LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

 This film wasn't really on my radar, but I ended up seeing it while recently visiting the 'rents.  They were going to see it at their local independent cinema, so I tagged along.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I have to admit that I didn't know much about LR other than that she dated Jerry Brown on his first go-around as Governor of California. Suffice it to say, she was a badass during her career. What a set of pipes. And her command of different musical genres was pretty unparalleled. She also seems like she was hella cool and not a spoiled diva, which was refreshing to see given her stature and level of stardom she achieved.

The film is a classic documentary in that it unfolds in a pretty linear fashion, starting with LR's birth, her upbringing in the Southwest, and continues on from there chronicling her meteoric career.

To this end, the film contains some fantastic archival footage and a host of great interviews from the likes of Dolly Parton, Don Henley, Ry Cooder, Emmylou Harris, and more. 

I had no idea how deep Ronstadt's career went nor about her connections to Neil Young, The Eagles, and others.

I also had no idea that she is just a singer (and a mightly damn good one), not a songwriter. She's like Sinatra, a vocalist with a signature voice that is heralded for her interpretations of other people's songs. She was also a maverick when it came to the course of her career (she literally flipped her script at least 5 times in terms of the genres of music she peformed).

The only minor off-putting element of the film is that it has a tendency to feel slightly maudlin when discussing why she retired from singing.

Still, if you are into popular music at all, this is completely worth watching for the classic footage and interviews with her peers.

LITTLE MONSTERS [Film Review]

By now everybody knows that the zombie film is essentially dead. Yet every few years somebody comes along and tweaks the genre just enough to keep it shuffling along. Over the years we’ve had fast zombies (Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead), zombie romances (Warm Bodies), zombie pub crawls (Shaun of the Dead), zombie musicals (Dead and Breakfast), zombies on trains (Train to Busan), and Cuban refuge zombies (Juan of the Dead), to name a few. And now, thanks to the delightfully debased, yet sublimely sweet Little Monsters, the genre gets another off-beat and entertaining boost.

Falling nicely into the zom com sub-genre, this ditty from Down Under manages to inject a little life into the by now rote zombie cinematic routine. Imagine Kindergarten Cop crossed with Night of the Living Dead and you’ll get a pretty good idea of where this film is coming from and where it’s going. Toss in a bit of Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy and you’re good to go. But it transcends these comparisons thanks to some good, old-fashioned, in-your-face Aussie humor, not to mention some damn fine acting, and lots of ukulele accompanied singing. The comedic timing and overall swift pacing don’t hurt, either.

The quick summary of the film is thus: a group of kindergarten-aged school children go on a field trip to a petting zoo/put-put golf park and get overrun by zombies. To say any more would reveal too much and spoil the fun. Borrowing elements from George Romero’s classic canon (specifically Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead) as well as the twisted satiric slant first displayed in the granddaddy of zom coms, Return of the Living Dead, and mixing it liberally with equal parts crude humor and heart-on-the-sleeve sentimentality, screenwriter/director Abe Forsythe for the most part, turns a hodge-podge of clichés and familiar tropes into a winning combination of laughs, tears, and tension. To wit, I laughed my ass off for the first 30-minutes, found myself on the edge of my seat during what should have been a trite and predictable sequence of events at the heart of the film, and I even shed a tear or two towards the end. For a zomedy to elicit such a wide range of emotions means that all involved did something right.

While Forsythe's quick wit and brisk manner keep things lively, the two leads-- Lupita Nyong’o (Us) and Alexander England (Alien: Covenant)-- really anchor the film by displaying wonderful comedic timing, great chemistry, and some not-half-bad singing. Nyong’o’s character is a proper school marm, while England plays the classic man-child who grows up considerably through the course of the film. Sure, the archetypes are cliché, but each actor owns their character and instills them with a sense of multi-dimensional realism. And then there’s Diesel La Torraca.  As Felix, the main “little monster”, he is sublime. His off-kilter demeanor and display of a kid’s sense of wonder and nonchalance is fantastic; I mean he is a kid, but to do all of this unintentionally funny kid behavior onscreen takes some talent. If there is any fault to the story it might be that the other kids in the film are seriously side-lined, coming off as standard one-dimensional characters (the fat kid, the crippled kid, the nondescript kid, etc.). In addition, Josh Gad offers up a relentless and over-the-top portrayal of a kid’s television host. Granted, we’ve seen this self-centered douchebag character before, but despite the unoriginality, it still provides a wee bit of comic relief.

While not really bringing anything new to the zombie table, Little Monsters at least has a trio of fantastic actors at the core, more laugh-out-loud moments than I can recall encountering in any recent comedy, and it proves, without a doubt that surviving the zombie apocalypse ain’t shit when compared to teaching (ie wrangling) a classroom of 5 year olds. Oh yeah, and it just might make you a fan of Taylor Swift and Neil Diamond in the bargain.

Currently streaming on HULU

Rating: 3.5/5

RIYL

Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse; Shaun of the Dead; Dead and Breakfast; Kindergarten Cop; Big Daddy;

JOKER [Film Review]

There is absolutely no question that Joaquin Phoenix is mesmerizing in his role as Arthur Fleck. Yet despite this I couldn’t help feeling as if he were purposefully channeling Crispin Glover for the entirety of the film (this is particularly noticeable during the talk show bits in the film). In the end this similarity is distracting and disconcerting. Then again, that’s kind of the vibe of the entire film.

Director and co-screenwriter Todd Phillips, who is best known for blunt, in-your-face comedies (Old School, The Hangover trilogy) instills his first foray into “serious drama” with a singular heavy-handedness that never lets up. Let’s just say that dude needs to learn the art of subtlety. The myriad messages contained within the story (inadequacy of social services systems in America, corrupt businessmen, mental illness, the cult of personalty, amongst others) are delivered with somewhat ham-fisted bravado and utterly lacking any sense of nuance.
One thing not lacking is exposition. I usually feel that most modern Hollywood fare tends to go light on exposition, here, however, Phillips generously ladles it out. The judicious amounts of set-up prevent the film from really percolating until the latter half of the third act. I get it, it’s meant to be a character study, but there is such a thing as too much character development. Also, the pacing could have been just a tad more brisk. By the time our protagonist completely unravels it’s a bit underwhelming. The long journey we are led on just doesn’t warrant the ultimately predictable end.
But perhaps the most distracting element is the relentless and overbearing score by Hildur Guonadottir. Her string heavy sounds feel as if they were meant for a different film, possibly some cold, arctic drama, not a gritty urban nightmare. What’s more, Phillips has her atonal notes blaring at maximum volume throughout the bulk of the film, rarely allowing for moments of subdued background noise or quietude. The end result is that the music often drowns out the emotional impact of the story, almost as if Phillips is trying to force particular emotions on the audience rather than letting them be cultivated naturally.
The other things bogging the film down are the obvious nods to DeNiro’s classics The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver. The fact that DeNiro himself is a character in the film doesn’t help alleviate these comparisons. While some might find it ironic having the former Travis Bickle be the object of Fleck’s obsession, I did not.
On the plus side there’s Zazie Beets, who although a minor character in the story, still manages to outshine just about everyone else in the cast (fwiw, she has become one of my favorite actors in terms of her ability to disappear completely into every role she has taken to date). Additionally, sprinkled throughout the film are some truly spectacular moments: Fleck, amidst utter chaos in the streets, spreading his bloody fingers across his mouth to create a demonic crimson grin; Fleck’s sweetly creepy clown routine at a children’s hospital; All of Fleck’s Gene Kelly-inspired flights of fantasy; The next-to-last scene when he walks out of a counseling session at Arkham Asylum. There are others, but alas a smattering of well choreographed and artistically composed scenes do not a great movie make; for every one of these moments there are equal moments that were unnecessary or just fell flat (the final scene with Phoenix running through the hallways of Arkham being chased by an orderly as if recreating some scene out of an Abbott and Costello film, for example).
All in all it feels as if Phillips was just a bit too earnest with his first “serious” film, trying too hard to prove that he is more than a a master of crude comedy fare. It also doesn’t help that the spectre of the Batman mythos lurks in the background, yet is never fully developed. In many ways this film might have worked better had it not had any ties to the Caped Crusader at all.

RATING: 2.5 / 5

RIYL: King of Comedy; Taxi Driver

Creative Casting Ideas #1: Kathy Bates As The Joker...?

While I have yet to see the new Joaquin Phoenix film, I have been binging American Horror Story: Apocalypse and I gotta say, Kathy Bates would deliver a great take on the Caped Crusader's psychotic adversary...

Faults

Riley Stearn's (he wrote/directed The Art of Self Defense, which I highly reccomend: https://spencesez.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-art-of-self-defence.html) debut feature is a dark, creepy, and incredibly unnerving little motel room thriller. The film bursts out the gate by introducing our warped and erratic protagonist, who is acerbic, eccentric,  and not the leasr bit likeable. An "expert" on cults, he is soon hired to deprogram a couple's young daughter. Things go off the rails from the moment the woman is "kidnapped" and taken to a seedy motel where she is contained in the hopes of being reunited with her parents. The film is played low-key and every character is just a bit off, creating a surreal and disturbing aura. Things move along in a dreamlike state (actually, it's a bit more likea stifling nightmare) with subtle events unfolding in a deliberate pace which serves to keep you off-balance.

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

RATING: 4/5

RIYL: The Sound of My Voice; The Invitation; Martha Marcy May Marlene 

Monos

Straddling the line between visual tone poem and quasi-non narrative storytelling, this Spanish language film revels in vivid, semi-hallucinatory imagery and a plot saturated in abstruse elements, all of it taking place in an unnamed South American country. Drawing heavily from Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but also tossing in guerrilla ambiguity and what can only be described as “jungle noir”, it unravels as a languid commentary on lost innocence, corrosion of conformity, and the primal human nature surrounding survival of the individual. The strength of the film lies in slow building dread, a feeling that something catastrophic is just waiting to happen in the next frame. The downfall of the film, however, is that nothing really does. But damn if it all doesn’t look like an idyllically off-kilter travelogue as rendered in lush green hues, teeming with fog, mud, and rain forest audio ephemera. Speaking of sounds, the score is a bristling and immersive offering that paints much of the imagery with fairy tale-styled ambiance, but also slips in nuances of nightmarish menace. The ending of the film leaves many questions unanswered as well as requiring the audience to fill in any lingering blanks on their own. On the one hand it feels unfinished, on the other it creates a ripe atmosphere for post-viewing discussion.

Rating: 3.5/5

RIYL: Apocalypse Now (specifically the third act); The Thin Red Line (and pretty much any other Terrence Malick film); The Mission; Apocalypto; Quest For Fire

The Peanut Butter Falcon

Heart-warming.

Sweet. 

Feel good.

I’ve never been a fan of these descriptions when applied to cinema, literature, or art. But, dammit anyway, they are kind of applicable in regards to this little film.

A figurative twist on the Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer mythos (they even name-check the book early on), TPBF is an “exotic” American road trip-cum-quest-cum buddy movie. I say “exotic” since the North Carolina coastal locale is completely foreign to this California native.

Fueled by some beguilingly charismatic acting from Shia LaBouef, Dakota Johnson, and newcomer Zack Gottsagen, the film has a decidedly laid-back demeanor; it just kind of ambles along with a mellow, down home sensibility.

Teeming with After School Special-styled tropes ranging from the loner with a dark past to the wide-eyed social worker and populated with some generic background characters (for example, the villains--John Hawke and Yelawolf(!)--are pretty one-dimensional, yet they serve their purpose well), the film really succeeds due to the wonderful chemistry between the three leads. I’ve always enjoyed Beef Boy’s thespian escapades from Holes on through mediocre action fare like Transformers, Eagle Eye, and Disturbia. Here, he excels as the rambling, emotionally scarred Tyler. The Falcon, his ownself, is wonderfully spot on with comedic timing and an overall sense of naturalism. And the fruit of Don Johnson’s loins continues to showcase a wonderful depth and chameleonic virtuousness when it comes to the roles she takes. It’s mesmerizing every time one of these three graces the screen. There’s a few great cameos, as well. Hardcore wrestling fans will whoop and holler when Mankind and Jake the Snake flick into frame. And Thomas Haden Church should be deemed a national treasure.

If there is one downfall to the film it’s the all too feel-good ending. It looks like there was originally a bittersweet ending that I’m guessing might have tested poorly in trial screenings and as a result the filmmakers decided to tack on a happier ending, one which really doesn’t work with the way the rest of the climactic scenes have been edited; the final minutes just feel clunky. 

Lame ending aside, the bulk of the journey is a hoot. I laughed. I cried. I felt a connection to the characters. So much so that I found myself longing for my younger days and the missed opportunities of open road adventures on the fringes of America.

Rating: 3.5/5

RIYL: Rainman; Stand By Me; Yesterday; Fandango