Nosh 34: 'Our Little Sister,' 'Bridget Jones's Baby' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of Our Little Sister and Bridget Jones’s Baby)

Unless your need is animation or heavy-duty violence, we mostly go to Japanese movies for a subtle lacing of form and ritual within delicately nuanced drama. That is also true of some of the best violent ones, as when Akira Kurosawa made some of the greatest samurai action follow the rhythms of nature and village life in The Seven Samurai (1954), or when the quiet swordsman of Yoji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai (2002) sought refuge from the warrior world in domestic tranquility. And it dominates bravura works by sensitive male directors devoted to largely feminine themes, like Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse.

The new master in this line is Hirokazu Koreeda, whose Our Little Sister – not to be confused with Sisters, Little Sister or Little Women – carries forward the beautiful intricacies of his Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008). In this picture, adapted from the graphic manga novel Umimachi Diary by Yoshida Akimi, three sisters have been raised by their grandmother. Their father left for a woman; their mother fled as well. The three live in the late granny’s old, wooden home in Kamakura, a town best known for its Great Buddha statue. Sternly maternal, the elder sister at 20 is the elegant nurse Sachi (Yoshino Koda). She takes lovely, sexually adventurous Yoshimi (Ryo Kase), 22, and cute, amusing Chika (Kaho), 19, to attend the father’s funeral. Ritual and relatives stir up covert feelings, and the sisters share a revelation: their half-sister Suzu (Suzu Hirose), a pretty girl of 13 whose gentle eyes are almost pleading.

They take Suzu home, to live with them, and Koreeda explores the town, its natural setting, family secrets, and a sisterhood beyond any trendy rhetoric. At times amusingly, he opens up each sibling, plus some lively side figures. Using a light palette visually, a light touch dramatically, the movie renders increasingly layered emotions about domesticity, work, romance and obligation. There is the Japanese devotion to nature, with a beloved plum tree and the cherry blossom celebration. Some soft music murmurs “Fifties soaper,” but is under control.

Our Little Sister has an impeccable love for its people, without the somewhat tricky stylization of Kon Ichikawa's The Makioka Sisters (1983). More may remember Tampopo and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, because the "girls" are so often cooking, eating, talking about food, recalling old treats. Chika's "I'm so hungry, can you cook something?" is almost the main theme. Note to theater managers: rent a sushi bar for your vending counter.

Bridget Jones’s Baby

At 47, after a six-year break from movies, Renée Zellweger is back as Bridget Jones, at 43 “the last barren husk in London.” So Bridget says, but who is she kidding? She is still Zellweger, nicely older, with those peachy cheeks, that adorable accent, that goofy-dear smile, that floppy way of flailing, failing but springing right back. Not as sharp as the 2001 original, Bridget Jones’s Baby beats the dumb 2004 sequel. Yes, even with predictable plot turns, mooning, childbirth agony, ethnic and gender clichés, old songs (“That’s Amore,” “We Are Family,” etc.) to trigger scenes, and Colin Firth looking stern and wary in his return as fabled flame Mark Darcy.

Past, rakish suitor Hugh Grant opted out – his better option was Florence Foster Jenkins – and his amiable sub is Patrick Dempsey, an American biz-hunk courting Bridget while Firth hovers like a rather magisterial moth. She gets pregnant and, golly, who’s the dad? You may wince, you may laugh. If you prattle about small signs of Zellweger’s age, you’re a pig. If you grouch about obviousness, you are ignoring the small, true charms. Zellweger is still an ace actor, and she owns Jones. Emma Thompson appears wittily, and helped script. There is something OK about a comedy with zings like “ironic beards” and “Gladolf Hitler.”    

SALAD (A List)

For what it’s worth (loads of yen), here are my Twelve Favorite Japanese Films, not animated: High and Low (Kurosawa, 1963), Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954), Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952 ), Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953), Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Naruse, 1962), The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 1958), Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953), An Actor’s Revenge (Ichikawa, 1963), Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961), The Twilight Samurai (Yamada, 2002) and Our Little Sister (Koreeda, 2015). Clearly, for me the top master is Akira Kurosawa.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
As he knew, Orson Welles never had a better female actor than his old radio reliable Agnes Moorehead. In The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942, “Moorehead conveys Aunt Fanny’s torment in every birdlike gesture of her body, frequently drawing the spectator’s eye into little corners of the frame, where she dominates the screen without saying a word. In later scenes Moorehead’s depiction of the maddened spinster is so intense that it completely overshadows Tim Holt’s performance as George: ‘I believe I’m going crazy!” (From James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In essence, La Dolce Vita is a renegade Catholic film, and “the one bedrock idea is Catholic guilt, engorged by pagan pleasures. ‘I know that I am a prisoner of 2,000 years of the Catholic Church,’ Fellini confessed, ‘because all Italians are.’ The Church raged, and Fellini became the pope of cinema.” (From the Marcello Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita 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.

Humphrey Bogart lights up as jealously paranoid Dix Steele, In a Lonely Place (Columbia Pictures, 1950; director Nicholas Ray, cinematographer Burnett Guffey)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 33: 'Little Men,' 'Hell or High Water' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of Little Men and Hell or High Water)
It’s been too long since I got excited about discovering a director, and Ira Sachs is no newcomer. He has made seven features; among those I have missed is his Memphis music story with Rip Torn, Forty Shades of Blue. I loved his suspenseful drama Married Life, though its retro styling was a little tidy and curatorial. And, even more, his movie about an aging gay couple, Love is Strange, with its terrific performances by Alfred Molina and John Lithgow. Sachs, who is 50, gay, Jewish and very New York, hits the golden nail again with Little Men.

As in Love is Strange, we’re in New York (now Brooklyn) and “gentrification” is in full cry. Sweating it is Brian (Greg Kinnear), a devoted actor but a Chekhov man, not a Broadway man. He inherits his slightly estranged father’s swell apartment. The ground floor is a dress shop run by flinty, South American émigré Leonor (Paulina Garcia). Her lovely but old-style dresses are selling poorly and, feeling like “family” because the dead father gave her friendship and soft rent, she doesn’t want to budge. But money needs also hound Brian and his hard-working wife and sister. His son Jake (Theo Taplitz) is an aspiring artist who seeks to attend the best high school for the arts.

In a vividly fresh approach, Sachs and fellow writer Mauricio Zacharias pivot the story on the new teen friendship of Jake and Leonor’s son Tony (Michael Barbieri), a street-hip kid with an old Brooklyn spin of gab. Moving like whippets through the city, the boys are ripening in a way that leaves the harried adults feeling like clogged cogs. They aren’t sure how to handle their sons, mindful boys but, like all teens, self-involved. Growth is no guarantee of grace, Leonor proves stubbornly difficult, and Brian cannot turn to Chekhov for solutions.

Sachs is expert with mood, atmosphere and actors (he loves them, and tucked in a swell bit role for Alfred Molina). The boys are teens without Hollywood glazing, and Kinnear’s important speech about “balance” is utterly apt. Not only as advice to his son, but as our clue to Sach’s defining gift. He’s a juggler who drops nothing.

Hell or High Water
After 45 years Jeff Bridges has settled into his aged bulk and rough, baked hide, like Ben Johnson’s Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show. Set further west in Texas oil country, Hell or High Water is not a bravura soaper like the 1971 vision of small-town Texas that brought Bridges into view. Its rustics are even more parched for hope, in this crime yarn of heat and dust, beer and whisky, poker and profanity, expendable women and too many available guns. Dull towns only survive by the will of smug banks. To save their late mother’s ranch from foreclosure, hard-luck brothers Tanner (Ben Foster) and Tobey (Chris Pine) start knocking over the area’s main chain of banks, to pay off the home loan. Oil has been found on their land, so they must steal fast and wild or the bankers will soon get even richer.

The brothers – ex-con Tanner is a danger freak, the divorced, guilty Tobey is morose from pain – are pursued by more slow-poke Texas Rangers: the nearly retired but cagey Marcus (Bridges), and his Comanche-Mexican partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham, speaking the least but seeming most real). Prone to macho needling, Bridges often sounds as if a plug of chaw was stuck in his gullet. Foster and Pine are so beef-jerky manly and rustic that about half their dialog begs for subtitles. English director David Mackenzie is clearly no native here, and he relies on Bridges to provide depth and heft (much as Ben Johnson did in Last Picture Show).

The story rips along, pushing suspense into violence, saving its best scene for the very end. The sag factor is that other films have roamed this generic turf more creatively: Bonnie and Clyde almost half a century ago, The Getaway in the ’70s, The Newton Boys in the ’90s. This is another modern show which relies on a mostly young audience to be ignorant about the movie’s superior ancestry.

SALAD (A List)

Ten Good Films About New York Kids and Teens, in order of arrival:
Dead End (William Wyler, 1937), The Quiet One (Sydney Meyers, 1948), Little Fugitive (Ashley/Engels, 1953), Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955), West Side Story (Robbins/Wise, 1961), The World of Henry Orient (George Roy Hill, 1964), Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979),  Fresh (Boaz Yakin, 1994) and Raising Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett, 2003).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Though for philistine taste he may seem an “intellectual director,” Orson Welles had a visceral suspicion and even dislike of intellectual cinema: “You could write all the ideas of movies, mine included, on the head of a pin. It’s not a form in which ideas are very fecund, you know. It’s a form that may grip you or take you into a world or involve you emotionally, but ideas are not the subject of films.” (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles. I disagree with Orson’s first sentence.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

On the grand Champs-Elysees in Paris, in 1956, “I was directing Fred Astaire (walking and singing ‘Bonjour Paris’), and we had to have extras dressed as policemen to keep away the crowds …we used crumpled-up cigarette packages as Fred’s marks, and then I hit the playback and Fred started singing that song. I thought ‘This is it! In my entire life, this is all I ever wanted to do.” (Stanley Donen in the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising; Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Kindle and Nook).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Jean-Louis Trintignant, tense among night women in The Conformist (Paramount Pictures, 1970; director Bernardo Bertolucci, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 32: 'Southside With You,' 'Sully' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of Southside With You and Sully)

Did anyone ever make a film about the first date of Richard Nixon and Patricia Ryan? Probably not. If they did, it would surely squelch rumors that young Dick showed up in a dark limo driven by G. Gordon Liddy. That’s my idea of political humor, folks, and a little humor will spice your enjoyment of Southside With You. Chicagoan Richard Tanne’s affectionate but not shallow first film details, and gently embroiders, the 1989 debut date of Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson. Three years later she became Mrs. O, and she has been an amazing First Lady.

Tanne is sharp all the way. He did excellent casting, with tall, lean, pensive but not ponderous Parker Sawyers as the future President, who salves his nerves with periodic cigarettes. Sparky, elegant Tika Sumpter achieves equal presence as Michelle, whose mom (Vanessa Bell Calloway) sizes up the new dude as “another smooth-talkin’ brother.” Michelle was wary also, and Sumpter gracefully draws out the tension of a young black lawyer in a white Chicago firm, afraid to be seen dating her new summer intern. Michelle is that lawyer. Part of the movie’s pleasure is in watching Barack, the canny intern, take charge of the occasion, as he edges brainy, skeptical Michelle into enjoying his articulate charm and suave modulations (not too blatantly packaged).

They go to an art show (his idea), then eat (his idea), then a meeting (his idea) at the community action group he led before going to Harvard. Impressed, Michelle remains suspicious, a bit taunting. After they see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, there is a slightly forced encounter with her boss, and Barack schmoozes away the tension. In the film’s credible, hard-bitten but not ghetto Southside (very few whites appear), we sense destinies looping into unison. We have all had the benefit of their mature union ( as even many Republicans will eventually come to admit). Tanne’s valentine is probably the most satisfying “date picture” since Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke found Viennese love in Before Sunrise. If this is a comfy Obama shrine, it is also a terrific date. 

Sully

Howard Hughes flew his huge, wooden “Spruce Goose” plane on Nov. 2, 1947; it was airborn for less than a minute above water, landed safely and never flew again. Let’s give more credit to Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III, who flew US Air’s Flight 1549 for 3 minutes and 25 seconds on Jan. 15, 2009, from La Guardia Airport to the cold, wet surface of the Hudson River. It’s the greatest flight landing on water ever, as all 155 people on board survived (but not the birds who had smashed into the jets). Sully became a world hero, New York’s favorite aviator since Charles Lindbergh, and in due time (now) he became the justified hero of Clint Eastwood’s Sully.

Isn’t this obviously a “docudrama” package? Yes and no. Sure, Eastwood and writer Todd Komarnicki pre-view the fabled flight in scary glimpses, and give us Sully’s nightmares of the planes smashing into Manhattan buildings (is it coincidence that the movie came out during the 15^th anniversary of 9-11-01?). Later we get the full, terrifying flight, and also a shorter recap. And for suspense filler they use the FAA investigation which might have sullied Sully’s reputation for good judgment (image-wise, and factually, an insane move on a hero who’d saved lives). This is  an entirely human, not tech-driven drama, without the corny back-stories on passengers that made John Wayne’s heroic piloting n The High and Mighty seem, finally, like the rescue of multiple  TV pilots. 

I’ve criticized some past Eastwood films for their safe, boring classicism. But he’s found just the right tone, tact, balance and savvy for this better-than-headlines picture. And he has Tom Hanks to play Sully (along with fine work by Laura Linney as his wife, Aaron Eckhart as his co-pilot, and Michael Rappaport as a bartender). Hanks is a Sully-right star, an unaffected craftsman who brings smart, sober analysis to every touch. He wins his wings as a man of flight who is internally grounded. It’s his best heroic role since Cast Away, and admirable in its moving integrity.

SALAD (A List)

The Twelve Best Real President Movies, in order of star-performance quality: Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln (2012); Henry Fonda as Lincoln, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939); Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, Secret Honor (1984); Bryan Cranston as Lyndon B. Johnson, All the Way (2016); Gary Sinise as Harry S. Truman, Truman (1995); Raymond Massey as Lincoln, Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940); Van Heflin as Andrew Johnson, Tennessee Johnson (1942); Frank Langella as Nixon, Frost/Nixon (2008); Randy Quaid as Lyndon Johnson, L.B.J: The Early Years (1987); Kenneth Branagh as Franklin Roosevelt, Warm Springs (2005); Walter Huston as Abraham Lincoln (1930); Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson, The President’s Lady (1953). Sorry, no place here for FDR: American Badass! or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (yes, they exist).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
None of the fabled Welles stagings do I long to see more than his 1937 Doctor Faustus, a vividly concentrated rehab of Marlowe, Goethe and Gounod that used “black magic” and ingenious black-cloth sets. Even rehearsals had a kind of black-orchid bloom, as when John Houseman “arrived unexpectedly with a trio of influential friends – designer Pavel Tchelitchew, the poet and novelist Charles Henri Ford, and a Russian princess.” Orson “refused to raise the curtain, shouting at Houseman about ‘Russian pederasts and international whores’ until the producer beat a hasty retreat.” (From Patrick McGilligan’s sumptuous Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

With The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948, “Bogart needed ‘to prove something to himself as well as the industry and the public, who now saw him as a luminary rather than an actor’ (Stefan Kanfer). James Baldwin was partly right, that ‘one does not go to see stars act, one goes to watch them be.’ But that truth took a U-turn in Treasure. Dobbs was a transgressive leap. In entering the alienation pit with Fred C. Dobbs, Humphrey D. Bogart did what leading stars don’t do. He became a paranoid pustule of Marx’s Lumpenproletariat.” (From the Humphrey Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre 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.

Burt Lancaster starts to feel the preacher spirit in Elmer Gantry (United Artists, 1960; director Richard Brooks, cinematographer John Alton).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 31: 'Ben-Hur' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (review of Ben-Hur)

It is possible to remake a classic without digging up the old remains and torturing them. Ben-Hur showed us how in 1959, by advancing well beyond the silent 1927 epic. Now there is a Ben-Hur for 2016, from Russian-Kazakh director Timur Bekmanbetov. O visionary Timur, Great Khan of Excess! He gave us Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and now leaves us grateful for one thing. He has not made Jesus Christ: Chariot Racer.

And yet, why so many changes, but no improvements? Heroic Jewish sufferer Judah Ben-Hur is no longer that glowering silo of man-beef, Charlton Heston. He is smiling Jack Huston, the amiable grandson of John Huston. He sincerely reaches for heroism, but after five years grinding away at the oars as a galley slave, looks no more buffed for the big chariot race. Messala, his adoptive Roman brother and friend turned nemesis, who ruins Judah’s life and family before facing him in the arena, is no longer 1959’s turgidly charismatic Stephen Boyd. He is lean, scowling Tobey Kebell, whose Messala looks like a dealer in fake passports and moth-eaten suits.

The homo-erotic subtext that script doctor Gore Vidal smuggled into the 1959 bromance of betrayal (also a “tale of the Christ”) is gone. Except for one wink: Judah, sizing up Messala’s virile rig as a legionnaire, says “How long does it take you to get dressed?” Entirely gone is Miklos Rozsa’s fine music. Gone is Jack Hawkins, as the Roman admiral who hauled his rescuer, Judah, to the grandeur of Rome (Rome has gone to Vegas). Gone are the moving Jewish women, now played by their costumes. Gone is Frank Thring’s eloquent Pontius Pilate, replaced by a drab creep. Gone is the disturbingly tragic Valley of the Lepers, replaced by a dull dungeon.

And gone is delightful Hugh Griffith’s horse-loving Arabian sheik, replaced by horse-loving African sheik Morgan Freeman. Crowned with enough ropey dreadlocks to star in Bob Marley: Voodoo Maniac, he dispenses pearls of wisdom. Freeman, a great actor now deep into paid retirement, seems to be narrating his lines for all future remakes, like a prophet whose Teleprompter floats in a radiant cloud.   

In 1959 director William Wyler was the sage one. He wisely showed Jesus at a distance, or from behind. Now Jesus is a mannequin Savior, dropping by for quick miracles. After the chariot race (a gore binge of CGI blast and blur), Christ's crucifixion brings not just the healing of Judah’s family but … Messala! Rising from mauled, bloody wreck in the arena, he again becomes Judah’s buddy. Smiling, they ride together like Tom Toga and Huck Hebrew. Maybe that chariot slaughter was only a frat-house initiation. Such is thy vision, O Timur, and may thy herds multiply. But please, spare us the miracle of a sequel.

SALAD (A List)

By my nostalgic appraisal, these are Charlton Heston’s Ten Best Roles:
Judah Ben-Hur (Ben-Hur), Mike Vargas (Touch of Evil), Amos Dundee (Major Dundee), Moses (The Ten Commandments), John Sands (The Wreck of the Mary Deare), Gen. Charles Gordon (Khartoum), Will (Will Penny), Andrew Jackson (The President’s Lady), El Cid Rodrigo de Vivar (El Cid), Christopher Leiningen (The Naked Jungle). One should always keep in mind the comment of actor L.Q. Jones about Chuck: “He’s a poser.”

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

John Houseman, a crucial figure in Orson Welles’s early stage career, made a perceptive attempt at summing up the approach and style: “Welles is at heart a magician whose particular talent lies not so much in his creative imagination, which is considerable, as in his proven ability to stretch the familiar elements of theatrical effect far beyond their normal point of tension.” (From Peter Cowie’s The Cinema of Orson Welles)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In the splendid cast of Alice Adams, snappy Frank Albertson plays her brother Walter as a pistol mouth: “I’m no society snake! I’m as liable to go to that Palmer dance as I need a couple barrels of broken glass.’ He must be hooked on Cagney (Jimmy had five pictures in 1935). Hepburn ‘thought at the time he was a bit common. He turned out to be great.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams 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.

Charlton Heston drives his racing steeds to glory in the best Ben-Hur (MGM, 1959; director William Wyler, cinematographer Robert L. Surtees).
 

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.