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.