Movie Reviews - 2015 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

You’ve got to admire a sex comedy that can make Dan Savage squirm in his seat.

My main thought going into “The Overnight,” which closed the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival, was about the asterisk on the poster. I immediately thought it looked like Kurt Vonnegut’s illustration of an asshole from his novel “Breakfast of Champions.” But no way, right? I knew the movie was a sex comedy but I figured it wouldn’t reference Vonnegut (or assholes) so obliquely.

But that’s what it does. That’s what it is. (The poster has since gotten a sexier update: mouse over.)

It’s a simple premise. Alex and Emily (Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling) have recently moved from Seattle to L.A. for her job, but they feel isolated. Or he feels isolated. She, at least, has a place to go every day; he just goes to the park with their young son, R.J. But it’s there that they meet another father, Kurt (Jason Schwartzman), a porkpie-hat-wearing extrovert, who invites them to family pizza night, where, with wife Charlotte (French actress Judith Godreche), Kurt suggests they put the kids to sleep so they can continue their conversation like adults. But things get increasingly weird: They get stoned, he shows a breast-feeding video his wife starred in, he shows Alex his paintings of assholes, then he suggests they all go swimming in the pool and strips completely and dives in.

P.S. He’s hung like a horse.

Here’s the question: Is he just an extrovert interested in showing a Seattle couple a good time? Or is he interested in a good time?

It seems obvious he has ulterior motives but Alex doesn’t see them, even as Emily, and we, do. Alex’s continued naivete throughout the night is, in fact, the main false note in a movie predicated on delivering confessional truths. One assumes writer-director Patrick Brice needed to keep the show going, so he needed someone to be the naïve one, and Alex drew the short straw. So to speak.

That’s the part, I believe, that made Dan Savage—who moderated a Q&A after the screening—squirm. Not the fact that Kurt has a huge schlong and Alex has a little pee-pee; it’s Alex’s hot-tub admission that he has a small pee-pee—that his penis didn’t grow much after junior high, and that he and his wife have an unfulfilling sex life. That’s tough to admit. And baring your sexual soul to viritual strangers? Really? Although maybe it’s easier that way. Maybe that’s why we all go to priests and psychiatrists. A stranger is a buffer. Tell them anything and then continue with your normal, secretive life.

Still, Kurt and Charlotte are hardly pychiatrists, while the hot tub isn’t exactly a confessional.

Besides, you’d think with Alex’s particular secret, and with everyone stripping, he would be the first one to want to go, since staying would mean potential revelation. But he drew the short straw.

We wind up liking Kurt a lot more in the third act. For much of the movie, we assume he’s being nice to Alex to get to Emily; then we discover he likes Alex, meaning his motives aren't ulterior at all. Everyone, in fact, has a sexual secret or hangup. Alex has a small dick, Kurt likes Alex, Emily lusts after other men. Charlotte’s reveal is the oddest. She goes to Thai massage parlors and pays money so she can jack off fat men on tables. Really? In what world do hot French women need to pay money to give handjobs? And where do I volunteer for the experiment?

With its male full-frontal, and frank sexual discussions, “The Overnight” has potential as a cult movie. It’s certainly getting a lot of buzz. But I think there’s too many false notes on its path to the truth that we all have sexual hangups.

But I would love to take a poll of people exiting the film, particularly for gender reasons. After the SIFF screening, the women around me talked up how funny it was. That was their main thought: Funny. My main thought? Painful. But I seemed alone with this thought—and worried about what it said about me—until Dan Savage, with his first comment, set me free. Thanks, Dan. You’re right: It got better.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Oh, Peter Greenaway. What might you give us is you cared just a little about narrative and a little less about vomit and other forms of bodily excretion?

“Eisenstein in Guanajuato” is set in 1931 in, yes, Guanajuato, Mexico, where Sergei M. Eisenstein (Elmer Bäck of Finland, who’s good), the acclaimed Soviet director behind “Battleship Potemkin” as well as “Strike” and “October” (or “10 Days That Shook the World”), is at work on his next great project. But it’s the one that undoes him. Why does it undo him? From Greenaway you get a sense that maybe Eisenstein didn’t work hard enough (or at all), maybe he had too much sex (for a change), maybe his producers—Upton Sinclair’s wife, Mary (Lisa Owen) and her brother, Hunter S. Kimbrough (Stelio Savante, attempting an atrocious Southern accent)—were philistines who didn’t appreciate great art.

What is the project? According to this article, it’s meant to be “a six-part avant garde film spanning Mexican history and culture from pre-Conquest times through the 1910-20 revolution.” I hardly got that from Greenaway. I thought maybe it was on the recent Mexican revolution. Maybe.

There’s a lot of historical stuff Greenaway seems to bypass. You get a sense, for example, that the Mexican trip is part of a long, worldwide tour Eisenstein has been on, but I didn’t get he'd been on it for three years. I didn’t get that the original purpose was not only to show off Eisenstein to the world but for Eisenstein to learn how the rest of the world was making sound pictures. I didn’t get that Eisenstein was in trouble with Soviet filmmakers before he went on the trip—for not adhering to “socialist realism”—and not just because he seemed to be delaying his return.

Here are the film’s basics:

• In grand, white-suited pomposity, Eisenstein arrives at his five-star hotel and showers in front of the staff, including his Mexican guide Palamino Cañedo (Luis Alberti). He talks to his penis, telling it to behave. (Per Greenaway, lots of male full-frontal.)
• Eisenstein wanders the city but falls victim to Montezuma’s revenge; Cañedo cleans him up and puts him to bed. (More full-frontal.)
• Talk and flirtation between Eisenstein and Cañedo, who finally go to bed, with Cañedo taking the lead and Eisenstein suddenly shy. It turns out he’s a virgin. (Ditto.)
• The two in and out of bed, with various annoying people, particularly Sinclair and Kimbrough, interrupting, and with increasing talk about death and the Day of the Dead.
• Eisenstein forced to leave Guanajuato, and to leave his 250 miles of film footage in the hands of the philistines. It’s the 10 days that shook Eisenstein.

The movie is visually striking with beautiful sets and clever split-screens and triptychs, but it’s narratively limp. It’s mostly dialogue, and most of that is so-so—although I did love a line of Eisenstein’s on money: how it’s a new phenomenon; how idiots have a lot of it and great men have little, so what good is it? That made me smile. 

Not enough. All play and no work makes “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” a dull film. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Love, Theft and Other Entanglements” is a dark comedy about Palestine and Israel, but sadly it’s neither comedy enough nor dark enough. Still, you’ve got to give writer-director Muayad Alayan credit for trying. Tough to make comedy out of ongoing tragedy.

Mousa (Sami Metwasi) is a petty thief who gets enmeshed in more powerful forces when he steals a car not knowing an Israeli soldier—barter for the release of Palestinian prisoners—is bound and gagged in the trunk. Suddenly his hot car, a Volkswagen Passat, is superhot. No fence will touch the stripped items he offers, and both the Palestinian militia in their white van and the Israeli cops, led by a tall, bald official, are after him.

All his life, Mousa was someone who ran away. When we first see him, he’s at a construction job, angry and outraged with boredom; then he bolts. Years earlier, he got a girl, Manal (Maya Abu al-Hayyat), pregnant, and he bolted then, too, even though he now returns to bang her and stare moony-eyed at her/his daughter from a distance. (She married someone else, a rich man, so his daughter is now daughter to someone else.) Beofre this latest screw-up, Mousa was getting ready to run away anyway—to Italy, via a fake passport—but fake passports cost. The plan was to use the money from the Passat to pay for the passport. Now he can't. Now he’s trapped.

There’s some good bits. I like the nervous dance Mousa does, gun drawn, when he first releases the soldier, Avi Cohen (Riyad Silman), from the trunk. Metwasi and Silman have good chemistry as they go on the run, sleep on the ground, are discovered by a goat and a blind woman. Mousa isn’t much of a thief and Cohen isn’t much a soldier—a cook, I believe—and some of their back-and-forth is mildly amusing, but that’s about it. It’s all presented matter of factly. It feels like it needs a slight Coenesque push toward something broader, or more poignant, or both, but Alayan doesn’t give it that push. He also seems to care too much about Mousa without giving us reason to.

So if the essence of Mousa is to run away from responsibility, what will the ending be? Right. He stays to take responsibility for something he didn’t do. In a sense, the ending is the most tortured part of the movie.

WARNING: SPOILERS

After the screening at the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival there was a party at the Rainier Chapter House, a Mount Vernon replica home built in 1925, with open bar and hors d’oeuvres and Dilettante chocolates; and it was there, in this lovely building on a lovely evening surrounded by lovely and beautiful people, that I realized that I liked “The End of the Tour” more than everyone around me.

Then again, I’m about its perfect audience.

Like David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), I was a struggling writer in the 1990s who was envious of, and blown away by, the massive talent of David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel, cast against type), who, in 1996, became a household name—in households that cared about serious literature anyway—with the publication of the 1,000-page novel, “Infinite Jest.” (He killed himself 12 years later.) In the film, Lipsky has just published his own novel, “The Art Fair,” which is greeted with the indifference we greet most things, when he hears about the accolades for “Jest” and dismisses them out of hand. Popular equals shitty, right? But his girlfriend, Sarah (Anna Chlumsky), suggests he actually read the book. He does, in silence, for about 10 seconds of screentime. Followed by a quiet, envious: “Shit.”

Like Lipsky, I’ve also interviewed a lot of people—although not for five days while living in their homes or going on tour with them. At best, I get a few hours in the office. But I know the tension between opening them up, wanting to be their friends, and potentially betraying them. “You’re not his best buddy,” Lipsky’s editor tells him, “you’re a reporter.”

Even an innocuous scene reminded me of me. At one point, Lipsky is sleeping in Wallace’s spare bedroom, with extra stacks of Wallace’s books towering over him and threatening to crush him, and I immediately flashed on one of the first short stories I ever wrote. A middle-aged writer, obsessed with great writers, with not adding litter to literature, is made small and insignificant by the huge book cases along one of the walls of his apartment, and winds up being crushed beneath one of them. (I'm not saying it was good.)

Plus half the movie takes place in Minneapolis, which is where I was born and raised.

So I get why “The End of the Tour” appeals to me more than most people. It’s “My Dinner with David Foster Wallace”: philosophical discussions about writing, fame, self-awareness and all that crap. It’s Salieri interviewing Mozart for Rolling Stone, and Salieri is my patron saint.

It’s about why we feel as empty as we do, having as much as we do.

People who do not love us but want our money
But I’m not unsympathetic to the complaints I heard at the Rainier Chapter House:

• It went on too long.
• Foster Wallace’s sudden jealousy by the refrigerator was odd.
• Eisenberg’s jittery acting is off-putting.

Once I began talking about the film, though, people invariably admitted, “Oh yeah, that part was great. Yeah, that, too.”

Example. Foster Wallace says this, or something similar, at one point:

As the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up [grows] ... at a certain point, we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.

This quote is taken from Lipsky’s book, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace,” which is the basis for the movie. It’s an amazing quote. In 1996, I wasn’t even online; yet David Foster Wallace had already figured out what was already dangerous about it.

We get a lot of regular guy talk in the film: “Die Hard” (they both like), the empty calories of junk food (Wallace is an addict), the empty calories of television (ditto). Part of the tension is that Lipsky expects a genius while Wallace keeps retreating into regular guyness. Wallace has what Lipsky wants, is who Lipsky wants to be, but keeps denying that part of himself. Or so it seems to Lipsky.

Wallace is portrayed as a child of Holden Caulfield, worried about being a phony, and fame has simply added to that worry. The better-praised he is, the more he feels like a fraud. Popular equals shitty, right? He’s a hipster child of the ’70s, when you were never supposed to want fame. He’s a child of the Midwest, too, which is almost Amish in its reserve. You’re not supposed to stand out. All of these tensions make him a wreck. He’s trying to stay on the right path and it feels like success keeps pushing him off.

He’s weird about his privacy (“How did you get this number?” he asks when Lipsky first phones) and even weirder about women. In Minneapolis, Lipsky flirts subtly with Wallace’s college girlfriend, Betsy (Mickey Sumner), who flirts back less subtly, and that evening Wallace suddenly hijacks Lipsky’s conversation with Sarah for about 30 minutes. It’s payback. The next day, Lipsky gets Betsy’s email address, ostensibly for quotes about Wallace for the article, but Wallace sees something else, and demands Lipsky be a stand-up guy. Question: Is Wallace “too sensitive” here? Or is he simply “ultra sensitive”—picking up on what is happening all around us?

It’s the conversation, stupid
That moment leads to accusations, bad feelings, silent treatments, further arguments. It’s the story’s “arc” and it feels a little false. It feels like both men are expecting way too much of the other, that no one is being professional here. Is it even true? I can’t find anything about it in Lipsky’s book.

For me, “The End of the Tour,” written by Donald Marguiles (Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner with Friends”), and directed by James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now”), would’ve been better served finding a subtler arc; or none at all and going the full “My Dinner with Andre.” Its conversations are good enough.

Ironically, the one conversation Wallace and Lipsky don’t have is about the death of serious literature as a force in the larger culture. Meaning both men were both worried about a kind of fame—Wallace having too much of it, Lipsky not enough—that was going away anyway. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

About two-thirds of the way through “Being Evel,” Daniel Junge’s fun, straightforward documentary on Evel Knievel, the motorcycle daredevil who became part of the wider culture in the 1970s, we’re suddenly watching 8-milimeter footage of nondescript boys emulating his stunts on their bicycles: building ramps and jumping things on the sidewalks in front of their homes.

“Hey,” I thought. “Just like Chris.”

My older brother Chris was 10 in 1971 when we saw the B-movie “Evel Knievel” starring George Hamilton at the Boulevard Theater near our home. Inspired, he dragged an old toy refrigerator out on the front sidewalk, laid it flat, placed a sturdy board on top, and had at. Pedaling his banana-seat bicycle furiously, he jumped over stuffed animals, then real animals, then neighborhood kids. His daredevil career abruptly ended when parents got wind of the danger he was putting their kids in, but I’d always thought Chris had been an anomaly. Nope.

Part of the point of the doc, in fact, is how many young boys Evel Knievel influenced. As his son Robbie says with a smile, “We all have a little Evel in us.”

From Butte to Snake River
Robert Craig Knievel was a major asshole. Might as well say that up front. Maybe it’s more accurate to say he became a major asshole. Could’ve been the fame, could’ve been the painkillers/booze, maybe he landed on his head too much. The human body is a delicate machine and he didn’t exactly treat it delicately.

His life was a lot like the parabola of his jumps: rise, fall, crash.

He was born and raised in Butte, Montana by his grandparents. (It’s almost a cliché: another guy driven to success to make up for a lost father.) Butte was a tough town where you stood your ground, and that’s what he did. A relative remembers hitting Bobby, who promptly ran head-first into a door and told him point-blank: “You can’t hurt me.”

He was a rebel in the 1950s mode; he did petty crimes, skirted the law. Was he a safecracker? “He broke into my place,” says one resident. “He ran a racket,” says another.

The turning point almost seems like a joke. Evel Knievel, insurance salesman? But he was good at it—a natural salesman. And when he felt the boss screwed him over, he got a job selling motorcycles. That led to a stunt in Moses Lake, Wash., jumping his motorcycle over rattlesnakes. Then he was part of a team, “Evel Knievel and His Motorcycle Daredevils.” Throughout, he kept selling himself.

The big break came in March 1967 when he jumped 15 cars at a motorcycle race in Gardenia, Calif., which just happened to be aired on “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” Afterwards no one talked about the race; everyone talked about this crazy motorcycle jumper, this real-life Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape.” He got even more attention for the fountain jump at Caesar’s Palace later that year, but it only happened because 1) he thought it up, and 2) pushed and lied to make it happen. He kept phoning the owner of Caesar’s Palace and pretended to be different reporters asking about the event that hadn’t even been scheduled. He crashed—famously, in slow mo—but his career soared: Carson, Cavett, Sports Illustrated, Ideal Toys. All kids wanted to be Evel Knievel. Cue that 8-mm footage.

His most famous jump was a bust. At the end of the Hamilton movie, he talks about wanting to jump the Grand Canyon but the Dept. of the Interior said no. So he bought property next to the Snake River Canyon in Idaho and prepared to jump that. It was the excess of the period in microcosm. There was anarchy on the grounds (fights, rapes); the press saw him up close and didn’t like what they saw; and the jump itself was ridiculous. I was 9 when it happened and even I thought it absurd. Wait, he’s not on a motorcycle? Wait, he’s in a little rocket ship? Well, what’s the point of that? That’s not Evel Knievel. You see him being lowered into the rocket ship here and he looks like spam in a can. Worse, the parachute deployed early, and it was suggested that he did it himself; that he was scared. The press was brutal, even if it paid attention. For once, bad timing: That same day, Pres. Ford pardoned Nixon for crimes surrounding the Watergate cover-up. Evel Who?

He kept going—Wembley, Ohio, “Viva Knievel”—but he was increasingly paranoid and in pain, and his career crashed for good in 1977 when he assaulted his former publicist, Shelly Saltman, after the publication of Saltman’s book, “Evel Knievel on Tour.” There’s a good bit in the doc when various talking heads say, more or less, the book seemed fine to them; but Knievel took exception and went after Saltman with a baseball bat. At trial he was unapologetic, serving time even more so. The negative publicity hurt sales of the Evel Knievel toy and the Ideal company pulled out. His excessive lifestyle meant he’d saved little. He lost it all.

The sole, clean, clear leap
For some reason, Knievel’s influence on pop culture goes unmentioned here. There’s no Super Dave Osborne, Fonzie jumping 14 garbage cans (and a shark), nor Captain Lance Murdock inspiring Bart to jump Springfield Gorge on “The Simpsons.” Instead, Junge focuses on how influential Knievel was with, you know, the jackasses of the world. Johnny Knoxville is one of the doc’s main talking heads. We also hear from Knievel’s descendants, either literal (Robbie) or metaphoric (Tony Hawk, Robbie Maddison). We get footage of Maddison jumping an entire football field in 2007, which seems insane to me. It set the world record, but I first learned about it here.

That’s the thing: These guys are niche while Knievel seeped into the broader culture. His times allowed it. Back then, we had three channels and national meeting places, and Knievel broke through because he was crazy, original and a showman. He created and sold himself as a combo of Elvis, Gorgeous George, and Steve McQueen. The doc shows footage of him on “The Tonight Show” wearing a white fur coat and carrying a white cane on hands heavy with gaudy rings. What fun.

There’s also a rather forced attempt to redeem Knievel in the end. Junge wants rise, fall, crash and resurrection. There’s talk of needing heroes, of a man on a white horse, and somehow that’s applied to Knievel. C'mon. He was just a balls-out crazy showman who arrived at the right time. If Knievel means more than that—the way Muhammad Ali means more, the way Bobby Thomson’s homerun in “Underworld” means more—Junge doesn’t find it.

Maybe the beauty of Evel Knievel is simply the beauty Archibald MacLeish wrote poems about: the sole, clean, clear leap that has disappeared.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Here’s the main problem with the movie: The ex is too obviously awful.

In the middle of their daughters’ 5th birthday party, Will Henry (Jemaine Clement of “Flight of the Conchords”), a graphic novelist and teacher, finds his longtime partner Charlie (Stephanie Allyne) cheating on him in the upstairs bedroom with Gary (Michael Chernus), an overweight “monologueist.” A year later, after they’ve split up, and after he asks to spend more time with the girls, she shows up on his doorstep with the girls and just drops them off. No word in advance. A few days after that, he expresses concern that this impromptu shift doesn’t give the girls the proper structure, and Charlie practically throws their schedule—including cello and French lessons—at him. She claims, perhaps legitimately, that she spent too many years taking care of him, and then the girls, so she never had time for herself. Which is what she’s doing now. She’s taking improv classes. Gary thinks she has “hidden talents.” She’s obviously a spoiled nothing but Will is still in love with her. Worse, when he begins a relationship with someone else, Diane (Regina Hall), Charlie begins to covet him again. She kisses him. And he kisses her back.

At the SIFF Uptown theater where I saw “People, Places, Things,” a cry of despair literally went up from the audience at that moment. Particularly the women in the audience.

Will then tells Diane about the kiss. He’s confused, he says. He doesn’t know which way to go, he says. But we do. It’s so fucking obvious.

That’s the main problem with the film. If Charlie had been less awful, we might have felt Will’s dilemma—that sense of being pulled in two equal directions—but we don’t. Because they’re not equal. We not only know he shouldn’t wind up with Charlie but won’t. He’ll wind up with Diane. That’s how these movies go.

Otherwise, “People, Places, Things,” written and directed by James C. Strouse (“Grace is Gone,” “The Winning Season”), is a small, organically funny movie that makes great use of the dry humor and shaggy charm of Clement. An example from when he tells Diane about the kiss with Charlie:

Will: You should slap me or something.
[Diane slaps him]
Will: Ow!
Diane: You told me to do it!
Will (quietly, hurt): I said “or something.”

The comic-book art in the movie comes from Scott McCloud of “Understanding Comics” fame, and gives us a quick window into Will’s emotions: panels of growing up surrounded by family and thinking “I want to be alone,” leading to the final admission of loneliness; drawings of he and Charlie building something together, which turns out to be the wall separating them.

We also see the work of Kat (Jessica Williams of “The Daily Show,” good in a small role), Will’s brightest student, whose graphic novel is called “Mother Fuckers.” It’s about the men who entered (and exited) the life of her mom, an English literature professor at Columbia. Since her mom is Diane, this is particularly resonant for Will. He is the latest in a long line of mother fuckers.

Again, most of the movie works. The daughters in the film (Aundrea and Gia Gadsby) are supercute, while Clement’s interactions with them feel real enough. The back-and-forth between Will and Gary is always funny, and we get another of those sloppy, anti-Hollywood fight scenes that amounts to bad wrestling. Plus someone finally explained “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” to me.

A lot of the movie is about small validations. Everyone’s struggling, everyone’s juggling, and it’s nice to hear, directly or indirectly, that you’re doing OK; that you’re not incompetent. Basically, that you’re not Charlie. Sorry, Charlie. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Among my favorite scenes in the recent Superman movie, “Man of Steel,” were the ones where a bearded Clark Kent acted the itinerant laborer in search of answers to his true, Kryptonian identity. He worked on a ship, in a restaurant, in the Arctic. He remained quiet and hung in the background—as much as someone who looks like Henry Cavill can hang in the background. I wanted more of these scenes. I wanted a whole movie of them.

French writer-director Thomas Salvador has now given me that.

And? Ehh. I wanted more: more dialogue, more fun, more purpose.

Caché
“Vincent” is about a quiet, unassuming, itinerant laborer (Salvador), who has superpowers when he’s wet. He can swim superfast, punch walls, lift 300 kilograms (661.387 pounds). Essentially his powers are only limited by the film’s budget; but since we’re talking French/indie, that means they’re fairly limited. There’s no CGI here, it’s all hydraulics and wires. It’s doesn’t look bad but it’s not exactly “The Avengers.”

I saw it during the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival, with Salvador in attendance, and during the Q&A one audience member asked a rude but pertinent question: “Is there something in the French character that prevents Vincent from doing what most superheroes do—fight evil?”

Salvador, who struggles with English, answered mostly about Vincent’s character. Essentially: Vincent was someone who lived day to day.

I might’ve asked that question without disparaging an entire people. Something like: Why doesn’t Vincent do something worthwhile with his powers? Why hide them? What’s his fear?

The movie is full of unanswered questions like this. Is Vincent human? Where did his powers come from? When did he first notice them? If he stays in water longer, will he grow that much stronger? If he is out of water longer, does he grow that much weaker? Does dust make him weaker? Does sunlight?

The first quarter of the film is Vincent doing his job, then going to a nearby lake or stream to soak and bask and—when no one’s looking—swim like crazy.

Thank goodness Lucie (Vimala Pons) shows up. She’s hiking with a friend, sees Vincent in the stream, nods. That night, she sees him in the town square. They drink, listen to music, talk a bit. Their first kiss is rather charming: She all but pounces. In the relationship, she does most of the heavy lifting. A little ironic, given the movie’s theme.

For a lifelong loner, Vincent decides rather quickly to tell her his secret. I like the scene afterward when she checks between his toes for webs. And they have a  good rapport. Her character is lively, and she brings out a bit of life in Vincent.

Then trouble. At work, his friend and employer, Driss (Youseef Hajdi), gets into a fight. He’s getting pummeled, so Vincent grabs a bucket of water, pours it over his head, then lifts a cement mixer (the 300 kg. item referenced above) and tosses it onto a car. Everything and everyone stops. But as they’re leaving, one dude attacks Vincent. Whomp! Against the wall. He crumples and his friends call the cops.

Questions: Did the dude die? We never find out. And why didn’t Vincent just try to help Driss without dousing himself with water? Why get all super to stop a simple fight?

Most of the rest of the movie is chase, which is fun, but I almost wanted him caught. I wanted exposure and revelation. At one point, yes, the cops do catch up with Vincent; but then they take him outside in the rain and ... Bang, zing, boom. 

Z
“Vincent” (in French: “Vincent n’a pas d’écailles”—“Vincent without the cape”) is not an unenjoyable film; there’s just not much there. It's peculiarly empty. Most of us struggle to find a purpose in life, something we’re super in, and Vincent has this ready-made. But he does nothing with it. Why? And how come Lucie doesn’t ask? Shouldn’t they talk about this? I know it’s odd asking this of a French filmmaker, but how about giving us a little philosophical discussion now and again?

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Theeb” (“wolf” in Arabic) is a rare beast: an art film that is also a harrowing adventure story. You think its joys will be in the small details, in how tactile it feels, and in the fact that it’s about a Bedouin boy named Theeb learning the ways of men in the Arabian peninsula in 1916. One assumes slice-of-life, episodic and educational. Then you’re on the edge of your seat. The movie contains foreshadowing even though it all comes as a surprise. There’s an assuredness in every frame even though it’s writer-director Naji Abu Nowar’s first feature.

We start in voiceover, with life advice that mixes the idealistic and the realistic:

In questions of brotherhood
Never refuse a guest
Be the right hand of the right
When men make their stand

And if the wolves offer friendship
Do not count on success
They will not stand beside you
When you are facing death

These words echo as the movie plays out. We know Theeb means wolf, but we know Theeb isn't the wolf. So who is?

Is that Lawrence?
Theeb (Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat, extremely effective in his first role) has a mass of curly black hair atop an adorable face that is often furrowed with curiosity and concentration. When we first see him he’s being schooled by his older brother, Hussein (Hussein Salameh Al-Sweilhiyeen, Eid’s cousin), on how to shoot a rifle, and later, when two strangers come to their father’s home, on how to slit the throat of a lamb. The strangers are an Arabian guide named Marji (Marji Audeh), and a British officer, who is blonde, bearded and taciturn (Jack Fox). For a time we wonder: Is this Lawrence? Are we getting the Arabian side of the “Lawrence of Arabia” story?

Our view is Theeb’s view, which is the child’s-eye view. He knows things are happening but not why. He knows Hussein is to lead the two men to the “Roman Well” but nothing beyond that. He tags along anyway. The men are a day’s journey out before they realize the boy has followed them.

There are subtle tensions. The Brit, Edward (for Thomas Edward Lawrence?), gets angry when Theeb plays with a small box he’s carrying, and the three men are constantly looking for thieves and enemies. But which enemies? What’s the mission? And seriously, is that Lawrence?

We relax slightly when we get to the Roman Well—a hole in the ground surrounded by rock and sand. “Where are they?” Edward wonders, as he pulls up the well bucket. “They’re coming,” his guide says. But he’s wrong. Edward drinks, then starts back. The water is red with blood. The men they were to meet are at the bottom of the well. In a second, everything is charged. “We’re being watched,” Marji says. 

“Lawrence of Arabia” wasn’t the only movie on my mind as I watched this one. I wondered whether Theeb would be like Zushio in Kenji Mizoguchi’s  “Sansho Dayu”: the privileged son who falls from grace into the harsh realm of men. I thought of  “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Shane”: movies where violent sounds, particularly gunfire, explode off the screen. Here, it’s the lamb’s bleat as Hussein cuts its throat; it’s the gunshot that tears through Edward’s chest as he’s drinking from a bota bag. Guess he’s not T.E. Lawrence after all.

Even then we don’t even know who the enemy is. Germans? Ottoman officials? Thieves? But we keep calculating. With Edward and Marji shot, how will they get back? If their camels are stolen, how will they get back? The lowest point is after Hussein is shot and Theeb runs and falls into the well. Even if he escapes, what then? He’s a small boy in the middle of the desert in violent times; and as we hear several times in the film: the strong eat the weak.

Is that home?
“Theeb” deserves to be seen, and it deserves to be seen in a theater. Cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler (Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise” movies) makes the desert a force in the film. One shot of the night sky makes you mourn for the loss of all of your city stars.

It’s a movie that’s not just about the loss of life; it’s about the loss of a way of life. Hussein is a pilgrim guide—taking worshippers through the desert to Mecca. But he’s being replaced by the “iron donkey,” the railway that cuts through the desert. So even if Theeb gets back, what is back? What is home to a Bedouin? What is the point of a pilgrim guide in a world of the iron donkey?

WARNING: SPOILERS

We don’t quite get Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smith-McPhee) when we first meet him. He’s a thin, doe-eyed boy searching for his Scottish love in the American West of 1870. At night, he stares up at the stars and names the constellations. He’s polite, speaks French, and says things like “I come in peace” when no one would doubt it. The question isn’t whether he’s peaceful, it’s how someone so innocent survived for so long. In voiceover, Silas Selleck calls him “a jackrabbit in a den of wolves.”

We don’t quite get Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) when we first meet him, either. He’s tough-looking, dirty, and clenches a cheroot in his teeth like the son of Clint Eastwood. He shows up at a crucial point to kill the man who’s about to kill Jay, and somehow he knows all about Jay’s mission and strikes a bargain. He’ll protect him during the journey: $50 now, $50 then. But how did he find Jay, and how does he know about the girl, and why does he care enough to do this?

Answers come by and by. Most answers anyway. 

Sprinkle my salt on wounded gut
It turns out that Jay’s Scottish love, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius), along with her father, John (Rory McCann, who played “The Hound” in “Game of Thrones”) is wanted for murder. Dead or alive. Question: Is this for crimes in the states or for the crime they committed accidentally in Scotland—the death of Jay’s father, a Scottish lord? More, don’t they know they’re wanted for murder? And if they do know, why are they building a home? Wouldn’t you want to keep moving?

That’s the early big reveal anyway: Silas is after the reward money ($2,000), and he’s using Jay to get to Rose.

The bigger reveal is that Rose doesn’t love Jay. He’s just a hopeless romantic, with the emphasis on hopeless. Writer-director John Maclean (of The Beta Band) is rather cruel to him in this regard. 

Example: After various adventures, mostly attempts to shake Silas’ old gang, led by the fur-coat-wearing and silently menacing Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), Jay and Silas come upon the Ross homestead: a picturesque cabin surrounded by a field of corn. But the place soon becomes a shooting gallery as Silas, Payne and his gang, and yet another bounty hunter, all converge at the same time to try to claim the reward. Still thinking himself the hero, Jay rushes into the cabin to rescue Rose. Instead, not realizing who he is, she shoots him in the gut.

More: As he lays there, bleeding to death, he can only watch as the woman he loves, still unaware of his presence, kisses her lover, a tall, strong Native American warrior. The house shakes from the gunfire, causing the salt on the shelf above him to fall and spill over his wounds. I burst out laughing when it happened. At the same time I wondered: Is it overkill? Of course it is. It's cruel and unusual. But having been a hopeless romantic in my youth, I don’t have much tolerance for the species. 

Besides, Maclean allows Jay a moment of grace. He does it with all of his victims, now that I think about it. He doesn't forget them. He allows them one last moment. 

A long time ago
“Slow West” got a lot of buzz coming out of Sundance, where it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, and it’s mostly well-made. Fassbender is particularly good. His performance reveals what’s missing with all of those Clint Eastwood westerns. Silas actually has mixed feelings about Jay. He  takes delight in him at times. He takes delight. Eastwood’s characters never do—or not in a way that seems delightful. I miss that when it's not there. I love it when it's on screen. (See: Morgan Freeman watching Rita Hayworth in “Shawshank.”)

At the same time, “Slow West” is so jokey, or inside-jokey, it’s meta—from the salt in the wound to the anthropologist studying disappearing Indian cultures who disappears with most of Jay’s stuff. “In a short time,” he says, “this will be a long time ago.” He's telling this to Jay but it's Maclean winking toward us.  

The most jokey element, certainly the most incongruous, is Jay himself. In my review of “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” I wrote that the central joke is how the main character (Seth MacFarlane’s Albert) is really a 21st-century man stuck in the 19th century West. Here, too. Jay is too soft to exist when and where he is. He just isn't in on the joke.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The first time the lie was told I believed it and was relieved; the second time the lie was told I didn’t believe it and was even more relieved. But it needs to be there; and it needs to be a lie. 

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” from first-time director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”), and based upon the young adult novel by first-time novelist Jesse Andrews, won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and will draw comparisons to “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Both are coming-of-age stories set in Pittsburgh that make great use of the city and its bridges. Both feature nerdy guys as narrators fixated on adorable girls.

Both are bittersweet.

The thing we don’t want to happen
The nerdy guy here is Greg (the imposingly named Thomas Mann), who begins the story by telling us he has no idea how to tell us the story. “Bad start,” I thought. Then he tells us he made a film so bad it literally killed someone. “That’s better,” I thought.

A senior in high school, Greg has figured out how to maneuver through the various cliques by having “low-key good times” with everyone but being friends with no one. He only truly clicks with Earl (RJ Cyler), with whom he make short movies: parodies of classic world cinema, including:

• The Rad Shoes
• My Dinner with Andre the Giant
• Breathe Less
• Pooping Tom
• Death in Tennis
• A Box of Lips Now

So that’s me and Earl. The dying girl is Greg’s classmate, Rachel (Olivia Cooke, quite good), who has been diagnosed with stage-4 leukemia. Greg’s mom urges him to visit her. She pesters him until he does. That’s a good scene.

He and Rachel hit it off, of course. He jokes around in his goofy, adolescent way, and she appreciates the effort. She doesn’t want the deep conversation, the air heavy with import, the insulting palliative that “God has a plan.” She likes what Greg, and then Earl, have to offer. And she becomes the first regular viewer of their Criterion homages.

I related in a lot of ways to Greg—and not just for his love of movies. To write his college essay, he adopts the nihilistic tone of Werner Herzog narrating a documentary, and I actually did something similar. In these essays, you’re supposed to speak about yourself in superlative terms and I couldn’t do it (Minnesotan/Scandinavian), so like Greg I resorted to satire. I made myself ABC News’ “Person of the Week.” (I didn’t get in.)

A few things in the film don’t quite work. Rachel’s mom is played by Molly Shannon, and she goes over-the-top in that Molly Shannon way. Her comic creepiness doesn’t mesh with the film’s deeper, quieter sensibility. I also don’t get how Greg’s relationship with Rachel dooms his veil of invisibility at school. Yes, he makes enemies, but just Ill Phil and Scott Mayhew, and both dudes are already ostracized. To most everyone else, he’s still invisible.

Greg gets off some good lines (To his mom about prom: “Have you seen me in a tux? It’s like when they make a dog wear human clothes”), but a lot of his humor is, well, adolescent. Plus he can be a pill. When Rachel gives up on chemotherapy, they argue, they fight, he leaves. Then he fights Earl. Then he fights with his mom. He isolates himself from everyone because he can’t deal with what’s happening to Rachel.

It’s also why he lies to us. “She gets better,” he tells us twice. “I promise." 

The first time he says it I was relieved, because we like Rachel. A second later, I realized the movie would suffer as a result. This is true of almost every movie: The thing we don’t want to happen is what ultimately makes the movie a better movie. But for most of its history, Hollywood has given us what we want, which is why we keep getting lesser movies.

“Me and Earl” isn’t that. Its last 15 minutes are almost silent.

Death lessons
I saw the film at the Seattle International Film Festival with Gomez-Rejon in attendance, and he said that in the end, originally, as in the book, Greg gave a big speech about Rachel before the high school. It was the moment when he decided to become visible. It was, in fact, the speech that everyone who auditioned for Greg had to recite. And it was a great scene. But Gomez-Rejon felt it disturbed the mood and rhythm of the ending. It disturbed the silences, the processing, and so it had to be cut.

Question: Even though “Me and Earl” gives us what the movie needs rather than what we want, is its lesson about death still wish fulfillment?

The lesson is first relayed by Greg’s cool history teacher (Jon Bernthal), who tells him that when his father died he kept learning about him—from family and friends—so it was as if he continued on. “Life can keep unfolding itself to you as long just as you pay attention to it,” he says. Initially, Greg dismisses the lesson, as he dismisses most things; but then he experiences it.

After Rachel’s death, he returns to her room, where he discovers, on the wallpaper, little squirrels she’d drawn hopping from tree to tree. He’d noticed the tree wallpaper before but not the squirrels, and it recalls something Rachel told him about how she and her father used to take walks and count squirrels. (Greg had dismissed that story, too, with a one-liner.) Greg also discovers, in the books in her room, little dioramas she’d created out of their pages. He keeps finding out things about Rachel. She keeps unfolding, even in death.

I liked that thought when the lights went up. An hour later, I realized it was almost the exact opposite of the lessons I’ve taken from death.

For me, the death of a loved one, particularly a contemporary, forces you to deal with a heartbreaking, absolute finality. You will never see this person again. Whatever you go through in life, you will never be able to share it with them. Life may keep unfolding but they don’t. Their story ends. The movie’s lesson is nicer; I just wish it felt truer. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Currently, “Mad Max: Fury Road” has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 98%. Critics love it. It’s one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. But I was underwhelmed. To me, it’s “Meh Max.”

What didn’t I like? What’s my major malfunction?

Well, it’s a two-hour chase movie. It’s expertly done, with powerful photography and great imagination. It’s over-the-top the way operas are over-the-top, an aria to chase in a post-apocalyptic world. But it’s a two-hour chase movie. And I could give a shit.

Why do I think critics love it? A few reasons, beyond the superlatives mentioned above:

• It’s directed by George Miller, who directed the original movies with Mel Gibson (“Mad Max,” “The Road Warrior,” “Beyond Thunderdome”), as well as small indies (“Lorenzo’s Oil”) and feel-good biggies (“Happy Feet”). So the auteur whores are on board.
• Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa is a kick-ass character who is the equal, or better, of Tom Hardy’s Max. So people in favor of strong female characters are on board.
• It relies on stunts rather than CGI. We get real people up there on the screen. So the folks who are tired of CGI and want some semblance of authenticity from their absurd action movies are on board.
• Its dystopia is saturated with color and gorgeously photographed; it’s not the gray, rainy dystopias of “The Dark Knight,” “Hunger Games,” et al. So the cinematographias are on board.

Plus some people like a two-hour chase movie. I’m just not one of them.   

In this post-apocalyptic world, in which the lone and level sands stretch far away, Max is haunted by the past and the present. The past is made up of loved ones he couldn’t save (wife, children). In the present, he’s simply hunted. The bad guys want him for his car, his hair, his blood. They get it all.

We’ve been reduced to a barbaric caste society: peasants (most of us, begging for food and water), the warrior class (chalky-skinned and in need of blood transfusions), and the ruling class, led by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Bryne, Toecutter in the original “Mad Max”). He’s got massive sores on his back and a harem of Victoria’s Secret models with whom he’s hoping to breed the future of the human race. Or something.

Why does civilization end? We get snippets and crackles of news early on. Something about running out of oil, then water. Why do we run out of water? Is it global warming?

Pipe down, Brainiac, the chase is on.

The plot is propelled by Furiosa, who steals Immortan’s harem with the hope of taking them to “the green place,” the Edenic land on the other side of the desert where she grew up, and where life is good. Or reasonably so. At the moment Furiosa’s treachery is revealed, a captured Max is providing an upside-down blood transfusion to the warrior Nux (an unrecognizable Nicholas Hoult), and Nux insists on joining the chase, so he does it with Max strapped to the front of his car.

After much flipping of cars and riding into sandstorms, and after much mutual suspicion, Max and Furiosa join forces. Which makes sense. The heroes are all good-looking (Hardy, Theron, the harem), while the villains are mostly grotesques (sporting boils and gout; swimming in corpulence).

I do find it amusing that in a world of scarcity we still waste shit. We drive gas-guzzling monster trucks and spill water everywhere. No one’s careful about anything. We haven’t learned a thing.

A few moments I liked:

• When Max turns the corner and sees the supermodels washing off. It’s so absurd, such a soft-core image in such a gritty wasteland, I laughed out loud.
• The near death of The Splendid Angharad (supermodel Rose Huntington-Whitely), pregnant with Immortan’s child, since it’s followed by her actual death a second later. We go from “whew” to “oops” in a second. It’s Miller shouting, “Psych!”
• How “the green place” is no longer green, and that the answer to their problem is the place where their problems began. The chase is full circle.
• The third-act attack via poles bending over moving vehicles and dropping warriors onto our heroes.

But “Mad Max” is all about that chase, bout that chase, and I’m not. It’s an Aussie exploitation film with “A” production values. It’s what we fiddle with while the world burns. “What did you do before the apocalypse, Daddy?” “I watched post-apocalyptic movies, son.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

I like the running gag anyway.

Most genre spoofs occur when Hollywood takes someone who looks and acts like us (a schlub) and places them in an exciting genre movie (western, action-adventure, spy thriller). The laughs come when the schlub tries to live up to the genre and falls flat, while the catharsis comes when the schlub becoming the wish-fulfillment fantasy figure in the end. The genre may be mocked but it ultimately wins. Wish-fulfillment fantasy wins. We want us on the screen but no we don’t. See, among recent movies, “The Other Guys,” “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” “The World’s End,” “The LEGO Movie,” and “21/22 Jump Street.”

Paul Feig’s “Spy,” starring Melissa McCarthy, is another spoof—this time, obviously, of James Bond-type spy thrillers—but with a feminist twist.

Susan Cooper (McCarthy) is an assistant to superspy and superhunk Bradley Fine (Jude Law), of whom she’s enamored, quietly and painfully, even as she expertly guides him—via earpiece, cameras and high-tech CIA equipment—through missions. Then she watches him die at the hands of Raina Boyanov (Rose Byrne), who has a wayward nuke she’s willing to sell to the highest bidder. Or willing to sell to the person who will sell to the highest bidder. Or something.

Anyway, with Fine dead, Susan finally gets the gumption to ask her boss, Elaine Crocker (Allison Janney), for a field assignment to gather intel on Boyanov and get revenge for Fine. She travels to all the exotic locales, Paris, Rome, and Budapest, trailed, or preceded, by Rick Ford (Jason Statham), a CIA agent who went rogue after he didn’t get the assignment. Since he looks and acts like Jason Statham, we assume he’s super-competent, but he’s not. He’s a loud, tough-talking doofus. It’s Susan who’s super-competent. She’s smarter, tougher, quicker-minded and a better fighter than almost everyone around her. She just never got to display it because, you know, women in the workplace.

Susan, in other words, merely looks like us, but acts, almost from the beginning, like the hero. So where’s the spoof? In the way she tries to live up to the genre.

Spies are glamorous. They are given cool clothes and cool cars and cool devices with which to take out the bad guys. Susan is obviously not glamorous, but she thinks the assignment will help. Except she’s given dowdy clothes and dowdier identities (cat lady, etc.), while her Q-like weapons are hidden, not in cigarettes or sports cars, but stool softener packages, foot fungal sprays and rape whistles. Her disappointment each time is palpable. It’s a good running gag.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed—not least because “Spy” opened the Seattle International Film Festival, a spot usually reserved for small prestige pictures—but I was surprised by a couple of things.

I was taken aback that a wayward nuke that may get into the hands of al Qaeda was at the centerpiece of a comedy. That felt risky. Every time it was brought up, I didn’t exactly feel like laughing.

The other thing that surprised me was how uncomfortable I felt in the end. Bradley Fine, it turns out, isn’t dead but playing the double-agent game to get the nuke to save the world. And while Susan is busy saving the world, he overhears how much he means to her. In the end, he confronts her with this. He seems to soften, to become interested in her, and you think the movie is going to go in that direction. It doesn’t. She dismisses his overtures and ends the movie walking off with her friend, and the woman in her earpiece, the gangly Nancy (a very funny Miranda Hart). Cue credits.

But in that moment when there was just a chance that Jude Law and Melissa McCarthy would wind up together? I felt horribly uncomfortable.

Why?

Obviously because of the way she looks. And because in our society, women who look like her don’t wind up with men who look like him. The reverse is sometimes true, particularly on TV sitcoms (see Jim Belushi/Courtney Thorne-Smith), or if the schlubby man in question is rich or famous or both (Paul Allen/Laura Harring). But rarely do we get the hot man/dumpy woman dynamic. Men are just too shallow when it comes to looks, while women are too shallow when it comes to works.

But—to drill down a bit—was I uncomfortable with this potential romance because it felt false or because I found it unappetizing?

Sadly, I think more toward the latter. And the more I thought about it, the more I kept flashing on Dustin Hoffman’s great epiphany during the making of “Tootsie”: how he wanted his character, Dorothy Michaels, to be better-looking, and how it wasn’t going to happen. He realized that he (Dorothy) was the type of woman that he (Dustin) would never talk to at a party. Because she didn’t fit his notion of female beauty. And what a loss that was.

Is this more of that? I think it is. An odd, deep revelation to carry with me from a spy spoof.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s not a great movie but it is a sad fucking story.

Most music biopics follow a familiar pattern: hardscrabble beginnings, slow rise, white-hot stardom; then something gets in the way of the success: drugs, sex, overwork, marital and/or bandmate discord, maybe all of the above. After that mess, we get recovery, resurrection, final concert footage.

Here’s the problem: I almost never have sympathy for the artist once they become famous. You did too many drugs? You fooled around on your wife too much? My heart bleeds.

But with Brian Wilson? Yeah, there’s sympathy. God, yeah.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older
“Love & Mercy” is only the second movie directed by Bill Pohlad—son of Carl, the former owner of the Minnesota Twins—but he’s been producer on some of the greatest movies of the 21st century: “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Tree of Life,” “12 Years a Slave.” He’s also, from my understanding, a big music fan. In the Twin Cities, the Twins and the local music scene are intertwined in a way I haven’t seen in many other cities. One assumes this was Bill’s pet project.

The movie—like Brian himself, you could say—is split into two parts, with two actors playing him.

In 1965, a young Brian (Paul Dano), the chief singer-songwriter of the Beach Boys, is haunted by anxieties and discord, so he gives up touring with the band in order to work on what would become his great achievement: “Pet Sounds.” He retreats into the studio before the Beatles did, but he did it alone, without the camaraderie and competition that Lennon and McCartney had with each other. One wonders what might have been if Mike Love (Jake Abel) had been an equal partner in the process. Or was Brian, a solitary figure, doomed from the start?

The other half of the film is set in the late ’80s, and it’s from the perspective of Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a beautiful blonde saleswoman at a Cadillac dealership. One day she sees a pair of shoes outside a display car and finds a man (John Cusack) inside. Or man-child? He has a childlike way of talking that recalls Tom Hanks in “Big” and she doesn’t quite know what to make of him. When he asks her to sit in the car with him and then locks the doors, it’s a little creepy. But he just wants to sit there. He just wants to be calm. There are men watching him, bodyguards, he says, adding, “That’s a funny word—bodyguard.” A minute later, he says, “My brother died.” A minute later, she finds out from his handler, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), who he is.

The first part of the movie is about the triumph of an artistic rise intercut with the anxiety of a personal downfall. The second part of the movie is about the triumph of a love story intercut with anxious revelations about how bad things are for one of the lovers. Brian may be a rock legend but he’s also a virtual prisoner of Dr. Landy, a martinet with an explosive temper, who has control over Brian’s finances, diet, drugs, life, and who lives in Brian’s bigger house up the coast. Landy tries to control Melinda, too.

Was Brian always a prisoner of something? Or someone? His father, Murry (Bill Camp), was a martinet who boxed his ears as a child, damaging them and him. In the’60s, we see Murry: 1) disparage Brian’s new direction; 2) manage a Beach Boys-like band to replace his sons; and 3) sell the Beach Boys catalogue of songs since he thinks their wave of success is over. There’s not one good thing about him. Same with Landy. Both are monsters, while Brian is generally a victim. He’s like some jelly creature who’s washed up on shore without a shell, defenseless against kids poking him with sticks.

In the ’60s, Brian handles his defenselessness by retreating into his bed for years, but the second half of the movie demonstrates that retreat is not an option. Particularly if you’re wealthy and talented, people will find you and use you. And the sticks will get sharper.

In the kind of world where we belong
Dano as young Brian is perfect, while Cusack is good as the 50-year-old version. The scenes where he’s trapped by Landry, and by his own mental illness, are tough to watch. I’m thinking in particular of the hamburger scene, and that quick, wrecked image by the piano.

It’s tough to make mental illness and drug abuse interesting and “Love & Mercy” doesn’t quite succeed in doing it. Maybe because it focuses too much on the illness (where Brian's a victim) and hardly at all on the drug abuse (where he’s more accountable)? We don't get a great sense of the other Beach Boys, and we don’t quite understand why Melinda falls for Brian beyond the fact that he’s Brian Wilson.

But you do feel for the man. After the movie, you keep exhaling. You go home and you listen to “Pet Sounds” again. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Short age, long movie.

“Avengers: Age of Ultron” is a good comic book movie with interesting themes, smart dialogue, kick-ass action sequences and a few overlong and dull romantic subplots. Writer-director Joss Whedon throws it all in there. The Avengers big battle is less with Ultron than with the kitchen sink.

So why do I feel unthrilled? Is it because I don’t quite get how Ultron was created and/or defeated? Is it because the sound and fury between these two acts signifies nothing? Is it because I’m 52?

I think it’s because I’m 52 and I’ve seen this movie before. Battle, pause; battle, pause; battle, lead-up to final battle, final battle, epilogue. Credits. Next villain introduced: Hello, Thanos! (Dibs on title.)

It’s ironic that puppets on strings are a theme here, since you sense the corporate hand in moving the Avengers about the globe for international box-office advantage: first Eastern Europe, then Africa, then South Korea. To Marvel’s credit, two of the battlegrounds are fictional, Sokovia and Wakanda, where, no matter how good the movie, the box office will be zero.

Although maybe I’m just being cynical. Maybe the Avengers are moved about the globe to live up to the “Earth” part of “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.”

Mac vs. PC
There’s a line from Victoria Williams’  “Crazy Mary” I’ve always loved:

What you fear the most
Could meet you halfway

That’s this. The movie is about the Avengers dealing with the aftermath of the battle of New York, which is like the U.S. dealing with the aftermath of  9/11. And how the things we do to protect ourselves may actually make us less safe.

The movie begins in medias res, with the Avengers in Sokovia attacking a castle and bantering amongst themselves. It’s a bit confusing. There’s some guy named Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann), who’s been experimenting on people? And in the process has created two new super-powered beings: Pietro/Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Wanda/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen)? Even though these two are mutants in the Marvel universe? At least we get a good Whedonesque line. Strucker: Can we hold them? Flunky (hands in the air): They’re the Avengers.

After the castle’s defenses are breached, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) comes across some doohickeys in a basement lab, where Wanda puts a spell on him, making him see what he fears the most. In his case, it’s the Earth attacked, the Avengers dead, himself guilty. Back at Avengers headquarters in midtown Manhattan, this fear propels him to create Ultron, which he foresees as “a suit of armor around the world.” Except he and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) can’t make it work after, like, a couple days. So while they’re at a swanky party on the top floor of Avengers headquarters—nice cameo from Stan “The Man” Lee as a drunk WWII vet—Ultron (voice of James Spader) creates himself, then defeats Jarvis, Stark’s mainframe computer program, in a battle of the computer programs. It’s like Mac vs. PC. (Ultron, evil and full of bugs, is obviously the PC.)

Eventually, our heroes track Ultron to Wakanda, Africa, which has a rich source of vibranium, and which was used to create Captain America’s shield. Ultron wants it for ... himself? I guess? Anyway, there’s another all-out battle, and Scarlet Witch gets into the heads of most of the rest of the Avengers, and they have bad visions. Thor is stuck at an Asgaardian party, for example, while Captain America is stuck at a World War II-era party. So not exactly the worst visions in the world. Then an annoyed Hulk and a supersized Iron Man battle each other and destroy a small city.

Third battle’s in Seoul, where Ultron is trying to create a humanoid figure for himself, with skin and everything. Although since his goal is to destroy the human race, why would he want to appear more human? Either way, the Avengers steal the in-utero project, and use it to recreate Jarvis, who is renamed the Vision (Paul Bettany). Then the final battle, in which Ultron lifts a huge chunk of Sokovia into the sky in order to drop it and recreate the global dust cloud that killed the dinosaurs. This time for us.

Psst. The Avengers stop him in the nick of time.

Grace in our failings
I liked the oddness of Ultron. He’s buggy. At one point, in a big speech, he even seems to forget the word children.

Everyone creates the thing they fear. Men of peace create engines of war. Avengers create invaders. Parents create ... smaller people? Um. Children. [Chuckles] Lost the word there.

But I don’t think Whedon does enough with this. Most of Ultron’s schtick is generically malevolent: “Your extinction,” etc.

I also like how Ultron and Vision are the best and worst aspects of Tony Stark, but again Whedon doesn’t do much with this. Sure, in Wakanda, Ulysses Klau notices Ultron’s Starkian similarities and gets his arm ripped off for the effort. And Ultron does have a slower, more methodical version of Stark’s laser-sharp wit—as when he considers what humanity has done with vibranium. “The most versatile substance on the planet,” he says, “and they used it to make a frisbee.”

This bit of dialogue between Vision and Ultron is probably the best in the movie:

Vision: I suppose we’re both disappointments.
Ultron [chuckles]: I suppose we are.
Vision: Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites and try to control what won’t be. But there is grace in their failings. I think you missed that.
Ultron: They’re doomed
Vision: Yes... but a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts. It is a privilege to be among them.
Ultron: You're unbearably naive.
Vision: Well... I was born yesterday.

It’s also the key to why I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the movie. “There is grace in their failings” is a great line, but for the Avengers here, as for most heroes in most roller-coaster movies, failure is not an option, while most of the main characters are forced to stay alive for the sequel. Where’s the surprise? Nowhere. We exult in the ride, but there’s not exactly grace in it.

I have to hand it to Whedon, though. He gives us the kitchen sink yet somehow leaves us wanting more. One word more, to be precise.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In 1994, I was living with three other people in a house on 77th and Sunnyside in Seattle, writing in my spare time, and schlepping at a bookstore warehouse. One day that spring, I was biking home from work when I turned onto Woodlawn Avenue near Gregg’s Green Lake Cycles and ran into a cloud of exhaust. I quickly saw the cause: a riderless motorcycle putt-putt-putting by the curb next to a café. I’m sure my face screwed up into a kind of “What kind of asshole would leave his bike...?” when in rapid succession: 1) I noticed the tall lanky dude in leathers sitting at the café’s outside table; 2) recognized him as Krist Novoselic of Nirvana; 3) saw how bereft he looked; and 4) knew why. Just a few days earlier, Kurt Cobain had taken his life. That’s about when Novoselic noticed me noticing him. My face must’ve still looked annoyed because his face took on a combative look. It challenged mine to say or do something. I simply nodded and kept biking. Anything else, even a kind word, would’ve felt intrusive.

In Brett Morgen’s powerful documentary, “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” Novoselic, older and balder, still looks bereft. It’s 25 years later, and he’s still wondering what the hell happened. In a sense, that’s what the doc is about.

There aren’t many talking heads here. Per the title, it’s mostly montages and mash-ups from family photos and 8-milimeter film, plus audio of Kurt’s younger days set to animation, along with illustrations out of Cobain’s numerous notebooks. This last might be the most interesting gateway into his mind. All the things he writes. The things he writes again and again. Sometimes it’s breakthrough stuff, such as the word NIRVANA appearing as he’s listening to punk rock in Aberdeen. Sometimes it’s sadly prophetic. “I don’t mind if I don’t have a mind,” for example. Or more explicitly: “The joke’s on you so kill yourself.”

In Bloom
The doc’s title comes from one of Cobain’s audiotape mashups, made in Aberdeen in the 1980s, and when you think about—and I really hadn’t—you realize that almost everything he did was montage. His lyrics are snippets. Sometimes they’re epigrams (“I’m worse at what I do best”); other times, incomprehensible (“Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet”). Even the chorus to his most famous song, the song that sprung us all from the awful ‘80s, is a montage of thoughts that only form cohesiveness through the drive, energy and anger of the music:

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto
An albino
A mosquito
My libido
Yeah

I knew the basics of Cobain: Aberdeen, punk scene, reluctant rock star, stomach troubles, heroin, Courtney Love, boom. “Montage” fills in the blanks.

He was born four years later than I, enjoyed a happy childhood as I did; then his parents divorced as mine did. It’s shocking seeing some of these similarities. We shared pop culture. As a kid he drew H.R. Pufnstuf and as a teen recorded the Brady Bunch singing “Sunshine Day.” This last was surely ironic. At the same time, there is a sense that, having lost his idyllic childhood, he wanted it back. He wanted normalcy.  

Instead, after the divorce, he was shunted from parent to parent to grandparent, but nobody could take him for more than a few weeks. There is some suggestion of hyperactivity. There is some suggestion of some form of Ritalin that didn’t take.

I tend to think of angry guys as tough guys, but Cobain was hyper-sensitive. He hated and feared humiliation and couldn’t stand negative reviews or being psychoanalyzed. In high school, he wasn’t just not popular; he was reviled and isolated. There’s a tale told in animation—narrated by him?—of his doofus friends visiting a low-IQ fat woman who lived alone, and mocking her and distracting her while they swiped liquor from her basement. When Cobain realizes what’s happening we expect (thanks in part to Hollywood) that he’ll break free of these idiots, or somehow come to the woman’s aid; instead he returns by himself to have sex with her—his first sexual experience. When word gets out, he’s mocked in school as the “retard fucker.” It’s a small, sad story that leaves a bad taste, but it’s redeemed by its brutal honesty.

Most of the talking heads are members of Kurt’s family—mom, sister, dad, stepmom—and they navigate us through his childhood; but once he’s living with (and off of) his girlfriend, we delve into his mind with the audio/animation and the notebooks springing to life. It’s an effective treatment. We don’t get Novoselic saying, “I met Kurt when ...” or “We decided on the name when ...” It’s Kurt’s thoughts and stories and homemade audio leading to Sub-POP and rock posters and the beautiful burst of Nirvana’s cover of “Molly’s Lips.” The way Morgen tells the story is a little like Nirvana’s music (quiet verse leading to angry chorus), but it also gives us a sense of what it’s like to go from nowhere to everywhere, as Cobain did. One moment Nirvana is doing a promo show at a record store on the Ave, the next they’re playing stadium concerts. The huge crowds, shot from the stage, have never seemed more monstrous.

About a Girl
Cobain’s rise is fascinating—as rises tend to be—but then it becomes the Kurt and Courtney show and gets dull fast. To me, there’s not many people less interesting than 1)  happy loving couples, and 2) junkies. I would’ve cut some of this. But the rest is powerful and inventive.

We’re left with questions. The stomach troubles that led to the heroin use—surely he saw a doctor about this once he became rich. Or was he too far gone on heroin by then? Morgen seems to imply that he finally took his life because of hyper-sensitivity over Courtney Love merely thinking about cheating on him—we end with Cobain playing “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on MTV Unplugged—but is this a reach, given everything else? The fame, the stomach troubles, the heroin—a word, by the way, he never learned to spell, adding a Quayle-esque “e” to the end every time. Left unmentioned, but jarring to me as I watched, is how much his mom looks like what Courtney Love might look like in 20 years.

There’s a lot that’s disturbing in the doc but a beautiful honesty, too. It’s about as up-close a look as you’ll get of a major cultural figure. It’s almost claustrophobic.