No. 4: Feb. 26, 2016

By David Elliott

A movie menu, retro-rooted but served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews of 45 Years and Where to Invade Next)
Forty-five years ago you could never have imagined Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a couple. She was a Euro-queen of haughty seduction (The Damned, The Night Porter), he was a plain Brit playing men of small chances (Billy Liar, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). She was one glittering step down from Catherine Deneuve, he was one humble stop over from John Hurt. Now she is 70 and he, as of yesterday, is 79.

They are splendid together as Kate and Geoff Mercer, retired and living near a lovely English town. The film is 45 Years, which is the wedding anniversary they are planning to celebrate with many friends. Then news comes about a woman he once loved, long dead. Geoff's heart is uneasily kindled. Kate's shivers, and not only because the news involves a glacier (as the British say, a "glassier"). We watch them dealing with it, each pause and hesitation as exposed and expressive as their words. Time has crumbled these fine faces, but Courtenay remains masterfully subtle (only Alec Guinness surpassed him) in his vulnerability. Rampling is a chalice of elegantly mature nuances.

45 Years is slight stuff compared to the great marital duets (Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson in Scenes From a Marriage, Blythe Danner and Michael Moriarty in Too Far to Go, Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson in Long Day's Journey Into Night). But scripter and director Andrew Haigh has found the exact actors, the right settings and songs, and he doesn't settle for the soft goo of many "senior dramas." Life is mostly about moments, and truly felt ones live in this film.

In Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore has a tour that you won't see in the flashy cruise ads on PBS. Toting a big American flag, the liberal advocate "invades" countries that do some important things better than we do. In Italy, workers get five weeks of annual paid vacation and long breaks for delicious meals. France provides its school kids with healthy, refined lunches and smart sex education. Finnish schools teach by igniting imaginations in short, intensive workdays. Free college is standard in little Slovenia. Portugal de-criminalized drugs and now has a sane prison system. Rising female power is humanizing Iceland and even Muslim Tunisia, and rich Germany has gone beyond the Weimar Republic's best dreams.

It is too easy to zing Moore for shtick like the flag, for glib interviews and facile clips (the perfectly stupid Rick Perry moment is a marvel). Moore, the spark from Flint, is not a documentarian but an argumentarian -- he stokes arguments, or (in this case) nudges one along. Can he really expect this blithe, wandering editorial to rouse a nation of 322 million, currently afflicted by ideological toxins? What he drives home is the homeland insecurity of an imperial America often acting provincial, in which a polemical approach like Moore's can seem almost sophisticated.

SALAD (A List)
In honor of 45 Years, my selection of the Twelve Best British Romantic Films: Persuasion (Mitchell, 1995), I Know Where I'm Going (Powell, 1945), Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995), Pygmalion (Asquith, 1938), Brief Encounter (Lean, 1946), Maurice (Ivory, 1987), The Deep Blue Sea (Davies, 2011), Bright Star (Campion, 2009), All or Nothing (Leigh, 2012), Among Giants (Miller, 1998), Truly, Madly, Deeply (Minghella, 1990) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Lewin, 1951).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Citizen Welles never liked his somewhat snubby nose, and for Mr. Arkadin (1955) "the ubiquitous false nose was sharp and aquiline... Prior to the film, Orson obtained his false noses from his 'nose man,' John O'Gorman, who would ship dozens of false noses (made of mortician's wax) to any part of the world. This time he failed to send his most realistic noses to Orson to use as Arkadin, a fact that Orson complained about for years afterward." (From Frank Brady's very knowing biography Citizen Welles.)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
"The Producers runs past its high point, but Mostel gives it a size beyond weight, and Max is great beyond greed. Mere lucre cannot define a man who can exalt a hot dog, wear a filthy cravat, flaunt a cardboard belt and attempt to top his career with a colossal dud. His performance is in line with a truth that Walter Kerr discerned in silent comedy: 'The content of the work must fall into place without forcing, with simple rectitude. And its creator must expose himself in the content, as wholly as it is possible for a mortal man to do." (From the Zero Mostel / Producers chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, coming soon from Luminare Press.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it's a distillation.

Zero Mostel and Estelle Winwood in The Producers (Avco Embassy; director Mel Brooks, cinematographer Joseph Coffey).

No. 3: Feb. 19, 2016

By David Elliott

A movie menu, retro-rooted but served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (review of NEIGHBORING SOUNDS)
Sometimes, to feed the critical lobe in the aesthetic brain, you have to step away from the plex-barn tango, the churning mosh pit of puff and grosses. You go to a short run of an adventurous movie that simply rewards. For me, many of those have been foreign, films like The Pool (India), Circo (Mexico), Offside (Iran), Scent of Green Papaya (Vietnam, by way of Paris), Tony Manero (Chile), Le Quattro Volte (Italy), The Deep Blue Sea (Britain). And now Neighboring Sounds from Brazil, the eighth feature film of Kleber Mendonca Filho.

I'd never heard of him, but his Brazilian palette is very rich. If it doesn't have the fervent samba salsa of Black Orpheus or City of God, it is still deft, sure and saturating. The movie's star is the coastal city of Recife, in an old neighborhood being swallowed by new, generic high-rises that lift rents and tensions (the big slabs promise more security, but in an isolating, street-crushing way). Mendonca Dilho is unfaltering in his rhythms. His eye scans wide, nailing each image, and he never over-sells the music. His script deals with numerous uneasy citizens and a new team of security guards, rather "sketchy" guys but, despite some class envy, basically honest.

This propulsive carousel includes the sedation of a neurotic dog; a woman sexually excited by a washing machine; a movie theater in ruins; a little girl who massages Mom with her big feet; a black boy hiding in a tree; a lost tourist; a preening tough who can't live up to his Jackie Brown poster; a nocturnal dream of criminal invasion. Here again is the Brazilian counterpoint of desire and torpor, and a Godfather-ish patriarch who signals a backstory held in reserve for the finish. The satisfactions of this sensual screen-filler are not rigged for plot.

(Meanwhile, back at the Uberplex: If you crave pure idiocy, and the dumbest use of Rome since Alaric's Visigoths plundered the city in 410, your gift is Zoolander 2, the lavish parody of franchise overkill that provides sporadic laughs. If you want some overdue depth on the revived Star Wars mania, read Christian Caryl's lively personal essay "The Force of Nostalgia" in the Feb. 25 New York Review of Books. Among the insights: "Star Wars has become, to a remarkable degree, captive to the geek revolution it spawned back at the end of the 1970s." It was 1977, and I remember thinking "Flash Gordon revisited.")

SALAD (A List)
Here, inspired by the review above, are my Ten Favorite South American Films: Our Lady of the Assassins (Colombia), Black Orpheus (Brazil), Aguirre, Wrath of God (Peru), Me You Them (Brazil), The Motorcycle Diaries (Argentina etc.), Live-in Maid (Argentina), No (Chile), The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina), City of God (Brazil) and Evita (Argentina -- no, not the musical, the documentary). Honorary mention: The Wages of Fear, with the South of France subbing superbly for Venezuela.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
During the dicey days before Citizen Kane's delayed 1941 release (this May 1 is the premiere's 75th anniversary), Citizen Orson, RKO Pictures and Welles attorney Arnold Weissberger faced mounting threat of Hearst retaliation. At one point, "to be certain of scaring off Hearst, one of Weissberger's colleagues suggested threatening (the publisher) with disclosing that, in Mexico, Marion Davies had once covertly given birth to twins." This was not used. As Weissberger told Welles, the crux issue was: "Will a man be allowed in effect to copyright the story of his life?" Answer, despite retaliation: No. (From Barbara Leaming's great, authorized biography, Orson Welles.)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
All the key talents of 1984's finest movie came into it vulnerably: "Fault lines girded Paris, Texas. Wim Wenders had married four times. Sam Shepard had left his wife for Jessica Lange. Hunter Carson came from Kit Carson's failed union with Karen Black. Dean Stockwell's second marriage brought two kids, then divorce. Nastassja Kinski had survived her demonic father Klaus and several romances. Roving coyote Harry Dean Stanton never married, yet had one or two offspring he had not (by 1984) seen. Caringly, the gods of art saved Paris,Texas from going down the soap drain." (From the Stanton/Paris,Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, soon to be published by Luminare Press.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it's a distillation.

 
Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas (United Artists; Wim  Wenders, director; Robby Muller, cinematographer)

No. 2: FEB. 12, 2016

By David Elliott

A movie menu, retro-rooted but served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review: HAIL, CAESAR!)
I come to praise, not bury Hail, Caesar! In their 17th feature film the Coen Bros, Joel and Ethan, entrench their fond tribute to Old Hollywood in a 1950s studio, Capitol Pictures. The star of Capitol's ancient-world religious epic is big, buff meatloaf Baird Whitlock (George Clooney). As a dumb Roman general, Baird makes old toga titan Victor Mature seem like a Platonic form communing with Jesus. When you hear Baird feeding star gossip to bewildered Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a Communist cell meeting in a Frank Lloyd Wright home (the Walker house, Carmel, 1952), you realize that movie satire has achieved a new wrinkle. Fortunately, one not burdened by the morbid weirdness of the Coens's early Hollywood fantasy Barton Fink.

Baird's movie is "a tale of the Christ," which seems "a swell story" to Capitol honcho and fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin). A ruthless but fairly honest workaholic, Eddie is a devout Catholic who believes mostly in the studio, even when shark-cornered by rapacious twin gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton). Eddie's main job is rescuing stars from incipient scandals, in the feverish twilight of the old order. We get yummy lampoons of a frothy swim-film (Scarlett Johansson is like Esther Williams voiced by Thelma Ritter), a sailor musical (hunk Channing Tatum stars as a sort of Tab-Gene Kelly), and a backlot Western (as the rope-twirlin' star, delightful Alden Ehrenreich may get the career lift that he didn't in Francis Coppola's art-bomb Tetro).

True to form, the Coens blithely shampoo the goods, their satirical nifties elevated by the lush, Exacto-blade imagery of Roger Deakins (a Roman film set at night is like a DeChirico painting). There is real affection here for the shopworn glam of a world now gone, but only hip viewers, most over 50, will notch all the nuances with a laugh. Stuff like the excellent Brolin tenderizing the real Eddie Mannix, a tough enforcer at MGM. And the postwar Red Scare being so softly cuddled. And Clooney's "I do not, friend Gracchus," a likely nod to Stephen Boyd as "friend Fane" in The Oscar (March 4 brings the 50th anniversary of that insane debauch of the Awards, sadly still not enshrined on DVD).

The Coens are merry hipsters who hustle for a broad audience, and this endearingly silly comedy may not have found precisely the right sweet spot for that mission. But their hipsterism is contagious, if you get the gags. Surely the savvy brothers know that the best, imperial spoofing was done in the '50s by Peter Ustinov's Nero in Quo Vadis and Jay Robinson's Caligula in The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators, and in the '70s by John Hurt's Caligula in I, Claudius. Those are Caesars we can hail forever.

SALAD (A List)
With all due respect to Jesus, Moses and the Roman Empire, here are my picks for the Ten Best Ancient and Religious Epics: Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959), Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), Barrabas (Fleischer, 1961), The Messiah (Rossellini, 1976), Agora (Amenabar, 2009), The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988), The Ten Commandments (De Mille, 1956), Samson and Delilah (De Mille, 1950), The Fall of the Roman Empire (Mann, 1964) and Land of the Pharaohs (Hawks, 1955). And a toga'd curtsy to The Silver Chalice, 1954, for Jack Palance's crazy Simon the Magician and the design work by Boris Leven and Rolf Gerard.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Just a sip this week, as Citizen Orson touts one of his heroes, James Cagney, to the always receptive Peter Bogdanovich: "Cagney was one of the biggest actors in the whole history of the screen. Force, style, truth, control -- he had everything. He pulled no punches. God, how he projected! And yet nobody could call Cagney a ham. He didn't care about reducing himself to fit the scale of the camera." (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Bogdanovich.)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
I recall my first viewing, in 1973, of what I still think is Robert Altman's best film: "The Westwood preview crowd split wide, as Altman's neo-noir turned nostalgia on a spit of farewell. What he called 'a satire in melancholy' had a fee-good start, and then a shock that routed the funny charm. Elliott Gould's previous work had not prepped us, though he felt that The Long Goodbye was 'the first movie I'd ever really made.' I left giddy with pleasure, for that night we charter fans were snagged, bagged and tagged from the first minutes of succulent audacity." (From the Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, soon to be published by Luminare Press.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it's a distillation.

Elliott Gould and Nina van Pallandt in The Long Goodbye (United Artists; director Robert Altman; cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) 

No. 1: FEB. 5, 2016

By David Elliott

A movie menu, retro­-rooted but fresh for noshing each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review: ​THE REVENANT)

Nominated for 12 Oscars, The Revenant relies on an old trick of expensive movie­making: the landscape framing, the sheer spectacle of terrain and weather, attempts to camouflage the generic banality of this almost prehistoric Western. The big, lavish vistas make the human actions and motives seem puny.

Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu (Amores Perros, Birdman) and luxuriantly photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki in Montana, Canada and Argentina, the film has cinematic ancestry (Northwest Passage, Black Robe, the grim Richard Harris hits Man in the Wilderness and A Man Called Horse). Inarritu uses another old trick: Sergio Leone’s crafty, picturesque balancing of sadism and masochism, marinated in blood.

The hero is rather mythically based on an actual man in the early 1800s. As Glass, a scout for fur trappers, Leonardo DiCaprio isn't made of glass. After you've seen him survive a double mauling by a grizzly, plunge wounded down a frigid waterfall, eat the raw vitals of a buffalo, and crawl inside a gutted horse after falling from a cliff, a question fidgets: How come Leo didn't survive in Titanic?

The doomed, desperate Indians are often as cruel as the greedy whites. This brutal world is so verbally limited that Britain's Tom Hardy, despite a frontier accent that is often barely intelligible, comes off as the most intelligent of the crude yokels. After viciously burying Glass alive (DiCaprio almost always looks buried in furs, rags, wounds and scabs), he sparks the revenge motor that drives the long, punishing story from one nightmare to another. The result, while not boring, is a thundering migraine of misfortune.

DiCaprio suffers bravely, yet his feral grunts and gnarly snarls lack the often witty humanity of Tom Hanks in Cast Away or the backwoods sexiness of Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans. The gore and the glorious scenery may leave us dumbfounded, though we are not too dumb to wonder: Wasn't the furious grizzly defending her cubs? In this visceral die-orama, that makes her one of the most human beings on screen.   

SALAD (A List)

Here it is, so eagerly awaited by so few: my luscious Top Twelve movies from the 2015 harvest. In order of personal favor: Joy, Trumbo, The Martian, Jimmy's Hall, Turner, Carol, Clouds of Sils Maria, Brooklyn, Spotlight, Slow West, Meru, Mississippi Grind (the last, with Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds as Dixie gamblers, would make a swell double with Robert Altman's 1974 casino classic California Split). Worst experience: San Andreas, the final crushing splat of the disaster film. Chief letdown: Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, an elegantly drifting dirge with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as wistful old bores. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Welles)

Citizen Orson’s early, 1930s love life was often more courtship than consummation, as actress Geraldine Fitzgerald recalled: “One Saturday night after the show, we were going to elope. He’d hired a car and we were going to New Jersey to a motel, and then we kissed in the back­seat and I realized it was the kiss of a brother and not a lover, and so the car turned around ... Orson came up to the room with me where Eddy (her husband) was asleep, and Orson patted his foot and said, ‘Everything’s alright, old fellow. Nothing to worry about.’ And then he left.” But Welles never lacked for women, one of the many truths discerned in Patrick McGilligan’s vivid, juicy and superbly researched new book, Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Just over a decade before Funny Face, Audrey Hepburn served in the Resistance. As a teen courier she survived Holland’s grim Hongerwinter at the end of Nazi occupation, and suffered serious malnutrition. So starring a dozen years later with Fred Astaire in a Hollywood musical – and in her beloved Paris! – was a massive bliss bit. In this film Hepburn showed that her stardom was truly meant to last, and that she could carry a big American musical, with Fred’s bracing help. Funny Face is one of those rare pictures that justifies the epigraph at the start of Red Garters: “Many people have said: ‘The movies should be more like life,’ and a wise man answered: ‘Life should be more like the movies.” (From the Audrey/Funny Face chapter in Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies by David Elliott, soon to be published by the Luminare Press. Stay tuned, and spread the word.)

DESSERT (An Image!) 
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, 1957 (Paramount; director Stanley Donen; cinematographer Ray June)