Musical road warriors Chicago, who have toured for half a century and faced their first enforced year not touring thanks to COVID, this one hits select cinemas Sept. 30.
They used to travel with The Beach Boys, who’ve been around in some form even longer.
Remember that sequence of scenes in “The Godfather” in which Don Corleone receives visitors who come to ask for favors, make complaints and request justice?
That’s basically the plot for Eduardo Filippo’s play, “Il sindaco del Rione Sanità ,” “The Mayor of Rione Sanità .” Director Mario Martone (“The King of Laughter”) may take us to a club, a street shooting and out of doors for more action in the third act. But the film he serves up is a maddeningly talky morning, noon and early evening of a Neapolitan mobster — Antonio Barracano — granting audiences to assorted petitioners on his turf and dealing with the sorts of nonsense a mob boss must contend with because only he can dispense justice in this lawless underworld.
Francesco Di Leva plays Don Antonio, a charismatic and fit 40something who has such a hard time sleeping that his underlings fear disturbing him with whatever goes on in the wee hours in his world or in his Vesuvius villa in the hills overlooking Naples.
Two of his young toughs (Ralph P., Armando De Giulio) joke around about who’s stepping on whose toes, and laughingly pull their pistols in the alleys outside of the club where they grinned and played macho. Joking or not, one dude gets shot, and the villa’s doctor (Roberto De Francesco) has to stitch somebody up.
The don’s wife (Daniela Ioia) comes home late, and the don’s mastiffs attack her and maul her. Somebody’ll have to break the news to the boss that his beloved dogs sent his wife to the emergency room.
The doctor is held in virtual involuntary servitude and wants to travel and visit his brother in America. The don may smile and joke around about who he will ask to “greet” him (in Italian with English subtitles) in the U.S. But that’s a threat. And that trip? No dice.
This man with a debt, that one with a beef with his rich baker father, approach. A young pregnant woman is here with her boyfriend, another petitioner, all of them wanting the favor of/a favor from Don Antonio, whom one and all know is a “sincere man,” a reasonable man, if not someone to be trifled with.
The fact that one hand is bandaged up speaks volumes. The way the don wears his hoodie and does sit-ups — boxer-style — lets us know he’s tough. And he’s smart. The two pot-shot taking underlings get a good beatdown — with his good hand — when they come to beg his forgiveness.
“He has his own take on the law,” his wife admits as the doctor tries to get her on board the idea of sending those dogs into quarantine.
The little bits of action are well-handled. The setting is less striking than the dimly lit office of Don Corleone, but interesting in a “This is how the Naples mob lives” way. But the movie’s theatrical origins — stagey and talk-talk-talkie– weigh it down and render it too boring to justify an investment of two hours.
“Basta,” as the Italians say. Enough is enough. Give us some ACTION.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Francesco Di Leva, Daniela Ioia, Roberto De Francesco, Ralph P., Armando De Giulio and Francesco Di Leva.
Credits: Directed by Mario Martone, scripted by Mario Martone and Ippolita Di Majo, based on the play by Eduardo De Filippo. A Film Movement release.
Running time: 1:57
The tamest movie ever made about dabbling in LSD and Riot Grrrl culture has to be “Acid Test,” a non-prescription sleep aid of a movie.
Here’s a PG rated treatment of an R-rated subject.
It’s about a high school senior rebelling against her conservative, Harvard alum dad by being hesitant to become a “legacy” applicant to his alma mater. Nothing says “Viva la REVOLUCION!” like attacking the patriarchy on your Harvard admission essay.
Juliana Destefano is Jennifer, wearing the Harvard hoodie and all-in on her father’s (Brian Thornton) dream of her following him into the Ivy League and all the doors it could open for her. We meet her at her pre-admission meeting with a counselor, follow her and her kid brother to the movies with Dad and pick up on the dynamic of her home life. Mom (Mia Ruiz) is Latina, and that’s another leg-up for getting into Harvard.
It’s 1992 in Texas, and her senior year begins with civics class focusing on the election — lots of Clinton, Bush and Perot news coverage in montages — and “Hamlet.” Does Dad, who doesn’t seem all that unreasonable at first, know what he’s doing when he quotes “To thine own self be true” to Jennifer?
It turns out she’s not sure of her life direction. Her BFF Drea (Mai Le) is headed to UT-Austin. That gives Jennifer her first second thoughts. Then they duck out to catch a live show and are introduced to estrogen-powered punk rock and the Riot Grrrrl Manifesto.
“What is a girl?” Jennifer wonders. Here, in Bikini Kill pamphlet form, is an answer.
“BECAUSE I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real.”
Next thing we know “straight edge” Drea is debating her supposedly straight edge pal’s decision to accept a tab of acid from the flirtatious hunk Owen (Reece Everett Ryan). Everything that follows — the shift in Jennifer’s music tastes, the decision to lop off her hair, the “SLUT” magic marker tattoos she and Drea don to join the Riot Grrrl scene, sex with Owen — flies in the face of Drea’s seemingly sound advice before that first tab is dropped.
“Rich kids are the worst!”
The club scenes, capturing what I assume are real bands in real performance, are shot and edited so flatly that you’d swear we were seeing a Three Tenors show.
The acid trips are no-budget DIY dull, the “romance” isn’t remotely romantic and the character’s story arc isn’t A-to-Z, passing through a hell of self-discovery. It’s A to B. Yawn.
Writer-director Jennifer Waldo grew up in DC and went to USC, so whatever “memories” she was tapping into for this just-short-of-“true” story (per the opening credits) are seriously mild-mannered.
She must’ve forgotten that “acid” added or not, “Riot Grrrl” is more than a haircut and a bit of magic markering.
Rating: unrated, drug content, profanity
Cast: Juliana Destefano, Brian Thornton, Mia Ruiz, Reece Everett Ryan and Mai Le.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jennifer Waldo. A Giant Pictures release.
Running time: 1:43
If it was a “spoiler,” I wouldn’t use the word. And the word for “Don’t Worry Darling” is “Stepford.”
I mean, read and comprehend the title. There it is.
It’s an easily-grasped and obvious analogy for this satiric thriller from director Olivia Wilde and screenwriters Karen Silberman and Carey and Shane Van Dyke, and any filmgoer should pick up on it early on.
What matters is what they and the cast add to that sort of framework, the other possibilities about where this is going and why. A little whiff of “The Master,” a bit of “The Matrix,” a taste of “Truman Show” and a hint of “Twilight Zone” all enter into Wilde’s oddly unaffecting overreach of a Statement on Women in a War-on-Women/Age-of-Incels and the End-of-Roe era.
“Handmaids” much? “Logan’s Run,” anyone?
Forget the bad buzz surrounding the film, meet it on its own terms and it’s a chilly-not-chilling story set in a desert. Avoid the gossip about the actors and you’re still stuck with how uninteresting pop moptop Harry Styles is as an actor, how much Chris Pine leans into his inner Shatner and how unflattering the light or the way the cinematographer lights them makes Pine, leading lady Florence Pugh, the director/co-star Wilde and others look.
Lose yourself in a story that’s cryptic, but not so cryptic that one cannot figure out that it’s all about the wives, and whatever’s going on they’re kind of “Stepford” about it.
Pugh and Styles play “perpetual newlyweds,” a young couple in a 1950s oasis of middle class privilege — a mod ranch-style house in a posh, uniform subdivision, “Victory Town,” in a Palm Springsish corner of the desert.
Alice and Jack don’t need an excuse to go at it, and vigorously, morning noon and night. But dutiful and sexually-fulfilled housewife Alice can’t keep Jack from his clockwork AM departure for work, popping into his T-bird along with all the men in the neighborhood, convoying into the desert to work at “The Victory Project” run by the mysterious, cultish Frank (Pine).
Every day, Alice drinks and gossips in the sun, at the local pool or shopping with her posse (Wilde, Kate Berlant) between bouts of maniacally cleaning the entire house.
At night, rowdy cocktail parties rotate through town, with everybody showing off their Mid Century Modern decor and 1950s pre-rock record collections. Lots of Mel Torme and hepcat jazz-pop and martinis and Tom Collins highballs and cigarettes, even for the ever-pregnant Peg (Berlant).
Whenever the mysterious Frank is around, he praises those willing to “join this mission” to “change the world,” and Frank’s wife (Gemma Chan, chilling), who teaches the ladies’ dance class, compliments one and all for realizing “how extraordinary (Frank) really is.”
But something’s going on, something the wife (Kiki Layne) in the only Black couple of note seems to notice. And Alice can’t help but notice Margaret’s confusion and growing dismay.
“I’m not fine,” Margaret snaps at those who try to comfort her. “Nothing is fine.”
The immaculate design allows us to pick up on “signs” of what’s happening, the daily “radio” chats from Frank that the wives tune into, the buzz words in most every sentence he speaks, the calculating eye contact Pine makes with one and all.
The parody of 1950s life is so on-the-mark that the occasional anachronistic haircut and scripted line doesn’t so much break the movie’s spell as make you ponder what it will do as it takes you where you know it must go. It gets so invested in the women that next to no time at all is devoted to the “providers,” the men also trapped in gender roles in what older, conservative Americans (and Britons) seem to regard as “the good ol’days.”
Pugh, who came to fame in period pieces, seems out of place here, and that could be by design. Alice is an interesting choice for her first real star vehicle. The character is a passive, compliant “team” player waiting for her call to action, and we have to patiently wait with her. Pugh might have had more chemistry with Styles if he didn’t seem like a tall, gawky forelock and a child hanging with the grownups.
Wilde lets herself be filmed and made-up in a way that emphasizes the severity of her features, the “TRON” beauty with a Cruella in her future. I shouldn’t even get into how Nick Kroll, as one of Jack’s colleagues, is lit and framed.
But the original sin of “Don’t Worry Darling” might be how drunk the filmmakers get on the universe they create, dragging and dragging a less and less interesting pastiche of ’50s life — a drunken office party with a stripper, because we’re all so liberal and “modern” — on for so long that the more exciting third act comes as a refreshing jolt.
Sure, it’s as predictable as scores of science fiction finales. But the viewer’s big gripe at this point has to be, “OK, but what TOOK you so long?”
Rating: R for sexuality, violent content and language
Cast: Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde, Nick Kroll, Timothy Simons, Kiki Layne, Gemma Chan and Chris Pine
Credits: Directed by Olivia Wilde, scripted by Katie Silberman, Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:02
Well, there’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.
“How Dark They Prey” is a quartet of ineptly-scripted, randomly-assembled, adequately-shot but amateurishly-acted short horror films that fall under the broad horror subheading of “claptrap.”
They include the worst written, acted and envisioned World War II short I have ever seen. And I’ve judged student films, “48 Hour Film Project” saps and worse. There’s a demonic slaughter opener that slices up some UFO hucksters. That could have been funny. A black and white finale that begins with a traffic stop isn’t quite up to “student film,” unless we’re talking “middle school” students.
There is absolutely nothing anyone writing, directing or appearing in any of these has to say that would amount to a defense. It’s just rubbish, and never should have seen the light of day. But here it is, pushed by a publicist (waste of money) and rendered legit by its own page on Rotten Tomatoes.
Wait’ll they find out.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Names withheld to protect their acting conservatories, or online thespian courses.
Credits: Scripted and directed Jamison M. LoCascio and Adam Ambrosio. A Film Valor release.
Running time: 1:12
Long before they shot the serio-comic transgender odyssey “Tangerine” on a cell phone, over a decade before “The Florida Project” became an Oscar-buzzed drama about the transient-hotel homeless of Orlando, Sean Baker and producer Shih-Ching Tsou co-directed a gem about the dark underbelly of Chinese diner workers in New York.
“Take Out,” like the later documentary “The Search for General Tso,” sees America’s Chinese fast food world underpinned by illegal immigrants, often trapped in onerous “loans” that paid for their transit into the country, working as virtual indentured servants because it’s not like they can go to the police and complain about their plight.
Using the jumpy, fly-on-the-wall camera work that gave “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project” their intimacy and immediacy, they take us into one tiny eatery in New York and the big debt that faces kitchen worker, cook and delivery guy Ming Ding, played without a hint of affectation by Charles Jang.
“Take Out” is documentary-real as we see a couple of enforcers show up at the flop house when Ming Ding lives, shake him down for a 30% loan he’s behind on, and once they’ve cleaned him out and kidney punched him, ask for the $800 he’s still behind by tonight or “your debt will double.” “Mind your own business,” they tell his many roommates, who look on. Never once do they raise their voices.
Ming Ding’s options are limited. He speaks little English, has few relatives he can tap for loans. The fact that he’s still $300 short at the start of work drives our narrative. Can he make enough in tips to avoid the worst?
This simple scenario makes a great framework for giving us a little slice of urban working class life in New York City. Each brief interaction, often in an apartment doorway, could get Ming closer to his goal. Some customers are rude, a couple are hostile, and almost all are distracted. Speaking no English and being Chinese, he’s not inclined to smile and hasn’t mastered the “Thank you” that might boost his tips.
His chatterbox pal Young (Jeng-Hua Yu) passes along his wisdom — “Rainy day means more deliveries, more deliveries mean more money!” He gives Ming all of his deliveries to him to help him out, and tries to coach him on the niceties of getting a tip out of New Yorkers. No dice.
“I could’ve mail-ordered Chinese food faster’n this!”
And God forbid the kitchen, or the friendly owner and chef, Big Sister (Wang-Thye Lee) mess up an order.
What little dialogue there is is mostly Mandarin, with smatterings of English and Spanish from the customers. In the kitchen, the employees swap “How I got here” stories, make trips into storage to fetch more MSG and slice, pound, boil and fry their way through the day and night’s orders. Young provides non-stop banter as Big Sister gruffly handles counter customers, some of whom flirt in the hopes of getting a discount.
Even she doesn’t smile. This next order? “That bitch at 845 West End,” again, the young woman who complains about the order every single time. Yeah, “Seinfeld” got that right, too.
“Take Out,” beautifully shot and coming to a Criterion DVD, makes a gritty, intimate portrait of working life on the struggling end of the spectrum as we see Ming grind through a day of tip stiffers, bicycle flats and meltdowns over the stress he won’t talk about with just anyone, a debt that stands in the way of him ever getting his “You need to focus” wife and child into the U.S.
The plot has built-in melodrama, and the co-writers/directors add more, giving the story a glum inevitability. But if you’ve liked anything they’ve produced since, it’s well worth seeing this anchor title for that boxed set to come, The Real America of Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou.
Cast: Charles Jang, Jeng–Hua Yu, Wang-Thye Lee, Justin Wan, Jeff Huang
Credits: Scripted and directed Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou. A Criterion re-release, also on some streaming platforms.
Running time: 1:28
The pop star of the moment stood on a quiet, dimly-lit stage behind lit candles and performed a Bob Marley song, “War,” a cappella. When it was ending, she held up a photo of Pope John Paul. She tore it up, saying “Fight the REAL enemy.” And America, for not the first and certainly not the last time, lost its ever-loving mind.
That infamous piece of “Saturday Night Live” lore — Oct. 3, 1992 — is a centerpiece moment of “Nothing Compares,” Kathryn Ferguson’s bracing, eye-opening, straight-no-chaser documentary appreciation of Sinéad O’Connor. That night is revisited, explained and appreciated in ways it could not be back then, when Joe Pesci was threatening to “give her such a smack” and Catholic advocacy groups led protests against her music and went to war with her career.
Her then-publicist, Elaine Schock, recalls going backstage and telling the already-embattled singer “I can’t get you out of this.” And she remembers O’Connor smiling, “happy” and defiantly saying “You know what? I don’t want you to.”
“Nothing Compares” — its release on Showtime coinciding with the 30th anniversary of that night — hits the highlights of O’Connor’s rise, the abused childhood, the mentally ill mother, the Irish Catholic Church that figured into so many of her stories (she was put “in care” at a Magdalen laundry orphanage) of oppression and physical abuse.
But the perfect “explanation” for O’Connor’s outspokenness — pre-“SNL” she had been demonized for refusing to allow the American National Anthem from being played at her shows (during the Bush I Gulf War) — comes from the artist herself.
From Daniel Corkery and Sean O’Casey to Brendan Behan, there’s “a tradition of Irish artists being agitators,” O’Connor (she goes by Shuhada Sadaqat since converting to Islam) says now. And she’s right. Think of U2’s activism and Van Morrison’s anti-vax protests. They don’t always have to be “right.” They still feel a need to speak out.
That electrifying moment on “Saturday Night Live” was both the latest outrage from the outspoken Irish singer and her latest electrifying moment. Just a couple of years before, her breakthrough single, a cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was a minimalist video phenomenon which somehow never overwhelmed a stark, open wound performance of a song that became the world’s biggest hit.
The video’s director John Maybury recalls being shocked at “the connection coming down the camera. It’s not the direction. It’s not the cinematography (he hired a female DP to put O’Connor at ease). It’s entirely her.”
Ferguson interviewed friends, bandmates, an ex-husband, musicians, filmmaker-collaborators, journalists and publicists and O’Connor/Sadaqat herself, always off-camera. Their voices inform the film and the still photos and grainy early performance footage show us the young Sinéad, who always favored very short hair before impulsively shaving it all off when her first record label leaned on her to have an abortion when she and her beau got pregnant. The film skips past some of the trauma she wrote about in her memoir “Rememberings,” and revealed to talk show hostesses like Oprah. The idea seems to be to get her to a triumphant finale, in which we appreciate the things she went through to speak and perform her truth.
Fair enough.
There’s a lot of background and a lot of drama in this film, which reminds us of the soft-spoken way O’Connor came off in early interviews, and the confidence to speak out that grew as she grew up. She was world famous at 21, a singular talent with a voice that would range from a whisper to a keening yelp several octaves higher in an instant, a great beauty seemingly at war with her beauty.
Her sound, her look, her fashion sense and her politics are discussed and marveled at by those interviewed, who see her as a woman decades ahead of her time whom the passage of time has largely validated and exonerated.
“I don’t think that the powers that be were ready for her,” Chuck D says, admiringly. He remembers her showing up at her first Grammys, which Chuck D and Public Enemy were boycotting, with a Public Enemy logo painted on her head in solidarity.
Irish journalist Roisin Ingle looks at Parkland High School gun control activist X. Gonzalez and her shaved head, and singer Billie Eilish going off on stage demanding that politicians “Leave our bodies ALONE,” and sees “little sparks of Sinead.”
And we all know what happened to the Catholic Church when the ugly secrets started getting out, and what happened to Ireland when it shook off the misogynistic theocracy the model-gorgeous singer from Glenageary first started raising hell about over thirty years ago.
The film takes us all the way back to show us the elements that made her a star and lets us appreciate the principles with which she approached her career, right from the start. But “Nothing Compares” also makes us remember that we almost all laughed at the punchline O’Connor became, at the “Saturday Night Live” jokes at her expense, and that perhaps we even embraced the ginned-up outrage aimed at her way back when.
And if this film doesn’t change our minds about her state of mind — that Islamic conversion feels like another straw a sometimes impulsive, often unhappy and unmoored person has grasped — it at least makes us reconsider her rationale, her defiance and her guts.
Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking
Cast: Sinead O’Connor
Credits: Directed by Kathryn Ferguson, scripted by Eleanor Emptage, Kathryn Ferguson and Michael Mallie. A Showtime release (Sept. 30).
Running time: 1:39
“Pearl” was the aged, sex-obsessed psychopathic matriarch and villain of Ti West’s satiric, social commentary slasher picture “X.” She was played by actress Mia Goth, who also played the libidinous teen whose Texas family farm has been rented by a cut-rate crew anxious to get in on the coming porn picture boom by filming one out in the boondocks, where the locals might not approve and where all manner of farm implements and a gator are handy as their means of “censorship.”
“Pearl” is also the title of the origin story conceived during a COVID break in filming “X,” one dreamed up by the actress who played both roles back then. It’s a speculative piece of cinematic psychology that suggests how such a “monster” — isolated, old, embittered and murderous — might have come to be.
As psychology, it’s no deeper than the epilogue to Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” in which Simon Oakland “explained” how Norman Bates became “Mother,” or the few feeble attempts his shrink makes at analyzing Michael Myers in “Halloween.” It’s glib at best, wrongheaded “horror movie psychology.”
But that’s not really the point, as the idea is to take us back to Pearl’s first killing spree and show us all the creative ways she found to kill those who got in the way of her “dream” way back in 1918, when World War I was winding down, the Spanish Flu was blowing up and the movies were still new.
As young Pearl (Goth) launches into a very long and emotionally miscalculated speech explaining her hopes in life, her first clues that “something is wrong with me” and when she first started killing, I got lost remembering what grim going this whole picture has been.
Pearl’s at home, living with her family, helping out with the farm while her husband Howard is off having an “adventure” in Europe. He’s a doughboy in France, and she can only dream of him via his letters. She’s stuck in BFE, Texas.
Pearl dreams a lot, swirling and dancing to herself in reveries that tell us she wants to be a dancer like the leggy ladies she sees in the movies — leading a chorus line, catching the spotlight. Her stern German mother (Tandi Wright) has no time for this nonsense. Her father (Matthew Sunderland) is catatonic, a burden, not a help on this farm. Pearl needs to pull her weight.
“One day, you’ll never see me again,” is Pearl’s mantra and threat — to her farm animal audience, and to her mother. “I’m special.”
Her only relief is the periodic trip to town, at the local cinema, where she can see newsreels and movies about chorines dancing to their heart’s content in the big city. The dashing, mustachioed projectionist (David Corenswet) takes an interest. Will Pearl be tempted by his sophistication, the allure of “travel,” his after hours come-on of showing her an early “stag film” (“A Free Ride”)?
And there’s another way out, a big dance audition for a regional touring company, to be held at “the church.” Like the movies she watches — which have synced soundtrack sound and not a piano player accompanist — this is an anachronism. But she and her curly-blonde sister-in-law (Emma Jenkins-Purro) can dream of treading the boards, can’t they?
Pearl starts making plans and plotting her exit. Those parents? They just might be in the way.
West delivers some early cinema history sight gags — Pearl riding her bike into town has a hint of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch on a bike in “The Wizard of Oz” — but very little of this sadistic “dark horror comedy” struck me as the least bit amusing.
Pearl pausing a bike ride to make out with a scarecrow, because that’s how lonely and horny she is? Hilarious.
The social satire of “X” is missing. The commentary on the culture of the day — the war, with women struggling at home while the young men are “Over There,” worries about “germs” and the flu, the easily-shattered dreams that the new entertainment form offered those who lost themselves in the movies, “pictures” or “flickers” of the day — isn’t as focused.
It’s self-indulgent and self-referential, more a humorless counterpoint to “X” than a precursor. Sure, it’s a reminder that porn has been around since the birth of cinema, and that wherever dead-end “provincial” towns can be found, there’s some frustrated Belle longing to escape. And?
“X” was about something. “Pearl,” not quite.
The real intent here is to create a showpiece for Goth as an actress and a writer. The writer scripts this long, tedious and “revealing” third act monologue of Pearl explaining herself, giving us no information we haven’t picked up already. The actress vacantly emoting her way through this “What’s wrong with me?” moment isn’t well served by it, either.
Rating: R for some strong violence, gore, strong sexual content and graphic nudity.
Cast: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandy Wright, Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alastair Sewell and Matthew Sunderland.
Credits: Directed by Ti West, scripted by Mia Goth and Ti West. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:42
Guy tumbles under a damaged parachute, a skydiving blur, and wakes up the in the middle of the desert. He doesn’t know how he got here. He only knows he’s got no cell service.
And then he (Hugo de Souza) meets the more sedentary stoner (Vig Norris) who wakes up in his bathrobe. And then they’re hailed by another stoner (Cameron Dye) who’s even more demented.
This stranger and that one cross their paths. They all speak in the gobbledygook of self-absorbed unself-aware California-ese. Or maybe they’re quoting that song by Lauryn Hill.
“Everything is everything!”
The only food seems to be in the guys’ hallucinations. Their water? Long gone. Days and days pass.
Sounds like hell, right? Or maybe purgatory?
“The 4400!” the bathrobed fellow who decides he seems like a “Craig” declares. He starts laying out the plot to the skydiver and they debate its similarities to their as they aimlessly trek, trying to figure out where they are or even who they are.
So, “The 4400” it is? Nah, it’s even less interesting than that. Call it “Mister Limbo.” No wonder the other stoner wanders off.
Whatever promise there is in this well-worn existentialist premise starts to dissipate once the first guy meets the second, and the attention steadily fades the more characters in search of an exit — or a GPS fix — that they meet on their journey.
On their walks, and at night around a campfire, the skydiver who might be called “Enrico” thanks to the accent that comes and goes and Craig ponder life and God and self-worth and goodness and failings, theirs and others’ in a not-quite-definable accent that comes and goes.
“I went to church,” Craig recalls. “What does that say about me?”
“I tried like hell to do the right thing,” Enrico fruitlessly offers.
There’s nothing more to “Mister Limbo than that. And even a glib faux Pirandello swipe at the meaning of life and the life summation that comes with death should be deeper or at least more engrossing than this.
Rating: unrated, profanity, drug use discussed
Cast: Hugo de Souza, Vig Norris, Cameron Dye, Amy Hoerler, Jennifer Kennedy and Heidi Luo
Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert G. Putka. A Terror Films release.
Running time:
The images are stark, often silent snippets of little-remembered American history. And they offer a fresh view of the burning summers of 1967 and ’68, when American cities erupted in civil rights protests that quickly crossed over into riots.
“Riotsville, USA” isn’t a recycling of the oft-repeated footage of Detroit, Newark, Watts and elsewhere in flames, of troops fanning out across littered streets in front of shattered and torched storefronts. This documentary is built entirely from archival news footage, U.S. government training films and long unseen programming from the pre-PBS Public Broadcast Laboratory related to the unrest and televised efforts to get at and discuss its root causes and possible solutions.
Who can forget the iconic and ugly images of the “police riot” that took place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago? What filmmaker Sierra Pettengill shows us instead is the tightly-controlled, sanitized and “disciplined Republican Convention in Miami that preceded it, and how compliant the media were in covering it the way the Republicans wanted.
“We’ve heard about Chicago, ” Charlene Modeste dispassionately narrates. “But we’ve been living through Miami Beach.”
“The Southern Strategy” and Republican race-baiting, a party whose 1968 state delegations were whitewashed, a party whose standard-bearer, Richard Nixon, would make “law & order” a cornerstone of his campaign, and who would cast Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running to appeal to “the George Wallace” vote, all were trotted out in authoritarian lockstep contrast to the soul searching, debate and hand-wringing over the unrest, riots and assassinations of the previous two years.
“Law and order,” NBC anchor David Brinkley would drawl. “Everyone is free to interpret that however he likes.”
The film shows NBC’s coverage of the convention discussing the rioting that went on in nearby Liberty City, but never once cutting away to show disaffected American Americans protesting a convention that refused to meet or even acknowledge them miles away because the GOP had parked their fete on an island only accessible by drawbridges.
“Riotsville” takes its title from two U.S. Army Bases in Va. and Ga. which built fake city streets to train soldiers, National Guard and police forces in how to regain control of riot-torn streets, places to test tactics, weapons, and train helicopter pilots to make low sweeps spewing tear gas, all while Army and civilian brass took in the action — soldiers played the “professional agitator” rioters — from covered observation bleachers.
It’s a dry yet fascinating film that covers a lot of ground between the riots, the creation of the Riotsvilles and the convention where its training was unleashed on first Miami and Miami Beach, and later on Chicago.
There’s flattering TV coverage of the gadgets called “New Weapons Against Crime,” but were mainly modified military gear intended for use against civilians.
We remember the Johnson Administration’s Kerner Commission, a conclave of mostly white elected officials — “the least radical men in America” — who investigated the root causes of the unrest and came to what have been accepted ever since as the right conclusions. America might be splitting into two societies, that a police-backed “Apartheid state” was very much a danger, and that no good would come from suburbia plunging itself into gun culture thanks to the agitated state of a long-oppressed minority.
And most interesting to me, we see a lengthy PBL nationwide televised event that brought police chiefs and civil rights activists, social theorists and others together for a big discussion and debate on what back then was an accepted cause of the riots — “police brutality” — which no police chief or sheriff present would admit even existed.
The larger mission of this film — which is quiet and measured in its presentation, to a fault (“dry”) — is to remind us that over half a century has passed and a lot of those root issues are still open wounds.
One unintentional subtext is to show that despite the racism and myopia of the media of the day — Huntley and Brinkley chuckling off camera as the “demands” of Miami agitators — there’s a shocking maturity to many attempts to grapple with the problem in a televised public forum.
The PBL footage is surprising because it is both well-intentioned, air-clearing and potentially helpful. And we haven’t seen this footage since it was initially broadcast. Whatever their myriad issues with diversity and being tin-eared on the subject of race because they only employed middle aged white them, the limited TV news options at the time took their public service and society-building roles seriously.
Quite the contrast to today, when news organizations are so ratings-and-profits obsessed that they see more value in broadcasting the unnewsworthy ceremonial speech of a British monarch than in carrying an American president’s dire warning against fascist efforts to end American democracy at home.
I dare say the new hopeless tact-to-the-right of CNN means that “Riotsville, USA” won’t turn up there when it hits TV.
Rating: violence
Cast: Narrated by Charlene Modeste.
Credits: Directed by Sierra Pettengill, scripted by Tobi Haslett. A Magnolia release.
Running time:1:31
