FRANCES HA ...GIRL MOST LIKELY...

Greta Gerwig: Frances Ha

There was something about the trailers last spring that made Frances Ha seem an obvious favorite to become this year's indy gorilla. It looked vibrant, idiosyncratic, yet mysterious enough for people to wonder what the hell it was all about. Plus, Greta Gerwig has been on the brink of a type of stardom for a while.

While Frances Ha didn't score to the degree of a Little Miss Sunshine or Juno, it indeed turned out to be the year's indy darling, with Gerwig proving that she's the text message era's Parker Posey (minus the mischievous spark). Director Noah Baumbach wanted to ape the techniques of French New Wave films of the 1960s, but with modern New York characters. Fair enough - the broke and the beautiful have always been popular subjects -  but in the end, despite the artsy flourishes, despite that memorable scene of Frances running down the street as if being propelled by the David Bowie music on the soundtrack,  and despite the occasional crumb of wit, Frances Ha was just another story of arrested development. The key crisis of the current generation appears to be a fear of growing up.

 

 

Frances (Gerwig) is 27, and enjoying a non-romantic love affair with her roommate, Sophie (Mickey Sumner). They live an idyllic life of doing nothing,  play-fighting in the park,  reading to each other, nuzzling on each other's shoulders. They're slightly delusional, too; Sophie doesn't read, but imagines herself becoming a famous publisher; Frances falls down a lot and walks like a man, but thinks she has a future as a dancer. Their little life together is sort of cute, but annoying, like a Lhasa Apso.

 

Sophie eventually crushes their dream world by accepting another friend's offer to live together in an upscale Tribeca apartment. Frances is destroyed by Sophie's moving out, and the rest of the film follows poor Frances as she tries to carry on without her best friend.
 

She tries various things: she moves in with some hipster boys who mean well, but can never replace Sophie; she visits her parents in Sacramento; she takes an impulsive trip to Paris (if Baumbach had aped Italian movies, would she have gone to Rome?); she takes odd jobs; she makes new friends; she gets drunk; she wanders and flails. Sophie, meanwhile, gets married and moves to Japan. Sophie and Frances will eventually reunite, but not in the way Frances had hoped. The film meanders to a conclusion of sorts, with Frances finally taking a step towards maturity, and I'll admit, the final scene where the title of the movie is explained is rather pretty.

Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach, saves the film. She has a clumsy cuteness about her, and through her we sense that Frances has a big heart. The scene where she waves goodbye to her parents on an airport escalator is touching, and far more meaningful than all of the cheesy declarations of love she dumps on Sophie. Still, her constant self-pity is hard to take, and she isn't someone I'd always want to be around. As Sophie, Sumner is rather prickly, and for the life of me I can't see why Frances adores her. Frances likes to say,"We're the same person with different hair," but Sophie never displays any of the redeeming qualities that we see in Frances. Sophie is the sort of twit who enters an apartment, looks at the furniture, and says, "This apartment is too aware of itself." Fortunately, the movie is only 90 minutes long, as if Baumbach and Gerwig know such pompous airheads couldn't sustain a longer film.

There are some interesting touches, though. When running to a restaurant to meet one of her friends, Frances takes a nasty tumble on the sidewalk. We don't see the actual impact, but when she arrives at the restaurant, her friend notices she's bleeding. Frances hadn't even noticed. The city, you see, is beating the hell out of her and she's too self-absorbed to realize it. It's a nice touch. The film has a few of these. But not enough to make a meal. Once it ended, I was barely able to remember how it began. I had to consult another review to refresh my memory, and then, yes, I remembered that Frances had a boyfriend at the film's beginning, a petulant wimp who was angry with her because she wouldn't buy him a cat, or something. 

Frances Ha is also a poor argument for shooting in black and white,  at times resembling a child's black crayon drawing, smudged into blurs. I don't have to list the great black and white films of the past, and it's not fair to compare Baumbach to the great directors who used black and white, but he's the one who entered the arena.  Baumbach may also have accomplished a first: he made Paris look boring. Also, the New York shown in Frances Ha comes off as a dull, very expensive place that drains one while giving nothing in return. Not only did I not see why Frances loved Sophie, I didn't see why she loved New York.

In a fawning essay that accompanies the Criterion disc, playwright Annie Baker notes that the film has finally captured how young people talk these days. I don't know if this is true or not, but if it is, then young people these days don't sound like much of anything, The actors here, both male and female, all look like puppies at the dog pound, all self-consciously cute, hoping you'll be impressed enough by one of their acerbic comments to take one of them home.  They also seem terribly frightened of everything, particularly Frances, whose tunnel vision is such that the worst thing she can imagine is a future without Sophie to cuddle with. The others cling to dreams involving some small corner of show business. One of Frances' male roommates dreams of writing for Saturday Night Live, then talks himself out of it because the show isn't as good as it used to be. Instead, he resolves to write Gremlins III. This is funny, I guess, but such character quirks might better suit a short story, not a feature film. 

 

At least Frances seems comfortable at the film's end. As she guides a bunch of young dancers through her own choreography, she appears to grow more wise before our eyes, relieved that maturity was not as painful or difficult as she may have believed, and proving there may still be hope for the insipid.
 

Another recent movie where a woman loses everything and has to figure out where she belongs is Girl Most Likely. Kristen Wiig plays Imogene, a failed New york writer  who attempts suicide after losing her job and her boyfriend. The punchline is that the hospital  leaves her in the care of her mother, a rather tough looking New Jersyite played by Annette Bening.  Imogene hates the idea so much that the doctors have to give her tranquilizers to calm her down. When she comes to, she's in a casino parking lot while her mother is inside gambling.  The two of them trying to get along would be enough for a movie, but Girl Most Likely has at least three or four more plots to come, as if the filmmakers didn't trust any of them enough on their own.

Imogene is taken back to her hometown of Ocean City NJ, which she abhors, and learns that her mother has rented her old room to a boarder, which means she'll have to sleep in the basement. Imogene strikes up a romance with the boarder, even though he's a lot younger than she is and performs in a Backstreet Boys cover band. Mom also has a boyfriend, a weird character known as "The Bouche," (played by Matt Dillon as if he's reviving his role from Something About Mary). Imogene also has a brother who is a bit of a simpleton, and to top things off, she learns that the father she always thought was dead is actually still alive. Is this too much? You bet it is. The movie feels like an overstuffed Italian sub with everything on it.

Quite a bit of Girl Most Likely feels like recycled bits from other movies. Dillon is the sort of guy who tells what seem like lies about being in the CIA, but turns out to be an actual CIA operative. Bening is the usual mother with a heart of gold, despite her gambling. Wiig, not as animated as usual, seems to redo her shtick from Bridesmaids, including a stint in a jail cell, and an obligatory drunk scene. Still, Wiig is a likable actress, and even though you can see the punches long before they're thrown, it's a likable movie. You know it will end up with Wiig learning to love her wacky family, and that no one is going to get hurt.

The directing team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini has brought us some very good movies in the past, including   American Splendor (2003) and HBO's Cinema Verite (2011). I don't know how their partnership works, but they're one of Hollywood's unheralded talents. Even a slight misfire like Girl Most Likely is watchable.  Plus, Blondie is on the soundtrack, which always makes me happy.

 

HOW I LIVE NOW...THE WAY,WAY, BACK...

 

 

 When I was a teenager I used to have nightmares about nuclear attacks. In the dream, I'd wake up in the morning and look out my window to see that my neighborhood had been reduced to rubble, with nothing but scorched earth all around my home. Of course, there was no explanation of how my family's place survived and the rest of the town was burned to a crisp. Still, nuclear fears haunted me for several years, and there was nothing Jackson Browne and his No Nukes concerts could do to stop them. The world, I was convinced, would end in my lifetime because of a nuclear bomb.  

 

While watching Kevin MacDonald's  How I Live Now, a film about British youngsters and their American cousin trying to make the best of a nuclear situation, I couldn't help but think that my dream had been much more horrifying. I put this down to my dream being from an American point of view, where it's utter devastation or nothing. The film, a reasonably good one, is based on London- writer Meg Rosoff's novel. The Brits, having been through two wars, appear to interpret nuclear disasters as just something  to get through, another inconvenience they'll survive with a stiff upper lip. At the end, two survivors are eating beans in the dark when the lights suddenly come back on, as if the whole thing had just been a case of bad weather.

 

Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) is the American sent to England to live with her cousins, a motley bunch of teens who seem to look after themselves with little adult supervision in a house full of dirty dishes and animals, including a goat with a homemade horn to look like a unicorn. Daisy, being a modern American girl, is an angry, neurotic, germaphobe who fears everything from animals to cheese; the cousins can barely contain their disappointment that she's such a snot. 

 

She seems to have a thing for Eddie (George MacKay) the oldest of the cousins.  He's the sort of young buck that girls in fiction always love - a man of few words (and of few shirts), and he's good with falcons; you know the type. Eddie and Daisy fall in love and have sex in a barn, and suddenly our girl Daisy is just the sweetest thing you can imagine. One roll in the hay with a falconer has turned her from being a typical American teen bitch into Mary Poppins.

But even as this dreary romantic saga plays out, there is something insidious brewing: military planes are constantly flying overhead, menacing in their speed and cold power; Daisy's aunt, on the way to Geneva for mysterious reasons, is overheard on the phone saying that something is bound to happen in a few days; Daisy's littlest cousin, Piper, mentions that World War III is coming. The pay off comes in the film's best scene, when a nuclear attack on London causes the trees to bend and the wind to howl during one of Daisy and Eddy's idyllic picnics. "It's snowing," says little Piper, as ominous flakes of dust flutter to the ground. 

 

Within seconds the film whiplashes into its next act, as British soldiers raid the family home and separate the boys from the girls. Daisy and Eddie vow to look for each other when things settle down, with Eddie instructing Daisy to find her way back home, no matter what. The rest of the film involves Daisy and Piper on some sort of work farm, making their escape, and then walking for several miles to get back home, where Daisy is convinced Eddie will be waiting. There are several obstacles along the way, including Piper's bleeding feet, contaminated water, and the occasional ruffian they encounter on the way. Like Ray Milland in Panic in Year Zero, the original nuclear survival movie, Daisy isn't afraid to use a gun to defend herself.

MacDonald is an interesting director. He likes closeups of birds and dewy grass. The war torn English countryside (filmed in Wales, so I've heard) is convincingly turned into a kind of bucolic death camp, with piles of bodies neatly stacked where foxes can rummage through the corpses, looking for snacks. He's a very stylish director, and many of the scenes are truly beautiful. But too much of the film is shown through a teenaged looking glass. Adults are brutal; kids are full of soul. And what happened to Daisy's aunt who went to Geneva? What about the men Daisy shoots? Are there no consequences? And since when is screwing your cousin the gateway to true romance, anyway? (Did the author make Daisy an American so the cousins would seem less "cousinly," hence a little romp in the barn would seem less unsavory?)
 

On an intellectual level, I understand that the separation and reunion of Daisy and Eddie was supposed to be moving. But their romance bloomed so quickly, that I didn't have time to develop any feelings about these two.  Saoirse Ronan gives a nice performance as Daisy, even appearing to become more gaunt as the movie progresses, and I liked how she had to mature and take responsibility to look after Piper. She's also convincing as a young girl in love, even if she's merely "in love with love," as the old song goes. I just never believed in the love story part of the film.  Eddie was too much of a cardboard figure, not given much to do but smile and look earnest. Maybe that's all 16-year-old Daisy needs, but I needed a little more.

 

The real star of the show is Harley Bird as Piper. She shows more love when hugging a dog than Daisy and Eddie can show with all of their mooning and weeping. When Daisy and Piper return home, one of the family's old dogs comes limping out of the barn to greet them. Piper's reaction is so simple and heartfelt that I almost wept. Piper is someone I'd gladly share a can of beans with at the end of the world.

The coming of age tale is irresistible, whether played out in the middle of a nuclear disaster or not. As the characters of The Way Way Back are rolled out for us, it looks like we're onto something. We meet Duncan (Liam James), an awkward, sadsack of a boy; his mother Pam (Toni Collette); and her pushy boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell).  They are on the way to Trent's summer home to spend some time together "as a family," which Trent thinks is important. Trent also happens to be a ballbuster, and is constantly picking on Duncan for one thing or another, as step-fathers in movies always seem to do. 

Once at the summer house, we meet Trent's brassy neighbor Betty (the always lovely and delightful Allison Janney) and her wall-eyed son Peter (River Alexander). Betty drinks a lot and laughs like a drunken horse. There are tensions in the air, so Duncan finds his way to the local water park where he meets Owen (Sam Rockwell), a wise ass who hires him to work around the park and helps him grow up a little.

Duncan is at a tough age. He's 14, too young to leave home, but bright enough to notice that adults aren't all they're cracked up to be -- he sees nothing but failed marriages and adults who act like giggling fools at the sight of a drink or a joint. The summer resort, as one of the local kids tells him, "is like spring break for grown ups." It doesn't help that Trent undermines Duncan's every move. This man, who may one day be his step-father, actually asks Duncan to rate himself on a scale of one through 10. When Duncan shrugs and says "six," Trent responds, "I'd say you were a three." It's no wonder Duncan finds solace at the water park.

Rockwell works like hell to make an interesting character of Owen, the water slide worker, but there's not much to him besides a lot of bad jokes and not so witty patter. Duncan is supposed to idolize this guy, but it's unlikely that a 14-year-old would see Owen as anything but a weirdo who talks too much. Instead, in the film's unlikeliest twist, Duncan goes to work for Owen and within days is acting like him. The kid appears to magically come out of his shell, earns a new nickname, and becomes the sweetheart of the water park. A more realistic approach would've seen Duncan trying to meet kids his own age. As far as I can remember, kids don't particularly like adults, especially middle-aged guys who work at water parks.

As Duncan, Liam James does his best with an overwrought script. Collette and Janney are always good, and play roles here they could do in their sleep. The film sputters to a predictable finish, with Duncan showing some nerve, and his mother learning that Trent is a fool. Of course, we knew that from the beginning, so the climax doesn't quite have the kick it could have had.

The film was co-written and co-directed by  Nat Faxon and Jim Rush, two engaging fellows who have enjoyed long careers as actors in both films and television, and each have small roles here as water park workers. Perhaps due to their acting backgrounds, they've filled the movie with "actorish" moments, including lots of hugs and meaningful pauses, and occasional outbursts, just so the whole cast gets to feel like they're showcasing their talents. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels a little like watching actors trying to impress each other in scene study classes.  I almost wish there'd been a movie about Janney and her cross-eyed son. Their scenes together were funny, and River Alexander busts out some of the best moves in the film.

As it is, The Way Way Back isn't bad. There are some good performances from some actors I like, and one can never go wrong with theme park scenery. Best of all is Carell, who is very convincing as a shitheel step-father to be. When he addresses Duncan as "buddy," he makes your skin crawl. Looking sunburned and unshaven, this is a Carell we haven't seen before. If the comedy thing dries up for him, he could have a post comic career playing pricks.

THE LONELY GUY (1984)

 

 

A lonely man goes to a psychiatrist. The office is located in a   grimy tenement building in New York, the sort where neighbors lean out the window to yell at each other. The man finds the doctor's name on the rather unofficial looking building directory, and rings the buzzer, announcing his arrival.  But instead of being asked into the psychiatrist's office, he's made to wait outside and conduct the session through the building's intercom. The man doesn't seem to mind, for his life is often strange and sometimes cruel. People usually ignore him, so the chance to talk to someone, even through an intercom, is a ripe opportunity.

The scene is from The Lonely Guy (1984) a Steve Martin film that I'm always thankful to stumble across. I  think of it as a neglected classic.   Had it come out of Europe, it would've been hailed as a quirky masterpiece and played in art houses for six months.

 

 

Directed by Arthur Hiller, The Lonely Guy takes place in  an early 1980s New York that neither  Woody Allen or Marty Scorsese seemed to know about. It's a city of lonely men, dull afternoons in the park, and Sundays that stretch out interminably for those without a companion. There's a "lonely guy store" that sells cardboard cutouts of celebrities to make one's apartment feel more lively. Even the cops are lonely.  Martin plays Larry Hubbard, a greeting card writer who comes home one night to find his slutty girlfriend in bed with a man and a bottle of whipped cream. Heartbroken, Larry embarks on a new life as a single man. He takes advice from his friend Warren (Charles Grodin), a veteran of the single life, and is soon buying ferns for his apartment, a sure sign of lonely guydom.

Larry's efforts to find love border on heroic. When the fast talking shrew of a realtor finishes her spiel about the rules of the lease, he asks her on a date. She responds, "I'm a man." (I actually knew a woman who did this to a fellow; she was a bookstore clerk and he was a "lonely customer." I know this much: a woman has to really to hate a man to go to such lengths...)  Larry even resorts to jogging, hoping to meet a woman as he runs through the city. Since he's not a real jogger, he invests in a type of "bottled sweat" guaranteed to make him smell like a professional athlete. When he enters a health food restaurant, a woman says, "I thought Larry Bird just walked in."

The woman with the educated nose is Iris (Judith Ivey), a sweetheart who is everything Larry wants in a woman. Sadly, she turns out to be a neurotic who can't accept love. Frustrated by his failures, Larry  writes a book about being a lonely guy, which turns him into an overnight sensation. Now rich, he beds down everyone from a pair of Swedish twins to Dr. Joyce Brothers (all at once, as talk show host Merv Griffin watches and provides commentary!) But Larry is still lonely. He misses Iris.

As Larry, Martin conveys his loneliness best in scenes where he's perfectly still. The weight of his loneliness appears to hunch him over slightly. His brow is always furrowed, as if he's thinking all the time, debating whether his loneliness is just temporary, or perhaps his destiny.  It's when he decides to take action that the film jumps to a different speed,  such as in the scene when he notices Iris on a subway train. Grabbing a can of spraypaint from some hoodlums, he writes a note on the window, with instructions on where to meet him. "You're one bad backwards writer," says one of the thugs. 

The film isn't perfect. The decision to dress Martin as Charlie Chaplin for a costume party was pushing it, and some of the jokes fall flat. But much of it is just right, and the parts that work more than make up for the parts that don't. I like how Larry  goes to a public ladies' room with Iris and sits in the next stall because she has abandonment issues. I love how she happens to keep popping up in his life, as if fate keeps pushing them together. I also love when he thinks he's lost her, and he goes up to his rooftop to shout her name; on every rooftop in the city there's another lonely guy, and then another, screaming out the names of their own lost loves, until the night air is filled with desperate pleas of "Iris! Louise! Denise! I miss you! Come back!"  On the surface it's a decent sight gag, but I've always thought it was a very poignant scene about the folly of love.

Perhaps more than anything else in the film, I love Charles Grodin as the hapless Warren. Martin and Grodin have several scenes where they're just sitting on a park bench, talking about their day, what they had for lunch, or wondering why homeless men always have full heads of hair. These scenes are amazing. They  predate the kind of low key, awkward comedy that would come many years later in shows like The Office, and even Seinfeld.  At one point Martin is so bored he thinks about going home and taking a nap. "I hate naps," says Grodin, explaining that waking up once a day is bad enough.

Grodin makes a perfect foil for Martin. When appearing in films with other big time comics, Martin tended to play the straight man, either out of generosity, or from knowing that his brand of comedy was like a high wire act, and wouldn't automatically mesh with other styles. He began as a stand up comic, a solo act; fighting for laughs was probably not in his DNA. Grodin, as dry as sand, fits so well into Martin's groove that one wishes they'd made more films together.


Judith Ivy, in her first film role, is soft and understanding as Iris, a woman who knows Larry is perfect for her yet fears they can't last as a couple.  Singer Steve Lawrence has a funny cameo as a swinging Lothario who nearly takes Iris for himself. The musical score is actually quite beautiful,  and there are some nice songs over the opening and closing credits. The songs might have been better suited to a more conventional romantic film like Arthur or Starting Over, but that's also what makes The Lonely Guy so intriguing for me - nothing really fits together.

Hiller, whose career encompassed everything from comedy to horror to romance (including the ultimate 1970s romantic schlockbuster, Love Story),  aimed for a strange mix of the goofy and the poignant for The Lonely Guy. Some would argue that the two styles shouldn't be mixed, but I think he created something unique. At the time, though, the film underperformed at the box office, was hailed as a death knell for Martin, and was butchered in the press. Roger Ebert called it,  "a dreary slog through morose situations, made all the worse by Martin's deadpan delivery, his slightly off-balance sense of timing, and his ability to make you cringe with his self-debasing smarminess." A Milwaukee Journal critic noted that Martin's comic aura "was wearing so thin, it's becoming an engineering challenge to measure it."


Martin was in the middle of a rough spell. After the massive success of his comedy albums, his iconic performances on Saturday Night Live, and the surprising success of  The Jerk, he went into a kind of tailspin that lasted four years. He'd always approached comedy like he was experimenting in a lab; once he became famous, he began experimenting with how much he could pull back. He was trying to shed his doofus image as early as 1981 when he puzzled his fans with Pennies From Heaven, an unusually somber  piece where he played a Depression era sheet music salesman. Then came two comedies, The Man With Two Brains and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, neither of which connected. They weren't goofy enough for his cult of stoner fans, but they were too weird for the mainstream audience.  By the summer of 1984, though, Martin appeared in All of Me, a successful film full of physical comedy that paved the way for what would be his golden period where he won over the critics, regained his audience, and appeared in at least one certified classic: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The formula seemed to be this: more shtick; less pathos; and don't show Martin as too much of a loser.

The Lonely Guy remains one of Martin's unheralded films. Shortly after its disappointing release, Martin sat for an interview with The Times-Post News Service and referred to The Lonely Guy as "sort of a stinker."  It's still a hard sell today, and people looking for a comedy from that era are probably better off with Animal House. The Lonely Guy, you see, isn't gutbustingly funny. But if you are tuned into its unique vibe, and pay attention to the dialoge between Martin and Grodin, you'll find that it gets under your skin, like a Jules Feiffer cartoon, or an episode of Bullwinkle. It was the unevenness in tone that baffled critics, even the rare few who liked the film.

The problem could've been the involvement of  so many writers. The screenplay is credited to Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels (based on a book by Bruce Jay Friedman, adapted by Neal Simon).  Many of the jokes and set pieces come from Friedman's book.  Weinberger and Daniels had great backgrounds as TV writers (The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Taxi), and Simon, of course, was a prolific writer of plays and films. Martin and Grodin were also writers. Could they have offered their own input? Could that be why their scenes together seem brilliant, while the rest of the movie feels like a broad comedy? With so many writers chipping away, it's a miracle that the film retains any sort of charm or coherency.

Here's what I think happened. Someone read Friedman's book and thought it could be made into a film along the lines of those urbane  episodic comedies of the 1960s, such as What a Way To Go, or A Guide for The Married Man. Simon doesn't even mention the film in his memoirs, which makes me think he didn't put a major effort into it. Weinberger and Daniels tried to give it a sitcom feel, but with Martin attached, there was a compulsion to add some zany stuff. Meanwhile, Martin had his own ideas, and wanted to play it straight.

Janet Maslin in The New York Times noted that the film, "tries a little bit of everything, and winds up with an air of messy desperation." She blamed Hiller for "working against the material's essential gloom. Whenever the film tries for sprightliness, it stumbles. When it gives in to the basic misery of Larry and his situation, though, it begins to make some sort of morose comic sense."

Maslin's comments remind me of a scene where Larry talks to his pillow, imagining it's Iris. He hugs it and kisses it, and promises to never leave. Martin plays the scene with such earnestness that most viewers might think it's cornball; the truth is that it's so naked that it's difficult to watch. Very few actors, never mind comedians, would aim for such plain-faced honesty in a scene. Unfortunately, in some earlier scenes Martin is downright moronic, as if there'd been a contractual obligation requiring at least a little of his old comic persona.  "After a while," wrote critic Douglas D. Armstrong, "Arthur Hiller's droll project begins to feel like a chaotic struggle between serious and silly, or between intelligent and stupid."

The film's unabashed masterstroke, however,  where Hiller and company get everything just right, are the scenes involving the Manhattan bridge, where dozens of lonely guys gather every night and leap to their deaths. Warren tries it once - Grodin is exceptional here, utterly defeated by the depth of his loneliness - only to be talked down by Larry and Iris. Deciding to live, Warren wanders off into the foggy night. The sounds of men screaming as they drop into the ocean has a vaguely Monty Pythonesque effect, but not even their screams can dampen the sight of Warren  vanishing into the fog, as desolate as any character in film history. Later, when Larry attempts suicide, it's Warren who comes to his rescue. "Oh, Larry..." Warren says, with great sadness and disappointment in his voice. He seems to be eulogizing every lonely guy who has ever existed.

The film rebounds, however. Larry ends up with Iris.  Warren finds a mate, too. They all walk along the bridge together, vanishing into the fog, with bodies still dropping into the water below.  Whether you think they all live happily ever after is up to you; I happen to think they're all too neurotic to be happy.  

The upbeat ending feels odd for other reasons, especially since the film's underlying message seems to be that life is cheap. People in this movie trade mates like they're changing socks. Iris had six husbands; Steve Lawrence's character had seven girlfriends at once; Larry's ex-girlfriend trades in her oily dancer for a rock band, and the entire band eventually commits suicide; another character becomes gay; coupling seems random; nothing amounts to much.  There's a lot of death in the film, too, and not just the suicides. Even the greeting cards Larry writes are  consolation cards about deceased house pets. Late in the film Larry imagines himself dead, his stiff old body hauled out of his apartment and thrown into a garbage truck.  If for no other reason, Larry needs Ivy to take his mind from such thoughts. Ivy, of course, needs Larry to sit next to her in the ladies' room.

 

BIRTH OF THE LIVING DEAD...LAST DAYS ON MARS...

I remember going to the Westgate Mall Cinema in Brockton, MA to see a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead. This was an event, for the movie had been slogging around the country for years, creating its reputation as the biggest and baddest horror movie ever made. By the time it came to Brockton, it was as if Satan himself had landed. I don't know how I finagled it. Going to Brockton at midnight was not something my folks would've condoned, so I must have worked some kind of magic on them.

 

What I remember most about that night, aside from being impressed by the movie, was the sound of the audience. I've been to my share of midnight movies, but the gathering assembled that night at the Westgate was different. There was a  jumpy feeling in the air. I've heard audiences shout at the screen in my time, but on this night the sound was unlike any I'd heard; it was shrill, hyper-active, and more than once I saw someone's popcorn fly out of their hands. At some horror movies the screams would be followed by laughter. But there was very little laughing at this showing. After the first 20 minutes, the place began to feel dead, as if the audience had been worn out. 

I also remember that people would get up and walk around the theater, not to cause trouble, but because they didn't want to remain seated. At one point I looked around, and was shocked to see so many empty seats around me. People were lined up along the walls, as if driven out of their seats and slammed to the back of the theater by the sheer force of the movie. I imagined they were standing near the exits in case they wanted to flee the scene. I remember people covering their faces, wanting to look, but not wanting to see. I remember how the audience  groaned during certain scenes, as if watching a real life disaster play out. At times, I think I heard actual sobbing, as if the movie had driven the audience to a sort of mass nervous breakdown.

That night in Brockton came back to me while watching Rob Kuhns' excellent new documentary, Birth of the Living Dead.  There are great stories here about the making of the film, with a local butcher providing actual entrails for the famous gut-eating scenes, and Pittsburgh cops happily taking part in the movie. Various talking heads offer their thoughts on why the film works so well, but in between rhapsodic reveries on how the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights marches affected movie violence of the 1960s and '70s, the best bit is from a fellow recalling a matinee in a Detroit cinema when kids ran out of the place screaming. Those kids, and my group in Brockton, weren't thinking about Vietnam. It's fear, not a social conscience, that makes Night of the Living Dead a classic.

 

The highlight of the new doc is George Romero, the mastermind behind the Living Dead movies. He's a charmer, and genuinely loves to reminisce about the days spent filming guerrilla style in Pittsburgh. I believe him when he says he simply wanted to make a ballsy little horror movie. The pundits can talk all they want about the influence of the film, and how important it was to see a black actor in a lead role; but it's Romero who provides the documentary with its juice. His crooked smile, his guttural laugh,  and his sense of mischief make the film an utter joy. He acts as if he still can't believe he pulled it off, and seems pleased that people are still talking about Night of the Living Dead all these decades later.

My only quibble is that the Kuhn film runs a little short.  It could've used  more from Romero. I'd like to know his thoughts about shooting horror films. I'd like to know more about how he turned a theater full of Brockton brats into a captive audience. I wonder if those who saw it that night remember it the way I do. Do they remember how they cowered against the walls, like prisoners who'd been whipped and we're pleading no more, please, no more...

I remember the place began emptying out, as various ticket holders would see enough and leave. It was too much for them. I stayed until the end, though. I remember being bone tired. I remember that the film actually seemed to be throbbing on the screen, pulsating. The theater began to feel chilly with fewer people there. It was the dead of winter, and I'll bet the theater owner turned the heat down to save on electricity. By the end, the theater was down to just a few dozen people. I think there were more zombies on the screen than people in the seats. It was a wonderful night.

The first scene of The  Last Days on Mars is breathtaking. On a dry, pinkish landscape, the sort that Ray Bradbury must've envisioned when he wrote The Martian Chronicles more than 60s years ago, we see an innocent land rover trekking across the red soil. Then, a dust storm is seen ahead, a giant swirl of pink dust rising and gathering momentum. The passengers, Liev Schreiber and Ramola Garai, have to race back to their camp before the dust gets to them. I liked this sort of "man vs environment' scenario, and hoped for more. Instead, writer/director Ruairi Robinson introduces some kind of bacteria that turns the astronauts into murderous zombie type creatures, and the film dissolves into just another zombie movie. Granted, if I heard "zombies on Mars" at a pitch meeting, I'd probably perk up a bit. But The Last Days on Mars feels not only like a lost opportunity, but a misguided one.

The problems are the usual ones in a movie of this type, namely a bunch of characters that are no more than ciphers. Various groups are represented, male, female, American, European, black, white. But each is a cliche. Rather than get people we might care about, we get types: the no-nonsense woman who wants respect; the weepy fellow who wants only to see his children again; the skipper who tries to hold everything together; the angry one; the scared one; the one who plays chess by himself (to show he's smart, see? Cuz smart guys always play chess by themselves...); and of course, the tough guy who is willing to risk it all. They argue a lot, until someone says, "That's enough!" We've seen this sort of movie dozens of times. And  it wasn't very good the first time.

But worse than the meaningless characters is Robinson's decision to place most of the action inside a space ship. He creates a lovely Mars backdrop, and then, inexplicably, turns the film into a cabin fever story. When the action does go outside, and two astronauts are battling each other, rather than move the camera back to show these two tiny figures fighting on this giant red landscape, a scene that might've given the movie an existential, epic quality, he keeps the camera tight on them, so all we get is a lot of blurry scuffling and the sound of heavy breathing from inside somebody's space suit.

 

How I craved that far away shot. I think a homage to the final shot in Greed would've been perfect, combined with that pink landscape. The camera, though, swoops above the characters, and then, doesn't even go up into outer space.

 

Schrieber is reasonably convincing as the camp's tough guy, but since he's surrounded by a lot of women and old men, he takes the crown by default. A big problem in the film is that there are many scenes where we really can't tell who is who because they're all wearing bulky spacesuits.

 

A film like this one can only end in one of two ways. Either the tough guy beats back the menace, or he dies, too. Seeing that the current trend in horror films is one of sophomoric bleakness, I wasn't hedging my bets.

 

 

 

 

 

BIG SUR...CBGB

Four actors approximate The Ramones: CBGB

Nearly every character in Randall Miller's CBGB is worthy of a film of his or her own. The club itself, a New York Bowery dive where so many of the top "punk" acts of the 1970s played their first gigs, is the focus, while Hilly Kristal (Alan Rickman), the club's deadpan owner, is given the lion's share of the attention. Still, The Ramones deserve their own biopic, as do Patti Smith, and Blondie, and Talking Heads. For that matter, the transsexual rocker Jayne County might be a fit subject, too. Instead, all of these colorful characters are jammed into a single movie. The result manages to be both amusing and unsatisfying.


Rickman is fine as Hilly, a lumbering, slow moving bear of a man who isn't above hiring a local gang of bikers to take care of pesky debt collectors. The film doesn't have a particular plot - it's mostly one quick episode after another - but in the last act we see a half-hearted attempt at plot development, with Hilly trying to manage The Dead Boys, a moronic band from Cleveland that he hopes will become as popular as The Ramones. Typically, their tour bus turns crashes, and one of the band members is nearly killed in a street fight, which could serve as suitable metaphors for Hilly's ruined dreams, or the death of punk rock, or something along those lines. It's easy to sympathize with Hilly, who simply wanted to cash in on the punk music craze that he'd helped create.


But when he tries to hock the club as well as some family heirlooms to fund the rest of the band's tour, it's clear that he's not quite the visionary he's purported to be. He'd lucked into a good thing, and appreciated the originality of the bands he booked, but in choosing to back The Dead Boys, who were so stupid they didn't even understand that decorating their gear with Nazi emblems might insult their Jewish manager, he nearly capsized his career.


Rickman is particularly good when he goes back to New Jersey to get away from the hassles of the club. In a scene that is surprisingly moving, he sits alone in a barn plucking a guitar, singing a little song to himself. He's very convincing as a man who has created something that he didn't necessarily want to create, and watches wearily as it takes on a life of its own. Hell, he'd wanted to create a club for country music. But just as he's about to quit, the locals rally around Hilly and raise money to save the club. It's as if we've been watching It's A Wonderful Life, and Hilly is Jimmy Stewart. Again, amusing but unsatisfying.


As strong as Rickman is as Kristal, the same can't be said for the depiction of the various bands that made CBGB famous. The problem is that today's young actors are simply too healthy looking to play the decrepit heroes of early punk. Their complexions are too clear, their teeth too white, and they lack the feral quality of those early punks. The most glaring example is the girl playing Deborah Harry. Harry was a truly strange beauty, a lifesize vampire Barbie, while the girl in the movie looks like a generic California girl. Finally, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are portrayed by actors who seem like characters from Glee doing a tribute to punk.


Some reviewers have complained that the bands in the film are merely miming to the original recordings. This didn't bother me too much. I was more annoyed that the song choices were often wildly off target. For instance, Patti Smith is shown singing 'Because the Night,' at a time when The Ramones had yet to sign their first recording contract. There's a disparity there of a few years.


Still, the rats are well represented, the toilets are disgusting, Hilly's dog shits all over the club, and we see Tom Verlaine nearly electrocuted onstage. All of that seems accurate and proper. But if this movie is supposed to convince a younger generation about the importance of CBGB, I'm not sure casting a bunch of cheerleaders as Deborah Harry and Patti Smith was the way to go.

* * *

Michael Polish's Big Sur is a surprisingly good adaptation of Jack Kerouac's novel of the same name. The story takes place when the old language spinner seemed to be unraveling. Drained and distracted by the success of On The Road, Kerouac appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and is showing the effects of his burgeoning alcoholism. 

Trying to regain some equilibrium, Kerouac (Jean Marc Barr) hides out at a Big Sur cabin belonging to San Francisco bookstore owner and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Escape is not so easy, though. Within days he's back in San Francisco, drinking himself into a stupor.


He ends up back with his old traveling companion Neal Cassady (Josh Lucas), who is recently out of San Quentin, unemployed, and looking for trouble. Cassady is married but seeing Billie (Kate Bosworth) on the side. Inexplicably, Cassady "gives" Billie to Kerouac. Perhaps, Kerouac wonders, they will all someday be linked in a happy, four-way marriage. Such a plan isn't likely, though. Poor Billie falls for Kerouac, but he's too paranoid and self-absorbed to return her love. The story ends, as many of Kerouac's do, with a whimper; he pulls away from Billie, and vows to return home, where he hopes to find some peace in the company of his mother. In real life, Kerouac would do exactly that, and die at age 47.


The Beat Generation has a bad track record on film. But Polish comes closer than anyone ever has to doing it right, capturing Kerouac's highblown novel and wrangling it down into a movie. He does it with some beautiful cinematography to capture the lush mystery of Big Sur (mile high trees, crashing waves, a lone donkey wandering the beach) a steady voice over provided by Barr (using words I assume are taken from the novel), and a handful of strong performances.


Barr has the well-scrubbed but slightly ragged look of someone coming out of AA (or going into AA), and is constantly falling down, or sleeping on the floor. He has the dazed look of someone who was once happy but can't remember why. When he smiles, he seems to be smiling because he's heard that's what people do when they feel good. I suppose this is a reasonable way to play Kerouac, who in the few film clips I've seen looks sort of sad, and uncomfortable with being stared at. Mind you, this wasn't from shyness or insecurity, although he may well have been shy and insecure; it was more likely because the eyes of the public can pin a man down and make him feel trapped. It's difficult to play a writer, so Barr, instead, simply plays Kerouac as a nervous wreck. He gets away with it. He pulls it off.


The only footage I've ever seen of Neal Cassidy was in a documentary about Ken Kesey's band of stoned merry men who took a bus tour across the country. Cassady, a few years beyond the time depicted in Big Sur, drove the bus. He appeared to me like a big doofus, chattering nonsensically to himself; whatever magic Kerouac saw in him was long gone by the time he joined Kesey. But in Big Sur, Lucas opts to play Cassidy as Kerouac saw him, as a man who eats life from the ground up, and revels in his own jolly strength. The film finds its perfect pitch when various characters take a turn at chopping wood, and Kerouac comments in the voice over that a man's character can be gauged by the way he swings an ax. When it's Cassady's turn, he swings like Paul Bunyan; Kerouac calls him a "Greek God," and marvels at how Cassady's swings nearly lift him from the ground. It's a shame that Cassady leaves the film as soon as he passes Billie off to Jack.


There are other good performances: Anthony Edwards is convincing as Ferlinghetti; Balthazar Getti makes a suitably wormy Michael McClure; and Patrick Fischler has a couple of scene stealing turns as Lew Welch, Kerouac's pal and sometime chauffeur. Whether he's babbling about watching The Wizard of Oz and wanting to make love to munchkins, or offering a bizarre prayer before dinner, Fischler shows the kind of zany energy that movies about the Beat Generation have always lacked.

 

 

THOMAS DOLBY IN GLOUCESTER

The Cape Ann Cinema of Gloucester kicked off its 6th annual film festival last night. The place struggles mightily to be "hip," and I suppose it's hip in the way a fat guy showing off his Star Wars figurines is hip. Still, the dingy room with its overstuffed sofas was packed last night with what passes for hipsters in this neck of the woods. The occasion was a performance by Thomas Dolby, the MTV icon of yore who is in the middle of a 20-city tour promoting The Invisible Lighthouse, a film project about that most delicate of subjects: childhood memories.

 

The film, a documentary made in the best DIY manner, revolves around the impending demolition of a beloved lighthouse near Dolby's home in East Anglia. He weaves a number of themes throughout the short piece, including memories of boarding school, and his early days as a pop star, and ties them to memories of this particular light house, which sits on a beach once used by the British military to test bombs.

As happens with many documentaries, The Invisible Lighthouse is partly about the making of the film itself. In some hands this is an annoying technique, but Dolby has a sly humor and a sense of nostalgia that works for this particular doc. When he contacts the authorities to suggest a possible film, he's met with resistance. But the old science geek has more grit than we might've imagined from watching his old videos. He buys a boat and goes in guerrilla style at dawn, using a remote control spy camera. The effect is like watching a man invade his own dreams while wearing night vision goggles.

 

The film is complimented by Dolby's presence on stage, where he provides narration, plays snippets of music, and with help from inventive sideman Blake Leyh, creates a gentle wall of sound to accompany the action. It's an interesting evening of what could be called "performance art." It varies in execution from one city to the next, but I'm sure it remains more or less the same. Last night he sat down for a lengthy Q&A with the audience, where he talked about buying his equipment on eBay, joked about new technology in comparison to what he had in the 1980s, and expressed the challenges of being Thomas Dolby in 2013, when practically everyone owns a smart phone capable of technology unheard of a dozen years ago. How can one be cutting edge when everyone is armed with the same tools? And if we all have access to such technical marvels, doesn't that make our efforts a dime a dozen? I'm not sure, and I don't think Dolby is sure, either. He mentioned something about creating things that are personal to him as a way to stay fresh and unique, but the idea of an entire planet indulging in DIY films is a bit wearisome.

 

"I am quite impressed with the number of DIY films I've seen at festivals," he said. "Although it seems most of them are about zombies."

 

What most filmmakers don't have is a backlog of pop hits to perform after showing their film, which Dolby did last night. He performed several of the old favorites, including 'One of Our Submarines,' and 'She Blinded Me With Science.'  A local jazz singer, Amanda Carr, joined for a duet of 'The Ability to Swing.' A newer tune, 'Evil Twin Brother,' was brilliant, a kind of film noir story that was enhanced by a chorus best described as "power disco." Is there such a thing? Perhaps Dolby invented it.  The little crowd seemed pleased, especially by the older hits, and some of the women rose from their seats to dance.  Dolby received a standing ovation at the evening's end. It was well deserved. He is, among other things, a master entertainer.

 

Strangely, I'm not always uplifted by hearing the oldies. Sometimes an old song reminds me of bad times, of mistakes I've made, of  sitting in bars where I didn't belong, and the amount of energy I once spent pursuing women I should've ignored. Hearing 'Science' reminded me of nights at The Silhouette Lounge in Allston, where misery flourished, and friends gathered to discuss their latest disasters, and nights ended with that long walk home, slightly loosened up by alcohol, but still realizing there was something absolutely horrible about being young, in a town where the traffic snarled all night, and angry immigrants stared at you from the windows of their dark, unheated apartments. Dolby, through no fault of his own, had provided the soundtrack for some of the worst nights of my life, nights where I was broke and didn't look forward to the future.

 

But have my memories of Allston been somehow amplified, as Dolby suggests his own memories of his East Anglia childhood were distorted by the passage of time? If I could go back and revisit those days in Allston, were they really as bad as all that? Or are my shitty memories are just another form of vanity? I can't say for sure.

 

Regardless, it had never been cool to like Dolby, not for my crowd of rock & roll purists and roughnecks. Sure, we might have shouted along with "Science!" but he represented all that was bad with music in those days, nothing but sound effects and MTV posturing and silliness. He wasn't a rocker. He wasn't pounding out riffs on a guitar. He was noodling on that most dreadful of inventions, an electronic synth. Somehow, he won awards and developed a huge cult following. I never got it. Guys like Graham Parker and Joe Jackson were being prematurely flushed down the toilet, and Dolby was grabbing the success that should've been theirs. It felt unfair, another music business trend gone amok.

 

I'm glad I saw Dolby last night, though. My negative nostalgia was fleeting, I quickly forgot those deadly nights in Allston, and the power of his music worked its way into me. I was able, finally, to appreciate him. He really is a sort of pocket genius, and his songs are mini-masterpieces. They work as dance music, and they're also intelligent, and witty, and sometimes melancholy. Working by himself, Dolby created a kind of one man Euro-trash spectacle. In some ways, and I don't know why it's taken me so long to realize this, Dolby is the same sort of storyteller as the late Warren Zevon, a fellow I've always liked. 'She Blinded me With Science' is Dolby's 'Werewolves of London.'

 

Unfortunately, the night was slightly marred by technical difficulties, as Dolby's crew constantly ran around the theater to adjust the lighting. More than once Dolby seemed to have trouble with both the movie onscreen and the programmed music coming out of his keyboard. "While you're waiting," he said, "You might take this moment to text your friends. Tell them about the wonderful time you're having." 

These problems, however, allowed for the most transfixing moment of the night, as Dolby re-programmed, on the spot, an ad-libbed drum track, timing it perfectly. Watching him recreate this drum track was thrilling in a small way, a display of rhythm and high tech, tossed off casually as if he did this sort of thing every night. (And there is the possibility that he does it every night, as just another part of his patter. By the way, did you know he  once met Buzz Aldrin? If you see him on this tour, he might tell you about it.)
 

I wonder who is next for the Cape Ann Cinema. Gary Numan? Men Without Hats? I have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe the '80s weren't so bad, after all.
 

 

 

IDENTITY THIEF...THE HEAT...

GREATNESS BECKONS:
WILL MELISSA McCARTHY ANSWER THE CALL?

 

Melissa McCarthy:  She's found stardom. Can she find greatness?

 

There is an iconic comedic role out there for Melissa McCarthy. It didn't quite come in Seth Gordon's Identity Thief, although you can't say she didn't give it her best shot.  Like the great home run hitters of the past, McCarthy swings for the fences every time in this movie.  Because of her incredible efforts, she's the only good thing in Identity Thief. 

She certainly gets no help from Jason Bateman, who is playing the same dry character he's played for a decade. In this one he plays Sandy Patterson, a Colorado financial expert whose identity is stolen by McCarthy, a psychopathic thief living in Florida. She promptly goes on a spending spree and not only ruins his credit, but costs him his job. Desperate, he bargains with his boss - if he can bring her back to Colorado to explain what has happened, he gets to keep his job. He tracks her down, but finds that she's also being hunted by various criminals and bounty hunters. From there, we're treated to a reasonably entertaining road movie as Bateman tries to haul  McCarthy back to Colorado.

The film has already been unfavorably compared to Trains, Plains and Automobiles, but it actually owes more to the Robert DeNiro-Charles Grodin comedy, Midnight Run. Unfortunately,  Identity Thief so badly wants to be like those movies that it feels like a cheap copy, rather than an homage.

The main problem is that Gordon can't wait to spread on the pathos. Early in the film we see McCarthy drinking herself into a stupor.  Gordon may as well insert a title card reading: This woman is sad and lonely , and you will grow to love her... By tipping his hand so early, Gordon blows it. It would have been smarter to keep her as a psychotic crook for most of the movie, and not reveal her soft side until much later.  (Let's take Trains, Plains, and Automobiles as an example - if John Candy had been weeping over the memory of his wife in the first scene, would we have been so effected by the later scene when Steve Martin learns that Candy is alone on Thanksgiving? Of course not.)

McCarthy's skill as an actress is formidable. With just a slight downturn of her mouth, she can suggest a lifetime of sadness. You are talking about a classic sad clown here, someone along the lines of a Jackie Gleason or a Charlie Chaplin. She's really that good. An undisciplined director like Gordon figures such a horse must be allowed to run, but he should've reigned her in. There are times in the movie where McCarthy is working so hard, huffing and puffing, brawling, dancing, crying, that to watch her was like witnessing a lone deckhand try to keep a sinking ship afloat.
 

Still, McCarthy nearly wills the movie into something watchable. The scenes where she beats the hell out of Bateman make for some pretty good slapstick, and her encounter with a barfly named "Big Chuck" ( Eric Stonestreet  of Modern Family in a great cameo) is probably the film's highlight. When she invites Big Chuck to enjoy a "threesome" with her and an unwilling Bateman, the results are both comical and disgusting.

I wish good ol' Chuck had joined the duo on their ride back to Colorado, because his presence would've been more welcome than Bateman's  tight-lipped sarcasm.  Unfortunately, for every stellar moment of physical comedy, there's a maudlin scene waiting around the corner. Hell, there's even a makeover scene where McCarthy gets her hair done. As always happens in movies, Bateman's eyes glaze over and he tells her she's beautiful. In another scene McCarthy cries and admits that she'd been an orphan, and wishes she'd had a father figure like Bateman. It's all a bit much, and the goofiness of the comedy, which includes McCarthy getting hit by a car (and hit in the face with a guitar)  can't quite support McCarthy's emotional confessing.

Some might say that too much McCarthy is a bad thing, and that she's best taken in smaller doses, such as in her TV show, Mike & Molly, or in supporitng roles.  She is, after all, an impeccable scene stealer. In a film loaded with funny ladies, she demolished Bridesmaids and made it her own. More recently, her brief cameo in Judd Apetow's This is 40 was the absolute highlight of an otherwise shrill, unfunny comedy. She was also brought in to inject a little life into The Hangover III.

As reliable as McCarthy is in supporting roles, I think she could carry a movie, without needing a Jason Bateman to act as her straight man. She's unique, perhaps the funniest woman to hit Hollywood in several decades.  There's an iconic role for her up there in the ether, but it won't be in a formulaic film like Identity Thief. It will be in a movie where she doesn't have to try so hard.

The Heat, which saw McCarthy co-star with Sandra Bullock, was a monster summer hit, earning over 150-million in ticket sales. This was a truly astounding number for a film not based on a Marvel Comics hero.

Although possessing the structure of a traditional cop-buddy picture, and directed with skill by Paul Feig, The Heat is not significantly better than The Identity Thief. It's every bit as broad, with McCarthy playing the same sort of gross character, although this time she's on the side of the law. (For a change, Bullock is the orphan in this one. Will there be orphans in all of McCarthy's movies?)  Still, audiences flocked to The Heat, perhaps because she was paired with Bullock, America's sweetheart. Bullock is in full nerd mode here, playing a straitlaced FBI agent who finds herself in Boston trying to bring down a major drug dealer.  McCarthy plays  an ultra violent Irish street cop who reluctantly teams up with her. They bicker. They bond. They catch the bad guys.

There are a few funny moments, including some clever stuff with a cat, but there's a lot here that doesn't add up. At one point Bullock performs an emergency tracheotomy on the floor of a Denny's, which is not only gross, it makes her look mentally unbalanced. McCarthy, too, seems unbalanced. She spouts vulgarities as if she has Tourette syndrome, and her tiny apartment is filled with enough weaponry, including grenades and rocket launchers,  to impress Tony Montana.

There's also a scene where McCarthy clobbers a young black hoodlum with a watermelon. The scene is played for laughs, but an Irish Boston cop hitting a black kid with a watermelon is a bit lowbrow, particularly from Paul Feig, an intelligent fellow who seems scarily comfortable taking the low road.  Feig directed Bridesmaids, and there are scenes in The Heat where McCarthy treats Bullock to the same tough love she gave Kristen Wiig in the earlier movie. Feig knows this much: put enough female bonding in a film and you can overcome just about anything. Even watermelon gags.
 

As in The Identity Thief, McCarthy goes from violent to sad and back again, and by the film's end reveals herself to be a  softy.  Feig, a more sophisticated director than Gordon, doles these scenes out carefully, so they seem logical. Still, one wonders how long McCarthy can go on playing the vulgarian with a heart of gold.  Not only will audiences eventually tired of her silly/sad routine, but directors, unsure of how to use her, may simply burn her out after a few more movies. Melissa, jump off the roof, now cry, now fall in a pile of cow shit, now cry again, now have another grotesque sex scene, now cry again, scream some more vulgarities, and cry again, please. Like a good trooper, she'll do whatever is asked of her. But even a comic hurricane can blow itself out to sea.

 

As for McCarthy's immediate future, it looks like more of the same. Feig, quickly becoming von Sternberg to McCarthy's Dietrich,  is  directing Susan Cooper,  where McCarthy plays a wacky secret agent. McCarthy has already finished Tammy, a film from her own screenplay, where she plays a woman on a road trip with her mother. There are also rumors of The Heat II.  Aside from  St. Vincent De Van Nuys, which also stars Bill Murray and may be a little more serious, we're in for another year or two of more situations where McCarthy can trash hotels and embarrass people. Maybe the gimmick can work a while longer.  But with each foulmouthed tirade, she may be bellowing her way into redundancy.