Everything's Got 'Em: On the Point of Harry Nilsson's Animated Feature The Point!

THE POINT!
(Fred Wolf, 1971, USA, 74 minutes)

Two years before the publication of William Goldman's The Princess Bride, in which a father tells his son a bedtime story that takes up the bulk of the book, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson used a similar format for his own bedtime story, The Point!

Fourteen years later, Goldman's adaptation of his book would form the basis for the big-screen version with which most people are probably familiar. And Rob Reiner's film isn't bad, but as is often the case: the book is deeper, darker, and more fulfilling. Nilsson's narrative feature, however, lived on the small screen before it took shape in other formats, including a stage musical (with Monkees Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz) and a home-video release.

For this hand-crafted project, Nilsson did everything he possibly could. He hired a screenwriter (Norm Lenzer) to adapt his idea, a director and animator (Fred Wolf) to bring it to life, a producer (George Tipton) to conduct and arrange his songs, and a narrator to tell the tale; Dustin Hoffman, post-Midnight Cowboy, for the TV broadcast and his close friend, Ringo Starr, for the version that appears on most video releases, including the 50th anniversary Blu-ray MVD will be releasing next year (Nilsson won a Grammy for Midnight Cowboy's Tipton-produced theme, "Everybody's Talkin'"). It's Nilsson, however, who narrates the album version with which I grew up, and I believe it's definitive. Starr has an engaging style, but his narration can be a little drowsy, whereas Nilsson's has more pep.



The Nilsson who came up with the story, which hasn't lost one iota of resonance over the years--hippy-dippy trappings aside--is the same Nilsson who grew up without a father, wrote songs about fatherlessness, like "1941" and "Daddy's Song," and would go on to father seven children, none of whom would experience the same degree of abandonment--though it's fair to say that his youngest children saw more of him than his oldest son, Zak.

In the film, Oblio (voiced by The Brady Bunch's Mike Lookinland) begins life in a medievalesque town full of points. As Nilsson's song would have it, "Everything's Got 'Em"--except for Oblio, the sole round-headed citizen. As the narrator notes, "He had no point. He had no point at all." Always a fan of wordplay, Nilsson extracts as much meaning from the word "point" as any human conceivably could. Anyone who's ever felt different from the rest, for whatever reason, can see themselves in Oblio, not least because he's a regular kid. He's polite, he's well mannered; he's just pointless.

In order to help him fit in, his mother makes Oblio a pointed cap. His head remains perfectly spherical, but now he looks more like everybody else, though I don't think it's completely accidental that the other kids look like what we would now call poop emojis. Instead of befriending any of his orange peers, Oblio finds a soul mate in the blue-hued "greatest dog in the world," which leads to "Me and My Arrow," a sublime, two-minute pop song in which Nilsson describes a friendship in the first person, just as he did in his Tipton-produced theme for ABC's The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, while simultaneously expressing adult fears of abandonment in lines like, "And in the morning when I wake up, she may be telling me goodbye." It's a completely unexpected detour in a song that seemed designed expressly for children and animal lovers, but that was Nilsson's modus operandi in a nutshell: to subvert pop-song expectations at every turn.



With Arrow's assistance, Oblio becomes a formidable player of Triangle Toss, the town's boomerang-like game, but just as the other kids are warming up to him, he beats the Count's purple-hued, sore loser of a son. The Count can't have the town see its future ruler as a failure, so he convinces the King, not exactly the brightest bulb, to banish Oblio to the Pointless Forest.

The Count is a Dr. Seuss-grade villain to rival the green guy in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which preceded The Point! to TV by five years. Whether Wolf, best known for his work on The Flintstones, took inspiration from Dr. Seuss, I couldn't say, but there's a similar sensibility at work in terms of the quasi-surrealistic look of the thing. Other possible inspirations include George Dunning's animation for the Beatles' Yellow Submarine (1968) and Terry Gilliam's animated collages for Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974). Considering that Nilsson was friendly with members of both groups, it's unlikely that the similarities are wholly coincidental.

If it wasn't clear that The Point! is a parable about prejudice, one villager at the tribunal spells it out when she tells another, "If we let one of Oblio's kind stay, before long the whole village will be crawling…" She doesn't finish her sentence, and nor does she need to. Oblio stands for anyone who doesn't look, speak, or act the same as the majority of their community.



As Oblio and Arrow, found guilty of criminal conspiracy, enter the forest, Nilsson's Rube Goldberg ballad, "Think About Your Troubles" soundtracks their departure. The second-person song begins with you at the breakfast table, thinking about your troubles. You shed a tear that lands in your teacup, which ends up in the river, where it travels to the ocean to get eaten by fishes that are swallowed by a whale "who grew so old, he decomposed!" The cycle begins again as the body merges with the ocean, which flows into the river, which comes out of the tap, and ends up in your teacup.

Oblio, on the other hand, has no time to think about his troubles. He's just hoping to make it through the Pointless Forest in one piece, the first of his kind to accomplish the feat. To his surprise, it's full of points, although as the Pointless Man cautions, "A point in every direction is the same as no point at all." Oblio also encounters a swarm of bees and the Rock Man, who utters the best lines to a bass-driven bebop beat, "You see what you want to see," "You hear what you want to hear," "You don't have to have a point to have a point," and my favorite, "You been goofin’ with the bees?"

Just when it seems as if Oblio and Arrow won't meet any women along their travels, they come across the Fat Sisters, three tomato-shaped ladies who live to giggle and groove. Wolf has drawn them in such a way that they appear to lack clothes, and yet he's kept things G-rated by depicting them in a smeary, smudged manner as they bounce around like beach balls. "I really don't understand this," Oblio admits, ultimately deciding that understanding isn't necessary. The Fat Sisters exist simply to inspire joy and merriment.

The Pointless Man as depicted in the illustrated booklet.  

They next meet up with the Leaf Man, a malapropism-spouting businessman obsessed with leaf production. Frankly, he's a bit of as bore. It's possible that his conception sprang from the bankers and record company accountants Nilsson met during his career, but he's the least interesting character by far.

After an encounter with a prehistoric bird who takes Oblio and Arrow on a trip through the sky before bringing them down to Earth, hatching an egg, and then flying off with her chick, the two weary travelers decide to take a nap. Before, they drift off into unconsciousness, Oblio comes to a realization: what's in your head is more important than whether there's a point on top of it. With that, Nilsson croons "Are You Sleeping?," which picks up where "Me and My Arrow" left off as he continues to wonder whether a relationship, possibly his marriage to Zak's mother, will last. "And in the morning when I wake up, she may be telling me goodbye," he says with one breath. With another, he assures her that, "I'll be there by your side."

It's that unique combination of the expectedly childlike, the surprisingly adult, and the just-plain weird that makes The Point! work as well for me now as it did in grade school when I'd play the album over and over again, flipping the pages of the illustrated booklet all the while. In fact, I didn't watch the movie for the first time until this year (it's streaming on Fandor). If I've always felt as if I'd seen it, it's simply because I've memorized every line and image from the booklet and every lyric from the album.

There may be better children's films, but there are few that are more personal and less condescending to young people. And if there's a better soundtrack to spring from this genre, I've yet to hear it. As a song cycle, The Point! stands alongside Nilsson's finest albums, like Nilsson Schmilsson, to the extent that it loses nothing when un-tethered from the film. They're simply great songs about finding your place in the world.

In William Goldman's Princess Bride, there are two sets of fathers and sons; the father who read Goldman the original book--but "only the good parts"--before bed, and Goldman's son, Jason, who rejects it as boring (in Rob Reiner's movie, Peter Falk and Fred Savage play a version of the first pair). In truth, The Princess Bride was wholly the author's invention. His father, an alcoholic who killed himself while Goldman was in high school, never read him any such book, and nor did Goldman track down a rare copy for Jason, because Jason doesn't exist; Goldman and his wife had two daughters.

Through The Point!, Nilsson, the boy who grew up without a father, got to live out his fantasy of having one who was there for him, just as The Princess Bride allowed Goldman, the boy who lost his father, to live out his fantasy of having one who was happy and healthy. In Alyn Shipton's 2013 biography, Harry Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter, Fred Wolf says he's "unsure that the story is deliberately autobiographical." In 1970, when Nilsson was working on the project, just a year after he'd had his first son, he may not have seen it that way, but in hindsight: it sure looks like it.

Click here for the trailer (it's unsharable). 

The Princess Bride Quote-Along, part of SIFF's annual Holiday Favorites series, plays SIFF Film Center Dec 6, 7, and 8. For more information, click here. MVD releases The Point! Ultimate Edition on February 20, 2020.

"Young, Handsome, Brawny" Ex-Soldier Trades Israel for France in Nadav Lapid's Synonyms

Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) with Yoav (Tom Mercier)

SYNONYMS / Synonymes
(Nadav Lapid, France, Israel, Germany, 2019, 123 minutes)

"Male, young, handsome, brawny. Happy to serve as artist's model."
--Yoav's job posting

Israeli director Nadav Lapid (The Kindergarten Teacher) wastes no time in plunging his protagonist into a nightmarish situation. It's the kind many people are likely to dream about, but few will actually experience.

Yoav (Tom Mercier, equally engaging in stillness as in motion) has just arrived in Paris from Tel Aviv. For his first move, he sets himself up in a large, empty, unheated apartment. Some unknown benefactor left him a key. On his first night, he takes a shower. After he leaves the tub, he's horrified to find that his clothes are gone. He knocks on several doors while completely nude, but no one responds. The next day, neighbors Caroline (Louise Chevillotte) and Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) find him passed out in the tub, so they carry him up to their apartment, nurse him back to consciousness, and set him up with clothes and toiletries. (Since Lapid never resolves the mystery, it's suggested that the duo took Yoav's clothes and ignored his knocking before checking in on him the next day.)

Yoav proceeds to walk the streets wearing a woman’s long, gold coat. It's strangely flattering. While he walks, he mutters synonyms to himself in French, never in Hebrew. His vocabulary is very good, so it's clear that he's been studying for a while. He wants to be able to say all the words.

Yoav and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte)

It seems fitting that this language-obsessed traveler would find common ground with a writer. When he reconnects with Emile, the aspiring novelist asks him what he plans to do. "I'll be French," says Yoav. "That’s not enough," cautions Emile. Yoav begs to differ, and that's pretty much the theme of the film. He soon finds work as a security guard at the Israeli embassy, possibly due to his military background, though he also runs an ad offering his services as an artist's model. As the opening scene attests, neither Mercier nor Yoav has any problem with nudity. For my money, he looks a lot like a not-especially-buff Tom Hardy, though I don't recall Hardy being quite so casual about disrobing on film.

Yoav continues to hang out with the couple. It isn't clear if they're brother and sister or boyfriend and girlfriend, and they only encourage the confusion, which seems designed to disorient the audience as much as Yoav, whose sexual orientation also takes a while to come into focus. The ambiguity allows Lapid to establish sexual tension between the three that could find release in any direction. Then, Yoav's friend, Yaron (Uria Hayik), comes to town, and he divides his time between the boorish Israeli and the refined French duo. Yaron has come to Paris "to save the Jews," which means telling everyone he meets that he's Jewish, wearing a yarmulke, and singing the Israeli national anthem into the faces of subway passengers.

It's a relief when Yaron disappears from the scene, though his discomforting presence helps to explain what Yoav is eager to leave behind. It's not so much that he hates Israel, but that he hates the macho, militaristic side of the country. With Yaron gone, the film threatens to segue into a modern-day updating of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, which featured almost as much male nudity, except Lapid has different concerns in mind.

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

Yoav spends the rest of the film trying to make a living, to fend off his parents, to navigate his relationship with Emile and Caroline, and to maintain his dignity, which takes a nosedive when he poses for a photographer who seems interested in him/his body, but mostly seeks to exploit his nationality, the very thing he's trying to escape. During a session in which the photographer gets him to speak in Hebrew, Yoav realizes how much he's seen--and even fetishized--as different or other. Though Emile tells him, "Giving up your language kills part of yourself," that's precisely what he's trying to do. It's what his grandfather did when he traded Lithuanian for Hebrew. In a way, he's just carrying on the family legacy.

The strain eventually erodes his composure, and what had initially seemed like amusing quirks segue into signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Or maybe it's that he's finding his true self by trying on a cultural suit that doesn't fit. A rigid citizenship course only adds to his doubts about France.

At first glance, I was frustrated by the decision he makes to resolve his dilemma, but in retrospect, I'm not so sure he had any other choice. In the end, Synonyms, which draws from the filmmaker's own experiences with France, isn't a tragedy, but it's hardly a comedy either. It's more like a love story between a man and a country--two countries, really--that don't love him the way he wants to be loved...but why should France love him when he doesn't even love himself? Yoav's final move indicates that he just might be making steps in that direction, and that's what I'd call a happy ending.



All images from Kino Lorber. There are no further show times for Synonyms in Seattle, but it's still making its way across the country. For more information, please click here. For streaming, click here. 

Adam Driver Brings His Superhuman Focus to Scott Z. Burns' Directorial Debut, The Report

Adam Driver as Daniel J. Jones

THE REPORT 
(Scott Z. Burns, USA, 2019, 118 minutes)

After watching The Report, I read Katherine Eban's "Rorschach and Awe," the 2007 Vanity Fair article that inspired Scott Z. Burns' new docudrama. The filmmaker has personalized the story by honing in on one individual, Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), the senatorial staffer who helped to bring the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to light, but the article and the film are two entirely different things--to the extent that Eban never even mentions Jones. If you're interested in psychology, the former is where it's at; if you're interested in one-guy-against-the-system thrillers, like Michael Mann's The Insider (which also drew from a Vanity Fair article), the film is more likely to meet your needs.

That isn't a knock against The Report, which is definitely worth seeing, but it hits familiar--if welcome--beats along the way, while the article presents a far thornier reality. For instance, Burns makes little mention of the armed services-aligned psychologists who formed a task force to assist the CIA in the wake of 9/11. Through their $80 million contract, they led the agency to believe that enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) would best elicit intelligence from detainees, except they don't. The "rapport-building approach," as Eban terms it, does. Historically speaking, humane treatment provides the most reliable results, whereas EIT is a great way to get detainees to say literally anything to make the torture stop.

Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein

If George W. Bush and his Cabinet are bad guys for encouraging and defending EIT--and they are--so is the American Psychological Association (APA) for participating in the sham.

In order to neutralize the politics of the situation, Burns downplays Bush's involvement, while casting CIA Director John Brennan (an excellent Ted Levine, whose participation is deviously perfect in light of his role as a serial killer in Silence of the Lambs) as the primary villain. It works dramatically, in part because Bush has become an over-familiar presence in movies and TV shows, from Oliver Stone's W. to That’s My Bush, but I wonder if Burns would have tread so lightly if Bush wasn't still with us, painting terrible portraits of dogs and laughing it up with Ellen DeGeneres and the Obamas.

If Burns takes care to note the parts Condeleezza Rice and Dick Cheney played in promoting EIT as a geopolitical good, he keeps the focus on his lesser known protagonist at all times, sketching in his background with the broadest of strokes. All we really know about Jones is that he's a relentless workaholic. In the film's early stages, he assembles a team, including April (Barry's Sarah Goldberg) and Sean (Alexander Chaplin), to uncover as many details as possible about the EIT program. Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) provides the resources they need, but as the years grind on, Jones's colleagues move on to other, less emotionally draining projects, while the single, childless staffer forges on, largely on his own.

Steven Soderbergh, who worked with Burns on The Informant! and The Laundromat among other films, produced The Report, and in the press notes, the writer-director compares Jones to the star of Soderbergh's Erin Brokovich. Like that film, his never attempts to mimic a documentary, the mode of many recent handheld docudramas. It is, unabashedly, a movie, making it a throwback to the days of Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men. Burns even stages scenes in under-lit garages in which Jones has secret meetings with a physician (Tim Blake Nelson) and a reporter (Matthew Rhys). Chances are these real-life meetings played out in more quotidian ways, but they provide the dramatic juice this dialogue-driven film needs.

Scarlett Johansson and Driver in Marriage Story

If Adam Driver is never less than very good, there's no real emotional arc here. We know Jones will get the job done, and he does, but it doesn’t really change him, not as much--or as tragically--as similar system-fighting efforts would change NYPD plainclothes officer Frank Serpico or chemical technician and union activist Karen Silkwood. Annette Bening also deserves credit for her understated, quasi-unrecognizable work as Senator Feinstein, but as a director, Burns isn't at the level of Pakula, Lumet, Nichols, or even Soderbergh, and that's okay. He would probably be the first to agree, but this is an important story, and I'm glad he's told it.

By contrast, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, which opens at the Crest on November 29, shows the actor's range like never before. There's a sequence in which Driver and Scarlett Johansson's soon-to-be-divorced couple let down their guards to say all of the terrible things they've been repressing for years. Driver's Charlie yells so loud and so hard that he finally breaks down in heaving sobs. It doesn't feel like acting, but like Driver is re-living something truly traumatic. No matter how he got there, though: it is acting. What he does in The Report is worlds away, but it's still acting to play someone so diligent without making him dull, pedantic, or too good to be true. As Burns says in the press notes, he's "incapable of being boring."

In the end, Jones would produce a still-classified 6,700-page report for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Distilled to 525 pages, his findings were shared with the world, and I'd like to think they made a difference. Jones deserves credit for his dedication, but this country has broken my heart too many times for me to truly believe that the US will never engage in EIT again. It probably has, and it probably will again, but I also hope that men and women like Jones will continue to speak truth to power when they encounter that kind of injustice. It's not so much that torture is un-American, but that it is American--especially when inflicted against bodies of color. It would be nice to live in a country where that is no longer true.



The Report opens at the Varsity on Nov 15. It will be available on Amazon Prime on Nov 29. For extra-credit reading, I recommend this New York Times article, "The Report and the Untold Story of a Senate-CIA Conflict."

Making Waves with Walter Murch and the Sound Editors of the New Hollywood

Walter Murch and the Valkyries of Apocalypse Now

MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND
(Midge Costin, US, 2019, 94 minutes)

As 2019 Honorary Oscar recipient David Lynch, one of the key figures in debut director Midge Costin's illuminating documentary, observes, "People always talk about the look of a film; they don't talk so much about the sound of a film, but it's equally important--sometimes more important."

He's right, not least because he's such a strong visual stylist with specific ideas about music, and yet I can't recall the last time I heard someone mention the sound in his films. It's just too easy to take cinematic sound for granted, an oversight sound editor Costin (Crimson Tide) aims to correct.

In Making Waves, the sound designers, sound effects editors, foley artists, and re-recording mixers who took us from the dank jungles of Vietnam to the arid fields of Wakanda explain what they do. Filmmakers come along for the ride, too, like Sofia Coppola, Christopher Nolan, Ryan Coogler, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Peter Weir.

Walter Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation) and Ben Burtt (Star Wars, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial) start by talking about the phonograph and the camera. Originally, these were discrete inventions as consumers listened to records at home and experienced live musical accompaniment when they visited the cinema to see silent films, some of which also featured live sound effects and dubbing. Everything changed with the addition of synchronized music tracks, recorded dialogue, and post-production sound effects.

Ben Burtt and Richard Anderson record Pooh

Murch and Burtt credit Murray Spivack, who worked on 1933's King Kong, for inventing tricks still in use today, like sounds he recorded from nature and slowed down, sped up, or played backwards--whatever it took to achieve the effect he wanted. His peers, meanwhile, would incorporate generic sounds from an effects library, like gun shots and explosions, that would appear in movie after movie.

The two sound designers also credit Orson Welles who brought his radio expertise to film. He was "as aggressive spatially with sound," Murch notes, "as he was with his depth of focus on camera." Other speakers cite David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert Altman as filmmakers especially sensitive to sound. These sorts of idiosyncratic talents--he specifically cites Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa--inspired Murch to enter the field in the first place, because he longed to think creatively, rather than to re-use pre-existing sounds like a factory worker (he also took inspiration from John Cage and musique concrète composer Pierre Henry).

Murch met George Lucas while attending USC. Through Lucas, he met Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Finian's Rainbow. The three went on to form American Zoetrope to make films outside of the Hollywood system, like Coppola's Rain People and Lucas's THX 1138. Murch had found the freedom he sought. Fellow USC student Burtt found something similar when Lucas tapped him to design the vocalizations for a big, hairy creature in a film he was working on called Star Wars (he and Richard Anderson created the Wookie's signature yowl by recording a bear cub named Pooh).

Ai-Ling Lee at the console

Other films under discussion include Eraserhead and The Elephant Man (Alan Splet), Top Gun (Cece Hall), Braveheart (Anna Behlmer, Scott Millan, and Andy Nelson), Road to Perdition (Millan, Scott Hecker, and Bob Beemer), Mad Max: Fury Road and Blade Runner 2049 (Mark Mangini), The Dark Knight (Lora Hirschberg), Black Panther (Peter Devlin), Lost in Translation (Richard Beggs), The Matrix (Dave Davis), Monster (Peter Devlin), Brokeback Mountain (Eugene Gearty), Inception (John Roesch, Alyson Dee Moore, and Richard King), Selma (Greg Hedgepath and Bobbi Banks), Deadpool and Wild (Ai-Ling Lee), Roma (Skip Lievsay), and, of course, Apocalypse Now (Murch, Beggs, and Mark Berger) in all its permutations, like the 40th anniversary edition which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this year.

Costin's speakers also discuss multi-track recording, Pro Tools, 6-track Dolby Stereo, Surround Sound, and the relationship between the composer--represented by Hans Zimmer and Ludwig Göransson--and the sound department. As Gary Rydstrom says about the way sound effects give way to John Williams' score in Saving Private Ryan's Omaha Beach sequence, "There's a rhythm, there's always a rhythm; even to chaos there's a rhythm." Though none of the sound designers mention whether they have a music background, it's clear that many of them think like musicians.

All told, over three dozen sound designers get to have their say, but in the end, Murch makes the most memorable impression. As one speaker notes, "In a way, Walter Murch is the father of us all in this modern era of sound." It’s largely due to his skill, but also to the author and speaker's ability to explain what he does so eloquently and in such a deep, mellifluous voice. Making Waves may not have been intended as a love letter to Murch, but it plays that way, and I can't imagine that any true movie lover will mind.



Making Waves is now playing in New York, Los Angeles, and 24 other cities in the US and Canada (some screenings are one-night only). It opens at Seattle's Grand Illusion Cinema on Nov 8. For more information, click here. 

Prolific Japanese Auteur Takashi Miike's Gazillionth Feature, First Love, Is Pretty Great

Monica + Leo = True Romance / Well Go USA

FIRST LOVE  / Hatsukoi
(Takashi Miike, 2019, Japan, 108 minutes) 

First Love opens to the strains of fuzzy funk-metal, a boxing match bathed in golden light, and a decapitated head tossed into a neon-lit Tokyo street where it rolls, comes to a stop, rests for a moment, and blinks. Clearly, we're in Takashi Miike Territory, always a good place to be.

Leo (Masataka Kubota, Miike's 13 Assassins), a boxer, is a wiry fellow with floppy hair and a winning style, but his coach laments his lack of drive. When he wins a match, Leo shrugs his shoulders as if to say, "Eh, what-
ever." He never knew his parents, who abandoned him when he was a baby, and this isn't the kind of movie where he'll tearfully reunite with them at the end. When a sports writer asks why he boxes, he says, "It's all I can do."

One day, though, he collapses after a not-especially-hard punch from an opponent. An MRI indicates that he has an inoperable brain tumor. The neurologist informs him that he'll have to give up boxing. He's despondent.

On the run from yakuza and ghost dads / Well Go USA

Only a few blocks away, a young woman named Monica (Sakurako Konishi) isn't having much better luck. In order to pay off her father's debts to the yakuza, she spends her days locked in an apartment and her nights selling her favors to clients. It's driving her so batty she keeps imagining she's being followed by a bespectacled, tighty-whitey-sporting middle-aged man draped in a sheet like a cross between the wriggling figure in Miike's Audition and Casey Affleck's mopey husband in David Lowery's Ghost Story. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that Sheet Man is the ghost of Monica's fucked-up father. 

The fateful encounter that brings these Gun Crazy-like loners together involves the ghost dad and the corrupt cop, Otomo (Kōji Yakusho lookalike Nao Ohmori, Miike's Ichi the Killer), assigned to keep an eye on Monica. Soon, the two are on the run from the granite-faced mob boss and his minions, including crazed gangster's moll Julie (Becky) and Kase (Shôta Sometani), an excitable goon who keeps killing everyone he meets--good, bad, neutral--it doesn't matter. He can't help himself, and some of his kills are especially amusing. That wouldn't be the case if Miike was going for realism, but there's a stylized, graphic-novel quality to this twilight world.

Once Kase enters the scene, it becomes clear that First Love is Miike in fun mode. There are car chases, fiery explosions, unintentional blow jobs (I'm not about to explain what that means), and mayhem involving cars, guns, knives, samurai swords, and squealing, sax-driven jazz from composer Endo Koji. Just when you think it can't get any more gonzo, lightning bolts spring from Leo's head, and he drives into a Yellow Submarine-meets-Scooby-Doo animated sequence in which sound effects are spelled out in big, block letters: "CRASH! VROOM!" (This bit was too short for my taste.)

Kase is the cutie second from the right / Well Go USA

Viewers scarred by Miike's more extreme entries may breathe a sigh of relief. It's not so much that he's never made a film as zippy as this one, but that his more outrageous fare tends to attract more attention.

First Love isn't as sweet as his zombie musical The Happiness of the Katakuris, which is suffused with pastoral beauty and familial affection, but it's still pretty sweet--and with no sticky aftertaste. Granted, anyone expecting the abused, drug-addicted Monica to turn avenging angel may leave disappointed, but it isn't as if there aren't women in the film, like Julie, who can handle a weapon, it's just that she isn't one of them.

If anything, I would have liked to spend more time with her and Leo, even if I found the considerably less stable supporting characters more entertaining. The obvious solution: a sequel. Considering that 59-year-old Miike has churned out two to three features a year for almost 30 years, including two sequels to Dead or Alive--and I'm not even counting the 41 made-for-video, anthology, and TV projects--I wouldn't be surprised if we get one.



First Love opens at the Egyptian on Oct 4. Click here for more information.

On the Authorship of a Sharp Song Stylist in Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice

"Different Drum"-era Linda / CNN Films

LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE 
(Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2019, USA, 95 minutes) 

In a surprisingly youthful-sounding voice, Linda Ronstadt, 73, narrates this look back at her life. She speaks so quickly that the words seem to tumble out of her, as if she's been waiting for years to let them out. And that's as it should be. The device lets us know that she's going to be shaping her story rather than simply contributing sound bites to an outsider's take on it.

European-American on one side of her family, and Mexican-American (and European) on the other, Ronstadt took after her father, Gilbert, and her grandfather, Federico, who played traditional Mexican music. She grew up in Tucson, steeped in country, classical, and mariachi. In her home, English was for conversing and Spanish was for singing.

After singing with a few local groups, a former band mate, Bobby Kimmel, encouraged her to move to Los Angeles. She was 18 years old. They formed a folk trio called The Stone Poneys. Through their performances at the Troubadour, where aspiring artists went to make their mark, they landed a deal with Capitol, which led to a recording of the Mike Nesmith-penned "Different Drum." Though Ronstadt wasn't thrilled about the strings her producer added to the song, it was, she acknowledges, "a huge hit."

Capitol soon made it clear that Ronstadt was the one they really wanted, so her band mates went their separate ways. She invited Don Henley and Glenn Frey to back her up. They would go on to form the Eagles. J.D. Souther also made her his girlfriend, and I use that phrase, because his opening gambit was, "I think you should cook me dinner." I can't imagine that that line was any more enticing in 1971 than it is now. She made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich…and they moved in together.

Just a few steps away from super-stardom / CNN Films

From Capitol, she segued to Asylum Records and found a manager in Peter Asher, who was looking for a new gig after the implosion of Apple Corps. An opening slot on a Neil Young tour brought her in front of audiences 18,000-20,000 strong. If they were resistant at first, she won them over. If she felt isolated as a female performer, she formed firm friendships with other women, like Bonnie Raitt, which helped. The first time she saw Emmylou Harris, she thought, "She's doing exactly what I'm doing, but she's doing it better," but they hit it off big time. Harris credits her for offering comfort and support after collaborator Gram Parsons' death.

Other women, like Dolly Parton, emphasize Ronstadt's ability to "inhabit a song." She wasn't a songwriter, and yet songs that weren't unknown when she got to them have come to be more closely associated with her than their original performers, from the McGarrigle Sisters ("Heart Like a Wheel") to the Everly Brothers ("When Will I Be Loved"). I'm quite certain I heard her version of Hank Williams' "I Can't Help It (if I'm Still in Love With You)" before I heard his. As music journalist-turned-filmmaker Cameron Crowe notes, "When you become that sharp of a song stylist, you get authorship."

Ronstadt's success on the Pop, Country, and R&B charts--the first woman with five platinum albums in a row--saw her headlining the very stadiums she played on tour with Young. Long nights on the road with hard-partying men led to her to copy their worst behaviors, something she now regrets, though it's certainly understandable. Her drug of choice: diet pills. Fortunately, they don't seem to have wreaked the same kind of havoc on her that they did on Judy Garland, another petite brunette with a big voice.



The directors proceed to her relationship with California Governor Jerry Brown, which brought attention she didn't necessarily welcome, though she handled it as well as anyone could. When she grew tired of stadium life, she looked for other ways to use her voice, which led to a role in the Broadway production of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. Her voice was "so pure," co-star Kevin Kline remembers, that it made him cry. She moved on to albums of standards, a trio with Emmylou and Dolly, a duo with Aaron Neville, and two traditional Mexican albums, including Canciones de Mi Padre, the best-selling Spanish-language album in US history.

If she shape-shifted with ease, Ronstadt eventually reached a point where singing was no longer an option due to a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, and yet she sings, quietly and gently, in the film. If she can no longer sing professionally, because most of "the colors aren't there anymore," she can still harmonize with family members, just as she did in her youth.

Filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet, The Times of Harvey Milk), are best known for their non-fiction and fact-based films about civil rights and free-speech issues, so a documentary about a musician may seem uncharacteristic except that it was produced by James Keach (Walk the Line, Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me). If Epstein and Friedman lack any significant music credentials, Keach, who considered Johnny Cash a friend, doesn't (Keach met Cash when the musician guest starred on his wife's Jane Seymour's Western series, Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman).

Giving Bobbie Gentry a run for the money / CNN Films

Furthermore, Epstein and Friedman's Lovelace offers a sympathetic portrait of adult film star Linda Lovelace (nicely played by Amanda Seyfried) just as they offer a similarly sympathetic portrait of Ronstadt. Moving from a biopic about a famous woman to a documentary about another seems like a natural progression, and yet they've left out details that would've provided for a fuller picture.

As a portrait of a voice, their documentary does exactly what it set out to do, but as a documentary about a person, it falls short. We find out how Ronstadt met Souther and Brown, for instance, but we don't find out why they broke up. They ask Souther, but he says he doesn't remember, which seems disingenuous. How do you forget something like that? Bonnie Raitt defends a woman's right not to marry, and I fully support that, but it would've been better to hear from Ronstadt (the filmmakers also neglect to mention her relationships with Jim Carrey and former fiancé George Lucas). Though she never had kids of her own, she became a mother when she adopted a girl, followed later by a boy. This isn't mentioned even once.

Sometimes, when filmmakers work closely with subjects they revere, they tread too lightly, and audience members lose out on the chance to get to know them as well as we could have. We don't need to know everything,
but if a filmmaker is going to bring up a subject, like a relationship or a substance abuse problem, they should give it the attention it deserves.

So, I left feeling frustrated with the filmmaking, but not with the subject. Unlike Keach's Glen Campbell documentary, which focuses extensively on the late musician's experience with Alzheimer's disease, we learn almost nothing about Ronstadt's experience with Parkinson's, and that's okay. She's acknowledged it, and she's enjoying life as best she can, and that's enough. She's spoken about it in interviews; she doesn’t need to go into detail here. Mostly, the documentary makes you want to take a deep dive into her discography, especially that amazing run of albums from the 1970s, and that's one of the best things you can ask from any music documentary.


Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice plays Regal Meridian 16 and AMC Dine-In Seattle 10 through Oct 2. Update: the film returns to Seattle at Northwest Film Forum on Nov 24 and 27. Click here for more information. 

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend, I've Come to Talk With You…About The Sound of Silence

Peter Sarsgaard as Peter Lucian / IFC Films

THE SOUND OF SILENCE
(Michael Tyburski, USA, 2019, 87 minutes) 

Peter Lucian, the professorial-looking New Yorker played by Peter Sarsgaard in Michael Tyburski's debut, isn't a musician, a DJ, or even a Simon and Garfunkel devotee—he's a house tuner. Clients, who find him through other clients, tend to be skeptical at first, but once he identifies the noise that's causing their malaise, they become believers. Like a therapist, he doesn't just pinpoint the problem, he provides the advice they need to eliminate it.

Tyburski's feature film, an expansion of his 2013 short Palimpsest (also co-written with Ben Nabors), is filled with vintage recording equipment, just as Peter's life is filled with vintage recording equipment (in that sense, it recalls Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, which revolves around a sound mixer). Peter records the sounds he hears and the conversations he has with clients. After each assignment, he pins a note on a map, indicating the location of the problem. The map serves as the basis for a paper he plans to submit to an academic journal. For assistance, he enlists Samuel (Tony Revolori, The Grand Budapest Hotel), his mentor's TA, to help him compile the data (the incomparable Austin Pendleton plays his mentor).

Rashida Jones as Ellen Chasen / IFC Films

Ellen (Rashida Jones) contacts Peter, because she's tired all the time. And it isn't because she works at a non-profit that helps the homeless. It's her apartment, or she comes to that conclusion after talking to friends (Alex Karpovsky plays one of them) who benefited from Peter's services. Ellen looks tired, too, though because Jones plays her, she does so quite attractively. Peter looks tired, as well, though the actor who plays him often does. The Sound of Silence is just that kind of picture. This is not a complaint so much as an observation about the lonely-people-in-the-city brand of art house film--soft-spoken, chronically under-lit--to which I sometimes gravitate, and this one certainly fits that bill.

Peter identifies Ellen's toaster as the source of her problem. She's skeptical it can be that simple, but switches out her old model for the new one he provides. A recently-single woman more haunted by grief than discordant sounds, Ellen gives it a few days, but when her fatigue fails to lift, she gives Peter a call. He decides to visit her workplace to see if that could be a factor.

In the meantime, she tries acupuncture, while Peter rejects an offer to apply his knowledge to a commercial venture that manufactures ambiance for hotels through serotonin-targeted lighting, fragrance, and sound. He wants to make the world a better place by removing obstacles from people's lives and not by manipulating consumers into making wealthy realtors wealthier. It makes him sound heroic, except he's also arrogant enough to think he's too good for anything except the oddball career he's carved out for himself.

Ellen is tired of being tired / IFC Films

As for Ellen, it doesn't seem completely coincidental that Jones would be drawn to this role. As an actress, she's never needed to lean on her father Quincy Jones's fame as a producer and composer, and yet Peter has more of a background in music than science. Once he explains that to her, you sense Ellen's interest growing (Jones's partner is also a musician: Vampire Weekend front man Ezra Koenig).

Unfortunately for Peter, his well-ordered world starts to fall apart as a result of their meeting. Accustomed to being right all the time, he finds out what it's like to be wrong, and he doesn't know how to deal with it. As he tells Samuel, "Typically, I know the solutions to a client's issues before I even arrive," but Ellen's apartment messes up his map, which messes up his research project, which messes up his ability to trust his ears and his instincts. And on a more personal level, his arrogance and rigidity ends up scaring away someone who could be a friend--if not something more.

But sometimes you have to hit bottom to see your life clearly for the first time. It's a relatable (if somewhat clichéd) sentiment, so it's too bad cinematographer Eric Lin shot the film's conclusion in such darkness that I could barely see what was going on. It will probably make more sense on a big screen, but even on a small one, more light would have gone a long way. There's an unintentional irony that a film so sympathetic to sound, from the flapping of birds' wings to the clomping of horse hooves, would treat light with such casual disregard, but it reflects Peter's dilemma: he's so focused on seeing the world in one way that he misses all of the things--including some of the most pleasurable--that can't be so easily defined.



The Sound of Silence is playing at the Varsity (4329 University Way NE).