movie gourmet

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon

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DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD
DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine.  For those of you who weren’t there, the National Lampoon – ever irreverent, raunchy and tasteless – was at the vanguard of the counter-culture in the early 1970s.  Once reaching the rank of #2 news stand seller among all US magazines, it may be the most popularly accepted subversive art ever in the US (along with the wry Mad magazine during the Cold War).

In a few short years, the Lampoon rose from nowhere (well, actually from the Harvard Lampoon) to a humor empire with the magazine, records, a radio show and a traveling revue.  And, yes, the title DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD does encapsulate the arc of the Lampoon’s story.

Documentarian Douglas Tirola tells the story so successfully because he persuaded almost all the surviving key participants to talk. We meet co-founder Henry Beard, publisher Matty Simmons, Art Director Michael Gross and other Lampoon staff including P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Buckley.  You’ll recognize the first editor, Tony Hendra, from his performance as the harried band manager in This Is Spinal Tap.  We see clips of two Lampoon originals who haven’t survived, co-founder Doug Kenney and resident iconoclast Michael O’Donoghue.

The National Lampoon’s live performance revue featured John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Gilda Radner and Harold Ramis.  When Lorne Michaels hired the whole crew for Saturday Night Live, the hit television show instantly surpassed the magazine in cultural penetration.  “The Lampoon lost its exceptionalism”, says one observer.

But the Lampoon made its mark on the movies by launching the entire genre of raunchy comedies with Animal House and spawning the careers of filmmakers John Landis and Harold Ramis, as well as the SNL performers.  We also see a clip of Christopher Guest in an early Lampoon performance.  On the other hand, I hadn’t remembered a less successful Lampoon project from its later era, Disco Beaver from Outer Space.

This is all, of course, major nostalgia for Baby Boomers.  Before seeing DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I thought, yeah, I’ll enjoy the Blast From The Past, but will younger audience viewers dismiss this humor as quaint? After all, the Lampoon’s success came from puncturing the boundaries of taste, and it’s hard to imagine anything today that would be shockingly raunchy.  But, after watching DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD, I have to say that the humor stands up today as very sharp-edged.  After all, an image of a baby in a blender with Satan’s finger poised to press the “puree” button is pretty transgressive no matter when it’s published.  The sole exception is the Lampoon’s over-fixation on women’s breasts, which comes off today as pathetically sophomoric – or even adolescent.

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon has also vaulted on to my list of Longest Movie Titles.

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD is currently knocking about the film festival circuit, and distribution theatrically or on another platform is unresolved.  I saw it at the San Francisco International Film Festival.  This is an important cultural story, well-told and it deserves a wide audience.

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead2

MR. HOLMES: in old age, Sherlock reopens his final case

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Ian McKellen as MR. HOLMES
Ian McKellen as MR. HOLMES

It’s 1947 and 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes has been self-exiled to the Dover coast in retirement for almost thirty years.  He’s still keenly observant, but his memory is deteriorating with age, and he knows it.  That’s a problem as he feels an urgent need  to summon up the facts of his final case, left unresolved in 1919.  In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen plays Sherlock in his 1947 frailty and desperation and in the flashbacks to 1919, when he’s at the top of his game.

As Mr. Holmes, opens, Sherlock has just returned home from a trip to Japan.  So desperate to refresh his memory, he has sought a Japanese homeopathic cure (“prickly ash”), in the process meeting a Japanese family with an unsolved disappearance of their own.  Back home, he lives with his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her gifted son, Roger (Milo Parker).  Holmes recognizes the boy’s exceptionalism and quasi-adopts as a grandchild.  The boy has lost his father in World War II, and his relationship with the old man is another central thread in the movie.

Ian McKellen is delightful and endearing as the crusty Holmes.  McKellen is an actor of enough stature to pull off this iconic role, and he is able both to project the Holmes genius and to deliver the humor in this very witty screenplay.

Holmes resents how his former roommate Dr. Watson has depicted him in fiction – and doesn’t like fiction at all (until the very last scene).   At least, when they lived together, Watson avoided an onslaught of tourists by publishing the wrong address for their rooms (they actually lived across the street from 221B Baker Street).  And Holmes goes to a theater to see a very bad 1940s Sherlock Holmes movie.

I saw Mr. Homes at the San Francisco Film Festival at a screening in which producer Anne Carey and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher spoke.  When Carey read the source material – the novel “Slight Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin – she recognized the appeal of the central role, the settings and the theme of “don’t wait too long for things important to your heart”.  It took her eight years to get director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) on board, who brought in McKellen.

Hatcher was attracted by Holmes’ relationship to the boy Roger and by theme of how we rewrite our own stories.  He pointed out that the 1919 story in Mr. Holmes has four versions:  what really happened, how Watsone added a happy ending in his book, the  Hollywood melodrama of the film-within-the-film and, finally, as Holmes himself connects it to the Japanese story thread at the end.

Carey and Hatcher revealed that Condon playfully referenced Hitchcock  in Mr. Holmes: Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, carrying of tea a la Notorious and a “Vertigo” sequence  under the arches.

It’s a good story with a superb performance by McKellen.  Mr. Homes is scheduled for a theatrical release on July 17.

LISTEN TO ME MARLON: the pain and the truth in his own words

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LISTEN TO ME MARLON
LISTEN TO ME MARLON

In the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, we hear Marlon Brando relate his life story in his own words – and we ONLY hear Brando’s words.  Director Stevan Riley received access to hundreds of hours of audio tapes  – self-recording made by Brando while he was alone – and never heard until now.  These recordings, along with recorded Brando interviews and clips, are artfully assembled by Riley, and, together, amount to a deep and apparently truthful self-portrait.

Brando was playful and mischievous and often self-important, and the content of his interviews with journalists aren’t that reliable.  But it’s clear that he isn’t BSing in these solitary recordings.  He is open about his character flaws and their origin in his family background – a brute of a father and a sweet but erratic alcoholic mother.

Speaking in the third person, Brando describes himself as  “a troubled man alone…confused”.   Listen to Me Marlon is filled with nuggets:

  • On his upbringing: “My father is never going to come near that child (his first son Christian) because of what he did to me”.
  • On his art: “you want to stop that motion from the popcorn to the mouth. The Truth will do that.”
  • On the womanizing that broke up his first marriage “The beast aspect of my personality held sway”.
  • On the execrable Candy: “the worst movie I ever made” (drawing knowing chuckles from the audience).

Some of the tapes even record self-hypnosis as he battles obesity.  And there’s a VERY COOL digitized talking Brando head; Brando tried out very early scanning technology, resulting in moving imagery of his head in swirling blue pixels as he expounds.

There are also two outtakes where we SEE Brando’s womanizing in action as he comes on to attractive interviewers.  We can recognize the instant that, as he says, he starts “thinking with his penis” and launches his flirtatious charm.

I saw Listen to Me Marlon at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it will screen again this week.  Director Riley spoke at the screening, as did noted film historian David Thomson and Brando’s children, Rebecca Brando and Miko Brando.

Rebecca Brando credits Riley for the film’s “humanity” as it treats Brando’s “childhood pain”. Miko Brando pointed out that the flashing lights in some clips came from the bio-feedback machine that Brando used at night.  “He went to work as a movie star and came home – not a movie star – just a father”, said Miko, who had just seen the film for the second time.

David Thomson spoke of Brando’s “momentous”  and truthful Method as the birth of “genuinely American approach to acting” and its effect on cinema:  “the method is made for the close-up” because “if you are agonizing over what to say”, the audience needs to be close enough to see it.

I expect Listen to Me Marlon to get a theatrical release in the second half of 2015 and then play on Showtime.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE: chilling and powerful

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THE LOOK OF SILENCE
THE LOOK OF SILENCE

In the powerful and chilling The Look of Silence, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer explores the aftermath of genocide in a society that has never experienced a truth and reconciliation process. This is Oppenheimer’s second masterpiece on the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 in which regime-sponsored death squads executed over one million suspected political opponents.  Today, the victims’ families live among the murderers.

The Look of Silence centers on 44-year-old optometrist Adi as he investigates the murder of Ramli, the older brother he never knew.  Earlier, Oppenheimer had filmed Ramli’s killers as they describe and act out Ramli’s savage torture, mutilation and murder.   They are unrepentant and even nostalgic about their crimes.  Their matter-of-fact recollections are sickening.  We see Adi watching this video, trying to contain his rage and disgust.  Later, Adi – in the guise of fitting them for new glasses – is able to confront those responsible.   He faces the actual machete-wielding killers, the leader of the village death squad, the higher-up who ordered the killings and even one of his own relatives.

What makes this bearable to watch (and even more affecting) is meeting Adi’s family: his earthy 80-something mother, his frail and batty 103-year-old father, his giggly 7-year old daughter and his 10-year-old son.   There’s plenty of humor in this warm family.  But in one scene, the son receives a ridiculously twisted propaganda version of the genocide in public school.

The “Silence” in The Look of Silence is reinforced by the spare soundtrack.  We often hear only “crickets” (frogs, actually).

The Look of Silence is the companion to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, which made my list of Best Movies of 2013.  In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer got the unapologetic killers to re-enact their atrocities for the camera – even relishing their deeds.  The Act of Killing contains some of the most bizarre moments in any documentary EVER, including a cross-dressing mass murderer and a staged Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank the killers for sending them on to the afterlife. The Act of Killing is more of a jaw-dropper.  The Look of Silence – because it is more personal – is more powerful.

The Look of Silence stands alone – you can fully appreciate it without having seen The Act of Killing.  But what I wrote about The Act of Killing is true for both films:  “hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching”.

I saw The Look of Silence at the San Francisco International Film Festival before its limited theatrical release slated for July 17.  It’s one of the best films of 2015.

Movies to See Right Now

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Gene Hackman in the 1975 NIGHT MOVES
Gene Hackman in the 1975 NIGHT MOVES

I’m at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and I haven’t caught up with the promising sci-fi Ex Machina or the rock doc Lambert & Stamp. Here are the movies that I know are good:

In theaters, I liked Ethan Hawke’s gentle documentary Seymour: An Introduction. If you’re looking for a scare, try the inventive and non-gory horror gem It Follows.

Documentarian Alex Gibney has TWO excellent films playing now on HBO:

  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, a devastating expose of Scientology is playing on HBO; and
  • Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, an especially well-researched and revelatory biopic of Frank Sinatra.

Don’t bother with Clouds of Sils Maria – it’s a muddled mess.  Insurgent, from the Divergent franchise is what it is – young adult sci-fi with some cool f/x. The romance 5 to 7 did NOT work for me, but I know smart women who enjoyed it.  The biting Hollywood satire of Maps to the Stars wasn’t worth the disturbing story of a cursed family. I also didn’t like the Western Slow West, now out on video.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the drama Wild, with its wonderful performances by Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixter.

On April 27, Turner Classic Movies is airing the 1975 character-driven neo-noir Night Moves, with Gene Hackman as an LA private eye who follows a trail of evidence to steamy Florida. Hackman shines in the role – the detective is deeply in love with his estranged wife, but unsuited for marriage. Night Moves also features Melanie Griffith’s breakthrough role as the highly sexualized teen daughter in the Florida family; Griffith was eighteen or nineteen when this was filmed, and had already been living with Don Johnson for three years.

And TCM is also showing one of my very favorite films, the Sam Peckinpah 1973 Western Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (April 30), featuring James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in the title roles. Peckinpah takes us into a realistically dusty world of 1880s New Mexico and makes the story operatic in its sweep. Pat Garrett is a revisionist Western, with Billy representing the have-nots and his old pal Garrett hiring out to do the bidding of the capitalist one-percenters. It’s a near-great movie; if the unfortunate “Paco” story line were excised, it would rank among the greatest three or four Westerns of all time. (Another minor flaw: Richard Jaeckel has to wear a Paul Revere wig. )

Pat Garrett also features the Peckinpah repertory company of Luke Askew, Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones, Gene Evans, Dub Taylor, Emilio Fernandez and, in one his most memorable roles, R.G. Armstrong. The stellar cast also features Harry Dean Stanton, Jason Robards, Elisha Cook Jr., Chill Wills, Richard Jaeckel, Jack Elam, Barry Sullivan, Jack Dodson (Howard Sprague in The Andy Griffin Show), Richard Bright (Al Neri in The Godfather), and Charles Martin Smith (Terry the Toad in American Graffiti).

The sound track is by Bob Dylan, and Dylan has a small acting role, too; this is the origin of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, which perfectly underlines a heartbreaking scene with two greats of the Western genre, Slim Pickins and Katy Jurado.

DVD/Stream of the Week: WILD

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Reese Witherspoon in WILD
Reese Witherspoon in WILD

Based on the popular memoir by Cheryl Strayed, Wild is the story of how Strayed dealt with her own emotional collapse. Suffering  from the death of her mother, among other issues, Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) had become a red-hot mess, playing around with heroin and destructive serial sex and, in the process, dooming her marriage to a solid guy (Tomas Sadoski from The Newsroom). To cleanse herself from her demons, Strayed embarked on a solitary thousand mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Hiking the Pacific Coast Trail is a mighty quest – both an ordeal and an achievement. But walking it alone as a woman – that’s a whole different deal. The camera is on Reese Witherspoon in every scene, and she carries the movie with her performance – both as Cheryl implodes in the flashbacks and as she overcomes her fears and inexperience on her hike. It’s been eight years since Witherspoon won the Oscar for Walk the Line. Recently, she’s been reinventing her career with high quality fare like Mud, Devil’s Knot, Wild and the upcoming Inherent Vice. Her work in Wild is top rate.

Laura Dern’s performance may be even better than Witherspoon’s. She plays Strayed’s mom, a woman who has been dealt a shit sandwich every day of her life, but who relentlessly insists on appreciating life’s small pleasures. It’s a compelling and heartbreaking performance.

Now I have done some back country hiking and I know what it’s like to walk for 15 miles in a day. It can be pretty damn monotonous. But not this movie. Writer Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and director Jean-Marc Vallée do a fine job in presenting the scope of a thousand mile journey by pulling out the most compelling components – the moments that illustrate the impressiveness of the feat and the depths of Strayed’s emotional damage and healing.

It’s pretty fine piece of filmmaking overall, and I’m going to start looking for the work of Jean-Marc Vallée. As he did in Dallas Buyers Club, here he tees up extraordinary performances while avoiding what could have become trite and sentimental audience manipulation. Watching Witherspoon and Dern in Wild is a good use of anyone’s time.

Wild is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixter.

SINATRA: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL – as told by his wives and his kids

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SINATRA: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL
SINATRA: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL

Sinatra: All or Nothing At All is a solid and sometimes revelatory biopic of Frank Sinatra now playing on HBO. It’s shown in two two-hour segments. Sinatra fans should watch the whole thing. For everyone else, the middle part is especially strong – focus on the stretch from his affair and marriage to Ava Gardner through the Frank, Jr., kidnapping and the marriage to Mia Farrow.

Documentarian Alex Gibney has an unusual gift for finding the best possible source material, including coaxing interviews from the most intimate witnesses. The strength of Sinatra: All or Nothing At All comes from interviews of Sinatra’s children Tina, Nancy and Frank, Jr., along with audio of Sinatra’s first three wives – Nancy Sinatra, Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow – and girlfriend Lauren Bacall.

Gibney has another strong doc running on HBO right now: Going Clear: The Prison of Belief. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the excellent Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.

Sinatra: All or Nothing At All is a pretty comprehensive biodoc, tracing the Italian immigrant parents, the humble (but not destitute) Hoboken upbringing, rocketing to pop stardom, the career fade with the Great Comeback – along with his womanizing and friendships with the Mob, the Rat Pack and JFK. There are also some tidbits that I hadn’t seen before, for example, not being able to get an US government security clearance to entertain troops in Korea because of his political associations, plus an awkward performance with Elvis in the 50s. See “Spoiler Alert” below for the movie’s take on how Sinatra got the role in From Here to Eternity that launched his comeback. And, although I lived through it, I had completely forgotten about the kidnapping of Frank, Jr.

Sinatra: All or Nothing At All is playing on HBO and is available streaming from HBO GO.

[Spoiler Alert: By the early 50s, Sinatra’s career was floundering and he was desperate for the acting role of Maggio in the upcoming From Here to Eternity. For years, there has been a legend that Sinatra called on his buddies in the Mafia to put the arm on Columbia Pictures to cast him. This tale is depicted in The Godfather with the horse’s-head-in-the-bed scene. Sinatra: All or Nothing At All persuasively debunks this story, explaining that, instead, his recent ex Ava Gardner pressured the studio filmmakers to cast Sinatra. Another appeal was that Sinatra was also a big name who worked for very cheap. This is consistent with Director Fred Zinnemann’s version .]

Movies to See Right Now

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Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER
Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER

This week, most of your movie best bets are on TV and video.

In theaters, I liked Ethan Hawke’s gentle documentary Seymour: An Introduction. If you’re looking for a scare, try the inventive and non-gory horror gem It Follows.

Don’t bother with Clouds of Sils Maria – it’s a muddled mess.

Insurgent, from the Divergent franchise is what it is – young adult sci-fi with some cool f/x. The romance 5 to 7 did NOT work for me, but I know smart women who enjoyed it. I found Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter to be droll but tiresome. The biting Hollywood satire of Maps to the Stars wasn’t worth the disturbing story of a cursed family. I also didn’t like the Western Slow West, now out on video.

Documentarian Alex Gibney has TWO excellent films playing now on HBO:

  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, a devastating expose of Scientology is playing on HBO; and
  • Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, an especially well-researched and revelatory biopic of Frank Sinatra.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the hilarious Living in Oblivion, with Steve Buscemi and Peter Dinklage. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Xbox Video.

Don’t miss the 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler, playing on Turner Classic Movies on April 19. It’s the masterpiece of director Burt Topper, who specialized in low-budget exploitation movies. First, we see that lonely lab tech Otto Kroll (Victor Buono in an especially brilliant and eccentric performance) is twisted enough to murder random women and return to his lair and fondle his doll collection. Then we learn his motivation – he dutifully visits his hateful mother (Ellen Corby – later to play Grandma Walton) in her nursing room; she heaps abuse on him in every interaction. Pretty soon, even the audience wants to kill Mrs. Kroll, but Otto sneaks around taking out his hatred for his mom by strangling other women. Because Otto is outwardly genial to a fault, it takes a loooong time to fall under the suspicion of the cops. The character of Otto and Buono’s performance elevate The Strangler above its budget and launches it into the top rank of serial killer movies. (THE STRANGLER IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR RENT FROM NETFLIX OR STREAMING SERVICES. You can buy the DVD from Amazon or find a VHS tape on eBay.)

TCM will also show Murder, My Sweet (April 20), the 1944 film in which Dick Powell was able to escape his typecasting as boyish crooner in big musicals and immerse himself in a new career in grimy film noir. Powell proves himself right with the studio bosses, and Murder, My Sweet was just his first success in film noir. Powell, an actor from Hollywood’s Golden Age who would translate very well in today’s cinema, is very watchable as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, an LA private dick who is hired by three clients, each seemingly more dangerous than the last. As Marlowe follows the mystery, he is knocked out multiple times, taken hostage, drugged and temporarily blinded. Oh, and Claire Trevor tries to seduce him. Pretty good stuff.

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA: a muddled mess

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CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Man, what a disappointment! Somehow the Clouds of Sils Maria lets us lose interest in the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche and wastes a performance by Kristen Stewart that made her the first American actress to win a César (the French Oscar). But it’s just a muddled mess.

Binoche plays a Margot Channing-aged actress, and Stewart plays her personal assistant. The star is about to take the older woman role in a play that launched her career (in a younger role to be played by the star of a Hollywood comic book movie). As the movie begins, the play’s author dies and the Binoche character must deal with the loss of her mentor. She’s also going through a difficult divorce and fending off the advances of a onetime co-star, and generally being pretty difficult amid her midlife crisis. None of this interesting and some of the story is confusing to boot.

The only time that Clouds of Sils Maria perks up is when Chloë Grace Moretz shows up as the younger actress, a train wreck who is the epitome of paparazzi-bait . (Kudos to Kristen Stewart – the Moretz role is close enough to Stewart’s real life to demonstrate that Stewart doesn’t take herself too seriously.) It’s a funny role and Moretz nails it.

Oddly, Clouds of Sils Maria is almost entirely in English (for Kristen Stewart?), and Binoche just isn’t as enthralling as she usually is. It’s also odd that a French celebrity would hire a non-French speaking personal assistant for travel in French-speaking country – what’s up with this?

I blame director Olivier Assayas. I really liked Assayas’ miniseries Carlos , but he now has engineered three clunker features in a row (Summer Hours, Something in the Air and Clouds of Sils Maria)., so I’ll have to persuaded to see his next project.

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION: a master class in teaching from a piano master

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Seymour bernstein and Ethan hawke in SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
Seymour Bernstein and Ethan Hawke in SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION

As Seymour: An Introduction opens, we see an elderly man giving piano lessons to VERY talented pianists.  His gentle instructions address tiny details in the performances that we in the audience can’t notice – such as how deeply to press the piano key.  Each of his tips is constructive and easy to understand  As  exacting as his corrections are, his overall demeanor never fluctuates from entirely supportive.  This extraordinary teacher is the concert pianist Seymour Bernstein.

Bernstein long ago abandoned a career in the spotlight. We’re meeting Bernstein only because the actor Ethan Hawke met him by chance and benefited from his life advice.  Hawke directed this film.

Thank you, Ethan.  It’s a deep privilege to meet this gifted and kind man, and spend an hour-an-a-half watching him treat others as he does.  When the Wife and I caught a screening, no one left the theater until the end credits were completed.