Reviews

I knew this had won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2012, but with a couple thousand films on my 'View List' I did not get around to watching it until very recently. It is a remarkable true story -- I'm sure well covered here by now -- and in the overall drift of documentary subject matter an unusually uplifting one. The main point I'd like to raise is the elephant in the room never directly addressed in the film itself, but still present perhaps, looming in the wings: that there is ZERO correlation whatever between acclaim, notoriety, or in particular commercial success on the one hand, and *lasting* artistic merit on the other ! Van Gogh lived in poverty and with a rude rejection, selling just one painting in his lifetime, only recognized for his genius and awesome contributions to art long after, though his work eventually amassed in the high hundred million dollars in sales. (In this documentary, the record label owner Clarence Avant somewhat cavalierly dismisses Sixto Rodriguez strictly on the basis of negligible album sales, illustrating that very dichotomy, while at the same time ranking Sixto among the top 5 songwriters he could list, and ahead of Bob Dylan ! Something is clearly out-of-whack there !)

Van Gogh got a fictional psychological reprieve in the splendid 2016 short "The Red Fool" -- occasionally shown on cable channel ShortsTV -- in which he returns to our present day world to witness the redeeming personal vindication of history. But Sixto got to do this even better in real life, something denied most of the great artists who remained "unsung" in their own lifetimes. That would be the astounding vest pocket success in South Africa, a history-altering one *despite* an attempted suppression by the Apartheid-era authorities, which much later on jump-started his rediscovery. The documentary covers the falsely believed-to-be-dead rumor mill, and the spade work required to unravel it. The cherry on top is the biographical detail -- the sheer grace and humility of the man himself, and of his worldview.

I'm considering this among the best music-oriented documentaries that I've seen over the years, up there with Jay Bulger's 2012 "Beware of Mr. Baker" and Kevin Macdonald's fine 2012 film on Bob Marley. In terms of overall musical significance, the film and its subject would also keep good company with the 2010 documentary portrait "Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune," which you can add to that list.

(I'd extend to a 6.5, if fractions were permitted.) To begin with, Natasha Lyonne brings a sizable reservoir of audience good will into a project, accumulated over the course of her career -- and that's always a nice place to start. This one is a generally anthology type of story format, with certain background throughlines. Lyonne tends to show up in each episode after around 10 minutes or so of story setup, then backtracking from there. The prevailing gimmick has her being a "human lie detector", while she's on a run for her life cross-country from some determined, capable bad people who have considerable reach and resources, because she happens to be a loose-end bystander who figured out a murder, and then a revenge target due to a subsequently related death. In that, the formula here is at least somewhat of a nod back towards the venerable "The Fugitive" series of the 1960s. One key difference is that the running and roaming Richard Kimble never had to contend with modern tech like ATMs or cellphones, which can quickly and precisely betray one's whereabouts.

Another is that Lyonne's Charlie character becomes like a dog with a bone when it comes to being unable to *stop* following a trail of lies, as she repeatedly insinuates herself into various situations, mysteries, and the lives of people she encounters in her travels. Sort of like an unofficial, self-appointed, amateur Columbo.

And that leads into just where this premise gets kind of thin and rather strained. Are there that many -- even temporary --menial jobs out there for which no I. D. or references are required ? No one as smart as Charlie clearly is, with at least an ounce of self-preservation, would stick around as long in a situation or continue taking the risks that she does -- and all for strangers. Keeping a much lower profile would surely become the wiser order of the day. As such, I don't really see this as having enough substance to go for additional seasons. There are a couple episodes remaining, but I'm also wondering why she hasn't found some good disguising makeup artist, enabling her to once again make some subsistence money with her talents at playing poker, while still avoiding any major or well-covered tournaments ?

Namely, how unapologetically "*precious*" and self-conscious it is in most of his work. The reflexive, lurking-just-beneath-the-surface "I'm so damned Hip and so damned Clever, Aren't I ?" tone of it. Pretty tough to put up with, at least for me. Can't really abide that, from ANY filmmaker. Amidst Anderson's filmography, this title was one of the worst offenders in that regard.

There have been exceptions: I really liked his first -- and clearly a modest, low-budget indie effort -- "Bottle Rocket" (1996), apparently before this tendency emerged, and some of what he's done in the animation format has certainly been different and interesting. Apart from that, and so long as the pervasive self-congratulation fest continues, I would tend to avid his films.

This is kind of an odd duck, not quite so easily categorized, which left me wondering as to the creative motivations behind it and the niche it was intended to occupy. Even at a 47 minutes runtime it would still technically qualify as a "short"; short *features* going far back in film history generally clocked in at 60 minutes or more. There is no clear general drift from looking over the diverse list of the director's prior credits. This is nominally a German production, although the spoken dialog is in English. If you subtracted the graphic sex content, the setup is slightly reminiscent of a recommended feature, "2 Nights Till Morning" (2015), except that in this case there is no language barrier between the characters.

When I say 'niche', you would -- for example -- have the comedically inclined erotics such as Ken Russell's surprising "The Insatiable Mrs. Kirsch", part of a multi-famous-director collection of such shorts. But "Landlocked" is not at all like that, nor is it some (often feminist) art-porn like Erika Lust's "Impregnation Nation" (2020) , and also not simply made along the lines of your familiar, conventional porn. There is some serious sketching out of character and situation, of two very disparate people forging a real connection, under constrained circumstances -- though not quite enough of that to elevate this piece to real drama. The running time probably would not allow for that, once the decision was made to devote so much of it to the graphic sex interactions, which build into the second half. That said, the viewer does come to care about these people, and there is no less than a 50-50 divide between the sex and what looks like real passion and emotion. Not as cinema verite, but still like a relationship and encounters that could occur in the real world. And that is not characteristic of standard porn, which has a very different vibe and different objectives. "Landlocked" is also shot in a more tasteful and skillfully artistic manner.

So, where does that leave things, in terms of reaching for an applicable category ? My best guess for now might be a more free, non-prudish, couples viewing one, such as with the adult fare porn actress turned director Ovidie has long been making for cable in France. And I'm now curious to see some of the other and apparently rather different work of Livia Cheibub.

I don't often bother to review, particularly as regards films that I disliked immensely. And other reviewers have covered this well enough here already: for example, 'The strange disinterest in forward movement' by HEFILM, 'Dismally self-indulgent - gives "art house" a bad name' by davidkhardman, and 'All style, no substance...and not my kind of film' by Leofwine_draca. At the same time, I found that 'the spirit of giallo but with the soul of Kafka' review by christopher-underwood also raised some valid points.

Then, what I would add. If this was to be taken as a depiction of mental disintegration, Polanski's "Repulsion" handled that in a tremendously superior fashion, yet never entirely lost the viewer as to just what was transpiring, or lost coherence, nor did it quickly lead us not to care -- at all. And pretty much ditto for the body of David Lynch's work, a model of comprehensibility by comparison. Even a great technical finesse ultimately counts for little, on the other side of the ledger. This filmmaker duo of Cattet & Forzani obviously have zero interest in narrative, but rather only in some neo-Giallo homage, which comes off as just a bad acid-trip through random slices of Bava, Argento, et al.

In retrospect, I also greatly disliked their feature Amer, so I think I will avoid giving them any shot at a "Strike Three." .

Overall, I am rating this series as above average, containing some capable drama, good character work, and situational insights. So, just a few miscellaneous comments to make here. I have not read the source novel, but it feels like the creators have wrung whatever they could out of the material; can't readily see a basis for it continuing beyond the one season. The point-of-view narration mostly works, although with the (fairly common) proviso of the narrator knowing -- or surmising -- things that she never observed or learned about and therefore couldn't really know. Lizzy Caplan has been very good in just about every project that I've seen her in. I could say much the same of Claire Danes. A friend of mine has found Jesse Eisenberg pretty annoying in just about every project, and doing pretty much the same acting from character to character, with the possible exception of his version of Lex Luthor -- which was poorly written and for which he was badly miscast. But I had no such problem here, and think he did quite well with Fleishman. The final episode meanders off track a bit too much, concluding in a detail that is not logical or credible. Since most good writers are "vampires" of material drawn from their own and other people's lives, I was assuming that the narrator was going to write and publish a certain thinly-veiled novel, but that did not happen -- at least not yet -- with that guess apparently proving wrong.

This disappointing under-an-hour pastiche assemblage may possibly include some glimpses of Brigitte that you haven't seen -- the only reason that I can think of for watching it. (She is one of those few performers worthy of veneration IMO, however.) Deduct some points if you don't understand French, as was the case for me; there have been no EN subs available so far. It makes extensive use of Richard Allan (VI) clips from Claude Mulot's La Femme Objet (1981), as a reminiscence framing device. But there are a lot of titles in Lahie's filmography that have been quite scarce, and this has definitely been one of them.

"Very loosely based" on the source characters, indeed. If you are coming to this edition of Spenser with a zero frame of reference, and are unfazed by storylines centering on massive official corruption conspiracy cliches, then this one might advance to a 5.5 rating, though even that would be largely due to some comedic touches that are off-kilter for a Spenser vehicle. But if you ever saw the original series or the standalone TV movies with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks in the leads (apparently rather faithful to Robert Parker's vision), or even to the three later appearances by Joe Mantegna as Spenser, then you'd have to judge Spenser: Confidential as a major fail. How far to take a reinterpretation of well-established characters ? Not this far, in this direction. Wahlberg has been effective in the past, but is just not very well suited for this.

If you tell me that a film is extremely rare &/or was lost for decades and miraculously resurfaced or got resurrected, chances are that this will equate to some immediate interest. This one turned out to not ultimately work as a mystery thriller, but still proved to be worth a look. Just have to add that if the character Harold's beard was fake, it has to have been one of the worst in the history of makeup, but if it was real that would be even more disturbing.

. . . and to see more of his work. This only runs a few minutes, but I really enjoyed it. Computer animation of a rather high quality. The future-tech setup looks like a bit of a nod to the "Babylon 5" series.