GIGER RECOUNTER

Playing Saturday, June 6, at No Festival Required:

Dark Star: H. R. Giger’s World—The Swiss artist and designer H. R. Giger made his biggest single mark on pop culture as the creator of the title creature in the Alien films. As with much of Giger’s work, the Alien is scary but—to my eye, anyway—not ugly; it has a svelte elegance.

At the beginning of this fascinating documentary, director Belinda Sallin’s camera noses around the quiet grounds of Giger’s rambling, tree-shrouded, cat-guarded old house, set incongruously amidst the sleek modern architecture of Zurich. We’re brought in the door and down the shadowy halls, past freaky murals and heaps of books, to where Giger sits sketching.

Again, the home that Giger pads around does indeed seem “dark,” bizarre and macabre, but not evil. There’s a serene, almost idyllic atmosphere to the place that’s quite appealing.

This effect even applies to the man himself. In the film, completed shortly before his death last year, Giger looks like a real-world version of Tolkien’s Gollum. Written on his round face with sad eyes and small, fretful mouth are both a past that includes tragedy and a life spent transcribing, often via airbrush, the surreal, erotically-charged “biomechanical” visions in his head. He speaks in a low amphibian croak suggesting that he suffered a stroke at some point.

But he’s no recluse. He’s friendly, patient and grateful toward his wife and the many friends and helpers that hang around his home; I found myself wishing I could be among them.

“Hansruedi” Giger was born in Chur in 1940, the son of a pharmacist. His childhood seems to have been happy, although his seminal memories seem to be of his father giving him a human skull or his sister taking him to the Raetian Museum to see a mummy, and he is said to have designed “ghost rides” to entertain neighbor kids.

After art school he gained gradual fame throughout the ‘70s with posters and rock album art—I first became aware of him by his cover for Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery. His Alien design won him an Oscar in 1980, and he worked on many other films, including Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abortive Dune adaptation (Giger is memorable among the talking heads in last year’s Jodorowsky’s Dune).

Giger’s wife Carmen tells Sallin’s camera that she finds her husband’s paintings erotic, and at an art gallery in Austria, a curator says that he sees a light behind the darkness of Giger’s visions. I see it too. Although the artist expresses a disbelief in—and a distaste for—the idea of an afterlife, there is, in his work, an exalted spiritual radiance under the chilly surface.

Opening today:

Entourage—The adventures of a pretty-boy Hollywood star and the hangers-on who share his glam lifestyle and guide his career is the not the sort of show I would have expected to enjoy. But the HBO series, which ran from 2004 to 2011, and which this feature continues, became a favorite of mine.

It is, I suppose, a guilty pleasure, loaded with snazzy homes and cars and luxury items and, only slightly less objectified, innumerable nude or scantily-clad young women (yet, oddly, many of the show’s most devoted fans that I know are women). It’s so escapist that it doesn’t even show us the drudgery and tedium of actually working on a movie, only the decadent partying and lively studio intrigues that take place before and after a movie is in the can.

What gave Entourage a heart was the cast. Easygoing Adrian Grenier, as easygoing star Vincent Chase, was rarely the focus of the stories, he was the hook on which the acting ensemble hung—Kevin Connelly as Vince’s Jiminy Cricket manager Eric “E” Murphy, Jerry Ferrara as chauffeur Sal “Turtle” Assante and Kevin Dillon as Vince’s older brother, hack actor and self-appointed chef Johnny “Drama” Chase.

There was a raft of well-realized supporting characters, and many real-life celebrities showed more juice playing themselves here than playing characters in their own movies. But the real energy on Entourage came, beyond question, from Jeremy Piven. As Vince’s wound-up agent Ari Gold, Piven strode around unloading insults and invective in his emphatic, declarative voice, while also letting us see Ari’s underlying conscience, his capacity for affection, and his surprisingly fierce if selectively applied sense of integrity. Ari’s manic efforts to unravel the studio-politics messes in which he finds himself were the true hero struggles of Entourage, and the series would have been inert without him.

Piven and the rest seem happy to slip back into their roles in the new film, directed by series creator Doug Ellin. The plot, around which a half-dozen or so subplots revolve, concerns Vince’s directorial debut, the attempt by the imbecilic son (Haley Joel Osment) of a Texan investor (Billy Bob Thornton) to meddle with it, and the efforts of Ari, now a studio head, to prevent this meddling. The film may not do much for the uninitiated, but for fans, it’s probably enough to say that it plays like a sped-up season of the show. Ellin keeps things moving, and for the short running time of Entourage—it clocks in at well under two hours—I was contentedly entertained. It feels like a reunion with old, immature, disreputable, goodhearted friends.

I'M TOO LISTY, & TOO MUCH IN LOVE

Time again for the film critic’s annual self-indulgence—as opposed to all those weekly self-indulgences—the Top Ten List. Admitting that there are still quite a few high-profile flicks I haven’t gotten to yet—The Theory of Everything, Selma, Get On Up, Boyhood, Calvary and Belle, among others—here are ten moves that, as of this writing, I’m willing to admit I really liked and found memorable:

Jodorowsky’s Dune—The mad director narrates us his abortive ‘70s-era film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, to the accompaniment of glorious conceptual art. This documentary is marvelously entertaining, probably more so than the movie Jodorowsky would have made back then.

The Imitation Game—Fascinating, inspirational, ultimately infuriating account of pioneering British computer scientist Alan Turing’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, and his heartbreaking struggles after the war. Benedict Cumberbatch is moving and maddening as the off-putting genius.

Blue Ruin—Badly overlooked, this gruesomely violent, highly suspenseful revenge noir, made on a tiny budget by writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, doesn’t put a foot wrong. Macon Blair is startling as the homeless man roused to horrific action against the family he holds responsible for the murders of his parents.

Rudderless—Also overlooked, William H. Macy’s debut feature as a director is a painful and emotionally challenging drama about the power of music. After his son’s tragic death, a stricken father (Billy Crudup) discovers, and starts performing, beautiful songs written by the boy. Crudup does his best movie work since his (very different) performance in Almost Famous.

Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me—James Keach recorded the final tour of the Alzheimer’s-afflicted country great. It’s a powerful document, and an artful, warm, occasionally funny piece of filmmaking.

Snowpiercer—After an apocalyptic Earth-wide freeze, a supertrain carries the remnants of humanity in an annual circuit of the planet—lower classes confined to the rear cars; upper class toward the engine. Movies don’t come much more elegantly weird than this…

Frank—…unless they’re accounts of a visionary punk musician who walks around all day wearing a huge papier-mache head that makes him look like Davy from Davy and Goliath, and keeps his band in cult-like semi-isolation while he strives for perfection. This bizarre, all-but-impossible-to-explain movie is funny, unsettling and unexpectedly poignant.

Guardians of the Galaxy—Critics can feel a little sheepish putting a big-budget smash hit like this on the list, but James Gunn’s sci-fi comedy really gave me a good time. Also, its soundtrack is full of wonderful ‘70s-era pop music. And also, it features a talking raccoon.

The Boxtrolls—This stop-motion fantasty about well-meaning subterranean trolls who wear boxes is pungently grotesque, with a tendency toward the gross-out. But it has a big heart.

The Book of Life—Maybe the most ambitiously-titled movie since The Tree of Life, this animated fantasy spun from Mexican Day of the Dead motifs feels both authentically traditional and vibrantly modern. It’s a visual knockout, and the music is beautiful as well.

And here are ten very-near-misses: the delightful Mike Myers documentary Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Million Dollar Arm, Noah, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Into the Woods, Wild, The Homesman, Chef, Unbroken and Tim Burton’s fascinating misfire Big Eyes.

While I admit the excellence of its filmmaking and of Michael Keaton’s acting—I hope he wins the Oscar this year—I couldn’t quite bring myself to like Birdman, but other movies I wasn’t sorry I sat through this year included: Gone Girl, Interstellar, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Joe, Big Hero 6, Penguins of Madagascar, Top Five, Elsa and Fred, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Jersey Boys, The Monuments Men, Stonehearst Asylum, The Lego Movie, Obvious Child, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Planes: Fire and Rescue, The Skeleton Twins, The Trip to Italy, For No Good Reason, The Hundred-Foot Journey and The Last Days of Robin Hood, with Kevin Kline, excellent as Errol Flynn on his last legs.

And finally, there’s The Interview, which I heroically attended at Harkins Valley Art instead of watching on pay-per-view, in defense of our American way of life.

PAPER DUNE

It’s a ridiculously crowded movie weekend here in the Valley; the two best I saw were, oddly, both documentaries about old men:

Jodorowsky’s Dune—Though an interesting, badly uneven film of Dune by David Lynch was released in 1984, it was not the first attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s ponderous sci-fi epic to the screen. In the early and mid-‘70s, the Chilean-born avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky, famous/notorious for his Theater-of-Cruelty-style surrealist “midnight movie” western El Topo (1970) and a couple of other visually powerful but patience-taxing films, worked on an ambitious version of Herbert’s novel. Indeed, according to this documentary by Frank Pavich, Jodorowsky and his collaborators essentially finished the movie—on paper, in the form of a comprehensively detailed storyboard rendered by several of the top fantasy and sci-fi artists.

In Pavich’s film, Jodorowsky, still vital and garrulous in his eighties, recounts how he adapted Herbert’s tale, with considerable liberties—he refers to the process as “raping” Frank Herbert, “but with love”—and then recruited different artists to realize different aspects of his version: French comic-book great Jean “Moebius” Giraud for the characters, Brit sci-fi cover artist Chris Foss for the spaceships, Swiss illustrator H. R. Giger for the evil planet Harkonnen, American Dan O’Bannon for the special effects, and so on. Cast members were to include Jodorowsky’s son Brontis, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali!

Studio financing never materialized, and not a frame of the movie was ever shot. The thrust of the new film is twofold: First, the documentary asks, what if this had been the big space movie of the ‘70s, rather than Star Wars? Second, the filmmakers assert that Jodorowsky’s magnificent storyboard material has been pillaged by countless sci-fi, horror and fantasy films of the past four decades.

The first question is specious. You can argue that the Star Wars franchise, enjoyable as much of it is, helped make pop culture more insipid. But it doesn’t follow that if Jodorowsky had managed to realize his Dune project, we’d be a culture of avant-garde spiritualists. As to the storyboard’s influence, however, the movie uses compare-and-contrast to build a pretty convincing case.

I enjoyed Jodorowsky’s Dune as much as any film I’ve seen so far in 2014. I’m nowhere near deep enough to say whether Jodorowsky’s a visionary or a conman, but either way he’s irresistible—a buoyant, exuberant raconteur.

Indeed, as I sat watching him, I thought, this movie is so much better than the pretentious space opera that Jodorowsky would probably have made back then. Instead of glacially-paced spacescapes and portentous pronouncements, we get to see the beautiful illustrations—likely far more beautiful than their onscreen realizations would have been—while Jodorowsky describes, with infectious enthusiasm, key scenes from the movie in his head, or dramatically narrates his failed struggle to get it out of his head.

Near the end, he notes that with modern CGI capabilities, his Dune could be made, even if he’s dead. I’d like to see the effort, certainly, but I’m not sure, after Pavich’s film, that it’s necessary. I’ll take Jodorowsky’s Dune over Jodorowsky’s Dune anytime.

The Unknown Known—This portrait of W. Bush-era Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is another jaw-dropper from the great Errol Morris. Rumsfeld is the only talking head here, and with the distance of retirement, and perhaps a bit chastened at the judgment even of many conservatives that the Iraq War was a disaster both morally and practically, the ruefully smiling fellow comes across as maybe the most unassuming of the rogue’s gallery from that administration. It’s startling when his mild-mannered interview footage with Morris—in this film we hear the director’s exasperated questions—is intercut with footage of his press conferences from the lead-up to and early days of the war, in which he’s condescending, combative, snidely dismissive of anybody’s doubts about the project.

The Unknown Known is a remarkable document, but it’s also a hypnotic, graphically complex piece of cinema, driven by Danny Elfman’s sad, tense music. As with 2003’s The Fog of War, the new film is about how an idiotically ill-advised military adventure can grow out of the intellectual abstraction of a bright, rational person. Rumsfeld’s arias of spin cross over into a gibberish that’s almost poetic, and at times he stops talking and grins in satisfaction at his own equivocations, as if they were Sufi parables.

An obsessive writer of memos—they were so abundant they became known as “snowflakes”—Rumsfeld seems to have gotten lost at times in a fog of words. In many memos he fixated on definitions, as if by using his terminology narrowly enough, he could somehow parse out a justification for the bloodbath.

Also opening this weekend:

Rio 2—The 2011 animated kidflick was about a romance between two endangered blue macaws who might have been the last of their kind. In this sequel the two of them, voiced by Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway, travel with their three chicks from the title city to the Amazon rainforest, where they learn that the female’s old flock is thriving. Some lovely musical numbers ensue, sung by the likes of Bruno Mars, will. i. am. and Jamie Foxx, and “choreographed” in the style of Busby Berkeley. Come to think of it, I bet Berkeley would love to have worked with parrots, if he could have.

The best strand, however, belongs to Jemaine Clement as a vengeful cockatoo, Ellen Chenoweth as the brightly-colored frog who regards him with unembarrassed adoration, and a silent anteater who puts his prehensile tongue to spectacular use. Clement’s rendition of “I Will Survive” was my favorite number in the movie.

But the flock’s home is threatened by deforestation, and if you think about the reality this conflict represents, then sweet and tuneful as Rio 2 is, and sincere as the wish of its makers to raise environmental consciousness may be, it may leave you feeling as depressed and helpless as The Unknown Known.

Southern Baptist Sissies—Playing in Phoenix one night only, this Saturday at FilmBar, this is only nominally a movie. It’s really a well-produced video of a live L.A. performance of the play by Del Shores, concerning four adolescent boys (played by adults) in a Baptist church in Texas, and their varying struggles with the awareness that they’re gay. Central character Mark (Emerson Collins), who chats up the audience between lines of the hymns, notes that they were four out of forty kids in the congregation, so the percentage was about right.

All of the acting is good—Leslie Jordan and Dale Dickey, as two barflies representing the middle-aged lapsed-Baptist contingent, put on an entertaining drawl clinic—and there is some fine music, ranging from choir offerings to drag numbers. Make no mistake, however, this is no festive musical comedy, but a bluntly didactic, often tragic drama, and the later scenes are painfully overwrought, though never, alas, implausible.

I just hope that Shores knows that you don’t have to be gay to feel forsaken by the conservative-Christian idea of God. You only have to have, say, a fondness for masturbation, or a belief in evolution, or, maybe, some gay—or nonbelieving or Jewish or Muslim—friends that you don’t think ought to be flung into the fires of hell for being who they want to be.