Nosh 46: 'Manchester..', 'Why Him?' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Manchester by the Sea and Why Him?
Manchester by the Sea
I am not in the big hallelujah chorus for Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. I liked the intricate flow of his You Can Count on Me (2000), with its terrific acting by Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney, yet never saw his mangled and barely released Margaret (2011). Now the writer-director leads us to Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), once a local sports star, currently an efficient but morose building superintendent.

Lee is in emotional stupor after a family tragedy drove away his expressively depressed wife (Michelle Williams). About as verbal as an earthworm, Lee goes to a tavern and drinks himself into fights. When his brother dies, Lee becomes the dutiful but resentful guardian of his snappish teen nephew (Lucas Hedges). The nephew’s mom (Gretchen Mol) floats in with her nice, placidly Christian catch (Matt Broderick), an episode that has a slight tingle of David Lynch. Gray New England weather piles up in sync with Lonergan’s grinding, granular script, which involves tricky flashbacks.

Affleck’s performance, for all its sincere integrity, is suffocatingly limited. The remote torpor of the character is like dramatic quicksand. Williams, though under-served by the script, has a stunning scene of raw desperation as her feelings claw the cold air. But mostly the film relies on inarticulate, bunkered despair and spiteful nagging. Not even Ella Fitzgerald’s “I’m Beginning to See the Light” can lift the mood tonnage, though it might make you yearn for a different movie.

Lonergan pours Tomasso Albinoni’s famous Adagio over the revelation of Lee’s past tragedy. The brooding, melancholy piece suited the baroque convolutions of Orson Welles’s The Trial, but here it is just a ponderous bolster for obvious family situations. Manchester is a sort of prestige laundromat, where guilty soap operas go for a final rinse of catharsis. Better we should return to the lacerating verbiage of Eugene O’Neill’s haunted, boozing, macho-burdened Irish Catholics. This film puts those elements back in play, but to what gain? Fancy TV drama has bought up all the rights on this kind of material.

Why Him?

The modest, clunky appeal of Why Him? is in the contrast of Bryan Cranston and James Franco. Cranston is “Cheese,” head of a dying printing biz in Battle Creek, appalled that his bright, pretty daughter has fallen for Laird (Franco), a Silicon Valley cyber-game genius who is also a preening idiot. Too bad Laird isn’t Lard, because then we’d have a Cheese & Lard comedy. Cranston does savvy facial reactions that echo old studio laugh squeezers like Edgar Buchanan and William Demarest. Franco flaunts his buff, absurdly tatted body with the supple fluency of James Dean (Franco came to fame as Dean in a TV movie). Laird is like Dean doing young Jerry Lewis, but stuck in a Seth Rogen world.

It has only taken 22 years, but modern comedy has evolved from Jeff Daniels stunningly trapped with a clogged toilet in Dumb and Dumber to Cranston taking a high-tech dump in Laird’s mansion without benefit of toilet paper. Even Franco’s comically versatile charm cannot quite refine the wit of Laird calling his sweet fiancée “boner bait.” There is nothing beneath the snarky, slumming surface of crank-ups like this, but we can probably read the recent election in the duel of the old-tech guy from rusty Michigan (narrowly for Trump) and a genial edge dope from dynamic California (massively for Clinton). When Cranston decides to save his company by switching from printing work to vanguard commodes, it’s a teaching moment: Trump progress! As bonus, there is a dud cameo by Elon Musk. 

SALAD (A List)

The Best Catholic Family Dramas on Film, by my light (with director and date): Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962), The Godfather I and II (Francis Coppola, 1972, ’74), The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1962), Catarina in the Big City (Paolo Virzi, 2005), Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973), Mafioso (Alberto Lattuada, 2015), Mac (John Turturro, 1992) and Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015).     

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Youthful Orson Welles had a romantic taste for lean, strong ballerinas, and for the cupid powers of Western Union. Courting Vera Zorina, a star dancer and future wife of George Balanchine, he “ran out of the auditorium between acts of her Broadway play, sending her telegrams to praise her performance in each act; he sent her telegrams when he knew she was asleep, wishing her sweet dreams; he sent her telegrams saying simply I AM ACROSS THE STREET.” How many still remember the old jolt of telegrams? (From Patrick McGilligan’s delicious Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Walter Huston won an Oscar (supporting actor) for his prospector Howard in 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the moment that probably got it for him is his impromptu dance, a “jig of joy as ‘gaily vivacious as a water bug’ (James Agee). Lashing out at Dobbs and Curtin for being ‘dumber than the dumbest jackass’ on finding surface pyrite (fool’s gold), the old boy breaks into a guffawing dance. He’d learned it from Eugene O’Neill, and Tommy Lee Jones would offer a fair approximation in The Homesman, 2014.” (From the Humphrey Bogart/ Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter of 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.

Monica Vitti and Alain Delon live it up in L’Eclisse / The Eclipse (1962; director Michelangelo Antonioni, cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo).

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Nosh 45: 'Moana', 'The Eagle Huntress' & More

By David Elliott

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

NOTE: The next Nosh will be on Dec. 30, 2016.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Moana and The Eagle Huntress

Moana
There are probably fewer than 30 talents of real genius who have significantly swayed the history of movies, and of those the biggest global impact came from Walt Disney. The “Mickey Mouse man” was busy theme-parking his vision, before dying in 1966. In the last 50 years many permutations followed, some merely dull and corporate. But the challenges of UPA (Mr. Magoo, etc.) and Pixar and Japanese animé were absorbed, and as more than a rising profit stream came to extend and enrich Walt’s legacy. The empire can still flash some magic.

Proof positive is the extravagantly vivid and colorful Moana. Moana (voice actor: Auli’i Cravalho) is teen princess of a Pacific isle, a sort of toon-merged Hawaii and Tahiti. She discovers the mythic roots of her culture, to save her people with the aid of a  super-dude, Maui (voice: Dwayne Johnson). It’s like Gidget joining Fabio for a glorious adventure, festooned with big-eyed people, fantastic seas, sinister coconuts, a volcanic villain and a tropical ecology of creatures (including a stunningly dumb chicken). Though hyperactive and a bit exhausting, like many big-time animations, the film is delightful.

Also beautiful, with startling waves of surprise, is perhaps the ultimate delivery of an enduring Disney specialty: water, fluent in epic variety. Of course, since big cartoons now mostly try to be musicals, songs sound like auditions for Polynesian Idol. This is very much a corporate package (four directors, eight writers, 90 or so principal animators). But since Lin-Manuel (Hamilton) Miranda helped craft some funny lyrics, it's entertaining. And it is hard to imagine anyone over the age of five who won’t find their imagination surfing the pleasures.  

The Eagle Huntress

Stretching the fabled arc of her talent, Jennifer Lawrence is again marvelous in The Eagle Huntress. No, wait, let’s revise that. The star of Otto Bell’s documentary is Mongolian tribal girl Aisholpan Nurgaiv, 13 during filming. If not the Lawrence of her country, nor of Arabia, she deserves her rising fame. Aisholpan is the first female to become a champion eagle hunter. That is, she uses a big eagle (caught by herself on a mountain ledge) to hunt small game, while riding a shaggy horse across vast steppes.

Her father, who is also her trainer, firmly ignores the elders, weathered old coots facing this upstart eaglet. One harrumphs, “While men go eagle-hunting, women are at home preparing tea.” When not at school or helping around the yurt, the cheerful, full-faced girl wins a competition against 69 experienced males. With her dad, she then heads into the wintry wild to gain her first true kill (a fox). This is far beyond picturesque. Simon Niblett’s terrific imagery, the exotic power of ways both earthy and aerial, and Aisholpan’s brave charisma are inspiring. Not even Great Genghis himself, lord of the horde, ever imagined this: Mongolia, feminist frontier.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Top Non-Cartoon Creature Movies: Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar (donkey), Ken Loach’s Kes (hawk), Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion (horse), Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (dog), Chris Noonan’s Babe (pig), Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (bears), Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (dog), John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz (birds), Colin Gregg’s We Think the World of You (dog), Byron Haskin’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars ( monkey), Masanori Hata’s Adventures of Milo and Otis (dog, cat) and Cindy Miehl’s Buck (horses).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though he often visited Paris and made a great movie there (The Trial, 1962), Citizen Welles had very mixed feelings: “Do you remember what the Seine was like, when you could stroll along it with your girl? I’ve been asked to write some little thing in Paris Vogue, about why I love Paris. When I could walk on the sidewalk in Paris, I loved it, but now I have to climb over automobiles. Taking down Les Halles (market) was the beginning of the end. The new one is already falling apart. It looks older than Notre Dame!” (Welles, talking to Henry Jaglom in My Lunches With Orson).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The fancy-dress dance is an unforgettable scene in Alice Adams: “In a splendid shot (director  George) Stevens pulls the camera up high among the columns. We see Alice below, alone on one side of the room, across from the babbling in-crowd. She fidgets, quavers, powders her nose. ‘The scene of social humiliation is peculiarly American,’ Andrew Sarris commented, ‘in that it reflects the tensions created by social mobility, but no actress ever suffered more beautifully through the trauma.’ And no other film era had so many snobbish swells, daffy debs, playboy puffins.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams 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.

Aisholpan Nurgaiv with bird and father, The Eagle Huntress (Sony Pictures Classics 2016; director Otto Bell, cinematographer Simon Niblett).

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Nosh 44: 'Allied,' 'Bad Santa 2' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Allied and Bad Santa 2

Allied
Of all the war movies in all the world, few have had the nerve to go back to Casablanca. Which means Casablanca, and its Moroccan port city haunted since 1942 by Rick, Ilse, Ugarte, Capt. Renault … round up the usual suspects. And here we are, back there again in Allied, and just a year later. We are with Canadian-British agent Max Vatan (Brad Pitt), and soon he is with undercover va-voom de chic Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), of the French Underground or something. Her back story is a furtive murk of Euro intrigue and could stand more light, but Cotillard gives her reality.

Robert Zemeckis’s movie, from a crafty pastiche script by Steven Knight, bounces off the esteemed classic with true verve. Nobody beats Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in black-and-white Casablanca, but Pitt and Cotillard flesh out a vivid color parallel. She’s at the apex of her French beauty, he has finally settled handsomely into solid middle-age. They share a Great Love, and although they never make it to Rick’s Café Americain, there is a remarkably bold assassination at the German legation.

Rick’s movie has a fabled sequence in Paris, and here wartime London is rather less seductive. But Zemeckis is very good at staging major set pieces: hot sex during a sand storm, childbirth during a bombing raid, a booze-driven Blitz party, even an airport finale that echoes Casablanca. While no Hitchcock, he keeps the tension wired with his strong stars and a neat surprise or two.

Allied  is unabashedly old-fashioned. It has a true story arc, and doesn’t rely on big effects, long shocks, monsters or a coy, franchising finish. If Pitt’s manly feelings are a touch rote, well, that’s Brad. Like Warren Beatty’s more adventurous Rules Don’t Apply (see last Nosh, below), the historical nuances are ripe. Not exactly a letter of transit in today's market.

Bad Santa 2

When someone, soused, slams into the cinema bar and slurs, “Gimme a BB ’n BS,” insiders will understand at once: Gimme Billy Bob Thornton in a Bad Santa. It’s taken 13 years to get a sequel, Bad Santa 2. This does not mean maturing – that would be a betrayal. Mr. Thornton, grizzled but game, still knows how to open a holiday movie with Dickensian cheer: “Let’s just say my whole life has been one long fucking nightmare.” Nobody lobs a snark better than Billy Bob, and he has certainly made up for his verbal limits as Karl, in his stellar launch pad Sling Blade.

As Willie T. Soke, an alcoholic thief pressed into another heist, while posing as an obnoxiously rude street Santa, Thornton again partners with fuming dwarf Marcus (Tony Cox is as tall as any man when it comes to hurling curses). The profanity snorts feminist fire when Kathy (Misery) Bates unloads as Willie’s mom (calling him “shitstick,” repeatedly, she’s all heart). Along with raunchy women and sex gags, there is bizarre balancing of Elvis’s funky “Santa Claus is Back in Town” with a Chopin nocturne. Above all, spirited vulgarity trashes holiday clichés and cooks the sap in every Christmas tree. I admit to numerous laughs. Thornton, Bates and Cox are a profane trifecta.

SALAD (A List)

Here is my ammo clip on the Fifteen Best World War II Movies (with director and year), not documentaries or prisoner or death camp films: Come and See (Klimov, 1985), Attack! (Aldrich, 1956), Cross of Iron (Peckinpah, 1977), The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957), The Devil’s General (Kautner, 1955), Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), The Pianist (Polanski, 2002), Il Generale Della Rovere (Rossellini, 1959), The Guns of Navarone (Thompson, 1961), The Story of G.I. Joe (Wellman, 1945), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (Huston, 1957), The Big Red One (Fuller, 1980), The Purple Plain (Parrish, 1954), Sahara (Korda, 1943) and The Enemy Below (Powell, 1957).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Talking to Peter Bogdanovich, Citizen Welles saluted his fellow “martyr” to Hollywood studio constriction, Erich von Stroheim, “whom I knew well and loved. He was just a nice Jewish boy and I was always on to that – that’s what I think is so great about him …  a  great charlatan, and a true artist. My God, he had talent!” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Bogdanovich and Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“My language limits blocked almost all foreign films. Silent cinema remains a lovely but distant music. My Oscars piety centers only on The Oscar, that stunning, unintended comedy (1966) that debauches the awards. I only got excited by box office when dear Harry Potter stacked up his millions.” (From the explanatory Introduction to 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.

Robert Mitchum, Marine, comforts nun Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (20^th Century Fox, 1957; director John Huston, cinematographer Oswald Morris).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 43: 'Rules Don't Apply,' 'Loving' & More

By David Elliott

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

 

APPETIZER: Reviews of Rules Don’t Apply and Loving

Rules Don’t Apply
I suppose that Rules Don’t Apply is Warren Beatty’s swan song at 79 – but this is quite a bull swan, and often a funny one. When a movie has a clever script (Beatty), inventive direction (Beatty), splendid photography (Caleb Deschanel), ace production design (Jeannine Oppewall), a wonderfully diverse soundtrack (from Bobby Day’s “Rockin’ Robin” to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth), a gifted and game cast, lovely streaks of period footage, and a bold, larking spirit, then the movie ought to be good. And so, by my lights, this is.

You need to know and care a little about the Howard Hughes myth, or mystique, or vapor trail. Hughes produced movies, though his big income was from aviation (his passion) and oil drilling (inheritance). As Hughes, Beatty doesn’t reach for the rafters like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator, but he is the funniest Hughes since Jason Robards in Melvin and Howard. Partly due to his age limits, Beatty has compressed the wild Hughes saga to wedge between 1958 and 1964, bringing forward the ’40s “scandal” about his huge wooden plane, the Spruce Goose, and pulling back the “scandal” of the phony Hughes diary (1971; see 2006’s The Hoax). Few young viewers will notice these time mutations, mostly because not very many will be attending this film. But the picture is more than an old movie star’s last vanity gift to himself.

To brace himself as Hughes (sometimes the smartest guy in the room, but increasingly a loonybird), Beatty got two budding stars: Alden Ehrenreich as Frank, a foxy chauffeur in Howard’s driver pool, ascending upward (although scared of flight); and Lily Collins as Marla, a doe-eyed, Southern Baptist virgin recruited into Hughes’s harem of bunkered, wannabe starlets, women on pay but often without roles. Ehrenreich is appealing and sharp, but Collins gives the movie its sexy tingle and vital anchor. Even when flummoxed by Hughes, she seems to be finding a future by sheer force of personality. Collins has screwball spunk, like much of the movie, and her brisk wising-up is a major contribution.

In a charmingly vintage L.A. (plus London, Vegas, Acapulco, Managua) that Beatty clearly recalls with nostalgia, yet never stupidly, we notice many talents: Annette Bening, Candice Bergen, Steve Coogan, Martin Sheen, Paul Sorvino, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Oliver Platt plus Matthew Broderick, terrific as an executive stooge (his "I once had a life" is perfect). But it was the crafty Beatty who most held my interest, by holding his long career and late fatherhood and Hughes fixation and politics up to a light of  bemused inspection. He stays on the right side of fond caricature, and his direction is supple, imaginative, often surprising. Beatty is still the brave adventurer who reached for glory with Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey One, Shampoo, Bulworth, Reds and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

If you don't get it, Rules Don’t Apply may seem, like the aging Hughes, loopy. If you do, it is a humming coil of pleasure. When Hughes sits munching a burger, warmly gazing up at his big, beloved Goose by moonlight, you know that you’re somewhere quite special. This odd, bravura movie makes the year’s other Hollywood nostalgia kits, the Coen Bros.’s Hail, Caesar! and Woody Allen’s Café Society, seem a little tame, a little tidy, a little tired.   

Loving

Movie-making excitement is never the goal of Loving, from talented director-writer Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter, Midnight Special). With sober, earnest fidelity, Nichols has turned a history tale into, well, a history lesson. It’s about the Lovings: white, working-class Richard (Joel Edgerton) and his black wife, Mildred (Ruth Negga). Raised among blacks, Richard is devoid of prejudice, a man of few words but dense and tense with feeling. Edgerton, with his solemn, homespun gravity, has a remarkably spare expressiveness (like Henry Fonda in Gideon’s Trumpet). Most decisive actions come from big-eyed Mildred, who hires an eager ACLU lawyer once the old “miscegenation” (race-mixing) law chases them from rural Virginia. With their kids they sneak back to continue the quiet struggle, and in 1967 their Supreme Court victory kills the old racial laws on marriage.  

Rich in homespun ambience, finely acted (including Nick Kroll as the lawyer and Michael Shannon as a Life photographer), at times so soft-spokenly Southern that it’s a little hard to follow, Loving could use more juice and crackle and candor. It becomes a case study, although touchingly human. Dick Loving was a mason, a virtuoso brick-layer. As filmer, Nichols seems here to be practicing the same trade. His movie is a sort of Hallmark brick, a valentine to moral masonry. (By the way, who else recalls Irvin Kershner’s intimately fine drama Loving, from 1970, with George Segal and Eva Marie Saint doing top work?)   

SALAD (A List)

Here are my Ten Favorite Warren Beatty Movies, in order of favor, with year and director: Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), Rules Don’t Apply (Beatty, 2016), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Bulworth (Beatty, 1998), Reds (Beatty, 1981), Bugsy (Barry Levinson, 1991),  All Fall Down (John Frankenheimer, 1962), Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (Jose Quintero, 1961).       
                                                       
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
During WWII, FDR asked his fan Welles to undertake a secret mission, but Orson said wife Rita Hayworth wouldn’t believe him. So Roosevelt called her, and sure enough, “Hedda Hopper, sensing a possible extramarital affair, kept pressing Rita for details (and) in her column the next day, Hedda announced to millions of her readers that the President of the United States had called Rita about the special work Orson was doing for him.” Evidently, he served his hero well. (From Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As New York City’s most personal and colorful bus tour guide, Tim “Speed” Levitch sometimes let the facts fly: “Factual promiscuity rankled management. ‘Speed has declared war on historical accuracy,’ (director) Bennett Miller told me in 1998. ‘He really believes that the emotions, not the facts, dictate the truth.’ But though the Empire State’s height kept changing, ‘he always caught the spirit of it.” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, ripe for purchase from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Giulietta Masina is night worker Cabiria, Nights of Cabiria (Rialto Pictures, 1957; director Federico Fellini, cinematographer Aldo Tonti).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.