Movie Nation

Getting your first feature film finished and released is a cause for celebration. It’s a Herculean task involving training or on-the-set-experience, finance, casting, locations and hiring a crew.

Most first-time feature filmmakers don’t get this far. And many of those who do can’t find distribution for their newborn feature.

If you wonder why no distributor nibbled at “The Wedding Party,” director and co-writer Kyle Larsen, it might be due to you filming, editing and releasing a walk-through hehearsal. Your “finished” film needed a few more staged readings in a workshop setting, a fresh set of eyes and ears to tell you “Not one joke works” and that entire production is 113 minutes of Arizon to Montana road trip tedium.

The “editing” should have started with the script and left out a third of the incidents — again, no laughs — that were sleepily acted-out and filmed. Another vigorous cut in the final edit — providing you cooked up or bought a few gags that play — would have shaved endless unfunny reaction shots and further trimmed this wallowing hog of a movie down.

The cast has little to work with and can’t make that “little” even a little bit funnier.

You’ve made a road to nowhere road trip comedy that staggers toward a conclusion, not a climax. So I hope nobody blew too much money on champagne to celebrate the wrap.

Two sets of adult siblings are wrangled into making a 1400 mile trek together in a former rock band’s van by their aged about-to-marry parents (Shalee Mortensen Schmidt and Bill Gillane). They make videos, leave QR coded quests for them to accomplish on the way.

And short-tempered job-quitting Sean (Ische Bee) and her put-upon, just-dumped born victim sister Maggie (Amelia Joan Bowles) aren’t equally enthusiastic about “crazy” Dad’s latest scheme.

“The road to Thompson Falls (Montana) is full of surprises,” they’re promised. Not really.

Onetime TV star Theo (Erik Kl Larsen), reduced to teaching acting at summer camps and his writer-brother Olan (James Rudd) aren’t all that thrilled, even after the van Mom they toured the country with accompanying her and her band Neon Valkyrie decades ago.

“Shield Maiden” the van had good memories. Some of them were good, anyway.

They head out on an odyssey that includes meeting old hippy acquaintances of their parents and the like, finding items in a scavenger hunt and playing confessional road-trip games to tell each other all about themselves.

Nobody’s “story” is fascinating, although a couple have promise. Characters with edge have that edge rubbed off by the funereal pacing and general mamby-pamby nature of the story.

Simple slam-dunk “incidents” are so mishandled as to play as lifeless.

Road comedies are one of the cinema’s most reliable genres, but this movie doesn’t try hard enough when hunting for interesting interludes, detours and moments of truth or “personal growth.”

The players don’t have a lot of pop to their performances, and Larsen the director smothers potential in the slack way they’re filmed, pointless edits filled with dead space before and after a line or “gag.” It’s “student film” sloppy.

Comedy is fast and this picture stalls out at the first intersection it teeters into and never gets going afterwards.

Yes, all involved got your first feature finished. But don’t ever roll camera again without having more on the page and more sense about what to cut and what to leave out of each and every finished “take.”

Rating: TV-14, a hint of violence, some nudity, profanity

Cast: Ischa Bee, Amelia Joan Bowles, Erik K. Larsen, James Rudd, Bill Gillane and Shalee Mortensen Schmidt

Credits: Directed by Kyle Larsen, scripted by Kyle Larsen and Tyler Harrah. A District 22 release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:53

The new Chris Pratt thriller “Mercy” is managing respectable money on its opening weekend. Nothing special, but adecent Thursday night and Friday should push it over $12, close to $13 million, enough to FINALLY take “Avatar: Fire & Ash” off the top spot.

“Hamnet” ($1.8 million) is back in theaters — LOTS of theaters — but the Shakespearean tragedy/Oscar contender won’t earn much more than $2 million and barely crack the top ten.

And“28 Years Later: The Boneyard” ($4 million, maybe a bit less) is falling right off a cliff from its WELL-shy-of-blockbuster opening weekend, on track to lose over 70% of its opening weekend audience, week-to-week. As I noted in this space last weekend, NOBODY asked for that.

And nobody is interrupting their stock-up/buy a generator prep for an Ice Storm for the ages to go to see Pratt as a detective in the future accused of murdering his wife in the future, or see another zombie or “Silent Hill” movie. And much of the country won’t be able to even get out to watch a movie late Sat.

“Avatar” is set to add another $7 million reasons to James Cameron’s excuse to spend the final decades of his career prancing around Pandora.

“Marty Supreme” is the Oscar nominee that’s already in theaters and already doing good business, but a blizzard will dampen its take. “Sentimental Value” is reopening, and “The Secret Agent,” both of which I’ve been hankering to see in nearby cities. Their original releases were so limited and did so little business I couldn’t find a showtime that worked.

“Mercy” and “Return to Silent Hill” aren’t earning reviews that will put Subaru owners behind the wheel to brave the ice and snow. The Shaker leader drama “The Testament of Ann Lee” starring Amanda Seyfried and the anime contender “Arco” have the reviews but not enough screens outside of major cities to make a dent.

“Hamnet” has lingered in the top ten during the week and with added screens seems likely to push “Greenland II” out of the top ten. The two new releases plus a “Lord of the Rings”: re-rlease will give “Anaconda” the boot, one hopes. “Spongebob” as well. “Song Sung Blue” is now an Oscar contender but the Neil Diamond fan demographic is not going out in this weather so it’s out of the top ten, too.

If you’ve got power, it’s the perfect weekend for a Netflix, Amazon et al binge or to check out the Mel Brooks love-a-thon documentary. With so many states in “State of Emergency,” theaters will be closed outside of the biggest cities.

I’ll update these figures as the weekend progresses. But let’s be careful out there.

In the dark of night, a child is taken from her bedroom right in front of her younger sister. She lived to describe her ordeal and the years it took to brng her kidnapper to justice.

Near misses, moments when she might have been discovered and freed, are detailed and chillingly remembered.

Law enforcement goes “by the book” and gets nowhere except to have an innocent man die in custody after weeks of interrogations. The fact that he “had a record” seems to be their only concern.

And a family takes matters into its own hands to get the word out and get around doubting, occasionally competent but stubbornly dogmatic lawmen who did less to free Elizabeth Smart than they’d like you to remember.

The British director of “Atomic People” and the Brit series “24 Hours in Police Custody” takes us inside a closeknit Salt Lake City Mormon family and into an investigation that transfixed the U.S. in 2002-2003 for “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.”

The documentary focuses on the Smart clan’s frustrations, the days the police spend focusing on members of the extended family as suspects — which is at least statistically defensible as such cases are often perpetrated by relatives — and the arrogance of detectives who fixate on a suspect the eyewitness daughter told them wasn’t the perpetrator.

Director Benedict Sanderson skillfully re-creates suspense where there shouldn’t be, as we know Elizabeth Smart survived and are reminded of that by present day her appearance on camera, early on. What we didn’t know or certainly don’t remember are all the times Smart came close to being discovered, rescued and freed — from the early searches to public and even police encounters with her and her kidnappers months afterward.

Smart grimly describes her religious crank persecutor as looking like Rasputin, with “this terrible smile” he broke into when he told the 14 year-old he wasn’t going “to rape and kill me…yet.”

The police come off understandably trapped by procedure, dogma and fixated on false leads. But there’s no getting around this reminder that the sharpest, most competent “Law & Order” detectives are figments of TV producer Dick Wolf’s cop-worshipping mind.

Smart’s under-suspicion uncles Tom and Dave have character arcs, coming off as klutzes early on, but redeemed by the third act.

Sanderson apparently didn’t have access to the mother of the missing girl, or her aunts. Is that the patriarchy at work? And “religion” should certainly figure more prominently in the story as the Mormon Church shares American Catholocism’s record of abuse and coverup.

Elizabeth talks about her young teen naivete about the sexual nature of this awful crime at the time it happened, but not about her advocacy for abused children in the years since. About the most revealing thing the film touches on regarding the Mormon faith of the family is the not-exactly-shocking realization that Mormons curse like everyone else.

“Kidnapped” is a solid piece of work, recreating a touchstone case in America’s furious fixation on abused children and kidnapped girls and women — the white and the blonde ones especially. For all the cans of worms it almost opens and doesn’t quite, it still tugs at the hearstrings as we remember the awful crime and the child who survived nearly a year of abuse, hunger and living under an abusive fanatic’s veil.

Rating: TV-MA, discussions of sexual violence, profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Smart, Mary Katherine Smart, Ed Smart, Dave Smart, Tom Smart, Cory Lyman and Cordon Parks.

Credits: Directed by Benedict Sanderson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

We remember the boy.

Going on seventy years since “The 400 Blows” arrived on screens, one is still hard-pressed to think of a better performance by a child in a film.

James Dean and Jean-Paul Belmondo defined “rebellious youth” on film — the greatest punks in the cinema’s first recognitions of the type. But it took Jean-Pierre Léaud, just 14 when he shot the movie that made him immortal, to show us a punk-in-progress.

Little Antoine is into attention and mischief, an impulse-first/consequences-later child of a servicable if unhappy home, a school system with no tolerance for bad apples and a child welfare system that was nothing of the sort.

Putting a Tony Perkins/Tony Curtis child beauty in a turtleneck as he acts-up in class, cadges smokes, steals from family and strangers and sneaks into cinemas seals the deal. This is what cool looked like and now — an underage rejector of the status quo, a punk living on impulse, wits, passion and lies.

Truffaut’s 1959 masterpiece — recently restored — is appreciated for its sense of heedlessness, a freedom-relishing child rushing into adulthood without a clue what he’s in for but in a hurry to escape an intolerable present.

The kid is what we remember when we think of the title. But director of photography Henri Decaë’s gorgeously filmed snapshot of 1950s Paris wows us visually upon (4K restoration) reaquaintance, a true monochromatic masterpiece filmed in the almost-forgotten CineScope variant DyaliScope.

The critic-turned-director Truffaut made an unsentimental picaresque that can’t help but play as sentimental to a modern viewer, a period piece set, conceived and filmed in the period it sentimentalizes.

Antoine is “last in his class,” a kid who never quite seems to get around to doing his homework but who always has time to cut up to grab attention. He’s the one unlucky enough to be caught when a pinup calendar is passed around by his classmates. He’s the one dumb enough to escalate the matter, writing a bit of doggerel threatening the teacher (Guy Decomble) on the wall when he’s ordered to stand in the corner.

He’s a latchkey kid who takes a shot at his homework before Mom (Claire Maurier) gets home. But first there’s cash to snatch out of her stash. And when his joker of a Dad (Albert Rémy) rolls in, there’s another distraction and reason for not doing the assigned writing punishment.

“Ask your mother if a dish towel is on fire,” Dad jokes when she starts cooking. But some of his jokes have an edge. She’s beautiful enough to be out of his league and he’s suspicious.

The richer classmate René (Patrick Auffay) is his spirit guide to delaying exposure and punishment. They take off for a day of playing hooky, which Antoine explains away by saying “My mother died” (in French with English subtitles).

The reckoning for that and the threat of “military school” as punishment speeds this heedless kid down his Road to Nowhere. Dropping out, dropped into the juvenile justice system, he’s on the path to prison or Cannes Film Festival fame with this bad background in the making.

Truffaut, who co-wrote the script, suggested an autobiographical connection to his pint-sized hero and star, a boy who had his own issues with school at the time the movie was made. I’m guessing Léaud was far more of a punk than his mentor.

The complexities tossed into Antoine’s story veer between picaresque and melodramatic. He hides out in his pal’s father’s printing plant, then in the kid’s room where a pricey, collectible near-lifesize statue of a horse is stored. Antoine subsists on stolen bottles of milk and whatever René can slip under the nose of his rich, older father. Antoine has childish dreams of what one determined to grow up at 14 sees as his future, and thefts in mind to get him there.

Stealing tips from the men’s room attendant at the cinema is a no-no. But swiping a typewriter from his dad’s office is René’s idea. And when it goes wrong, it isn’t René who’s fingered.

Mom? She’s been cheating and the kid knows it. Dad’s gregarious nature can’t bear this suspicion and a “son” who isn’t even his who acts out as much as Antoine does.

Every element, from the daring to the conventional, sentimental and melodramatic, works.

And Léaud’s peformance for Truffaut set the standard for child performances to follow and Truffaut set the tone for how the best directors of children — his fan and “Close Encounters” director Spielberg, for instance — speak to kids and direct them.

Changing attitudes and the passing years make the movie’s frank treatment of the psychology of delinquency and suggestion that this “phase” shouldn’t mark children for life seem less daring than the film was upon release. But the lead performance and ultra-realism of the street scenes and street life captured here, rendered in beautiful images and “How’d they film THAT?” moments, make “The 400 Blows” ageless, a classic that can’t help but age life fine wine no matter how tastes, filmmaking styles and social mores evolve or devolve with the passage of time.

Rating: unrated, TV-14, violence, some nudity, children smoking, profanity

Cast:Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Patrick Auffay and Guy Decomble.

Credits: Directed by François Truffaut, scripted by François Truffaut and Marcel MoussyF A Janus Films/Criterion (restoration) release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:39

Amazon tacked the incorrect release date (2024) onto this scurvy dog (2017) which is why I watched it. That, and the sailboating subject matter.

There’s not much to recommend “The Boat Builder” beyond Christopher Lloyd almost colorfully playing a widowed old salt prepping an aged lapstrake wooden sloop for a final trip to sea.

The villainous children — punks who pick on “Crazy” Abner” and vandalize the boat — are over-the-top, leather jacketed preppy tweens — “Newsys” who don’t sing. They don’t exist in reality. The old man’s daughter (Jane Kaczmarek) badgers him by phone but seems to have no clue about his suicide-by-sea plans and no counter-argument at the ready.

And the child (Tekola Cornetet) who also gets bullied and begs the old man to let him help with the boat re-fitting is more makeup and $1600 hair style than performance.

Writer-director Arnold Grossman wrote one episode of “The Love Boat” and supposedly took a shot at landing Bruce Dern for the lead on this, his only feature film credit. He hasn’t been heard from again. I’m guessing this film’s nonsensical finale explains that.

One more time, Amazon (I would’ve known had I turned on Tubi). Put the correct release dates on your titles. Scores of older, unreleasable films passed off as “new.” Bad streamer.

Rating: TV-PG, profanity

Cast: Christopher Lloyd, Tekola Cornetet and Jane Kaczmarek

Credits: Scripted and directed by Arnold Grossman. A Shoreline Entertainment release on Tubi, Pluto, Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:28

The title of the touring exhibition “Giants,” featuring works by Gordon Parks and Jean-Michel Basquit, is a pun.

The musical power couple Alicia Keyes and Swizz Beatz have collected works by those familiar names in art history — “Giants.” And, as evidenced by the collection of statuary, installations, wall-covering paintings, blown-up photos, commissioned self-portraits and historical hip hop musical hardware (pioneer Kool Herc’s sound system), these two like their art BIG.

Vibrant colored paintings in a wide array of artistic styles and “movements” suggest African and African American history and art history in this eclectic collection which screams, “Honey, we’re going to need a higher ceiling” after each purchase.

They are artists and arts supporters and there is nothing here that says “shrinking violet.” Everything practically shouts itself off the walls.

I generally disdain oversized artworks like this, tracing back to my lifelong loathing for the oversized art of Joan Miro. But self-indulgent (Hanging your favorite bikes, Mr. Beatz, as art?) as some of what we see plainly is, there’s an artistic eye in evidence and a mission statement inherent in it.

The Basquiat is a lesser work, a scrawled caricature and “name” painted appreciation of Langston Hughes — probably the cheapest Basquiat any collector could afford these days. Reminded me of what Basquiat mentor Andy Warhol (played by David Bowie) said to young Jean-Michel in the ’96 bio-pic about the mercurial New York artist.

“It’s not very good, is it?”

But the photography is a dazzling showcase of Gordon Parks and one of his heir apparents — Brooklynite and New York chronicler Jamel Shabazz.

And the scale of everything we see, from mural-sized replications of South African township decor to a Nick Cave statue, can’t help but awe.

“Giants” continues at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond through March 1.

Actors have an old saying. If you’re not getting work, create work for yourself.

Career bit player Alexi Wasser takes that advice with “Messy,” a comedy about a single thirtysomething sexing her way through many Mister Wrongs in a hunt for Mister Right.

It’s more gutsy than funny, because not many actresses — even youngish and thin ones — would try to make a splash by putting it all out there as a character who has embraced her promiscuity and not quite reconciled to any goal beyond that.

Wasser doesn’t just spend a lot of on camera time nude, in the throes of hook-up passion in a variety of settings, situations and positions and with a wide array of partners. She gives herself monologues in extreme closeup, inane, semi-amusing jump-cut rambles that invite us to give thought to her makeup, her hair style, her dentistry and the general state of her pores.

I couldn’t decide if she was showing us her bravery, brazen self-confidence or a delusional fantasy that she’s living out.

In any event, she’s more interesting than her movie, which presents her as Stella, an Angelino just moved to New York, getting over a breakup by blitzing through bartenders and bar-owners, party pickups and street flirters, teenagers and 50somethings (Adam Goldberg) trying to pass for 40somethings.

“I’m just a chunky, texting, phone-calling, deeply-feeling girl in a ‘TLDR’ ‘LOL’ world,” Stella declares, giving a hint of the insecurities driving her lust (She’s about as “chunky” as a swizzle stick).

She overshares with taxi and uber drivers, bar pick-ups and her new friends (Ruby McCollister, Merlot) and with her many temp lovers mid-coitus. She screams about love and desire and particular sexual preferences in the frenzy of the moment, and doesn’t fret about birth control, hygeine or anything else until the trance of passion passes.

“I say ‘Yes’ to what is” sounds like a line cribbed from a women’s mag. “I just wish men would face the fact that all women love Target, ‘Real Housewives,’ crystals, ‘Sex and the City’ and astrology!” Yes, she’s thirtysomething going on AARP-something.

One barfly Stella meets (Ione Skye of “Say Anything”) gives her solid advice about “just meeting the wrong person until you meet the right one.” The “wrong” ones are played by the likes of Goldberg, Thomas Middleditch and Jack Kilmer.

Mario Cantone brings some bitchy flair to the magazine editor Stella tries to impress with her writing when it’s really her “Sexing My Way Through the City” travelogue that’s killer content.

“Messy” lives down to its title in too many ways to recommend it. It’s vulgar in the myriad ways it reaches for coarse laughs. There are several smirks, a couple of near chuckles and nothing more as far as “sex comedy” giggles go.

And I don’t know if it gave Wasser the star vehicle bounce she wanted out of this “put it all out there” project. But give it up to her for swinging for the fence, in close-up or in the nude in a “Sex and the City” that’s carnal, crass and controlled-substance contemporary for a new era. Let’s just hope that her parents were OK with it.

Rating: 16+, explicit sex, drug abuse, slapping, nudity and profanity

Cast: Alexi Wasser, Adam Goldberg, Ruby McCollister, Merlot, Thomas Middleditch, Mario Cantone and Ione Skye.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexi Wasster. A Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:22

“The Rip” starts out bloody and gets bloodier.

The dirty cops and drug money plot is messy. And turns messier.

It hits “preachy” hard, and then becomes even preachier.

The copshop cliches, quips and acronyms pass by in a blizzard of blue bloods blather.

And at some point, this “Fast and Furious” meets “Miami Vice” mashup gets in its own way. A drawn-out coda sees some intense and over-the-top performances from a cast headed by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck all but undone by overdone and over-explained final-act twists.

Hey, it’s a Joe Carnahan picture. The carnage and grit always comes with “Smokin’ Aces/A-Team” claptrap.

Damon is Dane, a detective lieutenant in charge of Miami’s TNT — Tactical Narcotics Team. We see his unit’s boss (Lena Esco) executed on the foggy ICW waterfront in an opening scene. That comes right after she assures a tipster that she’s “the only cop you can trust.”

Nobody in her squad seems A) all that surprised by her murder or B) all that torn up by her death.When it turns out Det. Sgt. Byrne (Affleck) was romantically involved with his captain, that seems kind of fishy.

But everybody here falls somewhere on the “sketchy” spectrum. The Major (Nestor Carbonell), detectives Ro (Steven Yeun), Baptiste (Teyana Taylor) and Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno), DEA commando (Kyle Chandler) and FBI hotheads (Scott Adkins, et al) asking the hard questions all come off as defensive — hiding something or fretting that someone else is.

“Snitch” is the dirty word that runs around dirty law enforcement circles. It’s what just broke up another acronym unit (VCAT — Violent Crime Action Team) that crossed lines, took shortcuts and worked for the bad guys — “cops playing robbers.”

An above-the-law afterwork parking lot party of burnouts and drifts and public beer drinking is broken up by a tip. There’s big cartel cash at this “stash house” in Hialeah. Let’er rip, TNT!

We watch the police lie to the woman (Sasha Calle) who comes to the door, get her signature of “consent” to search for drugs, and then unleash Wilbur, the beagle “who only tracks money.” It’s there, millions of dollars in contractor paint buckets. And no, it doesn’t pay to ponder why the seemingly savvy “homeowner” would sign anything or open the door to these people out to lock her

That’s when the paranoia busts out in the open — phones confiscated, loyalties tested, tips passed on and cold hard cash coveted by Miami’s “finest.”

“Do you trust our command structure?” “Do YOU?”

And those acronyms tattooed on Dane’s hands — “A.W.T.G.G.” (“Are we the good guys?”) and “W.A.A.W.B” — are explained and embraced, or exposed as the biggest lie of them all.

Artists who make their mark on the world are the ones who dare to experiment, who take big chances in the belief that they can show us something new.

Werner Herzog’s “Heart of Glass” was such an experiment, a hypnotic Bavarian period piece about prophecy, class, tradition, lost knowledge and the fragility of existence. Herzog, at the peak of his art cinema early career, took a shot at having most of his cast hypnotized for their scenes, which gives the film a disorienting, mesmerizing quality thanks to the achingly slow, sometimes random, off-center nature of the performances.

It doesn’t really work. At its worst, it’s like a period parody of the art cinema of the day, “Pythonesque” without the laughs. Herzog prefigures David Lynch’s filmed invitations to enter his dreams. But whatever message this brooding sleepwalk is sending, it’s simply unsatisfying as a narrative. “Glass” is indulgent in ways that make one wonder about the artist’s own state of consciousness at the time.

A stoner period piece nightmare? Something like that. As striking as some scenes and images are, how was this ever supposed to “work” as cinema?

A lonely prophet (Joseph Bierbichler) speaks his truths to whoever will listen in the late 18th century village he has settled in.

Hias is a doomsayer. “I look into the distance to the end of the world,” he narrates (in German, subtitled). “Before the day is over, the end will come.”

He makes his pronouncements to any who ask, or any who will listen. “They come to pass,” he insists, no matter what the listener believes.

This Alpine town is full of believers. A crisis is upon them. Their only industry is imperiled. The foreman at the glassworks has died, and with him, the secret to making the town’s famous “ruby red glass.”

Some become manic at Hias’ pronouncements about their gloomy fate. Others are resigned to drinking their fears away. But the baron who owns the glassworks (Stefan Güttler) is obsessed with finding the formula. He puts glassblowers to work experimenting, badgers the dead man’s widow and even sends off for her sofa when he becomes convinced that foreman scribbled the recipe down and hid it inside the cushions.

Hias, who takes the time to dispell local fears that “giants” will awaken and reconquer the Earth, wades through this madness, observes some of it from afar and continues to prophesy doom. As if that’ll help.

Herzog opens the film in fog and hits us with striking images of the waterfalls and gorges of the Swiss borderlands with Bavaria. He stages forlorn arguments over beer — with a stein slowly broken over a drinking partner’s head. The baron’s high-handed obsession turns murderous.

And still the glassblowers blow and work their glass as if the end isn’t nigh. These scenes are the film’s most visually arresting, a veritable ballroom dance of blowers and globs of molten glass weaving amongst each other as they approach the furnace and ply their trade.

It’s a real relief to know that these real-life artisans — like Bierbichler, playing the prophet — were not hypnotized while making the movie. Other scenes involving drunks, corpses and a dog goaded into waking the “dead” with a pitchfork, were.

The dazed, surreal and slow-walking performances of the hypnotized reminded me of Hitchcock’s “Rope,” an experiment in storytelling with long takes without edits. The Master of Suspense realized, only afterwards, that editing is the essence of cinema, the way suspense is created and heightened. He never did it again.

Herzog almost certainly learned to never try hypnotizing his actors again. Klaus Kinski, for one, would have disemboweled him for trying. Whatever he learned from this experiment he internalized in his own persona.

The bold adventurer who made “Aguirre” and “Fitzcarraldo” became a mesmerizing screen presence, voice-over narrator and interview subject. He was and remains a fascinating character, a philospher of film and the human condition. If he needed to try something “out there” to get where he was going, “Heart of Glass” was worth the gamble. Without that gimmick, it’s questionable whether this folk parable oddity would merit mention in the long course of his career.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz, Volker Prechtel, Wilhelm Friedrich and Sonja Skiba.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Werner Herzog, based on a story by  Herbert Achternbusch. A New Yorker Films (US) release on Tubi, Mubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:35

Every year or so I am moved — by WordPress’s lack of movement to fix glitches or eagerness to make an almost unending series of changes for the worse — to point out this Automatic blog provider’s unsuitability, if you’re new to blogging, vlogging or what have you and shopping for a site.

I’ve been dealing with WordPress, via newspaper-anchored blogs and private ones, almost since its inception. Years and years. And the take-away from those many years of experience is that owner Mark Wullenweg’s operation has grown more automated, less accountable and more cumbersome to use by the year.

Recently, I’ve had to restore broken connections that cross-publish this blog onto social media, an occasional aggravation that comes without warning and is almost always due to a bungle or botched “upgrade” at Wullenweg World HQ.

At present, I am ten days FIFTEEN DAYS into a glitch that knocked the hilariously inequitable and unjust (“a class action suit waiting to happen”) Wordads-provided advertising from this site.

This may have to do with WordPress’s demand that customers now much use their EXTORTIONATE and data stealing/losing “Stripes” payment plan. I have gotten repeated pitches for this instead of replies from “Happiness Engineers” about the status of my increasingly profane and furious demands that they FIX WHAT THEY BROKE.

As I deal with an array of chatbots that do nothing and are named “Happiness Engineers” with the bot-ish/bot-built? names Rhys Marine (LOL) and Mohammed Something Arabic, I can’t help but feel extorted. “Service” supposedly improves with every up-purchase this shit-show site provider rolls out and pitches to “customers.” I seriously doubt that.

Does that mean a human being gets involved? Might there even be a PHONE NUMBER to call? Probably not, because this “company’s” business model is all chatbox/AI.

Users have been complaining about WordPress forever, and nothing changes.

The company was ahead of the curve in its dealings with customers. A hallmark of Trump era interactions with all manner of service providers is a “Try and make me” do what they contracted and used to be legally obligated to do.

A simple matter like a refund for service not provided is taken right off the table when you’re this unaccountable. Basically, you pay them money, they take it and irritate the hell out of you with everything that they do rather than PROVIDE that service and accountability for NOT providing it.

Again FIFTEEN DAYS without them fixing what THEY broke. It’s like dealing with a Mickey Mouse version of Big Cable and Big Telco from days of yore. “Bad Service is our Brand,” but let’s call them “Happiness Engineers” because we’re sure they haven’t read “1984.”

Years of highhanded “improvements” that glitch and add workflow-killing keystrokes and drop menus and prompts and “features” (photo publishing is an ongoing death-march to oblivion) to what is still a simple cut-and-dried write and publish process come to mind every time some new affront of this nature happens.

The fact that migrating all my years of work — which WordPress swears it will preserve “forever” when they are actually deleting reviews from years and years of archived and supposedly “live” content, with no apology, explanation or compensation– to a more complex site-provider seems too onerous to consider.

So I am in the process of demanding a refund for the two years of stewardship these bots are supposed to be providing, as the month since I paid for that “service” into the future now has made this endless parade of cut-rate, short-changed workarounds more than I can stomach.

If you see fewer posts here, I’m just givng up. Zuckerberg Lite Wullenweg has just about killed the experience for me. Two weeks of no service is deliberate, a “business model” choice and a “What are you gonna do about it?” middle finger to customers.

And if you’re thinking about blogging, Bluehost, Wix or Square seem like the less extortionate, more user/customer-friendly options. WordPress has engineered “happiness” out of the picture.