Review: 'Desert One' tells of servicemen's courage, and a presidency's last gasp, during the Iran hostage crisis

The riveting documentary “Desert One” reminds us that history is a great teacher, if only we would listen to the lessons — which, in the case of the failed rescue mission of 52 American hostages in Iran in 1980, include lessons on the limits of military might and the importance of a president taking responsibility when things go wrong.

Before getting to the central event of the story, director Barbara Kopple takes us back to the 1970s, when the U.S.-supported regime of the Shah of Iran was starting to unravel. The Shah — put in power after a Western-backed coup of Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953 — was facing a rebellion, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and fled the country in early 1979. 

Then a group of students supporting Khomeini overran the U.S. Embassy, and took 52 staffers, including diplomats and military men, hostage. President Jimmy Carter and his administration tried to negotiate a release of the hostages, but would not give in to the Iranian’s chief demand: Custody of the Shah, who was in New York receiving cancer treatment.

While negotiations dragged on, the Pentagon was making plans. The military’s Delta Force had come up with a rescue plan, an elaborate plot to fly Special Ops servicemen into Iran on C-130 transports, and transfer them to helicopters for a daring raid on the embassy in Tehran. The rendezvous point was a dry lakebed, code named Desert One.

The range of people Kopple and her team interview here is impressive. They include: Three of the hostages, at least three of the Iranians who held them captive, several members of the strike force on the rescue mission, military and CIA advisers (including Robert Gates, later Secretary of Defense), and President Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale.

The movie also corrals a wealth of news footage, from both Iran and the United States, and even the long-classified conversations between Carter and his generals when the mission was going drastically wrong.

The portrait painted by this new and archival material is of the country hamstrung not only by a foreign nation’s action but by the U.S. government’s miscalculations at what a small country might do to get revenge for a grudge that American leaders forgot existed. “Desert One” also tells a story of heroism, of servicemen who risked their lives — and, for eight of them, gave their lives — because they believed their leaders knew what they were doing. It also shows Carter as a man of integrity, taking personal responsibility for his administration’s failure.

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‘Desert One’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, August 21, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville) and Megaplex at The Junction (Ogden); and in the SLFS@Home and Utah Film Center virtual cinemas. Not rated, but probably R for gruesome images of war. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: Something comes from outer space in effectively chilling Russian horror thriller 'Sputnik'

In space, we’ve been told, no one can here you scream — but in the Russian space-faring horror thriller “Sputnik,” all the action is back on terra firma, so there’s plenty to scream about.

In Moscow in 1983, Tatiana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) is a brilliant but abrasive doctor fighting for her professional life in front of a medical board — because she made a snap decision that saved a patient’s life but ruffled feathers with the family and other doctors. On a break during her disciplinary hearing, Tatiana is approached by Col. Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk), who has a case that he wants Tatiana’s consulting skills. It’s not just her expertise Semaradov wants, but her ability to think outside the box.

Semiradov flies Tatiana to a distant military base, where she meets an unusual patient: Konstantine Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov), a cosmonaut recently returned from a mission on the Soviet space station Mir. Veshnyakov’s capsule made a rough landing in Kazakhstan, which left his partner near death. Tatiana, overriding the base’s medical staff, diagnoses Veshnyakov with PTSD, which may explain his amnesia.

When Semiradov shows Tatiana the night surveillance footage of Veshnyakov’s cell, she learns the truth: The cosmonaut brought back an alien parasite — or, rather, a symbiote — that crawls out of the sleeping Veshnyakov’s mouth at night to feed.

Now Tatiana must decide whether to study the creature for science, or let Veshnyakov know the truth about what’s living inside him.

Director Egor Abramenko doesn’t shy away from his influences, everything from “Alien” to “The Thing,” as he constructs scary special-effects set pieces as Tatiana is drawn ever deeper into the mystery of this alien creature and the humans who want to exploit it. Abramenko and screenwriters Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev modulate the tension well, building up the suspense and gore on parallel tracks toward a bloody satisfying ending.

What carries “Sputnik” is the central performance by Akinshina. It’s been nearly two decades since Akinshina, as a teen actress, wowed international audiences in Lucas Moodysson’s gut-wrenching sex-trafficking drama “Lilya-4-Ever.” Now as an adult, her talent is undiminished, and her mix of steely determination and medical compassion become the key to unlocking this compelling thriller.

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‘Sputnik’

★★★

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 violence and gore. Running time: 114 minutes; in Russian, with subtitles.

Review: 'Spree' is a candy-colored but disgustingly sour slasher movie that's also a weak satire of social media

It’s hard to think of a movie that has such cynical disdain for everything it touches — its message, its cast, its audience — than what director Eugene Kotlyarenko brings to “Spree,” a putrid slasher movie told from the viewpoint of its cheerily and boringly psychotic killer.

Joe Keery, who’s so charming as the reluctant babysitter Steve Harrington on “Stranger Things,” stars here as Kurt Kunkle, a Los Angeles rideshare driver and would-be internet influencer. If only he could get the views on his live-streamed evening on the road above the single digits. He’s decked out his car with cameras all over to capture the action, and aims to enlist Bobby (Joshua Ovalle), a teen web phenom that Kurt used to babysit, to drive up his “likes.”

As Kurt explains in his stream-of-conscious rambling to the camera, he plans to have the most epic ride-sharing day ever. He’s got his complimentary water bottles ready, his car decked out with colorful lights, and intends to break records for most rides on the Spree service in a single day.

What soon become apparent is that Kurt isn’t going to get all his passengers to their destinations. The water bottles are poisoned, and if that doesn’t work, he has other, bloodier ways to dispatch the people he picks up.

Kotlyarenko and his co-writer Gene McHugh stack the deck for Kurt. His first passenger (Linas Phillips) is a white supremacist. Once he’s gone, Kurt picks up a rude real-estate agent (Jessalyn Gilsig), and then a sexist blowhard (John DeLuca). The first “normal” person Kurt has in his car is Jessie Adams (former “Saturday Night Live” performer Sasheer Zamata), a stand-up comic and web celebrity — whom Kurt tries and fails to impress with his own internet ambitions.

The story devolves from there, with Kotlyarenko setting up one gruesome murder after another, laden with Kurt’s annoyingly chipper banter and the constant feed of web commenters either egging Kurt on or doubting the bloodshed is real. There’s a message in here somewhere, about the dehumanizing effects of web culture, where being “liked” is more important than being a decent human being — but Kotylarenko buries the moral in self-consciously flashy editing and a during-the-credits epilogue that unfairly turns the filmmaking process and the audience into accessories. 

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‘Spree’

★

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 extreme violence and gore, and language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'Represent' profiles three women running for office, spotlighting the people part of politics

The documentary “Represent” is a friendly reminder, one we need now more than ever, that politics is supposed to be about people — the ones running for office, and the ones who vote for them.

Filmmaker Hillary Bachelder — who directed, shot and edited this PBS-backed documentary — follows the fortunes of three women running for office in the Midwest in 2017 and 2018. They are:

 • Myya Jones, a 22-year-old Black activist who in 2017 started a long-shot campaign to be mayor of Detroit, with the goal of shifting city funds to poverty-stricken African American neighborhoods.

 • Julie Cho, a Korean immigrant in Evanston, Ill., running for her local Illinois state house seat, as a Republican in a solidly Democratic district, on a platform against gerrymandering.

 • Bryn Bird, a progressive policy wonk and produce farmer in rural Ohio, running against the conservative establishment to fill one of the three seats on the Granville Township Board of Trustees.

Bachelder doesn’t spend too much time on the candidates’ policy stances, Instead following the candidates as they try to connect with the people they hope will vote for them. There’s a lot of pounding the pavement, knocking on doors and shaking hands (in the pre-COVID days). There are also living-room fund-raisers, and state party conventions where they try to stand out in a crowd.

Bachelder’s approach is gentle and even-handed, avoiding the vitriol of internet trolls and national party squabbles. Much of the backlash these three women feel is of the quieter variety, whether it’s Bird coming to understand the old-boy network in her town or Jones trying to cut through the chatter of the state convention. Cho faces the loneliest road in some ways, rejected in crowds when she says she’s a Republican while also being abandoned by her state’s GOP apparatus. 

Like any good documentarian, Bachelder shows us the people behind the process, and lets us get to know and like them. By the end of “Represent,” these women may not have earned your vote, but they will have earned your respect.

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‘Represent’

★★★

Available Friday, August 14, in the Salt Lake Film Society’s “virtual cinema.” Not rated, but probably PG for mature themes. Running time: 93 minutes.

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.