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).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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