Prisoner of love

One is a princess, one is a genius, both confined for being women.

They're going to have to make a mini-series about Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus, in order to explore all the stories and complexities of this ambiguous figure in music history.  In Amadeus, he was the enabler, in Mozart's Sister (2010), the disabler of musical genius.

I presume you can guess at the story premise from the title.  René Féret, the film's writer-director, has imagined that Nannerl was not only a fine performing musician, but an incipient composer, an idea which can be neither proved nor disproved, since although we have no surviving compositions by her, Féret proposes that she burned all her manuscripts when her path to composing became impassable.  But it feels plausible, especially given the very nice music composed for her by Marie-Jeanne Serero.  (In time Nannerl is persuaded by her father Leopold to give up the man she loves and marry a nobleman of his choice, then to turn over her only son, named Leopold for her father to raise in case he was also a musical genius, which he was not.  She died blind and impoverished, having turned almost everything she had, material and spiritual to her voracious father.)

Féret's screenplay makes Nannerl the confidant of princesses, most notably the youngest daughter of Louis XV, who had no contact with her parents after early childhood and eventually became an abbess, turning to the only people who had shown her love, the nuns of the abbey in which she was raised and lived.  Louise and Nannerl (shown above) are played by daughters of Féret, which raises questions as to how much of a Leopold Mozart is the director of the very film we are watching, and is the whole thing just a hall of mirrors?

Two more observations and I'll go.  First, this is a very difficult type of film to make without the audience getting lost in the elegant surfaces of late 17th century court life.  It helps that the Mozarts are often living in shabby circumstances which diminish the glam factor.  And starting the film with Nannerl peeing in the snow might help some people.  But I suppose we can never resolve the tension as to whether people of previous epochs are just like us with fancy clothes, or utterly unlike us other than a superficial flesh resemblance, albeit the flesh factor is magnified by the film medium.

Second, it's odd to see Wolfgang Mozart relegated to a small supporting part as a bright-eyed, somewhat mischievous but still rather sweet child.  Maybe Amadeus would have been easier to take if we had seen that he once had not been an insufferable pig.

Third (I know I said I'd confine myself to two, but I thought of another and if you really want to hold me to my word, you're going to have to stop reading because Lord knows, I can't control what you do with your free time), I don't know whether it's Féret or just being French or even being European, but the film is a little bit like that person you're trying to finish a conversation with and he makes his point and you acknowledge that you understand and accept that and now it is time for you to get in your car or the elevator or what-have-you but you can't because he is making that same point again, and you are politely nodding and trying to indicate with body language that you are ready to move on and that he should be, too, and yes, he nods his head suggesting that he has read your non-verbal message and you are about to turn away but still he takes on that pre-emptory inhale that warns that long-winded important things are to be said, and alas, they are the very things that have been said.

The point is, we know that it sucks to be a woman and that it really, really sucked 275 years ago and we never really believed that she was going to make a career as a composer because...guess what...we've never heard of her music.  So, M. Féret, we're way ahead of you and we stay ahead of you for most of the two attenuated hours.

But there is no question, as far as performances by the daughter of the director go, Marie Féret has got Sofia Coppola beat six ways from Sunday.

Taking command

The film adaptations of the Millenium series which began with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo switched directors for the second installment, The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), with great success. What is impressive this time is often what is omitted.

Case in point: The film does not end with the usual order-is-restored conclusion typical of the mystery-thriller genre. In fact, the clean-up of the climatic violent sequence has not even begun when the film fades out. Also missing is the scene where everyone sits down and figures out the difference pieces of the story they know fit together and thus explain it all for the audience. If you're not going to take the trouble to keep up, this movie won't help you. Like Lisbeth, you better just go look it up on the Internet.

All of which demonstrates greater trust in the audience than demonstrated in the first installment. Played With Fire has two other elements not found in its predecessor: colors other than gray, including flesh tones, and the dominating presence of Lisbeth as played by Noomi Rapace, who seemed like a guest star in the first film, but here takes command as she should do, given both the strength of the character and Rapace's own strong presence.

Paradoxically, this second film serves as a kind of origin story, although it is chronologically after the events of the first film. I'll spare the details, as this one of those films in which the revelation of information is the principal activity of the plot, interspersed with bouts of violence. None of the violence is as explicit and repellent as in the first film -- but is that a good thing? Shouldn't violence, especially violence against women be repellent? Nonetheless, this time there's a sprinkling of martial arts and gun fu that edges toward more conventional "movie-movie" violence. That "movie" feeling is heightened by the principal thug's resemblance to "Jaws" played by Richard Kiel in the Bond movies.

But the greater professionalism of this entry also binds the top story (the crime to be unraveled) and the underlying story (who and what is Lisbeth and how did she get this way) into a more cohesive fabric than the first film, which seemed at times like two unrelated films. In Dragon Tattoo, the mystery of the missing girl in the Northern village seemed to have little to do with the Lisbeth's disturbing story, and she solves the mystery because it is an interesting job. Here the murders are inextricably bound up in someone's animosity to Lisbeth, and she has a moral duty to find and punish the killer. (Oddly enough, the evidence against Lisbeth's own persecutor, which is set up in this film as though it where something that might be lost or destroyed becomes irrelevant in rather short order. In fact, the entire threat to her shifts in this film, and one wonders if it will survive to Part 3.)

Director Alfredson has a smoother camera style and there is witty and perky cutting by Mattias Morheden. The music, like the earlier installment, is still overstatedly ominous in the Hollywood mode. Over the years I have observed that the use of music -- when and how it is used as well as the actual style of the music -- does more to date a film than any other single element, including the women's hairstyles. Most audiences can look past matters of passing fashion, but a crashing, thumping music score can seriously interfere with the audience's engagement. It is hard to think of a film which suffered badly from having too few or too subtle music cues.

The damaged Lisbeth put me in mind of the neglected girl at the center of The Curse of the Cat People (1944) a strange death-obsessed fantasy film which RKO had ordered up, hoping to get a sequel to the straight-on horror of Cat People.

Young Amy has forged a relationship with his father's deceased former wife, who gives her the loving attention she is missing from her own parents. Naturally, the adults around her treat Irina's appearance as that of an imaginary friend. But she finds another adult, Julia Farren, who encourages Amy's belief in magic and in making connections with the unseen world. Unlike Amy, who sees the dead who are not here, Julia cannot see her own daughter, whom she insists has died and been replaced by an impostor.



There is an enchanting scene with Irena on Christmas Eve, which would be season-appropriate, but finally Amy's father, whom Amy cannot reach emotionally, orders her to stop seeing Irena, and in a haunting scene that I can't embed, but I can link to here, they say farewell. The full palette of the tricks of studio filmmaking are on display here, in all their artificial splendor.

Amy goes to look for her friend one more time and stumbles into the home of Julia and her daughter, and inadvertently heals that family -- but through death, in a scene which could be called by horrific and cathartic. Producer Val Lewton is definitely toying with the boundaries of the horror genre. Amy learns she must make her own path through life and not rely on those who have gone before, and that she must live in the here and now and with her own parents and friends. She begins to take command of her own life by passing through fantasy, just as Lisabeth had to pass through violence.

Why are you telling me this?

Maybe it's because I'm not a middle-aged woman married to a very successful, much older man, but I cannot figure out why The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) was financed and produced and what it wants to say to what audience. It feels like yet another entry in the mid-decade tax-shelter movie boom.

The writer director was Rebecca Miller, daughter of the great playwright Arthur Miller. Perhaps that is how one attracts actors of the calibre of Alan Arkin, Shirley Knight, Julianne Moore, Monica Belluci, Wynona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Blake Lively to stand around gape-mouthed at how wonderful (or not-wonderful) Robin Wright Penn is. (It's clear why she took the project--she is the center of everything, which she rarely has been on film.)

Miller seems to have a talent for scene-making, but not storytelling. The style carries over some suspiciously theatrical techniques, such as putting past and present in the same moving frame, in the manner of Sjoberg's Miss Julie. Otherwise, I could not tell you what the film was about, what happened in it or what I was supposed to feel about that. The title character has a platonic relationship with Keanu Reeves, and Monica Belluci finds no reason to continue living, which might mean the film is science fiction or fantasy. On the other hand, Wynona Ryder is unstable and annoying, which might make it a documentary. And Julianne Moore is a lesbian again, which just means the film is just as unoriginal and unimaginative as you thought. (Ms. Moore should start saying ix-nay on the esbian-lay art-pays for a while. It's getting a bit self-congratulatory.) And the whole story suggests an unnatural reflection on what it would be like to be married to one's father. (Arkin's character is creepily similar to Arthur Miller.)

I know this blog is supposed to be reflective rather than summative. But what do you do when the film does not even dent the wrinkles of one's brain? The best I can offer here is public service -- skip this. There, I just gave you 98 minutes of your life back.

How long has this been going on?

I would like to apologize to my younger self, with regard to my complete ignoring of punk rock. In my defense, pop music and mainstream rock was in a tremendous creative doldrums during my high school and college years, and I spent the time learning about jazz, classical and theater music and dismissed most everything else as not worth my time. With regard to punk, the adolescent desire to outrage for its own sake was tiresome to me, and so I declined to pay attention to the music because of the juvenile label that was wrapped around it.

The Runaways (2010) is, by all accounts, a reasonably accurate telling of the story of the band by the same name, a band, which to all outward appearances was a cheap bit of exploitation -- "let's make a bad girls band as an answer to all those bad boy bands." In fact, it seems to have been music-based, and that is an unusual thing in ANY rock movie, especially one featuring young women.

The musical process is something that is usually botched by filmmakers. Only a handful of filmmakers ARE musical. George Roy Hill, who used Bach brilliantly in Slaughterhouse Five and introduced the world to Scott Joplin in The Sting was one. (I like Hill because he avoided underscoring, letting the music stand side-by-side with the image, rather than hover down below the dialogue.) My brief research has not turned up any other examples. A number of directors, including Spike Jonze, F. Gary Gray and Floria Sigismondi, director of The Runaways, began with music video, and therefore had some practice with the fusion of music and images. (Ridley Scott, Taylor Hackford and Baz Luhrmann have also demonstrated a flair for music.)

But all this is a matter of expressing music visually. The question before the court now is the creation of music. Stories of sole composers fall into the same trap as movies about writers. There is nothing visual about a person sitting and thinking. When they do write some music, it is usually a travesty -- improvising a full-blown song-hit. Amadeus avoided the problem by relying on the legend that Mozart composed the entire piece in his head and then merely transcribed what he had already composed. Most musicians find that fairly doubtful. There are always technical, engineering-type problems to be solved when composing, especially for an orchestra. There is a line that doesn't sit correctly for that instrument in that range, voice leading to be corrected, parallel lines to be eliminated (or perhaps emphasized). Even allowing for Mozart knowing exactly how the architecture of the music would work, there are nuts and bolts matters to be worked out.

But when the story is about a band, about people playing together, now you have a dynamic among people which can be dramatized. We've seen bad jam session movies, but there have been good ones, including Jammin' the Blues and the TV special The Sound of Jazz. In those cases, actual music conversations were taking place and the director and the camera operators were astute enough to actually capture them.

The Runaways is not a documentary. Its scenes are staged, using actors, not musicians. But it has some good scenes of the musicians finding their way toward each other and coming up with a collective cohesive style. This has nothing to do with music videos or musical staging. It is about the way musicians communicate with each other and sublimate their individual expression into a group product. When The Runaways is on this course, it is exciting and powerful. When it drifts into the usual drugs-and-sex tropes in every rock-and-roll movie, it is the Same Old Stuff. Because that stuff has nothing to do with what is going on between the characters, but is simply trading in what we are supposed to think about them.

And while theater is well suited to address the distance between us and the characters, film is better at dealing with the spaces between the characters. In this case, the space between the characters is taken up with music. When The Runaways sticks to that, it is first rate.

Brain trust

For a film about the development of trust, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) doesn't trust its audience very much. It turns out the lights, turns up the music, and bangs us over the head with some of the most grotesque and nauseating personal violence ever seen in a mainstream movie. It purports to condemn violence against women, then serves up a big steaming bowl of it, including attacks on and by the title character (who is not the central character).

Most of the film occupies that newly-established place bridging mystery, thriller and horror film, pioneered by Silence of the Lambs and continued with 7even. The addition of horror elements means not only horrific depictions of the murders, previously only described in more polite mysteries, but also violence upon one or more central characters, and thereby to be experienced by the audience.

That accretion of new genre conventions is almost necessary, because once the audience is past the preliminary investigation into piles of original documents and photos, the principal mystery becomes fairly easy to guess--I did so, and I'm terrible at solving mysteries. Thus, the final bursts of violence are perversely welcome after a long becalmed period, incorporating an improbably romance between the protagonist, a middle-aged reporter and the title character, a badly damaged young woman who has discovered a talent and passion for hacking. After that, there is a very limp resolution of the "outer" plot, in which the inner story has been nested. Thus, Dragon Tattoo has some unintended common ground with Inception, in their mutual Russian-nesting-doll structure.

The trust trope is thoroughly infused into the narrative: most institutions in this universe betray and degrade the people they are meant to serve. Government employees, businessmen, guardians of minors, lovers, fathers, brothers--none of them are trustworthy. It's a miracle that Blomqvist or Lisbeth can look anyone in the eye. And although the romance does not necessarily pan out, it's very existence, though brief, is a spiritual triumph.

The color palette is washed out as is de rigeur these days to indicate "atmosphere," and the production design is oppressively drab. Presumably this was deliberate--everyone seems desperate to find happiness or joy in this very bleak world. This movie's going to kill Swedish tourism.

Finally, although this is not a reflection on the film itself (which is what I try to confine myself to), one must applaud the producers' boldness in committing to filming the entire trio of mysteries at once. The Americanized version will not be done that way--there will be a slow, tentative stab at the initial installment, then a reluctantly made decision to go ahead, by which time the original actors and/or director will not be available, or perhaps the series will be abandoned incomplete due to the natural gutlessness of the American film finance market.

And will the villains in America be Nazis? That does not have the resonance in the States that it has for Europeans, who were faced with the actual option to join the party. American Nazis are fringe cuckoos. European Nazis could be either evil or careerists (like Herbert von Karajan).

But then driving out ambiguity is what American mainstream filmmaking is all about. At least they hired David Fincher for the remake, so we can hope.

Spiritual quest porn

Back to basics: Movies are pictures. They do pictures well. They even do pictures of things that are better experienced than viewed: hence there are successful movies about sex and food. But pictures do not reveal depths of meaning. There is no accurate picture of the inside of the mind. Sure, you can have voice-over narration, but that still needs to be concise and pithy in a way that naturally reduces and homogenizes a complex task like a spiritual journey. As Liz Gilbert, protagonist of Eat Pray Love (2010) says to her friend Richard (see illustration), "Do you always talk in bumper stickers?" The whole script is sort of a bumper script pasted onto a Range Rover taking the viewer on a marvelous journey which is less than the sum of its parts.

One symptom of the problems with this film is that never once does it explain how Liz is living for this 12-month quest. Pains are made to tell you that her bitter ex-husband has taken all her money and her house. Let's see, broke and homeless--time to travel around the world! What?? I've been gainfully employed for many years and only just got to Paris a couple of years ago, and then for just a few days. My wife tells me that the book explains that this whole one-year sojourn was on assignment. Not only does the film omit that, but it omits any sequences indicating that she is writing. She sends a couple of desultory e-mails, but as for being a disciplined professional, dependent on her skills to make a living, it is typical of the Hollywood fantasy machine that all that icky real-life stuff is overlooked. Even worse, the filmmakers seem to be unaware that anyone would want to know such things. Or else, they just don't care if we believe in the story they're telling. (Which is a hint that they don't believe it either. Sad for a story based on real life.)

Ryan Murphy comes from television and seems to believe that filmmaking is nothing but script and acting. He does not seem to be aware of how the camera, the editor or the composer could help him tell his story--it is hard to see if his technique is invisible or non-existent.

Frankly, only the first part of the film is executed with complete confidence, as it focuses on food and sex, albeit Liz abstains from the sex herself. Nonetheless, the sexual vibes are pervasive, along with red sauce and red wine. It begins to lose its bearings when it gets to India, where everyone is eager for Liz to have a spiritual experience, especially Richard, played by Richard Jenkins, a wonderful actor who almost makes this character seem to be a person, although the writer has given him nothing but a propensity to give unsolicited advice. He has a teary monologue about being a drunk and NOT hurting his kid. That gives you a clue to the kind of stakes the movie likes to play with--everything is close to being real, but just doesn't get there.

Everyone else who has the key to spiritual enlightenment in India seems to be English--Michael Cumpsty and Sophie Thompson. But the key seems to be held by a magic elephant who appears, rather delightfully to tie up that sequence. (There is an Indian wedding, but those are getting to be a dime a dozen in movies these days.)

Finally, the film arrives in Bali and its willpower completely collapses. Liz falls into a blindingly predictable romance with Javier Bardem, who is both Natural Man and Brilliant Businessman. She shows she is now strong and independent by shying away from his romantic proposition, then seeing her spiritual advisor and then accepting. How disappointing--she learns that her problem is that she has to learn how not to be with a man all the time. So she goes out and finds a man to be with. Problem solved. It feels like a bad Audrey Hepburn movie once removed.

Which takes us to the principal asset of Eat, Pray, Love. Julia Roberts is made to be in movies. Her large expressive features are completely legible at all times, and although she is not bad at delivering lines, the movie is better when it is most quiet, focusing on food, landscapes, sunsets, ocean views and Julia's big brown eyes. It doesn't get deeper than that, but since I couldn't afford an August vacation this year, this will have to do.

Frisky in Frisco

One aspect of early talkies that doesn't get enough comment is the amount of drama and life experience they could cram into 70 minutes or less. In Frisco Jenny (1932), Ruth Chatterton goes from hard-boiled youngster keeping the books in her dad's San Francisco saloon, through the 1906 earthquake (in an impressive sequence for a program picture), becomes the city's leading madam-of-madams and political fixer and self-sacrificing (secret) mother of the crusading district attorney who not only wants to put her kind out of business, but has her sentenced to death for murder--a murder she committed in order to prevent the son from finding out she is his mother. This is Madame X stripped down and short of sentiment, and Chatterton's just the gal that can deliver the story straight from the shoulder with the support of the breezy William Wellman directing.

A few Wellman tropes turn up here--rain; a corrupt power system; and most notably action which is partially obscured, usually hiding the most essential moment. In Frisco Jenny, that moment comes when Louis Calhern, crooked lawyer pal of Jenny, is wrestling with degenerate gambler J. Carroll Naish. They disappear behind the round top of a large table and a gun goes off. Calhern straightens up suddenly and staggers and we think he is the victim until we see the pistol in his hand. Then we realize Naish is the one who has bought the farm. There is a very entertaining gavotte as Calhern and Chatterton hide the pistol from the police who have just shown up, transferring it from one location to another. It spends the greatest time in an ice cream log/cake; is this meant to be an image of death and corruption buried in sweetness?

The conclusion of the film raises the question as to what one considers sentimental. Yes, our heroine is self-sacrificing for her son. But the real sentimental ending would have been for her identity to have been revealed at the last possible moment and for her son to have prevented her execution, as they fall, grateful and weeping into each other's arms. This film has no tears to spare, no pity for characters or audience. Chatterton continues straight along the path she set out on many years before, without complaint, explanation or a demand for understanding. Aside from the great Stanwyck, I can't think of another female actor whose characters conducted their lives more like a man. We really need a Chatterton renaissance.

Hard, hard

You can't complain that the title is misleading. The Stoning of Soraya M (2008) is about just that. It's not about her hard life, or the whispering campaign against her or the treachery of her husband or the powerless of women in post-revolutionary Iran, although all those elements are touched in the first hour of the film, which might be considered a preamble to the main event.

Because at around the one-hour mark of the film, we know that Soraya is going to be stoned to death in just a few minutes and nothing can change that. And that fact may make this film the hardest film to watch in many years. Not hard because it is not engaging, but hard like watching videos of 9/11 is hard.

Viewed purely as aesthetics, the film is an admirable example of literary adaptation, simply because what it does in its second hour can only be done on film. I have not read the novel the film is based on--it is certainly widely and highly praised. But writer Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh and director and co-writer Cyrus Nowrasteh have lit upon purely cinematic story-telling solution to the central problem of the story: the pivotal event is sickening, horrifying and susceptible to melodrama.

Whereas other filmmakers focus on melodrama and suspense (and this is what I had expected in this case) as to whether and how Soraya will be found guilty on trumped-up charges, Soraya M reveals the plot at once and establishes its inevitability. There is no question that this woman's husband is in too great a hurry to marry his blond girlfriend, and that it is far easier to get a married woman publicly executed than to obtain a divorce.

Finally, the film gets to the heart of the matter and does what only film can do. If you have seen stonings as staged in other films, you have no idea what happens. I thought, as I saw the men digging a hole, that she will stand in the hole, dodging the stones until she can no longer do so. No. The victim is placed in the hole, and buried from the waist up (see illustration above). The arms are bound, so the victim is completely immobilized, body and arms and helpless to defend herself from the rocks, so eagerly gathered by small boys seeking excitement. In Soraya's case, the first stone is to be thrown by her father, who fails not for lack of will, but lack of arm. The effort wavers, and then the "aggrieved" husband takes up a stone, and the onslaught begins.

You think the camera will turn away--it will play out the scene on the faces of the witnesses, or of the women listening to it all from a safe distance. No again. Nowrasteh stays there, right there, as we see every rock hit face and head. This is, of course, a fiction film with actors and there was some film trickery involved, but you don't think of that as the scene unfolds. You apparently see a woman stoned to death from beginning to end.

There is a lot of idiotic criticism of the film, calling it heavy-handed, propagandistic and one-sided. These critics are all American men, mostly from the South and Middle West. None of them suggest what the "other" side, the "fair and balanced" side of a story of a person being stoned to death would be. The facts of Soraya's case ultimately don't matter, which is why I grateful the filmmakers didn't dwell on them. What matters is this. It's the 21st century and stoning people to death--by ordinary citizens--is still a legal punishment.

My write-up here will probably discourage a lot of people from seeing the film. I hope not. There is a lot of good filmmaking, and a great deal of courage from everyone involved. The pivotal scene is very hard to watch, but not physically nauseating as in a cheap horror film; it is horrifying to the mind and spirit, but ultimately edifying. One can no longer say about such practices, "Well, that's just their way there." It is better to be forced to know the truth.

Leavening the film is the action of the women as a community. Early in the story, we see Soraya protecting the property of a widower whose wife's possessions are snatched up by greedy neighbors (a choice which brings her trouble later). Later, we see Soraya's aunt (who did her best to protect her) taking charge of Soraya's daughters (the sons will go with the father) and the circle of women drawing around them to shield the from the horror. Over and over, every society tells the story; how men enter the wilderness and women bring the family, and with it decency, kindness and moral order.

Just not enough moral order, evidently.

Short back and sides

There are low-budget independent films and then there are miniscule budget films. Miniscule has its charms, as in The Village Barbershop (2008), which had a minimal release after being seen at the Toronto Film Festival.

It belongs to the hopeful-young-person-joins-up-with grumpy-old-man-genre as exemplifed by Gran Torino and Up. So you know the success of the film is going to hang on the quality of the company, because there really isn't anything new to say. Everybody finds out that they need a new start, they need to find a way toward hope. With the young, it's natural; with the old, it needs to be re-learned.

The extreme low budget of this film forced economies upon it which actually add to its quality. For example, most scenes play out in two- or three-shots, so that the actors have control of the performances instead of the editor and director. Frequently, multiple actions are played out in single shots. If comedy is tragedy plus time, it is also misfortune plus distance. Keeping the camera a little farther away lends the kind of dispassionate distance that makes everything a little funnier.

I can prove this. Imagine you are viewing a performance of Oedipus Rex. You hear and see what Oedipus hears and sees and you feel for his terrible misfortune with him. Catharsis and all that good stuff. Yay tragedy. Now--put Oedipus on his throne very far away from you. Let's put him half a football field away. Then he summons the seers or whoever and says to them, "Tell me why the city of Thebes is so afflicted." Then one of the seers walks up to Oedipus and talks very quietly to him, so quietly we can't hear him. We can sort of see Oedipus's face scrunching up. Then we hear him scream:"I did.......WHAT???!!???" The world's most famous tragedy is now funny.

This is one of silent comedy's built-in advantages, that everything in that world takes place behind a large window that prevents sound from reaching us, and thus we are always a bit separated from the world of silent film, which is one reason the comedies have lasted, while most of the serious drama has not (and in fact, often looks funny).

Back to Village Barbershop. John Ratzenberger will lose his barbershop if he doesn't snap out of his widower funk and face reality. Shelly Cole helps him do that. Both go from sad to happy. They have a good, believable chemistry. It all takes place in the working-class "backstage" areas of Reno. [I have a warm spot for stories that take place "behind the scenes" of a place or a milieu which seems glamorous to outsiders, but which is workaday to its own denizens.] Novice writer-director Chris Ford exhibits decency, some comic chops and a proper sense of scale (small). The villain is a bit cardboard, but that may have been due to the limitations of his casting pool.

Mr. Ford could do a lot worse and so could you.