Nosh 122: 'Puzzle,' 'Skate Kitchen' & More

By David Elliott

    

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Puzzle and Skate Kitchen

Puzzle

I’ve always liked Scottish actor Kelly Macdonald

(Gosford Park, No Country for Old Men, Nanny McPhee, a Harry Potter). She is lovely without pushing it, and her docile, pensive sweetness has an aura of secrets that could become interesting. But those qualities never spark much life in what should be a showcase for her, Puzzle, which is fairly closely based on the 2009 Argentine film Rompecabezas. Macdonald plays a devoutly Catholic American housewife who is drudge, cook, cleaner and all-purpose nanny for her two near-grown, restlessly rooted sons and husband Louie, a financially insecure garage mechanic.

Bright but soul-dampened, gently generous and often exhausted, Agnes is pushing 40 when she discovers her gift for the rapid assembly of jigsaw puzzles. In a braver era, this might have led her to join the secret brains at Bletchley Park and undermine Hitler. Instead she sneaks off like a daring church mouse to a puzzle shop in New York. Soon she’s the puzzle competition partner of a semi-retired, rich inventor from abroad, Robert (Irrfan Khan), who is vaguely sexy and solemnly wry. Their board results are very attractive, but there is no dramatic tension sizzling in watching Robert (and the faster, intuitive Agnes) tightly join 500 or more pieces of cut cardboard.

As directed by Marc Turtletaub (Little Miss Sunshine), too many elements remain rather murky. Family drama simmers, like a sitcom teapot. Louie loves Agnes in his complacent Daddy Bear way. She mostly loves him, but a puzzled piece of her is tempted by Robert, who seems to love … love? Oddly, the most detailed piece is Louie, who looks and talks like a less neurotic Vincent D’Onofrio. He also: a. snores a lot (Agnes listens), b. loves cheese, c. expects his meals on time pronto, d. finds little quality time for the boys, and e. despite all that, is not so much a loser as a cheeseball with a beer gut. Quietly ticking way, dear Agnes edges towards assertive choices, although the final resolution is feminist in a very 1958 way.

  

Sorry, Agnes, but the great puzzle lady in movies remains Susan (Dorothy Comingore), bored wife in Citizen Kane. When old Mr. Kane (Orson Welles) finds her scanning yet another puzzle in the lonely expanse of Xanadu, he quips “How do you know you haven’t done it before?” She pings him right back: “Makes a whole lot more sense than collecting statues.” Of course, that movie is itself a vivid jigsaw puzzle. Puzzle, by contrast, has missing pieces.

Skate Kitchen

Last week The Cakemaker! This week Skate Kitchen! But Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen is not a culinary occasion. Moselle previously made documentaries, including one about six New York City brothers, The Wolfpack. Her first dramatic feature fuses acted storylines and digitally vivid  reality sequences of young women in a street-skating group, Skate Kitchen. Their swerves, glides, jumps and speed-zips capture, with documentary verve, the passion of adolescence. Like any true teen scene, it’s a way of life.

The movie’s heart, along with ground-level Manhattan, is Rachelle Vinberg as Camille. A shy proto-woman from a Long Island suburb and a busted family, Camille meets the fierce, yappy Kitchen rollers at a skate park in Chinatown. After a dangerous accident she becomes a force in motion, despite her glasses and a pensive, observing reticence that the others find mysterious. Moselle mostly keeps the camera on Vinberg, whose instinctual acting (and improvising) anchors and resonates what could have been just another video blast of adrenaline. Camille, skittish about her options (including sexual), never entirely integrates into what a boy calls the “rowdy-ass girl crew.”

Vinberg gets wonderful support from Ardelia Lovelace as a slender black girl who generously welcomes Camille, Nina Moran as a funny lesbian tomboy whose skater name is Kurt, and Jaden Smith (Will Smith’s son) as a wary, sensitive guy who (like boyish Rocket in City of God) sees street photography as his ticket upward. Moselle includes some filler dialog and a few odd notes (like Camille’s rather late lessons in feminine hygiene). Still, the movie is alive, reviving some of the old urban voltage of Mean Streets and The Warriors. Rolling wild, the skaters relish the freedom of the city.

SALAD (List)

Memorable Fempowerment Movies

In order of arrival, plus directors: The Women (George Cukor 1939), Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz 1945), The Beguiled (Don Siegel 1971), Foxy Brown (Jack Hill 1974), Norma Rae (Martin Ritt 1979), 9 to 5 (Colin Higgins 1980), Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler 1982), Deep in the Heart (Tony Garnett 1983), Mystic Pizza (Donald Petrie 1988), Gorillas in the Mist (Michael Apted 1988), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott 1991), A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall 1992), The Ballad of Little Jo (Maggie Mansfield 1992), Ruby in Paradise (Victor Nunez 1993), Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino 1997), Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh 2000), Whale Rider (Niki Caro 2002), Bring It On (Peyton Reed 2002), Frida (Julie Taymor 2004), Offside (Jafar Panahi 2006), Dreamgirls (Bill Condon 2006), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt 2008), Queen to Play (Caroline Bottaro 2009), In a World … (Lake Bell 2013), Ocean’s 8 (Gary Ross 2018) and Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence, 2018).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is off this week, preparing his narration of Marcel Ophuls’s definitive six-hour documentary Orange Armageddon: The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Every writer has a temperament of taste, and ‘each work entrusts the writer with the film it seeks’ (Borges). Taste is important, but if you are constantly polishing marble in your personal Parthenon, you become a frieze. I agree with novelist Ross Macdonald that ‘popular culture is not and need not be at odds with high culture, any more than the rhythms of walking ae at odds with the dance.’ So I walk along, and tap a little.” (From the Introduction 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.

Charlie Kane’s taste runs more to statuary than the puzzles assembled by wife Susan at Xanadu in Citizen Kane (RKO Pictures, 1941; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 121: 'The Cakemaker,' 'Alpha' & More

By David Elliott

    

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Cakemaker and Alpha

The Cakemaker

That Colorado baker who got lucky with the U.S. Supreme Court, after refusing to bake a gay wedding’s cake, should maybe avoid The Cakemaker. In possibly the best Israeli-German movie ever, debut feature director and writer Ophir Raul Graizer has baked in flavors of subtlety, grace and humanity – remarkable in a picture about German-Jewish tensions, covert gay love, and sexual pressures in a religiously contentious society.

The flour-white face of big German actor Tim Kahlkof resembles the dough he so masterfully shapes as Thomas the Berlin baker. Thomas has the wary self-sufficiency of a loner (parents long-gone, raised solo by a grandmother). Though eloquent with his cakes and breads, he rarely speaks. Solitude crumbles when he meets an assured, married, German-fluent Israeli businessman, Oren (Roy Miller). The secretive, erotic joys of Oren’s visits end when he is killed by a car in Jerusalem (no big spoiler: it happens early). Thomas (“I have my work, and my apartment, and I have you”) might fold in a sag of sorrow, back into bearish hibernation.

Instead, seeking the truth, Thomas leaves his cozy café behind. In Jerusalem he meets Oren’s widow Anat, struggling with her own little café. Not very religious, kosher but rather resentfully, Anat finds that her new helper is a splendid baker. Communicating in English, they are both needy kneaders. Attraction rises like a great loaf, despite her fretful suspicions of his past (and the unspoken intuitions of her sage mother). Anat’s son, initially loyal to the kosher strictures of his intrusive uncle, soon adores Thomas’s Black Forest cake. Tenderness advances, bit always sweetly. Omri Aloni’s photography, avoiding mere tourism, impeccably supports Graizer’s intimate script and excellent cast.

The Cakemaker doesn’t knead bread ($) in the sense noted by the great émigré Berliner Marlene Dietrich, who snapped that “in Hollywood every church should be shaped as a box office.” Nothing is rushed, pounded, prodded, overbaked. Revelation must come, with some shock, but the story never loses it attentive poise. It balances on the joining rails of Kalkhof and Adler (with her slightly plain beauty, a Jewish-mama Charlotte Gainsbourg).The movie might abrade some gay PC piety, as it suggests that gayness is not always life-determining. Graizer’s layer cake uses few standard ingedients. For all the scenes of happy cooking, tasting, eating – surely the most subtle culinary emotions since the delightful, Italo-American Big Night – the movie is about affection overcoming fear. Love is, when you bite deep, the most complicated and surprising dish at the human banquet.

Alpha

Essentially a dog movie, mostly for boys aged to 16 – do kids still read the old Jack London dog stories? – Alpha is also a cross-species Quest for Fire set around 20,000 years ago. Keda (finely named Kodi Smit-McPhee) is facing his Cro-Magnon coming-of-age. His dad, the tribal leader and master hunter, fears that the beardless teen might be on the soft side. Mom reckons that the lad “leads from his heart, not his spear.” In fact, he does both. Having survived a cliff fall that has killed a herd of bison, Keda (left for dead) overcomes wounds, makes fires, eat worms, faces hyenas and blizzards. And (merit badge!) tames the first wolf pet of our acquisitive species. The animal is curious, too – wolf star Alpha is actually Chuck, a Czech wolf-dog from France.

Pumping primeval adrenaline and defying implausibility, Alpha has more digital skies and effects than I like in a tough survival story. But once Keda meets and befriends the big canine for a bonding adventure, the film finds its furry niche. The raw survivalist lineage of The Naked Prey, A Boy and His Dog and The Revenant has found a remarkably warm-spirited ancestor, with McPhee an engaging young lead, and director Albert Hughes making a wondrous show of locations in Canada, Iceland and California. There’s something here for the owner of every Fifi and Fido, Butch and Pepper, Spot and Rover.    

SALAD (List)

Ten Good Movies That Vividly Feature Cooks

Tampopo (director Juzo Itami, 1985), Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987), Big Night (Campbell Scott, Stanley Tucci, 1996), Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006), Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011), Chef (Jon Favreau, 2014), City of Gold (Laura Gabbert, 2915) and The Cakemaker (Ophir Raul Graizer, 2018).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles said he included one of the surreal moments in Citizen Kane “just to wake the audience up” – was that ever a problem for the film? A scholar elaborated: “When Raymond the butler describes Kane destroying Susan’s bedroom, the scene opens with a startling shot of a screeching cockatoo. The bird – which appears for less than two seconds – has no eye. The background of the Florida coastline shows through where the eye should have been. The missing eye, long a subject of speculation among film writers, was, Welles admitted, only the result of a mistake in the special effects lab.” But Kane has very few glitches. (See photograph below. Quote from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The rising Nicole Kidman had a key breakthrough in 1995: “Not since Jean Harlow’s Bombshell and Bette Davis’s Dangerous had a title fit so snugly as To Die For. Kidman’s vampy Suzanne hustles TV fame in a small town, affirming the insight of Marshall McLuhan: ‘What’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching?’ Blind ambition leads to a dumb crime, and teen Joaquin Phoenix is a snack for Suzanne’s eroticized ego. Her dress clinging at night in the rain, haloed by car beams, she shim-boogies to ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ in a splurge of soft-porn wit. Kidman became an American star.” (From the 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.

The eyeless cockatoo makes its loud, eye-catching appearance in Citizen Kane (RKO Pictures, 1941; director Orson Welles; chief optical printer Linwood G. Dunn).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 120: 'BlacKkKlansman' & More

By David Elliott

    

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

APPETIZER: Review of BlacKkKlansman

It has been 18 years since Bamboozled, with its bold but rather scrambled-hash lampooning of stereotypes from the blackface “coon” shows of the Jim Crow era (and its slightly smug take on black talents who mined a living from the types). In those 18 years Spike Lee has made some strong documentaries, but his dramatic works that I’ve seen tend to be remarkably uneven. Now comes BlacKkKlansman, an angry, lively comedy, almost as jammed and awkward as its title. The story is inevitably hung with the message bells and wake-up whistles that Lee prefers. His plots come with signs that say “Remember this?” or “Important point!”  

                                 

The source is a memoir by Ron Stallworth, about his time exposing the Ku Klux Klan as a young cop in Colorado Springs (a city notable for its right-wing elements). Although black, Ron (played by John David Washington) joins the Klan, using as his cover for the sting his new partner, Skip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Skip, white and wired (and muddled about being Jewish), goes as Ron to the risky hate dates. The real Ron talks with bigots on the phone, using amusing white-speak to gull Imperial Wizard David Duke. Topher Grace’s dull-drip venom as Duke, the Klan’s only conspicuous modern politician, is far less imposing than the black power fire-breathing of Cory Hawkins as Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael).

The script, partly by Kevin Wilmott, maker of the brilliant satire C.S.A.: Confederate States of America, has moved Ron’s story from the late ‘70s to 1972, picking up rancid Nixon-Agnew vibes and the Afro-dashiki time of Blaxploitation films (already, to Ron and his new girlfriend they are nostalgia tokens). No neo-Nazi goons this time, but we get the usual KKKrud; louts, beerheads and dirtball dodos. A cartoonish Klan wife, Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), lolls in bed like a squeeze-toy blob, chirping about the coming race war. Movies have really exhausted the ritual Klan tropes, so Lee reaches for timely resonance with a spoken foretaste of Trump, and closes with footage of the tragic 2017 riot in Charlottesville, Va.

The Coen Brothers’s O Brother Where Art Thou? and Tarantino’s Django Unchained got  more edge and pop from their stylized rednecks (the dialog crackles with the “n-word,” a footnote to Lee’s long feud with Tarantino about its use). In a solid cast Washington is sly and effective, but Adam Driver virtually takes command as  Skip. With his big body, drawly delivery and oddly amiable aura of implied threat, Driver may be the best heir of the  Mitchum manner since the arrival of Clive Owen. A touching cameo comes from old (91) civil rights champ Harry Belafonte, telling young blacks about vile racist terror.

His speech is intercut with the Klan’s idiotic initiation ceremony for Ron (Skip). The kluxers treat themselves to D.W. Griffith’s racist classic The Birth of a Nation, guffawing piously as blacks catch hell. The clips underline one of film’s most embarrassing truths: Griffith, back in “primitive” 1915, was more effective at racial melodrama than any director since. His Klan scenes remain the most frightening, because those scary men in sheets are shown triumphant.  

SALAD (List)

12 Movies Featuring the KKK

Clearly, Mississippi has the best sheet supply:

The Birth of a Nation (director D.W. Griffith, 1915), Black Legion (Archie Mayo, 1937), Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler, 1951), The Black Klansman (Ted V. Mikels, 1966), The Klansman (Terence Young, 1974), Mississippi Burning (1988), Murder in Mississippi (Roger Young, 1990), A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, 1996), O Brother Where Art Thou? (Joel, Ethan Coen, 2000), C.S.A: Confederate States of America (Kevin Wilmott, 2004), Mississippi Cold Case (David Ridgin, 2007) and BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

No one who worked in the old Hollywood system was more racially progressive than Orson Welles, who knew all the games that got played. Hedda Hopper tried to squelch his affair with singer-actor Lena Horne. When much later his friend Henry Jaglom said, “They put makeup on (Horne) to look darker in movies, because they didn’t want her to look white,” Orson set him straight: “The movies that they made her look darker in, those were the race movies only for black audiences. I was on the set waiting to take her to lunch when she did Cabin in the Sky, and she was made up like she would be with her own (light) skin color. But when she was 15 and 16 and 17 she made a lot of those race quickies.” (Quotes from Jaglom’s My Lunches With Orson). 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As in Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson’s definitive way with the n-word in Jackie Brown “ignited debate. In Tarantino context (with Blaxploitation sources: Boss Nigger, The Legend of Nigger Charley, etc.) the freighted word hooks solidarity, curls contempt, funnels rage – and allows Jackson his verbal sport. Of his n-talk, Jackson gave his reason to Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited: It’s my story, isn’t it?” (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.

Lillian Gish, front and center, sees the Klan as her savior at the climax of The Birth of a Nation (Griffith Productions, 1915; director D.W. Griffith, cinematographer Billy Bitzer).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 119: 'Eighth Grade,' 'The King' & More

By David Elliott

    

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Eighth Grade and The King

Eighth Grade

Jean-Pierre Léaud was 14 when he entered film history as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in 1959. He has been in over 70 features, going from lean poster boy of the French New Wave to a crusty old chub. Hardly anyone gets that kind of career now, even with a vivid teen start. But I think Elsie Fisher, 14 when filming Eighth Grade last year, has entered teen-movie history as Kayla Day. It’s a great performance in a “small” film made full and true by Fisher. And by Bo Burnham’s script, and his feature-debut direction at 27 (Truffaut’s age when Blows appeared). Burnham’s accuracy, subtlety and humane sense of adolescence would have made Truffaut say, smiling, “Marveilleux, mon frère.”

Concerning Kayla’s last phase of eighth grade, it pivots on the lonely girl reaching out with her new podcast (her verbal tic, “you know,” is like a flare for “please know me”). Middle school, “junior high” in my shy, distant youth, is generally seen as a kind of hormonal whirlpool of pain between childhood and full-steam adolescence. Kayla, very bright and a little pudgy, has image-subversive pimples and an aura of hopeful innocence that invites snarking. With her mother long gone, her dad (fine Josh Hamilton) is loving but struggles to find the lines of connection, and Kayla’s insecurities are like a Maginot Line. She has fairly hip interests, and some gumption, but her identity anxiety almost invites rejection (that she has no pals from earlier years is rather hard to fathom).

Burnham found the right, videographic approach. So much of Kayla is internal but brimming close to the surface, and Fisher’s acting is all intuitive nuances. The fake-jaunty podcasts, mirror glances, willful silences, gutsy but masochistic attempts at winning over some “cool” girls (snobs, perky in their cruelties) require the granular use of close-ups to capture all the mood weather. This is not the sleek, joke-driven suburban world of John Hughes’s teen movies. Hughes’s modular clichés have been overdone. So Burnham, on a tight budget, provides a more subtle interplay between Kayla, her fretful dad, an older high school girl (Emily Robinson) who boosts Kayla because she can recall her own mid-school agonies, and a brainy nerd (funny Jake Ryan) who has a Woody Allen sense of small talk: “Do you believe in God?” Kayla is trying to believe in herself (in a nifty irony, the quiet girl plays the school band’s loudest instrument: the cymbals).

All the parts converge and click without turning into plastic flash cards of familiarity.There are real danger tensions, as when Kayla desperately surveys a soft-porn site, and later must deal with a boy whose brain has gone to his crotch. After far too many generic teen movies, Eighth Grade graduates with honors. Elsie Fisher may not be an expressionist wow like Brooklynn Prince, the fierce moppet of The Florida Project, but the actor makes her first major part a starring triumph. May her zits vanish, and more good roles appear.

The King
We first hear Elvis in weary, wistful voice-over: “You can have everything and if you’re not happy, what have you got?” That sad strum is the heartbeat of The King, a tabloid docu-dossier on Elvis Presley’s impact, aura, myth and bankability (dead 41 years, he still sustains a Southern tourist industry). File-footage glutton Eugene Jarecki (Reagan, Why We Fight) had the small-bulb idea of getting hold of Elvis’s old Rolls Royce. He brought on board, for short drives and reflections, celebrities like Ethan Hawke, Emmylou Harris and Alec Baldwin. One good ol’ musician cries, imagining the car as Elvis’s jail or coffin. Some of the movie’s cruising wisdom is road kill, some is juicy chaw, with welcome intervals from little twang-canary Emi Sunshine and her roots band.

As aging fans liposuction dead Elvis for blobs of the American Dream, Jarecki lingers on young Elvis dazed by fame, mourning his mom, manning up for the U.S. Army. After soft service he was unmanned by celebrity, wealth, drugs, movies, fried food and the money vampire “Colonel” Tom Parker. Set among clips of Ali, Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton, Elvis is the Ghost of Paleness Past. Jarecki taps enduring black resentment of Presley as a gifted cribber. “Muthafu’ Elvis!” explodes rapper Chuck D, before admitting the value of musical crossover. At times a great singer, Elvis also became a fat, gilded tenement of Vegasoid indulgence.

He was non-political, but Jarecki suggests that the Trump  movement, full of racial resentment, draws upon  the Elvis cult. When the Rolls breaks down, it clearly represents the dying dream of white hegemony. The dream included a Klan kracker who denounced Elvis’s “vulgar animalistic nigger rock ’n roll bop” (the “bop” is priceless). Such stuff doesn’t lead to very deep reflections. Among the testifiers, Mike Meyers is sharp, funny and Canadian. Old Dan Rather goes up the Empire State Building to gain some perspective. The enduring value, the legacy, is in Elvis’s early songs.  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Most of Orson Welles’s films can be seen as poetic, kaleidoscopic fusions of powerful, beautiful fragments. He attempted many unfinished projects, as he reflected with melancholy late in life: “I’ve wasted an awful lot of my life trying to finish them, rather than letting them go as I should have done … I deeply regret this steadfast and stubborn loyalty, now that I look back on it. If people see it the other way, I can understand. But God, what I’ve been through trying to get ‘em done! What I’ve never done was to leave a film because I was tired of it, or angry at somebody or fed up. I’ve only left a film when there wasn’t any way to shoot it, no money.” (Quote from Joseph McBride’s What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

While never a major actor, Anita Ekberg was immortally right to play the visiting star Sylvia in La Dolce Vita: “At Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, shadow-carved by torches for Sylvia’s party, Rubini (Mastroianni) dances with her, gushing an awe to which she, lacking Italian, is indifferent: ‘You’re everything, Sylvia. You’re the first woman of creation, the mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, the earth, the home.” No female was more flattered by ruins, or so unlike Ingrid Bergman sickened by Pompeii in Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia.”(From the Marcello 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.

Anita Ekberg leads one of film’s great dances in La Dolce Vita (Cineriz/Astor Pictures, 1960; director Federico Fellini, cinematographer Otello Martelli.) 

For previous Noshes, scroll below.