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. 

Nosh 84: 'The Foreigner,' 'Faces Places' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Faces Places and The Foreigner

Faces Places

Though film-struck, I was too youthfully ignorant of French cinema in 1955 to know about Agnès Varda making her first movie. Her latest, Faces Places, was filmed at age 88. Varda has probably toppled eternally controversial Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s choice!) as the greatest female director. Nominate Jane Campion, Agnieszka Holland or Chantal Akerman, and you’d better make a fantastic case.

Faces Places is a road-tripper like Varda’s The Gleaners and I, another loosely built documentary essay. Her compelling partner is the roving photo-site artist called JR, then aged 33. The tall hipster, a former tagger, wears dark glasses (Agnès keeps urging him to remove them) and has a terrific eye. They first met on Paris’s Rue Daguerre (long ago the locale of Varda’s Daguerrotypes). Delighted by the tiny, round auteur, JR invites her to hit the roads in his van, which is made to look like a camera. With it he creates, often first using a 28mm. wide-angle lens, black-and-white portraits of people he finds. Like Varda he is a humorous gleaner of life and humanity.

JR “blows up” many pictures, expanded for sectional pasting onto buildings, trains, ruins. These visions confer a local fame closer to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland than Orwell’s Big Brother. A shy villager feels conflicted about her wall-sized celebrity, while a wry down-and-outer is bemused and thrilled by his elevation from obscurity. The stimulating talk of Agnès and JR adds Gallic sauce to their trip, as they ponder art, age and film. Two splendid creations rise near waves. In one, a snap that Agnès took in youth, of her late friend the photographer Guy Bourdin, is JR’d onto a fallen German bunker on a Norman beach. The other lofts epic snaps of three women onto stacked cargo containers in Le Havre (they’re among the port’s few female harbor workers). One episode spills open love, time, loss, transience, while the other is a towering feminist statement.

Like other New Wave talents, even Truffaut, Resnais and Varda’s beloved husband Jacques Demy, Varda was always crowded by the cerebral éclat of Jean-Luc Godard. There is a clip of young Godard with her, and a fond, merry salute to his Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). Agnès chose to end with a Godardian topper, which proved to be less than the celebration she wanted. But the finish is still a touché. Varda remains triumphant, the great surviving surfer of the New Wave.

The Foreigner

One asset of The Foreigner, a strong action movie, is that Jackie Chan at 63 uses his age well. At least his face does, as Chan sustains the battered, angry grief of a man who has lost his daughter in a London terrorist bombing. This being a Chan film, we know that the body will out-perform the face. The moves are less flamboyant now, and may have stunt support, but Chan is in charge. He plays a London restauranteur with a covert military past (Vietnam and beyond), and he goes on the revenge path against a viciously rogue I.R.A. unit that detonated the bomb (as for more current evil, there is one mention of Isis and Al-Qaeda).

Despite his Vietnamese name our hero is Chinese, even gets called “the Chinaman” (I thought the term faded with Charlie Chan and chop suey). The source is Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman, a title that must still be PC in Britain. Giving old, Bronson-trashed action clichés some fresh zest is director Martin Campbell, a proven wiz with mayhem, suspense, torture, the whole kit. The action in Belfast and London is grimly exciting, though it does seem that both cities are mainly platforms for surveillance cameras. Jackie’s fists and tricks, leaps and traps will, of course, lay high-tech low.

In essence The Foreigner is a duel of two aging men. The acting edge belongs not to Chan, for all his grizzled-cherubic intensity, but to nemesis Pierce Brosnan. As a former I.R.A. war chief turned into a peace-pious politician, while playing his own dirty game, Brosnan (Irish-born, now 64) swings a St. Pat’s Irish accent like an emerald flame thrower. He schemes, simmers and unleashes profane, Piercing rages. It’s a show in itself, and more than makes up for Brosnan’s singing in Mamma Mia! 

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Other Important Agnès Varda Movies:

La Pointe Corte (1956), Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962), Salut les Cubains (1963), Le Bonheur (1965), Lions Love (and Lies) 1969, Daguerrotypes (1976), One Sings the Other Doesn’t (1977), Murs Murs (1981), Vagabond (1985), Jacquot de Nantes (1991), 101 Nights (1995), The World of Jacques Demy (1995), The Gleaners and I (2000).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles: “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus. It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world, a world that is not ours, that brings us to the heart of the great secret. Here magic begins. A film is a ribbon of dreams.” (From Peter Cowie’s The Cinema of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“And then – shazaam! – a shining key plops into the dirty water. Diane places it in the trash, but later finds her nerve and presses the buzzer of her new neighbor: ‘Are you washing a dog?’ (Lionel: ‘Excuse me?’) ‘Your dog’s hair is in my pipe.’ (Lionel: ‘Perhaps you should check out the basement’). In 2015 some of us chuckled when Kidman, in Paddington, spoke of ‘drains clogged with hair.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus 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.

Lily Tomlin, Art Carney and Bill Macy wash a lot of noir laundry in The Late Show (Warner Bros. 1977; director Robert Benton, cinematographer Charles Rosher Jr.)

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 83: ''Battle of the Sexes,' 'Rebel in the Rye' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Battle of the Sexes and Rebel in the Rye

Battle of the Sexes

A time capsule for those who don’t recall the challenge tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in the Houston Astrodome (Sept. 20, 1973), Battle of the Sexes lumbers along dutifully for its first hour. In 2001 an ABC-TV movie, When Billie Beat Bobby, had Helen Hunt as King and Ron Silver as Riggs. Now we’ve got Emma Stone as King, then 29, rising fast in a career that pushed female pro tennis into feminism. Steve Carell plays Riggs, at 55 way past his early prime (at 21, male singles winner at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open). Stone and Carell provide good facial matches, though she seems slight, almost girlish. In long shot, gifted players reproduce the action which led to King’s triumph (6-4, 6-3, 6-3). She got the $100,000 purse. Riggs, notoriously a gambler, likely profited from side-bets.

Director Valerie Feris and Jonathan Dayton stage obligatory wind-ups about the families, Billie Jean’s anchoring the new Virginia Slims tournaments, and male piggery from the old tennis elite and press (BJK is called “this little lady” and Howard Cosell praises her for playing like a man). No fella wore his hog bristles more keenly than Riggs, though that was often just porky bunting for his   hustle. Carell revels in every stunt, goad and gambit, and Elisabeth Shue not only looks terrific but is subtle as his wife, alternately patient and fed-up. There are plot conveniences. Did Bobby really show up at Billie Jean’s hotel to pitch the big “battle” on the very morning after the married King embraced her first lesbian love, a dewy hairdresser? She later came out as a gay icon, but Stone often seems trapped in the script’s netting of sexual and political points. As for tennis, well, Stone’s court action is on a par with her dippy-trippy dancing in La La Land.

Battle earns points for bringing back a remarkable sliver of the ’70s, when tennis had cultural edge. The match ended rather predictably: a superb young athlete had everything to prove, and she did, by exhausting and out-smarting a brash has-been who confused chutzpah with training. For the history lessons, this is Billie Jean’s movie. As entertainment it belongs, as in 1973, to Bobby. His new rival is the tennis outfit stylist for the Virginia Slims players, played by Alan Cumming as a queenly composite of Noel Coward and Project Runway’s Tim Gunn. He intones the final lesson, royally. 

Rebel in the Rye
J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye never had much of a chance with me, given that the young sourball hero, Holden Caulfield, says this on page two: “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” O.K., kid, but in my book you’ll never be William Holden. Now that the novel has sold over 60 million copies, and Salinger has been dead since 2010, we get the movie Rebel in the Rye (its literary wit is more like Dabble in the Wry).

Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski contributed to the script, a studious rummage through “Jerry” Salinger’s early writing ordeals and then the cultic fame that turned him into a fabled recluse. The details, 1939 to early ’50s, are credible, and Kevin Spacey is skillfully engaged as an early writing mentor, Whit Burnett. There’s something O’Neill about this scrappy idealist, as if extracted from Spacey’s work in The Iceman Cometh (Salinger’s first big love was Oona O’Neill, the playwright’s daughter, who married Chaplin).

As Salinger, British actor Nick Hoult has a small touch of Jack Nicholson, but perhaps maintaining a flat American accent limited him to about three facial expressions. None of the more adult figures add much drama, though Spacey is touching and Bernard White is appealing as Jerry’s Vedantic guru (still, “overcoming distractions” hardly sums up this great religious philosophy). It’s a movie in which the hero’s rich dad (Victor Garber) stiffly insults his son’s artistic dreams, but later, near the finish, confides that he had yearned to become a musician. Director Danny Strong is strong with the WWII scenes, yet Jerry’s combat trauma just sort of dribbles into his Vedantic meditations and his phobia about fame. Salinger now seems buried inside Caulfield. Holden may still live, yet not much in this movie. 
      

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Good Movies About Real Sports Figures (with lead subject, director, date): Olympia (Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1937), The Pride of the Yankees (Lou Gehrig, Sam Wood, 1942), Pumping Iron (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Butler/Fiore, 1977), Raging Bull (Jake LaMotta, Martin Scorsese, 1980), Cobb (Ty Cobb, Ron Shelton, 1994), When We Were Kings (Muhammad Ali, Leon Gast, 1996), The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Greenberg, Aviva Kempner, 1998), Ali (Muhammad Ali, Michael Mann, 2001), Riding Giants (Laird Hamilton, Stacy Peralta, 2004), Unforgiveable Blackness (Jack Johnson, Ken Burns, 2004), Senna (Ayrton Senna, Asif Kapedia, 2010) and Moneyball (Billy Beane, Bennett Miller, 2011). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Standard popcorn chompers decided the Hollywood fate of Orson Welles at a March 17, 1942, Pomona preview of The Magnificent Ambersons. Most hated the dark, demanding film. RKO chief and Welles advocate George Schaefer was aghast, and a committee effort hacked the melancholy beauty, adding some weak inserts. Welles, on location in far-off Brazil, “simply assumed – as he had every right to – that he would have an opportunity to rework the film himself (and) cabled 37 pages of revisions …’I had no idea that (my enemies) would prevail.” The bad fix was in. (Quote from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Pam Grier’s apex role as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) had been a long time coming: “In Roger Corman’s Filipino quickies, with sweaty, under-clad women staging cat fights, Grier was the only one reading Stanislavsky on the set. Pam shaped her image, enjoyed doing stunts, asserted some independence. Violence was obligatory, but ‘my movies featured women claiming the right to fight back.’ Her innate dignity and force gave her leverage, despite promo like ‘A chick with drive who’ll take no jive!” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown 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.

Villain Raymond Burr (top) watches his goons subdue Robert Mitchum (bottom) in His Kind of Woman (RKO, 1951; director John Farrow, cinematographer Harry J. Wild).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 82: 'Brad's Status,' 'Polina' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Brad’s Status and Polina

Brad’s Status

Ben Stiller’s got the whole world of Brad in his hands, as well as Brad’s Status. His Sacramento life is quite nice: good job serving not-for-profit enterprises; a lovingly supportive wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer); a late-teen son, Troy (Austin Abrams), flying  with dad to apply at Harvard and other posh Eastern schools. This lad is so cool and thoughtful, such a budding mensch, I’d say he should drop his musical dream and become a diplomat.

The movie, largely narrated and thought-spoken by Stiller, is mainly about the algae bloom of neurotic anxiety in Brad’s head. The trip reminds him of his college days, when his future beckoned like God’s red carpet. Now Brad not only envies his blithe, sturdy son, he suffers midlife jealousy of old buddies, alpha-males in the fast lane. The movie, written and directed by Mike White (script shaper of Chuck & Buck and School of Rock), has cartoonish fun with these over-attainers. One (White) is in Hollywood gay, party bliss mode. Another (Luke Wilson) is piling loot as a shady investor. Another (Jemaine Clement) lives a Hawaiian beach dream with micro-bikini sexpots. The chief piece of work is Craig (Michael Sheen), a celebrated White House intimate who preens in a restaurant like Achilles admiring himself in a battle shield.

Most of the best humor, and seriousness, comes from Stiller. He again puts the accent in “comic actor” on “actor.” He’s as nakedly exposed as a Woody Allen noodle, yet with real insides. Even his near choke-up, listening to Dvorak’s Humoresque, has validity. True, the movie’s “issues” are a little la-di-da in this stormy, Harvey-Irma-Maria time. And at moments the film seems like a weird double promo for Harvard and Pringles. It’s a small work, rather glib, but the father-son combination unpacks some credible ideas and feelings, all finely performed. 

Polina

Polina in Polina is not Polish but Russian. Part of the film’s lure is the musical flow of Russian speech, sprinkled with French. The effect is fairly Tolstoyan, and there is a touch of Tolstoy’s Natasha in Polina at 8, played by delicate Veronika Zhovnytska. Her doting dad takes her to the snowy woods to hunt rabbits, and the fawn-like girl sees a proud elk, rivaling the majestic Scottish stag in The Queen. Alas, dad could be hunted himself, since he’s a minor figure in one of the criminal operations of the post-Soviet era.

Polina’s passion is ballet (hence the French). Her dance teacher into adolescence (Alexei Guskov) sternly shapes her to become a ballerina at the great Bolshoi in Moscow. We expect the film to exalt the continuance of that old, imperial heritage. But not long after pencil-thin Polina is taken over by teen sylph Anastasia Shevtsova, she pirouettes towards the West. Lured to lusty Provence by a lofty dance hunk (Niels Schneider), Polina faces the challenge not only of debut sex (softly gauzed by hanging tutus) but a different dance culture. For a while, having left the Bolshoi academy’s barre, she is doing bar work (yep, serving beer) in Brussels. Soon, a new partner stirs new moves. 

Lovingly detailed, dance-driven and mood-spun (by director Valerie Müller and choreo-director Angelin Preljocaj), the film charms. Despite one clear handicap. Although she’s a camera vision worthy of Degas, Shevtsova and her male partners dance better than they act. When Juliette Binoche turns up as a modern dance mentor, passionately engaged, the film matures. Like most dance movies, Polina is exciting in motion but otherwise a touch static. Some clichés land en pointe, but Franco-Russian graces still cast a Tolstoyan spell.

 

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Strong Movies About Dance and Dancers:

Shall We Dance (Sandrich-Astaire, 1937), The Red Shoes (Powell, 1948), Invitation to the Dance (Kelly, 1956), Black Orpheus (Camus, 1959), Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977), Dirty Dancing (Ardolino, 1987), Shall We Dance (Suo, 1997), Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000), Mad Hot Ballroom (Agrelo, 2005), La Danse (Wiseman, 2009), Pina (Wenders-Baush, 2011) and The Fits (Holmer, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles, an inspiration even for Ed Wood Jr. (see Tim Burton’s Ed Wood), made art even at humble Republic Pictures, with Macbeth (1947). Having prepped with a stage production in Salt Lake City, Utah, he filmed at the studio, sometimes using horse-opera sets dressed up as dark, dank, medieval Scotland. They included “the salt mine that the cowboys always used to get lost in. That became the great hall of the castle. Our costumes, lamentably, were rented from Western Costume, except for Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth … mine looked like the Statue of Liberty, but there was no dough for another, so I was stuck with it.” (Welles, a bit  painfully amused, to Peter Bogdanovich in This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Robert Altman filmed The Long Goodbye precisely because he wished to update Raymond Chandler’s tired, baggy novel to 1972, and use Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe: “Source piety never had a chance, and those who feel that Altman sabotaged Chandler should ponder the novelist’s statement to his agent: ‘I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about the strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.’ Gould, working with Altman, gave that a spin and a bounce like no other actor.” (From the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Angora-sweatered Ed (Johnny Depp) strikes a rather Wellesian note in Ed Wood (Touchstone 1994; director Tim Burton).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.