Nosh 145: 'Captain Marvel,' 'Apollo 11' & More

David Elliott

         

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

Note: Nosh 146 will appear on Friday, March 29.

APPETIZER (Reviews: Captain Marvel and Apollo 11)   

Captain Marvel

Every star career, from Brando to Danny Trejo, is about luck and talent, options and choices, zig and zag. For Brie Larson, formerly Brianne Sidonie Desaulniers (French-Canadian parentage) that means: novice recognition in a comic skit on Jay Leno’s show, then theater, more TV, acclaimed work for indy movies (Short Term 12, The Glass Castle, Room – the last earned her an Oscar). Larson is a committed feminist and activist, but even young, sexy, Oscarized stardom’s gotta eat, so on to: Kong: Skull Island. And now, at 29, the giddy embrace of what Comic-Con fans call the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (what we yawny retros call Marvel Comics).

Larson’s Captain Marvel is a lab sample of pure MCU. Late Marvel founder Stan Lee beams in the opening logo, and has a cameo inside the story. By not buying the film’s Entertainment Weekly “collectors issue,” I denied myself deep research, but a ticket will do just fine. Here is the gaga saga of buff but peachy Carol (Brie Larson), who star-gazed right into America’s advanced stealth-plane program as a “girl” pilot. Alas, Carol crashed but was (shazaam!) Marvel-ized to the planet of the Kree, haughty empire builders fighting lizard-skinned and bat-eared enemies. Now called Vers, and given voltage-blast hands, she joins Kree commandos led by Jude Law (very game but possibly hankering to be back in the smarter sci-fi dream of Gattaca, or the more pictorially exciting Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow).

Carol’s past Earth aviation mentor Wendy is also the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree, which makes sense only because she is Annette Bening. Also named Mar-Vell (clever!), Bening appears to have been digitally “youthed” (expect more of that magic with the aging stars of Scorsese’s The Irishman). Her “How’s my hair?” after crashing seems like a tart dart at Larson’s lustrous, evolving hair. Ben Mendelsohn is a mighty hard case, un-Earthly but sporting Ben’s rock-dude Aussie growl. Reliably the king dude is Samuel L. Jackson as Earth cop Nick Fury, whom Jackson played in past movies and a TV series. Nick bonds with Carol/Vers, but more happily with a tabby cat, while swinging his Jackson 5 voice (that is, five times hipper than anyone else). Wolfing down a fat sandwich, he gurgles “Mmmm, we goin’ t’space?”

After whopper blasts and Marvel mutations, it feels good to get back to the home planet, circa 1995 (typically, Marvel chose to symbolize  the decade with a Blockbuster video store). Earth is called “a real shithole,” a writers’s giggle poking Trump’s infamous “shithole countries” remark. There is some humor, also vivid zips from Larson and Jackson (no one is quite bad here, just decal shallow). In essence, the Cinematic remains Comics. Every plot advance heads generically to super-powers violence. Every “mythic” hook draws on past movies, TV or comics, while seeding its own sequel. We want better: Rise of the Ruths: A Gender Odyssey, starring RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85) and DRW (Dr. Ruth Westheimer, 90). Premiering on Venus, 2022.  

Apollo 11

Captain Marvel is a gaudy space donut next to the reality feast of Apollo 11. The real deal about the Right Stuff, Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary has big-screen power (frame ratio 2:1, first shot 65 mm. for an abandoned NASA film). The subject may be the most daringly successful science experiment ever. From July 1969: the massive preparation; the fiery launch of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins; on site-viewers (mostly regular folk but also ex-President Lyndon Johnson and actor Hugh O’Brian); the near-glitches (a broken warning light, a leaky valve); Walter Cronkite intoning about “the burden and the hopes they carry for all mankind”; the huge tech team at Apollo Mission Control in Houston (almost all male, heavy on crewcuts, white shirts and Slim Jim ties); the Earth orbit like a sling-shot for the 240,500 mile trip to the moon, then back; our planet a diminishing blue oasis, while the glowing target rises as never before; the laid-back astronaut talk (“Hey there, sports fans”); the huge suspense of the little landing craft peeling off to put Armstrong and Aldrin on the surface (Neil’s flat eloquence: “one small step for man …,” Buzz’s plain awe: “magnificent desolation”); the planting of Old Glory (the U.N. flag was vetoed); and the stunning return, with a fiery re-entry at seven miles a second. All like clockwork, raised to a higher human power of courage and expertise. President Nixon’s speech was not bad, for the Dickster, but no rival to (also seen) JFK’s speech launching the dream. The film is a complete, beautiful experience. We no long make such history, but the infinitude beckons.   

SALAD (A List)

A Dozen Visionary Space or Alien Visitor Movies

From best to less (with director and year): 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick 1968), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg 1977), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1980), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956; Philip Kauffman 1978), Forbidden Planet (Fred M.  Wilcox 1956), The Martian (Ridley Scott 2015), War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin 1953), Apollo 13 (Ron Howard 1995), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise 1951), Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull 1972), Moon (Duncan Jones 2009) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Haskin 1964).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles didn’t have much use for sci-fi after his fabled War of the Worlds gig on radio. Peter Bogdanovich once asked, “Did you like 2001?” OW: “Bet I’ll love it.” PB: “You’ll never see it.” OW: “I will, too –when and if a shorter version is released. I won’t see anything that keeps me in a theater seat for more than two hours.” Somehow I doubt that he saw it, or if he did, much loved it. (Quotes from the compelling interview book This is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Sam Peckinpah relished Mexico in the studio-broken Major Dundee, even better in his masterwork The Wild Bunch. He was a full-blown alcoholic and his affair with Mexico ‘went south’ in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a deadly corrida for his dreams of Mexico and lost women and booze-bonded friendship and filming as a manly crusade. (Critic) David Thomson lamented that ‘the style turns to vinegar the way it can in wine,’ but Alfredo is more tequila de sangre than vinegar.” (From the Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Robbie the Robot, seen here with Walter Pidgeon, became the surprise star of the sci-fi hit Forbidden Planet (MGM 1956; director  Fred M. Wilcox).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 144: 'A Madea Family Funeral,' 'The Invisibles' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: A Madea Family Funeral and The Invisibles)

A Madea Family Funeral

It’s been 14 years since Diary of a Mad Black Woman launched Mabel “Madea” Simmons into movie stardom. Her creator and actor, Tyler Perry, has said that her tenth showcase, A Madea Family Funeral, is the last. Only loyal fans can viably bewail the loss. I have seen just Diary and Funeral, so cannot trace the profitable arc that made Madea a pop icon and Perry a show-biz tycoon (some reports mention $800 million in personal wealth ). No white critic has the identity tools to fully grapple with a 6-foot, 6-inch  force of black comical nature (Perry, inside tent dresses and girdles of thespian blubber). No mere celebrity, Perry-Madea is firmly wedged between two cosmic forces: Jesus (thanks to Perry’s beloved, church-going mother) and Oprah (the media goddess who is Perry’s role model and enabling fan).

Madea’s family remains the same: the men mostly  cheating, glandular animals, whom the women endure and then verbally eviscerate.  Madea, of course, kicks male butt best. She is less dynamic now, her sass sags a little, but when that gun-tongue fires, prepare to die (laughing). A great multi-tasker, Perry has rightly been praised for giving employment to black talent. Mostly he offers equal opportunity to himself.  He lords and ladies as Madea, but also appears as stolid good-guy Bryan, as raunchy old ex-pimp Joe, and as Heathrow, not the British airport but a legless veteran whose hand-held voice enhancer is like a profane PA system. Add Madea’s escort court of female jesters, the snarky little aunts Bam (Cissi Davis) and Hattie (Patrice Lovely).

The oldsters have nearly all the good lines. Their dull juniors hang around looking sexy and providing cheap plot gristle for the veterans to process as randy riffs. One old boy dies, which brings casket gags including posthumously virile Viagra. Such “wit” was fairly vanguard back when Redd Foxx was young. Spike Lee, maybe resenting Perry’s rise as the king (and queen) of sitcomical black feminism, sneered about “coonery buffoonery.” Some ghosts do gather, from Moms Mabley, Amos ‘n Andy, even the giddy drag humor of Milton Berle’s TV prime.  

As for style, nothing: mediocre shots, and sets that are like vaguely sepia offspring of the Hallmark channel. Perry is welded to formula. Madea’s sermon-like rouser, about male guilt and female empowerment, is the familiar go-girl gospel. Still, give credit. Once a kid who suffered a very mean father, but survived thanks to his mother and her tough, funny, churchy friends (and his own wits), Tyler Perry made a career, a franchise, a fortune and a character who merits lingering affection. Don’t bet on there not being prequels or sequels in Madea’s future.        

The Invisibles

In recent years we have had amazing opportunities to consider how politically stupid people can be, caught in slop buckets of emotional “thinking” and junk propaganda. But they are not the worst. Not as long as there are still Holocaust deniers. Almost 75 years after Hitler’s inferno, there is immense evidence (ovens, cellars, graves, inventories, orders, plans, photos, memoirs, archives) beyond the dead and near-dead found in 1945. Add a bumper crop of credible books, plays and films. And yet, some fools argue that Hitler never planned to exterminate the Jews and others.

To the encyclopedic denial of the deniers add The Invisibles, a movie saluting four German Jews who removed their stigmatizing yellow stars and slipped through Berlin’s Gestapo net, even after Dr. Goebbels proudly declared the capital Judenrein (free of Jews) – about a fourth of the 7,000 secret Jews would survive the war. They lived at extreme risk, faking “Aryan” identities, aided by some other Jews, Communists and gentile Germans (one runs a movie theater). German director Claus Räfle chose some obvious set-ups in his dramatizations, but skillfully integrates them with interviews of the old survivors (some now gone), Nazi newsreels and war footage of Berlin becoming a hell of fire and rubble.

Each subject is movingly vivid, in person and as performed. Like brilliant Cioma Schonhaus, who despite almost caricaturally Semitic looks would survive as a superb forger of documents (and would bike from Berlin to liberation in Switzerland). Hanni Levi dyed her hair blond, and was virtually homeless before finding a brave protector. Ruth Arndt worked as a maid for Nazis (the Soviet soldier who later found her was, providentially, Jewish). Werner Scharff, a feisty radical who escaped from a death camp, bringing news of the Final Solution, is virtually an advance scout for the rise of Israel. Strong in witness, less in art, The Invisibles honors civilian heroism in our era’s most tragic time.  Unforgettable – and undeniable.

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable Black Family Films

From my pale perspective, in order of arrival: Anna Lucasta (director Arnold Laven 1958), Porgy and Bess (Otto Preminger 1959), A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie 1961), Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer 1964), A Man Called Adam (Leo Penn 1966), Sounder (Martin Ritt 1972), Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett 1978), To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett 1990), Jungle Fever (Spike Lee 1991), Fresh (Boaz Yakin 1994), Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Michael Apted 1998), DysFunktional Family (George Gallo 2003), The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino 2006) and Fences (Denzel Washington 2016).

 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A life-long advocate of black rights, Orson Welles’s cultural affinity began with his love of early jazz. That led to his April 20, 1944 radio salute (on The Orson Welles Almanac) to great, sweet-toned clarinetist Jimmie Noone, invited to debut his “Jimmie Noone Blues.”  But Orson began with: “One of the things we are most proud of on this show is our New Orleans jazz group. The part of the clarinetist Jimmie Noone is going to be taken by Wade Barkley. This music was not just played for dances but to express the whole spirit of a people, at festivals, weddings, churches, at funerals … Yesterday I got a call from Jimmie Noone who told me how proud he was, to be going on our program. Jimmie had a particular reason to be proud, (for) the group was going to play one of Jimmie’s own compositions. Jimmie died suddenly last night. Now, in his honor, his friends are going to play one of his works.” When the piece ended, Orson held his hands up to the studio audience as a signal not to applaud, and then quietly read the 23^rd psalm. (From Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In 1935’s Alice Adams the girlish, nervous Alice (Katharine Hepburn) “natters defensively that ‘Walter tells the most wonderful darkie stories.’ Glib racism pervaded the era. In Casablanca the sensitive, cosmopolitan Ilse (Ingrid Bergman) refers to black singer Dooley Wilson as ‘the boy at the piano.’ Wilson, 56, had been a public performer for 44 years. Alice is no more a true racist than Ilse. Her ‘darkie’ comment underscores her own social marginality.”  (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

In Always Outnumbered…, Laurence Fishburne is brilliant as the ex-con who saves a boy (Daniel Williams). (HBO/Palomar 1998; director Michael Apted, photography by John Bailey.)

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 143: 'They Shall Not Grow Old', 'Arctic' & More

David Elliott

         

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

A week for men in the maelstrom, of war and nature:

APPETIZER (Reviews of They Shall Not Grow Old

and Arctic)

They Shall Not Grow Old

Survivors of the awful Great War of 1914-18 were never praised as “the greatest generation” (the last American vet of WWI died in 2010, the last Britisher in 2012). Despite strong books and excellent movies (Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, Gallipoli, Jules et Jim, All Quiet on the Western Front), the conflict always felt distant to me. I grew up in the more imposing shadow of WWII, “the good war” – a rather questionable term, given the Holocaust, fire-bombed cities and two atom bombs.

Education continues, and I have now seen Peter Jackson’s amazing They Shall Not Grow Old. The title is a wistful grace note for the fallen. The British Empire lost almost a million combatants, including many boys accepted well before the legal enlistment age of 19. Jackson has raised a monument to rival Europe’s many WWI memorials, and one more viscerally effective. For the BBC’s centenary of the war’s end (Nov. 11, 1918), he made this documentary from around 600 hours of once-hidden, frequently frightening footage at the Imperial War Museum. He edited to 99 superb minutes, and added color. Tinting only starts once the recruits, having endured the rude rigors of training, join the frontline in France or Belgium. The digital tinting (mostly pink, brown, green, gray with gashes and dribbles of red) punches right through all the quaint newsreel memories. We feel entrenched, at times almost bayoneted.

The steady drumbeat of veterans’s voices was taped decades ago, their varied accents often affecting a very British sangfroid (“You take the rough with the smooth”). Nobody imagined this kind of rough, for the home front was soaked in propaganda and censorship. Soon most of the soldierly bravado was smelted down by fear, but that also forged a bond of total comradeship (the men felt that civilians never did, or could, understand). Only such soul steel could deal with the daily hell: lousy food (mostly tinned stew), awful latrines, boot-sucking mud, lice and rats, snipers, corpse odors, oncoming barrages of artillery. Two weeks of such service brought 50 pence, often spent near the line in a shabby bordello, but “rest” mostly brought more grueling work and exhausted sleep.

The front was a dark satanic mill. In one astonishing sequence, a platoon waits to go “over the top” and march into machine gun fire, barbed wire, shell craters. The faces, many young in a hardened way, stare at the camera with a glazed foreboding. They knew then (as we know now) that for many this was their final day of life. A century later they flicker as mates for life, beyond death.

Masters have filmed great battle episodes (Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, Welles’s Chimes at Midnight). Jackson’s glory here is another kind, exceeding his epic battles in the Lord of the Rings saga. This is so much more real, so shockingly candid. The Great War didn’t need a great generation, it just needed desperately to end. One of the moving truths is that nearly all the Brits felt compassion for the Germans they killed or caught (and vice-versa). Hell had bound them together. Dazed veterans on both sides went home to poor pensions, unemployment, general indifference and little talk of their ordeal. One survivor converted the brutal nightmare into his own grotesque “victory,” a frontline messenger who found a new, deadly message. Adolf Hitler.  

Arctic

Frigidly rooted in Nanook of the North and the novels of Jack London, Arctic is set in a world where global warming will bring no timely relief for H. Overgard. With his crew mates buried near his smashed plane, now crusted in snow, Overgard hunkers inside the fuselage. There he can sleep, eat the fish he pulls up from ice holes, and attempt feeble radio contact. As death seems more certain than rescue, he will strike out into the white mountains.

Arctic is the sure-footed feature debut of director Joe Penna, best known for short films (and self-promotion on YouTube). He was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and you wonder how much these wintry, Icelandic locations tormented and enchanted him (Tómas Orn Tómasson’s landscape vistas are like beautiful abstract paintings that want to kill you). Mads Mikkelson, far from past roles like Igor Stravinsky and Bond villain Le Chiffre, has the severe face of a Nordic crag, perfect for Overgard. No review should map out the incidents that reveal his fate. Let’s say it involves another person, two bears, a cave and the sort of total struggle that has no time for posing like a hero. Arctic puts the cold into our bones, but has a heartbeat of warm humanity.   

SALAD (A List)

Stanley Donen’s Dozen Best

Donen, one of the supreme directors of musicals and other entertainments, died at 94 last Saturday. He made the best Hitchcocky film not directed by Hitch (Charade), and what I would call the two finest American musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face). Donen also gave one of the best Oscars acceptance speeches, singing and tapping for his honorary award in 1998. (You can watch it on YouTube.)

His Twelve Best, by my reckoning: Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Funny Face (1957), Charade (1963), The Pajama Game (1957), Two for the Road (1967), On the Town (1949), Damn Yankees (1958), Bedazzled (1967), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954),  Once More, with Feeling! (1960), Arabesque (1966) and  It’s Always Fair Weather (1955).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

For all his ebullience – see his early scenes in Citizen Kane  (and his Will Varner in The Long, Hot Summer) – Orson Welles had a streak of lucid melancholy, which provoked the studio-edit ambush of the movie he loved best, his 1942 family tragedy The Magnificent Ambersons. He later said that “everything (in America), including a six-minute talk show conversation or a 30-second commercial, has a happy ending. There was just a built-in dread of the downbeat movie, and I knew I’d have that to face, but I thought I had a movie so good – I was absolutely certain of its value, more than Kane – that I had  no doubt that it would win through, in spite of that industry fear of the dark movie.” In a lasting sense it has – see the new Criterion blu-ray. (Quote from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The two, often rainy weeks of 1956 filming in Paris for Funny Face in Paris, above all the sunny Champs-Elysees scene that opens “Bonjour, Paris,” was probably the apex of Stanley Donen’s vivid career. As he told biographer Steven Silverman, “It was Sunday, we were on the Champs. I was directing Fred Astaire, and we had extras dressed as policemen to keep away the crowds … We used crumpled-up cigarettes as Fred’s marks, and then I hit the (music) playback and Fred started singing that song. I thought, ‘This is it! In my entire life, this is all I ever wanted to do.” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Kay Thompson, Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire after arriving in Paris in spring 1956, to shoot the French scenes of Funny Face (Paramount Pictures 1957; director Stanley Donen, photography by Ray June).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.