Thursday, May 18, 2017

Nosh 65: 'Fate of the Furious,' 'Risk' & More


By David Elliott
                                                  


Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.
NOTE: The next Nosh will be Friday, June 2.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Fate of the Furious and Risk

The Fate of the Furious
The fate of The Fate of the Furious is more money. I waited until global grosses hit around $1.2 billion before contributing my senior $6.75. The eighth in the series, which began with The Fast and the Furious in 2001, cost $250 million, the sort of franchise loot that assures everything except quality. The latest big, loud rubber-burner is more exciting than slowly letting air out of your tires, but probably less than getting a signature  shammy cloth from Elon Musk (films 9 and 10 are on the assembly line).

Naturally Vin Diesel repeats as Dom, hottest wheel man on our planet. Once sleek, the Yul Brynner of street-cred motorheads, Dom is now a sort of Chunkie Cheese (but buff cheese). The movie opens in blindingly sunny Havana, less a capital than a postcard screaming “Come down, gringos, and bring money!” A challenge race, roaring its effects, goes from implausible to absolute idiocy in seconds. Dom, lightly attired, rolls from his burning car at about 120 m.p.h., lands unscratched on asphalt and wins despite the meltdown. He wins over the Cubans like a bald, beardless Fidel.

Diesel joins his usual crew or (as he insists) family, including squeeze Michelle Rodriguez (rightly missed is the late Paul Walker). Once the scene switches to Berlin, dark as a Hitler migraine, Britain’s Jason Stathem appears, projecting his special brand of steroid void (his facial stubble is mocked as a “whisker biscuit”). Kurt Russell, the jaunty boss of something very global, wisely treats the movie as a goof-along. As his son or stooge, there is Scott Eastwood, Clint’s boy, who might achieve the career of Pat Wayne. Ludacris preens, and Helen Mirren’s weird drop-in probably cost a few million.

Stealing the chrome laurels are Charlize Theron as chilly villainess Cifer, basically a promo float for Theron’s coming summer blast Atomic Blonde, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Dom’s sworn enemy (poor Stathem stares up at him like Mini-me). A recent cover story in National Review hailed the Rock (pardon me, Mr. Johnson) as “the celebrity we need now.” It seems that Trump’s vanity effusion has not saturated our zeal for mindless celebrity.

When the plot pulls in a baby, Dom cries a perfect, CGI tear. While New York is trashed by Cifer on a crazed hacking spree, we are supposed to care about Dom’s faltering family values, which is like finding that your deluxe road beast has a motor made of taffy. For all its super-charged moves, the latest Furious isn’t going anywhere. It’s a pit stop.

Risk
Julian Assange, with his unlined face and saintly-sexy white hair, was the poster lad of the subversive elite of cyber hackers in the early Obama years and the doomed Arab Spring. Then a rival wizard emerged: hyper-cool CIA escapee and intel dumper Edward Snowden (whom Assange aided). Assange faced accusations of sexual assault in Sweden, went into official hiding in Britain, then fled into less posh refuge at Ecuador’s embassy in London. By then Snowden was like a fish bunkered in a samovar, in Moscow “sanctuary.” Assange saw his Wikileaks mole kingdom tarnished by suspected complicity with Russia’s invasion of the 2016 U.S. election.

So director Laura Poitras, who made a whispery, furtive movie about Snowden, Citizenfour, is stuck with Risk, an often stir-crazy, opaque documentary on Assange. The film wanders down the years, Poitras heard but not seen, Assange seen but often talking in haiku. What does he think about the sex charges, apart from murmuring about angry feminists? Can he explain what Wikileaks hopes to achieve? Was his on-video meeting with Lady Gaga more than a shared ego massage? Why does he feel betrayed by Poitras? Is her fascination with him flaking? Is there a Putin-Assange Pact? Does he like Ecuadorian cooking?

Such questions float around Risk, unanswered. It should not have been released in this jittery, loose-binder form. Fretting these days about poor, pale Julian seems pointless.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Often irascible and spikey when working for other directors, Welles was typically a happy maestro on his own sets. “He always said,” recalled Peter Bogdanovich, “that he liked ‘to give the actors a good time.’ And he did. He always made it a lot of fun. Orson was funny, he was teasing. He was warm, encouraging, spontaneous. He loved anything that you did, was effusive if he liked it, kidded around if he didn’t, never made you feel anything except that you probably were gonna be better than you’d ever been in your life.” Alas, such testimonials are in smaller circulation than a tape of Welles exploding at the hapless makers of a corny commercial, one of his last and least gigs. (Bogdanovich quote from Robert K. Elder’s The Film That Changed My Life).  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The tap root of The Producers was Mel Brooks’ earlier zest as a writer “for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Albert Goldman described the writers: ‘They’d light their cigars, form a circle around Sid, watch him improvise like a one-man band until they were turned on. Then they’d jump up, start throwing lines, capping each other.’ Imogene Coca was ‘distaff’ zany, ‘the timid woman who, when aroused, can beat a tiger to death with a feather.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, yours at Amazon, Nook, or Kindle.):

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.


Kay Francis and Herbert Marshall play for love in Trouble in Paradise (Paramount, 1932; director Ernst Lubitsch; cinematographer Victor Milner).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.


Thursday, May 11, 2017

Nosh 64: 'Their Finest,' 'Colossal' & More


By David Elliott
                                                


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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Their Finest and Colossal

Their Finest
Pleasure in Their Finest (and I certainly had some) relies on a triple nostalgia: for Britain’s heroic Blitz years of 1940 and ’41, for the plucky patriotism of English films at that time, and for the humane coziness that  English movies brought to a pitch of charm and wit, mainly in the Ealing  pictures after the war. Made with high craft by Lone Scherfig, it’s about a  propaganda film patched together for fast release after the Dunkirk rescue. That operation saved the neck of Britain’s almost cooked goose from Hitler’s army, inspiring some great Churchill rhetoric and this movie (and Christopher Nolan’s massive Dunkirk, coming in July). Using an English beach, fake boats, retro effects and a corny script (but isn’t Casablanca fairly corny also?), Scherfig still gives us a fine sense of that amazing, frightening time on the “sceptr’d isle.”

No Churchill (just posters), but here is Jeremy Irons as a war minister, knocking off a chunk of Henry V to rally the filmers. He also saddles them with the need for a gung-ho Yank hero, a volunteer pilot who can’t act. This doubles the stress of the young scripting team, played by Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin (romance beckons, of course). Helping the American empowers snappish old pro Ambrose (Bill Nighy), who recovers the zip that once gave him dash as a matinee idol. Has Nighy ever given a bad performance? Or one not graced by his sly, deft, mildly dotty finesse? As this vain but touchingly committed ham, he has the sort of scene-lifting fun that Peter O’Toole bestowed on My Favorite Year.

Scherfig made a star of young Carey Mulligan with another look-back story,  An Education. He won’t do the same for Arterton, with her smaller luster, yet she is game, pretty and heartfelt. In the final quarter there is a small plot shock, but Their Finest can, like Britain, take it. Though a comedy in its best tactics, the film has a good strategic edge: we sense the bombs, the blood, the personal losses. And many lines crackle (even the weird “spawning spontaneously in the sawdust”). Dunkirk will find its own way to the famous beaches, no doubt closer to Joe Wright’s Atonement and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

Colossal
There endures a certain resentment of Anne Hathaway. Envy? She does resemble Audrey Hepburn plus Shakespeare’s dream of a perfect rose. Maybe it’s the contrast with her slightly tinny, American voice, or because her talent doesn’t always rise to her beauty. Cast those doubts away for Colossal.

As screw-up Gloria, Hathaway is funny and fetching and often goofy-drunk. Her British lover (Dan Stevens, the long-lamented Matthew Crawley of Downton Abbey) kicks her out of his swank Manhattan digs, so she returns, tail dragging, to her hometown. There the hub of interest is a bar run by Gloria’s childhood pal, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis, who seems to be reaching for an improbable convergence of Russell Crowe and Paul Giamatti).

The director, finely named Nacho Vigalondo, wrote a script that also seems to drink a lot. The “plot” involves Gloria’s startling, hungover insight that she has a behavior-controlling brain link with a huge monster lizard terrorizing Seoul, South Korea (as in old Godzilla days). Down at their past playground, Oscar also gets into trans-Pacific telepathy. Not even the combined gifts of James Joyce and Ray Bradbury could find a tight narrative thread, but that barely matters.

The strangeness, as sitcomical Americana intersects Korean panic mobs (maybe a bit too topical right now, in the age of Kim Jong-Trump), makes Colossal one of those oddities you won’t forget – movies like Eat the Peach, Trees Lounge, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Plot Against Harry, Tremors, Withnail and I, Slow West, Wise Blood, Chan Is Missing, O’Horten and Whiskey Galore. And I’ve never liked Hathaway quite this much before.

SALAD (A List)
Twelve Outstanding British WWII Movies ranked by quality, with director: Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings), The Life and Death of Col. Blimp (Michael Powell), The Purple Plain (Robert Parrish), 49th Parallel (a.k.a. The Invaders; Michael Powell), Hope and Glory (John Boorman), Atonement (Joe Wright), In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, David Lean), The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean), One of Our Aircraft is Missing (Michael Powell), The Cruel Sea (Charles Frend), The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson) and The Cockleshell Heroes (José Ferrer).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
At the grand “Night of 100 Stars” at Radio City Music Hall in 1982, singer Tony Bennett felt the jitters before going on, but “Orson Welles was backstage, and he stood there smoking a big cigar and staring at me. He could tell that I was having a case of the butterflies, and with perfect grace he said to me, ‘I go to every party at Sinatra’s house, and he plays nothing but Tony Bennett records,’ Just at that moment the announcer said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Bennett!’ Orson knew exactly what to say to help me get through. No wonder he was a great director.” (From Tony Bennett’s memoir The Good Life).    

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Gulley Jimson (in The Horse’s Mouth) has a sexual forwardness rare for Alec (Guinness). He had slyly spoofed the machismo of military men, taking it to a high level in Bridge on the River Kwai and Tunes of Glory. He admired alpha-male friends like Jack Hawkins, Bill Holden and Harry Andrews, and envied Richard Burton’s stellar wallop. Piers Paul Read’s biography suggests a closeted gay or bi impulse but never finds the closet key. Possibly Alec didn’t either (and had a strong marriage).” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth 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.


Keira Knightley in a peaceful moment of Atonement (Focus Features, 2007; director Joe Wright, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.


Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Nosh 63: 'The Circle,' 'Lost City of Z' & More


By David Elliott

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


APPETIZER: Reviews of The Circle and The Lost City of Z

The Circle
Thank heaven for Emma Watson! How often we felt that, watching her brainy little Hermione saving Harry and Ron in the Harry Potter series. Watson delivers again, as Mae in The Circle. She is rescued from a dismal temp job, invited to join the Bay Area’s smart, rising elite at The Circle. The ring-shaped, corporate campus is as cool and glassy as Watson’s American accent. The Circle is a Hogwarts School minus magic and medievalism, its British witches and wizards replaced by computers and their giddy human servants.

The movie, directed by James Ponsoldt from a script by him and original writer (novelist) Dave Eggers, has Mae as a recruit who can’t quite swallow the brightly feathered hook of futurism. The visionary fly-caster is boss Eamon Bailey. He and his partner (Patton Oswalt), among the few people over 40 at the vast complex, are angling to destroy “criminal” secrecy by eliminating privacy, by creating ominiscient spy-tech. Thrilled by this  smothering promise of “transparent” democracy, young savants glow like Mormon missionaries programmed by robots. The film has a wry hum of smiling menace from Tom Hanks as  Bailey, his snappy great-guyness twinkled by sinister shadings.

But it’s Watson who keeps the concepts circling, by not being too cerebral. Her pretty face and big eyes are rich in quicksilver reactions as Mae corkscrews from belief to doubt and back, though the finish has a teasing ambivalence. There are some mediocre chases and a skeptical rogue genius (John Boyega) who hangs around being obscurely subversive (instead of Deep Throat’s big garage, he has long storage vaults). There is good work by Karen Gillan as Mae’s jealous mentor, Glenne Headley as her mother and, as her stricken dad, Bill Paxton (his sign-out role; he died in February).

The story could have benefited from the more elegant visual allure and sexiness of Gattaca, the 1997 fable about the dangers of biogenetics and scientific elitism. The Circle is, to use an old-tech term, something of a chalk talk. But as Hermione proved early in  Hogwarts classes, Watson is no piece of chalk.      

The Lost City of Z
He never knew Richard Nixon’s rhetorical phrase (State of the Union speech, 1970) “the lift of a driving dream,” but in the early 20th century Britain’s Lt. Col. Percy Fawcett found his way to live it. Bravely (and foolishly?) he led small expeditions into Bolivia’s Amazonian wilds, not to put more imperial pink on the maps, nor for gold or oil, but to find “the ultimate piece of the human puzzle.” A Victorian-bred racist, but no snob, Fawcett felt that steamy terra incognita and its “primitive” natives had truths to offer, wonders to unfold, even the fabled El Dorado which he called Zed (no, not the source of Peter Greene’s Zed in Pulp Fiction). After World War I combat, the aging Fawcett went back for another, fatalistic penetration of the forest primeval.

Director-writer James Gray tells the tale with rugged devotion in The Lost City of Z, helped by a strong if not wildly charismatic performance by Charlie Hunnam (and excellent Sienna Miller as his wife, bound by home and kids but no meek mouse). Robert Pattinson plays his heavily bearded, sometimes skeptical cohort. The film’s budget is stretched by crafty, traditional means, and there is a potent, increasingly nutty integrity in Hunnam’s portrayal. But I never quite felt the lift of the driving dream, neither the old exhilaration (Stewart Granger tracking past countless critters to a mountain domain of tall African warriors who do exotic jump-dancing, in King Solomon’s Mines), nor the old mythic fevers (Klaus Kinski as a feral Spanish lunatic, lost in the Peruvian wilderness of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God).   

While not dull, the film does tend to slog. Despite very rich, celluloid imagery by Darius Khondji and a strong score by Christopher Spelman, grand vistas and a do-or-die cast, there is a rummaging, archival aura. This dream is caught in the amber of another age’s geographic imagination, already plundered by past movies (remember Spencer Tracy as fearless Henry M. Stanley?). Lost City is a fine old Britisher at his club, beckoning us with “Listen, I have a wonderful story to tell. But first, allow me to light my pipe and describe my notes.”

SALAD (A List)
Fifteen Top Movies of Exotic Adventure (with year and director): The Nibelungen (Fritz Lang, 1924), The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924), King Kong (Cooper-Schoedsack, 1933), King Solomon’s Mines (Compton Bennett, 1950), The African Queen (John Huston, 1951), The Wages of Fear (H.-G. Clouzot, 1953), Robinson Crusoe (Luis Bunuel, 1954), The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958), Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Aguirre Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972), The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975), Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984), Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam, 1988), The Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles, 2004).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Temporarily back in Hollywood’s favor while making Touch of Evil in 1958 (and playing its fat-slob sheriff), Welles “decided to throw a party for all the little Hollywood grandees … to show that I still remembered my friends, Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner and those people. And I was late, and I thought ‘I won’t take time to remove this terrible, enormous makeup that took forever to put on. When I came into my house, before I had a chance to explain that I had to get upstairs and take my makeup off, all these people came up (to me) and said, ‘Hi, Orson! Gee, you’re looking great!” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles).  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
When I first visited Rome the fabled Via Veneto seemed a little “off,” with its downhill curvature – it didn’t match my 1961 memory of La Dolce Vita. That’s because “in planting Cinecittá (studio’s) flag on the Veneto, Fellini also brought the Veneto to Cinecittá. To reproduce the street at the studio he gave up his profit share (and future wealth). His radiant replica was so level and straight that it cheated the truth, but it made the street immortal.” (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.


A Watutsi prince (Siriaque) meets Deborah Kerr, Richard Carlson and Stewart Granger in King Solomon’s Mines (MGM, 1950; director Compton Bennett, cinematographer Robert Surtees).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.