Movie Reviews

  • When Paul Simon Bombed at the Movies
    by Tim Grierson on March 18, 2024 at 1:51 PM

    Last night, MGM+ premiered the first chapter of its two-part documentary “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.” (Part Two airs this Sunday.) It’s an exhaustive look at the 82-year-old singer-songwriter’s career—or, at least, the first chunk of it, starting with his days in Simon & Garfunkel and continuing through his solo years, ending around 1990 and the release of The Rhythm of the Saints.  The documentary, directed by Alex Gibney, mostly focuses on the successes, but there are occasional peeks at the low points. One of them, many may not remember. In October 1980, Simon wrote and starred in a movie that wasn’t autobiographical but was definitely close to his heart, telling the story of a singer-songwriter at a crossroads. “One-Trick Pony” got mixed reviews and bombed at the box office, proving to be one of the legend’s biggest failures.  For years, it wasn’t easy to find the film, with even the accompanying soundtrack (written by Simon) mostly known for its bouncy Top 10 hit “Late in the Evening.” But its mention in “In Restless Dreams” may inspire fans to seek the movie out. If you do, you’ll be greeted by a curious, muted little misfire that demonstrates that, no matter his prodigious talents, filmmaking and acting may not be among them. And yet, “One-Trick Pony” has this odd poignancy running through it—an acknowledgement of the path not taken by Simon, one in which a life in music was mostly filled with disappointment and heartache. Paul Simon is a superstar, but his onscreen character is far from it. “One-Trick Pony” is about Simon wondering how the other half lives. It had been five years since Simon’s last album, 1975’s acclaimed hit Still Crazy After All These Years, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year. But in the interim between records, it wasn’t as if Simon was floundering. Memorably appearing on the hip new variety series “Saturday Night Live”—yes, of course, his turkey-outfit bit is legendary, but have you seen him play one-on-one with NBA great Connie Hawkins?—he soon became one of its most popular guests. He was also quite amusing in 1977’s “Annie Hall,” playing a corny L.A. music executive who lures Woody Allen’s singer girlfriend away from New York. That same year, he also released a best-of, Greatest Hits, Etc., which included a new song, “Slip Slidin’ Away,” that went Top 10. Things were going well for Simon. What was also notable about Greatest Hits, Etc. was that it had completed his contractual obligations to his longtime label, Columbia. He signed a lucrative new deal with Warner Bros. and, as part of that agreement, Simon was itching to get out of his comfort zone. He was curious about making a movie.  “I wanted to do something other than just record an album,” he told Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh shortly before the release of “One-Trick Pony.” “I felt my choices were either to write a Broadway show or a movie. I chose the movie because I thought it would be closer to the process of recording. You get a take, and that’s your take. I don’t have to go in every night and see whether the cast is performing. Also, I could still record and use the movie as a score. But if I’d written a show, I couldn’t have recorded my own stuff—other people would have had to sing it.” “One-Trick Pony” follows the struggles of Jonah, a mid-30s rock musician who, back in the 1960s, had written a generational anthem, an acoustic antiwar protest song called “Soft Parachutes.” But that was a long time ago, although Jonah is still out there touring with his band, gigging wherever anyone will have them. Unfortunately, his style of rock is losing popularity, as evidenced by the fact that a cool new band, the New Wave-leaning B-52’s, blow away the same crowd that was, before, only politely receptive to Jonah. (You can see why: Performing “Rock Lobster,” the Athens unit absolutely slays.)  Things aren’t much better on the home front—that is, when he’s actually home. Jonah is separated from his wife Marion (Blair Brown), who not unreasonably wonders when he’s going to stop chasing a young person’s dream. Engaged in random hookups on the road, Jonah makes gestures toward reconciling with Marion, but it’s clear they’ve done this dance before, many times, and if it wasn’t for their young son, Matty (Michael Pearlman), whom Jonah loves dearly, he wouldn’t try that hard. With the possibility of getting to record another album looking iffy, Jonah is facing both a professional and personal reckoning. As “In Restless Dreams” makes obvious, outside a similar penchant for romantic turmoil, Simon’s and Jonah’s life trajectories didn’t have much overlap. (In the late 1970s, Simon was dating soon-to-be-wife Carrie Fisher, leading to an endearing moment in “One-Trick Pony” in which Jonah and Matty go to the movies to check out the then-brand-new blockbuster “The Empire Strikes Back.”) But if Simon played Jonah, some audiences and critics would inevitably assume that he was the main character—and that, by extension, Jonah’s artistic frustrations and music-business complaints were actually Simon’s. Truth was, Simon didn’t want to portray the character—his new label, Warner Bros., pushed for that to happen. (If Simon had gotten his way, maybe his buddy—and recent Best Actor winner for “The Goodbye Girl”—Richard Dreyfuss would have taken on the role.) Eventually, Simon realized he had to do it. “I didn’t want to do a film about music that I couldn’t believe in,” Simon explained later. “That’s the biggest problem I found with other [rock-related] films. They seemed false. Take [the 1976 version of] ‘A Star Is Born.’ It didn’t seem like a rock film to me. 
 You don’t really believe Barbra Streisand is a rock star. You always know it’s really Barbra Streisand.” The idea of having Dreyfuss, or anyone else, lip-synch to his vocals just seemed silly to him. Simon was in a position where he could make such decisions. Even though he didn’t direct “One-Trick Pony,” he did have final cut (according to the 1980 Rolling Stone profile). And he got to choose the director, which meant that certain filmmakers balked at his invitation, figuring they wouldn’t be calling the shots on set. “I remember having a conversation with Alan Parker,” Simon told Marsh. “He said, ‘What would I do here? You wrote it, you’re starring in it, and you wrote the music. I don’t want to be a yes man. What would my role be?’ A lot of people, I think, had that feeling.” Ultimately, Simon went with Robert M. Young, who died last month at the age of 99. “His ego didn’t get in the way,” Simon suggested. “He saw room for him to function as a director and be of help to the movie and still feel that he was, you know, in charge.” Up to that point, Young had worked mostly on independent films, like 1977’s “Alambrista!,” which chronicled a Mexican farmer (Domingo Ambriz) trying to cross the border into America in order to secure a better life for his family. By comparison, “One-Trick Pony” was a more mainstream project, even if it did somewhat reflect the New Hollywood era in its lament for an outsider facing off with an unfeeling society. And Simon took his lead role seriously, even working with an acting coach to play this unhappy artist who, ultimately, must decide whether he’ll allow his personal, rock-oriented songs to be corrupted by a shallow music exec (Rip Torn) and the flashy producer (Lou Reed, of all people) who are only concerned about getting Jonah on pop radio.  The late 1970s was a prolific, if uneven, period for rock movies. You had acclaimed concert films such as “The Last Waltz” alongside disasters of varying degrees like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (a jukebox musical that featured Beatles songs but not the Beatles) and “Renaldo and Clara” (Bob Dylan’s spacey, nearly-four-hour melodrama that he wrote, directed and starred in). The same year as “One-Trick Pony” came out, Hollywood released cheesy musical (or music-adjacent) opuses like “Xanadu” and “Flash Gordon.” Simon’s old partner Art Garfunkel had made the leap to acting—he’s terrific in 1971’s “Carnal Knowledge”—but Simon didn’t have much on-camera experience. And unlike “Purple Rain,” which would open a few years later, “One-Trick Pony” wasn’t meant to catapult a rising star into the stratosphere—and use a semi-autobiographical storyline to achieve it. This was music icon Paul Simon playing a guy who most definitely wasn’t Paul Simon. And yet there was something about Jonah’s disappointing career that Simon envied. “Not since I was a kid have I played in a band,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s odd to have been in rock ‘n’ roll all this time and never really been part of a band. I was part of a duo—a vocal duo—and I played with studio musicians. So I was never part of that life in that way, and that is an essential part of rock ‘n’ roll. I only know it by being with people who are in it. But I never lived it.” In “One-Trick Pony,” he lived it, sorta, recruiting an actual band to play Jonah’s group. (Simon diehards will recognize his frequent collaborator, drummer Steve Gadd, alongside legendary bassist Tony Levin and the late, great Eric Gale and Richard Tee.) But in one of the immediate signs of the film’s problems, the music that Simon/Jonah plays in “One-Trick Pony” is just okay. Lacking the sharpness and dynamism of Simon’s initial solo work from the early 1970s, the songs don’t exactly make the case that Jonah is still producing incredible work. And for a movie that’s so much about the artistic importance of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s striking how un-rock the tunes are. (As Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau put it in his review of Simon’s soundtrack album, “Like so many aging folkies he’s devolved into a vaguely jazzy pop.”)  If “One-Trick Pony” was trying to suggest that Jonah’s creative heyday was long gone, that would be one thing, but the movie essentially argues that it’s the industry that’s changed, not our hero. That reading is backed up by something Simon said in that Rolling Stone profile when addressing criticism that he was too focused on the movie to make sure the songs were good. “I know how hard I worked on the music,” he said. “And I know what’s there in terms of melodies and rhythms and time changes.”  This is not the film’s only limitation, though. No matter how funny he was in “Annie Hall” or “SNL,” Simon doesn’t have leading-man presence. His dramatic scenes with Brown are often awkward—there’s one moment where he’s meant to get angry that’s unintentionally hilarious—and he’s not any more convincing when Jonah encounters different desirable women in his travels. (Joan Hackett and Mare Winningham do their best playing off his drab, stiff demeanor.) It’s telling that, like Dylan in “Renaldo and Clara,” the only sequences that really work really are the ones in which the star is performing on stage—or when Simon interacts with the young, adorable Pearlman. In these scenes, Simon seems to loosen up—his discomfort and self-consciousness fade away.  Simon’s ineffectual acting might have been less of a hurdle if it tied into the character’s depressive misgivings about the musical purgatory in which he finds himself. (One of the movie’s most cutting moments is when Jonah allows himself to be part of a 1960s-nostalgia TV special, alongside the Lovin’ Spoonful and Sam & Dave, all of them treated like has-been curiosities—exotic animals in a surreal pop-culture zoo exhibit.) But Simon’s script doesn’t lend much insight into who Jonah is—and his odyssey in the film isn’t particularly engaging.  There’s a potentially great idea in “One-Trick Pony”: What does the life of a struggling, working-class musician, the kind who never gets movies made about him, look like? But Simon seems too removed from that reality to embody it. “One-Trick Pony” is so confused about the world it’s trying to dissect that, watching the film this time, I wondered if the wondrous B-52’s were supposed to represent everything that was “wrong” about contemporary music—while noble Jonah symbolized “real” art and rock ‘n’ roll integrity. (I’m not the only one: In a recent interview, B-52’s member Cindy Wilson admitted to having the same feeling regarding what their purpose in the film was supposed to be, saying: “He picked the wrong band! That was hilarious, the way that happened.”) You can’t deny the empathy Simon conveys toward Jonah, knowing how lucky he is not to have met the same fate. Being incredibly talented has no doubt helped Simon, but even the most successful artists recognize the fickleness of the business—how an unwise creative direction here or a bit of bad timing there can fatally derail a career. So many folk artists didn’t survive the shifting musical climate once rock ‘n’ roll took hold. Which is why, with hindsight, “One-Trick Pony” might be best viewed as an unlikely companion piece to “Inside Llewyn Davis,” another tale of a poor bastard who never could quite get it together commercially. However, unlike the Coen Brothers’ soulful, darkly comic masterwork, “One-Trick Pony” rarely touches something deeper or truer about art, life, relationships, legacy and impermanence. Not that there aren’t great jokes in Simon’s film—casting the snarling, uncompromising Reed as the smiling avatar of artistic sellout was inspired—but too often “One-Trick Pony” is too superficially glum, too dragged down by a stagnant lead performance, to be a compelling portrait. Simon cares about Jonah, but he doesn’t really understand him. And yet, that lack of understanding is what makes the film somewhat touching. Tracking down that Rolling Stone piece, I learned something: “One-Trick Pony” originally had a different ending before it came to theaters. While it seems perverse to worry about a spoiler alert for a 44-year-old film, I will just say that Simon’s initial choice of how to resolve Jonah’s struggles strikes me as either falsely optimistic or dully cynical.  As the movie reaches its finale, Jonah is working on his new album, with Reed’s producer throwing on a lot of strings and saxophones to give the songs more commercial appeal. Naturally, Jonah hates it, although it’s an indictment of “One-Trick Pony” that I think those touches actually make the tunes better. (And it’s not like Paul Simon doesn’t incorporate horns and strings to his own material all the time.)  But in the theatrical version, rather than continuing to fight the record label suits, Jonah does something else, leading to an ending that feels defiant and striking in the way so many 1970s American movies did. But it’s certainly not triumphant—if anything, it’s very much in keeping with this sad, beaten musician who can tell the deck is stacked against him. Also, I suspect it’s not something Paul Simon himself would ever do.  He recovered from this film’s failure—just like, decades later, he’d recover from finally making his Broadway debut with the poorly-received musical The Capeman. One of the hallmarks of his hallowed career is that, no matter what, he has just kept going. What makes the failed, fascinating “One-Trick Pony” still haunting is it’s him, for once, imagining what hanging it up would look like. 

  • Palm Royale is Pretty and Shallow, Which At Least Matches its Characters
    by Cristina Escobar on March 18, 2024 at 1:50 PM

    Apple TV+’s “Palm Royale” has unfortunate timing. It’s an earnest entry in the class-striving genre, here telling the tale of Kristen Wiig’s Maxine Simmons D'ellacourt as she tries to break into high society in Palm Beach in the 1960s. But the conventions of these tales recently took a high-profile battering with the breakout popularity of Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn.” Love it or hate it, that squirm-inducing film did something new with the conniving rags-to-riches formula. “Palm Royale” does not. Adding insult to injury, it is overly long, clocking in at nearly ten hours in what could surely be done in half the time. Even “Saltburn’s” biggest fans were not clamoring for it to go on five times its run length. Now, that’s not to say that “Palm Royale” is completely without charm. Its cast certainly goes a long way toward making it watchable. Wiig is fantastic—funny, likeable, and dynamic. As Maxine, she clearly proves her leading-lady chops with a role showcasing her Hollywood glamour (the '60s styling works for her) while also portraying a depth of emotion those primarily familiar with “Bridesmaids” and her SNL days may not know she has. Likewise, Allison Janney knocks it out of the park.Her Evelyn Rollins, as the type of striver who pulls up the ladder after her, should not be sympathetic. Her voice screeches, her actions are cruel, and her charm has faded with her age. And yet, under Janney’s careful stewardship, Evelyn is hard not to care about even though she gives no real reason why anyone should. That said, the rest of the ensemble doesn’t sparkle quite as much. Ricky Martin does a serviceable job as Robert, the bartender at the women’s social club. He wears his costumes well and inhabits Robert’s darker moments with ease, but he flubs the comedy. Likewise, the usually reliable Laura Dern can’t make a person out of her bohemian character, who remains little more than a collection of slogans. Still, the costumes and sets are a delight. As women of a certain age, the matrons of “Palm Royale” sport a copious amount of hairspray and beehives, harkening back to an area where a woman’s hair was her de facto helmet. “Palm Royale” also has a lot of fun with its clothes—the silhouettes, patterns, and colors all telegraphing wealth and the aesthetics of its period. It makes sense that there are several set pieces in the dress shop, where our wealthy women converge to gossip, make power moves, and fight over their next fits. The sets and props are fun too with antique guns and statutes, fanciful homes, and at least one of-the-era bookstore. It’s all a lovely time warp, sending us back to 1969 with its limitations and styling, reflecting Maxine’s obstacles and ambitions. But style isn’t substance, and “Palm Royale” is lacking in the latter if not the former. For one, not much even happens for the first two-thirds of the season. Yes, Maxine gets a foothold in the rarefied society of Palm Beach but that’s never really in doubt. Instead, the first bit of the season seems to mostly exist to give its heroines opportunities to wear those amazing costumes and not much else. By the time some real action takes place, it’s hard to imagine too many people will still be watching. And then, after wasting so much time, it has the audacity to end on a cliffhanger when a tidier conclusion would have been a much wiser bet. Due to its length and lack of substance, the whole enterprise is hard to care about. Does Maxine deserve to have the same amount of money as the rest of them? Sure! But that’s a very low bar. In “Palm Royale,” no one works, the wealth all seems to be inherited if not ill-begotten. And these are not particularly smart or talented people. They’re petty, easily manipulated lay-abouts. They don’t deserve Maxine’s idolization, a fact she doesn’t ever seem to realize. Instead, we’re supposed to root for her ascent, despite her happiness probably lying elsewhere. Like “Saltburn,” “Palm Royale” seems unsure if it's trying to lampoon or celebrate the upper classes it’s depicting. But in Apple TV+’s series, “greed is good” is a given, a default for all humankind. And that’s a depressing worldview that no amount of talented actresses in fabulous clothes and makeup can cover up. In the end, “Palm Royale” is shallower than its protagonist and that’s saying something. Whole season screened for review. It premieres on March 20th.

  • SXSW 2024: Table of Contents
    by The Editors on March 17, 2024 at 7:24 PM

    BRIAN TALLERICO"The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem""Arcadian""Azrael""Babes""Cheech & Chong's Last Movie""Clemente""Dandelion""Desert Road""Dickweed""The Fall Guy""Gasoline Rainbow""Grand Theft Hamlet""The Hobby""I Don't Understand You""I Love You Forever""Immaculate""Kryptic""Monkey Man""My Dead Friend Zoe""A Nice Indian Boy""Oddity""Omni Loop""Resynator""Road House""Roleplay""Secret Mall Apartment""She Looks Like Me""Stormy""Things Will Be Different""This is a Movie About The Black Keys""Whatever It Takes""Y2K"MATT ZOLLER SEITZ"Civil War""The Greatest Hits"

  • SXSW 2024: Omni Loop, Desert Road, Things Will Be Different
    by Brian Tallerico on March 17, 2024 at 7:08 PM

    I’ve had several conversations recently with people regarding how time has gotten weird since the pandemic. Maybe it’s because we were locked inside for so long, but some events of the last four years feel like they took place yesterday while others seem so far in the rearview mirror. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I think this kind of weird fracturing of memory has not only led to more Mandela Effect conspiracy theories but it’s at the root of the recent spate of films in which time and space break. Reality just hasn’t felt real lately. There were several such films at SXSW this year, including a standout of the entire fest co-starring everyone’s favorite recent Emmy winner. Bernardo Britto’s “Omni Loop” is a clever, moving riff on a “Groundhog Day”-esque piece of storytelling, one that comes at its concept from a deeply human and empathetic angle. So many of these films have been about people breaking out of a rut in order to learn how to live again, but “Omni Loop” is more about how we all should reconsider the repetitive nature of our lives and focus on what’s really important to us while we can. As someone who is approaching 50 and has watched his three children turn from babies into teenagers in the blink of an eye, Britto’s film really struck an emotional chord. It takes a bit too long to get going and ends a few too many times, but these are minor complaints for a really well-done piece of sci-fi storytelling, a movie that uses what seems like a familiar set-up in a new way. Mary-Louise Parker gets her best part in years as Zoya Lowe, a woman who learns that she has a black hole growing inside her chest that will kill her—don't worry, just go with it and trust that it’s not as weird as it sounds. It’s mostly a stand-in for not just any terminal diagnosis but the parts inside our hearts and souls that we struggle so much to fill what really matters while we still can. It turns out that Zoya discovered a bottle of magic pills when she was young that can take her back briefly in time. She goes home from the hospital with her diagnosis, lives a week, her noses starts to bleed, and she takes a pill to do it all over again. Imagine not only having a week to live but a chance to re-do that week over and over again. What would you fix at the last minute? “Omni Loop” is not as much of a drag as that sounds as it expands to something entirely different with the introduction of Paula (Ayo Edebiri of “The Bear” fame), a young woman who Zoya works with to discover how the pills work so maybe she can fight the inevitable or at least pass along the knowledge to someone else. Edebiri and Parker turn out to be an inspired duo, ably assisted by great supporting turns from Carlos Jacott, Harris Yulin, and especially Hannah Pearl Utt as Zoya’s daughter. There’s something so tender in the way it’s her “Hi, Mom” that sparks each new cycle of Zoya’s last week. They’re two simple words, but they have so much warmth in them that they say so much. And they’re emblematic of a film that contains so many big ideas without losing sight of it’s the small interactions and relationships that really define us. Sometimes just two words from the right person. A very different kind of loop unfolds in Shannon Triplett’s very good “Desert Road,” a film that it truly feels that Rod Serling would have dug. “The Twilight Zone” regularly returned to travelers who break from reality, and that’s the basic template of Triplett’s film, a movie that consistently challenges perception of what’s really going on. Even at its conclusion, I’m not 100% it all adds up, but that’s fine for a film that’s more interested in how we move on than checking all the narrative boxes. Most of all, this is just a well-made mindf*ck of a movie, and a wonderful showcase for Kristine Froseth, who gives one of the best performances of SXSW 2024. Froseth plays an unnamed woman traveling across one of those desolate patches of land in the Western part of this country where there’s little sign of civilization for miles. She stops at a gas station and has a somewhat unsettling encounter with a gas station attendant (Max Mattern) who may have skimmed her credit card. She drives off, calling home to Iowa and informing them that a long road trip is about to begin. It doesn’t. She blows a tire, getting stuck on a boulder. When she walks over the hill to the next gas station, she finds the one she left, with the same attendant. She calls a tow truck driver (Ryan Hurst), and then things start getting really weird. No matter where she goes, even off the road to another one that should be on the other side of a hill, she ends up back at the same gas station and the same broken-down car. Getting stuck in time and space is an old idea in sci-fi, but it requires not just a sharp script but an engaging lead. Froseth keeps us in this complex story by anchoring us to her excellent performance, running with this woman down the desert road that she can never leave. There’s a bit of thematic inconsistency in Triplett’s script, especially when it shifts a bit in the final act to a story of closure more than survival, but it’s certainly never boring, the kind of film that could easily find a loyal audience with the right studio backing. A smart distributor should pick this one up while there's still time. The final screwy film of SXSW for me this year was Michael Felker’s “Things Will be Different,” a movie with some neat ideas and sharp construction that nevertheless kept me at arm’s length more than the other two projects in this dispatch. There’s a very fine line between leaving your audiences with enough questions to answer on their own and making a movie that feels frustratingly opaque. As a directorial debut, Felker’s film is a promising one, but I can’t say it works for me on its own terms. It's through no fault of stars Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy, who are asked to navigate a lot of choppy waters here as performers, both narratively and emotionally. They play Jospeh and Sidney, a pair of siblings who have committed a crime and are basically hiding out in a safe house that defies reality, a sort of metaphysical space in which they can’t be reached, but also may have trouble leaving when they choose to do so. The thematic subtext of people stuck in their troubled existence is a solid foundation, but Felker can’t find the momentum in a story about people who have so little of it. It may not be surprising to learn that Felker has been the editor for Jason Benson and Aaron Moorhead, two filmmakers who do this kind of time-bending experiment better than anyone really. And Felker’s editing on projects like “Synchronic” and “The Endless” were absolutely essential to their success. He knows how to put a project like this together, and that shows in “Things Will Be Different” too. It’s really a screenwriting issue above all else on a film that I think likely makes more sense to its creator than it will to viewers. That’s the tough part about films about people stuck in impossible situations—making viewers want to get stuck there too.

  • SXSW 2024: Clemente, Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie, This is a Movie About the Black Keys
    by Brian Tallerico on March 17, 2024 at 6:15 PM

    Bio-docs have become a staple of the film festival circuit, an easy way to get butts in seats by attracting fans of the subjects on the screen. To be honest, this genre of non-fiction filmmaking has also become glutted with lazy artistry, putting cameras down in front of interview subjects and asking them to tell stories about themselves, or, worse, anecdotes about famous people they know. They’re usually shallow renderings of what made these people successful enough to have a movie about them in the first place, and all three of the bio-docs in this dispatch fall into this trap a few times, but the best of the trio elevates its subject by highlighting not just his game-changing abilities but his deep empathy for the human condition. That film is David Altrogge’s “Clemente,” a loving ode to one of the most impressive and important athletes of all time. Robert Clemente was the first Latin-American to win an MVP, a World Series MVP, and be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He shattered the color barrier in a way that still resonates across all sports to this day. It was kind of perfectly appropriate to watch this movie on the same day I was downloading the latest edition of Sony’s “The Show,” which has on its cover the great Vladimir Guerrero Jr., one of many Latin-American athletes following in Clemente’s giant footsteps, and continuing his legacy in the way they're changing the game. “Clemente” spends enough time on the field and in the clubhouse for baseball nuts, focusing a great deal of time on the historic 1971 World Series, the one in which Clemente’s Pirates came back down two games against one of the most impressive teams of all time in the ’71 Baltimore Orioles. That he would be dead just over a year later, perished in a plane crash while trying to take emergency supplies to Nicaragua, was unimaginable to his millions of fans. The baseball stuff is fun-but-familiar—it’s in the humanizing of Clemente that Altrogge’s film really succeeds. Not only does he get warm interviews from Clemente’s sons, he speaks to the fans that Roberto interacted with in ways they’ll forget. There’s an amazing story from a woman whose father drove Clemente after the team left him because he was taking too long signing autographs—their families became friends for life. Richard Linklater, who also produced the film, shares how he used to send photos to his favorite athletes in the hope of getting a signature. Clemente wrote back. He would just show up at children’s hospitals because he knew his presence could do some good. One might say “Clemente” is a piece of hagiography, but it feels like this is a guy who deserves it. As someone says in the film, “Everything about him was royalty.” Let him wear the crown placed on his head by the movie that bears his name. There are no crowns being handed out in David Bushell’s “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie,” a detailed history of the early lives and partnership of two of the most famous comedians of their generation: Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin. Both gentlemen come off splendidly, particularly in a series of conversational scenes as they drive through a desert talking about their friendship and sometimes-contentious partnership. There are times when some of these scenes feel a bit stagey, especially as the pair gets into fights about their eventual break-up, and I longed for a bit more context about Cheech & Chong’s impact on comedy—ethnicity is oddly avoided for most of the project, which is a mistake given how many doors these guys opened and how their unique, cultural voice is one of the reasons they became so popular. Having said that, this is certainly an easy watch, the kind of thing that I suspect will pop on a service like Hulu later this year. To this viewer who knew little about the backgrounds of Cheech and Chong, the early biographical material is enlightening, especially in regard to the very different life that Tommy lived as a musician long before he met Marin. It turned out the pair were drawn together by a love for improvised comedy, admiring those who could develop charact3rs and bits on stage, and aware that they could do the same. I wished that “Last Movie” simply had more comedy material in it—the balance is sometimes off between how Cheech & Chong got famous when the film could have used a little more why. It's also a bit unusual that “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” basically ends with their break-up. The details about how that happened—Marin accuses Chong of being a bit too power-hungry as a director while Chong seems honestly betrayed over being asked to do little more than a cameo in “Born in East L.A.”—is some of the most interesting material in the film, but, again, I wanted greater context. How did the guys get out of the shadow of what were actually characters they were playing—even though so many though these two guys were just version of the people playing them? And everyone knows how Chong has struggled with legal issues around something that’s now widely legal. They were ahead of their time in SO many ways, comedically and culturally, which makes the fact that “Last Movie” feels stuck in the ‘70s and ‘80s all the more disappointing. There’s a similar lack of ambition in “This is a Film About The Black Keys,” a project that will likely play well for fans of the Grammy-winning rock duo but will struggle to bring anyone new into that fan club. Jeff Dupre’s film has a “Behind the Music” quality to it in how it hits all the major career checkpoints in the careers of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney from their lives growing up in Akron to being one of the most popular bands in the world. The brutal truth here is that, while Auerbach and Carney are undeniably talented, there’s not much meat on the bones of their life story. It’s nice to see two dudes who are so good at what they do find fame, but that’s about it here, other than another case study in how two-man bands are going to inherently struggle when there’s no third party to break a tie in an argument. Some of the historical details in “This is a Film About The Black Keys” are interesting, including the major role that Beck played in their ascendance when he heard their first CD and got them to open for him. The choice by the guys to reach out to Danger Mouse after hearing “Crazy” is also a neat bit of trivia, given how that song’s cinematic sound feels like a perfect fit with what The Black Keys do. At its best, Dupre’s film does convey the stress of a job in which your livelihood is truly based on production—if you’re not writing, recording, or performing, you’re just going to disappear. And it deftly captures the difficulty of two hard-headed people trapped in that kind of stressful dynamic forever, knowing that they need some sort of compromise to succeed. Again, it feels like there’s a bit of broader context that might have helped. Most people think that rock is pretty dead right now, so how have The Black Keys defied that? And they’re old enough that you would think we would start to see their influence on the genre, although I’d be hard-pressed to think of too many bands now that sound like The Black Keys. Maybe they’re just so talented that they’re the anomaly in the music scene? While I generally like films that allow their subjects to tell their stories, this one could have benefitted from a bit more outsider perspective on what makes The Black Keys so special.

  • The Greatest Hits
    by Matt Zoller Seitz on March 17, 2024 at 5:42 PM

    If you’re a genre nostalgic who’s looking for a romantic comedy that could’ve been made in the ‘90s or early aughts, and that features all of the comforting types (including the widowed protagonist, the dreamy lost love, the sassy, truth-telling best friend, the equally hunky potential new love and his cynical yet adoring sister) “The Greatest Hits” will tick most if not all of the boxes. The problem, in the end, is that you’re probably going to be too aware of the boxes as they’re checked—and although the performances are nearly faultless, the characterizations rarely rise above the requirements of their respective “types.” And only one of the three central relationships in this love triangle (between a grieving woman, the memory of her dead boyfriend, and the incredibly appealing new guy that she meets in a grief counseling group) comes completely alive as a person, thanks more to the performer than the role. As a piece of filmmaking, “The Greatest Hits” doesn’t lack ambition, much less a pedigree. Writer-director Ned Benson took a huge swing ten years ago with “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” which recounted a relationship from two lovers’ perspectives, and was reedited into a combined, “Rashomon”-sh story (they were subtitled “His,” “Hers” and “Them,” and are available in all three versions). This new feature has a splash of “Slaughterhouse Five,” in that its heroine Harriet (Lucy Boynton) trips backwards in time whenever she hears a song that reminds her of a moment she shared with her late boyfriend Max (David Corenswet, James Gunn’s newly anointed Superman), and one of Benson’s smartest decisions as a screenwriter is to keep you guessing during first two-thirds as to whether Harriet’s condition is scientifically quantifiable or if she’s so deep in the grief-pit that she’s starting to crack up. The big problem, for this viewer anyway, is that when the movie finally pulls the trigger on its concept and entirely commits to it, in a scientific procedural way, the story is getting ready to be over. Chung Chung-hoon shimmering, lens-flare-y photography, Page Buckner’s dense and meticulous but never showy production design, and Olga Mill’s costumes go right up to the edge of a sci-fi parable love story (parts of it are reminiscent of “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” particularly the moments when Harriet is triggered by a song and the movie itself seems to be straining and vibrating inside the projector) but don’t quite cross over.  I wanted it to. I’m admitting that here, even though it’s poor form to dock a movie for not being what you wanted it to be rather than embracing what it is, because what it is becomes repetitive, and without enough real-world messy specificity to make the repetitiousness the point, and the reward, of watching. Harriet’s best friend Morris (Austin Crute), a DJ, keeps sweetly but firmly informing her that she’s stuck in a self-punishing grief loop and needs to get out of it because it’s turned into a sort of twisted safe place giving her permission never to move on. (“Grief is temporary, but loss is forever,” is her group’s mantra.)  The better realistic dramas about grief have either an anthropological level of detail about how and why people feel certain things, or else translate it into bold but easy-to-grasp metaphors (science fiction and horror are particularly adept at this). This one is stuck somewhere between the two, unable to move ahead and make choices, rather like Harriet. I’d applaud the movie for taking the form of its heroine’s pathologies if the result was something more than a good try with a lot of heart. Boynton does a lot with a little here. The character is defined almost entirely by her loss (which is something nobody who’s lost a mate would want) and the steps she takes to cope with her condition (such as wearing noise-canceling headphones in public avoid hearing a triggering song, culling her own music collection to remove anything that could send her into the grief zone, and getting a job at a public library, which is of course silent). Her great, lost love is an abstraction. You don’t learn much about him except that he was incredibly handsome and loved Harriet and was a musician and that she produced his albums and (a belated bit of detail that one wishes were explored) he could be a bit of a self-centered prat. Are we seeing him this way because Harriet idealized him to the point of dehumanizing him? There’s nothing in the movie to indicate this, except for a couple of too-late intimations in the third act. All of the other supporting players have maybe one-and-a-half dimensions at best, though they’re so appealingly performed that it’s hard not to like them regardless. Justin H. Min, who made such a strong impression in “After Yang,” rescues the movie from the doldrums just by showing up. He’s got a naturally sunny presence that could seem self-regarding and irritating if it weren’t so brilliantly modulated. No matter what he says or does, you believe that he has Harriet’s best interests at heart and is a fundamentally good dude. He might be the latest evolutionary iteration of the character that John Cusack played in “Say Anything,” who was—despite the scene with the boombox, which has been retroactively identified as “stalking”—nearly a perfect specimen of young straight American manhood, so pure of heart that you might have rejected him out of hand if the actor playing him didn’t make you believe every moment.  Reviewed at South by Southwest 2024. It premieres on Hulu on April 12th.

  • SXSW 2024: Whatever It Takes, Resynator, The Hobby
    by Brian Tallerico on March 16, 2024 at 3:21 PM

    The documentary sections at SXSW were very strong this year with standouts like “Roleplay,” “Grand Theft Hamlet,” and “Gasoline Rainbow,” which I expect will all find loyal fans when they leave the fest circuit. However, the documentary that could make the most waves is the most “Holy Shit” doc I’ve seen in years, the kind of thing that builds buzz on a streaming service simply because of the insane story that it unpacks that everyone needs to share. It helps, of course, that “Whatever It Takes” is also just a very well-made true crime documentary with a twist, a story of innocent people tormented by an absolute lunatic who, in my opinion, was operating under the orders of power players in the business community that should be in jail. This one has exactly what people love in this kind of true story: real people thrust into unreal situations crafted by the kind of sociopath who rarely considers the cost of his actions. The tag for Jenny Carchman’s film is “The Most Shocking Scandal in Silicon Valley History” and it actually lives up to that high bar. Produced by Allyson Luchak (who worked on the game-changing “The Staircase”), “Whatever It Takes” is the story of Ina and David Steiner, an ordinary, likable couple who had a deep interest in online commerce and wrote about shifts in the industry at their blog EcommerceBytes, which had existed in some form since 1999. The site presents news, but that naturally leads to the rampant criticism that comes through comment sections, and life at eBay was a little tense in the 2010s. When someone aggressively tweeted at the Steiners about the damage they were doing to the company, it seemed relatively harmless at first. It became something much darker quickly. The Steiners faced non-stop and terrifying harassment for the next few months, including an attempted delivery of a pig fetus, an actual delivery of a “Saw” mask, live bugs, and even a shipment that included a book about living without your spouse—a not-so-vague threat on at least one of their lives. It was insane, escalating to break-ins and someone literally following the Steiners in a van. Everyone involved is lucky that no one got physically hurt—a scene in which David has just been followed and then the harassers order a pizza to their house got me thinking how easily Steiner could have shot the man who pulled a black leather case from the back of his car in the middle of the night. Without spoiling too much, it’s not hard to figure out who was behind the harassment, but the ridiculousness of this story only grows as it’s revealed. Inter-office affairs, training through clips from “Training Day” & “Full Metal Jacket,” general macho bullshit toxicity—“Whatever It Takes” is the kind of story that would seem unbelievable if it was a Hollywood script. In other words, it’s a documentary filmmaker’s dream come true. A very different story unfolds in Alison Tavel’s deeply personal and moving “Resynator,” a story of a woman trying to learn something about the work of a father she never really knew and discovering so much more than she could have imagined. “Resynator” kind of runs out of chords to strike before it's over, repeating a lot of its best ideas and revelations, but Tavel is remarkably likable, and it’s easy to root for her journey to succeed, to find closure in a way that most of us who have lost loved ones could never imagine. “Resynator” is about a device that turns organic sound into something technical; the film with the same attempts the reverse journey, finding strength through human emotion like grief more than the specifics of how this technology works. Alison grew up thinking that her dad Don Tavel invented the synthesizer. Not quite. She learns that he developed a technology called a Resynator, a unique synthesizer that was interesting enough in its early days to pique the interest of Peter Gabriel. Finding a prototype, Tavel sets out to get the machine physically working again, learning more about the father who died in a car crash when she was only 10 weeks old. Without spoiling anything, there are revelations about Don that are heartbreaking, and Tavel deserves a lot of credit for taking what is clearly a very personal trip in front of a camera. She is front and center through most of “Resynator,” and there’s a vulnerability to the filmmaking here that’s very admirable (even if some of the techniques employed, including animation, feel a bit unnecessary). In an era when nothing feels like it’s the right length as Netflix stretches out stories to multiple episodes, “Resynator” suffers a bit from running out of story to tell at around the hour mark. At a time when it feels like it could be wrapping up, it shifts into something else, including a roster of famous musicians who rediscover or play with the Resynator for the first time. The idea is likely that Tavel’s work can still have an impact, but the truth is that his artistic passion has clearly been handed down to his daughter. Even if the device he invented never worked again, he would have a legacy. It’s all there on camera. Finally, there’s the frustrating “The Hobby,” a film that feels like it should be a slam-dunk to a guy who grew up playing board games and tries to get his tech-loving kids to sit down and roll an actual physical die now and then. Simon Ennis’ film is about game-loving people who gather at something called the World Series of Board Games in Las Vegas, a sort of “Spellbound” for people who love the Catan and Ticket to Ride games. The personalities captured here are interesting, but “The Hobby” feels flat and repetitive, banking too much on quirky characters instead of having anything to say about why they love what they love or this unusual subculture. Too much of “The Hobby” feels like a promo reel for The World Series of Board Games, an event that looks a lot more fun to attend than watch in a feature film. Frustratingly, every time that “The Hobby” gets into broader culture issues that are interesting, such as the Black couple who work to further POC representation in the fan base, it skips away to someone being quirky. I don’t blame any of the people profiled, but Ennis needed to place them in a more interesting context about the importance of board games and maybe more of their historical impact. The film opens with a great scene in which a historian comments on how people have been playing games for literally thousands of years, and I wanted more of that broad history that led from Mesopotamian soldiers playing homemade games to what happens in Vegas. “The Hobby” certainly isn’t the worst doc at SXSW, but it feels like a missed opportunity, too focused on specific people instead of the larger picture. Although it did make me want to go buy another Ticket to Ride expansion. So, mission accomplished, I guess.

  • The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem
    by Brian Tallerico on March 16, 2024 at 2:34 PM

    There has been a growing subgenre of non-fiction films that I jokingly call “Internet Bad” movies. The worst of these feel like shallow fearmongering, playing up the fears of older viewers like a modern “Reefer Madness.” Part of the problem with this subgenre is that too many filmmakers try to paint something as complex as the internet and technology in general with a very broad brush. The truth is that our technological revolution is way too complex for most feature films to begin to capture or even really comment on, especially as it's shifting every day, so doc filmmakers end up not saying anything by trying to say too much. “The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem” has a little bit of this problem as it traces the impact of 4chan from Rickrolling to the insurrection, but it’s more engaging than a lot of this doc subgenre by virtue of the filmmaking acumen of directors Giorgio Angelini (“Owned: A Tale of Two Americas”) and Arthur Jones (“Feels Good Man,” one of the best films in this category, by the way). Like so many things that the internet poisons, 4chan started innocently enough, a community for people with shared interests to come together. One of the interesting tidbits learned in “The Antisocial Network” is how this system essentially followed another down the rabbit hole to toxicity as 2chan had been turned into a political nightmare in Japan. The early days of 4chan are almost lovingly memorialized, a time when people were fascinated by an online presence named “moot,” aka Christopher Poole, who would go on to become the Mark Zuckerberg of this organization. Seeing the early in-person meetings is fascinating, as is watching the groups fracture as more and more people wanted to make an offline impact through the pranks that ultimately developed into the work of Anonymous and the QAnon conspiracy nuts. There’s a cautionary tale in the inherent flaws that come in this kind of shitposting and trolling in terms of escalation. When the trolls of 4chan, some of whom are interviewed here, got away with one thing then it would only lead to the desire to do something more impactful or crazier in the future. For better or worse, “The Antisocial Network” seems reticent to point fingers, almost taking the stance that the kind of unchecked power that was held by 4chan was destined to corrupt and so we shouldn't really blame any of the people caught in this spider web. It sometimes feels like a few people, including one being interviewed, are let off the hook in terms of personal responsibility in a way that can be frustrating. These folks still did make choices. And, while the truth is that much of the activity on 4chan may not have created the giant riffs in society in 2024, it sure didn’t help, amplifying garbage like PizzaGate into the actual national conversation. Yes, Anonymous brought attention to issues like privacy and income inequity, but the cavalcade of conspiracy theories and flat-out lying to get clicks have dumbed down the entire country because no one knows what’s true anymore in a world where so many people believe that Q is real. At its best, this point is embedded in “The Antisocial Network,” pulling back the curtain on so much of the bullshit of the last decade and revealing it to be just a bunch of people who tugged at the strings of national anxiety for the lulz. The film can be a big weighed down in terms of hyperactive editing, but that’s because it’s trying to tell bits and pieces of so many stories, cutting between interviews about the practical history of 4chan and attempting to convey its international impact at the same time. In an era in which Netflix usually turns everything into a multi-episode series to drag it out for the viewing hours, it’s almost funny that a true story that could have justified more time gets shoved into a feature-length box that makes some of it feel shallow.  With all of its unpacked tragedies, “The Antisocial Network” fits pretty snugly into the “Internet Bad” category of documentaries, but it’s better than most because of how deftly it chronicles how it broke that way in the first place. This review was filed from the SXSW Film Festival. It premieres on Netflix on April 5th.

  • SXSW 2024: Dandelion, A Nice Indian Boy, I Don’t Understand You, I Love You Forever
    by Brian Tallerico on March 15, 2024 at 8:39 PM

    Film festivals have long been a safe place for personal stories, usually independently produced passion projects for creators to explore their own interests and sometimes even their life journeys. Sometimes a film like this can almost feel too close to the creator, a case where someone not so close to the story might have offered a fresher perspective. Sometimes they resonate with more strength by being so true. These four films in this dispatch aren’t all true stories, per se, but they all feel like they reflect what truly matters to their creators, for better or worse. For better comes in the case of Nicole Riegel’s excellent “Dandelion.” The writer/director of “Holler” introduced her newest work by commenting on the difficulties for women in creative spaces like independent film or the increasingly unprofitable world of original music. “Dandelion” is a deceptively smart character study, a movie that feels like an Alt-Folk “Once” for a while before pivoting to something else entirely. Through it all, star KiKi Layne gives her best performance since “If Beale Street Could Talk” as the title character, a Cincinnati-based troubadour who is exhausted from playing unrewarding gigs at a local bar and quarreling with her mother Jean (Melanie Nicholls-King).  As a sort of last chance to escape her life, Dandelion attends a music showcase in South Dakota, where she meets a very charismatic man named Casey (Thomas Doherty). The pair alternate a growing romance with impressive songwriting—Riegel never loses sight of the creative spirit of Dandelion. A lesser filmmaker would have discarded that aspect for pure sexual chemistry, but creativity is an essential part of not just this dynamic but Dandelion’s entire being. Of course, it helps a great deal that the excellent original music is written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National (and “Cyrano”) fame. Riegel’s approach is organic and grounded, focusing with cinematographer Lauren Guiteras on Dandelion and Casey’s hands, arms, and expressive faces as they create. Riegel loves close-ups, and I love the decision to keep us in so tight on this pair as they fall in love with music and each other. It’s a raw, sweaty, human film with a stronger visual language than nearly anything else I saw at SXSW. As with “Holler,” there’s a heartbeat in Riegel’s filmmaking that’s often lacking in independent cinema, which too commonly looks like it was made for a streaming service. “Dandelion” takes its time visually and narratively, respecting how creativity comes with ups and downs—lyrics change, tunes shift, relationships are redefined. It all plays out like a folk song, right down to the whopper of a final act. Without spoiling anything, Dandelion has to find the creative courage within herself. Casey may have helped light the match for her fire to burn, but the brilliant screenwriting element of the back half of this movie is that Riegel never lets it become just another story of how a woman needs a man to inspire her. When Dandelion finally reaches a song that feels like it’s truly, finally, expressing her voice, it’s one of the most moving moments you’ll see in a film this year. One doesn’t need press notes to sense that Roshan Sethi’s “A Nice Indian Boy” is personal for its creator too. A lot of films at SXSW this year felt like political statements, but Sethi’s film feels more like a call of kindness in this world. It is a remarkably sweet film, the kind of nice comedy that feels increasingly hard to make well in a landscape when so many films come with cynical agendas. It is sometimes disappointingly sitcom-ish in its structure and visuals, but the amount of love that Sethi and writer Eric Randall (working from a play by Madhuri Shkar) have for these characters is obvious and contagious. You’ll grow to love them too. Naveen (a gentle and genuine Karan Soni) is a doctor who struggles to meet the right guy. He’s tired of going to Indian weddings while being nowhere near scheduling his own. His sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) is married, which has made his parents Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit (Harish Patel) very happy. Naveen meets a photographer named Jay (Jonathan Groff), who seems almost like his opposite in terms of personality, but the extrovert and the introvert find love, and eventually Naveen gets the wedding of his dreams. That’s about it. And that’s all it needs to be. There’s a simple sweetness to “A Nice Indian Boy” that’s charming, largely due to the fact that everyone involved seems to be on the same page. Groff is always a welcome presence in just about anything, and the typically supporting Soni proves he can carry a film. Even the parent roles that usually come off as two-dimensional feel different in Garg and Patel’s hands. The fact that Naveen’s parents put on Out TV in an effort to understand their son could fit on a network sitcom, but the team here somehow makes it work. It’s because this is a film that deeply loves its characters, and while I think there’s a version that takes a few more risks and has a bit more visual confidence, it’s impossible to deny that this film lives up to its title by simply being so very “nice.” Writer/directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano introduced their dark comedy “I Don’t Understand You” by noting how it was inspired by and dedicated to their son. Making a film that conveys the difficulty of the adoption process—both in practical terms and emotional ones—is an admirable venture. Thousands of couples can relate to the apprehension that comes from considering yourself strong enough to raise another human life. And that foundation of emotional honesty sometimes salvages this tonal misfire but can’t quite pull together a movie that is constantly coming apart with bad screenwriting choices and direction that never figures out how to tell this quirky story. Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells are well-cast as Dom and Cole, respectively, a couple that is adopting a baby that is about to be birthed by a woman named Candice (Amanda Seyfried). After seemingly agreeing to terms with Candice, Dom and Cole decide to take a final trip, their own babymoon. They head to the Italian countryside, where “I Don’t Understand You” becomes a very different movie, a comedy of errors about communication that eventually leads to violence. Before you know it, Dom and Cole are hiding bodies, wondering how they’ll ever even meet the baby that was supposed to change their lives. There are moments, usually between Kroll and Rannells, in which “I Don’t Understand You” threatens to become a better movie. Relatively early in the film, they tell a story about adoption fraud that’s the scariest thing in the entire movie—the idea that someone could do something as vile as to use a couple’s desire to be parents for profit is horrifying. But these moments that feel real are smothered by a script that gets increasingly ridiculous in ways that aren’t entertaining. Most problematically, we start to wonder if we’re supposed to be rooting for Dom and Cole at all as they make decisions that impact (and end) lives. Making a movie in which Americans basically carve a path of destruction in another country requires a truly deft tonal hand, and this one just doesn’t make sense. A similar tonal problem betrays the intentions of “I Love You Forever,” written and directed by Elisa Kalani and Cazzie David. The buzz going around after the screening was that it was a thinly-veiled commentary on David’s relationship with Pete Davidson, which is actually more interesting than the film itself, a dark relationship dramedy that also misfires in terms of tone and lacks in filmmaking confidence. There are some funny beats in “I Love You Forever,” most of them courtesy of David herself actually in a supporting role, but this is a movie that wears out its welcome early, spinning around the same relationship ideas, and, worst of all, failing to give its lead enough character depth to justify spending so much time with her. Sofia Black-D’Elia is genuinely fine here, but Kalani and David simply haven’t written her enough of a character. It’s baffling to me why a movie that’s in part about standing up to emotional abuse is content to present us with a protagonist that we know so little about. We actually get more personality traits from David’s Ally and Jon Rudnitsky’s Lucas, who are best friends to Black-D’Elia’s Mackenzie, a law student who semes to let guys like her regular hook-up Jake (Raymond Cham Jr.) take her for granted. When she meets a charming reporter named Finn (Ray Nicholson), she falls head over heels, only to pretty quickly discover that Finn is a needy jerk, the kind of guy who has a panic attack when she doesn’t text back immediately. We haven’t often seen emotional abuse like this portrayed in film, and I think everyone will be able to see bits and pieces of past (and hopefully not current) relationships in the spiraling of Finn and Mackenzie. But there’s just not enough meat on the bones of this movie, which is also frustratingly shot and edited. Every time that the film shifted away from Mackenzie to her friends, I really just wanted to go with them instead of getting stuck in another one of Finn’s tantrums. I guess that’s part of the point in that the filmmakers want us to feel as weighed down by his nonsense as Mackenzie. But it doesn’t make this movie particularly lovable.

  • In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon
    by Clint Worthington on March 15, 2024 at 6:17 PM

    At eighty-one years of age, Paul Simon is still producing the most interesting music of his career. That makes over six decades of Simon’s impact on the popular music consciousness—from his earlier days as an Everly Brothers-inspired double act with collaborator/nemesis Art Garfunkel to his branching out into world music. Now, in his twilight years, he’s released a nearly forty-minute-long album, all one track, called Seven Psalms, a sermon delivered via plaintive guitar and his own soft whisper of a voice.  His body of work is as huge as the man is short, so it makes sense that a documentary spanning his career would stretch well past the three-hour mark. But for fans of Simon, Alex Gibney’s two-part doc “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” should serve as a healthy diagnostic on a pop music icon—comprehensible, digestible, and chock-a-block with more than a half century of the man’s stamp on pop culture. It’s his “Eras Tour,” basically. Framed largely around the recording sessions he conducted in 2021 for Seven Psalms at his studio in Wimberly, Texas, “In Restless Dreams” zips back frequently to let Simon reflect on the various moments of his career. (Suffice to say, Paul Simon has to think about his entire life before he plays.) It’s in these stretches that Gibney, a veteran documentarian who normally handles more politically prescient material (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the World,” “Totally Under Control”), breezes casually through the usual mix of interviews, narration, and archival footage of Simon’s relatively uncontroversial career.  This isn’t to say Simon’s career hasn’t been a rocky one, as Gibney makes clear (though frustratingly refuses to explore deeply). A good bit of the doc’s first episode—which Gibney cheekily dubs “Verse One”—details Simon’s early collaborations with, then bitter feuds, with Garfunkel, a close childhood friend who becomes a bitter creative partner. Then, his solo career (and life) stumbles more than a few times, from his attempt to follow Garfunkel in front of the camera in the 1980 flop “One Trick Pony” to the accusations of “cultural slumming” he faced around his Grammy-winning world music tracks in “Graceland.”  Peppered throughout these sections is the same sense of perfectionism Simon lends to his music. We watch his boyish face and weary eyes grow and change over the years; his hairline grows thinner, his blazers boxier. He and Garfunkel come right out of the gate with The Sound of Silence, and recount the way “Mrs. Robinson” was essentially being written as they recorded it, rushing to complete it for “The Graduate.” Whether there, or in the minutes-long jam sessions we see in South Africa with some of that nation’s most talented musicians or finding the right lyric for Seven Psalms—complete with handwritten text floating overhead—we get a decent sense of Simon’s perfectionism.  Docs less enamored with their subject might eke out some more interesting tidbits about their famous feud in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (Garfunkel is only seen in voiceover and archival footage; it would have been nice to get a reunion of sorts with him.) But Gibney seems content to leave it up to a few snide remarks at awards shows and shrugged acknowledgments of bitterness. Even the way he elides the aforementioned accusations of appropriation feels defensive, and we don’t get him reflecting on those controversies in the present day. In 2021, Paul Simon is all but focused on getting Seven Psalms done, to the point where that footage feels a little divorced from the archival stuff we’re seeing. In general, the doc seems to lean into Simon’s outward persona as a shy, gregarious guy—and indeed, the bits of contemporary footage we see bear out a wise old songwriting legend ruminating on his own life, with wife Edie Brackell and a flood of millennial musicians and sound engineers by his side. But for a work that feels like the final punctuation mark on the man’s life (he is, after all, in the middle of recording an album about whether he truly believes in God in his eighties), it feels a bit too curated for the unironic fan. The arrogant songwriter who had rocky relationships with Carrie Fisher and was accused of cultural appropriation in his world music era of Graceland? We see him only in a few scenes. Gibney’s approach, like Simon at his peak, is to play the hits. In so doing, even the darker parts are lacquered over with a healthy dose of Simon’s output, like the teeny-bopper hit “Hey Schoolgirl” he released with Garfunkel—back when they were called “Tom & Jerry”—and extended footage of the various hit concerts he headlined. Admittedly, these are a treat for Simon (and Garfunkel, mind you) fans, and the footage of the ‘81 reunion concert with Art and a concert in Zimbabwe are particular standouts. Those looking to groove out to the man’s music will be well-supplied, especially in “Verse Two,” where Simon’s life smooths out a bit more and he’s just looking for the next thing to focus on. Paradoxically, “In Restless Dreams” feels like it could, or should, go on longer—it ends at the Rhythm of the Saints portion of his career before zooming back to the present and Seven Psalms. But even so, Gibney knows the appeal of this man to his public is the music, first and foremost. He’s not about to sacrifice that for a more withering, clear-eyed expose on the musician.  “I’m afraid of the nights,” a frail Simon says into the phone while he preps for more recording sessions at a local church for Seven Psalms; he’s been prone to terrifying coughing fights in the dark. Just a couple of minutes later, he dances on the stage with all the playful energy of a man thirty, forty years his senior. “In Restless Dreams” captures Simon in both modes, for better more than for worse—a reverential doc about an iconic musician. On MGM+ on Sunday, March 17th.

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