Nosh 38: 'Denial,' 'Miss Hokusai'

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Denial and Miss Hokusai

Denial

Who can deny that “historian” David Irving is a jerk? A Royal Navy officer’s son, the boy admired Adolf Hitler. His Fuhrer fondness caused a public scandal in college. He went on to write about WWII from Hitler’s viewpoint (his mastery of German did not save him from many errors of fact). And then Irving became the world’s most famous, anti-Semitic doubter of the Holocaust – a stain not bleached by his helping to expose the fake “Hitler diaries” (largely to embarrass a more worthy historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper).

Irving remains alive at 78, still rather ruggedly handsome. But, given his sordid character, it’s no wonder that in Denial the famously homely Timothy Spall plays him like a hybrid of Dracula, Dick Nixon and Spall’s rodent-faced Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter series. Quite fine as Churchill in The King's Speech, Spall as the cocky Irving comes off as a scowling, deluded gargoyle. In court he faces the American historian he foolishly slandered, Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz). Her team of London legal eagles, led on film by Tom Wilkinson and Andrew Scott, must prove that Irving knowingly lied and ignored facts, to a judge who is one very hard brick of Britannic cheese.

The tense story, scripted by David Hare from Lipstadt’s book, plays up Weisz’s use of a flat, almost grating American accent, high contrast to the verbal brandy of the Brits. There is too much obvious counterpointing of English formality and cool, “manly” logic to her volatile feelings. They refused her wish to call Holocaust survivors to testify, but the bond held.

The verdict is now history, satisfyingly. Irving never recovered, and has been reduced to hawking Nazi memorabilia (maybe Donald Trump can recruit Irving to ghost his political memoirs). Director Mick Jackson keeps it humming, a chill visit to Auschwitz is haunting, and Wilkinson is wonderful as the lawyer who needs frequent wine to lubricate his brilliance and his conscience. Denial digs into its story with insight, but this year’s Holocaust movie remains, certainly, Laszlo Nemes’s amazing Son of Saul (see Nosh 6, below).

Miss Hokusai

I can be lukewarm about Japanese animé, or Japanimation. So much beauty and imagination! But also too much quirky plotting, gory violence and sentimentality about big-eyed cuties. Forget such flaws with Keiichi Hara’s Miss Hokusai. Loosely using history, Hara’s gorgeous film is about O-ei, daughter of the great painter Hokusai. It takes place in 1814 in Edo, the future Tokyo.

An artist, under her father’s haughty thumb and masterful brush, O-ei has spunk and talent. Her standard task is to ink female figures, but she’s a virgin and the old man declares that she lacks sensuality. We follow her self-questioning growth as artist and woman. Hara offers amazing vistas, an imperious concubine, a Godzilla-like Buddha, dreams, ghosts, a huge fire, fear of sex and death, and a seduction with a surprise finish. O-ei’s blind little sister is a big-eyed peg for pathos, and yet handled with such subtlety and tender emotion, why crab about it?

This may well be a masterpiece (only a savvy Japanese viewer could say for sure). What held my fascination, along with the wonderful depiction of an era before capitalist Japan Inc., is the silky, brush-like fluency of Hara’s feel for emotional changes in a family, the kind that here shapes art on paper and film. When he tops a river excursion with a surging homage to master Hokusai’s immortal “Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” he has earned it. For a glimpse of the beauty, see the end of this Nosh. 

SALAD (A List)
My favorite 12 Films About Trials and Lawyers:
Twelve Angry Men (Lumet, 1955), The Trial (Welles, 1962), The Confession (Costa-Gavras, 1970), Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950),  To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962), Paths of Glory (Kubrick, 1957), Compulsion (Fleischer, 1959), My Cousin Vinny (Lynn, 1992), The Letter (Wyler, 1940), Reversal of Fortune (Schroeder, 1990),  Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959) and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Rothemund, 2012).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Chosen by Orson Welles to play Helen of Troy in a 1950 Paris show, young Eartha Kitt remembered being escorted by him at dawn back to her hotel, with Orson spouting yarns and Shakespeare. He also staged fancy cast lunches, where “he ordered everything for us from soup to nuts (and) wanted a bit of everything” from everyone’s plates. Welles never, she believed, had to pick up the tab. (Quotation from Barbara Leaming’s great Orson Welles: A Biography).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Tony Perkins’s commercial smash was Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho: “Norman’s unity with his dead mother was a warped X-ray of Tony, who even invented some dialog. Personal subtext came forth screaming: ‘She had to raise me all by herself, after my father died. I was only five.’ Despite his mimetic skills, Perkins refused to do Ma Bates’s voice, perhaps sensing the arrival of a campy career trap.” That fear was correct. (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

O-ei makes Edo her own, in Miss Hokusai (Gkids, 2015; director Keiichi Hara, cinematographer Koji Tanaka)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 37: 'Miss Peregrine's Home ..', 'Harry and Snowman'

By David Elliott

 

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

APPETIZER: ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home …’,‘Harry & Snowman’

After sitting (as I did last Monday) through six preview trailers that seem to jostle each other in a contagious riot of high-tech, effects-mad hysteria, one fears that the feature film will be more of the same, like a Trump rant that just won’t stop. To my relief, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children takes “event”  hysteria down a few notches to become a pleasing entertainment. After a long, scattered period (though Big Eyes certainly had its moments), director Tim Burton is back in his groove, using Jane Goldman’s crafty adaptation of the Miss Peregrine novels of Ransom Riggs.

The effects are extravagant but not crushing, the CGI and natural vistas are dressed in elegant depth, and the story favors whimsy on the right side of bonkers. Burton keeps the narrative thread alive, with enjoyable characters and a sustained aura of this-must-be-so. The lavishness is lovely, also funny, including Miss Peregrine herself (Eva Green’s black, sculpted hair crowns her elite diction). Her grand goth mansion on a wee Welsh isle shelters “peculiar” kids who have magic powers. Their life is suspended on Sept. 3, 1943, right before a Nazi bomb will blast it apart. Each day Miss P rolls them back safely in a time loop, deferring the dreadful moment.

The awed interloper from now, yet spiritually "peculiar," is Jake (appealing Asa Butterfield, with big Disney eyes), wired for adventure by the secret tales of his refugee grandfather; we could use more of Terence Stamp’s great, cathedral vault voice. Jake meets a blond adorable (Ella Purnell) who commands the wind, and also a swell swarm of villains, not Nazis but hexed weirdos led by Barron. He is, happily, Samuel L. Jackson with razored teeth and death-creep eyes. With his singular splat of savvy Jackson lobs lines like “Boo!” and “I had to masquerade as a psychiatrist for three weeks – in Florida.”

Burton has always been a dreamy custodian and archivist, driven by his peculiar taste (here enhanced by by the story’s jolly-morbid Britishness). Few young viewers will notice Winston Churchill’s voice on the radio, yet quite a few viewers can savor the winking curtsies to Groundhog Day, Titanic, The Lady from Shanghai, Lost Horizon and Ray Harryhausen’s pioneering animations. At his best Burton is a terrific giggle. His new movie indulges the big-budget folie de grandeur of a climax that strives for multiple orgasm, but your imagination has to be pretty sexless not to enjoy the wallop of his wow.

Harry & Snowman
In 1956 Harry de Leyer, a post-WWII emigrant from ravaged Holland, then a riding teacher at a posh Long Island school for girls, went to a terminal auction of work horses. The penetrating gaze of a big white gelding, already truck-loaded for the “glue factory,” caught his eye. This was love, and for $80 the Dutchman got the ride of his life. Twice they beat the posh, blueblood steeds in national show-jumping championships (1958, ’59). The gentle, calm, big-footed champ became the adored pal of Harry and his eight kids. Eventually the 24/7 horsiness was too much for Harry’s wife, who left. Workaholic Harry kept training, riding, jumping.

How he discovered Snowman’s jumping power is one of the delights of the documentary by Ron Davis, who previously filmed beauty pageants. Modern interviews intercut vivid vintage footage, including a startling episode of Harry falling off a horse but rebounding with a smile (he won the top ribbon). Snowman lived to 28 in 1976 – better bring a hanky for that. Harry, now 89, last competed in 2008. As a valentine to equine passion, this movie is surpassed only by Buck, Cindy Meehl’s homage to “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman. Saddle up. 

SALAD (A List)
Tim Burton’s Ten Best Movies, by my account: Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Ed Wood (1994), The Nightmare Before Christmas (with Henry Selick, 1993), Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016), Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Corpse Bride (2005), Mars Attacks! (1996) and Sleepy Hollow (1999).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles missed his old moviegoing in the ’30s: “You sallied into the theater at any time of day or night, like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. We never asked what time the movie began. We’d go down to the Paramount where they had a double bill, and see the B pictures …There was an actor called J. Carrol Naish. Anything he did, we’d laugh at.” (From My Lunches With Orson by Henry Jaglom and Peter Biskind.) For the record, ethnic specialist Naish did some good work, and gained Oscar nominations for Sahara  (1943) and A Medal for Benny (1945). 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A film “starts with the find of the location,’ said (cinematographer) Robby Muller. Wim Wenders agreed: ‘If I don’t have a gut feeling about the place, I don’t know where to put the camera.’ They were John Ford devouts, and without pedantry Muller evoked Winton Hoch’s majestic landscapes for The Searchers. Hoch seems to mural the West from horseback, Muller snaps it through a car window. Hoch echoes painter Frederic Remington, Muller the classic modern road-shooter Robert Frank.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Ed (Johnny Depp) admires Bela (Martin Landau) in Ed Wood (Touchstone Pictures 1994; director Tim Burton, cinematographer Stefan Czapsky). 

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 36: 'The Birth of a Nation' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Review of ‘The Birth of a Nation’

It must have seemed like a bravura coup to writer and director Nate Parker: highjacking the title of D.W. Griffith’s fabled and infamous The Birth of a Nation. In 1915 Griffith boldly advanced a young art form and gave us our most potent vision of the Civil War era. But – his big, nostalgic blunder – he indulged his fantasy about the Ku Klux Klan as a Christian crusade of white knights, out to protect their damsels from black lust.

The movie was a huge success and was screened for years, not just in the South. It set the stage for David O. Selznick’s romantic magnolia binge, Gone With the Wind. A counterpoint rebuke, James W. Noble's The Birth of a Race (1918), gained little attention outside a few "colored" theaters. A movie  like Griffith’s cannot be made again, for which the verdict a century later is “thank God.” Parker, a black actor directing his first feature, has every right to select his own terms of racial payback. After all, the white author William Styron took the moldering facts about Nat Turner, who in 1831 led a bloody slave rebellion in Virginia, and wrote a controversial, Pulitzer Prize’d novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).  Styron is now on a dusty shelf, Griffith is an easy target, and Turner is a martyred, partially mythic piece of history, still ripe for use.

Sadly that does not excuse Parker's liberation saga which, despite some glints of power, wraps history and myth, religion and revenge, inside a blubber ball of chunky clichés and clunky tactics. The whites are nearly all rustic brutes, though a pale plantation lady gives kid Nat a Bible and teaches him to read. Still, he’s sent back to sweat in the cotton fields for her son, a boozing hayseed and brooding cyst of guilt. Nat has a preacher gift, but takes quite some time to reckon that the whites are exploiting him to sedate slaves with religion (very little Jesus, mostly Old Testament). Periodic acts of sadism keep us involved before the blowout revolt, ordained not only because Nat is now a vengeful “prophet,” but because the plot pressure can only be vented in a grisly hallelujah of violence (almost 300 died).

As director, Parker favors glossy, picturesque vistas, walloping close-ups, and the facile branding of stick figures which Griffith was already trying to reach beyond in 1915. A central problem is his performance as Turner. Parker has warm eyes and a big, sunrise smile, but after so much suffering the effect of that charm starts to make Nat seem too simple, if not quite a servile Uncle Tom (speaking of which, Samuel L. Jackson’s Tom tactics as a cunning, two-faced mansion slave in Django Unchained had more layers of nuance than Parker ever manages). The performances are highly posed and often hackneyed, without the impact of Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh and H.B. Walthall in Griffith’s silent picture. Parker uses rape to oil rage, and for tragedy invokes Strange Fruit, the powerful Billie Holiday song against lynching.

12 Years a Slave, a touch pedantic but richly dramatized, showed us vile plantation cruelties as well as any film has. Quentin Tarantino’s Django took the whole, lurid package to a new level of crafty melodrama. Parker’s Birth has been ambushed by news about his tainted sexual past (while in college he was accused, then acquitted of rape). Beyond that controversy, any serious look tells us the movie just isn’t very good.

SALAD (A List)

By my reckoning, The Ten Best Slave-themed Movies are: Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), Amazing Grace (Apted, 2006), Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012), 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013), Burn! (Pontecorvo, 1969), Mandingo (Fleischer, 1975), The Ten Commandments (De Mille, 1956), Amistad (Spielberg, 1997), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Korty, 1974), Slaves (Biberman, 1969). Obviously, Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is in its own category, as both a great film and a history travesty.   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A strong Roosevelt liberal, Citizen Welles was urged to run for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin against a paunchy young Republican “war hero,” Joseph R. McCarthy. The real problem, as he said later, was “Joe McCarthy had the dairy people behind him and there was no way to beat him.” Orson didn’t run, “and that’s how come there was a McCarthy. It’s a terrible thing to have on your conscience.” But 1946 was a big Republican year; it also gave us Richard M. Nixon. (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No one is funnier in The Producers than Estelle Winwood, 84, prim but sparky and sex-minded as an old widow: “Mel Brooks recalled that ‘she poked Zero in unmentionable places.’ On hitting 100 she would sigh, ‘I wouldn’t mind being dead. It would be something new.’ Of The Producers she said, ‘I must have needed the money.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Henry B. Walthall charms Lillian Gish in The Birth of a Nation, 1915 (director D.W. Griffith; cinematographer Billy Bitzer).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 35: 'Deepwater Horizon,' 'The Beatles: Eight Days a Week' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Deepwater Horizon and The Beatles: Eight Days a Week
Mark Wahlberg is the quality hamburger of stars (Dwayne Johnson is more like butt steak, Vin Diesel a wiener with attitude). Wahlberg’s macho appeal is so sturdy and grounded that when you match him with Kurt Russell, who achieved similar effects long before, you have the support beams for a disaster whopper like Deepwater Horizon. The name belonged to a huge British Petroleum-leased oil rig off the Louisiana coast, above a mile of water. "The well from hell," says a worker on film, but for the 126 rig occupants it was a living (and for 11 of them, a dying).

The movie directed by Peter Berg points a finger at corporate profit-over-prudence, like skipping a $125,000 cement pressure test. Those saved dollars turned into billions lost, once the Horizon became (April 20, 2010) a fireball of frying, flying metal. The underwater spill polluted the Gulf Coast for 87 days (and how many decades?). Rig manager Mike Williams (Wahlberg), heroic in the crisis, soon left the offshore petro-biz. His boss “Mr. Jimmy” Harrell (Russell), full of outspoken doubts before the disaster, stayed in the trade. A convenient (real?) villain personifies BP, oozing a Dixie accent like a one-man oil leak; John Malkovich’s reptile gaze and cocky idiocy echo his psychotic Cyrus the Virus in Con Air.

Berg and a fine cast (including Kate Hudson as Williams’s wife) are basically lubing the lavish, creaky machinery. We feel viscerally on the rig as it clanks, sputters, shakes and then blows. The shock and fear are like multipliers of the derrick disaster in There Will Be Blood (anyone who misses John Wayne’s The Hellfighters should be left on the rig). Remember James Dean’s joy in Giant, when his well became a glorious gusher? Here that dream dies. Although a frantic seabird crashes into a control room, this  movie never gets a grip on the vast environmental cost, which is rather like making a Katrina film without mentioning New Orleans. (Still, it's a swell platform  for Kurt Russell. For all who love King Kurt, I recommend Scott Marks's ace interview with him, in the Movies section of the current sandiegoreader.com)

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years
That title is ridiculously long for a simple, endearing documentary that should have been released as Beatles!, or maybe Fab Forever. Ron Howard directed (more like pasted) this scrapbook of period clips and modern interviews, including band survivors Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. For us vintage viewers, it’s timeless. I recall the Beatles, drowned out by fans when I went with pal Mike Walters to a Chicago showing of A Hard Day’s Night. Here they are again, those swarming, screaming girls, as if recorded on eternal ear wax.

The Beatles came out of Liverpool by way of Hamburg and Ed Sullivan, toured for a few giddy years, disbanded a few years later. The Rolling Stones rock on, into fossil twilight, but mere longevity can’t beat the Beatles. This zippy dossier of their heyday brings back just how fresh, keen, funny and creative they were, the four unique lads making the best tunes of a troubled decade. Whoopi Goldberg, former screamer, offers a quiet salute: “I never looked at them as white guys. They were the Beatles.” Nobody is too old, too young or too jaded for this pleasure. It will, in this angry year, de-Trump your brain.

SALAD (A List)

The Twelve Best Disaster Movies, in my experience: Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964), Titanic (Cameron, 1997), Take Shelter (Nichols, 2011), The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Guest, 1961), Things to Come (Menzies, 1936), War of the Worlds (Haskin, 1953), The Forbidden Quest (Delpeut, 1993), The Sinking of the Lusitania (McCay, 1918), Deepwater Horizon (Berg, 2016), The Naked Jungle (Haskin, 1954) and The Impossible (Bayona, 2012).
 
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Put together on the run across Europe, using a patchwork budget and actors caught between other, better-paying projects, the Fifties noir mystery Mr. Arkadin is a Wellesian wonder. Or as a great critic said, “a kaleidoscope of signs, and like a brainteaser of clues. The truth rises up in fragments, is shattered, is recomposed and finally is discovered whole: the terrible secret of Arkadin is that he has no secrets.” (Guillermo Cabrera-Infante, A Twentieth Century Job, 1991)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Sometimes an actor has one indelible role, worthy to last. In The Horse’s Mouth (1959), “Mike Morgan had few lines, but each arrives as touching or funny, not so much hobbled by his stutter as made achingly sincere. During the editing, Morgan died from meningitis, which puts a heart flutter in Jimson’s toast, ‘Young man, I drink to your gloomy future.’ For me the endearing actor still mirrors my young dream of art.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Poor cowhand Jett Rink (James Dean) gets oil-rich dirty in Giant (Warner Bros., 1956; director George Stevens, cinematographer William C. Mellor)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.