherein I see whether I can clear from my DVD shelves or my DVR hard drive a film that has been sitting there unwatched for a long time and (2) recall that I intended to see this film but was thwarted on a Manhattan trip not long ago. The explanation for (1) is that I want to get this Netflix disc in the mail tomorrow, in hopes that it will get to Hartford on Monday and that the Very Long Wait currently on the board for the first disc of the just-released second season of Treme will magically morph into immediate availability so that I can start watching it on Tuesday. Maybe I'll deaccession later in the weekend, maybe not.

So, the film. As with every crime-and-capital punishment documentary, we meet the convicted killers, we meet the victims' survivors, we meet a law-enforcement agent involved with the investigation, we meet a man who handled 120-odd condemned prisoners in their final hours, we even meet the wife of one of the convicts, who came to know him through assisting in his legal representation and fell in love before meeting him face to face.

But because it's a Werner Herzog documentary, it's completely unlike, and maybe better than, any we've ever seen before on the subject, though I'm not sure I can really say why. In part, it's that, as always, he brings himself, with the quirkily perfect questions that an irrepressibly curious nine-year-old might ask, into the film. In part, it's that even though both convicted killers claim innocence, he doesn't really seem to care much about that angle.

He wants us to see everything we can see--including police-investigation video of the home in which one of the murders was committed, complete with poorly concealed pools of blood and spatters on the walls--and he wants you to hear the story from every possible human angle. The film is subtitled A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, and where Joe Friday might insist on "just the facts," Herzog's interest lies in exactly the opposite direction: just the perceptions, ma'am. The result is that we're immersed in the multiangled story and we care for everyone in it, and mistrust everyone as well. An astonishing achievement.

What separates us

Temple Grandin

(2010)

Truly amazing film, centered on a truly amazing performance by Claire Danes, about the autistic pioneer in humane treatment of livestock (who got her Ph.D. in animal science at Illinois, though the film leaves her at the M.S. level). Yeah, a lot of people wish she'd come out against eating animals rather than in favor of making their time in the feedlots and slaughterhouses less stressful, but she is who she is, and the film gives at least a pretty convincing simulation of putting you in her image-flooded head. And astonishingly, given that lack of empathy is the autistic person's Achilles' heel, being put in that head is one of the most moving experiences a movie will ever give you. A beautiful film.

And it was your world

The Concert for Bangladesh

(1972)

Oh, right: this was the time of All Things Must Pass, which in the original vinyl edition, which I stubbornly treated to as if it were a Beatles album, there was about one listenable side out of six (including a jam disc that even I couldn't listen to more than a few times). Fortunately, either George himself or the director chose mostly the good songs, and in the one exception, "Beware of Darkness," one verse's worth of Leon Russell spices it up nicely.

When Russell or Billy Preston or Ringo gets the spotlight, we're definitely in the B-zone, but then Dylan comes on for 5 terrific songs. I've never seen him live but have heard that he's mumbly and surly, but he was neither here--the adjective I'd choose would be godlike, and I mean that in a good way.

One annoying bit: that old fake encore after the musicians have left the stage before playing one song that everyone in the joint knows they're gonna hear, in this case the theme song for the whole gig.

One pleasant reminder: that Eric Clapton, the consummate team player, has the highest ratio of attention merited to attention demanded in the history of rock & roll, if not the history of music.

Seven veils

Forgotten Silver

(1996)

Brilliant, if accidental, timing, watching this shortly after Hugo. That was fiction based on early cinema fact; this is convincing "documentary" about fictional early cinema. Knowing that it was a "mockumentary," I made a point of paying attention to when the first veil falls away: not until more than 7 minutes in, meaning that even attentive viewers would (or at least could) have been carried along for about one-seventh of the TV-slot film. And indeed, what's beautiful about this film is that it doesn't chuckle and pat itself on the back, like, say, This Is Spinal Tap (and don't get me wrong--I love that film). Instead, a young Kiwi filmmaker named Peter Jackson, who had by this time introduced us to Kate Winslet but not to Gollum, had the confidence to go with the soft sell: the film is funny, but not guffaw funny; it's smart funny, wise funny, with a reverence for what is being parodied. All young filmmakers with an impulse to try too hard should watch this and see what you get when you let your material lead you where it wants to go.

The horror

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

(1991)

Yeah, yeah, I really needed to use deaccession night to free some space on my DVR hard drive, but the problem is, Netflix won't stop sending me discs. I switched more than a week ago from 1-disc-at-a-time-unlimited to streaming only (same price, $7.99, so you can switch any time without paying more or having to wait 'til the end of a billing period), but since then they've twice sent me discs. And what am I gonna do, send 'em back unwatched? So it's theoretically a bonanza, as I'm getting twice the service I'm paying for, but practically speaking, it's not without its inconvenience--plus, I keep worrying that after the 10 days or whatever passes when I'm obliged to have returned the disc I'd just watched when I switched, they're going to try to charge me 20 bucks or whatever. As I've mentioned before, it's hard being me.

Anyway, life imitates art imitating madness in this documentary--much of the footage shot by Eleanor Coppola--on the making and near-unmaking of Apocalypse Now. It's mostly fascinating, but unsurprisingly, the most riveting section concerns the director's bout with despair over needing to film an ending that he has no clear plan for with an actor whose time on set is limited to 3 weeks (at $1 mil per), who doesn't understand who his character is supposed to be (in part because he has never read Heart of Darkness), and from whom, it develops, a performance can be coaxed only by allowing him to improvise on a series of thematic questions. If you take away nothing else from the film, you'll always be glad you've heard Brando say, "I swallowed a bug."

Oh, and it's also great fun to see little 4- and 6-year-old Sofia.

The ideal friend

My Dog Tulip

(2009)

A delightful, melancholy story of unconditional love that will resonate with anyone who has ever been a dog person, even those of us who haven't fit that description for decades. The animation suggests a soberer Triplettes de Belleville, but the narrative is terribly, terribly British.

Until you use me up

Never Let Me Go

(2010)

Another one I ignored when it was in the theater because critical response seemed lukewarm, but which gained ground among the critics in the rear-view mirror. And indeed it was worth seeing, sci-fi with a deliciously creepy concept--clones reared as medical parts farms--played out by a trio of fine young actors.