The Griswold clan clearly understands the repulsive monstrosity they have wrought on this earth
VACATION (John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein, 2015)
Opens Wednesday, July 29
vacationthemovie.com
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s Vacation is one of the most vile, insipid, insulting, mean-spirited, and offensive films ever made, the Human Centipede of comedies. This next-generation sequel to the first four theatrical movies in the popular series — which began in 1983 with National Lampoon’s Vacation and continued as the Griswold clan, featuring Chevy Chase as luckless dad Clark and Beverly D’Angelo as his sexy wife, Ellen, visited Europe and Vegas and celebrated Christmas as only they can — is an unmitigated disaster, a thoroughly repulsive trip through the dregs of nasty humor. Russ “Rusty” Griswold (Ed Helms), originally played by Anthony Michael Hall, is now all grown up and married to Debbie (Christina Applegate), who dreams of going to Paris. But Russ has a better idea — a drive cross-country with their children, the sensitive James (Skyler Gisondo) and the younger Kevin (Steele Stebbins), a cruel little asshole who bullies his older brother relentlessly, to visit Walley World, the ultimate destination of the first film. Russ rents a ridiculous blue Tartan Prancer, the “Honda of Albania,” and off they go on a series of absurd, disgraceful and, most unfortunately, unfunny adventures involving a steer, Debbie’s old sorority, a hot woman (fashion model Hannah Davis) in a red car, white-water rafting with a just-jilted guide (Charlie Day), hapless border guards (Tim Heidecker, Nick Kroll, Kaitlin Olson, and Michael Peña) at the Four Corners Monument, and Russ’s sister Audrey’s (Leslie Mann) very well hung conservative husband (Chris Hemsworth). I have to admit that I did laugh out loud three times, but those extremely brief respites do not make up for the rest of this abhorrent and repugnant monstrosity. Even cameos by Chase and D’Angelo ring false and fall completely flat. There was a sweet, playful charm to the original, written by John Hughes and directed by Harold Ramis and featuring the great Imogene Coca as Aunt Edna and Randy Quaid and Miriam Flynn as Ellen’s in-bred cousins, but there is nothing the least bit appealing about this ill-conceived sequel, written and directed by Goldstein and former Freaks & Geeks star Daley, who have previously cowritten Horrible Bosses, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. At one point, the Griswolds take a break in what turns out to be a basin filled with raw sewage; Vacation will make you feel like you’ve just spent one hundred minutes in that rancid pond.
Carmen & Geoffrey is an endearing look at Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder’s lifelong love affair with dance — and each other. The New Orleans-born de Lavallade studied with Lester Horton and went to high school with Alvin Ailey, whom she brought to his first dance class. Best known as a pitchman for 7UP (the “uncola”) and playing the intriguing Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die, Trinidadian Holder was a larger-than-life gentle giant who was a dancer, choreographer, composer, costume designer, actor, stage director, writer, photographer, painter, and just about anything else he wanted to be. The two met when they both were cast in Truman Capote and Harold Arlen’s Broadway show House of Flowers in 1954, with Holder instantly falling in love with de Lavallade; they remained together until Holder’s death this past October at the age of eighty-four. Directors Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob combine amazing archival footage — of Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Ulysses Dove, de Lavallade dancing with Ailey, and other splendid moments — with contemporary rehearsal scenes, dance performances, and interviews with such stalwarts as dance critic Jennifer Dunning, former Alvin Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison, and choreographer Joe Layton (watch out for his eyebrows), along with family members and Gus Solomons jr, who still works with de Lavallade, and Dudley Williams, who just died last month. The film was made on an extremely low budget, and it shows, but it is filled with such glorious footage that you’ll get over that quickly. Carmen & Geoffrey, along with additional rare archival footage, is screening August 1 as part of the free Lincoln Center Out of Doors program “A Celebration of the Life of Geoffrey Holder” and will be preceded by the panel discussion “The Life and Work of Geoffrey Holder” with Doob and Atkinson, moderated by Leo Holder, Geoffrey and de Lavallade’s son. Fans should also check out the new exhibition 
“Razor blades are words,” art critic Alain Jouffroy tells painter Daniel Pommereulle (Daniel Pommereulle) in one of the prologues at the start of La Collectionneuse, the fourth film in French master Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (falling between My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee). Words might have the ability to cut, but they don’t seem to have much impact on the three people at the center of the film, which offers a sort of alternate take on François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Needing a break from his supposedly strenuous life, gallerist Adrien (Patrick Bauchau, who also appeared in La Carrière de Suzanne, Rohmer’s second morality tale) decides to vacation at the isolated St. Tropez summer home of the never-seen Rodolphe. Daniel is also at the house, along with Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a beautiful young woman who spends much of the film in a bikini and being taken out by a different guy nearly every night. Adrien decides that she is a “collector” of men, and the three needle one another as they discuss life and love, sex and morality, beauty and ugliness. Adrien might claim to want to have nothing to do with Haydée, but he keeps spending more and more time with her, even though he never stops criticizing her lifestyle. He even uses her as a pawn when trying to get an art collector named Sam (played by former New York Times film critic Eugene Archer under the pseudonym Seymour Hertzberg) to invest in his gallery. While everybody else in the film pretty much knows what they want, Adrien, who purports to understand life better than all of them, is a sad, lost soul, unable to get past his high-and-mighty attitude. Rohmer crafted the roles of Daniel and Haydée specifically for Pommereulle and Politoff, who improvised much of their dialogue; Bauchau opted not to take that route, making for a fascinating relationship among the three very different people. La Collectionneuse is beautifully shot in 35mm by Néstor Almendros, the bright colors of the characters’ clothing mixing splendidly with the countryside and ocean while offering a striking visual counterpoint to the constant ennui dripping off the screen. His camera especially loves Politoff, regularly exploring her body inch by inch. The film is both Rohmer’s and Almendros’s first color feature; Almendros would go on to make more films with the director, as well as with Truffaut, even after coming to Hollywood and shooting such films as Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. Winner of a Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 1967 Berlinale, La Collectionneuse is screening July 31 in Transmitter Park as part of the annual Films on the Green series, which concludes September 10 with Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux’s The Rabbi’s Cat at Columbia University’s Low Library.
It’s about time the story of Sophie Tucker gets told. Unfortunately, William Gazecki’s The Outrageous Sophie Tucker is not quite the telling we’ve been waiting for. “She is the most underrated jazz singer that ever lived,” Tony Bennett says in the documentary about the bigger-than-life Tucker. “She was a great jazz singer.” Born Sonya Kalish on Christmas Day in 1886, Tucker was determined to become a star, and she ended up leaving her mark in vaudeville, on radio and television, and in films as an actress, singer, and comedian. But mostly, the woman known affectionately as “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” was a major mensch, cavorting with presidents and fans, keeping track of almost everyone she ever met, doing her own promotion, and living life exactly as she wanted to. The Jewish, bisexual Tucker hobnobbed with world leaders, Al Capone, Ed Sullivan, and J. Edgar Hoover (who once asked her for one of her dresses), among many others, and saw her name in lights on theater marquees across the country. However, although the film features some wonderful archival audio and visual footage and photographs of Tucker — singing such songs as “My Yiddishe Momme,” “Some of These Days,” and “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl” and appearing in the films Broadway Melody of 1938 and Gay Love — it never really gets to the heart of who she was; instead, it’s more about producers Susan and Lloyd Ecker, who, after cashing out of a successful internet company, became obsessed with Tucker, meticulously cataloging her more than four hundred scrapbooks and beginning a biographical trilogy with I Am Sophie Tucker: A Fictional Memoir.