Out of It

Gretchen Corbett and Barry Gordon

Paul Williams' Out of It is an amateurish teen film set in Long Island in 1965 or so. The teens take turns dating each other and hanging out at the beach. The boys are tormented by their football coach (Frank Campanella) during summer practice and that is about it in terms of plot. Nobody seems to have a summer job. The kids are enjoying upper middle class leisure and the film, to its credit, acknowledges this. Williams' dialogue is more nuanced than his direction. Even the villains of the film have moments in which we see glimpses of humanity. Ultimately, this is a better teen flick than the beach blanket flicks or a pretentious youth picture like Last Summer. The main reason is that its four main actors are all solid performers who have their moments here and would go on to greater acclaim. 

The main character of Out of It is Paul (Barry Gordon), a restless and horny teen riding out the summer between Junior and Senior year. He is a existentialism reading nerd ultimately more interested in getting some girl action than understanding Camus. He dates Barbara (Gretchen Corbett) briefly, but doesn't seem to mind when she pairs off with one of his buddies. This is because he is fixated on Christine (Lada Edmund Jr.), a stunning blonde who functions here much as Suzanne Somers would in American Graffiti. Christine is going steady with Russ (Jon Voight), a lunk-headed football star and Paul's nemesis. The role of Russ is not dissimilar to that of Joe Buck. Out of It which, judging from Ms. Corbett's paisley bikini, was shot in 1967, sat on the shelf for a while until it was released in 1969 to ride the coattails of Voigt's starring role in Midnight Cowboy. Voigt was promoted as the star of Out of It along with Gordon, but Voigt's role in the film is really a supporting one.

Barry Gordon and Jon Voigt

Russ, at one point, taunts Paul about his Jewish heritage. I found this interesting, especially since Out of It seems to be a cut rate version of The Graduate, a film which somehow managed to turn Dustin Hoffman into a goy. Director Williams gives Paul some ridiculous Walter Mitty type fantasy sequences that fall flat, but he also gives Paul moments of emotional growth that redeem a shaky picture. Paul asks Christine out for a date and is surprised when she accepts and eventually comes on to him. He is able to provide her the conversation and feeling of relatedness that she doesn't find with the dim Russ. Paul learns that to have a real relationship there has to be a common bond that transcends sexual attraction. This leads him back to Barbara.

The wimpy baroque rock soundtrack is credited to the New York Rock Ensemble and one of its members, Mark Snow. Snow would soon leave the group and become a successful composer for television and film. Out of It is greatly helped by the cinematography of John G. Alvidsen who went on to direct Rocky and The Karate Kid. His efforts are the most professional aspect of a film that suffers from poor pacing and clunky sound. Barry Gordon would have a successful and long career in television and movies. He ended up being the longest serving President of the Screen Actors Guild, but is best known as the voice of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Donatello. Lada Edmund Jr. was one of the original go-go dancers on the Hullabaloo television show and eventually realized that she was not cut out for acting. She became one of the most successful stunt women in Hollywood. 

Out of It marked the film debut of Gretchen Corbett, always a Kino Biff favorite. She is most famous for her continuing role as James Garner's on-again, off-again love interest and attorney on The Rockford Files. She was either bussing Garner or bailing him out. An Oregon native, Corbett first had success with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and on the Broadway stage. Her glowing notices led her to be signed by Universal Pictures as one of its last contract players. She eventually returned to Oregon and has been heavily involved in Portland theater for the last thirty years or so. She still makes appearances in films and television, usually for productions that are filmed in the Pacific Northwest like Pig, Portlandia, and Shrill. I think she is the cat's pajamas and the bee's knees.

James Garner and Gretchen Corbett in The Rockford Files

Normal

Bob Odenkirk and f(r)iends

Ben Wheatley's Normal combines small town atmosphere, propellant bursts of action, and dark comedy. Bob Odenkirk stars as Ulysses, the newly hired interim sheriff of Normal, Minnesota. That an outsider could take on such a job for a mere two months strains credulity, but Normal strives for a canvas of bent reality rather than realism itself. Soon into the film, Ulysses and the audience begin to feel that something sinister is lurking beneath the prairie home exterior of the little burg. An inept bank robbery reveals that the institution was housing yakuza money and that the whole town is on the take. Ulysses and the two hapless robbers (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) must fight off the entire populace. The town is armed to the teeth and Ulysses takes advantage of the firepower in an extremely violent last act.

Normal was written by Derek Kolstad, the writer chiefly responsible for the John Wick series of films. Mr. Kolstad has written a clever script, thankfully more compact than the operatic Wick films. The action scenes contain more of a Rube Goldberg/ Wile E. Coyote element than in the Wick films and are expertly wrought by Wheatley who has previously displayed his action chops in Free Fire and Meg 2. Kolstad gives Ulysses a voice over narration in the form of phone messages to his estranged wife, Penny (geddit). Odenkirk handles the voice overs with aplomb, but this points to the derivative nature of Kolstad's work. Not derivative of Homer though Kolstad is brainy enough to make shout outs to Dorothy Parker, Breaking Bad, and Old Boy. No, Normal is a Coen brothers tribute, grafting the Homeric allusions of O Brother, where art thou? to the high plains noir of Fargo. There are worse formulas, I suppose, but seasoned cinema goers will have seen it all before.

That said, Kolstad deserves credit for creating varied and striking roles for a compact, B movie format and Wheatley has elicited good performances from Mr. Odenkirk, Ms. Jolly, Mr. Fletcher, Henry Winkler, Lena Headey, Jess McLeod, and Billy MacLellan. Manitoba stands in well for Minnesota and the picture gets points for killing off a beloved character actor halfway through the proceedings. Mr Wheatley's psychedelic dynamism meshes well with Kolstad's askew view of his characters, but with limited results. Novel seems more like a project for hire for Wheatley whose best and most personal works remain the films he has directed in his native England: Sightseers, A Field in England, and In the Earth.               

In the Fog

Vladimir Svirskiy at center

Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog, from 2012, is a harrowing series of vignettes showing Belarusian partisans fighting Germans and Belarusian black shirts during what the Russians term the Great Patriotic War. The film's title points to the ambivalence with which the film regards wartime allegiances. The plot hinges on issues of betrayal and retribution. Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is a railway worker suspected of collaborating with the Nazis, implicating three comrades who are hung for sabotage. Late one night, an old friend named Burov (Vladislav Abasin) comes calling. Sushenya knows that the partisans have decided to execute him. He is accepting of his fate and walks away from hearth and home with Burov and another partisan.

In the Fog opens with a bravura sequence detailing the hanging. It is a near wordless dolly through the watching soldiers and horrified populace. It firmly establishes that the Nazi's have let slip the three-headed dog of war, terror, and torture. The remainder of the film follows Sushenya and his two executioners as they head into the woods. As often amidst the fog of war, things go awry. The slow burn of the plot is heightened by three flashbacks which illuminates the back story of the principals. The film is based on Vasil Bykaǔ's 1989 novel. A Belarusian author, Bykaŭ specialized in World War 2 fiction. His novella The Ordeal was the basis for Larisa Shepitko's film masterpiece The Ascent. 

In the Fog is terse to the point of absurdity. Danger is always imminent, so talk is cheap. Loznitsa ratchets up the feeling of paranoia by eschewing a musical score. Thus, our attention to the ambient sounds of the film is heightened whether we are listening to the trees rustle, an animal cry or a far off rifle shot. Even if I find the ending fatalistically predictable, In the Fog stands alongside such memorable films about Russian resistance fighters as The Ascent and Elem Klimov's Come and See.