Nosh 99: 'Black Panther,' 'Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool'

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Black Panther and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.

Black Panther

Set largely in Wakanda, an African El Dorado, Black Panther tells of fierce rivalry between the new King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and his baiting challenger (Michael B. Jordan). The hidden realm is both rich and ecological, tribal and high-tech, royal and democratic, leafy-green and cyber-metallic. Don’t turn to history or archeology or Alex Haley for roots. This extravaganza has an archive of back-story, including the original comic book, a 2010 animated series, updates by Te-Nehisi Coates and a 2016 Marvel movie (Captain America: Civil War) where Boseman had a romping audition for his Wakandan destiny.

A lot of press has greeted this show as if it were an overdue Oprah opera, as if black America (and Africa?) finally had a film equivalent of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Director Ryan Coogler employs the solid conviction he brought to Creed and Fruitvale Station. Boseman and Jordan are manfully robust leaders. Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker and Lupita Nyong’o have good strut time. Colorful effects are so dazzling that the movie is its own parade, and the New York Times even had a giddy feature on the lavish, stagey hairstyles (sort of the Vidal Sassoon approach to “black lives matter”). There is general rejoicing, though I add a tiny ribbon of pathos: Eartha Kitt died nine years before she could have purred and preened as Wakandan royalty.

No doubt this is a totem of racial pride, but the black story has a green virus: Marvel money fever. Now a movie empire, still using its comics-born brain, the Marvel machine nearly always falls back on over-used ideas, a lavish mash of hash. So we find a plot hectic with obvious motivations; a car chase we’ve seen in countless mutations; cross-pollination with past and coming movies; lifts from other franchises (a weapons scene is straight outta Bond, not Compton); superheroes with bionic muscles but cardboard dialog; wow women holding statuesque poses; the villain feasting on sadistic fun – here that’s Andy Serkis as the racist British psycho Klaue (claw), hailing his own mayhem as “awesome!”

A white critic should not be too skeptical about a production that may inspire many a black child. After all, at 8 I thrilled to a re-release of King Solomon’s Mines and found tall, majestic Siriaque (as Umpoba, returning king of the lofty Watusi) even more excitingly heroic than “great white hunter” Stewart Granger. That 1950 adventure movie has dated attitudes (notably re: Deborah Kerr). But its green horizons still beckon, and it never lays out a red carpet for gilded purple kitsch.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

In her prime time, few actresses had a better decade than Gloria Grahame: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Crossfire (’47), immortal with Bogart in In a Lonely Place (’50), The Bad and the Beautiful (her loveable ditz won a supporting Oscar, ’52), The Greatest Show on Earth (’52), Sudden Fear (’52), the Fritz Lang/Glenn Ford noirs The Big Heat (’53) and Human Desire (’54), and a funny flip of image: Ado Annie in Oklahoma! (’55). Consider also the imposing first decade of Annette Bening: superb as Myra in The Grifters (1990), then ace in Postcards From the Edge (’90), Bugsy (’91), Guilty by Suspicion (’91), Richard III (’95), The American President (’95), Mars Attacks! (’96) and American Beauty (’99).

I would give Grahame the edge, though Bening has had a saner life and a good marriage (she bagged The Beatty!), while Grahame had five flops. Now a karmic kiss has brought these singular beauties together. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is based on a fond memoir by Pete Turner, an English actor selling furniture when he met Grahame, who was doing a play in Britain near her life’s end. Jamie Bell may never match the boyish sensation of his Billy Elliot, but this layered movie proves he was no fluke. He supports Bening’s Gloria scene by scene, with genuine feeling and tact.

For Bening, Grahame is a capstone role, ripe in physical and emotive courage. She brings out Gloria’s nerve-strung moods without making her a tabloid neurotic. She underplays Gloria’s obsession with her upper lip which led to bad plastic surgeries, but we get the insecurities of a woman both fragile and forceful. Gloria and young Pete had a love affair from 1979 to 1981, and their story is no quaint footnote to Sunset Boulevard or Sweet Bird of Youth. It has the sweat and heat of sexual romance. And there is pathos. Grahame was dying of cancer, wouldn’t admit it, invited Pete to America, and later fled back to Liverpool as a refuge.

Pete’s parents are wonderfully earthbound Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham (who looks back at movie Gloria and smiles with relish: “You knew you’d get sore lips walking her home”). Vanessa Redgrave has a plummy scene as Gloria’s actress mother, reciting from Shakespeare’s Richard II (Gloria’s funny compliment: “Yeah, the Bard’s the nuts, mom”). Director Paul McGuigan polishes grace notes, doesn’t oversell sentiment or suffering, and allows Bening, an innately witty talent, to find the spit and spark in Gloria. Urszula Pontikos’s superbly lighted imagery, using a tight budget, resonates Liverpool, Hollywood and New York without sudsy nostalgia. While there may be overall a slightly gauzy scrim of memory, every soul texture is truthful.

Long ago the brilliant essayist Robert Warshow wrote that no one should leave their self out of the movies that matter. Grahame’s father was an architect (so was mine), and Gloria’s life span (1923-81) ran parallel to my father’s. Gloria’s gutsy, stoical finish reminds me of my mother’s last phase, three years earlier. Bening, who in early scenes has flashes of Monroe’s breathy sexiness, by the end looks more like haggard Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden. It is a small crime that Bening and Bell are not up for Oscars, but never mind. It’s the movie that matters.

SALAD (A List)

Fifteen Terrific Female Noir Performances:

Mary Astor as Brigid in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis in Double Indemnity (1944), Ann Savage as Vera in Detour (1945), Jane Greer as Kathie in Out of the Past (1947), Agnes Moorehead as Madge in Dark Passage (1947), Gloria Grahame as Laurel in In a Lonely Place (1950), Ida Lupino as Mary in On Dangerous Ground (1951), Thelma Ritter as Moe in Pickup on South Street (1953), Marie Windsor as Sherry in The Killing (1956), Kim Novak as Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo (1958), Nina van Pallandt as Eileen in The Long Goodbye (1973), Faye Dunaway as Evelyn in Chinatown (1974), Lily Tomlin as Margo in The Late Show (1975), Annette Bening as Myra in The Grifters (1990), Kim Basinger as Lynn in L.A. Confidential (1997).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though an outspoken racial progressive, Orson Welles creatively admired film’s founding pioneer D.W. Griffith, whose biggest hit was the epochal (and racist) Birth of a Nation. He met him once, while making Citizen Kane, offering admiration but “uncharacteristically hemming and hawing.” They “stared at each other across a hopeless abyss … ‘There was no place for Griffith in the film industry by 1940,’ Welles said years later. ‘He was an exile in his own town, a prophet without honor, an artist without work. No wonder he hated me.” (Quotes from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Matthew McConaughey made a big jump forward with 2013’s Arkansas river story Mud, written for him by director Jeff Nichols. With teen Tye Sheridan he had “a virtual blood transfusion of feeling. One of the best boy performances, ever, matches up with film’s best man-in-nature performance since Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, (and) the river seems to rise with Mud’s emotions.” (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.

Glenn Ford confronts the full-frontal Gloria Grahame in Human Desire (Columbia Pictures, 1954; director Fritz Lang, cinematographer Burnett Guffey).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 98: 'The 15:17 to Paris,' 'I,Tonya' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The 15:17 to Paris and I, Tonya.

The 15:17 to Paris

In life, the ratio of banality (our daily ration) to heroism (our rare hero) is very high. Clint Eastwood respects that, in his padded but moving The 15:17 to Paris (that’s 3:17 p.m). It is about the Aug. 21, 2015 episode on a French train terrorized by a fanatic, Ayoub El Khazzani (acted by Ray Corasani as a generic, nut-eyed maniac). Three young Americans with military training (skin-headed Spencer Stone was an active USAF staff sergeant), further bound by boyhood friendship in Sacramento, rose to the occasion by disarming the gun-wielding villain and rescuing a severely injured civilian. It’s all over in about ten well-staged minutes, with two bits of curious foreshadowing: Stone had felt that life was “catapulting” him to a special event, and one guy’s mother talked of hearing God’s vague promise.

Eastwood probably felt he had to include such stuff, as part of the cinema verité approach defined by casting Stone, Alek Skaulatos and Anthony Sadler as themselves. Hired actors, including kids and teens cast as the heroes in youth, plus their moms and various other figures, are TV standard-issue, but that eases the burden on  the amateur stars (playing yourself is no ticket to Brando). They are likeable, all-American dudes who say “man” a lot, enjoy beer and wine, pizza and smiling women. Only Stone, a sort of apprentice Woody Harrelson, has much camera charisma. Their shared, zip-zap tour of Europe might as well be luggage labels, with Venice a rush of selfie shots, Rome overlaid by a kitsch version of “Volare,” and a little wit in Berlin – the perky guide who shows them the marker for Hitler’s bunker strides away chirping “Springtime for Hitler.”

There are brief flashes of coming mayhem, which arrives with credible power and compensates for flat stretches, like two of the pals being taken out of public school (after a teacher presses meds  as a quick-fix for ADD problems) and put in a Christian school. However factual, some elements have an implied agenda (only Christians and the military can shape “real” men). Eastwood, who gave one of the dumbest speeches ever at a Republican convention (which is really saying something), saves the heart-grab for last: the classy ceremony where President Francois Hollande of France gives the three Americans the Legion of Honor. It’s like a splendid echo of 1944 and ’45, when most of the French were thrilled to see Americans. And a deft rebuke to the current, lousy phase, with France so high on Trump’s f-you list.

I, Tonya

A sharp, speeding skate blade cuts into ice less than an inch deep. I, Tonya cuts about that deeply into its subject (admittedly, a shallow one). It shows Tonya Harding, whose 1990s skating career was ruined by scandal, as a gifted but miserable athlete lost among losers. The film stacks its social analysis like igloo blocks. Tonya, from a scratch-patch section of Portland, Oregon, is her mother’s “fifth child, by husband No. 4.” Her Vegas-babe skating offends judges who have a damsel princess ideal of what makes a champion. Tonya likes working on motors, flaunts epaulettes of rebellion, and rocks on the ice to ZZ Top (after a more delicate girl swans to Vivaldi). Adored by some, reviled by others as white trash, Tonya is queen of the dangerous triple axel jump.

Flashback to childhood: dorky dad shoots rabbits for meat, giving tiny Tonya the fur for costumes. He soon exits, leaving the adorable doll with mom, played by Allison Janney as a chain-smoking witch of control mania. Made-up homelier than worn linoleum, with a cold laser stare and a nail-gun voice that could make a drill instructor weep for mercy, Janney brings deadpan precision  to her snarky f-bombs. She is up for an Oscar. So is Margo Robbie as pretty, rage-packed Tonya, who falls into the sexy but then abusive arms of a preening dodo, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan). Mom’s disgust achieves Zen clarity: “You fuck dumb, you don’t marry dumb.” Jeff comes with a fat bonus: conspiracy addict Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser), a slob Rupert Pupkin with G. Gordon Liddy aspirations. Shawn’s insight on undercover work is one that John Le Carré never considered: “Remember, if your mind is a blank, nobody can pick up your vibes.”

Nudged along by Jeff, Shawn and a cohort contrived the insane ambush of Tonya’s rival, picture-perfect skater Nancy Kerrigan, given a wicked leg blow before the 1994 Winter Olympics. Director Craig Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers reach for elliptical irony, raising but also smudging how much Tonya knew. The story melts into the media slush of an Geraldo Rivera “investigation.” Some confiding close-ups appear in reduced frames, surrounded by black, evidently a gift to fans of square peepholes. I, Tonya has no evolving “I” or “we,” just a floating crap game of pathetic people making bad choices without imagination. Inside this cranked-up wallow, a new Capades show struggles to be born: Duh on Ice.

SALAD (A List)

Movies with Outstanding Train Sequences:

The General (Buster Keaton, 1926), Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934), The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock. 1938), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952), Daybreak Express (D.A. Pennebaker, 1958), North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), Flame Over India (J. Lee Thompson, 1959), High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963), The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964), The Incident (Larry Peerce, 1967), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1968), Emperor of the North (Robert Aldrich, 1973), Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974), The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007) and Lion (Garth Davis, 2016). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson expostulated on why he preferred Jack Lemmon’s TV performance, as flop comedian Archie Rice in The Entertainer, to Laurence Olivier’s more acclaimed stage original: “Larry can’t bear to fail, even if he’s supposed to fail. So when he played the comic onstage, he played for real laughs from the audience, instead of giving a feeling that he was in a half-empty theater where nobody was laughing … Success to Larry demanded being an effective comedian, even though it made no sense!” (Welles to Henry Jaglom, and Lemmon, in Jaglom’s My Lunches With Orson. To be fair, Olivier got a little more flop sweat into Tony Richardson’s movie of the play.)   

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Many intro “scrolls” for movies are trite filler, but if more people, including critics, had seriously absorbed the one for Steven Shainberg’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus in 2006, they wouldn’t have fallen into dull, literal rejection of his poetic film: “This is a film about Diane Arbus, but it is not a historical biography. Arbus, who lived from 1923 to 1971, is considered by many to be one of the greatest artists of the 20^th century … What you are about to see is a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her extraordinary path.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur 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.

Johnny (Buster Keaton) is cinema’s definitive train man, in The General (1926; director Buster Keaton, with Clyde Bruckman; cameramen Bert Haines, Dev Jennings).  

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 97: 'Call Me by Your Name' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

Note: Nosh 98 will appear on Friday, Feb. 16.

APPETIZER: Review of Call Me by Your Name

My projection candle did not burn to see Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name. His elegant I Am Love was Italo-crafted to flaunt an upscale erotic bravura (it even had sexy prawns). A Bigger Splash emitted an earthier heat, with Ralph Fiennes ripping around like a jolly, boozed Bacchus. The trailer for Call Me has a languorous, voyeuristic emphasis that made me think “Here we go again, back to the naughty old oo-la-la.” Back to when imported films winked and peeped European skin, the genuinely adult ones trailing veils of cultural knowingness. Most American cities had one or two theaters that survived simply by getting one or two such movies a year.

The old woo revives in this film, but Call Me is also drawing audiences with genuine shadings and subtleties. It surpasses the coffee table va-voom of I Am Love and the goaty, Club Med gusto of A Bigger Splash. The script, by the late James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel, has Ivory’s trademarks: literary textures, lofty tourism and a pensive feel for time folding into nostalgia. It is a coming-of-age story set in 1983, about slender Elio (Timothée Chalomet), a brainy pianist and, at 17, still sexually a wavering, quivering reed. His expat father is an esteemed classics professor, who each summer invites a star student to spend the season with his family at their northern Italian villa. The Perlmans are demurely Jewish. Or as Elio’s elegant French mother (Amira Casar) puts it, with a smile, “Jews of discretion.”

Not so discretely Euro-cultural. Languages flit like glib crickets above elegantly rustic meals at the old villa, as servants quietly hover. It’s fine when Dad and the guest student display their etymological savvy. It is charming in a showy way when Elio performs Bach in the manner of Lizst, then the Lizst version a la Busoni. It’s a bit much when gracious Mom translates an old French tale from German into English, milking  every nuance. The cultural climax is Dad taking Elio and the grad student to see a Greco-Roman statue of a nude wrestler, being pulled from a lake. It’s time-trip magic, like the ancient rooms uncovered in Fellini’s Roma. Fans of kitsch archeology may recall Boy on a Dolphin (1957), starring Alan Ladd, Sophia Loren and a sexy Greek statue liberated from the Aegean.

Elio is a boy riding the dolphin of emergence. The student, the older Oliver (Armie Hammer), could be a whale of a ride. The tall, blonde American has the Mr. Malibu looks of a surfing Apollo. To his credit, Hammer doesn’t simply play a cool, knowing seducer. Though deeply stirred, he tries to push back the teen’s impulsive gambits with “I want to be good” (mainly as a guest, not as a stud). Inevitably he finds Elio irresistible. The movie is compulsively erectile. Half of it is simply (but sensitively) foreplay – for a love that may not speak its name but will certainly find sexy translation. After so much build-up the sex is less than fireworks, but a midsummer’s love has been born. And the emotions ring true at every step.

The photography, playing freely with light and focus, is a floating fresco of warm Italian walls and fields and summer heat, with ripe fruit, fat flies and cool water. Pretty girls ogle Elio, who is like a rebirth of Donatello’s David. One fair lass is used by Elio like a sexual merit badge, but he is caught in the coils of that old fascination enshrined by Plato, which the Victorians called “Greek love.” Timothée Chalamet’s vain but self-doubting, bright but immature Elio gives the story a humming sincerity within its erotic buzz. There is nothing new about the gay/straight tensions, nor the film’s bouquet basket of multiculturalism, yet the young American actor (now 22, of French parentage) fills the movie’s heart, and has won a deserved Oscar nomination.

Every generation needs its own youth, its own films. It would be silly to expect many of this lusty reverie’s young fans to know about the derivations that pour into it: the exquisite, tragic take on a rich Jewish-Italian family in De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis; the eroticized family politics of Malle’s Murmur of the Heart; the disturbingly intimate Roman eroticism in Bertolucci’s La Luna and the fascistic sublimation of homoeroticism in his The Conformist. A remark about change echoes the central idea in Visconti’s The Leopard, while the heartfelt pathos of trapped identity has roots in Ivory’s Maurice and Scola’s A Special Day. Call Me by Your Name swans its moods and is almost comically teasing. But it is also a movingly human story of desire, love and friendship, right through the final remarks of the caring father (excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) and a great shot of Elio, a boy who can now find his maturity from real experience.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Remarkable Coming-of-Age Performances: Katharine Hepburn as Alice in Alice Adams, 1935; Julie Harris as Frankie in A Member of the Wedding, 1952; James Dean as Cal in East of Eden, 1955; Anthony Perkins as Josh in Friendly Persuasion, 1956; Carroll Baker as Baby in Baby Doll, 1956; Helen Mirren as Cora in Age of Consent, 1969; Benoit Ferreaux as Laurent in Murmur of the Heart, 1970; Timothy Bottoms as Sonny in The Last Picture Show, 1971; Molly Ringwald as Andie in Pretty in Pink, 1986; Kate Winslet as Rose in Titanic, 1997; Alice Teghil as Caterina in Caterina in the Big City, 2012, and Tye Sheridan as Ellis in Mud, 2013. (Photo above: artist James Mason makes a sand sculpture of Helen Mirren in Age of Consent.)

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

While Touch of Evil (1958) can be seen as prescient of the later binge of goth-horror shockers, also previewed by Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it has Welles’s charged, corkscrewing mix of different styles, periods and genres: “Welles was able to give life to expressionist theatrics when a great many movies were shot on location, and when dramatists like Chayefsky and Inge were praised for their ‘realism.’ In a sense, Touch is the last flowering of artful crime melodrama from the ‘40s, a style that survives in our own day in the form of nostalgic imitations. Debased as (its) world is, the actors seem driven by beautiful demons, the shadowy rooms and buildings retain a certain voluptuous romanticism … Perhaps because he has never taken thrillers very seriously, Welles exaggerated everything to the point of absurdity.” (From James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Quentin Tarantino exposes and exploits words with an Elizabethan (and black) succulence. He delves, noted Stanley Crouch, into ‘the artistic challenges of the many miscegenations that shape the goulash of American culture,’ and by his skill ‘the human nuances and surprises in the writing provide fresh alternatives of meaning, as they render a grittier, more relaxed integration (rarely found) in American films.’ Tarantino seems to have been ‘born knowing.’” (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.

Gangly teen Laurent (Benoit Ferreaux) meets a girl at a clinic in Le Soufflé au Couer (Murmur of the Heart; Palomar, 1971, director Louis Malle, cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.