Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Hunter
Killer and The Sisters Brothers
(NOTE: Nosh 131 will appear Friday, Nov. 16.)
Hunter
Killer
Tell me you are man enough for another submarine
action movie. You’d better be woman
enough, too, for what could rouse any gender better than an Arctic Ocean dive
by a giant atomic sea-phallus? There is a male frisson to this occasion. Told that his assignment could trigger
World War III, a burly commando thinks briefly of peace, then grunts “Fuck it.
I’d rather go kick some ass.”
A coup-minded Russian general kidnaps his peacenik President
at a big Commie (oops, Russian) naval base. Our own Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs (Gary Oldman, seizing his
check) is ready at once to go Def Con-die!
But our President (Caroline Goodall), being female and reality-rooted, says
let’s go on high alert while sending in the nuke sub Arkansas to rescue the Russian leader, aided by a team of the
bravest, hunkiest, hairiest Seals. Arkansas
Capt. Joe Glass, who “never went to Annapolis,” is fresh in command but hormonally
ready for the big show. In the mall food court that is modern stardom, Gerard
Butler is a solid slab of manloaf (weren’t fabled Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster
doing similar jaw locks and steel stares in Run
Silent Run Deep?). Butler has a command station so crammed with tech gizmos
that even James Mason’s visionary Capt. Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) would grow gills of envy.
OK, it’s a waterlogged fleet of clichés, including a
depth-charge attack, torpedo evasions, an ocean-bottom landing, combat midway
between a video game and a recruiting poster. It is almost a cousin to Ice Station Zebra (absurd, but Howard
Hughes’s favorite movie). I fell many fathoms into it. Sixty years ago this
movie would have intoxicated me, and boyish brain vapors remain to rouse the inner
aquatic beast. Down Periscope (see
list below) parodied the submersible genre for all time. Hunter Killer blows a manly kiss at self-parody, then sails gung-ho
into the dangerous deep.
The
Sisters Brothers
There have been many oddball Westerns, the dusty genre
that keeps dying but mutating. Such vivid curiosities as Three Godfathers, Lust for Gold, Track of the Cat, The Baron of
Arizona, Heller in Pink Tights, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Barbarosa, Viva
Maria!, Duck You Sucker, The Missouri Breaks, Dead Man and Meek’s Cutoff (the best and most
beautiful is Altman’s McCabe and Mrs.
Miller). The quirky-branded herd is joined by The Sisters Brothers. Dreamy slob Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly) and his
alcoholic brother Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) are killers-for-hire, bonded by
blood, body odor and saddle-sore humor.
During an Oregon gold rush they track the dreamy immigrant
Herman K. Warm (Riz Ahmed) and well-spoken conniver John Morris (Jake
Gyllenhaal). French director Jacques Audiard films as if the Western myth were
a pile of quaint bones he found in a cinematheque
crypt. His eccentricities include a chemical potion for finding gold in
streams, a massive bordello madam who doubles as mayor, a spider crawling into
sleeping Eli’s mouth, a tender salute to ole Mama Sisters, a speechless coffin cameo
by Rutger Hauer (from Blade Runner to
this?), and Eli’s most poignant request
to Charlie, “Don’t puke on me.”
The actors ride this round-up at a slightly oafish gallop,
stuck with a tumbleweed plot and some garbled dialog. There is fine use of
light and night, creek and canyon by cinematographer Benoit Debie. But this strange
Euro-cruise into the Old West is a burro to park behind the barn, like a jokey
gift for the rawhide ghosts of Strother Martin and Slim Pickens. They will both
cackle, and spit some chaw.
SALAD (A List)
15 remarkable
(well, entertaining) submarine films
In a “dive, dive, dive!” order of interest:
20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea (director Richard
Fleischer), The Spy in Black (Michael
Powell), Das Boot (Wolfgang
Petersen), The Enemy Below (Dick
Powell), The Russians Are Coming …
(Norman Jewison), Hell and High Water
(Sam Fuller), Above Us the Waves
(Ralph Thomas), The Hunt for Red October
(John McTiernan), Down Periscope
(David S. Ward), Devil and the Deep (Marion
Gering), The Bedford Incident (James
B. Harris), Operation Petticoat
(Blake Edwards), On the Beach
(Stanley Kramer), We Dive at Dawn
(Anthony Asquith) and Run Silent Run Deep
(Robert Wise).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Getting
his friend Marlene Dietrich to do a witty cameo in Touch of Evil (1958) was a plum coup for Orson Welles, who looked
back fondly years later: “We were well along before I even thought it up … I
think that Dietrich part is as good as anything I’ve ever done in movies. When
I think of that opening in New York, without even a press showing! She really
was the Super Marlene. Everything she has ever been was in that little house
for about four minutes.” (From the Welles/Bogdanovich This is Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
If
an actor delves deep into a part, it is often because the part delves deeply
into the actor, as with Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas: “The movie streams,
yet ‘seamless’ is too smooth a term for both the process and result. Truth
rises as vents of inner pressure, in a tri-tonality of silence, speech, music.
After the shoot, Stanton happily told reporter Patrick Goldstein of ‘finally
playing the part I wanted to play.’ He had found ‘a tremendous amount of me in
that character,’ indeed ‘all my feelings about innocence, children, Nastassja
(Kinski), having a brother … it’s the story of my life here we’re talking about.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris,Texas 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.
Paul
Lukas, Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre and James Mason are all ship-shape for Jules
Verne submarine adventure 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea (Disney, 1954; director Richard Fleischer, photography Franz
Planer).
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