Nosh 107: 'A Quiet Place' and Andy Goldsworthy

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

Note: Nosh 108 will appear on Friday, May 11.

APPETIZER: Reviews of A Quiet Place and Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy.

A Quiet Place

Not until 37 minutes into the film does a human speak in normal volume in A Quiet Place. Until then, just sign language and whispers, along with hushed silence and tip-toe walking. It’s a world where speaking normally can make a scaly, leaping alien eat you alive. It’s Upstate New York, with few people still visible (eaten, or maybe trembling in the last of Nelson Rockefeller’s Cold War atom-bomb shelters). Lee (John Krasinski) and wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s actual spouse) and their kids are so vulnerably in harm’s way. Their youngest boy was devoured by a creep after brief, childish noise.

Krasinski directed, scripting with two other writers. Their work, a sort of Zen Amish Alien, is one of the most intimate and nerve-taunting of spook movies. Family values are packed into every fearful step and glance, each furtive gesture. The tensions widen in Blunt’s wonderful eyes (Krasinski, bushy-bearded, is also a fine eye actor). There is a wonderfully worried son (Noah Jupe), and a bright, gutsy daughter (Millicent Simmons) whose fear of the beasts merges with her anxiety that Lee loves her a bit less than the boys. Gender tropes achieve stark definition when Dad, clutching a rifle rather forlornly, looks for the lost kids while Mom, in advanced pregnancy but refusing to scream, must deal with a vicious critter in the house.

The film is beautifully paced and shot, with moody images of nature by cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christiansen. But it’s the sounds and silences, abetted by Marco Beltrami’s emphatic but spare score, which certify the story’s primal essences. Millicent Simmonds is deaf, and her acting has the compelling resonance of her sign language and her vitally expressive face. Before long, like the predators (blind, yet with the hearing of super-bats), we are all ears. Instead of idiotic teens becoming psycho snack bait, a family fends off feral ferocity with mutual support. Their angel must be dear old Sylvia Sidney, song-smashing the Martians in Mars Attacks! with her Slim Whitman record.     

Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy

Now for some really quiet places (but not always). Andy Goldsworthy has a quietly pensive voice in Leaning Into the Wind. His world-renowned art, some looking permanent as Stonehenge and some literally blown away by wind and rain, manipulates nature into art (and, seemingly, the reverse). Documentary maker Thomas Riedelsheimer broadened Goldsworthy’s fan base with Rivers and Tides (and also directed Touch the Sound, the terrific doc about the deaf, Scottish wizard of percussion Evelyn Glennie). He returns to the great modern artist and follows him to much of the world: to Morecambe Bay, England, where natural stone and surf first moved him to art in college days; to a Brazilian shanty with strangely beautiful clay floors; to San Francisco’s Presidio for a writhing sculptural installation of gorgeous woods; to a dense jungle structure of woven logs in Gabon, and to interlocking stone arches in St. Louis that are like primeval echoes for Eero Saarinen’s soaring metal arch.

Nobody else does quite this form of magic with yellow leaves, skinny branches or dappled water. Goldsworthy talks with a slightly elfin charm about learning from falls and failures, and his elation when nature cooperates for another masterwork (many are transient but survive in poetic films and photos). His whimsy is like a Victorian explorer’s. We hear rustling from a big hedge in Edinburgh and know the artist is inside, midway up, tunneling its length by hand and foot (his emergence is a Harry Potter moment). There are some late languid passages, but wonders keep coming, including the great scene of leaning into the wind.

SALAD (A List)

My 12 Favorite Scare Movies, in order of arrival:

Nosferatu (director  Murnau, 1922), The Phantom of the Opera (Chaney etc., 1925), Island of Lost Souls (Kenton, 1932), Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960), Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), Sssssss (Kowalski, 1973), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1978), The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981), The Dead Zone (Cronenberg, 1983), Cronos (Del Toro, 1993) and In My Skin (De Van, 2002). And don’t forget two thunder-duds of dumb: Night of the Lepus (Claxton, 1972) and The Blair Witch Project (Sanchez-Myrick, 1999). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles enjoyed jousting with French intellectuals, the auteurists who liked calling him a “baroque” artist. He fed their rhetoric, while snacking a side-dish of skepticism about it. “If there were other extremely baroque artists (in film),” he said in 1958, “I’d be the most classical film-maker you’ve ever seen.” But the essential truth, noted Peter Conrad, “is that the baroque was Welles’s instinct, not his choice. It matched both his psychological quirks and his intellectual temper.” And his voluptuary’s eye! (Quote from Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In 1968 Mel Brooks’s The Producers was “Mel’s deli, which had a great kosher pickle: theatrical giant Zero Mostel, in his one enduringly great movie role. The two pickled Adolf Hitler in the best satirical brine since Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in 1940. Zero +2 (Brooks, Gene Wilder) was a new math of mirth.” A flop on first release, it soon became a cult shrine and then a big Broadway hit. (Quote from Zero Mostel/The Producers 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.

Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg and the great Kay Kendall (center) vie for Gene Kelly in Les Girls (MGM, 1957; director George Cukor, cinematographer Robert Surtees).

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Nosh 106: 'Isle of Dogs' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs is a furry splurge of creativity. Filmed over four years, using a wizard’s brew of stop-motion animation with a bravura graphic density, it proves again that Anderson is one of the most imaginative artists we have. You can call his work derivative, a baroque pastiche of inspirations, but as Picasso demonstrated it’s the polyphonic mutation of combinations that can fashion a tremendous body of work. Isle of Dogs is a masterpiece fit to join Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

It takes place mostly on a big trash-dump island used as a toxic  Gulag for condemned dogs thought to carry plague, by order of power-mad Mayor Kobayashi of Megasaki. Even his family dog Spots is sent to garbage hell, pursued by his loyal boy-pal Atari. Cast-off canines include Chief, a slightly feral stray (“I bite. I don’t fetch”) and the fem-wow bitch Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson vamps her, vocally). The film’s kennel of voices include Liev Schreiber, Ed Norton, Bryan Cranston, Bob Balaban,Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Yoko Ono, Anjelica Huston, Frances McDormand, Greta Gerwig and Harvey Keitel. It is inspired that most Japanese dialog is not translated (still, we get the drift), for it helps to unify the terrific design and animation team’s use of Japanese art, animé and stylized vistas.

With its propulsive rhythm paced by Kodo drums, the movie clicks into view like amazingly fluent Lego blocks. Anderson said he was most ignited by old Christmas cartoons, and by the live-action classics of Akira Kurosawa. We hear theme music from the master’s Seven Samurai, detect echoes of the official corruption in his The Bad Sleep Well, recall the slum zones in his High and Low, Dodes’ka-den and The Lower Depths. Also fertile are spores from monster films, spaghetti Westerns, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, Tarantino’s Kill Bill. It won’t matter to young viewers, not knowing that Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije suite echoes its previous use in the British film The Horse’s Mouth. Nor that Kobayashi’s giant metal K echoes citizen Kane’s gate, nor that canine class conflict has many human antecedents in Japanese films.

Anderson’s design mania, his layered aestheticism, is not to everyone’s taste. As often in animation, the animals seem very human, the people somewhat less so. The climax is a little crowded with twists. Such complaints are kibble. Funny enough to be amusing without pushing for topical satire, often beautiful enough to deflect the olfactory resistance of trash-squeamish humans, the movie strums political, environmental, scientific and species themes that never overpower the fun of its fantasy.     

SALAD (A List)

18 Outstanding Dog Movies (with director, year):

A Dog’s Life (Charles Chaplin, 1918), High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1940), Lassie Come Home (Fred Wilcox, 1943), Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952), Hondo (John Farrow, 1953), Lady and the Tramp (Disney 1955), Across the Bridge (Ken Annakin, 1957), Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957), The Incredible Journey (Fletcher Markle, 1963), A Boy and His Dog (L.Q. Jones, 1975), White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Paul Mazursky, 1986), We Think the World of You (Colin Gregg, 1988), K-9 (Rod Daniel, 1989), Turner & Hooch (Roger Spottiswoode, 1989), Homeward Bound (Duwayne Dunham, 1993), 101 Dalmatians (Disney, 1996), My Dog Skip (Jay Russell, 2000), Best in Show (Christopher Guest, 2000).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

No one, even for horror and sci-fi films, has ever done better make-up creation than movie newcomer Maurice Seiderman’s for Orson Welles and other actors in Citizen Kane. But local union politics and studio protocol kept him from getting screen credit. As Seiderman recalled, “after it was exhibited, Franklin Roosevelt invited Orson to dinner at the White House. Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, was one of the guests. Orson told her the story about this Russian immigrant who did the make-up on Kane, but could not get into the union. The following day, the Labor Dept. called the head of the union and said that it was beginning an investigation into unfair labor practices involving Maurice Seiderman. At four o’clock, a union card was delivered to me at the studio.” (From Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In The Horse’s Mouth, painter Gulley Jimson’s “antic mischief suggests Ealing, the famed North London studio where Alec Guinness flourished in comedy. But the film transcends that, and its roots run back through Joyce Cary’s novel to the London bohemia of Augustus John, Walter Sickert and others. While (director) Ronald Neame was no Hitchcock or Michael Powell, he knew how to tap the yeasty fermentation of Cary’s prose, which Guinness adapted and distilled, filling the movie’s cask.” From the Alec Guinness/Horse’s Mouth 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.

The consummate profiles of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer transcend their doomed love in Out of the Past (RKO, 1947; director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 105: 'Chappaquiddick' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Chappaquiddick

For those who imagine that Chappaquiddick is where Ethel and Norman Thayer’s Golden Pond flows into Hiawatha’s Gitche Gumee, a bit of modern history. On July 18, 1969, driving from a night party at a site on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard, U.S. Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy (D-Mass.) made a wrong turn and went onto a rickety bridge without a railing. His car tipped over and fell into water. He escaped but Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, one of the “boiler room girls” at the party who had been idealistic workers for the 1968 campaign of Ted’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, died (she probably suffocated after exhausting an air  bubble). Ted, athletic but alcoholic, had been drinking.

Chappaquiddick, huffing along like a tabloid news bulletin arriving half a century late, crams proven, likely and suspect facts and factoids into a lurid cartoon of criminal negligence and character collapse. It indicts Ted Kennedy as a callow, shallow man-boy of 37, dazed more by his legacy and three dead brothers than by his shock from the tragic accident. That he suffered shock, panicked, failed to report the accident for hours, and fell into the rough arms of a Kennedy rescue team for protection and media massage, is certain. But the factuals get very spongey in this film, which has the aroma of a calculated smear. At the end, I almost expected this credit: historical research by Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon.

Ted (modest look-alike Jason Clarke, working hard) is shifty-eyed and unhappy even before the accident, disturbed by talk of his inevitable Presidency. The creeping implication is that, feeling inadequate, he had a death wish for his “destiny,” and poor Kopechne was collateral damage. Ted’s choices on the grim night remain sticky and murky. In this hard-breathing rumor rummage of speculation, he ignores advice, fumbles alibis, fondles a football, straps on a neck brace, even flies a kite. He almost seems like a Kennedy pretender, imitating Nixon’s flop-sweat disaster in the first 1960 debate against JFK.

The family’s elite rescue squad (Robert McNamara, Ted Sorensen, etc.)  swoops in as a cynical Irish Mafia, like a pirate crew recruited from every anti-Kennedy fantasy of the toxic right. The senator turns to his dad Joseph who, though half-dead from a stroke, slaps him and snarls. Mother Rose is never seen, and Ted’s wife Joan has one line, the eloquent “Go fuck yourself, Teddy.” Loyal cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) serves as the prod of Ted’s squishy conscience, and for his pains is humiliated: made to hold the cue cards for Kennedy’s TV speech.

The most memorable Kennedy is the patriarch, death gargoyle Joe. The eyes of veteran pro Bruce Dern, 81, haven’t blazed quite like this since he shot John Wayne in The Cowboys (Ted even gets snarked for attempting “John Wayne shit”). Director John Curran could handle a cholera epidemic in The Painted Veil, but this leering slum-along makes him look like a hack. Private, two-person conversations are re-imagined, and most of the suspense tactics are like vintage agit-prop, defamation drones launched by witers Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan. Their film is a crude gift for all the never-forgivers who don’t care to know that Ted Kennedy, despite alcoholism, became a great senator, father of major legislation like the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He lived until 2009 under a triple shadow: JFK, RFK and MJK (Mary Jo Kopechne). Dubious and mean-spirited, Chappaquiddick is a sniper on a knoll made of old National Enquirers.    

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Strong Movies Set in New England:

Captains Courageous (director Victor Fleming, 1937),

The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941), The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946), All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), The Trouble With Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955), The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958), The Devil’s Disciple (Guy Hamilton, 1959), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973), The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982), Ethan Frome (John Madden, 1993), The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) and Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015). Photo above; Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman and deer in All That Heaven Allows.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though a friend of sorts with Charlie Chaplin, in the great Chaplin vs. Keaton debate Orson Welles was in Buster’s camp: “You’ve got to separate jokes from beauty. Chaplin had too much beauty, drenched his pictures with it. That’s why Keaton is finally giving him the bath and will, historically, forever. Oh yes, he’s so much greater … more versatile, more finally original. Some of the things that Keaton thought up to do are incredible,” (The debate will never end. Quote from My Lunches With Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Playing the sybaritic seeker Marcello in La Dolce Vita changed Marcello Mastroianni’s image, career and even view of himself. He was grateful, except for the new Latin Lover image, upset that “producers wished him to play men who were ‘somehow always slithering across the rug toward some beautiful woman.’ Fighting back, he became impotent in Il Bel Antonio, a cuckold in Divorce Italian Style, a myopic radical in The Organizer, a comically deluded monarch in Henry IV.” From the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita 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.

Suave, Sicilian Cefalu (Marcello Mastroianni) is not thrilled by his slightly moustached wife Rosalia (Daniella Rocca) in Divorce Italian Style (Janus Films, 1962; director Pietro Germi, cinematographers Leonida Barboni, Carlo Di Palma).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 104: 'The Death of Stalin,' 'Unsane' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Death of Stalin and Unsane

The Death of Stalin

In the mid-1950s an American TV program offered a grim, pseudo-documentary take on the 1953 death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. I was a kid, but mesmerized. The names of the old Communist Party Politburo still resonate for me, but now with a tinny effect, thanks to director Armando Iannucci. His The Death of Stalin, based upon a Titan Comics graphic, reaches for wild lampoon that turns into an embalmed cackle.

The comedy is curdled by the fact that Stalin, despite his Papa Bear moustache (now fronting the face of actor Adrian McLaughlin), remains scary. This is the happy guy who said that “to choose one’s victim, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to stake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world.” The power maniac slaughtered his own countrymen, converted Politburo service into Russian roulette, defeated Hitler (after first losing his nerve), and began a paranoid purge of a “Zionist doctors plot” before his stroke, in bed, on March 1, 1953. During his last four days medical care was minimal (including leeches), while his successors plotted. Some researchers now think Stalin was poisoned by KGB chief and sadist Lavrenti Beria.

The Kremlin-like settings are impressive, but the casting might better fit the Moscow, Idaho zoo. As fat Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s favorite butt of humor at vodka-soaked parties, lean Steve Buscemi hurls New York actor sarcasms. Britain’s rotund Simon Russell Beale plays Beria as if he were Uncle Fester becoming  Rasputin. As shifty heir-in-waiting Georgi Malenkov, Jeffrey Tambor seems to be an onion dome fond of weeping. Michael Palin somehow confused cold, phlegmatic Vyacheslav Molotov with another foreign secretary, Britain’s elegant Anthony Eden. As famously bald war hero Marshal Georgi Zhukov, built like a T-34 tank, the tall, handsome Jason Isaacs sports a fine head of hair and a vast crop of medals. Being Slavic is equated with fits of hysteria as the shenanigans fall somewhere between Marxism and the Marx Bros. The movie missed its musical cue: Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin, but the film’s main music is by Tchaikovsky.

Political satire is a hard game (rare successes: Ninotchka, The Great Dictator, Wag the Dog, Dr. Strangelove). Iannocci slathers on slapstick, dud gags, an autopsy, a zinger about Abbott and Costello (should be Martin and Lewis, as 1953 was a big year for them). I enjoyed the phrase “unauthorized narcissism,” and the way Buscemi barks about lusting for Grace Kelly. The Stalinist Stooges bumble around in a flop-sweat of defrosting terror until the transparently evil Beria is shot dead, then cremated in a courtyard (odd echo of Hitler’s end). The laughs are lost in the samovar, or maybe Stalin’s moustache.

Unsane

Steven Soderbergh made three asinine Danny Ocean comedies, which took macho hipness down to ankle level. But in a checkered career, playing with a chessman’s verve, he’s also given us sex, lies and videotape, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, King of the Hill, the rustic fun of  Logan Lucky and TV’s grimly effective The Knick (beefcake fans enjoy Magic Mike). For Unsane, a cheap thriller shot very quickly, Soderbergh directed, edited and photographed using his three iPhone 7 Plus cameras fitted with different lenses. To say he “phoned the film in” would be a little glib.

Fresh from dewy Queen Liz II on The Crown, Claire Foy turns American, haggard and desperate as Sawyer, a sharp biz-wiz who fled an obsessed stalker in Boston. Now she gets trapped in a mental therapy “clinic” where (presto demento!) her lovesick chaser turns up on the staff. At first there are good jabs about shady medical practice and insurance scamming, but the bear-like stalker (Joshua Leonard) hauls the story into pulp, with creepy implausibility. Soderbergh’s images dangle the vague premise that maybe this is just Sawyer’s nightmare as shots turn fuzzy with shadows, faces loom in fish-eyed exaggeration. Unsane underwhelms, despite good work by Jay Pharaoh as a calmly decent patient, a spry cameo by Matt Damon, and murmuring hints of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor. I have read comment comparing this movie to Kafka, but Soderbergh probably got that out of his system with his vivid, faltering Kafka in 1991.  

SALAD (A List)

Bravura Film Portrayals of Real Political Leaders:

Charles Laughton as Henry in The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933; Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939; Charles Chaplin as Hinkle (Hitler) in The Great Dictator, 1940; Nikolai Cherkassov as Ivan in Ivan the Terrible, I and II, 1944-46; Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, 1949; Alec Guinness as Benjamin Disraeli in The Mudlark, 1950; Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata!, 1952; Herbert Lom as Napoleon in War and Peace, 1956; Bob Hope as Jimmy Walker in Beau James, 1957; Ben Kingsley as the Mahatma in Gandhi, 1982; Gerard Depardieu as Georges Danton in Danton, 1983; Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in Secret Honor, 1984; Paul Newman as Earl Long in Blaze, 1989; Gary Sinise as Harry in Truman, 1995; Madonna as Evita Peron in Evita, 1996; Cate Blanchettt as Elizabeth I in Elizabeth, 1998; Eriq Ebouaney as Patrice Lumumba in Lumumba, 2000; Gael Garcia Bernal as Ernesto “Che” Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004; Bruno Ganz as Hitler in Downfall, 2004; Paul Giamatti as John Adams, 2008; Filippo Timi as Benito Mussolini in Vincere, 2010; Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, 2011; Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, 2012; Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson in All the Way, 2016; Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, 2017. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

On June 29, 1940, Orson Welles shot his first scene for Citizen Kane: the newsreel staff crammed into a screening room, being told to track down Kane’s “Rosebud.” For ten hours the neophyte filmed, “rearranging his actors, asking for more overlapping of dialog, making sure there was enough cigarette smoke filtering through the light from the projection booth … He attempted shots never successfully used in a film before, (even) having the camera shoot directly into blazing arcs. A special lens coating had to be used on the camera to cut the glare of lights shining into it.” (Shot as a “test,” the debut footage was used after minor editing. From Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A unique entertainment, Funny Face (1957) “endures with few wrinkles. John Russell Taylor’s The Hollywood Musical calls it ‘about as near flawless as one can hope for in an imperfect world, (and) also virtually the death-knell of the intimate, integrated musical as we had come to know and love it.’ It lost in all four Oscars nominations. A year later Gigi, a candy-box musical rehab of Hepburn’s Broadway hit, starring Leslie Caron, won nine statues.” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face 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.

Newsreel editor Rawlston (Philip Van Zandt, right) orders reporter Thompson (William Alland) to find Rosebud “dead or alive,” in Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland).

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