Film Facts: 8.31.16

Werner Herzog takes viewers on a journey through the internet and all that entails. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World unwinds in a series of chapters that examine specific benchmarks of connectivity starting with the lab at UCLA that sent the first email (to Stanford University) in 1969. Here Herzog converses with professor Leonard Kleinrock, a co-creator of ARPANET (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

It turns out that Herzog is a net neophyte. He doesn’t even own a cell phone. To quote Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder: “There were no cell phones in ’69, I’m head to toe legit.” The director’s innocence to modern media informs the documentary’s narrative, and frankly it’s a welcome point of view.

Among numerous talking heads that get the Herzog treatment are Elon Musk (Tesla Motors, SpaceX) and the world’s most famous hacker Kevin Mitnick. We meet a family mocked by social media trolls after the death of their daughter, as well as a scientist developing a driverless car. A trip to the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, one of the world’s largest satellite dishes at 100 meters, reveals a county where radio transmissions are limited if not banned. People who are allergic to cell phones move to this area known as a National Radio Quiet Zone.

Lo and Behold plays theatrically at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston starting Thursday, September 1 and running through September 4. Lo and Behold is also available on various on-demand platforms.

Klown Forever (Klovn Forever) picks up where the raunchy Danish film Klovn left off. As in the original film, itself a spin-off from a popular Denmark television series, our morally bankrupt duo Frank and Casper find themselves over their head in decadence and subterfuge, this time in Los Angeles. The shift to America allows for some cool cameos by Isla Fisher and Adam Levine.

While not quite as funny as the original there are still some solid laughs, some of which involve sexual hijinks. In a year of domestic R-rated comedies that are mostly hit or miss, with the exception of Bad Moms, Klown Forever is a welcome addition.

Klown Forever unwinds exclusively at the AlamoDrafthouse Vintage Park.

Nobody is talking about the film that won the recent Academy Award for Best Picture and nobody is still talking about the airport fight sequence from Captain America: Civil Wars. So it’s unlikely that people will be talking about Complete Unknown long after they see it.

There are some interesting parallels between people who create lies to hide their real identity and people who fib to play practical jokes. A woman (Rachel Weisz) invents different backgrounds in order to attend the birthday party of her former lover (Michael Shannon).

The psychological twists that follow would be better suited to a live play with the theme of reinvention than a feature length movie that boils down to a two-hander with Shannon and Weisz providing the fireworks. Both lead actors are performers that always make a film worthwhile, but it seems that they’ve done much more interesting work this year in films like The Lobster or Midnight Special. Kathy Bates and Danny Glover briefly show up as a couple Shannon and Weisz meet during a walk.

Complete Unknown plays exclusively at the downtown Sundance Cinemas Houston.

by Michael Bergeron