Movie review by Greg Carlson

David Byrne and Spike Lee embrace the inevitable comparisons between Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense” and their recently-released filmed version of “American Utopia.” Lee’s skillful screen translations of more than half a dozen live shows, including “Passing Strange” and “Rodney King,” position him as an ideal choice to capture the immediacy of the in-person event. Like Demme, Lee also takes the viewer to all kinds of places inaccessible to ticket holders, and the result is an exhilarating and exuberant companion to the legendary 1984 concert film.

Byrne maintains his minimalism. He is joined on the stage of Broadway’s Hudson Theatre by eleven performers all dressed in matching outfits and bare feet, and the international troupe gives him a platform from which to make some pointed remarks on behalf of immigrants. It is just one of several instances of editorial commentary rebuking the current administration and its erasure of kindness, compassion, and decency. The musicians are completely untethered and cable-free, and the wireless wizardry combines with Annie-B Parson’s choreography in a sublime union of sound and movement.

Rachel Syme devoted an excellent New Yorker Culture Desk column to the evolution of Byrne’s gray suit, quoting from the performer’s own thoughts on the matter from his 2012 book “How Music Works,” as well as from Pauline Kael’s astonishing review of “Stop Making Sense.” For superfans in search of esotericism, Syme’s article delivers the goods, fully pressed and cleaned. The custom-built costumes in “American Utopia” will make any fashion enthusiast geek out, and Syme’s note that the uniforms suggest “a rare kind of harmony, and a lack of hierarchy” corresponds to the arresting images collected by veteran cinematographer and frequent Lee collaborator Ellen Kuras.

The show’s twenty-one song set spans Byrne’s career discography, but no one record or era dominates. Only five of the selections are from the 2018 studio album from which the musical takes its name. The order and arrangements don’t always thematically cohere, but a narrative emerges, abetted by the anecdotes and narration interspersed between the songs. Messages of hopefulness and positivity coexist with the reality of bleak and disheartening setbacks. In one timely example, Byrne pauses to highlight the importance of voting, urging audience members to go to the polls.

During the introduction to the ensemble’s cover of Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” Byrne reassures the audience that Ms. Monae provided her blessing when approached about the inclusion of her shattering protest song. As a “white man of a certain age,” Byrne’s acknowledgment of his own privilege may not be enough to persuade everyone, but his good intentions, combined with Lee’s own long tradition of speaking and listing names, electrifies the unforgettable moment — especially when Lee adds a triptych of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd as a reminder of the work yet to be done to dismantle institutionalized inequality.

The 68-year-old Byrne of today is less livewire, exposed-nerve, performance-art provocateur and more professorial elder statesman, particularly when delivering observations while holding a human brain prop, but the durable rhythms and elastic lyrics of classic Talking Heads numbers like “Don’t Worry About the Government,” “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” and “Road to Nowhere” — like any timeless texts — suggest chilling and urgent new meanings during a global pandemic intensified by frightening authoritarianism, racism, and misogyny. The latter song turns out to be the ideal curtain-closer, a joyous march through the audience that captures a moment in time shortly before live performance went dark and imagines the thrill of being able to do it again in the future.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The return of Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev is deliberately timed to bring shame to the already circus-like Trump administration ahead of the looming national election on November 3. The first of three evolving onscreen title translations tags the project “Borat: Gift of Sexy Monkey to Vice Premier Mikhael Pence for Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan.” While this “subsequent moviefilm” is statistically unlikely to move the needle for any unicorn-esque undecided voters, it is also a worthy successor to the original 2006 outing. A finely calibrated blend of lowbrow vulgarity and sharp social satire, it is a document — or mockument — of and for the moment.

Baron Cohen’s longtime working methods depend, at least in part, on the unwitting participation of people not in on the gag. Some content is carefully scripted while other scenes emerge from the expected and unexpected reactions of the marks who cross the path of the production. One imagines that the presence of cameras might arouse a certain skepticism, but there is no shortage of willing performers. And alongside the regular folks are those with some degree of power and/or public profile. Given how long Baron Cohen has been drinking from the well, it says something that a high-visibility figure like Rudy Giuliani ends up with egg on his face and a hand down his trousers.

Giuliani’s encounter with breakout star Maria Bakalova, the Bulgarian performer who plays Borat’s fifteen-year-old daughter Tutar, has gobbled up most of the initial coverage of the movie. Even if you buy Giuliani’s claim that he was merely tucking in his shirt, his eagerness to follow Bakalova into the hotel suite’s bedroom for post-interview drinks shows remarkable gullibility and poor judgment. It’s no mean feat that Giuliani comes off worse than the woman who, at Borat’s request, decorates a cake with “Jews will not replace us” or the two disconcertingly sympathetic conspiracy theorists who host Borat during the pandemic.

Besides the set-piece that posterizes Giuliani and the moment in which Baron Cohen interrupts Mike Pence at the February 2020 meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (in which Borat disguises himself in a Donald Trump costume), the general arc of the narrative is in keeping with the antics of the original movie. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as the comedian makes a convincing argument that racism, ignorance, misogyny, and antisemitism are perhaps in even greater evidence, if not greater supply, under Trump.

The original “Borat” launched the ridiculousness at such a rapid pace that it didn’t matter whether every gag landed. The sequel utilizes the same more-is-more technique (the trailer contains several items that didn’t make the final cut), and the weary and the wary might not be inclined to offer Sagdiyev the warmest of welcomes on his return to the United States. There is a certain “eye of the beholder” quality to Baron Cohen’s tactics, and Inkoo Kang and others have written essays questioning the extent to which Baron Cohen punches down instead of up. Outrageous exaggerations and fabrications about Kazakhstan culture aside, Borat stumbles into hopefulness where it is otherwise in short supply.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Animator Don Hertzfeldt holds at bay the crushing malaise of life during pandemic-time and reaffirms his status as one of the planet’s most accomplished filmmakers with “World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime.” The presumptive conclusion of his second major trilogy, the thirty-four minute adventure leaves admirers drooling like one of the title character’s imperfect clones. If Hertzfeldt’s ability to successfully expand on the emotional terrain and metaphysical considerations of previous chapters is a recipe, then he is an impeccable cinematic chef de cuisine.

Considering Hertzfeldt’s uncanny gift for sequels of increasing depth and breadth, nothing stands in the way of future “World of Tomorrow” installments. Fans may still clamor for an all-in-one feature-length Hertzfeldt effort yet to materialize, but there is much to appreciate in the artist’s longtime method — a kind of artistic accretion that functions like its astrophysical parallel, gravitationally pulling together particles into one massive whole. Like the preceding films in the “World of Tomorrow” series and the trio of “Everything Will Be OK,” “I Am So Proud of You,” and “It’s Such a Beautiful Day,” one can look at the pieces separately or together. Either way, the conclusion is the same: Don Hertzfeldt is a master of his form.

The special potency of the original “World of Tomorrow” in 2016 appealed to critics and audiences alike. Worries about Hertzfeldt’s move to digital animation were quickly quelled. The film received a Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Hertzfeldt’s second Academy Award nomination, and dozens of honors from the film festivals in which it was screened. Like the earlier stories featuring memory-challenged protagonist Bill, “World of Tomorrow” executed a dazzlingly choreographed fireworks display of colorful rockets alternating bursts and plumes of humor and horror. Hertzfeldt continued to etch his key themes, contemplating mortality, temporality, memory, love, and loss.

Winona Mae’s beloved Emily Prime is now absent, but happily, Hertzfeldt enlists Jack Parrett as young David, briefly returning to the technique of hilariously visualizing and integrating the captured-moment child’s-eye views and observations that mapped a large share of the inaugural passage’s dynamism: “We have a rabbit! And a shark! A universe!” In one of the movie’s many highlights, Hertzfeldt situates Parrett’s thoughts in an incongruously innocent kaiju nightmare. Assault helicopters fire on the evolving Godbaby while it knocks down towers and terrorizes a cityscape. The inspired lunacy is classic Hertzfeldt.

Julia Pott returns as Emily and deftly handles all the convoluted time travel explanations with her character’s established affinity for deadpan gallows humor: “Death was instantaneous. Probably.” In contrast, aside from some “uncontrollable horrifying screaming noises” that come from an adult iteration of David, the mature figure’s quietude aligns him with the determined and indefatigable silent era dreamers portrayed by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The stakes are high and the sacrifices great. David must continually dismantle aspects of selfhood, deleting parts of his own neural operating system to carry out his quest.

Later, in what might be the film’s most stunning piece of purely visual storytelling, Hertzfeldt revisits a pivotal moment that we first saw from Emily’s point of view, taking us “between the frames” to experience a previously hidden series of events that expands the greater “World of Tomorrow” mythology and deepens our appreciation for the moviemaker’s skill. It would be terribly unfair to say much more about that sequence and risk spoiling it for those who have not yet viewed the film (what are you waiting for?), but it rearranges our previous perceptions with a “Rashomon”-like epiphany that suggests there is no ceiling for Mr. Hertzfeldt. I’m already counting the days until his next movie.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Veteran cinematographer and documentarian Kirsten Johnson follows one directorial masterwork — 2016’s “Cameraperson” — with another. Stylistically distinct from “Cameraperson,” “Dick Johnson Is Dead” captures the filmmaker’s relationship with her father, a longtime Seattle-based psychiatrist whose declining health necessitates retirement and a move across the country to Kirsten’s place in Manhattan. During the physical and metaphorical journey, the Johnsons talk candidly about the Alzheimer’s disease that has now begun to erode Dick’s neurocognitive abilities and in 2007 led to the death of his wife Catherine Joy, Kirsten’s mom.

The creative enterprise, which combines Johnson’s instincts for investigation and her eye for memorable visual storytelling, operates with a sleight-of-hand premise misdirected by the movie’s title. Dr. Johnson is most definitely not dead, but his mortality looms large, reminding moviemaker and audience member alike of the impermanence of our lives on earth. Johnson places her dad, who is always cheerful and game, in a series of elaborately-staged gags dramatically depicting Dick’s potential demise(s). The results, including the hilarious implausibility of an air-conditioning unit dropping, cartoon-like, from an apartment window, are paired with a gorgeous diorama of Dick in heaven — a heaven complete with Buster Keaton, Bruce Lee, and a number of other artists and historical figures.

The several gruesome vignettes in which Dick meets his end are reminiscent of the imaginative mock suicides in Hal Ashby’s “Harold and Maude.” Both films examine big picture considerations, including the philosophical standard often referred to as “life and how to live it,” and anyone who has experienced the cruelties of seeing a once vivacious loved one succumb to dementia will recognize the catharsis that can come from laughing in the face of an utterly impossible set of circumstances. Kirsten and Dick refuse to reject content that some will argue is undignified. They make a great team.

Assuredly, the bond between daughter and father here is strong and special, and “Dick Johnson Is Dead” resonates as a kind of intimate therapy for both Johnsons. Dick, even as the sharpest elements of his mental acuity and short-term memory capacity dissipate, recognizes the closeness to Kirsten afforded by their strange collaboration. And Kirsten exorcises the unthinkable by anticipating what it will be like to ultimately lose her beloved parent. One of the movie’s most compelling motifs revolves around the role of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the personal history of the Johnson family — along with the ways in which they were, and were not, bound by that theology.

Johnson brilliantly arranges and organizes the vignettes that account for her unique “living obituary.” These constructions, which are routinely exposed via cutaways to wide shots of sets that contextualize Johnson’s intentions, move in a deliberate and inevitable direction. I love the way Johnson intersperses the more quotidian milestones. Dick packing up his office is just as poignant as the aftermath of a harrowing Halloween sequence, for example. And the best scene in the movie might be one that takes place while a camera is tipped on its side at floor level. It is every bit as good as any of the show-stopping resurrections.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Polymath artist Miranda July adds an excellent new title to her filmography with “Kajillionaire.” As hard to reduce or simplify as “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and “The Future,” July’s latest movie — which contemplates parenthood and family ties under the idiosyncratic lens of the filmmaker’s built-from-scratch microscope — blends slapstick and sorrow like a latter-day Charles Chaplin. Thematically related to July’s previous films, “Kajillionaire” fixates on the human, pondering and prodding the things that separate us from one another as well as the stuff that brings us together. Along with Chaplin and July’s contemporary Wes Anderson, she is the rare moviemaker who can conjure a smile and a tear in the space of a heartbeat.

July introduces the Dyne family, a nuclear unit whose logic-defying domestic decisions involve skimming, or getting by without all the burdens of holding traditional jobs and conforming to the expectations of society. Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) have raised daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) to be fluent in their system of petty larcenies and labor-intensive scams. July handles the variety of grifts and cons with aplomb, but she complicates the quirkiness with a shattering revelation: mom and dad treat their only child as a business partner and have always withheld the most basic expressions of love and affection from Old Dolio. No birthday gifts, no kisses, no embraces.

Old Dolio’s name — she was dubiously christened in honor of a derelict lottery winner in the hope of some kind of cosmic lucky rabbit foot payoff — is a great gag in a film full of them. July applies her prodigious imagination to surprises both verbal and visual: cartoon contortions as the family attempts to sneak undetected by their landlord; the cascading wall of bubbles cleared daily in exchange for a place to crash; the ninja stealth required for evading security cameras during daylight mail theft; a poignant, touch-free massage. In one of the movie’s best scenes, the Dynes playact routine family banter at the request of an elderly mark whose house they burglarize.

The arrival of fellow con artist Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) upends the lifelong patterns imprinted upon Old Dolio by her folks. It is through Melanie that July realizes another gear, introducing an unanticipated conflict that disrupts Old Dolio’s allegiance to Robert and Theresa. Wood’s performance as the late-bloomer is her best to date. Behind a curtain of Cousin Itt tresses and hidden in a shapeless track jacket that functions like a suit of armor, Old Dolio comes to life through Wood’s total commitment. Speaking in a flat monotone, Wood somehow manipulates potential caricature into something fully alive.

The Dyne family might exist on the fringe, but July has always used the unexpected as a Trojan horse for deep looks at universal experiences. Never weird for the sake of weird, July’s movies are perfectly prismatic, refracting facets of recognizable life experiences through the singularity and peculiarity of her vision. Even as we might seek to avoid awkwardness and discomfort at all costs, July’s characters can’t seem to escape it. So the next time you return the acceptable and socially-sanctioned response when someone announces that “we’re all in this together,” you can conjure up Old Dolio and fantasize a different answer.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Well-deserved praise for writer-director Amy Seimetz’s efficient and provocative “She Dies Tomorrow” almost inevitably points to the film’s eerie timeliness as a metaphor for pandemic-inspired malaise and disequilibrium. More interesting, however, is the split among observers who interpret Seimetz’s intended tone in different ways. Some claim the movie is hilarious, others see it as terrifying, and another faction argues that it is tragic. Of course, it’s entirely possible for the story to encompass all those descriptions and then some, but individual reactions to the filmmaker’s carefully calibrated vision will vary. For my money, that’s a positive thing.

The movie’s central rhetorical device manifests as a kind of highly contagious, virally-spread sense or premonition of impending death. Passed from one hapless victim to the next in a manner reminiscent of the linked-chain transmission in David Robert Mitchell’s “It Follows,” “She Dies Tomorrow” trades Mitchell’s sexual panic for a more disquieting and interpersonal apocalypse. We come to understand the nature of the “disease” through Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), an alcoholic who, certain her life is going to end the following day, calls her friend Jane (Jane Adams) to share the bad news.

Confused, concerned, and more than a bit annoyed at what she perceives is Amy experiencing a relapse, Jane does her best to offer some comfort. But Jane soon falls prey to the same strobing colored lights and pulsating sounds that signal the advent of next-day mortality. Jane attends her sister-in-law’s birthday party and infects the guests. And so on. In the film’s press notes, Seimetz writes about the film’s origin: “I was dealing with my own personal anxiety and found I was spreading my panic to other people by talking about it perhaps too excessively – while simultaneously watching a ton of news and watching mass anxiety spreading on the right and left politically.” It’s a grim coincidence that the movie’s eventual release lined up with COVID-19.

Even though Seimetz’s “ideological contagion” might have its roots in coping strategies for depression and a range of mental health issues, the director works wonders imagining how we might react if we knew we only had a few hours to live. The vignettes, which swing from poignant to bleakly comic, are among the movie’s highlights. Especially noteworthy is the droll, deadpan, and beautifully underplayed relationship between Brian (Tunde Adebimpe) and Tilly (Jennifer Kim). Their hard truths surrounding a striking, even shocking, hospital scene exemplify the gallows humor to such an extent we wish we could spend more time with the doomed duo.

The movie’s modest budget — reportedly covered by Seimetz’s “Pet Sematary” earnings —  is an asset; domestic spaces are vividly photographed  (Seimetz used her own home and yard as a key location) and situated for maximum impact. “She Dies Tomorrow” lacks the impact of “Melancholia,” but even though Seimetz’s film has been frequently compared to von Trier’s, there is a crucial distinction to be made: “She Dies Tomorrow” elects not to confirm whether the characters will, in fact, meet untimely ends. Instead, Seimetz ponders whether predictability or unpredictability would govern our choices and actions when the clock is running. Her answer? It’s personal.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Charlie Kaufman, the unfairly talented and imaginative cinematic magician whose screenplays and films have explored the realms of art, artifice, and identity over the course of a dizzying career, lifts the curtain on another masterful storytelling exercise. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is based on Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, but like the hall-of-mirrors treatment Kaufman gave to “The Orchid Thief” in “Adaptation,” the source material is twisted in several significant ways. What results is one of the most rewarding and satisfying movies of 2020, a year in which film lovers have come to expect the unexpected.

Jessie Buckley narrates as Lucy — or Lucia, or Louisa, or Amy/Ames; we can’t entirely be sure. She is a young woman with a protean range of occupations that encompass painting and poetry and physics and scholarship and food-serving. Lucy’s inability to grasp the contours of her relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons) are all the more troubling as he appears to be able to hear her thoughts during their snowy road trip to visit the farm where he grew up. Point of view and selfhood have assumed for Kaufman a place of great consequence from “Being John Malkovich” to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” to “Anomalisa,” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a remarkable extension.

Once Lucy and Jake arrive at the farmhouse, Kaufman turns the duet into a quartet, adding Jake’s parents — Toni Collette and David Thewlis, both hilarious and heartbreaking — to an unfolding weirdness exacerbated by the shifting ages of mother and father. Not since David Lynch’s unforgettable meet-the-parents dinner scene in “Eraserhead” has a filmmaker so vividly rendered the awkwardness and anxiety of making a good first impression. One could offer an argument that the influence of Lynch, particularly in Kaufman’s comfortable mix of horror, humor, dream-states and surrealism, is the lodestar of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”

When contemplating the work of Kaufman, it should go without saying that a spoiler-free viewing beats anything a critic or reviewer might have to say. Even so, the literary, theatrical, and cinematic allusions rain so thick and so fast, it would take a special kind of savant to identify all the layers of references and homages. Au courant recognition of the durability of “Oklahoma!” (which recently reported for duty in Damon Lindelof’s “Watchmen” series) joins a long list that includes the wide-ranging echoes and quotations of William Wordsworth, Guy Debord, Eva H. D., Ralph Albert Blakelock, David Foster Wallace, Anna Kavan, Frank Loesser, and Pauline Kael, to name a few.

The raspberries of Gena Rowlands’ Mabel Longhetti mingle with Kael’s bruising 1974 New Yorker review of “A Woman Under the Influence” in one of the movie’s many wonderfully eccentric scenes. Buckley performs both in a tour-de-force consideration of the “Misogynist! Genius!” dispute laid out in Le Tigre’s “What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?” The theme comes into even sharper focus when Kaufman steers us to the rural high school that will serve as the setting for the movie’s brain-melting finale, which, among other things, includes a mashup of “Wild Strawberries” and “A Beautiful Mind.”

Outside the school, Jake leaves the vehicle and Lucy says to herself, “It’s hard to say no. I was never taught that. It’s easier just to say yes. Anyway, sometimes you’re just caught off guard. And the request comes, can I have your number? And the easiest way out of it is just to say yes and then that yes turns into more yes, and then it’s yes, yes, yes.” Lucy’s agency and her frustration with the extraordinary demands placed on women resonate, especially given Kaufman’s decision to deliberately avoid springing what could be construed as a kind of twist or device. What we are instead invited to discover about the real and the imagined is a joy and a gift.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Director Arthur Jones makes his auspicious feature debut with “Feels Good Man,” an engrossing and timely documentary that examines the phenomenon of artist Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog. Created by Furie in 2005 for the comic “Boy’s Club,” Pepe’s now iconic visage morphed into a surprisingly durable meme — made all the more confusing and controversial when internet trolls and supporters of the alt-right nationalist movement adopted and appropriated Pepe as a symbol of white supremacist hate. Pepe’s transformation ramped up during the 2016 presidential election, when candidate Donald Trump retweeted a mash-up of himself as Pepe.

While Jones’ film will appeal directly to anyone with an interest in media, intellectual property, and the labyrinth of web-fueled culture wars, the onscreen presence and participation of Furie grounds the movie as a deeply human story. Once the most vocal 4chan users twisted Pepe for their own ugly agenda, Furie was faced with the challenge that sits at the heart of the film: give up, overwhelmed by the seemingly Sisyphean task of reclaiming his character, or devote himself to the legal and intellectual battle to take back Pepe.

Jones tackles mountains of bizarre Pepe-related incidents on Furie’s exhausting odyssey, and the way in which they accumulate transforms “Feels Good Man” into a time capsule irrevocably linking Trump’s covert and overt support of the far-right through the originally innocent amphibian. As a consequence of his crossover into the mainstream, and recognition by “normies” and celebrities like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, Pepe is dragged to the dark side, relentlessly depicted as a swastika-adorned Nazi and worse.

Jones stacks up numerous examples of the injustices suffered by Furie after Pepe was stolen. Extremist Richard Spencer is punched in the head on-camera just as he was explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin. “The Adventures of Pepe and Pede,” an Islamophobic publication presented in the style of a children’s picture book, incenses Furie, who successfully files suit. Furie also takes on malignant InfoWars prevaricator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who sold posters that included Pepe among a constellation of Trump-world figures.

“Feels Good Man” earned Arthur Jones a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and the moviemaker’s narrative instincts serve the film. Jones has a background in animation and motion graphics, and one of the most uplifting aspects of “Feels Good Man” is the use of colorful animated sequences featuring, as Furie describes them, the “chill” Pepe, “party animal” Landwolf, “wise guy” Andy, and “fashionable dancer” Brett. The psychedelic phantasmagoria of the anthropomorphic Boy’s Club quartet presents the most convincing argument for the future of Pepe, Hong Kong protest scenes notwithstanding.

The manipulation of popular characters outside the control of original creators has existed for hundreds of years, but what makes “Feels Good Man” especially significant is the entanglement with “fake news” during the era of Trump, who so easily denies affiliation with fascists while winking otherwise. Some viewers might take issue with Furie’s failure to immediately set up the necessary legal protections that might have prevented some of his later copyright infringement despair, but the portrait of determination that builds during the course of the film, abetted by Furie’s live-and-let-live stoner persona, is an overwhelmingly sympathetic one.

“Feels Good Man” will be available on demand starting September 4, 2020.