Nosh 92: 'Wonder Wheel' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

Note: Nosh 93 will appear on Friday, Jan. 5, 2018.

APPETIZER: Review of Wonder Wheel.

Recently we had Wonderstruck (good film) and Wonder (didn’t see it) and, last summer, Wonder Woman (good woman). If someone brings back The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), I will be having a wonderful time somewhere else.

Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel, named for a famous Coney Island ride, is a retro rummage sale that lives only inside Allen’s endless spool of nostalgia. In the rude, jostling, postwar ’40s, Ginny (Kate Winslet) toils at a boardwalk clam bar (shades of Susan Sarandon serving oysters in Atlantic City). Her waitressing (shades of Winslet in Todd Haynes’s fine Mildred Pierce) is essentially rehearsal for domestic duty as the drudge wife of Coney workin’ slob Humpty (Jim Belushi, also quite a Dumpty).

Into their idyll of slow rot in a fading fun zone come figures crammed with aching dialog and melodramatic destiny. Humpty’s cute daughter Carolina (Juno Temple) returns, pursued by mobsters. Dreamy lifeguard hunk and aspiring writer Mickey (Justin Timberlake) talks about Hamlet, as if wanting him on rye bread, with some Method mustard (Timberlake, though fairly subtle, often seems to be channeling Ray Liotta from GoodFellas).

Mickey makes a hot play for Ginny, who’s thrilled, and then Carolina, who’s hopeful. Primitive Humpty growls, bellows, threatens and pleads. If you ever imagined Ernest Borgnine playing Stanley Kowalski, Jim Belushi delivers, in a Marty manner. The earthy ape is the only figure attuned to common sense, but like everyone he cooks in Allen’s drama stew, which has oodles of Odets, chunks of Chayefsky, winks of Williams, explicit mentions of O’Neill  and Greek tragedy, obvious debts to Simon (Brighton Beach Memoirs) and Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice). Vittorio Storaro, usually superb, photographed by infusing so much stagey, rusty-orange twilight that the steamy emotions begin to barbecue. As surplus heat, Ginny’s bored, angry kid is an arsonist, and during a kiss a torch song wails about a “kiss of fire.”

Allen is 82, and this is his 47^th feature as director-writer. The perennial “why?” nagging Woody’s career is how he can still make some good entertainments, while awkwardly panting for approval as a serious artist (as if good comedy were not serious work). There is quite enough honest, show-savvy pathos in Annie Hall and Broadway Danny Rose for any good career. Digging for depth, he is less a writer than an underliner. On his messy boardwalk of broken dreams we can smell the saltwater taffy rotting. This is Allen’s worst picture since Interiors, the 1978 snooze bomb that appeared to be tracking chilly Edward Albee on the angst-frozen tundra of Ingmar Bergman. That was ice, this is fire, they’re both crap.   

The one stuck with the tab is Kate Winslet. I’ve never seen her give a bad performance, but Woody grinds her down. He gives her a big memory speech in achingly dull close-up. Later he dumbly cuts away, squishing her cri de coeur “Rescue me.” Living with a fat frog who can never be a prince, fearing her allure fading, Ginny is a pathos puppet. Allen even gives her vapors of Blanche Du Bois craziness. That derivation mostly worked for Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, but Winslet just looks blue and wasted. It’s as if she escaped the Titanic only to beach at Coney Island with a bad screenplay.

SALAD (A List)

The Dozen Best Leading Performances in Woody Allen Movies, ranked by my taste, naturally: Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives (1992), Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977), Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985),  Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris (2011), Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine (2013), Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite (1985), Scarlett Johansson in Match Point (2006), Woody Allen in Zelig (1983), Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown (1989).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson decants a vintage memory for pal Henry Jaglom: “(Critic) George Jean Nathan was the tightest man who ever lived. He lived for 40 years in the Hotel Royalton and never tipped anybody in the Royalton, not even at Christmas time. (Finally) the room-service waiter peed slightly in Nathan’s tea. The waiters hurried across the street and told everyone at the Algonquin … As the years went by, there got to be more and more urine, less and less tea. And it was a great pleasure for us in the theater to look at a leading critic and know he was full of piss. And I, with my own ears, heard him at ‘21’ complaining to a waiter, ‘Why can’t I get tea here as good as at the Royalton?” (From My Lunches With Orson, by Jaglom.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Alec Guinness did a lot more good work after his 1950s prime, including “delicate fun being starchy in the Cuban sun of Our Man in Havana. Co-star Noel Coward snapped in his diary that ‘Alec has cultivated a zombie-like equilibrium, heavy on the Librium.’ Recessive brooding and pregnant silences found their summation on TV in spy George Smiley, who suggests a sand clock yearning for dust, yet so humanly. Smiley, a Brit-Zen sphinx, goes far past Gunnness’s wise Jedi knight in Star Wars (loving the income, Alec found the fan crowd a bore).” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter in 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.

Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) savors his Roman terrace vista in The Great Beauty (Janus Films, 2013; director Paolo Sorrentino, cinematographer Luca Bigazzi).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 91: 'Coco,' 'Chavela' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Coco and Chavela

Coco

Disney-Pixar’s lavish embrace of the Latino audience, Coco, is a package rich in ambiguity. The movie’s ancestor is Walt Disney’s “south of the border” cartoons for the Good Neighbor Policy during WWII (the effort that jinxed Orson Welles’s Hollywood career with the doomed, Brazilian-Mexican project It’s All True). As soft as a creamy burrito, Coco attempts to turn Mexico’s morbidly festive Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) into a Dis-Pix fiesta of flamboyantly Latin fun-for-families.

It’s about the boy Miguel (Coco is secondary, but the imagineers wanted a cute title). The adorable muchacho loves ranchero music and is a guitar wiz. But his matriarchal family was enraged when an ancestor left them behind for a big career in Mexican music, films and moustache waxing. Banned from the town’s music center (key line: “That plaza is crawling with mariachis!”), Miguel goes up to the airy land of the dead to find his grandfatherly hero, on the holiday when Mexican families honor their forebears via candles,  food, music and skeleton art. The place is a bursting piñata of wildly vigorous after-lifers, plus vapors of pathos. The dead, including Frida Kahlo (minus Diego Rivera), are costumed skeletons held together by a kind of gossamer spirit gum.

Coco, abundantly picturesque in its animation, may be the most patronizing movie of Mexicans since Hollywood served up Tortilla Flat  (1942), which starred those three fabulous amigos Spencer Tracy, John Garfield and Akim Tamiroff. The movie needs more songs in Spanish, and the famous ancestor’s top hit, “Remember Me,” is about as Latin as “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” The festivities, though elegantly stylized, seem less Catholic or indigenous than theme-parked. I found the bone-zoned dead fairly amusing, but an adorable Hispanic girl of about 2, also present, started crying about every 10 minutes, freaked by the loud sounds and blazing sights. Parents, family fun is not entirely defined by Disney biz and Pixar pixels, and family sanity is your department.

Chavela

The great French singer Yves Montand was born in Italy, the great Argentine singer Carlos Gardel in France, and the great Mexican singer Chavela Vargas in Costa Rica. She is saluted in Chavela, a moving documentary from Catherine Gund (who interviewed Vargas in the ’90s) and co-director Daresha Kyi. After her family scorned Chavela’s androgynous ways (“solitude became my best companion”), she fled to Mexico as a young woman. A lesbian who liked to wear pants and ponchos, with a severe haircut and a voice that had a soul-baring blend of male and female qualities, she was called by a friend “the most macha of the machos.” Her muse, however, was assuredly female.

As a disciple and then drinking chum of the esteemed ranchero composer and star José Alfredo Martínez, Chavela became a major voice and a devout alcoholic (tequila). She sang in cantinas, vanguard cafes, private parties, her gay frankness not promoted but not really hidden, either (she was denied major venues). A strong, fierce but loving figure, Chavela made the most of the heartache in songs, with a voice of uncanny intimacy (she was, of course, cheated by record companies). She was something of a cult figure, and her lovers evidently included legends Frida Kahlo and Ava Gardner. The one that mattered most was the cheerful, gringa-looking lawyer Elena Benarroch, herself a superb interview subject.

Chavela fell into midlife obscurity, but with Elena’s help stopped drinking and found larger glory. Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, a huge fan, opened big doors for her in Spain and France, and finally she sang at the top of her culture’s musical pyramid, Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. Chavela is a rich, true portrait of a most remarkable person, artist and pathfinder.

SALAD (A List)

12 Good American Movies Set in Mexico, though not all were filmed there (director, year): Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen, 1941), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948), The Big Steal (Don Siegel, 1949), The Bullfighter and the Lady (Budd Boetticher, 1951), Viva Zapata! (Elia Kazan, 1952), The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959), The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1968), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Peckinpah, 1974), El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983), Under the Volcano (John Huston, 1984), Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles, himself no demure blush, had an acute sense of the vanities of other director-showmen, like Cecil B. DeMille “who had a wonderful sense of his own persona. As a director on the set he had the greatest act that’s ever been seen, I suppose, except for the two ersatz vons.” Peter Bogdanovich: “Who?” Orson: “Stroheim and Sternberg.” Peter: “Ersatz?” Orson: “Both of them took their own patents on nobility (via ‘von’). You won’t find either in the Almanach de Gotha. Does that sound snide? Really, I don’t mean it to be.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Bogdanovich.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

With La Dolce Vita Marcello Mastroianni and director Federico were fated to make film history, “and very quickly the bond formed. Fellini ruled, yet not like autocrat Luchino Visconti, more like a gambler happily heisting the casino. When Marcello showed up on set wrongly attired, Federico simply grabbed a nearby jacket, tossed it to him and began shooting. ‘He kept saying,’ Mastroianni enthused, ‘that we were moving along like a couple of shipwrecked sailors on a raft, absolutely at the mercy of where the wind pushed us.’ They heard the mermaids singing.” (From the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita 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.

Burt Lancaster waltzes with Claudia Cardinale at the grand closing ball in Il Gattopardo/ The Leopard (20^th Century Fox; director Luchino Visconti, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 90: 'Three Billboards ... ', 'Lady Bird' & More..

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Three Billboards and Lady Bird

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Welcome to Ebbing, a town where Mildred (Frances McDormand) is considered an unholy terror, even more flint-faced and torch-tongued since her teen daughter was raped and killed by a man unknown to the law. So she rents three billboards for $5,000 a month, shocking the town and its cops. Her brazen words on ragingly red, pasted paper demand action from stymied police chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). He is himself a man of sorrow, plus deadpan humor. The verbal duels of McDormand and Harrelson, both in high prime – McDormand rises to her level in Fargo – would be enough to sustain this movie of long title and potent suspense.

But wait, we’ve got a trinity. Deputy cop Jason Dixon seems at first only a dumb, racist hayseed who licks the lollipop of his little mind while staring at comic books (ancestors: Slim Pickens in One-Eyed Jacks, Warren Oates in In the Heat of the Night). Sam Rockwell, going well beyond his previous, still-boyish charms, has a wonderful arc here, full of growth rings. The plot written by director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) brings in murder, arson, racism, police brutality, but also tender love, a deer, a beetle and Oscar Wilde. There is clear influence from the Coen Bros., Tarantino and TV’s hillbilly slum feast Justified. Dialog snaps and pops. Ben Davis did ace images, Carter Burwell a wonderful song mix, and the foolproof cast has not only the Key Three but Abbie Cornish, Peter Dinklage, Clarke Peters, Caleb Jones and John Hawkes.

With its swerving tonal shifts, Three Billboards can be a little hard to peg. McDonagh is piloting a roller-coaster, and at times his story feels like Li’l Abner moving the grimly classic photo-book Wisconsin Death Trip down to Missouri, McDormand is the linchpin, but ensemble power stars. This is a funny but tough thing, heartfelt and beautifully rooted. It is also a savvy peek into the pain, ignorance and hatreds which helped Don the Dud to sweep nearly all the rural counties in 2016.   

Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age film carries no debt to Lady Bird Johnson, First Lady and Texan of rare plumage, nor Ken Loach’s great feminist film Ladybird, Ladybird (2005). It owes a big debt to female acting generations. Here is Lois Smith, 87, beautifully playing Lady Bird’s pious but sensible Catholic school principal (Smith’s calling card was the bordello bar maid with a crush on James Dean in East of Eden, 1955). Here is Laurie Metcalf, 62, as her devoted but critical mother Marion (I first admired Metcalf as a great Laura in The Glass Menagerie at Chicago’s rising Steppenwolf Theater). And here is Saoirse Ronan, 23, as teen Christine in 2002, calling herself Lady Bird to gain some leverage from her family, so hard-pressed in Sacramento (Bird dreams of the exotic East: college in New York or New England).

The very Irish Ronan erased Gaelic touches to be Lady Bird, and her voice could fit any American schoolgirl movie of the last 30 years. We’re halfway back to John Hughes teen turf, but this cast is layered beyond the Brat Pack’s huggy-fuzzies. Some types are familiar: Lady Bird’s first crush who keeps a shy secret; a dreamboat who crops virgins; the heroine’s loveable dad (Tracy Letts) who is a saint without a halo; a chunky-cute girlfriend with frail feelings. Still, they all feel fairly new here. Depths wink from trace mentions of unemployment, adoption, cancer, drinking, abortion and the coming Iraq War.

Director Gerwig’s script is a little soft with its resolutions, yet Ronan (Brooklyn) is extraordinarily sure and vivid. Metcalf is more so. Marion is the sort of mom who loves so much that she nags her smart, push-back daughter with demands, and uses the family’s tight budget like a cudgel. Metcalf makes the bursting “Everything we do, we do for you” both a shrill stab and a heart-cry for closeness. In an airport sequence, emotions ripple through her with stunningly genuine, not generic force. Metcalf, an antidote to sitcom banality, is one of those ace women (like Karen Allen, Ronee Blakley, Blythe Danner, Eartha Kitt, Piper Laurie, Virginia Madsen, Zasu Pitts, Amanda Plummer, Anabella Sciorra, Elisabeth Shue, Maureen Stapleton, Madeleine Stowe, Lili Taylor) whose talents movies have often under-served. An Oscar for Metcalf’s Marion would be a good amend for that.

SALAD (A List)

Top Movie Showcases of Those Actresses Mentioned in the Last Paragraph: Starman (Karen Allen), Nashville (Ronee Blakley), The Great Santini (Blythe Danner), Anna Lucasta (Eartha Kitt), The Hustler (Piper Laurie), Sideways (Virginia Madsen), Greed (Zasu Pitts), Cattle Annie and little Britches (Amanda Plummer), Jungle Fever (Annabella Sciorra), Leaving Las Vegas (Elisabeth Shue), Sweet Lorraine (Maureen Stapleton), The Last of the Mohicans (Madeleine Stowe), I Shot Andy Warhol (Lili Taylor).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Welles’s favorite love goddess apart from wife Rita Hayworth was friend Marlene Dietrich. He though Greta Garbo “was essentially very dumb, and Marlene was very bright. (During the war) I was having dinner with Garbo and we came out of the restaurant and there was a soldier in uniform, without a leg, standing on crutches with an autograph book – and she refused it. That is how dumb she was! She refused him in front of my eyes! Marlene was a very different kind of cat.” (From Barbara Leaming’s fine biography Orson Welles.)

  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In Funny Face, Fred Astaire’s best dancing is for “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” in a “Paramount Paris courtyard. In an Astaire prop spree, an umbrella becomes a sword, then golf club, and his raincoat’s red lining becomes a bullfight cape. As he recalled, ‘I thought, ‘How am I going to get a reason for doing bullfight passes?’ With help from a trucked cow and its winsome moo, it came together. Fred’s tossed umbrella echoed his tossed cane in You Were Never Lovelier.” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Zasu Pitts and Gibson Gowland enjoy a rare lyrical moment near San Francisco Bay in Greed (MGM, 1924; director Erich von Stroheim, cameramen William Daniels, Ben Reynolds).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 89: 'Wonderstruck,' 'Loving Vincent' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Wonderstruck and Loving Vincent

Wonderstruck

I always wanted to see the vast scale model of New York City created for the 1964 world’s fair, now at the Queens Museum and still periodically rehabbed (though the WTC towers remain intact). Now I feel I’ve been there, thanks to Todd Haynes’s cornucopian Wonderstruck. His remarkably complex version (and vision) of a children’s story book concerns two pre-teen kids: deaf mute Rose (subtle, demure Millicent Simmonds), who sets off alone from Hoboken in the 20s to find her gone mother in the huge city; and Ben (expressive Oakes Fegley), a fatherless child in the 1970s, made deaf by lightning (yes, it’s that sort of movie).

With its longing for lost parents, this is like Oliver Twist speeding on a twisty double track that converges at the American Museum of Natural History (and for Ben, also the Queens Museum). Rose’s runaway quest is shot in 1920s duotone, the skyline evoking old Goldiggers sets and Murnau’s great Sunrise. She adores a silent-film queen (Julianne Moore, striking fine retro poses) and, being deaf, absorbs silent movies with special devotion. The newly afflicted Ben flees into a color-popping 70s Manhattan, including David Bowie music and a teemingly funky 42^nd St. Their twin adventures, increasingly braided, are homages to history, bookstores, museums, dioramas, New York and (most soulful) the mental topography of the deaf.

Haynes’s imaginative fluency, backed by editor Alfonso Goncalves and cinematographer Ed Lachman, doubles down on the stylistic, conceptual daring that made his Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, Velvet Goldmine and Carol seductive. He makes the great natural history museum a fountainhead of fantasy well beyond its smart, comical use in the Night at the Museum series. Haynes got Brian Selznick to adapt his novel (another Selznick book ignited a fresh creative burst from Martin Scorsese in Hugo).

But here’s the rub, an itchy one. Scorsese went baroque in a fairly straight, showman’s way. Haynes has so many literary curlicues going, bending on two time frames, that we often want to shout (as Ben does) “What’s going on?!” The treatment of deafness, with pauses for writing things down, tends to gum the narrative pulse. We feel our heads spilling over, with almost too many questions. Wonderstruck is as lovably poetic as Dreamchild, as mad for New York as The Cruise, as high on fruitful wonder as Hugo, but it’s also a brain teaser that turns a little chalky with obscure, talky connections. Still, it’s cherishable chalk.  

Loving Vincent

As man and artist, Vincent Van Gogh was seen (to the degree he was seen) as unnervingly odd. That began changing a few years after his death by gunshot wound in 1890. Today Vincent is modern art’s solar god, a genius who stamps culture, including refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs. Numerous movies have been made about him, and of those surely Loving Vincent is the most, well, odd. He was  a sick man (suspects: porphyria, bipolarity, sunstroke, syphilis) and now I feel rather schizo about this new tribute to a great artist.

About 150 animation artists painted 65,000 cells, transforming  famous Van Gogh pictures into activated images (a few are simple backdrops, and memory flashbacks are rendered black-and-white). Rain falls as dripping pigment, Vincentian trees bend in the wind, immortal portraits come to talking life, the famed starry sky rolls voluptuously, actors (including Saoirse Ronan and Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson) provide facial templates and voices. The color-blazing effect engrosses, yet with a strain of redundancy. The innate magic of Van Gogh’s paintings is that, although flat and framed, they still create a teeming life that invades our imagination with his throbbing, passionately stylized world.

Seeking plot and suspense, Loving Vincent begins after his death, then tries to sleuth how and why he died. The postman Roulin’s son Armand (Douglas Booth) rushes around questioning people who knew him (very few knew that he was great). This becomes a kind of Victorian “penny dreadful” of teasing suspects, furtive tangents and fevered speculations. The tragedy of Vincent dying at 37, after a nine-year storm of painting, turns into a morbid rural melodrama. Directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman and their largely Polish team achieve visual marvels, yet their framework is a whodunit soaper. If you want the story truly performed, turn to Vincent (Kirk Douglas) and brother Theo (James Donald) and Gauguin (Anthony Quinn) in Lust for Life, and to Vincent (Tim Roth) and Theo (Paul Rhys) in Vincent & Theo.          

SALAD (A List)

A Dozen Major Movies About Real Modern Painters:

Lust for Life (Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh), La Mystere Picasso (Pablo as himself), Moulin Rouge (Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec), Wolf at the Door (Donald Sutherland as Paul Gauguin), Vincent & Theo (Tim Roth as Van Gogh), Pollock (Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock), Georgia O’Keefe (Joan Allen as O’Keefe), Frida (Salma Hayak as Frida Kahlo), Edvard Munch (Geir Westby as Munch), Lovers of Montparnasse (Gérard Phillipe as Amedeo Modigliani), Love is the Devil (Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon) and Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy as himself).    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles was certainly the hero of his life, but didn’t care to play heroic roles: “The character of suave philosopher-criminal Harry Lime (The Third Man) suited him like a Savile Row suit. In a 50-year acting career, he never played a hero. Rather, his tastes ran to men as flawed as they were flamboyant – the murderous Renaiassance grandee Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, obsessed and suicidal Ahab in his stage version of Moby-Dick, a roistering but finally pathetic Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight and, of course, citizen Charles Foster Kane, so desperate for love that he exhausts and alienates everyone who might provide it.” (From John Baxter’s introduction to the novel of Welles’s Mr. Arkadin).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The men of Treasure of the Sierra Madre “are not heroes. They are sub-social, rather comically so when Howard speaks of retiring on a modest haul of gold and Fred snorts, ‘Well sure, you’re old. I’m young. I need dough and plenty of it.” Bogart perfected boorishness. When interloper Cody takes some water, Fred calls him a thief. To Cody’s ‘I thought I was among civilized men’ he grunts, ‘Who’s not civilized?’ – and decks him.” (From the 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.

Slim Pickens faces his stunning end in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (MGM, 1973; director Sam Peckinpah, cinematographer John Coquillon).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 88: 'The Florida Project,' 'Murder on the Orient Express'

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

Note: the next Nosh, no. 89, will arrive Dec. 1.

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Florida Project and Murder on the Orient Express

The Florida Project
April 30, 1969: a Disney press conference at the Ramada Inn off Highway 50 in Ocoee, Fla. – and I was there. But even as a very green “cub” reporter (for the Chicago Daily News), I was not very impressed by the scale model for the coming Walt Disney World, nor the flat speech given by nice, dull Roy O. Disney, Walt’s elder brother and junior partner. Roy built Walt’s final dream, not achieving the total Vision Thing but making the company billions (and making sleepy Orlando boom, if not bloom).

I never went back, yet a fine sequel has come: The Florida Project. Sean Baker’s movie, bursting with enough Floridean light and color to make the sun wear shades, was filmed in (don’t snicker) Kissimmee, 26 miles from Ocoee and 12 miles from Orlando. The film’s big motel, the Magic Castle, is supposedly very close to Disney World, and near Seven Dwarfs Lane, the huge-domed Orange World, the Twistee Treat and rotting, abandoned motels and condos. The Castle’s manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), has painted it candy purple and slaves to keep it civilized, despite cheap fixtures, bedbugs and many “guests” who are welfare tenants and remnants like Gloria (Sandy Kane), an old showgirl who sunbaths topless at the pool.

Dafoe buzzes with alert, fretful attention and almost saintly forbearance (his Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ was an excellent rehearsal). The film’s dramatic tripod rests on Bobby’s anxious concern about single mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her child Moonee. Halley, with a flashing smile and the vinegar sass of an amateurish whore, is both a playful chum-mom and a trash pile of immaturity. Her crude talk and breezy attitude are imitated by smart little Moonee. As Moonee, Brooklyn Prince is a funny, vulnerable, snarky but innocent update on Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. When she zips a zing like (at a buffet) “This is the life, better than a cruise,” a Tinkerbell rings: a little star is born.

Director, editor, writer Baker (with co-writer Chris Bergoch) also made 2015’s comedy Tangerine, about transsexual hookers in West Hollywood. Using that tripod of characters, Baker achieves a triple vision: the gaudy Florida of kitsch vulgarity, as seen by motel children living half-wild; a convulsed world of fearful, hard-luck adults, where a simple man like Bobby towers morally; and nearby Disney World, a fantasy of safe (and expensive) family fun. He combines the loose-jointed ensemble fluency of Robert Altman and the pop-eyed visual flair of Wes Anderson. In the closing 20 minutes all the strings converge, bringing one of the great finish shots in modern film. Like every director of hardy appetite, Baker captures a world by creating it. The parts can seem ragged, yet the living whole feels fiercely true. 

Murder on the Orient Express

It has been promoted like a last call for old thrills, mostly for the over-50s who might remember past versions, but Murder on the Orient Express overcame my resistance. The latest is a plush, credible entertainment, or as credible as the old Agatha Christie plot will allow. Deluxe suspects twist and tremble in a vortex of clues, though the only corpse is a gangster sharpie. It’s unlikely that the 1974 version with Albert Finney will ever be matched for pure star power on a posh train. But this new one is on the top side of a tradition that was dying when that picture was made: the star-spangled contraptions, crammed with major faces doing minor acting (in the desperate studio era of The VIPs, The Yellow Rolls Royce, The Longest Day, How the West Was Won, etc.).

Kenneth Branagh directed, smoothly polishing suspense rails as the Orient Express (Istanbul to Calais) rolls only to rural, 1930s Yugoslavia. The swank train is stranded by a wintry avalanche, leaving Belgian ultra-sleuth Hercule Poirot (Branagh) with a surfeit of suspects. To follow every deductive tangent would be silly, but tension mounts to a striking crisis of judgment, guilt, revenge and melodrama. Along with all the luxe (glossy woodwork, Deco glass, couture, champagne, Cole Porter), we get a   tricky overhaul of the Lindbergh kidnap tragedy (1932-36). Performances are deft: Johnny Depp, Derek Jacobi, Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Leslie Odom Jr., though stylish Judi Dench, Penélope Cruz, Daisy Ridley and Michelle Pfeiffer are a bit under-served (Pfeiffer, using her age well, has a good crescendo).

Swift, elegant, not too festooned with CGI display, this diversion  has the sophisticated flair of Branagh, surely the wittiest Poirot since Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile (1978). The dapper affectations, the éclat of precise innuendo, the accent pitched well above Inspector Clouseau, make his commanding performance the binding element. If we must filch old gems from the past, Branagh is a fine jeweler. He doesn’t cut the stones as if they were only coals to feed the furnace of plot.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Strong Movies Set in Florida:

The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), Key Largo (John Huston, 1948), Distant Drums (Raoul Walsh, 1951), The Strange One (Jack Garfein, 1957), Wind Across the Everglades (Nicholas Ray, 1958), Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan,1981), Cross Creek (Martin Ritt, 1983), 92 in the Shade (Thomas McGuane, 1992), Ruby in Paradise (Victor Nuñez, 1993), Rosewood (John Singleton, 1997) and Ulee’s Gold (Victor Nuñez, 1997). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson was not fond of the Method, or intellectual acting, or even some classical effects of his old friend and early stage mentor Micheál Mac Liammoír, playing Iago (very well) in the 1952 Othello: “There was a moment near the end of a scene that has remained a standing joke between Micheál and myself for years. He had to pick up Othello’s cloak and go. And he picked it up, and looked very meaningful and all that sort of stuff, and finally I said to him, ‘Micheál, pick up the cloak and go!’ And that’s become a sort of basic thing I use when an actor wants to enrich his performance, I say, ‘Pick up the cloak and go!” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. The beautifully restored Othello recently came out as a Criterion double disc.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Katherine Hepburn’s subtle brilliance in the small restaurant scene in Alice Adams, with Fred MacMurray’s Arthur, “pressures Pauline Kael’s remark that Hepburn ‘has always been too individualistic, too singular for common emotions.’ Here she is giving fairly common emotions an uncommonly stylish clarity. Words arrive emotionally liquid, tempo ebbs and flows, candor teases open truth. It’s a lesson in ‘good breeding’ beyond the social game. She even chides Arthur’s dull, ‘laconic eloquence’ by warning about loose talk.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Cigar aloft, Orson Welles armors up to be Othello, as his Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) watches (Mercury/United Artists, 1952; director Orson Welles).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 87: 'LBJ' (Lyndon Johnson), 'Take Every Wave' (Laird Hamilton)

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of LBJ and Take Every Wave

LBJ
“All the Way with LBJ.” Theaters that show double-bills – how many are left? – can now echo the 1964 campaign slogan with a fine pairing: All the Way (Bryan Cranston as Lyndon B. Johnson, 2016) with LBJ (Woody Harrelson, 2017). Granted, neither grapples with his big, ruinous mistake: Vietnam. But each is a powerful lesson in the charisma of political power incarnated. Of the two I’d vote, by a narrow margin, for Harrelson’s. Rob Reiner, surely no LBJ fan when he was the “meathead” son on All in the Family, directed this Johnson tribute to embrace him without fawning. The details, richly packed, provide a discerning view of the 36^th president (1963-69) as, in high prime, a brave and very impressive figure.

Cranston’s excellent performance came from a stage play, Harrelson’s by way of Joey Hartstone’s script. Over half of the picture uses flashbacks from Nov. 22, 1963, when Vice President Johnson, believing his political future was over, was vaulted into power by the killing of President John F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan, credible). That it happened in LBJ’s Texas tossed a deeper shadow on Johnson, furthering the bitterness of Robert Kennedy (febrile Michael Stahl-David). The venom of the relationship came mostly from Bobby. Johnson also had to deal with a nation in shock, and JFK’s legacy left unfinished. The movie focuses on how Johnson turned away from his Southern roots and the bond with his Dixie mentor, Sen. Richard Russell (excellent Richard Jenkins), by reviving the ideals of his New Deal youth and his heartfelt concern for American blacks (the neat peg to personalize that is his esteem for his cook, a black woman).

Johnson championed Kennedy’s civil rights bill with a canny, ruthless urgency that JFK never summoned, using the fallen leader as the key to force overdue change. LBJ climaxes with his first speech to Congress as president, one of the greatest in our history. By then we have gobbled the feast of his willful drive, foxy wiles, pushy charm and vulgar bravura (to hear him call Sen. Strom Thurmond “an asshole and a moron” is rude poetry).Woody Harrelson doesn’t have the full Johnson height, and is a little boxy in the jaw, but he has nailed the Johnsonian juggernaut humanly. Even John Wayne, who hated Lyndon, might have saluted.

LBJ is not a work of art like Pablo Larrain’s Jackie, about Mrs. Kennedy in trauma, and yet it gets nearly all the essentials right. Old footage and new join well, and expert acting includes Jennifer Jason Leigh’s nurturing, twang-true Lady Bird Johnson. Given the current manure pile in the White House, you can come away from this film believing that Johnson was heaven-sent (until Vietnam). For the total saga, the full Texan typhoon, go to Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography.

Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton

Many years in San Diego never led me to surfing. I’ve only seen Laird Hamilton in movies which have a Big Kahuna whiff of “Surf’s up!” But once you fathom the immense range and danger of his aquatic empire, you realize that Hamilton is one of the greatest modern athletes, repeatedly putting body, health and life on a liquid line. “Awesome” has become an exhausted word, but it fits him like a wet suit. At 53 he has conquered just about any wave he chose to ride (and even board-paddled across the English Channel with a pal).

Little Laird’s mom, soon single, moved the tot to Hawaii, where waves fill the horizon and where his blond bod became propulsively hydraulic. Rory Kennedy, director of Take Every Wave (and also the fine Last Days in Vietnam), is not an icon polisher. He reveals that Hamilton was a bratty white rebel fighting native Hawaiian boys, chose a surfing step-dad whose “tough love” bordered on abusive, hated school but found in the Pacific a turbulent university of risk and reward. Riding giants of crushing power, he became the loner-leader of other surf gods. Distaste for authority and judgment made him disdain contest surfing, and quickly ended his dude posing for photographer Bruce Weber, also starring in cornball beach movies.

This has not won universal affection from other wave masters, some resenting Hamilton’s willfulness and celebrity. There are acute testimonies, but inevitably the film is about Laird in action, including his breakthroughs in tow-surfing, sailboarding and foil boards, and his topping, gutsy gambles off Hawaii and Tahiti. On land he remains the brash jock, hard-muscling past age and injuries (down moods nearly lost his beautiful wife Gabby, who is like an Aphrodite clone of Laird). At sea he is the master, the kin and king of any wave that curls in his direction. 

   
SALAD (A List)
Worthy Movies About U.S. Presidents:
The Crossing, 2000 (Jeff Daniels as George Washington); The President’s Lady, 1953 (Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson); Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939 (Henry Fonda as Abe); Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1940 (Raymond Massey as Abe); Lincoln, 2012 (Daniel Day-Lewis as Abe); Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!, 1975 (James Whitmore as Harry Truman); Truman, 1995 (Gary Sinise as Harry); 13 Days, 2001 (Bruce Greenwood as John F. Kennedy); All the Way, 2016 (Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson); LBJ, 2017 (Woody Harrelson as Johnson); Secret Honor, 1984 (Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon); Frost/Nixon, 2008 (Frank Langella as Nixon) and Southside With You, 2016 (Parker Sawyers as young Barack Obama). .  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of the many superb shots in Citizen Kane is a deep-focal view past prone, suicidal Susan to Kane bursting into her room, yet Welles later found it hard to watch: “It was a very dark scene until the door opens and I come in – and then you see this bracelet I had on by accident, because I had a girlfriend who made me wear it. Every time I think of that scene, I think of my reaching down and you see this awful love charm – nothing at all to do with Kane.” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich in the book This Is Orson Welles. It’s hard to imagine that anyone made him wear a charm bracelet, until you realize that the girlfriend was almost certainly his luscious Latina love, Dolores Del Rio.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

My “declaration of principles” (and method): “My text wears no academic robes of canons, semiotics, formalist analysis, etc. Every writer has a temperament of taste, ‘each work entrusts the writer with the form it seeks’ (Borges), and newspaper ink lubricates my prose. Taste is important, but if you are constantly polishing marble in your personal Pantheon, you become a frieze. I agree with Ross Macdonald that ‘popular culture is not and need not be at odds with high culture, any more than the rhythms of walking are at odds with the dance.” (From the Introduction to my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Abe (Henry Fonda) take his leisure in Young Mr. Lincoln (20th Century Fox, 1939; director John Ford).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 86: 'Lucky,' 'Mark Felt' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Lucky and Mark Felt 

Lucky

Harry Dean Stanton’s acting apex was Paris, Texas (1984), his lonesome Travis first seen solo, walking the baked Texas desert. As the title figure in Lucky, Stanton walks alone near a desert town in California, not far from an escaped pet tortoise. Lucky is 90. The shelled critter, though probably older, will never attain Harry Dean’s cultic aura.

Lucky is a farewell valentine that pivots on Stanton, his moves and moods, his scarecrow bod and haggard face. Bits of Stanton history crop up: never married, maybe had a child or two, Kentucky roots, Navy service WWII, love of singing (no mention of acting). Lucky awakens each morning, drinks milk, exercises a little, then opens his daily pack of smokes. His doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) marvels, given that Lucky lives mainly on cigarettes, coffee and Bloody Marys. He is a stone-cool totem of local color, his chief competition being Howard (David Lynch, often Stanton’s director), mournful owner of the departed tortoise called President Roosevelt.

Lucky is a cranky atheist, but Stanton’s own, existential Buddhism seeps in. There is sober nobility in his Zen yen to look death in the eye, with both fear and resolve, an echo of Yeats’s wish to exit “proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.” Lucky’s main regret: shooting a mockingbird in boyhood (young Stanton could have been a wonderful Boo Radley). At a Latino birthday fiesta, Lucky croak-sings “Volver, Volver,” as piercingly genuine a moment as the old man’s final song on a swing in Kurosawa’s Ikiru. Another epiphany has Lucky meeting a fellow veteran (Tom Skerritt) at a coffeehouse, and hearing his war tale. This painful reverie of memory equals a similar scene with Richard Farnsworth and Wiley Harker in Lynch’s The Straight Story.

Actor John Carroll Lynch (Marge’s husband in Fargo, recently swell in The Founder) directed with acerbic love, not corn. Fine supports are sharp-eyed photographer Tim Suhrstedt and actors Jame Darren, Beth Grant, Ron Livingston and Barry Shabaka Henley. At its best the movie is like Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge with added mysterioso vibes from David Lynch or Werner Hezog. It is HDS’s memorial and a lovely exit: wistful, wise, funny, smart but heartfelt. To hear Lucky growl “there goes your fuckin’ Buick” is a deeply Stantonian reward. Harry Dean died at 91 of natural causes on Sept. 15, having been a natural actor for over 60 years. (My earlier tribute is in Nosh 80, below; a richer one is the Paris, Texas chapter in my book.)

Mark Felt

Mark Felt is like a Watergate buff’s picnic basket, full of snakes. Around it coils now, inevitably, Trump’s toxic python. Richard Nixon was a destructive neurotic, yet his “high crimes and misdemeanors” may be surpassed by the “clear and present danger” of our current presidential creep. In this context, Mark Felt is a pertinent reminder from the past.

Felt was the suave keeper of dark, dark secrets for J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. He gained murky fame as Deep Throat, his hidden clues  prodding the Washington Post’s exposure of Nixon’s fiasco. Hoover died weeks before the Watergate burglary, and Felt was bitter about not getting his job (the Nixonites never trusted him to preserve their own jars of slime). Those of us who lived through the 1972-74 saga can now feel a weird rush of names and memories. For those who don’t: good luck.

Peter Landesman directed and wrote (from Felt’s books), using radiant D.C. structures, shadowy confrontations, and glimmers of All the President’s Men. The new star in the old cave of corruption is Liam Neeson as Felt. With elegant hair, eagle profile and the lofty posture of a statue, he might be Eliot Ness’s dream of Lincoln. Felt is also a control maniac and fierce smoker who feels crucified by betraying his Bureau norms (for a greater good). Long  Hoovering for J. Edgar has left his spirit clogged by too many shredded files.

Diane Lane struggles to portray Audrey Felt, depressed that Mark is really married to the Bureau. A side-story about their radical daughter leads to a “hippie love commune,” very odd in context. But the pacing is swift, the clips fine. Good actors include Ed Miller, Josh Lucas, Bruce Greenwood, Eddie Marsan, Tom Sizemore and (excellent as Nixon squirm tool L. Patrick Gray) Martin Csokas. Above all, Felt rescues Neeson from revenge movies that were making him a retro collage of Charles Bronson and Charlton Heston. If he had the voice of Hal Halbrook, the classic Deep Throat of All the President’s Men, he’d be the perfect Felt.                  

SALAD (A List)

Worthy Watergate/Nixon Movies, with star and date:

All the President’s Men (Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, 1976), Will: G. Gordon Liddy (Robert Conrad, 1982), Secret Honor (Philip Baker Hall, 1985), The Final Days (Lane Smith, 1989), Nixon (Anthony Hopkins, 1995), Dick (Dan Hedaya, 1999), Frost/Nixon (Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, 2008), Our Nixon (Richard Nixon, 2013), Mark Felt (Liam Neeson, 2017). There also potent Nixonian vibes in The Conversation (Gene Hackman, 1974).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of film’s great, important screenings occurred at RKO on Feb. 14, 1941. For the newly minted but controversial Citizen Kane, studio chief George Schaefer “wanted a tough audience, film artisans whose reputations were towering … Directors King Vidor, William Dieterle, Robert Stevenson and Garson Kanin came, along with Howard Hawks. Distinguished agent Leland Hayward sat in, Cedric Hardwicke was an honored guest … everyone there knew why he had been invited. In some ways, not only the fate of one picture was at stake that night, it was easy to believe that Hollywood’s future could have been hovering in a sort of existential balance.” It went very Welles. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Bennett Miller, no pedant but alive to all nuances, shows Tim on top a Brooklyn roof. He gazes into milky Manhattan light, and suddenly my mind blushes pensively: Speed Levitch’s chiseled features, curly hair, acne scars and aura of expectancy bring back Jeffrey Jacobs, my Chicago pal, usher, waiter, wit, gone unacceptably soon when his cruise ended in 1990. Movies can be astonishingly personal.” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Kanji (Takashi Shimura) faces a graceful end in Ikiru (Toho, 1952; director Akira Kurosawa, cinematographer Asakazu Nakai).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 85: 'Blade Runner 2049' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Blade Runner 2049 

Any tiny buds of hope that 2049 will be a good year are prematurely trampled by Blade Runner 2049. An avalanche of posturing visions, almost three hours long, this follow-up to the 1982 cult film (loved by me and many) is a severe case of sequelitis deformatus. Director Denis Villeneuve showed he could bulge budgets and taffy-twist ideas in Sicario and Arrival. Now he blows the roof off a factory of sci-fi concepts, lavishly mutated from Ridley Scott’s masterwork (which at age 35 – ancient in multiplex terms – still has more beauty, texture and emotion).

Scott went on to make the most humanly rooted and scientific of modern space hits, The Martian. He also pointed the way to this overload, with his 1992 “director’s cut” of Blade Runner and then a “final cut.” Villeneuve’s cram-o-rama deserves about 40 minutes of cutting. Instead of Harrison Ford as Deckard, the deadly “blade runner” cop who tracked down “replicants” (slave androids) in a rainy, trashy, retro-futurist Los Angeles, the star is Ryan Gosling. As young blade K (the nod to Kafka’s Joseph K is made explicit), Gosling’s face is often a mask of bland but manly puzzlement. Maybe he’s missing his L.A. jazz club in La La Land.

K’s L.A. in 2049 is a cold, brutalist hell, with most of the past city a radioactive death dump of ruins and refuse. K owns a pop-up holographic bimbo, played with love-sofa lips by Cuba’s Ana de Armas. Up in a high tower, grim and ruthless Robin Wright serves the big corporate devil (Jared Leto, his intensity black-holed by dead eyes). The pass key here is fixated nostalgia. The movie assumes that we not only revere and recall every wrinkle of the first film, but yearn to smooth them out with this injection of improved paranoia. The result has some remarkable sights but is finally sedating. BR 2049 is a dreamy lab mummy, like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and the Spielberg/Kubrick A.I.

Old theme: Are the blade runners themselves androids? New twist: Can replicants reproduce sexually? Such fanboy vapors blow through a kind of theme park for the 2049 “Die Like a Droid” issue of Vanity Fair. The film’s ideal viewer is a smart kid who dreams of becoming the master nerd at Comic-Con. Hyper-designed settings blast our eyeballs, climaxes spawn offshoots, digital nudes offer kinky winks of sex. Instead of 1982 robo-hunk Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), dying in tropical rain (so movingly that the big brute won audience tears), a replicant expires in soft, gentle snow. Finally, at last: a Perry Como Christmas special for cyborgs.

But look who’s back! Harrison Ford! Age becomes him. No, age is him. The crags sag, the voice is blunter than ever, the nuances growl and explode. But his Deckard has a ravaged poignancy that upstages Gosling, who remains a sullen Hamlet looking for a script (or a styling comb). The central limitation of this almost interminable saga – spiced with hip plugs for Kafka, Nabokov, Tchaikovsky, Elvis and Sinatra – is that we welcome dear old Deckard while caring little for K. How do you hug a guy whose full name is KD6-3.7?                   

SALAD (A List)

Harrison Ford’s Ten Best Efforts, starting from the top:

1. Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive (1993), 2. Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982), 3. John Book in Witness (1985), 4. Jack Trainer in Working Girl (1988), 5. Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981), 6. Allie Fox in The Mosquito Coast (1986), 7. Han Solo in Star Wars (1977), 8. Deckard in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), 9. Jack Ryan in Clear and Present Danger (1994) and 10. Bob Falfa in American Graffiti (1973).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A bias against Orson Welles, before the Hearst attacks on Citizen Kane, began showing itself with the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast and its “panic”: “For a decade, newspapers had gradually lost ground to radio in both ad revenue and timely reporting, owing precisely to the innovation of flash news bulletins of the type Welles dramatized in War of the Worlds. Among old-school newsmen there was a distinct ‘anti-radio’ sentiment (which) in turn lent an anti-Orson slant to the press coverage. Welles recalled: ‘Editorials ranted about how irresponsible CBS and Welles were, insisting that I would never be offered another job in show business, and how lucky I was not to be in jail … they assured their readers that newspapers would never sink to such reckless disregard for the public’s welfare.” (From Patrick McGilligan’s invaluable Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path of Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“No young star entered the 21^st century from a better starting block than Matthew McConaughey. He had the best male star-bod since Paul Newman; the structural definition of Gregory Peck; film’s finest flash-smile since Jack Nicholson; the most confident entry role since Cagney and Gable, and a voice with the rooted American appeal of John Wayne. Add the virtues of absence: not agingly boyish like Tom Cruise; not a middleweight McQueen like Brad Pitt; not macho-stolid like Matt Damon; not fetchingly fey like Johnny Depp; not a goofball like Nicholas Cage; not a beef buffet like Channing Tatum, and not a red-carpet totem like George Clooney. Here was the best Texan for movies since Tommy Lee Jones, and far more likeable.” (From the Matthew McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club 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.

Rutger Hauer’s deathless (though dying) role, as replicant Roy Batty in the original Blade Runner (Warner Bros. 1982; director Ridley Scott, cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.