Review: 'Happy Happy Joy Joy' captures the rise and fall of an iconic cartoon, but underplays its creator's disturbing behavior

I remember seeing “Ed Wood,” and feeling somewhat ripped off that director Tim Burton gave us the triumphant Hollywood ending — at the premiere of Wood’s crap-masterpiece “Plan 9 From Outer Space” — and not taking us to the real end of Wood’s career, making porno films.

I had a similar reaction when I watched “Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story,” a documentary that captures the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of one of TV’s most out-there animated programs — but barely scratches the surface of the awfulness of the man who created it.

Ron Cicero and Kimo Easterwood, two longtime crew guys directing their first film, largely follow the storyline of a rags-to-riches-to-rags Hollywood story. Canadian animator John Kricfalusi toils in the L.A. trenches, recoiling at the cheap, toy-driven animated product around him — so he gathers some like-minded artists to start creating the kind of cartoons they loved, in the mold of Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. 

Most notably, Kricfalusi brings on Bob Camp, who is as talented and devoted to the old style of animation as he is. He also brings on Lynne Naylor, who becomes his production partner and, for a time, his girlfriend — but when they break up, Naylor leaves the production company they co-founded, Spumco. As one animator puts it, it’s like the parents divorced, and Mom left the kids with their jerk of a father.

Kricfalusi creates some characters and makes a pitch to the networks, who turn him down flat — one even has a security guard escort him off the lot. He meets Vanessa Coffey, a producer with ties to Nickelodeon, who dislikes the pitch — but likes two of the characters, a manic chihuahua and a not-very-bright cat. Coffey convinces the big cheese at Nickelodeon, Geraldine Laybourne, to give Kricfalusi a six-episode tryout with these characters, called Ren and Stimpy.

The show is an instant hit in 1991, an anarchic mix of juvenile humor and innuendo that sails over the kids’ heads. Nickelodeon, sensing the hip factor, reruns the shows on its sister network, MTV. Nickelodeon also orders 20 episodes for the second season.

Here’s where the fairy tale falls apart. Kricfalusi’s perfectionism, and his verbal abuse of his team, leads to budget overruns and missed deadlines — and his dismissive treatment of Coffey and the network brass leads to Nickelodeon firing him. Interviewed by the documentarians, Kricfalusi still calls the termination a betrayal by his Spumco staffers, especially Camp, and by Coffey — without ever acknowledging his role in his professional self-immolation.

If that were all to the story of how “The Ren & Stimpy Show” came and went from the public psyche, then I’d say Cicero and Easterwood did an admirable job of cajoling thoughtful, self-effacing interviews out of most of the principals — as well as commentary from some celebrity fans, including Jack Black and comic Iliza Schlesinger.

But that’s not the whole story. Cicero and Easterwood were well into production and editing when Buzzfeed News broke a big story in 2018, detailing Kricfalusi’s inappropriate sexual relationships with underage fans who came to Los Angeles and lived with him. The revelation reportedly convinced Kricfalusi to grant the filmmakers an interview he had previously denied them, presumably so he could frame the story his way. The filmmakers also interview Robyn Byrd, one of the two women in the Buzzfeed story, an artist who struck up a mail correspondence with Kricfalusi, and moved in with him when she was 16 and he was in his 40s.

The problem with “Happy Happy Joy Joy” is that Cicero and Easterwood leave this part of Kricfalusi’s past for the last 15 minutes of the film. Besides making Kricfalusi’s behavior with the young women — which, if not for the statute of limitations, might have put him in prison — an afterthought, the filmmakers give Kricfalusi the last word, a non-apology apology that includes a creepy invitation to see Byrd in person again.

The filmmakers didn’t do what they should have done, which was to bulldoze their edit and start over — to put the art of “Ren & Stimpy” and the abusive treatment of his Spumco staff in context of Kricfalusi’s actions as an alleged sexual predator. The results, as they stand, are uncomfortably like watching an old “Red & Stimpy” episode: Entertained at first, then somewhat saddened, then totally creeped out.  

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‘Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story’

★★

Opening Friday, August 14, at the Megaplex Theatres, and available as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably R for language, crude animated humor, sexual situations and descriptions of sexual abuse. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: In the dread-soaked 'She Dies Tomorrow,' director Amy Seimetz finds a perfect metaphor for our contagiously anxious times

The new movies available to us during the COVID-19 pandemic — not the blockbusters the studios are kicking down the road, but the indies in “virtual cinemas,” or streaming on-demand, or playing in drive-ins or the few theaters that reopened early — will fall into two categories: Time capsules of what was before the virus, and chillingly prescient allegories for our unsettled times.

Writer-director Amy Seimetz’ suspense drama “She Dies Tomorrow” lands squarely into that second category — a tight, doom-laden creeper that speaks to our fears of isolation and contagion with devastating silences.

When we first meet Amy, played by Kate Lyn Sheil, we see a close-up of her eye — mascara streaked, tears welling up, filled with fear and resignation. We fill in some details about her, that she’s a recovering alcoholic who’s just moved into a new house, and that one of her friends, Jane (Jane Adams), is apparently her AA sponsor. What we hear Amy saying, over and over, is “I’m going to die tomorrow.”

Amy says this to Jane, who comes over to make sure she’s OK. She’s not OK, and soon Amy’s belief that she’s going to die becomes Jane’s fear. Jane starts behaving oddly, and fully believes she’s going to die tomorrow — and she takes this information to her brother, Jason (Chris Messina) and his wife Susan (Katie Aselton), who are celebrating Susan’s birthday with friends Brian (Tunde Adebimpe) and Tilly (Jennifer Kim).

While Jane is spreading her message to her friends, the movie takes us back to Amy, who decides to spend her last hours riding dune buggies and getting stoned with a guy (Adam Wingard) who rents her the buggy. She also flashes back to a date with Craig (Kentucker Audley), where this might all have started.

Seimetz is a jack-of-all-trades filmmaker, working both the indie and studio system for her benefit, in the tradition of John Cassavetes. Reportedly, she paid for “She Dies Tomorrow” off her earnings from starring in the “Pet Sematary” remake. (She also co-created and co-directed most of “The Girlfriend Experience,” and played the prudish relation of Emily Dickinson in “Wild Nights With Emily.”)

With “She Dies Tomorrow,” Seimetz shows herself a vividly experimental filmmaker and an expert calibrator of modulated suspense. As she follows Amy, then Jane, then other characters, the unseen menace of transmittable fear and dread becomes a palpable presence, an invisible fog that permeates the movie. Seimetz’ visual touches, like the flashing red and blue lights that signal the fear cooties doing their work, are genius in their direct, simple ability to convey terror.

For all the elements of fear, and more than a little blood, it’s not quite right to call “She Dies Tomorrow” a horror movie. There aren’t any sudden shocks, no explicit gore, and death is a concept to consider than a plot point to show in detail. But it’s a movie that burrows under the skin and bounces around the brain, a parasite feeding off of our pandemic-battered psyches.

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‘She Dies Tomorrow’

★★★1/2

Available Friday, August 7, as a video-on-demand rental on most platforms. Rated R for language, some sexual references, drug use and bloody images. Running time: 85 minutes.

Review: 'The Burnt Orange Heresy' is a slow-burn heist movie that doesn't use star Elizabeth Debicki at all well

Though “The Burnt Orange Heresy” is a thriller about stealing art, don’t expect some fast-paced thriller like “The Thomas Crown Affair” or one of the “Ocean’s” trilogy. 

The fuse burns slowly here in this adaptation of a novel by the late Charles Willeford (“Miami Blues”), with enough time for an examination of what’s art and what’s fakery.

Claes Bang, the Danish actor who starred in the art-gallery drama “The Square,” here plays James Figueras, an American art critic in Italy who makes his meager living through lectures to art tourists. He used to be a big wheel, as art critics go, and the billionaire Joseph Cassidy (played by Mick Jagger), knows it.

Cassidy, a man of wealth and taste (to borrow one of Jagger’s lyrics), invites James to his mansion on Lake Como with a proposition. Cassidy has a reclusive artist, Jerome Debney, living on his property. Debney hasn’t exhibited a new work in decades — ever since the fire that destroyed his Paris studio, after which Debney left behind an empty frame on a wall, an enigmatic promise of what was or might have been there. Cassidy’s offer to James is a chance to interview Debney, if James can snatch one of Debney’s current paintings for Cassidy’s collection.

James, by the way, has been accompanied to Lake Como by Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), a schoolteacher from Duluth who came to Italy for a little adventure — and finding it by jumping into bed with the charming art critic. When James meets Debney, the artist has no interest in subjecting himself to the writer’s interrogation, but he does invite both James and Berenice to dinner and a visit to his studio to see what he’s working on these days.

Director Giuseppe Capotondi and screenwriter Scott B. Smith have taken us pretty far down the road by this point, and one more step would be spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that some things aren’t what they seem, while some people turn out to be exactly who they appear to be — and the sneaky delights in this movie are in discovering which is which.

Bang is good as the scheming critic, desperate to use Debney’s mystique to restart his career. Jagger and Sutherland exude charm in their small roles. The disappointment here is how poorly the movie handles Debicki, who is so ferociously good in “Widows” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” but is squandered in a role that teases us with more than she ultimately gets to do. Wasting a talent like Debicki may be the biggest heresy of all.

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‘The Burnt Orange Heresy’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 7, at Megaplex Theatres across Utah. Rated R for some sexual content/nudity, language, drug use and violence. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: The raunchy, raucous history of Creem magazine is captured in a fast and fun documentary

The documentary “Creem: America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine” is a fast and frisky jog through the archives of the legendarily outsider music publication — with an impressive roster of rock stars who were the mag’s fans and subjects.

Born on the wrong side of the tracks in Detroit, Creem was the brainchild of entrepreneur Barry Kramer, who owned several head shops in the Motor City, and its founding editor, Tony Reay. Kramer, the publisher, gave the magazine its downtown vibe; Reay gave it the name, a corruption of the band Cream — and an F.U. to the more upscale, hoity-toity attitude of its rival, Rolling Stone. One photo, of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner sitting next to Jackie Kennedy, says everything about what Creem was not. 

If Creem wasn’t highbrow, what was it? Under Kramer and Reay — and, shortly after, Reay’s successor, Dave Marsh — it aimed to be irreverent, in-your-face and a little bit dangerous, like the music they liked. As one Michigander interviewed here, the actor Jeff Daniels, puts it, Creem was a little like Playboy, in that “you didn’t want your parents to find either of them.”

One example of the magazine’s humor: The Boy Howdy profile, a spoof of the Dewar’s Scotch ads, where they lampooned the bands they covered, and got the bands to pose with a fake beer brand, Boy Howdy. (The logo was drawn by underground comic artist R. Crumb, in exchange for paying for Crumb to see a doctor.)

Marsh brought a slashing writing style, and an enthusiasm for every kind of music Detroit could produce — from Wayne Kramer’s punk band MC5 to the outrageous sounds of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and everything in between. Marsh also brought in the prolific, and abrasive, rock critic Lester Bangs as a senior editor. 

Bangs, recalls Cameron Crowe (who cast Philip Seymour Hoffman as Bangs in “Almost Famous”), warned that writers should never make friends with rock stars – but then Bangs did just that. Singer Peter Wolf recalls the time his group, the J. Geils Band, invited Bangs onstage to write his review, and Bangs ended up smashing his typewriter to bits.

Marsh and Crowe, along with Barry Kramer’s widow, Connie, and their son, J.J. (who’s the film’s producer), are among the Creem staffers who talk about the magazine’s rise and fall. Director Scott Crawford, who wrote the film with Creem alumna Jaan Uhelszki, also collects a slew of rock stars — some who were written about in the magazine, others grew up reading it — that includes Suzi Quatro, Michael Stipe, Chad Smith (of Red Hot Chili Peppers), Thurston Moore, Kirk Hammett (of Metallica) and Joan Jett, who wrote the magazine’s most infamous letter to the editor.

The documentary moves briskly, never settling on one thought or groove too long. As the images of low-resolution pages and fond rock-star remembrances wash over one’s psyche, what sticks in the mind is a perfect rock ’n’ roll paradox — that Creem must have been the most fun place to work, and the most aggravating.

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‘Creem: America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine’

★★★

Available Friday, August 7, in the Salt Lake Film Society’s SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably R for language, sexual content and drug references. Running time: 76 minutes.

Review: 'Made in Italy' is a gorgeous tour of Tuscany, with father and son Liam Neeson and Micheál Richardson as salty companions

For a nation that can’t go anywhere for vacation, the comedy-drama “Made in Italy” arrives just in time — allowing viewers to see the beautiful sights of Tuscany with two charming travel companions: Liam Neeson and his real-life son, Micheál Richardson.

Richardson plays Jack, who manages a fancy London gallery — and who is gutted when his soon-to-be ex-wife, whose parents own the gallery, tells Jack that they’re selling it. Jack begs them to give him a month to raise the money to buy the gallery, by selling the Tuscan house that he co-owns with his dad, Robert (Neeson).

Robert, a painter whose recent output hasn’t matched the greatness of his early career, goes with Jack to Tuscany to see what to make of the place, which neither have visited in decades. They, and a transplanted English estate agent, Kate (Lindsay Duncan), discover branches growing into the windows, a hole in the ceiling, and a hideously dark mural on the living room wall — painted by Robert in his younger days.

But the issues with the house are minor, compared to what else is there: Memories of Raffaella, Robert’s wife and Jack’s mother, who died when Jack was just 7 years old. This part of D’Arcy’s script cuts close to home for the actors, considering Neeson’s wife and Richardson’s mom, Natasha Richardson, died in 2009 — when Micheál, who changed his last name in her honor, was 13 years old.

D’Arcy — who’s probably best known for playing Jarvis, loyal butler to Howard Stark, in “Avengers: Endgame” and TV’s “Agent Carter” — makes a respectable debut as writer and director. The script is solid, if a bit formulaic with its romantic subplot between Jack and a beautiful chef (Valeria Bilello), but leaving plenty of room for Neeson and Richardson to establish their characters’ fractured relationship. And as a director, D’Arcy knows to use his talented cast and the bounteous views of Tuscany to full advantage. The results make “Made in Italy” a diverting trip without leaving the house.

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‘Made in Italy’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 7, at Megaplex Theatres in Utah, and available as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Rated R for language. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: Anti-romantic comedy 'Spinster,' a showcase for Chelsea Peretti, takes a while to find its groove

Chelsea Peretti is an abundantly charming person on screen — as fans of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” can attest — so it’s doubly annoying that the anti-romantic comedy “Spinster” doesn’t allow that charm to kick in for way too long.

Much of the issue stems from the character Peretti plays in Jennifer Deyell’s script. Gaby is a Halifax caterer who refuses to sell the fantasy of the perfect wedding that her customers want — because, at 39, she doesn’t think such romance exists. It certainly doesn’t for her and Nathan (Eugene Sampang), her boyfriend, who breaks up with her for a woman he met on Facebook.

Gaby’s post-breakup support network includes her married-with-kids best friend, Amanda (Susan Kent), her perpetually worried dad (Bill Carr), and her divorced brother, Alex (David Rossetti), who asks Gaby to babysit his 10-year-old daughter, Adele (Nadia Tonen) — because the one night his ex-wife allows Alex to have custody of Adele is also when he has open-mic nights to pursue his dreams to be a stand-up comic.

It takes awhile for Deyell’s script to set the table, and one wishes the writer, or director Andrea Dorfman, had taken one more pass through the screenplay to punch up the jokes. But eventually the story settles into a nice groove, as Gaby’s hapless romantic experiences — and her new friendships with her niece, Adele, and new neighbor, a 60-something professor, Callie (Kate Lynch) — help her realize that being alone may not be the worst thing to be.

Dorfman employs a light touch, where even Deyell’s more strident dialogue passages play nicely. She also gives Peretti space to explore the character, as Gaby discovers her own passion for life and her self-worth. 

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‘Spinster’

★★1/2

Available Friday, August 7, as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably R for language and some sexual material. Running time: 90 minutes

Review: 'The Fight' captures the excitement, and importance, of the ACLU's legal battles against the Trump administration's cruel policies

Watching “The Fight” gave me a brainstorm that any TV producer can have for free: How about a weekly drama series taken from the files of the American Civil Liberties Union. the way Jack Webb cribbed Los Angeles Police reports for “Dragnet”? The drama that comes from saving the Constitution would be spectacular.

The directing team of Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres — the folks who made the 2016 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “Weiner” — get into the New York headquarters of the ACLU, and follow four of the 147 (and counting) lawsuits the group has filed against the Trump administration since 2017.

In one case, a pregnant teen migrant girl in a federal detention center seeks an abortion, which is being denied by the federal government. In another case, lawyers are trying to stop the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border, and get those that have been separated reunited. In a third, lawyers fight a ban on transgender people serving in the military. And in the fourth, a battle against putting a citizenship question into the 2020 census goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

As these attorneys meet the people who are plaintiffs in these cases, the movie provides a look at the real lives being destroyed by policies that are not just constitutionally questionable but cruel and capricious. By following the lawyers arguing these cases, from the hotel rooms where they practice their arguments to trains on which they commute, the filmmakers turn the dusty legal briefs into compelling human drama.

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‘The Fight’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, July 31, in the Utah Film Center and Salt Lake Film Society “virtual cinemas,” and at the Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated PG-13 for strong language, thematic material and brief violence. Running time: 96 minutes.

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This review was published originally on this site on January 29, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Documentary captures the music and craftsmanship of Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk legend

A review on the main page of the Internet Movie Database entry for the documentary ‘Gordon Lightfood: If You Could Read My Mind’ bears the headline “Not as good as it could have been but still pretty good” — which might be the most Canadian thing ever, next to Lightfoot himself.

Filmmakers Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni establish Lightfoot’s Canadian bona fides early and often in this profile of the legendary folk musician — making the case that if Lightfoot were any more Canadian, you could stick a tap in his leg and maple syrup would flow out.

Lightfoot, who was approaching 80 when he was interviewed for this film, is depicted as the consummate musical craftsman, toiling with his guitar and pen to hone each song until it gleams. He would then record those songs, his silky baritone a perfect instrument for the yearning and heartache contained in each track.

Kehoe and Tosoni go through Lightfoot’s history in chapters, attaching a song to each one like a mighty playlist. Starting with “For Lovin’ Me” (a song Lightfoot admits now is chauvinist), through “In the Early Morning Rain” and “Ribbon of Darkness,” among others, we see Lightfoot’s rise in the folk music scene in Toronto and later New York. Getting into his ‘70s ballads, like “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Sundown,” the movie looks at his stardom, the women he left behind and the booze that came close to killing him. 

The capper, the one that gets the fans on their feet, is his 1976 epic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — which made a relatively recent Lake Superior disaster sound like an ancient mariner’s folk legend. (True story: Lightfoot wrote the song just two weeks after the ship sank, taking a Newsweek article for his inspiration.)

The admirers interviewed here are a roll call of Canadian musicians: Anne Murray, Sarah MacLachlan, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush, Tom Cochrane, Ian & Sylvia, Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive, and Burton Cummings of The Guess Who among them. Alec Baldwin is also interviewed, for reasons known only to him, aside from being a big fan.

Lightfoot is a cagey interview subject. He’s willing to talk about the work of writing a good song, and reminisce a bit about the old days, though there are some subjects he deflects. One of those subjects is his affair in the ‘70s with Cathy Smith, the backup singer and groupie who inspired the vengeful lyrics of “Sundown” — and the woman who, in 1982, gave John Belushi the injection of heroin and cocaine that killed him.

The film culminates in three nights of concerts at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 2018 — the last on July 1, Canada Day, of course. In that recent concert footage, we see a frail, careworn Lightfoot, still playing the guitar with precision and force, that voice weathered with age but still evocative. That image, of Lightfoot as a professional artist devoted to creating great music, is what remains when the nostalgia and tabloid moments of this documentary fade away.

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‘Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, July 31, in the Salt Lake Film Society “virtual cinema,” Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language, references to alcohol and drug use, and sexual references. Running time: 90 minutes.