Nosh 17: 'Francofonia,' 'The Family Fang' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of Francofonia and The Family Fang)
When you see a film as remarkable as Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia, you realize that most of our current movies just barely have a brain stem. Not drama, not documentary, this is a packed, juicy meditation on art, museums, France, war, history, waste and illusion. Achieving visual beauties which only he seems capable of, the Russian director wanders through the Louvre, but mostly the restaged Louvre of 1940, with most of its treasures (except statuary) having found refuge south of Paris. The stripped frames are like hollowed, hallowed ghosts, past which walk unusual tourists: German soldiers on leave. The remnants are guarded not only by the resident administrator Jaujard (played by wonderfully named Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) but a German culture official, the cultivated Count Graff Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath).

The two men achieved a tense, formal friendship. Both would protect France’s heritage, and each won the Legion of Honor. With Sokurov narrating and commenting in his ruminative, melancholy Russian, we also visit a castle where Gericault’s grand Raft of the Medusa stands alone, safe but unvisited. With musically timed skill, Sokurov inserts vintage footage of Paris under Nazi rule (including the Hitler shots used in Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, but Sokurov impishly has the Fuhrer asking: Where’s the Louvre?). This is not quite such a choreographed poem as his  Russian Ark, a tribute to St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum shot as one long, flowing take, but his wit continues. He tries to gently wake an Egyptian mummy, and depicts France’s symbolic Lady Liberty, Marianne (played by a German actress!) admiring, along with a grumpy, possessive Napoleon, the Mona Lisa.

In a recurring gambit, Sokurov shows an art-laden cargo ship foundering at sea; it’s a rather waterlogged metaphor for Europe afflicted by post-Nazi terrorism. More moving are his images of Soviet Leningrad under siege, treated by the brutal Germans with none of the “Aryan courtesy” they affected in Paris. Francofonia pulls you into its wandering and wondering, and its inventive fertility rivals Orson Welles’s F for Fake and Alain Resnais’s Mon Oncle d’Amerique. Sokurov has made two of the supreme modern films, Mother and Son (1997) and Russian Ark (2002), and Francofonia is very close to that status, an international treasure.

Held together by conceptual hooks, The Family Fang will either zipper your attention as a curious family drama or leave you contemplating rips in the fabric. Fully engaged are Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman, grown offspring of two “inspired” obsessives (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett). As kids, the offspring were praised and pressured into being players and audience bait in transgressive “performance art” hoaxes. Pushed fervently by their Dada daddy, the Fangs are minor art stars. But now the matured siblings, as actor (Kidman) and novelist (Bateman), feel like spent troupers. When father Fang unleashes a crowning hoax, there is a sick sense of both abandonment and assault.

Kidman, always a gutsy star, is quite fine as the daughter who realizes that her modest stardom has faded twice (as a child, now as an adult). She opens up some angry, startling pain. Bateman’s work as her brother has a reflective naturalness, possibly because his energy also went into directing. Walken and Plunkett chew ham. Most of the elaborate Fang stunts are in the goof-gag lineage of Alan (Candid Camera) Funt and the Jackass boys. This odd movie, from Kevin Wilson’s novel, is over-determined by its ideas. There was more wit in Phyllis Diller’s silly jokes about her husband, “Fang.”    

SALAD (A List)

With a nod to Sokurov, my Ten Favorite Films by Russian Directors: Oblomov (Mikhalkov, 1980); Crime and Punishment (Kulidzhanov, 1970); I Am Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964); Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2002); Ménilmontant (Kirsanov, 1926); Hamlet (Kozintsev, 1964); October (Eisenstein, 1928); Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997); The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957) and The Overcoat (Batalov, 1959).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Always bravura in his opinions, Orson Welles disliked safe, consensual taste: “I would personally die for Bach and Mozart, Bartok, Beethoven. I’m sure I’m right about them – and about Velázquez, too – but what troubles me is when people accept the whole edifice, the movies, the books, the paintings, what’s in, what’s out, just because it has already been accepted. That arouses my suspicion, even when it’s right.” (From My Lunches With Orson, by Henry Jaglom.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The bold virtuosity of Samuel L. Jackson: “Instantly cultish was his recital in Pulp Fiction of Ezekiel 25:17: ‘And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.’ Jackson syncopates and counterpoints hard-nail consonants, pontifical vowels, withering pauses. He’s the Glenn Gould of juju mojo. ‘Sam talked so fast,’ complained Pam Grier fondly, ‘that he could exhaust you just keeping up.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown, 1997 (Miramax Films; director Quentin Tarantino; cinematographer Guillermo Navarro)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 16: 'The Man Who Knew Infinity,' 'The Clan' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of The Man Who Knew Infinity and The Clan)

The tale of a devout Hindu genius in theoretical math, and his numbers-driven English mentor, The Man Who Saw Infinity will not pack the plexes as a buddy comedy or bromance. But the core is male friendship, cemented by excited talk about Newton, prime numbers and infinite series. While scratching your puzzled head, please do so with admiration. The goal is truth, and despite some clumsy touches Matt Brown’s film is engagingly truth-based (even some small talk has a little math zing: “Are you Ramanujan, by chance?” is followed by “Very much by chance”).

Srivanasa Ramanujan, a poor Brahmin from South India with a genius for abstract numbers, came to Britain’s Cambridge University to learn from G.H. Hardy, a superb  mathematician who would soon learn much more from him. Their timing was terrible. World War I was breaking out, many university snobs were stocked with race prejudice, and cold rooms, loneliness and lack of Indian food undermined the visitor’s health. But the new bond held, as if one plus one equals infinity. Dev Patel has a touchingly exposed humanity as the wizard far from home. Jeremy Irons is very fine as Hardy, increasingly caring though at times clueless in his stuffy, bachelor-prof way (if Irons’s magnificent voice could have been made viceroy, India might have stuck with the Empire a while longer).

The lovely, pining wife back in Madras is like a Bollywood soap flake, with the sounds of sitar and tabla gracing almost every Indian scene. What matters are the brainy Cambridge exchanges of the Indian marvel, who sees his intuitive propositions as gifts from God, and the British atheist who rose to a kind of Platonic awe. Can Ramanujan provide convincing proofs? Will Hardy get his new friend into the Royal Society? Well, the human cost of this is made clear, but even we math simpletons hear some of the music of the numerical spheres. (A footnote kudo for Jeremy Northam, who was singer Ivor Novello in Gosford Park, and here plays the great writer, logician and pacifist Bertrand Russell – that’s like an American actor playing both Cole Porter and Noam Chomsky.)

The Argentine Oscar nominee The Clan wedges neatly into the long line of good crime-family movies, from White Heat to The Godfather to The Newton Boys to Kill the Irishman. The planner and patriarch of the Puccio kidnapping racket in Buenos Aires is Arquimedes Puccio, who owns an upscale sports store. He looks like a silver fox, cool and contained, but is really a spider pulling everyone on his web, including his beloved son, a rugby star. The man kidnaps actual friends, destroying their families, though sincerely declaring “I will never put my family at risk.” He is suavely horrible, and star Guillermo Francella dominates even in stillness or silence. If not at Brando’s Don Corleone level, he is very close to Toni Servillo’s corrupt master of Italian politics in Il Divo.

Pablo Trapero, drawing upon an actual family history, directed a very fine cast with brisk efficiency, and does some Scorsese mining of the musical vault (old American pop and rock standards). The Puccios are small criminal players as we glimpse the country in the ’80s, the Malvinas (Falklands) disaster, the inept and cruel military regimes, the anarchic terror created by “disappearance” squads. The Argentine national family had become insanely dysfunctional. You can’t pin that on the Puccios, or even the Perons (too far back), but you can cry for Argentina.

SALAD (A List)

In Ramanujan’s honor, 12 Good Portrayals of Scientific Brains: Russell Crowe as Nash, A Beautiful Mind; Matt Damon as Watney, The Martian; Robert Donat as Friese-Greene, The Magic Box; Alec Guinness as Stratton, The Man in the White Suit; Curt Jurgens as Von Braun, I Aim at the Stars; Raymond Massey as Cabal, Things to Come; Walter Pidgeon as Dr. Mobius, Forbidden Planet; Eddie Redmayne as Hawking, The Theory of Everything; Edward G. Robinson as Ehrlich, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet; Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove; Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, Agora; Kate Winslet as Wallace, Enigma.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Long after Citizen Kane’s release, Citizen Welles persisted in maintaining his stance of defensive denial that publisher Kane was based essentially, at times brazenly, on William Randolph Hearst: “Hearst was raised by his mother and had a very happy childhood. My man Kane was raised by a bank … They were different types of men. For example, Kane would never have fought me the way Hearst did. Instead, he would probably have offered me a job.” (From Charles Higham’s The Films of Orson Welles)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Zero Mostel was political. Finding it ‘against my religion’ to give names to the Red-hunters, he was blacklisted for a decade after Jerome Robbins named him. After the blacklist grayed, he greeted Robbins with ‘Hiya, Loose Lips!’ This was not an amiable reprimand.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available via Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)
        
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Roger Livesey in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943 (The Archers; director Michael Powell, cinematographer Georges Perinal)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 15: 'The Jungle Book,' 'Taxi' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of ‘The Jungle Book’ and ‘Taxi’)

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. I like Disney’s 1967 The Jungle Book so much that I put off seeing their new version. Walt died before the ’67 release, but surely knew he had something special.

His hippest cartoon film (though the blackbirds in Dumbo are rustic hipsters, and José Carioca was Latin-cool), the movie went on to become one of the studio’s big hits. Animated in a breezy, sketch-pad style, with a delightful, jazzed, tunes-for-’toons score by the Sherman brothers (even better than their Mary Poppins), it has wonderfully funny voice work by Phil Harris, Louis Prima, Sterling Holloway and George Sanders. Fantasia lifts us to great music, but Wolfgang Reitherman’s Jungle is toe-tapping.

Thank my daughter, who nudged me (and her brother) to catch the new Jungle Book. Directed for Disney by Jon Favreau, it is darker, closer to the “red in tooth and claw” Kipling novel, here adapted by Justin Marks. It incorporates some of the best ’67 songs, and some of the wit (Bill Murray’s Ballou the bear, crazy for honey, somehow folds all of the actor’s laid-back ease and gentle eyes into this lumbering, shaggy beast). The best star is the jungle itself, a computer animation glory that rises above theme park charm to voluptuous engulfment, beyond even the beautiful matté paintings for the 1942 Zoltan Korda version (starring Sabu as Mowgli, the orphan “man cub” raised by wolves). Here is the best jungle since Avatar, maybe the best ever in its throbbingly intense variety of effects, with good breathing space for story between the breathless climaxes.

Enchanted by water and fire, rich in tension and violence (in 1942 New York critic Bosley Crowther complained of excess mayhem in the Korda film), this treatment allows Mowgli to be dirtied, scratched, stung and hurled about. But he’s a tropical trouper, splendidly acted by Neel Sethi. The New York boy, son of Indian immigrants, is entirely expressive and enjoyable, at times nearing the level of Mickey Rooney’s Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Supportively enhancings are the voicings by Murray, Ben Kingsley (Bagheera the panther), Idris Elba (Sheer Khan the menacing tiger), Scarlett Johansson (seductively hypnotic as Kaa the snake), Lupita Nyong’o (motherly wolf Raksha). As for Christopher Walken’s huge orang King Louie, ruling a jungle temple with funny, Brooklyn-ized overlaps of Brando in Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, what can you say? He tops the feast abundant of the forest primeval.

By the measure of his masterpieces (Offside, The Mirror, The White Balloon, Crimson Gold), Taxi is a “small work” from Jafar Panahi. Driving a freelance cab around Teheran, the Iranian director – for years banned from filming by the Islamic government – picks up customers, some aware of his artistic stature and legal status. Taxi, like his last covertly made and exported films, is a delicate manifesto of insurgency, free of rhetoric. Using hand-held, digital tactics, it reveals (like his great mentor Abbas Kiarostami’s  A Taste of Cherry) an intimate, vehicular cross-section of the city, a man’s condition, and a society at war with itself and its future.

Riders include elderly sisters who nervously carry a bowl of goldfish, a bootlegger of banned DVDs, a veteran protest organizer and, most enjoyably, Panahi’s smart, motor-mouthed niece, little Hana. She is making, for school, a phone-camera movie. Hana tries to understand the regime’s ban on “sordid realism.” When she films some (a boy thief on the street), she also offers moral chastisement, like a mini-mullah (Shirley Temple couldn’t have done it better). This is the wry Panahi irony, as his gentle smile moves up and down, like a meter flag, inside the cab. The only meter we hear is the slow tick of Iran’s evolution, which in time will cherish him, like movie lovers around the world.

SALAD (A List)

Here are my choices of the Dozen Best Animated Features, in slight order of preference: Dumbo,1941; Spirited Away, 2001; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937; The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993; Pinocchio, 1940; Finding Nemo, 2003; My Neighbor Totoro, 1988; The Jungle Book, 2016; Wall-E, 2008; Fantasia, 1940; The Secret of Kells, 2009, and The Jungle Book, 1967. A special bow (plus wow) to my childhood favorite: The Lady and the Tramp, 1953.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

“Orson Welles has said, ‘Realism doesn’t interest me. Newsreels are the worst enemies of the cinema as art … It is with actors that one must make art. Realism does not exist.' He has therefore invented a reality, his reality …When Welles sets up the camera next to the floor, behind a chair, on a gargoyle, in an aberrant close-up, he does not do it for pure visual trickery, for mere pyrotechnics. He is attempting to destroy space and create it anew.” (From Guillremo Cabrera Infante’s brilliant A Twentieth Century Job)  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

After the one shooting in The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman “wasn’t willing to let a bullet define the finish (too pulpy). Returning down the road zoom-flattened like a lush tropical dream, Philip walks past Eileen, arriving by jeep to meet her lover. Without stopping she stares, confounded. He ignores her as Alida Valli did Joseph Cotten, ending The Third Man. As she drives on, Philip pulls out the wee harmonica and, tootling it, swings a village lady into a jig. The topper is ‘Hooray for Hollywood.’ Our hip hooray is for Altman and Gould, more than Hollywood.” (From the Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, just published. Available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Bette Davis in The Letter (Warner Bros., 1940; director William Wyler; cinematographer Tony Gaudio)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 14: 'Midnight Special,' 'Hockney' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.
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APPETIZER (reviews of ‘Midnight Special’ and ‘Hockney’)
Jeff Nichols, just 37, has a canny command of pace, rhythm, mood and atmospheric detail. The Arkansan director and writer showed this in 2011, in the brooding conceptual thriller Take Shelter, and then masterfully two years later, in the river-haunted Mud. His latest demonstration is Midnight Special, which opens as a crime drama and turns into a sort of sci-fi road mystery. As far as I am aware, Nichols has never directed a bad performance.

Michael Shannon, star of Take Shelter, wanted the lead in Mud (the more charismatic Matthew McConaughey took it, brilliantly, to an Oscar). Now Shannon stars as Roy, whose marriage is broken and son is gone. The boy, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), was abducted by a cult group whose leader (Sam Shepard) uses the kid as an End Time prophet. Alton, whose eyes beam piercing astral lights, and who can “speak in tongues,” lifts the story to sci-fi strangeness without losing its rooting (Nichols is great with roots). Spaced faith and earthbound longing are the twin poles of the movie, one of those “little” sci-fi films – Starman, Village of the Damned, Strange Invaders, The Man Who Fell to Earth – that grip the memory long after you’ve forgotten most big, effects-driven space pictures.

Nichols bounces off E.T. and Spielberg family dynamics. Guilty, obsessed Roy and his loyal pal Lucas (very fine Joel Edgerton) retrieve the boy, then take him to the longing mother (Kirsten Dunst). The not too verbal tensions never become prosaic as a huge dragnet tightens on the family. I’m no fan of scenes where people stare at numbers and have a brainy insight we don’t share. This one, by appealing science nerd Paul (Adam Driver), reminded me of clueless Paul Newman faking it with physics equations on a blackboard in Torn Curtain. More limiting is that Shannon, though always credible, is locked into macho-dad compression, like an angry armadillo with hurt, sensitive eyes.

Clearly the boy is an alien star child, but Nichols keeps him vulnerably human, a little exile with split loyalties. His higher powers are naturally trippy, arriving like earthquakes and fires and meteor showers. Adam Stone filmed beautifully in celluloid, often at night, and some animated effects at the end are impressively not overdone. These flawed, scared, searching people are, at least, not waiting for Trump.  

Nearly always it is the colors that seduce you first, then you notice how they follow the lines in nuptial loyalty. A name seals the marriage: Hockney. Randall Wright's savvy documentary traces the long life (79 years so far) of British expat artist David Hockney with a witty, probing flair that fits his often dazzling evolution. The working class lad (first memory: a Blitz bomb) became the cherub-faced star of '60s London Bohemia, then a totem of New York's gay scene, and then one of the great lovers of L.A.'s warm melon sunlight and it plum harvest of young male flesh. The artist's Picasso versatility, tonic Matisse coloring and fluent weaving of lovers and friends into a creative tapestry find a prevailing tone in Nat King Cole's "L.O.V.E." Our only possible response is y.e.s.

SALAD (A List)

In honor of David Hockney, 12 Top Artist Performances: Isabelle Adjani as Camille Claudel; Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, Lust for Life; Alec Guinness as Gulley Jimson, The Horse’s Mouth; Ed Harris as Pollock; Charles Laughton as Rembrandt; Nick Nolte as Dobie, New York Stories; Michel Piccoli as Frenhofer, La belle noiseuse; Tim Roth as Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent & Theo; Anatoli Solonitsyn as Andrei Rublev; Donald Sutherland as Gauguin, The Wolf at the Door; Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner, Mr. Turner, and Geir Westby as Edvard Munch. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

This week 75 years ago, on May 1, 1941 in New York (RKO Palace Theater), May 6 in Chicago (Woods and Palace theaters), and May 8 in Los Angeles (El Capitan Theater), Citizen Kane opened after months of Hearst-hassled delay. At the lavish L.A. premiere, “bleacher stands opposite the theater were constructed, and thousands of fans crammed them to watch the entering glitterati. Welles escorted Dolores Del Rio. Among the sparkling guests were Marlene Dietrich, Janet Gaynor, Maureen O’Hara, Adolph Menjou, Gloria Swanson, Busby Berkeley, Mickey Rooney, John Barrymore, Charles Laughton, Olivia de Havilland, Sonja Henie, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Dorothy Lamour. Though they had already seen the film, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor, Leland Hayward, Cedric Hardwicke and Herbert Marshall came again. When Welles spotted Hedda Hopper getting out of her limousine, he could only shake his head and smirk.” (From Frank Brady’s excellent Citizen Welles).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita disturbed viewers more than the suicide of the austere intellectual Steiner (Alain Cuny): “Years later, talking to Studs Terkel in Paris, Cuny avowed that Steiner knew that ‘his life was a total fake …by the way, my life as an actor is a fake.’ But Steiner has real poignancy. Scripted by Tullio Pinelli, partly inspired by the 1950 suicide of poet Cesare Pavese, the sequence so upset producer Angelo Rizzoli that he told Fellini, ‘You could never have come up with such a thought. You have such a nice face.’ Fellini said his film needed a mortal shock.” (From the Marcello Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available on Amazon, also on Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Orson Welles, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins and Dorothy Comingore in Citizen Kane (RKO Pictures; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.