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.
For previous Flix Nosh posts, scroll below.
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