Movie Nation

It covers an entire city block of New York’s Fifth Avenue, a Dover marble and bronze citadel of consumption at its most conspicuous. Bergdorf Goodman is shopping at its highest end, a fashion arbiter at the oh-so-exclusive retail level, the capital of Aspirational America. From its exquisite designer salons to its ornate street level windows, ornate expressions of consumerism as public art, it is a monument, in its own way, to The American Dream.
“Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s” is a love letter to this New York institution, a celebration of its place within the fashion food chain and those designers who know that when they’ve been accepted there, their fortune is made.
Filmmaker Matthew Miele has made a worshipful, often playful documentary about the history, the people, the couture and the class of this worldwide icon of Money is no Object shopping.
Designers from Lagerfeld to Mizrahi, Wu to Vera Wang sing its praises and recall the rituals they endured and the wheeling and dealing that went on to get their foot in the door there, winning the acceptance of fashion director Linda Fargo.
Snippy personal shopper Betty Halbreich keeps an eyebrow ever-raised at whatever is you’re wearing when you arrive, knowing she’ll send you back out the door poorer but stylish.
We hear about the Christmas Eve back in the ’70s when John Lennon and Yoko Ono dropped $400,000 (in ’70s dollars) on furs in a single night.
We follow David Hoey as he marshals vast resources to create the incredible window displays that the store is known for.
It’s not a film about the battle between Saks Fifth Avenue, Barney’s and Bergdorf Goodman, though that is hinted at. It’s not a movie about the true cost of this sort of consumption or about what sort of laborer makes these expensive goods, and where.
The characters — heirs and managers and shoppers and celebrity fans (Joan Rivers, Susan Lucci) and designers (the Olsen Twins among them) — may be overly coiffed and coutured. But they’re never caricatures. Wherever this store sits in the retail hierarchy, there’s nothing extreme and little that’s biting or funny in the way Miele (William Fitchner reads a sparing narration) presents it. Despite inventive ways of showing the history (digital human shadows added to photos from the past), it’s a rather dry wallow in high fashion lacking the drama, wit or bitchiness of the Anna Wintour documentary “The September Issue.”
Here is Bergdorf’s, “Scatter My Ashes” says. “Look upon it in wonder.” And we do, even if we wish the tone was more Joan Rivers and less Miss Manners.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for a brief sexual reference
Cast: Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs, Joan Rivers, Susan Lucci, Isaac Mizrahi
Credits: Written and directed by Matthew Miele. An eOne release.
Running time: 1:33

This project — based on a Seth Grahame-Smith novel — just will not die. Perhaps fittingly.

Yeah, it seems a silly stretch of genre benders, and even the fact that it was based on a successful book has not been enough so far to ensure that this repeatedly revived film project ever got made.

But now Lily “Mirror Mirror” Collins is on board. Phil Collins’ daughter with the bushy bushy eyebrows will work for director Burt Steers (“17 Again,” “Charlie St. Cloud”) in tis latest incarnation of the project that will not die, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

THR is reporting today that “Iron Man 3” has already cleared the $240 million mark, meaning it’ll be almost in the black by the time it actually opens in the US Thursday.

All that smoke in the skies over Marvel Studios is from cigars, kids.

And the reviews haven’t been bad, either. Mr. Buzzkill here wasn’t nuts about it, but it’s pretty good — and the fanboy influence is fading as the Tomatometer tallies up print critics today and tomorrow. It was over 90% Monday, with foreign critics loving it.

Over thirty minutes of the historical/musical/spiritual documentary “The Source Family” pass before anybody uses the word “cult.” There’s no need to say it aloud. From the opening credits, a lingering close-up of a black and white photograph of a bearded fellow with long white hair while a singer croons “You are Jesus,” well, we figure it out.
For the followers of a guy who went by the names Jim Baker, Father Yod and YaHoWha, “cult” seems a given.
But “The Source Family” isn’t your typical film about cults. Baker was a decorated WWII vet, a muscular  a health food buff who killed a couple of men with his bare hands before finding his way into Eastern Mysticism along with some of his Beat Generation peers.
The film captures, in more detail than is probably necessary, Baker’s journey from mystic traveler to cult leader. And of all the long, strange trips of the late ’60s, early ’70s, none was stranger.
Baker parlayed a career as a Hollywood health food restaurateur into a following of the young, the beautiful and the lost who wandered into The Source — his Sunset Strip eating establishment.
Forty years later, many of his former followers, members of his 30-40 person commune, still speak of their time with him with reverence and joy. Others you couldn’t really call “former,” as they speak of still “doing the work.”
A cult film that doesn’t by design condemn the cult is an unusual thing, and filmmakers Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille take us through a bygone era of souls lost in a confusing age of street protests, a ruinous war, drugs and “God is dead.” Baker, a well-read and charismatic man, comes off as typical of the gurus of that age — an American into health food before it was popular, a seeker who cherry-picked his favorite tenets of the various world religions and concocted a “Ten Commandments for the Age of Aquarius,” who got his own Rolls Royce for his wisdom.
In classic cult fashion, Baker gives his “children” new identities — Isis, Sunflower, Heaven, etc. They dress all in white, at least until he becomes fascinated with say, the Templars, and has them change their attire. They form a free-form folk-blues jam band whose albums are collector’s items. Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins sings their praises.
Father Yod preaches “You can do anything in life, so long as you’re kind.” So
Baker seems benign, or more benign than most, until that inevitable moment when a “free love” cult becomes a polygamist commune for the benefit of the cult leader, when under-age girls are married off to other cult members to keep the police from arresting them all for statutory rape.
The filmmakers keep a keening soundtrack of the cult band’s music underneath the interviews, the home movies and vast collections of photographs taken by The Source Family historian, Isis. They show newspaper clippings documenting Baker’s “strongest boy in America” childhood, his war heroics and his run-ins with the law.
The film uses snippets of “Alex in Wonderland”, “Saturday Night Live” and “Annie Hall” to capture the LA vibe of that time, the health food/Utopian cult connection, and how funny it seemed to the culture at large.
And they share blunt testimonials from his older and wiser former disciples, as well as those who never got over the experience. Their memories use words like “miracle” and “It sounds insane, but” in talking up this formative portion of their youth.
“The Source Family” touches on familiar themes of young people’s need to belong and the void that cults and cult leaders fill in their lives. The arc of the story won’t shock anybody who recalls The Beatles’ stages of dabbling in Eastern mysticism — infatuation, enthusiasm, then the “dirty old man” shows his true colors, hitting on hippie girls and the jig is up.
But as Wille and Demopoulos play tape recordings of Baker’s lectures — he even affects a bit of an Indian accent, at times — “The Source Family” allows us to ponder the nature of “charisma” in a charismatic leader. And as we do, we understand why it’s not just delusional rationalization or nostalgia that has these 60somethings waxing eloquent about their few short years in Baker’s thrall. They got something out of the exchange — something, to a one, they would “never do again,” but an experience they don’t regret, no matter what.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity and childbirth depicted, profanity and pot use
Cast: Members of The Source Family
Credits: Directed by Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille. A Drag City release.
Running time: 1:38

Will Melissa McCarthy be as hot a property next summer as she will be this one?

Warner Brothers is betting on it. “Tammy,” a road trip comedy written by MM and co-starring Oscar winner Kathy Bates and Mark Duplass, will open July 2, 2014. McCarthy’s husband is directing it, according to Deadline,com.

So the stakes are high and if ever there was a moment fraught with peril for the comic star — a pet project, a spouse all-in — it is “Tammy.” And July 4 weekend? That’s comic book blockbuster territory.