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.
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