Nosh 100: 'Annihilation' and Oscars Predictions

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Annihilation

Any movie called Annihilation is, in today’s market, baited for the boys (and man-boys) hooked on violent video games.A better title for this remarkable sci-horror vision would be Mutation. Or Metamorphosis, with ancestral credit to the great Ovid – there is something Ovidean in the fluency and frequent magic of Alex Garland’s film.

As Lena, a genetic biologist with military training, now widowed, Natalie Portman delivers a nerve-strung, subtle performance that rivals her great work as Mrs. Kennedy in Jackie and surpasses her Oscar’d work in Black Swan. The husband was actually on a secret military op to our Dixie coast, where among the pines and mangroves something alien is growing, not a UFO, more like a MST (Mama Space Tumor). It has already absorbed and mutated much of a county. At the edges it has the drippy, rainbow candle glow of a really rich Sixties head-trip. It gets called The Shimmer, and nobody can shimmy into its fecund interior like an all-female commando team. Gina Rodriguez flaunts fem-machisma power. Tessa Thompson is a softer, dreamy soul. Scientist Lena, already heartbroken, is along for the very dangerous mission.

The team leader is Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), now 56 but still venting that rebel-hippie vibe which often made her seem like a Sixties ambassador to movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Ventress packs some tough attitude, sadly little help against the grisly critters that Garland (Ex Machina) and adapter-novelist Jeff VandorMeer mete out at intervals. One seems to be a vile tapeworm, another a hellish sloth-bear, but Annihiliation is better than its shockers. It has mood, suspense, a foreboding that seems to arise from both inside and out. The best aspect, along with Portman, is that the manner and method exactly fit the themes. The film seems to be sprouting and morphing like a fertile dream of, yes, annihilation.

Any viable movie lover can spot the derivation sources, given a new shimmer of bravura gloss and grip, from Alien, The Matrix, Predator, Avatar, Solaris, the 1979 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, even arty spores wafting in from sensual obscurities like Dreamchild and Till Human Voices Wake Us. The film is a sexy fatalist, viscerally sensual and morbidly daring. Yes, the albino deer with flowering antlers are a bit Disney. There is not enough sustained violence for the burning-meat audience, and the studio seems to be wobbling the release. But Annihilation is a full-made thing, and it suffuses our troubled imagination.  

SALAD (A List)

My Choices For the Oscars (the show airs Sunday; please, no wagering):

1. BEST FILM

    The Nominees: Call Me by Your Name, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Get Out, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

    My Favorite: Lady Bird.

    Best Not Nominated: The Florida Project.

    Will Win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

2. DIRECTOR

    The Nominees: Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread; Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water; Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird; Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk; Jordan Peele, Get Out.

    My Favorite: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird.

    Best Not Nominated: Sean Baker, The Florida Project.

    Will Win: Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water.

    

3. ACTOR

    The Nominees: Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name; Daniel Day Lewis, Phantom Thread; Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out; Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour; Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

    My Favorite: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour.

    Best Not Nominated: Richard Gere, Norman.

    Will Win: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour.

4. ACTRESS

    The Nominees: Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water; Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside …; Margot Robbie, I, Tonya; Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird; Meryl Streep, The Post.

    My Favorite: Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird.

    Best Not Nominated: Annette Bening, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.

    Will Win: Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird.

5. SUPPORTING ACTOR

    The Nominees: Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project; Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside …; Richard Jennings, The Shape of Water; Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World; Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside …

    My Favorite: Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project, (though he was the lead actor).

    Best Not Nominated: Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me by Your Name.

    Will Win: Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside …

6. SUPPORTING ACTRESS

    The Nominees: Mary J. Bilge, Mudbound; Allison Janney, I, Tonya; Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread; Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird; Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water.

    My Favorite: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird.

    Best Not Nominated: Brooklynn Prince, The Florida Project.   

    Will Win: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of the master builders of Citizen Kane was little-known Maurice Seiderman from New York theater, the make-up artist who aged Kane (Welles) from his 20s into a bloated fossil pushing 80, including the fabled time transitions in the breakfast montage.  “I never looked as young as that,’ said Welles of his make-up at age 25. ‘The idea was to look very young indeed, in fact younger than anyone could look.’ He was self-conscious about (as he said) ‘that terrible round moon face’ … ‘Notice how Orson either never smiles on camera,’ Joseph Cotten told writer Gore Vidal, ‘or if he has to, sucks in his cheeks so as not to look like a Halloween pumpkin.” (Quotes from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As radical contrast to The Cruise, “consider a counter-cruise: Martin Clary’s Mid-Manhattan, a big 1929 booster book for a property owners and merchants’s association. It smugly radiates what Salvador Dalí called the ‘pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash.’ The lavish text, classy photos, ‘dignified’ ads and solemn faces of ‘men who have learned the true worth of cooperation’ honor that Mammon god who ‘welcomes the worthwhile’ and ‘exterminates the worthless.’ Weeks later, the Great Crash made their fraternal penthouse fall down the air shaft, with a great shattering of idolatry.” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter in 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.

Hugh Griffith and Charlton Heston each won Oscars for Ben-Hur (MGM, 1959; director William Wyler, cinematographer Robert L. Surtees).

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