Nosh 26: 'The Fits,' 'Microbe and Gasoline' & More

By David Elliott

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

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APPETIZER (reviews of The Fits and Microbe and Gasoline)
From over 40 years of reviewing, it’s the bold surprises that best hold memory. Some were anticipated (like The Long Goodbye, Last Tango in Paris, Capote), many others were sneak-ups that zapped me (like American Graffiti, The Whole Wide World, Mike’s Murder, Oblomov, The Cruise, The Straight Story). Into that second bunch I pleasurably add Anna Rose Holmer’s debut feature The Fits, which in 72 minutes is among the most vivid, lyrical and feminist movies you will see in 2016.

It happens in Cincinnati, at a sleek recreation center where pre-teen Toni (finely named Royalty Hightower) dabbles in boxing while her older brother trains. Facing puberty, the future beauty can’t quite grasp or fit the male milieu, and she envies the fiercely energized, mostly older girls who practice nearby as the Lincoln Lionesses, an acrobatic dance team. She loves their flash, style, teen talk and show-bizzy costumes. Though Toni bonds with a funny little scamp, Beezi (Alexis Neblett), whose hair is cut like Mouseketeer ears, she’s facing a big growth surge. Soon she attempts the hot steps, and pierces her earlobes to insert her first rings. She smiles more, and her plank body, in motion, seems to predict emerging curves.

Then one girl falls down, in what seems like a swooning or spasmic collapse. And later another, and another. Discipline falters, and officials (barely seen) try to blame the water (hints of Flint). Breezy little Beezi has a keen  intuition: “Some kind of boyfriend disease?” Without turning clinical or creepy, writer and director Holmer has found a shape-shifting metaphor for pubescent fire, for the shock wave of natural and social chemisty that can send girls into giggle storms, or into depression, anorexia, bulimia, panic. She does not preach or teach, nor lose her clear-eyed fascination with young, still faces and expressive, kinetic bodies, and life-shifting moods.

Shot almost entirely in the rec spaces, where clean, spare lines supportively frame every motion and emotion, Paul Yee’s imagery beautifully uses long takes and varied focal effects. The Fits risks showing much more than it says. There is lucid enigma here, on the divide between fiction and documentation. Hightower is an ace find, no flirty poser. Holmer, for sure, needs to keep making movies.

Microbe and Gasoline

Director Michel Gondry rang the bell with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, went flat with The Green Hornet, hit a sweet spot of Gallic whimsy with The Science of Sleep. His delight in textures, colors, dreams and the ability of film to pull rabbits from invisible hats has a wit that signatures his addition to a French movie tradition going back to Lumiere, Tati, Louis Malle’s gag-driven whirligig Zazie dans le Métro and the odd, provocative buddy comedies of Bertrand Blier. In Microbe and Gasoline he examines the new friendship of pubescent schoolboys Daniel (Ange Dargent) and Théo (Theophile Baquet), the first called Microbe because of his pre-growth size, the second Gasoline because of his gassy, gimmick-laden motor bike.

Microbe, still beardless and (he thinks) sperm-less, develops a shy crush on a bemused girl. Impudent Gasoline contrives a small car disguised as a shed on wheels. Their Tom & Huck journey of escape includes a soulful lament for Gypsies, a funny diss of cellphones, an art contest, an oddly porny hair salon run by Koreans, and many bewildered adults. Don’t take it seriously, except in its genuine feeling for adolescent aches and confusions, and the  young actors will show you a good time. If not, blame the French. 

SALAD (A List)

My choices of 12 Top Movies About Adolescents (and their directors): The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich), Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle), The Member of the Wedding (Fred Zinnemann), American Graffiti (George Lucas/Francis Coppola), Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray), Zebrahead (Anthony Drazan), Les Enfants Terribles (J-P Melville, Jean Cocteau), Catarina in the Big City (Paolo Virzi), Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli), Election (Alexander Payne), Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater) and Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Citizen Welles admired John Ford, but not so piously as Peter Bogdanovich did: “I was in Peter’s house one night, he ran some John Ford pictures. During the first reel I said, ‘Isn’t it funny how incapable even Ford, and all American directors, are of making women look in period?’ I said, ‘Look at those two girls who are supposed to be in the covered wagon. Their hairdos and costumes are really what the actresses in the Fifties thought was good taste.’ … Peter flew into a rage, turned off the projector and wouldn’t let us see the rest of the movie because I didn’t have enough respect for Ford.” (From My Lunches With Orson by Henry Jaglom, with Peter Biskind).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No other writer-director so provocatively employs the “n-word” in his dialog like Quentin Tarantino, who “exploits and exposes the word with Elizabethan succulence. He delves, said Stanley Crouch, into ‘the artistic challenges of the many misceginations that shape the goulash of American culture,’ and by his skill ‘the human nuances and surprises in the writing provide fresh alterations of meaning.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Paulette Dubost and Nora Gregor in The Rules of the Game (France, 1939; director Jean Renoir, cinematographers Jean Bachelet and J.P. Alphen)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 25: 'The Infiltrator,' 'Wiener-dog' & More

By David Elliott

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

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APPETIZER (reviews of The Infiltrator and Wiener-Dog)
After enduring some of Manure Fest ’16, more formally known as the Republican National Convention, it was a relief to find myself watching The Infiltrator, a crime picture rich in ruthless narcs and cruel scuzzballs. Robert Mazur went undercover in the ’80s to penetrate far-flung tentacles of the Pablo Escobar cocaine empire based in Colombia. Vulnerably using a deluxe valise fitted for covert taping, Mazur set up a money-laundering operation  during the Reagan “Just Say No” era. He spun a cobweb for street thugs and Panamanian bankers and vicious, high-end traffickers.

You might exude a wary groan settling into this, as many fixtures evoke countless rampant movies and TV shows. Do we need another Scarface binge of Florida and Sudamericano creeps? But Brad Furman directed with a tense regard for balance, not pushing the vintage outfits and sleaze parties into camp, laying on bling without amping into Miami Vice kitsch, and not overselling violence (there are real jolts – the cake scene is a classic). His ace all the way is Bryan Cranston as Bob Mazur, a loyal family man. Tempted by crime rewards, Bob remains too inwardly terrified (and smart, and decent) to sell-out. Furman, who gave Matthew McConaughey the start of his triple surge to a new level with The Lincoln Lawyer (after it came Mud and Dallas Buyers Club), now provides Cranston with a trifecta topper for his film surge (which began with All the Way and Trumbo).

Cranston, whose well-mapped face and honed instincts are true in every move, sigh, stare and word, basically did a long warm-up for this with TV’s Breaking Bad. He has the supple, sure authority that can make an actor last and last (definition: Robert Duvall). The excellent cast includes John Leguizamo as a risk-happy federal mole, Juliet Aubrey as Mazur’s wife, Diane Kruger as Bob’s fake “fiancée,” old ugly-mug Simón Andrea as a stupidly amused hoodlum, Benjamin Bratt as an urbane master of evil deeds, and Yul Vazquez as a bisexual viper who seems to blend the aging Tony Curtis with Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet. Olympia Dukakis drops in as Mazur’s cynical aunt, prompting an Oscars joke (she took the supporting trophy for Moonstruck in 1987). The story’s climax, a true crescendo, satisfies.

Wiener-Dog

Only weeks after Weiner, a sharp political documentary, we get Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog, which is … what? Well, Solondz is bouncing off the abusive nickname of his homely heroine (Heather Matarazzo) in his 1995 oddball Welcome to the Dollhouse. Now he uses a female dachshund with lovable eyes, a kind of mascot for … what? Sort of a dark comedy, a  turnstile of alienated winks. At first the canine goes to a lonely boy whose control-freak family includes tightly wired mom Julie Delpy (she put on serious weight to play this grim frump, for me the most depressing thing about the film). She shares tender memories of a rabid hell dog named Mohammed, which may be Solondz’s gambit for topical currency as … what? Better kiss off the Arab market.

Then there is Greta Gerwig’s dull, cute airhead, hooked on a drug addict (Kieran Culkin). She gives the dog to a mentally handicapped couple. In another segment, Danny DeVito is a hack film teacher, Dave Shmerz (were Shmuck, Shlong and Shlemiel the witty alternatives?). Dave straps the trusting pooch to a suicide bomb, then walks away. And there is a dying, bitter grandmother (Ellen Burstyn), who quaintly renames the dog Cancer. The dachshund gets squashed by a truck (please don’t be an idiot and complain of spoilers – the spoiler is the film). Wiener-dog is like a dyspeptic reject from Portlandia, or a ditzy cinema nerd’s attempt to overhaul Au Hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson’s vision about the wandering travails of a soulful donkey. The donkey would have kicked the dog.

SALAD (A List)

These are the Ten Best Dog Movies, at least in my kennel: Umberto D, Best in Show, A Dog’s Life, The Lady and the Tramp, High Sierra, The Artist, We Think the World of You, Turner & Hooch, Across the Bridge, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles’s biggest blast of fame as an actor was not Citizen Kane but came in 1948, in Carol Reed’s and Graham Greene’s baroque Vienna mystery The Third Man. His suave scoundrel Harry Lime has minority screen time, but Welles knew that didn’t really matter: “Every sentence in the whole script is about Harry Lime – nobody talks about anything else for ten reels. And then there’s that shot in the doorway, what a star entrance that was! What matters is how much the other characters talk about you.” (Orson Welles to Peter Bogdanovich in This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The Tampico cantina fight of Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Barton MacLane in Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the great movie brawls: “It took five days to shoot. John Huston and cinematographer Ted McCord (rooted in Westerns) achieved the violent chiaroscuro of three crude men in churning, ungainly motion. Onlookers gape and sway in sync. A dozen punches and groaning pushes bring clumsy exhaustion. This is not pugilism but payback, a Goya tangle of furious beasts in the pit of survival. Fred puts Pat down with a mean kick, snarling ‘give us our money.’ He has, undeniably, Bogarted the joint.” (From the Humphrey Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available from Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Orson Welles suaves the slime of Lime in The Third Man (Korda/Selznick, 1948; director Carol Reed, cinematographer Robert Krasker).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 24: 'The BFG,' 'Sunset Song' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.
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APPETIZER (reviews of The BFG and Sunset Song)
Steven Spielberg, at times a brilliant movie-maker, has never shown much resistance to obviousness. In the preview “featurette” for The BFG, he stares glow-eyed at the camera and says “The arc of The BFG really touched my heart.” When his hand rises to touch his heart, he’s almost Joan of Arc. Or like Walt Disney, twinkling and avuncular when he did TV promo for his latest gifts as America’s Most Beloved Entertainer.

The BFG is a Disney-Amblin (Spielberg) production, adapted by the late Melissa Mathison from the 1982 children’s book by Roald Dahl. A wounded WWII hero (fighter pilot), Dahl shadowed his literary whimsies with some morbidly spooky stuff. But this movie’s “monster” giants are like epic, hairy oafs, and will probably scare only kids afraid of big, gaping mouths. The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) is Mark Rylance having a CGI effects ball. He mangles English comically, and enchants the brave girl he’s taken from London to the land of giants, a sort of verdant Iceland (he’s also a vegan; no BLTs for BFG). Rylance won an Oscar for Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, and was superbly subtle as Cromwell in the BBC’s Wolf Hall. But this is more fun, and while we are aware of whiz-bang effects we are not left chewing digital plastic from a theme park. The main theme (dreams) is a bit gooey -- the BFG is a dream-maker (i.e., Spielberg).

Ruby Barnhill as the adorable pre-teen, Sophie, is a spunky charmer, a worthy successor to my favorite Dahl heroine (Mara Wilson in 1996’s Matilda). She is like a hybrid of Mary Poppins and Mary Badham (Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird). Spielberg is a pastiche wizard, so we see a magical lake with a grand dream tree that evokes Avatar, Tinkerbell, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Maxfield Parrish. An enjoyably dotty segment has Penelope Wilton, fresh from Downton Abbey. As Queen Liz II, she has scampering corgis and a farting scene. One of her servants is named Mr. Tibbs (Rafe Spall, son of Timothy), so let’s hope that Sidney Poitier (They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!) got a piece of the action.  

Sunset Song

The English director Terence Davies makes true art films, rich in atmospheric detail. Vapors of the past haunt the present (not least in old songs: pop, hymns, folk songs), and the saturating intensity can soak your mind. Davies made one of the finest memory films (The Long Day Closes), and one of the best play adaptations (The Deep Blue Sea, with a stunning Rachel Weisz). He has finally realized his dream of filming Sunset Song, adapting the first in a trilogy of novels by the productive but short-lived Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

The Scottish BBC did an acclaimed multi-parter in 1972, now, on a recent viewing, rather TV-turgid. Davies blows off the dust. His landscapes of Northeast Scotland have a sweeping, painterly beauty (due to 70mm film), and interiors (shot digitally) are charged with intimacy. Sunset Song is a family story, often grim thanks to veteran actor Peter Mullan as John, a brutally “religious” farmer who rules his family with strap-flogging fist and barking voice. He’s a glum, Calvinist fossil, furious that the old ways are expiring before World War I. John is hateful, yet when a stroke topples him Mullan makes us feel some pity, and when he’s gone a lot of the narrative tension leaves with him.

The central figure is John’s daughter Christine, shyly evading patriarchal sadism (saddest witness: her mother, exhausted by multiple childbirths). Agyness Deyn is a sweet, lovely, nuanced Chris, but she doesn’t have the star force to drive the story along, and she seems too mature, even modern for this rustic, though bookish drudge. Davies inserts tunes and some tender sex, but in a late, post-war section he revives male brutishness in a way that struck me as schematic and crude. This U-turn may be loyal to Gibbon, but it monkey-wrenches the movie. More’s the pity for Christine.

SALAD (A List)

The Ten Best Spielberg-directed Movies, ranked in order by my taste: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Empire of the Sun, Lincoln, The Sugarland Express, Schindler’s List, Duel, Catch Me if You Can, The BFG,  Bridge of Spies. These are his worst: Hook, War Horse, Always, War of the Worlds, Adventures of Tintin, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

By far the biggest public impact of Citizen Welles came with his Halloween, 1938 radio broadcast of the Martian invasion story The War of the Worlds, provoking panic among many who missed the docu-dramatic program’s explanatory opening. Steve Allen, at 16 still a dozen years from becoming a master of the coming medium, television, caught the fear bug with his mother and aunt in their Chicago apartment. They opted to flee to a church: “I was putting on my coat, still too shocked to say much. Oddly enough, my predominant emotion was not fear but blank stupefaction. I remember saying ‘Gosh’ over and over again. I couldn’t believe it, and yet I had to, on the basis of years of conditioning. CBS News had never lied to me.” His mom remained motherly: “Button your coat, Stevie. You’ll catch cold when you go out.” (From Steve Allen’s show-biz memoir, Hi-Ho, Steverino!)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For Katharine Hepburn, 1935’s Alice Adams at RKO was a tremendous test: “Biographer William J. Mann observes that ‘the resonance she found with Alice Adams was not an external parity but a kinship of the heart, the most promising sign yet of her development as an actress.’ By bending the tiara she built the crown, grew from style performance (shaping mannerist effects expressively) into depth performance (creatively externalizing the internal). The more intuitive and feminine Hepburn’s ‘wiles’ and ‘charms,’ the more they uncovered the bedrock of character.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available from Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Carroll Baker and Eli Wallach sauce up Dixie in Baby Doll (Warner Bros., 1956; director Elia Kazan, cinematographer Boris Kaufman)

For past Flix Nosh meals, scroll below. 

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 23: 'Genius' and 'Hello, My Name Is Doris' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of Genius and Hello, My Name Is Doris)

“It’s either die, dog, or eat the hatchet.” So declares writer Thomas Wolfe in Genius, which could be called the Classics Illustrated movie version of Wolfe’s fierce, gluttonous chomping on the double-edged hatchet of fiction and fame. Opinion has always split on whether he wrote true classics (I’d say yes), but once you’ve consumed slabs of his teeming, sensual prose, they illustrate certain feelings and places forever. Novelist Pat Conroy, for one, spent many years digesting the legacy of his fellow Southerner.

Michael Grandage (The Madness of King George) directed. Writers A. Scott Berg (author of the acclaimed bio of Wolfe’s fabled editor Maxwell Perkins) and John Logan (who scripted historical figures in Hugo, The Aviator and RKO 281) pivot the film on the feuding-sibling friendship of Wolfe (Jude Law) and Perkins (Colin Firth). As a stressed third element there is Wolfe’s mistress, theatrical designer Aline Bernstein (an electric sketch by Nicole Kidman). Aline is sexually besotted, and jealous of Wolfe’s talent, and of his word-driven union with Perkins. Firth, clamping an American accent on his native English as Perkins, also seems to clamp down his solemn, pensive head by wearing a fedora, even indoors at dinner. His wife (Laura Linney) and five darling daughters take this with the blithe loyalty of a screwball family.

Genius appeals, largely, on how far you accept Jude Law. Having aged beyond pretty into handsome, he dives into the yeasty volcano of Wolfe’s yawping North Carolina personality. Wolfe was six feet, six inches tall, and so the shorter Law goes for breadth (and breath, in tumbling bursts of rhetoric). He has Wolfean gusto, being at his best like Vincent D’Onofrio as blazing young fantasy writer Robert Howard in The Whole Wide World (at cornpone worst, he’s like Dennis Quaid ham-grilling Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire). Law is the flame of a slightly tame movie that, too small for Wolfe, jams him into a ’30s New York of haggard breadlines, gray buildings and heavy brown suits. How odd that this totally American writer should now be served by an English director, two English stars and an Aussie (Kidman).

Perkins sought to harness Wolfe’s Niagara of prose, his own taste having been shaped by primly penciling the immaculate stylists Hemingway and Fitzgerald (Dominic West is a poster-boy Hem, Guy Pearce a more nuanced, touching Fitz). But Wolfe excited him more deeply. The Wolfe novels still overflow impressively, and if you want the delta undiluted you can read O Lost, the pre-Perkins version of Look Homeward, Angel, revived in 2000 with rich, pedantic love by editor Matthew J. Bruccoli and his wife Arlyn.

Wolfe’s barnstorming brilliance is no longer fashionable. The gaudier Tom Wolfe, master of comical excess, wears the rhinestone cape of fame. But this fond, ragged movie reminds us that Thomas was, along with FDR and Walt Disney, Orson Welles and John Steinbeck, Katharine Hepburn and James Cagney and Amelia Earhart and Fred Astaire, one of those starbursts of vitality that got America through the Depression, still glad to be alive.

Any hope that Sally Field might stage a bravura return like Lily Tomlin in last year’s Grandma dies quickly in Hello, My Name Is Doris. She’s a scattered old dear, living in a crammed house in Staten Island. Doris is instantly smitten by a handsome new colleague at work (nice Max Greenfield, who is like an AARP huggy-bunny for deluded spinsters). Bad hair, spaced outfits, and dithering shyness broken by squawks of alarmed self-recognition leave Field stuck in sitcom compost, munching the worms of the dopey script. But at one point she climbs up on furniture, raging in protest, and we think: Norma Rae lives! Too little, too late.

SALAD (A List)

Sixteen Very Good Performances Depicting Real Writers, in the order of their arrival: Donald Sutherland as Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976); Ben Gazzara as “Serking” (Charles Bukowski, in Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1981); Ian Holm as Rev. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, in Dreamchild, 1985); Gary Oldman as Joe Orton (Prick Up Your Ears, 1987); Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown (My Left Foot, 1989); Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, 1995); Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud (Total Eclipse, 1995); Vincent D’Onofrio as Robert E. Howard (The Whole Wide World, 1996); Michael Gambon as Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Gambler, 1997); Javier Bardem as Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls, 2000); Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf (The Hours, 2002); Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar (American Splendor, 2003); Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote (Capote, 2005); Helen Mirren as Ayn Rand (The Passion of Ayn Rand, 2009); Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy (The Last Station, 2009), and Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo (Trumbo, 2015). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles seldom favored plain, naturalistic acting. George Coulouris, who played the frosty banker Mr. Thatcher in Citizen Kane, observed this gratefully: “I made many films after Kane and one thing I’ve noticed is its intensity and power – more than would be tolerable in many films. The scene in which we argue back and forth in the newspaper office is not conventional movie acting. With other actors or another director, it would have been ‘brought down’ a lot, and lose a great deal.” (From James Naremore’s brilliant The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A master of delicately recessive nuances, Alec Guinness “banked his reserve like treasure, doled out in increments that we take to the vault of memory. He even pulled off good moments as Hitler, a rare deed, though the movie stays bunkered. As for the man himself, writer John Le Carré zeroed in: ‘Alec Guinness actually did me the favor of having me shown off the set of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. All I wanted to do was radiate my admiration, but Alec said the glare was too intense.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Walter P. Thatcher (George Coulouris) cranks up a head of steam in Citizen Kane (RKO Pictures, 1941; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.