Nosh 96: 'Phantom Thread,' 'Proud Mary' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Phantom Thread and Proud Mary

Phantom Thread

In playing Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis banishes any comparison to Billy Bob Thornton’s enjoyably obnoxious gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock. No, his character is a deluxe London couturier in 1955, his gray hair like the tendrils of zealous perfection that drives his designs, his boney face the beaked beacon of his bespoke world. Despising mere chic, Woodcock pampers every dress, often sewing little messages and spells into their linings. And if a lady should just happen to prolong her scraping of morning toast with her butter knife, he will spike her with a high, Anglican finality, “There’s entirely too much movement at breakfast.”

Paul Thomas Anderson has made another of his films about men driven by visionary work compulsions (previously: There Will Be Blood, The Master, Boogie Nights, Hard Eight and, in a hippie-cool, satirical way, Inherent Vice). Woodcock, entranced by exquisite fabrics, designs what seem to be conservative British variations on French couture (dowdy-Dior?). He will hang onto a 16^th century Antwerp lace for years, to find just the right model. That would be Alma, a teashop waitress elevated to star model at the House of Woodcock. Alma’s new gig is multi-tasking: model, cook, mistress, nurse, seamstress, mood target. To her credit Vicky Krieps, a Luxembourg blonde with facial touches of young Meryl Streep, hangs in there with Day-Lewis. Surely, he is the first actor who has done a composite of Bogart’s nutty Capt. Queeg and couture icon Hubert de Givenchy.

Alma was the first name of Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, and the script (by Anderson) has Hitchcockean drippings. Woodcock’s prim sister Cyril, played by Lesley Manville, has the hovering chillness of the control maniac Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) in Rebecca. Caught between the fussy, neurotic siblings, Krieps’s accent starts to echo Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, caught between the rival sado-lusts of Cary Grant and Claude Rains. Jonny Greenwood’s deft score has Hitchcockean surges. The Woodockian mood surges of Day-Lewis lead mistress Alma to become the puzzled, then canny new mommy for a masochistic baby-man. The guy wears his dead mother’s hair-snip near his heart, and enjoys seeing her ghost in a wedding dress.

P.T. Anderson has fashioned a seamless collage of period details, snotty manners, purring clues and impressive clothing. But if he thought he could achieve the witty, layered, very English triumph of his hero Robert Altman with Gosford Park, think again. As the movie slowly unpacks its bonkers basket, we crave more clarity and substance. Maybe this film should have been released as a fragrance, “Kinky Mist” – it’s pervasively nowhere. Even Day-Lewis, a master of nuanced intensity, cannot give the film a vital pulse. Around the time the plot’s culinary interest switches from asparagus to mushrooms …but never mind. This chic meal is rich in good taste, yet oddly tasteless.   

Proud Mary

Nobody in modern movies was more proudly sexy (yet also subtle) than Taraji P. Henson as Vernell Watson, the lover “finer than frog’s hair” in Talk to Me. But that was ten years ago, and at 47 Henson cannot be proud of Proud Mary. She’s still an excellent actor, but our memories of her ace work in Talk to Me, Hidden Figures and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are here stuck in a flush of futility. The maxi-foxy chops are simply no longer there to play this veteran kick-ass, stuck between warring crime mobs in Boston (or is it Bronson?).

If Henson thought Mary would be her crowning showcase, like Pam Grier’s in Jackie Brown, no chance. Director Babak Najafi is no Quentin Tarantino, more like a new Renny Harlin (auteur of Skiptrace, Cliffhanger). He spreads the mulch: an invasive song mix, Danny Glover as an old hood called Pop, a sad street urchin hungry for love, Slavic thugs with accents like Moscow road tar, violence dependent on overcranked editing, dialog rich in lyrics like “What’s with the questions, lady? You a cop?”

Henson tries hard, but often her face says: Nothing I can do for this one. There is the yard sale aroma of desperate picking and poking (three writers each provided a quota of duds). Proud Mary is another case of where the gristle meets the grunge, grievously. Movies keep hugging dead action dolls from the last century, and CGI has not been a salvation.

SALAD (A List)

Ten Crazy Romances to partner Phantom Thread, in order of their arrival: Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage, 1934; Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun, 1946; Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, 1947; Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place, 1950; Ninón Sevilla and Tito Junco, Aventurera, 1950; Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar, 1954; Shelley Winters and Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, 1955; Elke Sommer and Stephen Boyd in The Oscar, 1966; Chloe Webb and Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy, 1986; Linda Riss and Burt Pugach, Crazy Love, 2007. And, of course, the most profound bond: Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) and his beloved bike, in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, 1984.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The key powers of 1941 Hollywood gnashed their teeth over Citizen Kane before its May 1 release. Hearst columnist Louella Parsons insisted that Will Hays’s Motion Picture Association block the film, on the grounds that ‘Under the Code you can’t make a picture about a living person” … Hays: ‘Well, it’s very probable that the picture will have to be withdrawn. It’s a terrible scandal.’ Publicly, however, Hays made no move. One mitigating factor was that (chief censor) Joseph I. Breen claimed that after reading the script, (he felt) the film was not about Hearst.” (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A great film, The Long Goodbye had a tortured release in 1973, one that “was beyond perverse. Chicago got the movie before New York, and critics spread the spectrum (I tooted the loudest). L.A. was chill to one of its finest film portraits. (Actor) Henry Gibson felt that critic Charles Champlin, of the L.A. Times, ‘destroyed the picture in Los Angeles. Oh, he was just pedantically literal.’ Goodbye limped into New York, where Vincent Canby came on board (‘attempts the impossible and pulls it off’), and Pauline Kael raved one of her most enraptured endorsements, high on Altman and Elliott Gould. But most reviews were ambivalent, and The Long Goodbye had a fast farewell in theaters.” (From the Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook or Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

John Wayne visits director Budd Boetticher (right) and Randolph Scott on the set of Seven Men From Now (Batjac Productions, 1956).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 95: 'The Post', 'All the Money in the World'

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Post, All the Money in the World     

This week, two brave women are caught up in power, money and high-level intrigue:

The Post

The Watergate press marvel All the President’s Men (1976) came out just two years after President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. But the 1971 Pentagon Papers crisis, a year before the Watergate break-in, elevated the Washington Post from becalmed mediocrity and laid the foundation for its brave zeal to pursue Nixon almost solo, during Watergate’s early months. That tale has waited 46 years for The Post. The “loser” is again the New York Times, which barely factored in the Watergate film, and now sees The Post celebrate its old adversary right in the title. Although the Times first printed Pentagon Papers revelations, a court order soon blocked continuance and the upstart D.C. paper seized the laurel, crowned by the Supreme Court (pro-paper vote: 6-3).

Steven Spielberg’s film has surefire ’70s trappings and the brusque energy of a big paper in that era (almost steam-punky now: typewriters, rotary phones, pneumatic tubes, linotype machines). Quite a gift for those of us with old ink in the blood. Most people never read the secret, voluminous Pentagon reports that anti-war Daniel Ellsberg stole and released, exposing strategic lies during the Vietnam War. They got the gist from newspapers and TV. Spielberg craftily puts us inside the journalism, though without the gnawing suspense of All the President’s Men. Tom Hanks bunkers into growly-voiced ramrod Ben Bradlee, top Post editor. He never quite equals Jason Robards, Oscar’d for his ’76 Bradlee. More than Robards, he frets about his close friendship with JFK (the movie doesn’t mention Bradlee’s old CIA connections).

Jane Alexander carried a shy, nervous, feminist torch in the older movie, but Spielberg makes his torch a subtle bonfire: Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham, canny but nervous, living in the tragic shadow of her late, brilliant husband, Phil. The bouffant-haired press baroness is often cornered by male editors, lawyers and corporate wheels, and “Kay” is A-OK with her Georgetown supper parties splitting along genteel gender lines after dining. Among the smart touches is a deep shot of Mrs. Bradlee (Sarah Paulson) alone in her kitchen, dish towel in hand, listening intently as Kay Graham confers with her men. Streep distills and projects  the fretful feminism and pressured grace which turned a rather porcelain heiress into a steely, gut-hunch publisher.    

Clearly the film resonates in the era of press-hating Trump, who will someday get his own movie (may I suggest All the President’s Lies?). Overall The Post is a little facile, with rolled-out lessons in law, courage, press rights, gender progress and Nixonian paranoia. Patented Spielberg tactics include Bradlee’s cute daughter selling lemonade to harried newsmen. There is sly dialog foreshadowing the future Watergate storm, but at the end Spielberg chooses to spell it out very clearly. Nixon’s special era has certainly had its due on film. The Post is another stake in the dark heart of Dick.        

All the Money in the World

Director Ridley Scott spent heaps of money on All the Money in the World. It feels like a cable channel special flaunting an A-budget pedigree. Rome is used well, if not at La Dolce Vita or Great Beauty levels. Ruins of the Imperial Forum were shot in a ghostly light, maybe because (says the movie) oil billionaire J. Paul Getty felt he had once lived there as an emperor. Getty certainly had imperial tastes, building a huge Malibu replica of a first century villa to house most of his Greco-Roman collection. Another hilltop museum, with the aura of a shopping mall Acropolis, came after his death (his money refused to die).

The film is a sandwich. The top bread is a “bad old rich guy” story about Getty refusing for months in 1973 to pay a fat but shrinking ransom for his grandson JPG III, kidnapped by Italian radicals and then mobsters. The downside bread is a “poor little rich boy” story, about teen John Paul (appealing Charlie Plummer) in primal hell. During cruel negotiations he is mutilated (right ear severed). Stuck between the bread is not the lad’s father, JPG II (Andrew Buchan), a drugged shell of a man. No, the meaty heart is Michelle Williams as the abducted boy’s mom, Gail. Always wary of Getty Sr., she soon realizes that the money king is Scrooge McSuck, a cold, miserly conniver obsessed with deal-squeezing and tax evasion. Williams achieves a chemical bond of maternal agony and white-knuckled rage at brutal wealth. An ace touch is that, as her will hardens, her speech becomes more manorial, crusty with hauteur.

All the Money had a publicity earthquake when sexual scandal outed and ousted Kevin Spacey, who had finished playing the elder Getty. Old (87) trouper Christopher Plummer stepped in, infallibly. Having portrayed a Vanderbilt, Tolstoy, Kipling, Atahualpa, Nabokov, Scrooge, FDR, Aristotle, Mike Wallace, John Barrymore and even a guy named Shitty, he blithely nails down Getty as a fossil-faced creep, an art enthusiast and people wrecker (he loves a painted baby Jesus more than his own family). Italy, Plummer, Williams, Mark Wahlberg as a Getty fixer, even echoes of Citizen Kane, keep this deeply sad, effectively tabloid show involving. On TV it will look just as expendably expensive.    

SALAD (A List)

20 Impressive Portrayals of Rich People, in order of arrival:  

Walter Huston as Sam Dodsworth, Dodsworth (1936); Marcel Dalio as the marquis, Rules of the Game (1939); Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord, The Philadelphia Story (1940); Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, Citizen Kane (1941); Joseph Cotten as Eugene Morgan, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); Robert Ryan as Smith Ohlrig, Caught (1949); Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard (1950); Orson Welles as Grigori Arkadin, Mr. Arkadin (1955); James Dean as Jett Rink, Giant (1956); Burl Ives as Big Daddy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1957; Burt Lancaster as Prince Salina, The Leopard (1963); Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone, The Godfather (1972); John Huston as Noah Cross, Chinatown (1974); Anthony Quinn as Aristotle Onassis, The Greek Tycoon (1978); Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987); Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bulow, Reversal of Fortune (1990); Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, The Aviator (2004); Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, The Queen (2006); Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, There Will Be Blood (2007); Tommy Lee Jones as Gene McClary, The Company Men (2010), and Warren Beatty as Howard Hughes, Rules Don’t Apply (2016).                        

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

If he is not now remembered for Hamlet, that’s because Orson Welles played the prince at 21 – on radio. The script was “Orson’s first full-length script to be broadcast. He even oversaw the publicity, promising an ‘intimacy of interpretation not possible in stage productions.’ His voice, as radio scholar Bernice W. Kliman wrote, was ‘a remarkable instrument evoking visualization as well as clarifying (his) interpretative choices,’ his whispered asides suggesting ‘interiority or complicity with the audience’.” (Quotes from Patrick McGilligan’s engrossing Young Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The gay specter of possible outing haunted Anthony Perkins for most of his life: “A cruiser since puberty, Tony used studio starlets to beard his affair with Tab Hunter, even as that milkshake Adonis was being tattle-trashed by Confidential magazine. He risked exposure by living near Hunter, and when warned by a studio honcho he said, bravely, ‘But I love him.’ Appraising the bisexual Cary Grant, David Thomson provocatively wrote that ‘you could not be a movie star without having the dream love and allegiance of both the main sexual constituencies,’ and those pressures ‘moved a lot of the men and women in movies towards sexual experiment, bisexuality or gayness.” (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook or Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Joseph (Anthony Perkins) is harried into hell in The Trial (Astor Pictures, 1962; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Edmond Richard).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 94: 'Darkest Hour,' 'Shape of Water' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Darkest Hour and The Shape of Water

Darkest Hour

When the young, scrawny Gary Oldman played Sid Vicious (Sid and Nancy), Joe Orton (Prick Up Your Ears), Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK) and Dracula (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) nobody, but nobody, said “You know, someday this guy will make a great Churchill.” Even after he was a terrific echo of Alec Guinness as George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Winston still seemed way past his horizon.

In Darkest Hour, Oldman is the finest Churchill in films outside documentaries (with all true respect to the Winstons of Albert Finney, Richard Burton, Brendan Gleeson, Timothy Spall, Brian Cox, Michael Gambon and young Simon Ward). He has prosthetic jowls and body pads, a balding dome and a brandy growl that makes you wonder if the actor suckled cognac on the set. Oldman’s Winston has a loving, testing relation with wife Clemmie (Kristin Scott Thomas) – she’s so good we’d welcome more of them together – and a radar feel for his own foibles and vanities. He uses a twinkle without turning cherubic, can be childish to good effect, and declaims the best Churchillean rhetoric since Burton’s. It is true that, in a few brief angles, he looks like little American actor Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre). But only Oldman, not Shawn, could pull off My Dinner with Winston.

Probably 1940 was Britain’s (and Winston’s) finest hour – he said so – but May, 1940, was bleak. As scripted by Anthony McCarten, Joe Wright’s movie (the same Wright so right for directing Pride and Prejudice, so brilliant at staging Dunkirk in Atonement) captures the least merry May in British history. Hitler’s swastika legions seized the Low Countries and France, the British Army was cornered on the Dunkirk beaches, the Royal Navy faced great risk in the Channel, the RAF was short on fighters. And the new PM, favored by few in his own party after years of fierce anti-government speeches, was disliked (at first) even by King George VI. As was only revealed years later, Churchill also faced a coup plot by ex-PM Neville Chamberlain and his fellow appeaser Lord Halifax. Wright is good with parliamentary intrigues. His limiting burden is that Ronald Pickup (Chamberlain) and Stephen Dillane (Halifax) have all the manly, dramatic blood of cadavers fresh from the taxidermist (though bound by silk threads).

There is a key scene on a tube (subway) train that is contrived, perhaps entirely, but is a valid, Capra-class rouser. I doubt that in 1940 Churchill needed instruction on how to give a radio speech. The poor French are like mice looking for a hole, with no De Gaulle in sight. But here, so briskly urgent, is the living storm of one of the supreme crises of modern history. A doughty champion not only rose to the dire occasion but, with his singular voice and spine, gave it the afterglow of Henry V. There are some good digital models, and neat devices (like the typeface close-up invented for Citizen Kane), and touching work by Ben Mendelsohn as King George and Lily James as Churchill’s new secretary. But Darkest Hour follows its star. At 59, Oldman plays a grand old (65) man so movingly human, so cherishably complex, so stirringly heroic.

The Shape of Water

Sally Hawkins is no movie beauty, but the courage of her talent is beautiful to see in Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water. How many actors in one movie have used sign language eloquently, wittily saluted Ginger Rogers and Shirley Temple, pulled off a gorgeous nude scene, and wrung our emotions? Hawkins does, with her best work since Happy-Go-Lucky. Del Toro, the Mexican sensualist of densely gothic atmosphere, recovers the magic of his early Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. My modest reservations matter little, because The Shape of Water is so frequently engrossing.

Elisa (Hawkins), an orphaned mute, lives with her protector, the gay commercial artist Giles (Richard Jenkins, ace as usual). Their New York apartment is above a movie theater, the Orpheum, currently showing two forgettables: The Story of Ruth (1960) and Mardi Gras (1958). But the time seems more the earlier Cold War era – that is, the fright time of Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). Elisa works on the clean-up crew at a secret, massive lab where the control freak is security boss Strickland (Michael Shannon, whose face always suggests Frankenstein fun). Sadist Strickland loves tormenting a scaly amphibian from South America. It looks like 1954’s famous lagoon critter, apart from a lower, human face reminiscent of Keir Dullea. Inevitably, needy Elisa bonds with the he-beast. So does the key scientist (Nigel Bennett), a Soviet mole tipping off Moscow. Elisa’s janitor chum Zelda (Octavia Spencer) gives her sassy support.

The film is often lubriciously wet, its aquatic ambience recalling M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water. It is lit by Hawkins’s big eyes, as the trapped creature unleashes Elisa’s hunger for dreamy release from muteness and cramped living. Del Toro’s frisky facets include an Astaire-Rogers salute, little Shirley and Bojangles, Carmen Miranda, Alice Faye and shiver bits like Strickland’s “I bet I could make you squawk a little.” The movie is a feast of odds (very) and ends (exotic), superbly designed, cast and directed. The creature’s human mouth zone might be an error, as it makes us think of an actor wearing a sea-lizard suit (the actor is Doug Jones – not the one just elected U.S. senator in Alabama).

Like many imaginative directors using a fat budget and a go-for-broke story, Del Toro can spill over a bit (so did Todd Haynes in his impressively bravura Wonderstruck). This kind of fairy-goth tale would benefit from running shorter, and Del Toro tends to scramble our response wires when he rapidly moves from a breezy Fred & Ginger salute to a grim torture scene. But to miss this elegant entertainment, and Hawkins, would be a loss and a mistake.

SALAD (A List)

Ten Absorbing Films About Winston Churchill:

The Finest Hours (1964), starring Churchill; Young Winston (1972), starring Simon Ward; The Gathering Storm (1974), starring Richard Burton; The Gathering Storm (2002), starring Albert Finney; Churchill’s Bodyguard (2005), series starting Churchill and Walter Thompson; Into the Storm (2008), starring Brendan Gleeson; Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny (2010), starring Churchill; Churchill’s Secret (2016), starring Michael Gambon; Churchill (2017), starring Brian Cox, and Darkest Hour (2017), starring Gary Oldman.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The unfinished but eventually fabled Latin American travel film It’s All True, for which a Brazilian fisherman hero accidentally drowned in 1942, haunted Welles. While acting Rochester in Jane Eyre (1943) he almost got Fox to buy the RKO footage, “so that I would be allowed to cut and finish it, then that fell through … It would have been quite commercial in its time, not now. But it never worked. I tried everything. I was near it, near it … and began a pattern of trying to finish pictures which has plagued me ever since.” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In the years after Paris, Texas (1984), Harry Dean Stanton “became the hipster hermit on the hill. Free of tinsel in Tinseltown, he came down from Mulholland Drive to sing in small clubs or do modest roles. He finished his gig in HBO’s Big Love by crooning ‘Canción Mixteca.’ He inspired Debbie Harry’s ‘I Want That Man,’ the lyrics including ‘I want to dance with Harry Dean Stanton …’ And he appeared briefly in David Lynch’s great film The Straight Story.” After wrapping up his starring role in Lucky with another Mexican song, Harry Dean at 91 in L.A.. on Sept. 15. (Quote from the Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, out on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Harry Dean Stanton as Lyle Straight in The Straight Story (Buena Vista Pictures, 1999; director David Lynch, cinematographer Freddie Francis).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 93: 'Disaster Artist,' Best 12 (+1) Movies of 2017

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of The Disaster Artist

As usual, Noel Coward said it best: “Strange how potent cheap music is.” But Sir Noel paid meager attention to cheap movies, and I don’t mean just low-budget junk. Some of the cheesiest ones cost quite a bundle, like Independence Day, Sahara (the McConaughey, not the Bogart), Nine, Australia and Star! – the last even had Daniel Massey playing Noel Coward. The campy truth is that many movie fans develop an itch in the armpit of their taste, and for really awful films we must scratch.

Such a turd flambé is The Room, which star, director, writer, producer Tommy Wiseau gave to the world at a “glamorous” L.A. premiere in 2003. After many viewers left early, the theater posted a No Refunds sign. But then came the miracle: name talents like James Franco and Seth Rogen touted their tortured fascination. A cult was born. The Room has fan sites, midnight giggle shows and The Disaster Artist, a 2013 memoir by Wiseau partner and co-star Greg Sestero. Probably The Room has earned back its reputed $6 million cost (Wiseau seems to have lavish private funds, and maybe some shady investors).

The title location is the San Francisco seduction apartment of Johnny (Wiseau), where stagey, almost painted lighting flatters lamps and curtains but leaves actors stranded in a dead zone of helpless choices. Johnny is a glowering, goth-haired “banker” whose Baltic or Balkan accent often dips into gibberish. To borrow the meat metaphor (“filet Fane”) applied to Stephen Boyd’s rotten actor in The Oscar, Johnny is Polish sausage aspiring to beef jerky. With his cyber-stiff moves and slugged diction, he personifies failure, but pretty-boy Mark (Sestero) is entranced by Johnny’s ego plumage. Their kinky bond is so adhesive that the woman they both “love” is driven to nymphomania, or maybe just mindless panic. The plot seems extruded from an Enigma machine on another planet, and dreary, soft-porn episodes emphasize Tommy/Johnny’s bulging meat magnet, his rump. There is a distinct odor of De Niro’s Jake La Motta, faking Brando schtick in Raging Bull.

Using Sestero’s book James Franco has made The Disaster Artist. He stars as Wiseau, and his younger brother Dave plays Sestero. Dave echoes James’s early fame playing James “You’re tearing me apart!” Dean, in a 2001 TV film. In a bravura sibling transfer, James has given primal Dean fever to Dave, while he discharges the smoldering Brandonic moods and “Stella!” blasts. The Disaster Artist is a somewhat satirical re-shoot of The Room, plus background scenes rich in gaudy, motivational wallpaper. James Franco, reaching for kamikaze kicks (and kitsch), takes bold chances. His Tommy is a quasi-Brando Quasimodo, festeringly insecure, short on talent but also canny. Sensing his vanity flop’s rescue by slumming hipsters, Wiseau declared it an intentional black comedy. In essence he jumped to Late Shatner cash-in status, without ever achieving Star Trek.

Tommy, in both Wiseau and Franco modes, lacks the naïve charm of Johnny Depp in Ed Wood, and the funny complexity of Martin Landau’s Lugosi in that film. But the Francos rocket up on their vivid arc of brotherly fervency, and most of the game cast rises with them (not Seth Rogen, doing his usual, hey-whatever snarks). The Disaster Artist has road kill charisma. It is like a craftier version of gonzo actor Timothy Carey’s ludicrous ego trip The World’s Greatest Sinner. So go ahead, scratch that itch! We don’t get low-down highs like this very often.  

   

SALAD (A List)

My Dozen Best (plus One) Movie Experiences Found in 2017, in loose order of personal preference:

1. The Florida Project – Sean Baker’s tough, entirely humane vision of desperate lives in a big, purple motel in Disney’s shadow. It pivots on wow kid Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite as her mom and, at his most appealing,  manager Willem Dafoe (see Nosh 88).

2. Jackie – Chilean maestro Pablo Larrain made the most personally felt film about the JFK tragedy, capturing it through superb Natalie Portman’s angry, anguished Jacqueline (Nosh 49).

3. Wind River – Fist-faced Jeremy Renner reaches expressive apex as a federal tracker solving a Montana reservation murder case, in Taylor Sheridan’s superbly rooted, emotionally searing neo-Western (Nosh 78).

4. Norman – The nuances Richard Gere opens up as a glib schmoozer, finding his Jewish soul, is a New York hustle far beyond Trump and Madoff. Joseph Cedar wrote and directed expertly (Nosh 66).

5. Lady Bird – A superb cluster of female performances across generations (Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Lois Smith) centers on a young woman’s reach for independence, directed and written by Greta Gerwig as a deep soaper, bubbling with wit and revelation (Nosh 90).

6. Paterson – Inspired by his life and route, a New Jersey bus driver (Adam Driver) writes subtle poems. The cinematic poetry is Jim Jarmusch’s feather-fine command of every subtle sight, mood and moment (Nosh 56).
7. Neruda – Another poet’s tale. Chilean master Pablo Neruda is depicted in radical youth by Luis Ghecco, with Gael García Bernal his fascist pursuer, in one more marvel from director Pablo Larrain (Nosh 60).

8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Plenty of Heartland heartlessness, violence, sneaky twists in the Trumpian red zone. Actors Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, etc., give real grace to Martin McDonaugh’s crypto-Lynchean vision of a town where revenge is a dish best served hot (Nosh 90).

9. Hidden Figures – Three black women of science (ace actors: Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson) get our young space program off the launch pad in Theodore Melfi’s rousing lesson in history, math and sisterly soul (Nosh 48).

10. Lucky – Harry Dean Stanton left as a true star at 91, exiting with amusing, acerbic grace in John Carroll Lynch’s salute that includes a lovely Mexican song from HDS (Nosh 86).

11. A Quiet Passion – Another poet, no less than Emily Dickinson. English master stylist Terence Davies’s austerely deep view of her Amherst milieu and discrete passions let Cynthia Nixon, as Emily, top her long career (Nosh 67).

12. Faces Places – Old (88) auteur AgnesVarda chalks up another marvel, touring France with whimsical photo-site artist JR. It is a bright, surprising, satisfying trip (Nosh 84).

And….

13. The Disaster Artist – See the stunned review above.

Also definitely worth my time, and I hope yours: The Big Sick (Nosh 72), Chasing Train (68), Chavela (91), Chuck (66), Columbus (78), Fences (53), The Glass Castle (76), I Am Not Your Negro (55), I, Daniel Blake (70), Julieta (61), Kedi (58), LBJ (87), Letters From Baghdad (74), Lion (48),  Logan Lucky (77), Marie Curie (74), Neither Wolf Nor Dog (81), The Red Turtle (59), Take Every Wave (87), Wonder Woman (69) and Wonderstruck (89).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is away this week to South America, looking again for the fabled lost print of The Magnificent Ambersons. But did Che Guevara find it in Bolivia?

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Raising money to make The Producers, about a Broadway hustler overselling investment shares in a new show, Mel Brooks “probably didn’t know of an obscure precedent. Appraising Orson Welles’s Othello, Frank Brady states that Welles ‘sold more than 100 percent of the film to sundry investors, but the financial machinations were so complicated that it is difficult to ascertain exactly how much was sold to whom, and probably Orson lost track himself.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers 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.

Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) explodes his Brando ammo in The Room (Wiseu-Films 2003; director Tommy Wiseau, cinematographer Todd Barron).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.