Blow Out — The Criterion Collection

Article first published as Blu-ray Review: Blow Out — The Criterion Collection on Blogcritics.

The Film
Brian De Palma has his share of detractors. Some say he’s too concerned with style over substance or that he’s too jokey/cynical or he’s just a poor man’s Hitchcock. What can’t be said about De Palma, unless one is just being deliberately obtuse, is that he lacks ambition. His penchant for frequently venturing into unknown territory is a double-edged quality, but when De Palma is firing on all cylinders, the result is thrilling.

Probably no film confirms that more than Blow Out, a work that functions as a political thriller, a self-reflexive examination of filmmaking, a moody character piece and an ultimately chilling horror film — all with impeccable grace and style. There are no muddled genre exercises or pale imitations here. Even though the film undoubtedly owes inspiration to Antonioni’s Blowup and Coppola’s The Conversation, De Palma is mining new territory more than constructing homages.

John Travolta, in a performance that reveals the potential his career didn’t exactly make good on, stars as Jack, a sound effects technician for a sleazy exploitation movie studio in Philadelphia. He’s outside one night, recording wind noise for an effect, when he hears a bang, sees a car careening out of control and watches it break through the railing and plunge into a lake.

He dives in and is able to save the female passenger, but the male driver is already dead. Later, at the hospital, he discovers the driver was the governor and a shoo-in for presidential candidate, and the cover-up machine is churning away, with an aide instructing him to forget about the whole incident. No one must know the governor died in the midst of having an affair.

Jack is dissatisfied with this turn of events, but begins to develop a tentative romance with the woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), a makeup artist who also participates in blackmail schemes. When he gets a hold of video footage shot that night by her collaborator (Dennis Franz), Jack merges his sounds with the images to create a film of what happened — and what he believes is no accident.

De Palma feeds the audience information with expert skill, initially allowing us to digest it at a similar pace to Jack. In the early scene where he’s out recording, De Palma uses increasingly wide shots paired with rhythmic editing that’s informed by the sound design. Later, when Jack is recreating the moment in his head, we get the sense that a virtuosic director is capturing the trancelike operation of a virtuosic character. Both scenes allow the audience to traverse Jack’s path of discovery with him.

But the film shifts near the middle, just when it may have been in danger of becoming a zeitgeist-y (political assassination + Chappaquiddick-like circumstances ensured this) but rote whodunit. De Palma lays the cards out on the table, introduces a menacing John Lithgow and essentially solves the mystery. It’s then that the film kicks into a higher gear, propelled by Jack’s increasing paranoia and the dangers his obsession pose to him and Sally.

Travolta’s gentle, thoughtful Jack is a tragically doomed character, involving himself not because of personal bravado, but of a deep-seated desire to do something meaningful — confirmed by a flashback that reveals an earlier job with law enforcement. He’s brilliant in his own way, but he also may be overreaching in a way that has drastic consequences.

De Palma’s stylistic flourishes have probably never been more assured than here. His camera weaves and bobs with intelligent grace. He’s not content to opt for purely utilitarian camerawork, and the style is married to the content, like in a scene where Jack discovers his tapes have been tampered with, and the revolving camera matches his spiraling paranoia.

When the utterly unnerving final scene turns the satiric misdirection of the film’s opening on its head, it becomes totally clear that De Palma crafted a dark, engrossing masterpiece where concerns of image and sound can be matters of life and death.

The Blu-ray Disc
Blow Out is presented in 1080p high definition with an aspect ratio of 2.40:1. Supervised by De Palma, this new transfer is a marvelous recreation of the 35mm experience with healthy, but not obtrusive grain levels and absolutely superb image clarity. Much of the film is dark and subdued, but the film does see some vibrant colors, such as reds and blues, that pop off the screen. Fine detail is apparent in every frame, with both the infrequent close-ups and more frequent medium and long shots packed with information. Black levels are outstanding and even in darker shots, grain doesn’t come across as noise. Damage is essentially nonexistent.

Audio is presented in a 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack that dynamically communicates the film’s intricate soundscapes. Obviously a film about a sound designer will feature interesting sound design, and Blow Out does. Even with just a 2.0 track, the effects feature great directionality, and dialogue and music is always clear and distinct.

Special Features
Criterion has assembled an excellent set of supplements, with new interviews bearing the majority of the weight. An hour-long conversation between De Palma and Noah Baumbach serves well in lieu of a commentary track, with De Palma talking about a lot of interesting technical and anecdotal information. I was especially excited to hear him talk about his split diopter technique, which he uses in this film often, and is one of his most striking stylistic choices, in my mind. As he did on Criterion’s My Dinner with Andre disc, Baumbach serves as a genial and perceptive interviewer, even if he sometimes struggles a little with framing some questions (hey, it happens).

An interview with Nancy Allen covers her role in the film, which was a departure for her in some ways, and what it was like working with Travolta. It briefly touches on her relationship with De Palma (they were married at the time), and she expresses admiration for the film.

The third interview features Garrett Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam, and it’s a great inclusion, as he talks about his development of the device and his role in the film, which had him shooting the opening film-within-a-film Coed Frenzy. He’s a great interview subject and his dismissive attitude toward the intentionally bad scenes he shot is quite amusing (he had just finished working on The Shining, which probably only made the quality disparity more apparent).

Also included is De Palma’s 1967 film Murder á la Mod, which is presented in 1080p (as are all the extras) and looks rather wonderful. The experimental, freewheeling feature is one his first films, and while not everything sticks, it’s fun to watch De Palma throw a bunch of his pet tendencies up on the screen in the story of a fashion model getting caught up in the world of pornography. The film is glanced in Blow Out as a character watches it on TV, and its inclusion here is a nice touch.

Rounding out the package are a collection of beautiful black-and-white set photos from Louis Goldman, the theatrical trailer and a booklet with a new essay by Michael Sragow and Pauline Kael’s original New Yorker rave for the film.

The Bottom Line
Blow Out is essential for De Palma fans and just about everyone else. The film is constantly inventive and has never looked better on home video.

Robert Plant and the Band of Joy, Paramount Theatre

Robert Plant and Patty Griffin. Photo by Dusty Somers.

Article first published as Concert Review: Robert Plant and the Band of Joy - Paramount Theatre, Seattle, WA 4/20/11 on Blogcritics.

If one has any questions about why Robert Plant revived the Band of Joy moniker for his current tour, an evening with the new incarnation makes it abundantly clear. It turns out that the pre-Led Zeppelin project name fits the current lineup perfectly, with Plant himself acting as the grizzled, gleeful pied piper of joy.

At Wednesday night’s show at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, Plant spoke of finding paradise as a senior artist, which his relaxed, impish demeanor between songs further confirmed. He’s having a hell of a time up there, and that joy spread through the audience unhindered.

Flanked by the enormous talents of Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin, Plant kicked off the set with a reinvented, down-home rendition of Zeppelin’s “Black Country Woman,” an appropriate opener to a night of re-imagined numbers. With 2007’s Raising Sand with Alison Krauss and 2010’s Band of Joy, he has proven eager to explore new territory, and this current tour finds him melding Zeppelin hits, covers new and old, and gospel-inflected traditionals into one delicious bluesy, folky stew.

Buddy Miller and Plant. Photo by Dusty Somers.

Much of the first portion of the show found Plant and Co. mining the new album, with performances of Los Lobos’ “Angel Dance” and Richard Thompson’s “House of Cards,” along with Plant and Miller’s arrangements of the traditional “Cindy, I’ll Marry You Someday” and “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down.” The haunting Low cover “Monkey” saw Plant and Griffin harmonizing under chilly blue lights to great effect.

Interspersed with these early songs were moments when Plant said he wanted to introduce some of his friends, ceding the stage and lead vocals to Miller, Griffin and multi-instrumentalist Darrell Scott. Miller belted out a rousing rendition of his wife Julie’s “Somewhere Trouble Don’t Go,” underpinned by Plant’s churning harmonica. Scott sang perpetual cover “A Satisfied Mind,” which brought his voice together with those of Miller and Griffin in gorgeous harmony. Griffin — clearly a crowd favorite — opted for Teddy McRae and Sid Wyche’s heartbreaking “Ocean of Tears.”

The latter part of the show featured Plant heading further back in time with “In the Mood” from his 1983 album, The Principle of Moments, and the 1998 Plant/Page (and later, Plant/Krauss) collaboration “Please Read the Letter.” The audience, most of which were respectfully seated for the middle part of the performance, leaped to their feet with the opening chords of “Houses of the Holy,” and stayed there for an extended cut of show-closer “Ramble On.”

Photo by Dusty Somers.

The encore featured Townes Van Zandt’s “Harm’s Swift Way” from the new album, Zep’s “Gallows Pole” and the traditional “And We Bid You Goodnight.”

Plant remains a musical giant, with a voice that’s only been enriched with age. His decision to surround himself with a brilliant musical architect in Miller, the golden-throated Griffin and the ridiculously talented Scott makes for a band that has no trouble acting as the purveyor of joy.

Kes — The Criterion Collection

Article first published as Blu-ray Review: Kes - The Criterion Collection on Blogcritics.

The Film
Ken Loach’s breakthrough feature Kes is a remarkable film that is effective both as sociopolitical critique and as a naturalistic coming-of-age tale. Loach brings together the frustrations of the disenfranchised working class with a storytelling grace that is absolutely captivating, and allows the film to transcend mere polemic.

On paper, the film seems to follow a template for a number of films where a character transcends his circumstances through a connection with an animal. After all, the film is about a constantly put-upon Yorkshire boy who momentarily escapes his hardscrabble existence by training a wild kestrel.

But Kes is no heartwarming boy-and-his-pet story — based on the book A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, Loach’s film is a gritty, hard-nosed look at a class of people whose social status will not improve. That said, it’s also slyly funny and quietly moving. Loach keeps his distance from the film’s characters with a sentimentality-free and unobtrusive camera style, but it’s impossible to miss his simultaneous empathy, especially for protagonist Billy Casper (David Bradley).

Billy is on the bottom rung of a social stratus that’s at the bottom of the ladder itself. A scrawny 15-year-old, Billy is bullied by classmates, harangued by teachers, ridiculed for his lack of athletic ability and treated like dirt by his employer. Things aren’t much better at home, where his bitter coal miner brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) has nothing but loathing for him and his indifferent mother (Lynne Perrie) couldn’t care less.

Billy’s only ambition is not to end up in the coal mines like his brother and long-gone father. It’s the best future his existence allows him to hope for. Loach doesn’t frame Billy himself as any kind of saint though — he steals, bullies those smaller than him and generally behaves in a manner forged by cycles of poverty and neglect.

Some hope comes in the form of a kestrel falcon that Billy finds nesting in nearby ruins. The discovery ignites a previously unseen drive in him, and with a stolen book about falconry, he begins to learn how to train the bird. Sequences where he flies the bird and coaxes it to his arm are beautifully realized — Loach doesn’t emotionally underline them at all, allowing the simple euphoria of Billy’s connection with another creature to speak for itself.

Loach uses mostly nonprofessional actors to help retain a naturalistic sense, and nowhere is he more successful in this than with Bradley, who gives one of the greatest performances of a child actor on screen ever. An actual student at the school where the film was shot, he was chosen from the first group of students Loach saw, and his grubby charisma and wholly un-self-conscious manner is perfect for the role. Colin Welland is the only professional actor in the film, and as the one teacher who treats Billy with respect, he slips into the realistic world of the film with ease.

Kes was selected by the British Film Institute as the seventh best British film of the century, and its reputation is more than deserved. It’s a must-see.

The Blu-ray Disc
Kes is presented in 1080p high definition with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. This release represents a major restoration of the film, accomplished using both the original 35mm camera negative and a 35mm color reversal internegative. The film looks markedly different than any previous home video release, with deeply saturated colors and a grittier look that makes previous editions seem quite faded. The transfer is superb, leaving grain intact and clearly presenting a film that was made cheaply and fairly quickly in the late 1960s, but so cleanly, it seems that the print was almost never used. Damage is almost completely eradicated; only one early shot in almost complete darkness shows a fair amount of scratches and heavy noise. Otherwise, the image is full of richly rendered detail and looks just superb.

Audio is presented in an uncompressed monaural mix of the film’s original production soundtrack. An alternate track featuring some scenes dubbed for greater clarity has accompanied most home video releases, and is also included here. The original track is quite clean and natural sounding, with the feel of being recorded on location very much intact. Most American viewers will likely have trouble with the heavy Yorkshire accents in a number of scenes though. The alternate track helps alleviate this somewhat, but the tinny and artificial dubbing is less than ideal. Unfortunately, Criterion has not included subtitles on this release (mostly common practice for their releases in English), so prepare to strain your ears and probably just miss some of the dialogue.

Special Features
A great slate of extras accompany this release, with the most essential being Cathy Come Home, a 1966 television feature for BBC program The Wednesday Play, which Loach directed 10 films for. Like many of those films, Cathy Come Home is focused on critiquing a British social crisis, and its tale of a woman who loses her husband and children in the midst of homelessness details the housing problems of the era. It’s a film that’s intended to raise awareness, so its didactic elements are really at the forefront, but its experimental, French New Wave-inspired editing and relentless verité sensibilities make it a thrilling and heartrending document. A video afterword by Graham Fuller accompanies the film.

Also essential is a 45-minute making-of, which includes new interviews with Loach, Bradley, DP Chris Menges and longtime Loach collaborator and producer Tony Garnett. Each one has vivid memories of production, and the featurette traces the film’s humble beginnings to its eventual critical acclaim.

A 1993 profile of Loach’s career for the British program The Southbank Show traces his work up to that point, and provides a solid overview of his filmography. The theatrical trailer is also included. A booklet with an essay by Fuller sees him covering some of the same ground as in the video piece, as well as providing a comprehensive look at Loach’s work.

The Bottom Line
Kes is a landmark in British cinema, and this fantastic Criterion edition is all the more reason to visit or revisit the film.

Somewhere

Article first published as Blu-ray Review: Somewhere (2010) on Blogcritics.

The Film
Sofia Coppola’s films have always been growers for me. I wasn’t particularly enamored with either The Virgin Suicides or Lost in Translation on my first viewing, but my appreciation has grown steadily for each upon subsequent revisits. With her fourth feature, Somewhere, I expect to experience a similar phenomenon. Somewhere is certainly a companion piece to Lost in Translation, but with more subdued rhythms and a less obvious emotional core, making it even easier to dismiss the first time around if you’re not expecting something so delicate.

Like Lost in Translation, Somewhere is an examination of emptiness and ennui among the privileged, although in a slightly different milieu. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is an enormously popular Hollywood star living in the Chateau Marmont hotel. His life is full of stimulation — driving fast cars, jet setting around the globe, staving off the hordes of beautiful women throwing themselves at him — but is simultaneously suffocating in its hollowness.

His life takes a bit of a detour with the arrival of his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning), who begins to spend more and more time with him while her mother has a kind of emotional breakdown. The potential here for the precocious kiddo teaching dad what’s really important in life storyline is obvious, and fortunately avoided completely.

What we get instead are precisely observed moments — Johnny gets applied with old age makeup for a movie, he enjoys the company of a pair of twin pole dancers, he orders late-night gelato with his daughter.

Coppola allows almost every scene to really breathe, waiting several seconds (or more) beyond when we expect a cut. Some will call this pretentious or annoying or boring. But really, it’s an exercise in restraint, painting a portrait with fewer brushstrokes. It's a sensibility that allows the viewer to feel the emptiness in each frame. Harris Savides’ photography is frequently stunning in a relaxed, almost incidental way.

Dorff and Fanning exhibit a very sweet screen chemistry that relies on the subtlest of gestures. Older sister Dakota clearly got all of the histrionics, leaving Elle with a natural grace that lends the film its understated sense of hope.

Ultimately, it doesn’t feel like Coppola has a lot to say in Somewhere, but the film exhibits a formal maturation that might be even more obvious years or decades removed. The film sort of violates its own emotional control with an ending that’s frankly kind of silly, but there’s a lot that’s rewarding here for patient viewers.

The Blu-ray Disc
Somewhere is presented in 1080p high definition with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. This transfer replicates the look of film admirably, untouched by any apparent digital manipulation. Savides’ desaturated and slightly hazy photography recalls the work he did for Greenberg, and like that disc, it’s marvelously represented here. Colors are more subdued than vibrant and the image is rarely tack sharp, but that’s the intended look, and it’s communicated perfectly.

Audio is presented in a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track. The film is mostly very quiet with long stretches without dialogue, but when it’s there, it’s cleanly presented through the fronts. The track is unassumingly immersive, with little details sprinkled throughout the surrounds.

Special Features
Only a single extra finds its way onto this disc, but fortunately it’s head and shoulders above most featurettes of its ilk. The 17-minute making-of looks to be shot on film with a similar aesthetic to the movie itself, and features interviews with a number of the cast and crew. Elegantly constructed, it’s a pleasure to watch.

The Bottom Line
Somewhere will likely prove frustrating to many viewers, but I think Coppola is doing something interesting here, and I look forward to revisiting the film in the future.

The Submarines: Love Notes/Letter Bombs

Blake Hazard of The Submarines at Tractor Tavern

Article first published as Music Review: The Submarines - Love Notes/Letter Bombs on Blogcritics.

The husband and wife duo that makes up The Submarines, John Dragonetti and Blake Hazard, famously recovered from a break-up during the recording of debut record Declare a New State!, and the album’s melancholy pop tunes told the story of a relationship in turmoil. Sophomore album, the post-marriage Honeysuckle Weeks, was a sunnier affair that basked in the glow of blooming love.

This time around, it seems they’re splitting the difference. The dichotomy is present right there in the title — Love Notes/Letter Bombs — and that titular slash pops up all over the album, with notions of true love and human fallibility duking it out for lyrical prominence.

Like the previous two albums, Hazard’s bright vocals soar over Dragonetti’s electronic-tinged pop melodies, and if the lyrics tend to vacillate, the music lands solidly on the optimistic side of the scale. But as Hazard and Dragonetti showed on Honeysuckle Weeks, cheerful doesn’t have to equal mawkish — and the lyrics bear a matter-of-fact honesty that are comforting in how straightforward they are.

John Dragonetti of The Submarines

The first two cuts on Love Notes/Letter Bombs, “Shoelaces” and “Fire,” almost feel like they could be b-sides on Honeysuckle, with churning, luminous dispositions that seem ready-made for an iPhone commercial like the one Honeysuckle’s “You, Me and the Bourgeoisie” showed up on. Despite its more languid pace, “Birds” strikes a similar note.

Fortunately, Love Notes doesn’t simply regurgitate its predecessor, and the twin pairing of “Ivaloo” and “The Sun Shines at Night” exemplify admirably the contradictions the album is exploring. “Ivaloo” features ukulele underpinned by synthesizers, with Hazard and Dragonetti trading cautiously hopeful vocals. “You’ll bring your overhead projector / to demonstrate where we go wrong,” he sings. “You’ll chart our every flaw / shown 10-times tall on the bedroom wall / but if you love me / we can erase it all,” she answers.

On the earnest “The Sun Shines at Night,” the sentiment of “The sun shines at night / we’re in love and it feels so right” runs up against the reality of “Your doubts, they hold strong / and my hope, it burns too long.”

The Submarines at Seattle's Tractor Tavern (4/12/11) Photos by Dusty Somers

Many of the album’s songs have a kind of point/counterpoint structure, with love’s successes and failings comingling side by side, but Love Notes/Letter Bombs isn’t nearly as schematic as that sounds. Hazard and Dragonetti have a knack for creating soundscapes that seem effortlessly constructed, and one is much more likely to float away on the album’s melodies than get bogged down in some kind of emotional exercise. That more substantial concerns are present is simply a bonus for fans of intelligently constructed pop songs.

White Material — The Criterion Collection

Article first published as Blu-ray Review: White Material - The Criterion Collection on Blogcritics.

The Film
A brooding, roving portrait of near-madness fostered in isolation, Claire Denis’ White Material pulses with the unmistakable rhythms of a Denis film. One of the most accomplished filmmakers working today, she creates landscapes of feeling, where characters’ emotions dictate the tempo more than plot.

With the elliptically structured White Material, Denis builds her film around one woman — Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), the headstrong manager of a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country. Maria’s entire world is crumbling, as civil war is breaking out across the country and the family of her ex-husband (Christophe Lambert), who owns the plantation, has lost all faith in the operation. Workers have fled, the last helicopter airlifts to remove her from the country are departing and there is little tolerance for the brand of French colonialism her presence represents.

And yet, Maria remains undeterred in her determination to stay in the country and harvest her coffee. She picks up a collection of temporary workers to finish the job and ignores the signals of impending violence. Meanwhile, rebel bands of child soldiers roam the countryside and the government is especially interested in capturing a rebel leader who is simply known as “The Boxer” (Isaach de Bankolé).

The film’s flashback structure reveals some key details within the first few minutes, but soon, we’re plunged into the whirlwind that Maria finds herself in. Denis puts us squarely in Maria’s shoes for much of the film, shooting her from behind or in profile, and alternating these intimate close-ups with long shots that frame her against the land’s rugged beauty. For better or worse, Maria possesses a kind of primal identification with Africa — leaving would be like tearing herself away from a life force.

Denis’ profile shots of Huppert are frequent and surprisingly revealing. Framed this way, we see a woman with her face set like a flint, unwilling to relent to what should clearly be common sense. The Criterion cover art reproduces one of these shots, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the film.

Huppert’s performance is magnetic and wild, but it’s hardly all unrestrained histrionics. She throws herself into the role with great physicality, her slender frame belying her strength of presence, but her expression remains that of one who has total clarity of thought. Contrasted with the rapid devolution of her son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) into a manic, self-styled warrior, Maria seems like a rational figure — but her world may have changed too much for her paradigm to remain valid.

White Material is a film that’s elegant in its roughness. It has a captured-on-the-fly feel, with choices made in the editing room more for their impressionistic than structural value. None of this is any surprise coming from Denis, who has a talent for plucking evocative moments out of thin air — or reels of footage in this case.

The Blu-ray Disc
White Material is presented in 1080p high definition with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. This is a pleasing presentation that looks as sharp and damage-free as one would expect from a new film. Facial detail is especially excellent here and the film’s earthy tones are nicely reproduced, with browns dominating the color palette. Instances of bright color — a mural of a solider, a bloody and dismembered animal head — pop out with an attractive vibrancy. Created from a 35mm interpositive, the transfer is appropriately film-like, with an intact and very subtle grain structure.

Audio is presented in a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track that is mostly front-oriented, but sprinkled with enough details to create a more dynamic listening experience. The French dialogue is crisp and clear, with the score by British band Tindersticks mingling unobtrusively alongside.

Special Features
A fairly light set of supplements accompanies the film, but fortunately we get excellent interviews with three of the film’s major players. All recorded exclusively for Criterion, separate interviews feature Denis, Huppert and Bankolé, with the first two in French and the latter in English. Denis is a marvelous interview subject, touching on areas from the film’s conception to production, as well as speaking about her personal connection to Africa and the turmoil that has been a near-constant there. Huppert and Bankolé speak more specifically to their individual roles, with Bankolé also touching on his experiences working on Denis’ debut feature, Chocolat.

The non-interview extras aren’t quite as exciting, with a single two-minute deleted scene and a short documentary about the film’s premiere in Cameroon. The theatrical trailer rounds out the disc’s features. Also included is a booklet with an essay by Amy Taubin.

The Bottom Line
Denis’ Criterion debut may not be her best work, but it’s certainly emblematic of her talent and the beautiful Blu-ray release is a great way to see the film.

9 to 5: The Musical at the 5th Avenue Theatre

Article first published as Theater Review (Seattle): 9 to 5: The Musical by Dolly Parton and Patricia Resnick at the 5th Avenue Theatre on Blogcritics.

The national tour of 9 to 5: The Musical has a lot of things going for it — high energy numbers, impeccable choreography, and a trio of talented actresses each carving out a distinctive stage persona for herself. Whether that’s enough to overcome the strangely joyless tenor of the production probably requires devotion to the film that inspired it, to Dolly Parton herself, or some combination of the two.

Parton’s musical numbers are serviceably peppy, but the book by Patricia Resnick, who also co-wrote the film’s screenplay, is dispiritingly flabby. Flashes of screwball wit, workplace satire, and broad physical comedy pop up briefly, but the show never commits to a comedic style and mostly settles for corny set-ups (strait-laced office workers smoking pot, an unattractive assistant pining after her boss) with even worse punchlines.

This first tour, which began in September, is at the 5th Avenue Theatre through April 24. The musical largely follows the plotline of the film, with three underappreciated female office workers at the generic Consolidated Industries fighting back against the sexist regime that runs their company. Violet (Dee Hoty) is a capable, strong widow balancing career with raising a teenage son. Doralee (Diana DeGarmo) is a busty country girl, constantly being gazed upon by lascivious male coworkers. Judy (Mamie Parris) is newly single, and thrust into the working world without skills because of her husband leaving her for a 19-year-old.

The three are unlikely friends, but have a common enemy in their boss, Franklin Hart, Jr. (Joseph Mahowald), a bumbling, leering man who treats his female employees either like dirt or like potential sexual conquests. He has a seemingly insurmountable power over them, but a series of events just might give the women a chance to change the power structure at Consolidated.

The first act of 9 to 5 is a laborious affair, mostly filled with a series of “I am” songs that establish superficial details about the characters without propelling the musical into any interesting territory. The numbers are certainly bombastic, with the decent-sized ensemble engaging in complicated choreography, but to what end? It’s like a massive engine revving while the vehicle remains in park.

It’s only toward the end of the first act, when the three women each indulge in a revenge fantasy about Hart, that the show gains some traction. Judy imagines a ’50s-era noir, Doralee a rip-roaring western, and Violet a cracked Disney-type fairy tale. Act Two, where the imagined comeuppance has a chance to come true, should be more of an outrageous romp, but at least the book tightens up a bit.

The specter of Dolly Parton hangs over the entire affair — literally. In a framing device that’s even tackier than it sounds, a video of Parton introducing the characters is projected onto a clock that hangs above the stage. At the end of the show, she returns for a where-are-they-now epilogue. Director and choreographer Jeff Calhoun is clearly doing his best, but the Parton videos are just another indication that 9 to 5 is simply a second-rate musical, and no number of impressively staged numbers can allay the feeling.

Fortunately, this national tour is stocked with talent for its three leads. Hoty carries a formidable comic presence, displaying flawless timing as the no-nonsense Violet. Parris is a vocal powerhouse, and the jaw-dropping run she performs in the penultimate “Get Out and Stay Out” makes one wish this show utilized those pipes more. DeGarmo, who’s coming into her own as a musical theater talent, practically becomes Dolly Parton onstage, emulating her speaking and singing voice with a precision that extends beyond mere imitation. It might seem like a lazy choice to play the character just like the role’s originator, but she does it so well, there’s hardly a reason to complain.

With a set of rotating cubes that are frequently and efficiently used in Kenneth Foy’s scenic design and whimsically nostalgic costumes by original Broadway costumer William Ivey Long, 9 to 5 looks the part of a classic-to-be. Appearances can be deceiving, however.

9 to 5: The Musical is on stage at the 5th Avenue through April 24, with performances Tuesday through Sunday. Tickets are available at the 5th's website.