By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of The Great Wall and The Salesman
The Great Wall
Maybe
to prep for the coming thrills of summer, I found myself gaping up at The Great Wall. The $150 million Chinese
production is stuffed with the retro values endemic to
modern, big-deal Chinese cinema, but this time that felt just fine. As
throwback adventure entertainment, The
Great Wall is better than anything we are likely to see strung out along the Mexican border.
Matt (The Martian) Damon must have
thought, “Wow. Mars this isn’t.” The reds are much redder, as Chinese troops in
stylish, color-coded uniforms defend the medieval Great Wall, a set-built and CGI masterwork.
Matt’s mercenary William has come from the West to steal some “black powder” (gunpowder),
even though that doesn’t give Chinese
imperial forces much of an edge against Siberian swarms of green-blooded
leapin' lizards, storming the Wall (the edge proves to be William's archery skills). Bill finds time to test his buddy bond
with sidekick Tovar (Pedro Pascal), to gaze hormonally upon the rising Commander Li (spitfire
beauty Tian Jing), and to say things like “I have been
left for dead twice.” More time is given to swarming tides of voluptuous violence.
No time at all for historical or scientific accuracy, but even in China who cares?
Director
Zhang Yimou carries forward the lavish pictorial talent of his past hits. A titan
of stress and excess, Zhang will no doubt some day remake The Good Earth as The Great
Earth: Golden Topsoil! For those of us far from young, there are fond, flickering
memories of Destination Gobi, The Naked
Jungle, Genghis Khan, etc. This new epic is silly but fairly thrilling. Every
cliché is nicely honored, and John Myhre’s production design binds it all superbly.
I came away from this with a thrilling new emotion: I want to build a Great
Wall – around Trump.
The Salesman
The
steady drip, drip eating away the cold wall between the U.S. and Iran
has been Iranian films. Many are pearls of humanity, deft in technique and pellucid
in vision (and seldom drippy). Movies like The
Salesman, from writer-director Asghar Farhadi.
Emad,
a Teheran schoolteacher and actor – he and his wife Rana are the leads in a new
staging of Death of a Salesman –
returns to their new apartment to find Rana bleeding, brutalized. She is
mystified about a lustful stranger who entered as she was bathing. Emad
suspects a hidden connection with the previous tenant, a sex worker, and her
many clients. The childless couple, cosmopolitan and not religiously orthodox (an
Audrey Hepburn portrait is on display), suddenly feel as vulnerable as kids without
parents.
Rana,
ashamed, refuses to see the police. Emad internalizes her fear and begins to
feel a primal male rage (night after draining night, his Willy Loman is losing
male status on stage). The marriage clots. Inevitably Emad will seek revenge,
but forget about Liam Neeson or Charles Bronson. In a manner slow-going by U.S.
action standards, Farhadi tightens the fine-grained plot with tremendous
assurance and no slick melodrama. The very fine, natural work by Shahab
Hosseini (Emad) and Taranieh Alidoosti (Rana) is joined by superlative Babak
Karimi, who gives one of the best performances of an old, sick man I have ever
seen.
Farhadi
won the foreign movie Oscar in 2011 for A
Separation, and this new picture is also subtle, tense, devoid of hokum and
squeeze. He won’t be coming to Sunday’s Oscars (The Salesman is nominated as foreign film) because of Trump’s travel
ban against Iran and six other Islamic countries. If our Maximum Leader could view
just three or four of the best, deeply humane Iranian films from recent
decades, he might be less prone to snarl us into conflict with Iran. Well, no –
he’d fall asleep from boredom, or start tweeting. Such a big man, such a tweety
bird.
SALAD (A List)
Ten Absorbing American or Brit Movies
Set in China, in order of arrival
(director, year): The Bitter Tea of
General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933), The
General Died at Dawn (Lewis Milestone, 1936), The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), The Shanghai Gesture (Joseph von Sternberg, 1941), The Left Hand of God (Edward Dmytryk,
1955), The World of Suzie Wong (Richard
Quine, 1960), Mulan (Disney: Bancroft
and Cook, 1998), Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000), The White
Countess (James Ivory, 2005) and The
Painted Veil (John Curran, 2006). The retro worst was Blood
Alley with John Wayne (Bill Wellman, 1955).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Peter
Bogdanovich gave his opinion on why Citizen
Kane and its lordly citizen maintain their grip: “All (of Welles’s)
passions – theater, magic, circus, radio, painting, literature – suddenly fused
into one. This may explain why to so many people, even those who’ve seen
Welles’s other pictures (not so many have, actually), Kane remains the favorite. It is not his best film – either
stylistically or in the depth of his vision – but its aura is the most romantic
(thanks to) the initial courtship of the artist with his art.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and
Bogdanovich. My opinion: It is his
greatest work, but not by a mile.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Quentin
Tarantino knew that Jackie Brown (1997)
was a big creative leap: “Miramax optioned three Elmore Leonard novels for Tarantino,
who almost passed on Rum Punch. Once
he saw its riches, as he told me in an interview, ‘I did what I wanted with it.
Oh, the full-out fans, the kind who start Pulp
Fiction Web sites … Jackie was
not necessarily for them.’ He wanted ‘a more mature character study. I’m a writer,
most of all.’ As a teen he had loved Leonard’s work so much that he was nailed
for shoplifting a paperback, and he thought that ‘when I become a director I
can see every other movie I do being an Elmore Leonard novel.” That didn’t happen,
but he made a great one. (From the Pam Grier/ Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable
from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
James
Whitmore and Sterling Hayden face hard choices in The Asphalt Jungle (MGM, 1950; director John Huston,
cinematographer Harold Rosson).
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