Nosh 13: 'Miles Ahead' & More

By David Elliott

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

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APPETIZER (review of ‘Miles Ahead’)

Once you’ve seen Steve Allen walk like a smiling stick (or clarinet) through The Benny Goodman Story, or Forrest Whitaker stuck in glum pieties of pain as Charlie Parker in Bird – or even Dexter Gordon playing a sweet, aged version of himself in the reverent but moving Round Midnight – it is a high-relief pleasure to find such a risky, emotively bopping performance as Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis in Miles Ahead. Here is a raw, proud, angry, paranoid, jazzed man, less an icon than an artist who fears that his muse has fled.

Directing himself, Cheadle plays the great trumpeter in his silent, “lost” years from 1975 to 1980. The close-ups and outbursts that Cheadle gave himself are not vain. They offer insights as riffs of exposure, with feelings improvised like a terrific solo. The master of bluesy make-out ballads and then funk-rooted fusion sounds, now isolated, avoids his instrument and most friends. Davis’s 1989 memoir stated the reasons: “I felt musically drained, tired. I was beginning to see pity in people’s eyes when they talked to me … It was a long, painful road back to sanity and light.”

At times, trapped in his private refuge, Davis is like Philip Baker Hall’s lonely, spouting Nixon in Secret Honor, turning on a spit of rancid grievances. But Miles (unlike Dick) remains sexy in decay, and his profanity (in a raspy gravel voice that's almost another kind of horn) strikes erotic sparks. In his most emphatic, demonstrative performance since radio-TV spieler Petey Greene in Talk to Me (2007), Cheadle get ace help from cinematographer Roberto Schaefer and editors John Axelrad and Kayla Emter.

The scenes often have a lacerating flow and urgency, though the script (by Cheadle and Steven Baigelman) is bumpy. An opportunistic reporter (funny Ewan McGregor) breaks into Davis’s sacred space, and that leads to a violent pursuit involving a hidden session tape that Miles guards like future treasure. Past triumphs don’t interest him, and he isn’t at all sure there will be more. The tape, a sort of Hitchcock McGuffin device, dangles the issue. It provokes predatory music producers, cocaine jags and a chase that feels like a sop to the gangsta-rap audience.

Like most “biopix” films, Miles Ahead has predictable hooks: racism, addiction, star power, a lost love (impressive Emayatzy Corinealdi), an upstart trumpet challenger, jolting flashbacks to highs and lows. This is not a great movie, but it's a great portrait. The full thrust of dramatic tension, supported by the sensual flux of Miles’s music, is in Cheadle’s un-preening and stunningly frank performance. Perhaps no actor playing a musical god has used fewer notes to more piercing effect. That’s very Miles.

SALAD (A List)

Here are Ten Top Jazz Movies with real musicians, in order of arrival: New Orleans (Armstrong, Holiday, Herman, 1947), The Benny Goodman Story (Krupa, Hampton, Wilson, Getz, 1956), St. Louis Blues (Cole, Kitt, Fitzgerald, Jackson, 1958), Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Armstrong, Jackson, Monk, Washington, 1959), All Night Long (Brubeck, Mingus, Dankworth, 1962), Round Midnight (Gordon, McKee, Hancock, 1986), Let’s Get Lost (Chet Baker, 1988), Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser (Monk, Coltrane, Rouse, 1988), Kansas City (Belafonte, Redman, Chestnut, 1996) and Calle 54 (Puente, O’Farrill, Barbieri, Cachao, 2000).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Miles Davis salutes Citizen Orson, and a Welles friend: “Now, it ain’t that I don’t love Frank Sinatra, but I’d rather listen to him than maybe get in his way by playing something that I want to play. I learned how to phrase from listening to Frank, and also to Orson Welles.” (From Miles: The Autobiography, by Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey “wanted full incarnation, warts and all, choosing to ‘stick with that anarchic humor, stick with him being a selfish bastard (and) a businessman out for himself.’ He also dis-incarnated, losing 47 pounds (183 to 136) on a diet of veg-and-fish cups. Most surprising, he told interviewer Tim McMasters, was gaining ‘an amazing amount of energy from the head up’ as his body skeletized.” (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club (Focus Features; director Jean-Marc Vallee, cinematographer Yves Belanger)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 12: 'Krisha,' 'Marguerite' and 'City of Gold'

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of Krisha, Marguerite and City of Gold)

Krisha is not one of the gummy feel-goods for seniors. At the start, Krisha is a mask of ravaged endurance. By the end, she is devoid of cover. In her 60s, Krisha goes to her sister’s comfy Southern California home for Thanksgiving, facing a family rich in resentment of her busted marriage, alcoholism, pills, rampant insecurity. Her grown son won’t even look at her.

The cynical husband of Krisha’s sister, played by scene-grabber Bill Wise, uncorks Nicholson-ian zingers (fireballs like “I eat leather and shit saddles”). Dogs run around, underscoring the family tensions. When Krisha suffers a humiliating turkey moment, everyone appears to be considering how to carve her up. Everyone occupies an ego cage, but only Krisha is truly alone.

Trey Edward Shilts wrote, directed and plays the son. Employing his aunt Krisha Fairchild and a few other relatives, he has carved a digital bar of soap with great intimacy. He found just the moment to unleash Nina Simone’s “Just in Time,” and his movie recalls, in its hunger for thespian catharsis, actor-loving auteur John Cassavetes. Fairchild, using every mood and unflattering close-up as if cashing in a bucket of career tokens, ranks close to Cassavetes spouse and star Gena Rowlands. Krisha is almost a “reality show” pilot, yet with the cutes and compromises removed, exposing moments so vulnerable that you may wish to turn away, but can’t.

Director-writer Xavier Giannoli floods Marguerite with beautiful music, as if to emphasize that Baroness Marguerite Dumont can’t sing (echo of Groucho’s Margaret Dumont, and also the chanson “Si Tu Vuex Marguerite” in Renoir’s The Grand Illusion). Though her estate’s peacock screeches better high notes, Marguerite is drunk on music. At lavish private performances, invited listeners cringe, suppressing laughs because she sounds like a constipated parrot from a tone-deaf planet. In 1920s Paris, her public demolition of “La Marseillaise” provokes a scandal.

Somewhat inspired by fabled awful singer Florence Foster Jenkins (whom Meryl Streep portrays in a coming movie), the film is wonderfully populated. While Marguerite’s husband (subtle André Marcon) squirms in embarrassment, and comforts himself with a mistress, her huge black servant (formidable, Congo-born Denis Mpunga) sustains her mad fantasy, like Erich von Stroheim did for Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. A fading Italian tenor (funny Michel Fau) is bribed to prepare her for a public recital. Though he doesn’t say “Some people can sing, some people can’t,” like exasperated opera coach Fortunio Bonanova in Citizen Kane, he does prompt her to sing “like a Chinese whore.”

Marguerite has a Parisian taste for overstated concepts, but Giannoli’s almost satirical approach finds a poignant, sobering metronome: Catherine Frot as delicately dreamy Marguerite. She cannot hear her vocal sound (a case of psychic ear wax), but her love of great music surpasses deluded egotism. In her head, her rendition of Mozart’s aria “Queen of the Night” is sublime. Frot makes us want to hear what she does – at least in the shower.      

Not since Jiro Dreams of Sushi has food been so humanly garnished as in City of Gold, Laura Gabbert’s documentary salute to prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold. A Los Angeles native, Gold raises small, often ethnic eateries to fame and profit (dining pundits can impact more potently than movie critics). Sampling dishes on repeat visits, Gold opens up a vast diaspora of nabes, cuisines and kitchen crews. He is an aesthetic anthropologist, a gourmand whose taste buds of  reflective curiosity devour Ethiopian banquets, glorious pastas, Oaxacan grasshoppers, Thai pepper dishes that napalm the tongue. Gold's romantic, cruising feel for L.A.’s ugly-duckling beauty is the film’s dominant spice, and we stuff it all in.  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In 1941, in an elevator at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, Citizen Welles met up with Citizen Hearst and said: “Mr. Hearst, my name is Orson Welles …A movie of mine called Citizen Kane is opening tonight here in town, at the Geary Theater on Mason St. If you’d care to attend I’d be glad to have some tickets sent to your room.’ Hearst ignored the speaker. The elevator doors stopped, the doors opened, and he stepped out. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Hearst,’ Welles couldn’t resist calling out, as the doors closed. ‘Kane would have accepted!” (From John Evangelist Walsh’s vivid, under-sung Walking Shadows.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

After Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, Kay Thompson topped Funny Face: “Loud, tall and long-jawed, Kay at 48 was a queen bee thrilled by her royal jelly. She had dropped the name Cathy Fink, gotten a nose job, and become a swing band canary. After MGM service, she left to form an act with Andy Williams and his brothers, and they dazzled fans into a cult. She educated the Williams boys, and in his memoir Andy would say, ‘whatever it was, I loved everything about her.” (From the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, coming next month).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Kay Thompson in Funny Face, 1957 (Paramount Pictures; director Stanley Donen,  cinematographer Ray June)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 11: 'My Golden Days' & More

By David Elliott

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

 

APPETIZER (review of ‘My Golden Days’)

The word “cinema,” still so resonant in Paris, means very little in American multiplexes. There, Paris is mainly a site for whiz-bang thrillers and soft pleasures like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. A film import like My Golden Days, a compact cinematheque of nostalgia, throbbing with vitality, gets tucked into small theaters, mostly seen by aging fans of a French New Wave far past nouvelle.  

Director and writer Arnauld Desplechin’s new movie overlaps, in the protagonist’s name and the main setting (provincial Roubaix, Desplechin’s  native town), his previous work. In this excitingly complicated carousel of themes and allusions, Desplechin favorite Mathieu Amalric is Paul, a French anthropologist recently back from long residence in Tajikistan. The lonely middle-ager is ambushed by memories of his great, first love of the late ’80s and early ’90s. His inner candle for lovely Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet) flames up again, in flashback. Amalric is stuck doing book-end service, once handsome Quentin Dolmaire takes over as young Paul. He finally gets a scene of angry summation, the last gasp of futile heartbreak.

My Golden Days is about the teen Paul’s driven, awkward obsession with blond, peachy Esther. The sexy actors spin like silk their febrile feelings and vulnerable vanities, the brittle pretensions of bright young provincials who aspire to Paris. Esther reads to Paul in classic Greek. He improvises a blithe valentine of love as they stand in front of a Hubert Robert landscape of Rome. There is also a Greco-Joycean conceit: Paul’s last name is Dedalus. Doing cinematic archeology, with admirable fluency, Desplechin and cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky plunder the old New Wave storehouse of jump cuts, split screens, circular iris shots, solemn narration a la Truffaut, Godardian frissons of playful quotation.

The Hitchcock echoes include a furtive, daring sequence in the Soviet Union, though Paul finding there his Dostoevskian “double” never adds up to more than a quirky riff of irony. More crucial are the roots in Truffaut’s romantic marvel Jules et Jim, although Esther’s decline from witty hauteur, as she becomes a moody love sponge, is hardly up to Jeanne Moreau. Nobody tweets or texts. Being blessedly pre-Web, the lovers write fervent letters almost as if they were back in the 18^th century. Their dangerous liaison (Esther’s mother denounces her as a whore, Paul’s jealous pal beats him up) achieves the ache of a love fated for nostalgia, casting more than a few Proustian rays.  

SALAD (A List)
For what it’s worth – a sip of absinthe? – My 12 Favorite French Films:

The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939), Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1963),  Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971), La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1936), The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953), A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956), The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956), Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), French Can-Can (Jean Renoir, 1955), Le Feu Follet (Louis Malle, 1963) and Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986).
 

And these, an extra dozen, are each in a class by itself: The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo,  1966), Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946), Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945), Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Get Our Your Handkerchiefs (Bertrand Blier, 1978), Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), Menilmontant (Dmitri Kirsanov, 1924), Mon Oncle d’Amerique (Alain Resnais, 1980), The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927), The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1970) and Zazie dans le Métro (Louis Malle, 1960).
 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Citizen Welles’s most memorable film speech was one that he wrote for his charming scoundrel Harry Lime, in The Third Man: “You know what the fellow said: in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michlangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Years later Orson told Peter Bogdanovich that “when the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks. They all come from the Schwarzwald in Bavaria.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Bogdanovich.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
On the Gray Line tour bus in New York, director Bennett Miller noticed that “the ‘blank stares’ of some tourists showed that they ‘they didn’t see the charismatic soul’ of Tim Levitch. Through 150 hours of footage Levitch stayed brave, depth-charging himself. Here was a traveler who would have gladly joined Carol (Joanne Woodward) on her cruise in The Fugitive Kind to ‘go jukin’ on the Dixie Highway and reveal ‘just how lewd a lewd vagrant can be’ … Levitch could, like Charlie Parker, loose the goose of improvisation and set the wild bird free.” (From the Tim Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, soon to be published.)

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

 Timothy Levitch in The Cruise (Artisan Entertainment; director and cinematographer, Bennett Miller)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 10: 'Eye in the Sky,' 'I Saw the Light' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of ‘Eye in the Sky’ and ‘I Saw the Light’)

Alan Rickman was great even as a one-scene hotel clerk in Smiley’s People, then fully great as a smug villain (Die Hard), a dour swain (Sense and Sensibility ), a goofy space man (Galaxy Quest), a ghostly dreamboat (Truly, Madly, Deeply), a sinister master of magic (the Harry Potters), etc. Rickman imposed his moody power with a silky, stretched, often baleful voice, his wit could purr charm or fell like a guillotine slicing ice. Eye in the Sky is dedicated to him (he died Jan. 14), and his Gen. Benson, so bunkered in melancholy but ruthless in duty, is a wonderful curtain drop on a fascinating talent.

The British general oversees a drone operation reliant on American technology, and he is balanced by that other pillar of English acting authority, Helen Mirren, She’s Powell, the mission commander near London, though the drone’s “pilot” is a young Yank (Aaron Paul) based in Nevada. Powell is eager to kill a turncoat Brit plotting terror slaughter in Kenya. She is willing to bend the rules for it, but higher-up Benson must deal directly with nervous politicians seeking legal cover on slippery ethical slopes (and with enough voyeurism to satisfy any Hitchcock film). Rickman has, to perfection, a military man’s suspicious regard for civilian authority.

To the credit of writer Guy Hibbert and director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), it is humanly revealing, not just cloying, that the escalation to a kill-or-not decision pivots on a little Kenyan girl (Aisha Takow) and a brave Somali agent (Barkhad Abdi of Capt. Phillips). Yes, it’s Screenwriting 101 when the girl’s love of a humble hula hoop (an offense to Islamic fanatics) balances Benson’s purchase of a lavish doll for his grandchild. The enemy remains essentially faceless, but the faces on our side do not hide behind astonishing technology (including a spy-cam that mimics a flying beetle). Vivid, real-time suspense, not just video-game kicks, involves stricken choices and complex feelings. Rickman and Mirren, those national treasures, were never more internationally resonant.

Does anyone recall George Hamilton’s 1964 portrayal of singer Hank Williams in Your Cheatin’ Heart? Will anyone in 2068 recall Tom Hiddleston’s Williams in I Saw the Light? The best Williams songs will endure, until country music is paved over by suburban sprawl. In singing those famous songs, Hiddleston has (despite criticism from Hank Williams III and other purists) gotten close to the essence, his voice and heart rooted in down-home feeling. Given that Hiddleston is another brainy Brit (a classics wiz at Cambridge), his performance is a credibly devoted tribute to the short-lived Southern king of what used to be called redneck, hillbilly or honky-tonk music (urban snarkers called it “shitkicker music”).

Writer, director, producer Marc Abraham has forged a labor of love, but sadly his labor grinds the love. Abraham, who made the small, appealing Flash of Genius with Greg Kinnear, offers pain-filled  songs more eloquent than long passages of malaise: Hank drinking, raging, smoking, chugging pills, suffering from spina bifida. His holy grail, the Grand Ole Opry, barely interrupts the down-spiral for him, his band and his great love and first wife, Audrey, well-acted by Elizabeth Olsen. I Saw the Light lacks style, fresh tangents, and freedom from the fan piety suggested by its come-to-Jesus title. Lean, vivid and commited, Hiddleston goes beyond his dark marcho narcissism in The Deep Blue Sea, but this plodding script never leads him to the jambalaya.

SALAD (A List)

My take on the Twelve Best Portraits of Real Musicians, roughly in order of quality: Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter; Geoffrey Rush as David Helfgott, Shine; James Cagney as George M. Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy; Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose; Gary Busey as Buddy Holly, The Buddy Holly Story; Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious, Sid and Nancy; Kurt Russell as Elvis Presley, Elvis; Angela Bassett as Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do With It; Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea; Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist; Jessica Lange as Patsy Cline, Sweet Dreams, and F. Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri, Amadeus. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

From the start, the Welles vision was “ironical, urbane, as lordly as the thundering voice and as bemused as the arching eyebrows. It drew upon the passions of tragedy and the trickster zest of magic. OrsonWelles loved film because it, like his god Shakespeare, was so consumingly open to life, so potentially equal to his own appetite. He was in thrall to the way that image and sound, film and theater and radio and magic, can be fused in the startling purity of a dream. To get that deep-focal dream intensity, he shattered the box frame, used oblique angles, played boldly with twists of pace, pulse and mood. But to a public raised on the tasty and often trite recipes of ordinary movies, his art can seem ‘arty’ and cold.” (From my 1987 attempt to get a handle on Welles, in the San Diego Union.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As a rising star in the 1950s, Anthony Perkins felt shadowed by his private self: “Perkins had been inanely touted as Paramount’s James Dean, although his ‘rebel’ streak consisted mainly of walking barefoot down Sunset Blvd. Like Dean he enjoyed manipulating gossip dragons Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, who saw a nice lad of opaque, studio-guarded sexuality. Tony triumphed as Gary Cooper’s scrupulous Quaker son in Friendly Persuasion, 1956. ‘Coop’ could read the clues, and mentioned that Perkins ‘might do well to spend a summer on a ranch.” (From the Perkins/The Trial chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, to be published soon.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Anthony Perkins in The Trial (Astor Pictures, 1962; director Orson  Welles, cinematographer Edmond Richard)

 

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below 
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Nosh 9: 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,' 'Knight of Cups' & More

By David Elliott

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

 

APPETIZER (reviews of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and Knight of Cups)

Nothing occupies the modern film industry more than the redundant “art” of recycling. Here are two new examples, one amusingly corny, the other an artistic dead end.

After she made My Big Fat Greek Wedding in 2002, writer and self-made star Nia Vardalos could have sat on her Greek laurels forever. Her comedy made $250 million. After 14 years, she unleashes another “Opa!” for the Portakolos family of Chicago: Toula (Vardalos, still a pleasure); her WASPy catch as husband, Ian (John Corbett, still a genial hunk); their adorable teen daughter Paris (delightful Elena Kampouris); Toula’s enjoyably pushy mom Maria (Lainie Kazan, her role and presence both enlarged); Maria’s husband Gus (basset-eyed Michael Constantine, still an endearingly pesty grump). Add Andrea Martin as Aunt Voula, who still has the best comic timing, and enough other relatives to staff at least three sitcom spinoffs and a Greek sailing expedition to Milwaukee.

No need to think much here, but it does occur to us that a culture which gave the world so much beauty has perhaps never before been associated with so much bad taste (what, no gilded nude statues of Michael Dukakis and Spiro T. Agnew?). And the sweet little nod to a gay couple is not exactly an adequate statement on what the prim Victorians called “Greek love.” MBFGW 2 is like diving into an Olympic pool of re-baked moussaka (the crunchy bits are the laughs). Under all the jolly loudness of its family, uniting again for another wedding, we hear the nostalgic murmur of a wheezing “Opa!,” the last ethnic sunset of Zorba the Greek.

No moviemaker since Stanley Kramer has laid down more golden tiles of heavy, searching themes than Terrence Malick. Kramer was an industry insider, but director-writer Malick is more of an A-list maverick, a visionary prowling the hills like a princely coyote. He has won some biz-town respect (for Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Tree of Life) and some sizeable budgets (The Thin Red Line, The New World), but there is always the aura of a shaman who can stare at a rock and see a mandala.

Malick has finally zeroed in on Los Angeles, and made a zero: Knight of Cups. True to title, there is a Tarot reader, babbling like Hollywood’s finest old gypsy crone, Maria Ouspenskaya. Also an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, a lusty pole dancer and a wounded pelican. Mostly there are streaming, almost tranced vistas of Greater L.A, which is where hypnotic becomes sedative. Nearly all the sights are familiar (the towering palms of Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip, swank showcase homes, the river control channels, Venice beach). Malick probably never imagined that his glowing pictorials would often remind us of better movies which used the same locations.

It is dodo crazy to hire such a daring actor as Christian Bale to impersonate driftwood. As melancholy screenwriter Rick, his almost toneless voice-overs arrive like solemn whimpers. As his angry dad, Brian Dennehy appears to be burying the last remains of his acclaimed Willy Loman. Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman play Rick’s lovers as if searching for an invisible script in the air. Malick keeps returning to water elements, but Paolo Sorrentino found more poetry with two Roman walks along the Tiber in The Great Beauty. Sofia Coppola’s stripped-down Somewhere, about a bored young star (Stephen Dorff), nailed down the glam-blues of L.A. far more smartly than this empty Cups.

SALAD (A List)

Whatever its worth in deflated drachmas, here is my list of Ten Top Greek and Greek-Themed Films: Zorba the Greek (Cacoyannis, 1964), Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969), Ulysses’s Gaze (Angelopoulos, 1995), The Trojan Women (Cacoyannis, 1968), Agora (Amenabar, 2010), High Season (Peploe, 1987), Pascali’s Island (Deardon, 1988), Eternity and a Day (Angelopoulos, 2008), Ulysses (Camerini, 1954) and Troy (Petersen, 2004). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Orson’s great hero was Shakespeare, yet without glazed piety. As critic Brooks Atkinson noticed in the 1936 Harlem production of Macbeth: “The witches scenes from Macbeth have always worried the life out of the polite, tragic stage. The grimaces of the hags and the garish make-believe of the flaming cauldron have bred more disenchantment than anything else that Shakespeare wrote. But ship the witches into the rank and fever-stricken jungle, stuff a gleaming, naked witch doctor into the cauldron, hold up Negro masks in the baleful light – and there you have a witches’ scene that is logical and stunning and a triumph of the theater art.” (From James Naremore’s brilliant book The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The one charismatic rival of Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935) is the family’s hired cook, Malena, the “ancestor of Octavia Spencer’s payback pie in The Help. Cramming surly, sullen rage into every ‘Yas’m,’ Malena is a racial comedy gargoyle, funnier then than now. And superbly played. Hattie McDaniel, abundant (and abundantly employed) stated her reality principle: ‘Why should I complain about making seven thousand dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn’t, I’d be making seven dollars a week being one.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, coming soon.)  

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray in Alice Adams (RKO Pictures; director George Stevens, cinematographer Robert De Grasse)

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