Movie Nation

It began with a twang, a twelve string guitar Greenwich Village folkie Roger McGuinn heard George Harrison play.

Something about the harmony of paired strings inspired close harmony singing, and “Folk rock” was born, thanks to The Byrds.

And from them, Buffalo Springfield and later The Mamas and the Papas.

But it was geography, eventually parking those groups in close proximity to The Beach Boys, that gave birth to “The California Sound.”

The new documentary “Echo in the Canyon” narrows that birthplace down even further, to Laurel Canyon, a hilly corner of Los Angeles where David Crosby of The Byrds led a musical migration that soon put producers, players and innovators in the same place.

Something about it, its “close proximity” the the clubs of Sunset Strip, producer Lou Adler speculates, conjured up a shared sonic idea born mainly of the simple mixing together of people who could stop each other on the street or knock on each other’s doors and say, “Hey, I’ve been working on this. What do you think?”

“Any time something good happens,” Florida native and later California transplant Tom Petty says (in his last interview), “it’s gonna show up other places.”

Jakob Dylan, son of Bob, leader of The Wallflowers, is our narrator and musical guide in this delightfully tuneful odyssey. He tools down the canyon and around town, to Western (United) Sound and other surviving recording studios, in a 1960s GTO as he chats up up Petty in a luthier’s shop as they pick at the Rickenbacker guitars there, over to visit Crosby or Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and Papas, Ringo Starr, McGuinn, Adler, Eric Clapton, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills.

Being a member of the Dylan clan, his declared “inspiration” of all this was a time-capsule drama “Model Shop,” a Jaques Demy film that featured Gary Lockwood tooling around the LA of this “scene” in a 1950s MG.

Dylan rounds up musicians of his generation — Beck, Fiona Apple, Norah Jones and others — for a glorious 2015 cover-song concert at L.A.’s Orpheum Theater, performing duets with Apple and Jade and Jones, close harmonizing through songs from The Byrds and The Beach Boys (with Brian Wilson) to Buffalo Springfield and those Mamas and Papas, “reviving those echos,” as he puts it.

Beck marvels at that era’s age of “supergroups” such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ferment of bands built around dueling innovators.

Clapton revisits how his “Let It Rain” eerily resembles Buffalo Springfield’s “Question.”

“I must have copped it!”

Ringo Starr verifies the legend of how much The Beatles adored The Byrds and the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” LP, and cherry-picked pieces of those sounds for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Crosby has finally mellowed enough to talk enthusiastically about his time with The Byrds, and bluntly admits why he departed for another “supergroup.”

And Petty, who died 2017, reminisces over being the first to “revive” the sound that earlier groups, Jackson Browne and others invented. He saw Buffalo Springfield in a concert and won “Pet Sounds” in an on-air call-in contest from a Gainesville, Fla. radio station “and I never got over it.”

The most ambitious thing about this laid-back documentary was creating a tribute concert and getting big names to perform in it, and that is lovely to hear and behold. The glory of “Echo in the Canyon” is gathering the oral histories of a generation of performers who are passing from the scene, getting their final words on how it all happened.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, drug discussions

Cast: Jakob Dylan, Michelle Phillips, Fiona Apple, Tom Petty, Beck, Jade, Roger McGuinn, Brian Wilson, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Norah Jones, Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton

Credits: Directed by Andrew Slater, script by Eric Barrett, Andrew Slater. A Greenwich  release

Running time: 1:22

So this is 50? Meh.

Lots of wine, personal crises dismissed or dealt with by your BFFs and a rigorous travel and “fun” timetable that would make Patton’s Third Army wince.

Amy Poehler‘s new Netflix comedy “Wine Country” is a distaff dance through California’s Napa Valley, just a bunch of female friends who came of age working together at a Chicago pizzeria decades before.

Just Amy and “Saturday Night Live” buds Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and Ana Gasteyer, and writers turned actresses Paula Pell (“SNL,” “Sisters”) and Emily Spivey (“Parks & Rec.”), with a guest appearance by Tina Fey, drinking and bonding, wining and whining through showcase vineyards and Architectural Digest wineries.

It’s a little raunchy, a bit rude, occasionally funny and entirely predictable. But as Netflix time-killers for grownups go, it’s not half-bad. Or exactly half-bad.

Poehler plays Abby, who herds the five cats that are her best friends into a trip to celebrate their pal Rebecca’s 50th.

She’s booked the AirBnB, made all the reservations, printed the t-shirts and arranged a drone. She turned the itinerary into a glossy-covered booklet for all to study and stick to.

Lesbian gal pal Val (Pell) needs to “try out my new knees…I cannot WAIT to see all your guys and pinch your butts! With consent!”

Naomi (Rudolph) is trying just a little too hard, with her “Mama needs to rock out and whip her c–k out!”

Catherine (Gasteyer) is a pizza entrepreneur with a TV deal pending, entirely too cell-phone busy to be there.

Jenny (co-writer Spivey) has issues, but nothing like Abby’s, of which her C-PAP machine is but a symptom.

And Rebecca (Dratch) is a therapist trying to convince herself “age is just a number” and prone to over-compensating with psychobabble buzzwords (“feedback”) and catch phrases such as everybody’s favorite, denoting the aging process.

Every groan, admission of weakness or compromise is this “thing we say now.” Because, you know, they’re all 50 or getting there. Fifty may be the new thirty, but mileage counts, too.

Tina Fey is the flannel wearing butch AirBnB owner who mocks them mercilessly, if with a pang of empathy, as she leads them through the house, their “toxic jibber jabber” possibly re-directed by the house’s fire pit.

“Stare into the flames and contemplate why the hell you came up here in the first place.”

The formula is thus set. Some will look for love, or at least release. Most have secrets. Some are succeeding and others failing. And when you apply day long bus trips to various locales offering truth serum (wine) tastings, the ugly words describing how you REALLY feel will come out.

Jason Schwartzman shows up as a cook, chauffeur and bearded doofus who “comes with the house,” Cherry Jones makes a beautifully bitter Tarot card reader, ironically named Lady Sunshine.

The script has plenty of time for dance-offs and “DUI Songs,” their nickname for whatever they belt out when they’re drinking — tunes from their Chicago youth by The Bangles, Bel Biv Devoe and Kim Wilde.

“OK, let’s play ‘paths not taken.'”

They weep over their lost prince, Prince Rogers Nelson, confess to this or that, fall down and insult assorted windbag wine-tasting hosts.

“Jeez, people REALLY love to talk about wine around here!”

Rudolph lands the biggest laugh and there’s some fun riffing involving Naomi and each of the other characters. Fey shows up, sticks her jokes, and leaves, only to come back and stick another joke or three.

Pell has been around comedy writing for decades, and is gifted with some of the funnier lines here, which she handles with skill.

But too often, in too many scenes, the strain of it all shows. “Trying too hard” isn’t a cardinal sin in screen comedy, but it’s always a little off-putting when you witness how much effort is going into making piddling inconsequential moments pay off, necessary effort since so few big moments do.

“I feel like the universe is gently nudging you to CHILL.”

“Wine Country” is no “Sideways,” even if the contrived stakes are supposed to be greater. It’s built for a particular audience and some of the laughs will hit home for anybody who’s gotten that AARP “invitation” in the mail.

But Poehler’s film never crosses the tipping point of being worth 100 minutes of your time.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language and some drug material

Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, Rachel Dratch, Paula Pell, Emily Spivey, Jason Schwartzman, Maya Erskine and Tina Fey

Credits: Directed by Amy Poehler, Liz Cackowski, Emily Spivey   A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Joy. Rapture.

https://www.slashfilm.com/atlas-comics-movies/

Watching the work of a great filmmaker in his or her later years is akin to following your favorite big league ballplayer on his “farewell tour.” Not so much because you’re eagerly anticipating the performer’s retirement. You pay attention because you’re looking for little hints of the greatness that was their prime.

Brian DePalma gave us “Dressed to Kill” and “Blowout” and “The Untouchables” and “Snake Eyes” and a “Mission: Impossible” picture. People stopped calling him a “Hitchcock Impersonator” decades ago.  But he’s going to be 79 next Sept. 11, and even though he’s got a “Predator” movie in the works and another thriller in pre-production, his last film that truly impressed probably came out 20 years ago.

But like a slugger taking that last trip around the circuit, he can still deliver one of his trademark bravura action sequences. “Domino” is a drab, implausible and melodramatic terrorism thriller showing his ongoing interest in the post 9-11 world of “Redacted (2007). Drab, that is, until he gets to one of those famous set-pieces.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Danish star of that TV show all the homebodies are talking about, “Game of Thrones,” takes another shot at a big screen action picture (he did “Shot Caller,” which did well on video among “GoT” fans) with this story of Danish cops, the CIA, a grieving immigrant seeking vengeance and an ISIS connected terror cell operating in Europe.

Christian may be one of Copenhagen’s finest, but on the fateful day that our story begins, we see him leave his gun behind on his post coital nightstand.

DePalma’s overuse of shrill Hitchcockian strings underscore “FORESHADOWING,” because wouldn’t you know it? That contributes to Christian’s partner (Søren Malling) getting his throat slit.

Very DePalma, BTW.

Christian covers up his ineptitude with his boss as he stays on the trail of the perpetrator (Eriq Ebouaney), a Libyan immigrant. The crime scene had a terrorist’s body already slumped in a chair, along with guns, explosives and produce. Hey, you’ve got to smuggle that stuff in somehow.

Dutch actress Carice van Houten, who broke out with “Black Book” and who also was on HBO’s most popular show, plays Alex, another cop assigned to the case.

As they chase clues south from Denmark into The Netherlands, Alex feels the need to stop the car for a little weeping session at the base of a windmill. And thus do we see how “international” productions finagle their financing, and get another serving of coincidence in a plot that leans on them far too much.

Their prime suspect was nabbed by guys in suits with tasers. The moment Guy Pearce drawls his first questions to the Libyan, we know he’s CIA, y’all.

“How’d you know?”

“We’re Americans! We read your emails!”

So the CIA is using the Libyan to get close to ISIS while the Danish police hop, skip and jump from “fairyland” (Pearce’s CIA designation for Denmark) to the south of Europe, while a pack of generic movie Islamists plot big suicide attacks, complete with machine guns, gullible suicide bombers, drones and streaming two-way video giving the head man (Mohammed Azaay) a first-person shooter video game thrill.

The dialogue is unquotably bland, the situations soap opera melodramatic and the performances perfunctory, although Pearce smacks his lips and chews up his few scenes and Ebouaney, new to films, gets across a hint of his character’s malice born of desperation. Coster-Waldau gets by on good looks and presence, here.

No, what we”re here for are the homages to Hitchcock, a rooftop nod to “Vertigo” and a finale that conjures up memories of “Stagefright” and Doris Day’s turn as a Hitchcock blonde in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

DePalma interjects random bits of up-to-the-minute surveillance tech into a movie whose clumsy, cut-and-paste script sees Danish cops having basic European geography and geopolitics explained to them. And to us.

But that payoff “bravura sequence” has multiple points of view, a crowd, lots of slo-mo and the threat of violence on a vast scale, all of it set to a bolero — not Ravel’s “Bolero,” just a pastiche of it.

And friends, if the entire movie had been as good as this Spanish last act, they’d have had something here.

Almost everything that comes before it is as generic as its title.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, some language and brief nudity

Cast: Carice van Houten, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce and Søren Malling

Credits: Directed by Brian DePalma, script by Petter Skavlan.  A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:29

Pattinson? Brooding, not particularly
Butch. Hoult, as “Tolkien” demonstrates, is just dull.

https://deadline.com/2019/05/rob-pattinson-nicholas-hoult-batman-short-list-matt-reeves-1202616908/

Tough crowd.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bruce-willis-booed-throwing-first-pitch-at-phillies-game-1211213

For profit Full Sail University’s most famous director alum is a veteran of the “Saw” franchise and Lionsgate has him attached to the comoc’sb”twisted” new pitch.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/16/saw-movie-reboot-chris-rock-twisted-promise

It’s no great surprise that the great Australian director Bruce Beresford wrings every ounce of sweet out of “Ladies in Black,” an upbeat Down Under tale of women who work in a prestigious department store back when there were such things.

He made “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Tender Mercies” and “A Good Man in Africa,” so this slight, sugary confection set in his homeland didn’t present much in the line of difficulties. He makes the characters distinct, their trials easily overcome and keeps the soap opera aspects in check in adapting Madeleine St. John’s novel for the screen.

And if there’s this charming subtext about the world-broadening vitality of immigrants, refugees, derisively labeled “REF-os” back in old Oz, that’s just an Old Master keeping his tale topical.

Goode’s is the posh multi-story Macy’s of 1950s Sydney, a city block of elegance where culture and couture meet in a country just then discovering them as it comes into its own not far removed from World War II.

There’s a uniformed doorman, a dapper greeter and floor manager (Nicholas Hammond) in tails, and a pianist playing Chopin as the customers pour in.

And there’s a locker room out back, where the saleswomen put on their “war paint,” change into their personal black dresses, earrings and heels and become “Ladies in Black” for the day.

Lisa (Angourie Rice, “Spider Man’s” Betty) is the new girl, gawky and 16 and brought in for the Christmas rush, a teen ready for “the leaving.” That’s what they call graduation in Australia.

The staff veterans, Fay and Patty (Rachael Taylor, Alison McGirr) are to show her the ropes, which they do. They’re nice enough, and posh as all get-out in appearance. But they’re working class, through and through, and they’re awfully quick to warn Lisa away from the “REF-o” Magda, a regal foreigner in charge of the “Model Salon,” where one-off designer dresses are sold.

“Soon you veel come to me,” Magda (Julia Ormand) sniffs to Lisa. “Some help I kan use.”

Our girl longs to be a poet. Or an actress. Or perhaps a novelist. The other ladies may raise an eyebrow, her parents (Susie Porter, Shane Jacobson) may range from “Let her dream” to “No daughter’a mine’s goin’ t’university!” But not Magda.

Over the course of that holiday season, Magda will give Lisa a makeover, the polish she’ll carry into adulthood, and expose her to The Big Wide World by way of her life experience and meals with her husband, Stefan (Vincent Perez).

Lisa, who is trying to outgrow her parents’ hand-me-down provincialism as sweetly as she can manage (“Lisa” is the name she’d prefer, not the one Mum gave her), reads “Anna Karenina” over lunch and exposes Fay to Great Books and Big Thoughts. Fay’s xenophobia is about to be overwhelmed, her horizons forever broadened beyond “the cocoon” Australia, at the time, was.

And Patty struggles to make her ranch worker husband (Luke Pegler) more “attentive,” so that they can have a baby.

There’s nothing particularly dramatic in any of this, but some of that is how gently Beresford handles this admittedly old-fashioned story and well-worn characters. All the rough edges, if there ever were any, are rubbed off every situation and every character.

Still, he never leaves his heaping helping of corn stuck in our teeth.

The perfectly-appointed store is home to many a recycled situation; the drudgery of the work, dealing with women who say “This has ALWAYS been my size” in the changing rooms, and cleaning up after vomiting little boys whose mothers dragged them shopping in this oasis of The Good Life in the middle of a city of streetcars and lunchpail jobs.

The players are well-cast, but the screen veteran Ormond (“Sabrina” and “First Knight” were her break-out films in 1995) has the most to play and the most fun, it would seem, playing it.

She purrs in a Croatian accent that “the Amerikins are sooooo modern,” that her fashion line is all gowns “too small for zees beeg Australian girlz,” that dresses made in Britain are ugly because they are cut to fit a nation of women “shaped like pears.” Lisa she takes under her wing, telling the others she wants to “steal your leetle slave girl” — just for a minute.

“Be heppy, ALL-vays! Eese goot choice!”

The European “REF-os” all have the whiff of displaced nobility (men in cravats), the Aussie men are either dandies or “manly” beer-swilling dullards, and Lisa, her mind broadening, has one piece of encouragement to carry with her into the liberating (even in Australia, to some degree) 1960s. Dated, yes, but worth remembering, Beresford suggests.

“A clever girl…That’s the most wonderful thing in all creation.”

MPAA Rating: PG for some suggestive material, mild language, and smoking

Cast: Julia Ormond, Angourie Rice, Rachael Taylor, Susie Porter, Alison McGirr and Celia Massingham

Credits: Directed by Brcue Beresford, script by Sue Milliken and Bruce Beresford, based on the novel by Madeleine St. John. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:48

Charm and wit count for a lot in romantic comedies, and they compensate for the many sins of “Funny Story.”

It’s a darkly funny “romance,” but only in the broadest terms.

The film covers familiar ground, and not just in the sense that it’s yet another tale set in scenic, over-filmed California.

And it traffics in cliches and stereotypes, or at least widely accepted tropes common in same-sex romances on the screen.

Walter, given a wry twinkle by Matthew Glave (of TV’s “Angie Tribeca” and “Better Things”), is a semi-retired TV actor with that one, goldmine of a hit under his belt. Decades before, he starred as a sword-and-sorcery “space Viking” in the popular series, “Youngblood.”

Set for life? Ask Shatner, Lynda Carter or Lucy Lawless. “Conventions” and residuals keep him flush.

Which is why he’s all set to dump the too-young/too-ditzy second wife (Daisye Tutor, yes that’s how she spells it.). She puts down her phone and her e-cigarette just long enough to blurt “I’m pregnant,” and put a stop to that.

That’s not news he’s looking forward to telling his adult daughter (Jana Winternitz), who is “always a bit standoffish” when he brings up “the girl that ended my marriage to her mother.” Can’t do it on the phone, and Nic just bailed on a weekend they were to spend together to be with friends up at Big Sur.

No worries, Walter can “drive up.” But Dad, one last thing. Could you pick up a friend, Kim (Emily Bett Rickards) whose car just died? You know, give her a lift up here?

We’ve met Kim as she skulked into her mom’s funeral, trying to shrug off the judgmental “Sorry that I never ran into you at the hospital” relatives.

Kim’s got issues that she might be working out with promiscuity.

Walter? We get a hint that he’s cut a wide swath through highway and byway barmaids and hoteliers.

These two may meet brusque, with brittle conversations about the “boob cancer” that took her mother and the like. We know “OK, do you have a PROBLEM with me?” and Kim’s testy recounting of Walter’s shortcomings as a father aren’t the end of it.

“For someone so small, you wear a huge layer of ‘bitch.'”

Not when he croons a little karaoke. Not when she offers, “Will you do a shot with me?”

Yup. “The best hair in daytime television” has a romp with a woman young enough to be his daughter.

And when they get to Big Sur, Walter figures out how wrong that was. His daughter comes out to him, Kim is her longtime love and oh yeah, this is the weekend they’re getting married.

“This is WONDERFUL. I think.”

I was amused by Walter’s over-the-top efforts to be “cool” with all this, his flippant reaction to his latest “stranger in a strange land” situation, the lone straight male in a fallopian jungle of California lesbians.

Glave gives this guy a light charm, witty and droll about just about everything, including the gulf between himself and the “My cell phone is more interesting than you” generation he’s dealing with.

He’s still popular with the fanboys, and the ladies he weekends with could consider him a sage, if they wanted to.

“Sometimes, regrets are our blessings.”

Rickard’s Kim is clearly a neurotic mess, life not working out on any level, the sort of woman you’d want your child to steer clear of, even if you hadn’t mounted her on a B & B’s armoire. Rickard walks the fine line between villain and basket case with her performance.

But man, the California cliches threaten to overwhelm this sort of faux Woody Allen (black screen intertitles, ancient jazz in the score) “awkward weekend” sex comedy.

Whatever popular culture says about gay men, in movies and on TV, gay women have long been portrayed with this “fluid” sexuality that is the politically correct norm for our more trans-friendly era.

“There are no doors,” one woman explains, cryptically satisfying Walter’s curiosity.

But in the movies, at least, you can’t be a lesbian without being a foodie/vegan, with all the crystals and teepees and shakra cleans uping cliches and wedding ceremonies that “commune with our friends in nature.”

Yeah, one woman plays the autoharp.

And that’s not even taking into account the whole promiscuous indiscriminate, on-the-spectrum sexual omnivore thing that gay women characters are in too many movies to count. What’s that mean? They’re still “available” to the hetero male hero, right?

That’s another thing this Michael J. Gallagher/Steve Greene script has that feels like an homage to Woody Allen — dated stereotypes.

These knocks don’t ruin “Funny Story,” and Glave sees to that. He makes Walter a soulful heel, so we don’t have to strain to believe he’d be attractive to women in general, bisexuals included.

But the trite tropes do make a pretty “Funny Story” a little less funny, I have to say.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, marijuana use, vaping, profanity

Cast: Matthew Glave, Emily Bett Rickards, Jana Winternitz

Credits: Directed by Michael J. Gallagher, script by Michael J. Gallagher and Steve Greene. A Blue Fox Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:25

Director Olivia Wilde declared war on Georgia’s cranky old men wanting control of women’s bodies bill, so one has to show one’s support. This looks rude and hilarious and is one summer movie I have been dying to see.

UPDATE And here’s my review of “Booksmart.”