By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Ocean’s
8 and First Reformed.
Ocean’s 8
Heist movies became a rococo genre long ago, piling on
more plot turns, tech tricks, wild implausibility. Still, they can give
delectable pleasure, now free of the old movie code’s “crime doesn’t pay” rule.
With our national government being heisted as a klepto casino, why should smart,
sexy jewel thieves lose their well-gotten gains? After all, diamonds are a
girl’s best friend, and by that Monroe doctrine the “girls” of Ocean’s 8 are friendly all the way.
Swingin’ heister Danny Ocean is gone, though seen in a
photo (George Clooney, not Frank Sinatra). His old chum Reuben (Elliott Gould) drops
in, and other cameos include Dakota Fanning, Griffin Dunne, Marlo Thomas, Heidi
Klum, Zac Posen, Elizabeth Ashley and Anna Wintour. The heist brain is Danny’s
sister, Debbie Ocean, played by Sandra Bullock with a hard laser stare. Her
team includes tough Cate Blanchett, mom-sweet Sarah Paulson, foxy player Rihanna,
Helena Bonham Carter as a ditzy couturier, and the fabulously named Awkwafina (unrelated
to Acquanetta, the “Venezuelan volcano” of 1940s B-pix).
Five years in a federal can gave Deb-O time to plan the
job: robbing the swank Met Gala for fashion mavens, at the big New York museum,
of a $150 million diamond mine conveniently disguised as a six-pound necklace.
As in 1999’s The Thomas Crown Affair,
New York’s Metropolitan Museum is extravagantly eager to display itself (masterworks
line up like mannequins). Alas, Pierce Brosnan, who grabbed Steve McQueen’s Crown,
is on holiday exile this summer to Mamma
Mia! Here We Go Again.
Director Gary Ross pumps the action, and a payback sub-plot
targets the only important male (Richard Armitage plays the jerk). Serious
acting from anyone would only gum up the clockwork caper thrills. Ocean’s 8, which makes Sinatra’s Vegas lark
of 1960 seem older than Cheops, is a candy box of yums: art, jewelry, fashion, food,
the ritzy ball, a crazy toilet scene, Wheaton terriers, brisk riffs of Bach and
an after-heist in debt to Topkapi. Supreme
among swans is Anne Hathaway, who breezily sends up her vanity princess image. Ocean’s 8 ices its cake so that every
karat blings. This fem-frolic is way past Sinatra. It’s all chick kicks now,
Frankie.
First
Reformed
The absolute opposite of Ocean’s 8 is Paul Schrader’s First
Reformed. Ethan Hawke stars as Rev. Toller, who hates himself because his
son died in Iraq, his wife left and now he is the lonely pastor (more like curator)
of a bone-white, 18th century church in upstate New York. The steepled
shrine is pure and stark, its pews laid out like caskets for the End Time. I
felt again the penitential vapors that blew through the tormented minister in Ingmar
Bergman’s Winter Light, a
confessional ordeal of soul-baring.
Schrader’s Calvinist upbringing is the migraine muse
of his films, and also motivated his book on austere auteurs (Bresson, Ozu,
Dreyer). Touches of those masters haunt the rectilinear compositions, meditative
silences, shadow-chilled moods, pause-laden dialog and (for added subtext) Toller’s
diary. Ethan Hawke has steadily grown as an actor, often in Richard Linklater’s
movies, and yet his sincere, granular agony is a frail nucleus for this torture
tempest.
Poor Toller is a butter pat melting in Schrader’s
waffle stack of sorrows: child loss, divorce, sexual guilt, a hopeless love (moon-eyed
angel Amanda Seyfried), consumerist Christianity (a mega-church minister, well
acted by Cedric the Entertainer), corporate pollution with a big CEO villain,
eco-terrorism, alcoholism, suicide, cancer, flagellation. The script strives to
be both timely and eternal, but you don’t serve Kierkegaard cookies at a church
social, and Toller is like a liberal college chaplain who wandered naked into
the Book of Apocalypse.
Reaching for the raw force that Scorsese exploded from
Schrader’s Taxi Driver script, the
story swivels from Bergman brooding into Mad Marty overdrive. The finish veers
away from one melodramatic abyss only to fall into another. A midnight mass of
sado-masochism, First Reformed won’t
sell much popcorn – last year’s Mother!
was a carnival ride next to this – but Schrader has nailed down the Calvinist Crucifixion
Prize for 2018.
SALAD: A List
The Ten Best Roles of Frank Sinatra
Conspicuously
not including Danny in Ocean’s 11:
1.
Frankie Machine in The Man With the
Golden Arm (1955), 2. Bennett Marco in The
Manchurian Candidate (1952), 3. Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953), 4. Dave Hirsh in Some Came Running (1958), 5. Joey Evans in Pal Joey (1957), 6. Sam Loggins in Kings Go Forth (1958), 7. John Baron in Suddenly (1954), 8. Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (1955), 9. Joe Leland in The Detective (1968) and 10. Danny in Meet Danny Wilson (1952). Clearly the 1950s was Frank’s golden time,
as actor and singer.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
The
almost forgotten hero of Citizen Kane
was and is RKO production chief George Schaefer: “The balancing act of
placating his board, negotiations with other studios, and soothing Welles was
endless, complicated by the still unsuccessful hunt to identify enough theaters
for a profitable run (which) in late January, 1941, produced the decision to
distribute as broadly as possible – if theaters were willing to screen it.
Unfortunately, the response was not good, thanks to Hearst, (and the option
became) an extremely narrow schedule. Eventually, Citizen Kane would open in only a handful of premium theaters in
seven cities.” For sticking with Welles, Schaefer lost his job in 1942. (From
Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s
Journey.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
A
key moment for Ron (Matthew McConaughey) and Rayon (Jared Leto) in Dallas Buyers Club: “At the market Ron
encounters old buddy T.J. (Kevin Rankin), who spots Rayon and snarls about
‘faggots everywhere.’ When he refuses Rayon’s hand, Ron presses him: ‘What’s
your problem.’ To the lout’s raised finger and obscenity, Ron turns alpha-male,
spinning him into a choke hold, forcing a handshake and releasing him with ‘Go
back to your miserable life’ (his own
former life). Rayon is awed; her face glows with feminine gratitude. Machismo
for a good cause is sweet indeed, but it may occur to us: Ron hasn’t yet shaken
Rayon’s hand himself.”(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.
Molly
(Kim Novak) sizes up drug addict Frankie (Frank Sinatra) in The Man With the Golden Arm (United
Artists, 1955; director Otto Preminger, cinematographer Sam Leavitt).
For
previous Noshes, scroll below.
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