Screen Grabs: Are we not doc’ed? We are Devo!

Anybody who even vaguely identified with the punk or New Wave musical movements of the late 1970s through mid-1980s probably experienced this classic moment of public idiocy: Getting cat-called with “We are Devo” or “Whip it good” by some passing posse of stoners and/or jocks. The latter masculine demographic really did seem threatened by an aesthetic they didn’t understand, as well as the instinctive need to defend the likes of REO Speedwagon, Journey, and Van Halen. In retrospect what most impressed about this phenom—repeated endlessly in the nation’s small towns and suburbs—was that Devo was the one band recognized by virtually all longhaired dudes who a decade earlier would’ve wanted to beat up hippies for having the same follicle lengths. Somehow the most eccentric and singular of all art school projects-turned-bands had managed to grab the attention of the most garden-variety stripmall metalheads.

Veteran documentarian Chris Smith’s Devo, which began streaming on Netflix Tue/19, provides a succinct overview of an act whose assertive surface style was so familiar, it may come as a surprise how little you know about the whole story. Which began waaaay before “punk” (a movement they never identified with anyway) was a thing. Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh met as students at Kent State, bonding over a shared taste for art whose ironical obscurantism expressed their view that US culture was devolving into consumerist, conformist vapidity. (The actual “devolution” conceit got borrowed from a moralizing 1930s pamphlet they stumbled across.) That was only reinforced by the Kent State massacre of 1970—they personally knew some of those anti-war protestors shot by National Guardsmen on campus.

Early performances were more deliberately alienating performance art than anything close to “rock”—there is footage of a 1973 show in which virtually the entire audience walks out. But out of perverse dedication to their concept (which also took major notes from the Dadaists, pop art, and 1932 rebellion-of-science-experiment-mutants horror film Island of Lost Souls), Devo persevered, even after graduation in the unfriendly deteriorating industrial midwest of Akron, Ohio.

From the start, they had conceived what they were doing in visual as much as sonic terms, by 1976 creating a 10-minute film called In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution. It won a prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which wound up being their first break—it got them initial notice from labels and media. Soon they were playing CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, being talked up by David Bowie (who turned production of their first album over to his friend Brian Eno), then caught in a messy bidding war between Warner Brothers and Virgin Records. In 1978 they were playing for 15 million viewers on Saturday Night Live.

It was an incredible leap for a “robotic” quintet in identical plastic jumpsuits whose best points of contemporary comparison weren’t the Ramones or Sex Pistols, but The Residents, Ant Farm, and Church of the Subgenius. “We’re basically a musical laxative for a constipated society,” they said in a TV interview. 1980’s “Whip It” was an actual, charting hit single. The de facto music videos they’d made before MTV existed put them in instant high rotation once it did.

But as they also said, “Being self-aware somehow puts you in a strange position,” purveying their retro futurist irony on mainstream platforms like The Merv Griffin Show, to audiences unlikely to “get it.” They were successful, but of course not successful enough to avoid being dropped from Warner and MTV at the first sign of tapering off. They then signed to Enigma, an indie label that overreached and sank. By the end of the Reagan era they’d both preceded and perfectly mocked, Devo was pretty much defunct.

Full of vintage clips in first-rate condition, DEVO is one of those rock docs that feel a bit truncated—as opposed to the many that seem overlong. This story is indeed a mite shortchanged, as Devo began reforming in various short-term ways just five years after its official dissolution, playing not just reunion gigs but eventually releasing new material. (The current lineup just played Oakland’s Mosswood Meltdown festival and plans a tour later this year.) Plus individual members have done some notable things, particularly Mothersbaugh with his extensive career scoring films and TV series.

But if American Movie director Smith leaves you wanting still more, that’s not a bad thing. One revelation here is that the members, while they stuck to their worker-drone personae onstage, were always intelligent and articulate when interviewed. Though Devo looked like a mere goofy novelty to some, to the band’s minds it was an “anti-stupidity” project—a surreal poke at all-American complacency. And while I haven’t felt any great need to put a Devo record on in years (that first album is engraved on the brain anyway), it’s remarkable how fresh their clips look decades later. They weren’t quite like anyone else, and they still aren’t.

Other new arrivals this week:

Eden

If you were asked “Who’s an apt director to dramatize a lurid real-life story of bohemian types self-destructing on a tropical island nearly a century ago?,” various names might come to mind…albeit probably not “Ron Howard.” And indeed, that competent middlebrow product of the Hollywood system immediately seems wrong for this tale, as he gawks at Euro-decadent behavior like a stunned tourist and seems to judge any intellectual endeavor as inherently pretentious and phony. No wonder would-be awards bait Eden has taken a year to open, then got dumped into the awards-desert doldrums of late August.

This was a once-notorious case of outsized personalities and scandalous actions in an exotic setting. It’s been told in many forms, from competing memoirs by survivors and a Georges Simenon novel to a 2013 documentary (The Galapagos Affair) whose starry cast of narrating voices included Cate Blanchett.

In 1929 Berlin doctor Friedrich Ritter (played here by Jude Law, who does not shrink from opportunities to go full-frontal) and his patient/acolyte/lover Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) moved to Floreana Island, a 67-square-mile volcanic formation in Ecuadoran waters. With high-minded goals of conceiving a “natural” philosophy and lifestyle influenced by Nietzsche, they craved solitude and got it… for a while.

But then their published reports began to attract others. First came the poorer, working-class German Wittmer family: Heinz (Daniel Bruhl), his wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney), and teenage son Harry (Jonathan Tittel), whose tuberculosis they hoped the tropical climate would cure. Much more irksome was the subsequent arrival of a supposed Baroness (Ana de Armas) and her all-male entourage of lovers-servants. They meant to build an exclusive resort in this inhospitable place, where resources (including fresh water) were already scarce. Things went south in a hurry, leading to theft, still-unsolved disappearances, and probable murder.

This is juicy stuff, and the eventual melodramatics inevitably have a trainwreck fascination. But the screenplay is crude, the direction humorless, and the heavy-duty cast stuck playing characters drawn in one-dimensional terms. Even the few sympathetic figures (notably that played by America’s new conservative sweetheart, Sweeney) aren’t made interesting enough for us to care about. Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a story this rich in grotesquerie and potential black comedy into a straight-up survival tale that’s ultimately about affirming the value of (groan) “home” and “family,” like every other movie at the multiplex. This isn’t a terrible film, but it represents a terrible missed opportunity. Eden opens in theaters throughout the Bay Area on Fri/22.

Relay

Intrigue of a different sort is had in this serpentine thriller from director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) and writer Justin Piasecki. Lily James plays Sarah, a corporate whistleblower who’s been harassed to the point where she now just wants to return incriminating documents (involving a major biotech company’s public safety risks) and promise never to open her mouth again in return for a normal life. Accordingly, she seeks help from a covert organization brokering resolutions between such parties, at a price. That means she acquires shadowy protection in the form of Tom (a near-mute Riz Ahmed), who increasingly violates his own stringent rules to keep her safe from a team of devious, highly skilled lethal agents (including Sam Worthington and Willa Fitzgerald).

Relay holds the attention, but there’s a point at which twistiness for its own sake stops building suspense and becomes just plain convoluted. The characters are all kept so opaque, we never feel emotionally invested—a real problem when we’re meant to care about the developing ties between them, or accept a climactic twist that renders much of that irrelevant. Any movie about institutionalized corruption is welcome now. It’s also always nice when somebody creates an espionage movie dependent on things other than nonstop bullets and car chases. But Relay ultimately feels too clever for its own good, while not engaging enough for the viewer’s. It opens in theaters nationwide Fri/22.

Sudan, Remember Us

That kind of cloak-and-dagger fiction—or any kind, really—looks a bit silly alongside this documentary by Hind Meddeb, a French-Tunisian-Moroccan journalist. Missives read aloud between her in European self-exile and friends left behind in Khartoum provide narrative structure to several years’ video evidence of the northeast African nation’s descent into “an open-air prison.” Ebullient, undaunted protests against the 30-year military dictatorship alternate with horror and destruction in the civil war that followed, and which remains ongoing. So far that conflict has displaced nearly 13 million, killing some 150,000—and it’s only the latest in a long series of massacres generated by oppressive regimes, political struggle and innumerable attempted coups.

Short (78 minutes) if hardly sweet, Remember Us nonetheless is gracefully made, with lots of good music and moments of stirring hope amidst brutalities and deprivations. It’s a finely crafted bulletin from a warzone that is never didactic, maintaining an intimate human identification while serving an urgent, informative purpose. It plays SF’s Roxie Theater this Mon/25 (more info here).

Shanghai Blues

For a counterbalancing dose of pure silliness, there’s Hong Kong cinema legend Tsui Hark’s 1984 film, which was recently restored to full, garishly colorful splendor for its 40th anniversary. The first feature produced by his long-running company Film Workshop, it’s a farcical tangle of coincidences, misunderstandings and romantic conflicts during a much more frivolously-depicted wartime. During the 2nd Sino-Japanese War in 1937, two young strangers (Kenny Bee, Sylvia Chang) get thrown together during an air raid. Then they’re thrown apart, each pining for the anonymous other. Years later, still in the chaotic aftermath of WW2, they reunite without realizing it—a predicament complicated further by a third party, comical country bumpkin Stool (Sally Yeh).

Shanghai Blues is a semi-musical, the characters’ involvement in the nightclub world affording several song interludes. But mostly it’s a melee of intricately worked-out slapstick, which the performers gamely plunge into almost non-stop. The level of frantic energy sustained can be a little exhausting. Still, it’s fun, as is the production look of artificial soundstage sets and old-school Technicolor hues. This revival plays SF’s 4-Star Fri/22 through Sun/24 (more info here).