Nosh 8: 'Pee-wee's Big Holiday' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (review of Pee-wee’s Big Holiday)
Actor Paul Reubens’s arrest for indecent exposure, in a Sarasota theater in 1991, sparked a media storm that was like a juvenile joke on the old, sordid carnival of celebrity scandals. On leave from his popular, cultish gig as infantile but weirdly hip Pee-wee Herman, Reubens had gone to the local theater as himself. His dazed mug shot, in beard and T-shirt, was a career crusher. Crazed moralists clearly didn’t share the ironic recognition of some fans: that the winkingly suggestive but sexually neutered Pee had, at least, discovered masturbation. Reubens’s little empire collapsed.

In 1978 he had created Herman as a skit figure, who went viral (in pre-Web terms). Fans loved his silly, goof-dork version of their lost childhoods. He hired Tim Burton to perfect Pee-wee’s style package, and in 1985 their elegant comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure earned six times its $7 million budget (a 1988 sequel flopped, its Big Top humor having reached an apex when Chaplin made 1928’s The Circus). The saddest scandal victim was Pee-wee’s Playhouse, after five TV seasons of inventive, whimsically edgy comedy that kids loved (so did their parents, from a different angle).

Reubens, in and out of Pee-wee, has had many gigs since, including a Broadway show that rallied diehard fans. In the Netflix production Pee-wee’s Big Holiday he is, at 63, twice his age when he made Big Adventure. Despite great make-up and some digital nip-tuck, he seems both ageless and a bit baked (hints of midriff bulge, a touch of sag in profile). Director John Lee is no master of quirky revels like Burton, but he shows devotion with this genial throwback. The hero’s obscure sexuality remains hidden somewhere in the seam line where Herman merges with Reubens (who might as well, by now, change his first name to Paul-wee or Pee-Paul).

This time, the dapper little guy has a bromantic but innocent crush on massive Joe Mangianello, the HBO werewolf star and Magic Mike beef-dish. In Herman’s cozy Ike Era town, Joe reveals that he shares enthusiasms just as childish. Their fast bond lures Pee-wee to New York, which doesn’t work for him a whole lot better than for Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Still, the fun includes a snappy send-up of the  opening of On the Town, and before NYC another retro bundle has Pee-wee fending off aggressive hick chicks, like Tony Perkins nervously afflicted by similar cornballs in Friendly Persuasion. The episode of Herman making balloon fart-music sounds for Amish yokels achieves real purity of Pee.

Big Holiday provides overdue compensation for the cheesy scandal, that rather asinine fit of hysteria. There are some flat patches and the subversive streak is fairly anemic. I miss Pee-wee’s bike! But the soft laffs and numerous chuckles include the funny return of Diane Salinger, who was sexy Simone in the 1985 film. The new movie is a fond smile, like coming upon a Pee-wee doll that you lost years ago in the attic. You pick it up and giggle.    

SALAD (A List)

As usual there was debate about the latest top Oscar winner, though Spotlight was a good choice (if not, to my taste, better than Brooklyn, The Martian or the un-nominated Joy, Carol and Trumbo). Oscar has made plenty of mistakes, and as a sample here are 20 Best Pictures (and the Better Films They Beat):

You Can’t Take It With You (over Grand Illusion, 1938), Rebecca (over The Grapes of Wrath, 1940), How Green Was My Valley (over Citizen Kane, 1941), Mrs. Miniver (over The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942), Going My Way (over Double Indemnity, 1944), Gentleman’s Agreement (over Great Expectations, 1947), Hamlet (over Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948), All About Eve (over Sunset Boulevard, 1950), My Fair Lady (over Dr. Strangelove, 1964), In the Heat of the Night (over Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), Rocky (over Taxi Driver, 1976), Ordinary People (over Raging Bull, 1980), Chariots of Fire (over Atlantic City, 1981), Out of Africa (over Prizzi’s Honor, 1985), Forrest Gump (over Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, 1994), Braveheart (over Sense and Sensibility, 1995), A Beautiful Mind (over Gosford Park, 2001), Million Dollar Baby (over Sideways, 2004 ), Crash (over Capote, 2005) and Slumdog Millionaire (over Milk, 2008). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In “Raising Kane,” her flawed but hugely readable 1971 essay on Citizen Kane, Pauline Kael had this to say about young Citizen Orson: “What I had once enjoyed but now found almost mysteriously beautiful was Orson Welles’s performance. An additional quality of old movies is that people can be seen as they once were … Many years later, Welles remarked, ‘Like most performers I prefer a live audience to that lie-detector full of celluloid.’ Maybe his spoiled-baby face was just too nearly perfect for the role, and he knew it, and knew the hostile humor that lay behind (writer Herman) Mankiewicz’s  putting so much of him in the role of Hearst, the braggart self-publicist.” (From The Citizen Kane Book, also found in Kael’s compendium For Keeps).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Nobody packed more versatile creativity into his movie breakout years than Alec Guinness. His finest role until The Horse’s Mouth was master thief “Professor” Marcus in Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing gothic The Ladykillers, in 1956: “His genius is foiled by an almost oblivious old doily (Katy Johnson) and, huge scarf trailing, buck teeth protruding, he is like a William F. Buckley vampire (closer to home: critic Kenneth Tynan). Devilishly sardonic, infallibly detailed, too refined for camp but too mordant for simple chuckles, he is perfection. Poor Tom Hanks got stuck with doing the pointless Coen Bros. remake.” (From the Guinness/Horse’s Mouth chapter in my book Starlight Rising, coming soon.)  

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers (Lionsgate; director Alexander Mackendrick, cinematographer Otto Heller)

For previous Flix Nosh posts, scroll below.

Nosh 7: 'Embrace of the Serpent,' 'Room' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews of  Embrace of the Serpent and Room)
Jungle films are usually dense with hot, humid colors. Embrace of the Serpent, from Colombian director and writer Ciro Guerra, has a look of impeccably engraved silver, its black and white images of the upper Amazon basin giving the story a memorial glow, a shimmer of enraptured lamentation.

The star, both a superb camera object and a fully present actor, is Nilbio Torres as Karamakate, a virtual 'last of the Mohicans' to his tiny, dying tribe. He is a young, wandering, heartsick shaman, a remnant of the ecological wisdom of an Amazonia ravaged by rubber exploitation and colonial Catholicism. In1909 he grudgingly helps a deeply ill, German ethnographer (Jan Bijvoet) to find a rare plant that has curative and hallucinogenic properties. The searchers bond through the virile, often accusing pride of the shaman and the vulnerability of the scientist, who hauls along his precious collection like a millstone of cultural guilt.

When the Indian says things like "All your science leads to violence" we detect the heavy cargo of Universal Significance. Guerra doubles down on that, jumping the story ahead 40 years (with different actors) to the old, lonely, bitter Karamakate, who guides a haughty young scientist deeper into the shrinking forest. As the two stories twin in overlap we get more lessons in brutal white imperialism. At times, Serpent is a snake engorging a prey too stuffed with big ideas for lucid digestion.

At its best echoing Aguirre, Wrath of God and Apocalypse Now, at its worst recalling the slacker Dennis Hopper bits in the later film (and Hopper's cracked South American vision The Last Movie), this picture maintains the magnetic allure of themes that seem both timely and timeless. The final, revelatory head-trip, on a holy mountain, is a little limp. But by then you're either hooked or you have slumped into slumber.

There was surprise last month when young Brie Larson took the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Room. I saw it later and was disappointed. Larson plays an Akron mom, abducted and kept in a drab shed locked down by Nick, the creep who drops in almost every night for some forced sex and intimidation. The extra torment is that her son by him, now 5, thinks the room is life, with the larger world reduced to a blurry TV and a small skylight.

Lenny Abrahamson's movie, with its mood-dripping claustrophobia and TV-scaled realism, veers into trauma-therapy soap (with modest appearances by Joan Allen and William H. Macy as relatives). Downplaying her prettiness, Larson is quite effective, yet
most of the expressive power is from Jacob Tremblay as the imaginative boy. He certainly has visiting rights to that Oscar. Even better, pass the gilded baldie to Jennifer Lawrence for her exciting, surefire wok in Joy, or to Cate Blanchett for her immaculate subtlety in Carol.

SALAD (A List)
The recent death (Feb. 28) of George Kennedy brought to mind a rich memory. No, not his amusing Oscar role in Cool Hand Luke, but his big Herman Scobie in Charade, terrifying Audrey Hepburn with his industrial-strength hook hand and almost dispatching Cary Grant off a Paris roof. In his honor ...

My Favorite Movie Villains: Eddie Albert, Attack!; Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men; Alfonso Bedoya, Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Steve Buscemi, Fargo; Bette Davis, The Little Foxes; Dan Duryea, Ride Clear of Diablo; Ben Gazarra, The Strange One; Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, The Maltese Falcon; Alec Guinness, Oliver Twist; Bob Gunton, The Shawshank Redemption; Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet; John Hurt, 44-Inch Chest; Jeremy Irons, Reversal of Fortune; Samuel L. Jackson, Jackie Brown; Ben Johnson, One-Eyed Jacks; Leopoldine Konstantin, Notorious; Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate; Charles Laughton, Mutiny on the Bounty; George Macready, Paths of Glory; Lee Marvin, Seven Men From Now; James Mason, North by Northwest; Ted De Corsia, Crime Wave; Robert Mitchum, Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter; Agnes Moorhead, Dark Passage; Jack Palance, Shane; Parnell Roberts, Ride Lonesome; Robert Ryan, Billy Budd and Crossfire; George Sanders, All About Eve; George C. Scott, The Hustler; Conrad Veidt, Casablanca; John Vernon, Point Blank; Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; J.T. Walsh, Breakdown; Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds, and Orson Welles, The Trial. And, of course, the Dark Lord himself: Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort, Harry Potter. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
I always thought that the black singer's "picnic" song in Citizen Kane was a simple fragment contrived for the movie. In fact in 1940 Citizen Welles went "to see Nat 'King' Cole (and his trio) playing at the Radio Room, the club across the street from NBC in Hollywood. Orson went away humming Cole's version of 'This Can't Be Love' ... (He) developed it into something else entirely: an extended interlude of carousing picnickers serenaded by Cee Pee Johnson's ensemble, performing a louche-sounding pastiche of Cole's song ... 'I kind of based the whole thing around that song." (From Patrick McGilligan's fine book Young Orson)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
"I had been hooked on Arbus's art for years, but it took Fur to open for me Patricia Bosworth's great Diane Arbus. Inspired by her book, the movie became its poetic distillate. A ledge-walker, Fur never loses poise. 'I don't see Fur imitating life as a bio-pic might,' remarked actor Jane Alexander, because 'if you're going to talk about the creative spirit of somebody, what better way to go than nto the realm of the fantastical, magical world of her mind." (From the Fur/Nicole Kidman chapter of my book Starlight Rising, coming soon from Luminare Press.)

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

Nicole Kidman and Ty Burrell in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Picturehouse; director Steven Shainberg, cinematographer Bill Pope)

For previous Flix Nosh posts, scroll down.

Nosh 6: 'Son of Saul' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review of Son of Saul)
The Hungarian film Son of Saul, having won the Cannes festival's top jury prize last summer, recently took the foreign film Oscar. The victory prompted from director Laszlo Nemes one of the more candid comments ever sparked by an Oscar: "It can be a poisoned gift ... maybe I'll never make a normal film again." And another from his star, Geza Rohrig, who called the Hollywood ceremony "not my world ... a near-clinical case of idiocy." If that sounds a bit ungrateful, it is also refreshingly sane.

Not a "normal film," Son of Saul is the first undoubtedly great movie I've seen since The Great Beauty two years ago. It is hard to take and impossible not to take seriously. Saul Auslander (Rohrig) is a Jewish worker in a Sonderkommando unit of men made to do the soul-crushing work at a Nazi Hungarian death camp, herding other Jews into gas rooms and open pits, coal-stoking the crematoria, stripping valuables for the kapos (overseers). For the Nazis the Jews are "pieces," raw material for looting.

Nemes shot almost every scene quite close to Saul (as a close-up film this rivals 2013's Locke), and his turbulent surroundings often turn blurry. In a maelstrom of fear, exhaustion, despair and hopeless empathy, the slave workers are "bearers of secrets," condemned to short service. Saul's dazed humanity awakens when a boy briefly survives gassing, but is then killed. He seeks to find a rabbi to recite kaddish over the body. This bewilders everyone else, but the mad mission is Saul's raft of moral sanity.

Nemes never tightly nails down Saul's orthodoxy or his precise relation to the boy and a woman in the camp. As a slave revolt becomes a sideline to his quest, Rohrig's fine, harried face never reaches for big effects. That is central to the story's rise above familiar formula. After Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift got all expressive in Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961, so sincerely translating Jewish suffering into an Oscar derby, Holocaust acting never fully recovered.

Possibly no other Shoah drama on film has been this present, this immersed in personal hell and crucified choice. The fiercely subjective style echoes Sokorov's Mother and Son, and the great battle scenes of Welles (Chimes at Midnight), Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) and Peckinpah (Cross of Iron).  The ending struck me as a bit too "poetic," but why quibble? Compared to this amazing vision, the popular vampire, zombie and android movies are just more popcorn at the plex.

SALAD (A List)
What does the word "best" mean, regarding a Holocaust film? The barbed question leads to thorny answers, but here is my selection of the Twelve Best Holocaust Movies: A Film Unfinished (Hersonski, 2010), Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955), Son of Saul (Nemes, 2015), In Darkness (Holland, 2010), Schindler's List (Spielberg, 1993), Lacombe, Lucien (Malle, 1974), The Pianist (Polanski, 2002), The Wannsee Conference (Schirk, 1984), Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), The Quarrel (Cohen, 1991), The Truce (Rosi, 1997) and Hotel Terminus (Ophuls, 1988).  Honorary mention, for so credibly bending the prison action genre: Escape From Sobibor (Gold, 1987).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Like many moviemakers, Citizen Welles esteemed France's supreme director, Jean Renoir: "His friends were without number and we all loved him as Shakespeare was loved, 'this side idolatry.' Let's give him the final word: 'To the question 'Is the cinema an art?' my answer is 'What does it matter?' You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix. Art is making." (Orson Welles, interview, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 18, 1979)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
Jackie Brown became Pam Grier's great comeback, and Quentin Tarantino had, like Welles, a debt to Renoir: "How fervently the boy Tarantino had savored her 20s prime as 'queen of blaxploitation.' Pam put on that tiara with The Big Doll House in 1971 and said, 'I took on a statuesque demeanor, clean-faced but no makeup, and gave off the aura of I'm not here for the usual bullshit' ... Tarantino left his heroine off the screen for 23 minutes to introduce other figures, because 'I treat actors as stars, and stars as actors.' Tarantino's creative yeast was Jean Renoir's dictum that everyone has their reasons, and like Renoir he is not prone to heavy judgments." (From 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.

Pam Grier in Jackie Brown (Miramax Films; director Quentin Tarantino, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro)







 

No. 5: March 4, 2016

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of RACE and THE LADY IN THE VAN)
One of the thrills of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, probably the finest film about sport, is seeing track-and-field legend Jesse Owens, dominating the first half. There is Hitler at the vast Berlin stadium built for the 1936 Olympics, applauding his master race. And here comes the very black American, a bolt of lightning. He won four gold medals, and the Nazi but not racist Riefenstahl gave her film's best star shots to der schnellste Mann der Welt (the world's fastest man).

Though Germany won the most medals, what everyone remembers is Owens (and a great film). Race is certainly not in a race with Olympia, but director Stephen Hopkins's reliance on some stale bio-pic cliches doesn't kill his movie. With its fine computer-enhanced stagings of 1930s Berlin and New York, and a solid cast, it finds the sweet spot: the tremendous tensions and then glory of a physical genius who, having endured American racism (North and South), eclipsed Nazi racism in four contests. Surely, no one-word title has had a more cogent double meaning than Race.

Built like a taut, sculpted gazelle, Owens looked fast even when just standing. Actor Stephan James has a blocky build, but his earnest humanity pays off, with a strong tripod of support: Jason Sudeikis as Larry Snyder, track coach and boozing ramrod; Jeremy Irons, growling wonderfully as Olympics official Avery Brundage, and David Kross as the decent German athlete "Luz" Long, who befriended Owens. The plot maintains the myth that Hitler snubbed Owens with a walk-out (in fact, he congratulated him behind the stadium, and later sent a framed portrait!). Race honorably salutes its hero.

When we saw Maggie Smith as the dowager countess, comforting her grand-daughter Mary in the next to last episode of Downton Abbey, her brilliance shone again in full beauty of subtlety. Now, in The Lady in the Van, she plays Mary Shepherd, a former nun and serious pianist. The rattled itinerant lives in her ratty van outside the London house of playwright Alan Bennett. Their odd friendship lasted 15 years, until by death she did part.

Into Bennett's script director Nicholas Hytner has crammed various devices: Bennett (wry, dry Alex Jennings) is split into twin parts as writer and private person -- as if, for any real writer, the two are not the same; quaint locals dispensing cute remarks; Chopin's music to gravy the thin patty of story; many mentions of Mary smelling bad, and a "surprise" that arrives as a limp jolt. Dame Maggie, 81, presses on, decrepit but unbowed, scattering seeds of cranky charm and puppy-eyed pathos. It's like a forlorn valentine to the fabled, postwar Ealing films, and yet never so engaging as Colm Meaney in The Van (1996).

SALAD (A List)
In honor of Spotlight, the newspaper film "hot from the headlines" that won Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday -- the first of that little genre to take the prize, and probably the last -- here are my choices of the Ten Best Newspaper Movies. Starting at the top: All the President's Men (Pakula, 1976), Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 1957), Spotlight (McCarthy, 2015), His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1948), Call Northside 777 (Hathaway, 1948), Park Row (Fuller, 1952), Platinum Blonde (Capra 1931) and Deadline - USA (Brooks, 1952). Citizen Kane, Roman Holiday, It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story go beyond this category.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Here is a glimpse of Citizen Welles, becoming radio's top voice 80 years ago: "CBS offered him his first regular radio stint in mid-January 1936. (Four days a week) he recited poetry for 15 minutes ... 'I got 50 bucks each time,' he recalled, 'and it was terribly nice money to have, because I just turned up five minutes ahead of time and read a poem.' His knack for speaking intimately to housewives led to more of the same." (From Patrick McGilligan's excellent new book Young Orson.)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
A big career test confronted my favorite Italian actor, Marcello Mastroianni: "He felt empowered by La Dolce Vita, but also burdened by a reductive bonus: the Latin Lover label. Maureen Orth's 1986 interview found this amusing: 'Sighing, Mastroianni patiently tries to put all this Latin lover chatter into perspective. What it is, he says, is an occupational hazard. A fireman gets burned, Mastroianni gets seduced.' Fighting back, he became impotent in Il 'Bell Antonio, a cuckold in Divorce, Italian Style, a shy, myopic radical in The Organizer, a comically crazy king in Henry IV." (From the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita 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. 



Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg and kitten in La Dolce Vita. (Cineriz/Astor Pictures; director Federico Fellini, cinematographer Otello Martelli)