Nosh 154: 'Booksmart,' 'Red Joan' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Booksmart and Red Joan)

Booksmart

If Booksmart were a book it would be spoken. L.A. teens Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are studious and literate. Amy’s bedroom door has a Virginia Woolf welcome, and warning:  “A room of one’s own.” But mostly they talk – even in Mandarin to a taxi driver. Their silences hum with coming verbiage, and Molly’s big, friendly face is like a thought bubble elevated by her snappy lines. She and slender, shyer Amy are high school pals, bonded grinds. Though not unpopular (Molly is class president), they have no party plans for the night before graduation. What shatters their smug but also envious aloofness is when Molly reveals that she’s been accepted by Yale, and finds that classmates she considered party-happy slackers are also heading to top-rank schools (or, for one dude, high-paying Google).

Filmed with funny, adolescent sass, Booksmart was directed by Olivia Wilde and written by four women, so a male critic is likely to miss a few of the nuances. The story’s brisk, generic situation keeps the fun accessible, rooted in the grad-night classics American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused but with a key difference. In those movies the teen ensemble is the star (several talents later rose to stardom). Here the big, pulsating group pivots around the reactions of Amy and Molly, who jump onto the wild-night party scene with awkward zeal, revealing cross-currents of rivalry and sexuality (Amy is verbally out as lesbian but still a virgin, while Molly covets a cool jock).  The finish smiles, and perhaps green-lights a sequel. 

Jason Sudeikis and Lisa Kudrow, now virtual old-timers, have minor, doodled roles as the school principal and a mom. Booksmart is a giddy carousel of up-and-comers, each with behavioral markers, glib attitudes and a rash of references (Avril Lavigne, Malala, Sasha Obama, Harry Potter, etc.). The hip music hops, and the visuals crackle, including maybe the best party pool scene since Boogie Nights. Everyone gets some shine time, notably Jessica Williams as a popular teacher, Skyler Gisondo as a party boy who proves to be charmingly decent, and Molly Gordon as a slut-shamed girl with true grit. This could easily spawn a cable TV series (Amy and Molly’s Wild Gap Year!), a bubble spree of more young faces, but Wilde has zestfully freshened the template.    

Red Joan

The stage and TV director Trevor Nunn, now 79, brings to Red Joan movie tactics that were going stale in his childhood, the WWII era of Hollywood’s Stalin-praising solidarity film Mission to Moscow, which soon got its makers in trouble during the Red Scare. Judi Dench plays old Joan Stanley, looking back. Sophie Cookson, who has traces of Dench’s faintly Pekinese features, plays young Joan, wooed in 1937 at England’s Cambridge University by sexy Leo Galich (Tom Hughes), a Jewish expat student so high on Stalinist Russia that he wears a red shirt while making another pass at red-haired Joan. A brilliant science student, Joan becomes brainy secretary to a top man in Britain’s wartime atomic program, and also a virtual kiosk:  committed socialist, patriotic idealist, emerging pacifist and proto-feminist (while typing, she also offers bright ideas).

The film, like Warren Beatty’s Reds, traffics in rather naïve notions of history. Dashing Leo is the chief naif. On missions for Moscow he keeps returning seductively, and while Joan’s alert brain warns her, her warm lips often give way. There is another Red recruiter, vampy Sonia (Tereza Svbora), an engaging but cynical fanatic. The actors are capable, the period touches credible, yet Nunn directs the script like a retro rally of hushed reveals, furtive risks, spy-craft on the level of Dick Tracy’s wrist radio. Dench at 84 still has touching nuances. But she is almost blind, so nearly all the action and passion rely on the rather overloaded Cookson, caught in a turnstile of conflicting lovers and loyalties (including her very non-proletarian loyalty to her mink coat).

Drawn from a novel, Red Joan romantically embroiders the faithful Communist spy Melita Norwood, who after 60 years of loyal Kremlin service was exposed by British intel, but not prosecuted because of age (87). One can feel for scientists and intellectuals who saw the Soviet Union as a rampart against fascism, and share their ambivalence about the new nuclear weapons, but Joan’s final defense is squishy. She believed that giving Russia bomb secrets would balance the two sides, for world peace. The Soviets had excellent atomic scientists and the stolen secrets bought them at most around two years of catch-up time, years in which neither the war-weary U.S. nor the war-ravaged U.S.S.R. had the will or means to launch a third world war. Nunn’s movie does not freshen the espionage template, and indeed scarcely advances beyond Greta Garbo’s old Mata Hari.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Excellent Teen Movies

In my ranking (with main star, director, year):

1. Rebel Without a Cause (James Dean, Nicholas Ray, 1955), 2. American Graffiti (Richard Dreyfuss, George Lucas/Francis Coppola, 1973), 3. Murmur of the Heart (Benoit Ferreaux, Louis Malle, 1971), 4. Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, Greta Gerwig, 2017), 5. Dazed and Confused (Matthew McConaughey, Richard Linklater, 1993), 6. Caterina in the Big City (Alice Teghil, Paolo Virzi, 2003), 7. The Last Picture Show (Jeff Bridges, Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), 8. Election (Reese Witherspoon, Alexander Payne, 1999), 9. The Warriors (Michael Beck, Walter Hill, 1979), 10. Colma: The Musical (H.P. Mendoza, Richard Wong, 2006), 11. Zebrahead (Michael Rapaport, Anthony Drazan, 1992) and 12. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Matt Broderick, John Hughes, 1986).

 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In a venture not predictive of his later film career, Orson Welles at 11 was taken by his often absent father Richard on a summer trip to New York, “where they would catch the premiere of Don Juan (1926), the first feature-length motion picture with a sound track for sound effects and music. Dick Welles’s friend John Barrymore played the title role, but Dick lasted only half an hour into the show, Orson recalled, before the horror of it all drove him up the aisle and out of the theater. ‘This,’ he grumbled, ‘ruins the movies forever.’ (This) ‘must have  been the very worst Jack ever was,’ Orson remembered, ‘They’d put this little curly blond wing on him – and he just looked diseased.” (Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane. YouTube slices of Don Juan reveal that Dick’s revulsion was quite personal. Despite a fancy wig, Barrymore’s Don Juan has ripe moments with his young real-life paramour Mary Astor.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Having revived John Travolta with Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino pulled off in Jackie Brown a double-rescue, for 1970s veterans Pam Grier and Robert Forster:  “Forster, 56 in 1997, had found theater in high school, soon became Arlene Francis’s stage stud in Mrs. Dalley Has a Lover. At 26 he appeared naked on horseback, ogled by furtive officer Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye. He was a radicalized newsman starring in Medium Cool, then burrowed into TV (Banyon, etc.) and junk films noticed only by scavengers like Tarantino. ‘Robert Forster’s face is back story,’ said QT, as was Grier’s: ‘They’ve had had breaks and success and failure and money and no money, and it’s right there.” It was there so rightly for Jackie and bail bondsman Max Cherry. (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

The richly weathered face of Robert Forster, as bailsman Max Cherry, is one of the glories of Jackie Brown (Miramax Films 1997; director Quentin Tarantino, photography by Guillermo Navarro).

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Nosh 153: 'Tolkien,' 'Ask Dr. Ruth' & More

David Elliott

         

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

Note: Nosh 154 will arrive on Friday, May 31.

APPETIZER (Reviews:  Tolkien and Ask Dr. Ruth)

Tolkien

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings saga wore me down with its tick-tock metronome of epic violence and long intervals of dialog (I relished more the inventive Harry Potters). Tolkien has now made me admire Jackson’s source writer. In its elegant construction of times past, Dome Kurokoski’s movie has some pious glazing, yet it stirringly revives the youth of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. We follow him as a poor, bookish, then orphaned lad, taken from a Hobbit-worthy countryside to the industrial vistas of Edwardian Birmingham, and then that fearful English furnace of snobbery: the male boarding school.

The film echoes the old Ivory-Merchant mix of crafty, nostalgic display and earnest plot pacing, yet life takes charge as Ronald bonds with three schoolmates of higher “breeding” but artistic interests. With good actors in each role, the sense of testing rivalry and comradeship is beautifully developed (no American teen movie compares to their interests and talks). What saves Tolkien from turning into a rather insular schoolboy drama is the struggling evolution of brilliant but insecure Ronald. After childhood, actor Nicholas Hoult takes over the role with solid sincerity (he resembles the mid-century American actor Jeffrey Hunter, of The Searchers and King of Kings). Ronald’s rich imagination finds its mate and goad in Edith Bratt, an artistic orphan and lady’s companion played by Lily Collins, who was so good in Warren Beatty’s daring but little-seen Rules Don’t Apply. Collins is both very sane and very fanciful. The virginal romantics join their fates in a scene of backstage infatuation with Wagner’s Ring Cycle (a seed for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels).

At Oxford University Ronald’s other raft arrives: the linguistics master Prof. Wright, whose rapt, eager speech comparing trees to language and culture is a career capper for Derek Jacobi. There is a fine curlicue touch, when he is thrilled to find Finnish roots in Ronald’s made-up fantasy language – director Kurokoski is Finnish, and did a movie about the gay-porn icon Tom of Finland. But Tolkien reaches well beyond academics, as it heads into the terrible test of Tolkien’s generation, World War I, for which each of the four friends volunteers.

If the Somme battle hell seems to combine aspects of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Spielberg’s War Horse and old service-buddy pictures, it also tallies the tragic reckoning with true power. In its last 20 minutes Tolkien becomes one of the most heartfelt, beyond sentimental memorials to the Lost Generation of 1914-18. Ironically its best companion came out recently, and from Peter Jackson: his amazing documentary on Britain’s wartime sacrifices, They Shall Not Grow Old (see Nosh 143, by scrolling down).

Ask Dr. Ruth

Good documentaries, even those of minor artistic interest, show us something valuable. If they center on a strong personality, all the better – as in Ask Dr. Ruth. Ruth Westheimer will turn 91 next month, and on the evidence of Ryan White’s film she is still the best German-Jewish, Israeli/American powerhouse of concentrated vigor that modern media has clad in limelight. If she and Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be inserted together into one of those giant super-colliders of particle physics, Einstein’s coveted Unified Field Theory might finally emerge as a fabulous new equation: E=2R3 (Energy equals two Ruths cubed).

A towering four feet, seven inches under a frothy mane of hair, Westheimer delivers opinions with a Teutonic crunch, but also the salt of the smartest old dame in a kosher kitchen. The middle-aged Ruth, a strenuously educated émigré, gained fame on New York talk radio in the ’80s as a sex-advice guru. She was always frank but gracious (imagine Howard Stern minus all the crude guy guff). She’s still a ringing anvil of good sense and goodwill about dating, love tactics, protection, abortion and (above all) two-way affection as the sexy nexus of satisfaction. Ruth was a beacon of humane sanity during the early, anti-gay AIDS years. Like some other short, Jewish, willful and verbose intellects (Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, Ayn Rand), Ruth doesn’t entirely welcome the accolade “feminist” (too au-courant or political?), probably due to  flinty individualism. But a feminist she is.

The movie’s heart, eclipsing all the media jive with Johnny, Jay, Howard, Merv, David, Arsenio and other gone or aging yakkers, is in the often tragic backstory: little Karola Ruth Siegel, losing her close, happy family in Frankfurt to join one of the last kindertransport trains from Hitler’s Reich; lonely years in a Swiss orphanage; parents killed in the Holocaust; postwar revival in new Israel (nearly killed in the 1948 war); hard, studious Paris years, then New York. Two brief marriages to handsome studs left few scars, then came lasting devotion with her beloved Fred Westheimer, an engineer (“I still remember those first kisses”) and children. To fill in much of that, Isaac Rubio’s animation sequences can be criticized as too golden with light (as if to fend off Nazi shadows). I found them intimate and moving. Ruth, who has seized life with great courage, infuses this movie with her very special self. 

SALAD (A List)

Strong Films About Real, Strong Women

In order of arrival (with subject and star):

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Joan, Marie Falconetti), Queen Christina (Christina of Sweden, Greta Garbo), The Nun’s Story (Sister Luke/Marie Louise Habets, Audrey Hepburn), Coal Miner’s Daughter (Tammy Wynette, Sissy Spacek), Gorillas in the Mist (Dian Fossey, Sigourney Weaver), What’s Love Got to Do With It (Tina Turner, Angela Bassett), Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett), The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (herself), Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts), The Passion of Ayn Rand (Helen Mirren), Frida (Frida Kahlo, Salma Hayek), My Flesh and Blood (Susan Tom, herself), Fur (Diane Arbus, Nicole Kidman), Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch), Agora (Hypatia of Alexandria, Rachel Weisz), The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep), Finding Vivian Maier (herself), Joy (Joy Mangano, Jennifer Lawrence), Marie Curie: The Passion of Knowledge (Karolina Gruszka).    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Probably film’s finest escalating speech is the stunning reply of Kane (Orson Welles) in Citizen Kane, after his cold, rich guardian (George Coulouris) tells the novice publisher that he’s wasting his lavish inheritance:

“The trouble is, you don’t realize you’re talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who owns 82,364 shares of Public Transit Preferred – you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings – I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town, a committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars … On the other hand, I am also the publisher of the Inquirer. As such it is my duty – I’ll let you in on a secret – it is also my pleasure, to see to it that the decent, hard-working citizens of the community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates, just because they haven’t anyone to look after their interests. I’ll let you in on another little secret, Mr. Thatcher. I think I’m the man to do it. You see, I have money and property. If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property.” (Thatcher sputters that Charles is losing a million a year, setting up the squelch supreme.) … You’re right, Mr. Thatcher, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in … sixty years.” (Any chance we can get Mr. Kane to run against Trump next year?)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No one else discerned the special flux and tang that director Robert Altman got from actors quite like critic Pauline Kael: “He has abandoned the theatrical conventions that movies have generally clung to, of introducing characters and putting tags on them. His approach entails losses (like) some plot holes that don’t get filled, (but) the inconveniences are inseparable from Altman’s best qualities.” Square viewers “were used to the Broadway sound where you get a line and then a dead space. What Altman did was get rid of the dead spaces.” (From the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

In a bad portent of their future, guardian Walter P. Thatcher (George Coulouris) greets new ward Charlie Kane (Buddy Swan), under the gaze of mom (Agnes Moorehead) and dad (Harry Shannon) in Citizen Kane. (RKO Pictures, 1941; director Orson Welles, photography by Gregg Toland).

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Nosh 152: 'Long Shot,' 'Woman at War' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews:  Long Shot and Woman at War)

Long Shot

Seth Rogen, a canny quipster, remarks in Long Shot that “just because you star in a movie doesn’t mean you’re a movie star.” The script (which Rogen partly wrote) also mentions how few TV stars have risen to full big-screen status. Having begun in stand-up and TV before mentor Judd Apatow made him a film comedy fixture, Rogen is himself an upstart long shot, a bearded blub with an amiable, doofy-dude edge. Playing journalist Fred Flarsky in Long Shot, he mostly leaves aside the honking laugh, motor-mouth joke rhythm and goofy non-sequiters that define his guest turns on talk shows.

Long Shot works (when it does) because of the amusing contrast chemistry of Rogen and long-term wow Charlize Theron. She is Charlotte Field, the idealistic, sexy-swank U.S. Secretary of State (the story’s TV bones stick out, with skeletal debts to the feminist pol hits Veep and Madam Secretary). Field wants to replace the dodo President who, like Trump, has TV bonafides. To polish her hip humor and youth appeal she hires the fiercely anti-corporate wiseguy Flarsky. In a sitcom touch, he first had a crush (or in modern laff parlance: boner) on Charlotte when she at 16 baby-sat him, 13. Between global trips and speeches, an odd-couple intimacy develops, which means sex jokes built on contrasts of Theron’s glowing, creamy construction with Rogen’s meatloaf bod (to upscale his appeal, Flarsky shaves off his neck hairs). The charm is that the stars seem to enjoy a real rapport, much like perky Jack Black and luscious Kate Winslet in The Holiday, and well beyond Polly Bergen and Fred MacMurray in 1964’s Kisses for My President.

Long Shot is a packing-the-package job. That includes lazy filler, like salutes to Game of Thrones and a mediocre version of “Moon River.” Charlotte’s environmentalism inevitably offends the Big Money (represented by a Rupert Murdoch media tycoon, played by Andy Serkis like an angry Smurf). Theron gets stuck with a scene of Charlotte, high on gonzo party pills, stopping a potential war, which feels like a flop skit from the SNL mothball closet. But the byplay between Flarsky and his black buddy (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), when the bud confides being a devoutly Christian Republican, has topical tang. Director Jonathan Levine keeps the motor running, with a few burps. There is no wild concession to good taste, and the closure gag involves online crotch raunch. Rogen and Theron zip this facile but entertaining comedy along to its expected finish.

Woman at War

It won ten Edda Awards, Iceland’s Oscars, and Woman at War has now become the latest dream project of Jodie Foster. Continuing an adult career that rallies issues like a soapbox derby, Foster plans to produce, direct and star in an American remake of the North Sea island’s rousing art-house hit. Given that she last ignited meaningful press heat with 2011’s The Beaver, an oddball platform for her loyalty to scandal-ridden friend Mel Gibson, my advice is: don’t wait. See the highly original import, with its urgent eco-message bundled in human charm.

Directed with fey-Nordic verve by Benedikt Erlingsson (as in “son of Erling”), it stars middle-aged but robust, athletic and zealous Halla, played by excellent Halldóra Geirhardsdóttir (as in “daughter of Geirhard”). A one-woman commando unit of green subversion, the chipper, clever Halla sabotages a Chinese-led energy scheme that plans to convert her cozy thermal nation into another  square on the global Monopoly board. The Reykjavik government is enraged as Halla’s attacks on power pylons revives fearless Viking courage in the severely beautiful landscape. As drones circle and the media salivates about her hidden identity, her only allies are a grumpy country cousin, his dog Woman, and twin sister Asa, a seeker who would rather be at an ashram in Asia. Geirhardsdóttir plays both siblings, a binary touch which sets up a terrific finish. A personal challenge also takes Halla to another level.

Wagner would suit this intrepid green Valkyrie, but simpler music is inserted with a Fellini touch of whimsy, which  serves both plot suspense and moral drama. There is something here of the classic British comedy about invention and greed, The Man in the White Suit, and also the delightful O’Horten, the Norwegian shaggy-dog yarn about a resourceful old train master. Smiling, as the story’s deft pieces fit together in your mind, you also realize that this bright movie is serious, timely and resonant.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A worldly traveler from childhood onward, Orson Welles heard the call of long wanderlust at the end of World War II: “FDR’s death, rising Cold War paranoia and tax problems motivated Welles to Europe. As a gypsy-beggar Barnum he acted in mediocre films (some not: The Third Man, Princes of Foxes) to finance his projects. His own film marvels were producer-chopped, some barely released, often reviewed as gaudy tokens of a myth in ruins. Still, view Leslie Megahey’s 1982 BBC interview. After Megahey says ‘flawed masterpiece,’ Orson rolls the phrase around in the snifter of his mood, saving the ambivalence like brandy. Will he swallow, or spit?” (From Starlight Rising; see below.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The quote about Welles is from the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Sgt. Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) and his stalwart few, including his beloved tank (camouflaged above), prepare to face a mad-for-water German brigade in the desert dunes of Sahara (Columbia Pictures, 1943; director Zoltan Korda; photography by Rudolph Maté).

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Nosh 151: 'Amazing Grace' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Amazing Grace)

Amazing Grace

In the 1960 film The Entertainer English music hall comic and jaded hack Archie Rice (Laurence Oliver) recalls hearing an old black woman sing a spiritual: “If I ever heard any hope or strength in the human race (it was from her) singing about Jesus, or something like that.” But Archie never heard Aretha Franklin. In the sphere of music, by now the music of the spheres (she died last year at 76), there is no other Aretha. Amazing Grace must be her best memorial, yet it isn’t funereal.

Her double-record “Amazing Grace” (1972) is still the top-selling gospel album. Alan Elliott, future music man (Atlantic Records), heard it first at age 8, felt heaven’s tectonic plates shifting, and after long effort delivers his joyful thanks. Elliott rescued the unfinished, unreleased film from mythic limbo. It had “technical problems.” Hollywood pro Sydney Pollack (Tootsie), directing this labor of love at a black Missionary Baptist church in L.A. in January, 1972, lacked docu-savvy. He didn’t use a clapper slate to sync image edits with the audio. Franklin felt bitter about it (there had been giddy talk about a “gospel Woodstock”). Although Pollack, before dying in 2008, gave Elliott his OK, Aretha was very tetchy about legality and legacy (and money) and even sued the devoted rescuer. Finally her estate made a deal, and Elliott assembled this anthem of Arethanosity (want an auteur credit? Call it an Aretha Franklin film).

Not so much backed as embraced by a small, rootsy band and the Southern California Community Choir of Rev. James Cleveland (unleashing his rugged soul pipes and playing piano), Franklin was almost 30. She is in control but shows the pensive dignity she probably had in girlish gospel days for her preaching dad (who appears on film). Aretha’s loose, flowing outfits are church-right, though no make-up could withstand the coming sweat in a hot church. Soon she has everyone sweating, shaking, rising, calling, responding (a joy-flung hankie will come flying past Aretha’s head to the camera). Her shout notes are rousers, breaking through the floorboards of heaven, calling Jesus for love and mercy. The climax of the first night (maybe the movie) is the title song. She gives it new life, prepping the coming of the glory with softly sung intervals, repeats, high notes like rockets. Old master Cleveland, overcome, leaves the piano briefly to pour his tears into a cloth.

“She’s the reason why women want to sing,” said singer Mary G. Blige, with pardonable excess (say amen always for song sisters Bessie, Billie, Ethel, Rosetta, Ella, Mahalia, Dinah, Nina, Etta, Betty, Eartha and Aretha’s mentor seen up-front, Clara Ward). This is never the conquering show-biz swagger by which Aretha reduced Belushi and Ackroyd to awed gapers with “Think” in The Blues Brothers (Pauline Kael wrote that she “smashes the movie to smithereens”). This is young Aretha looking back to when she was really young, but now a mature artist whose blazing power extends the fervent, swinging tradition of black worship. Mahalia Jackson was a spiritual locomotive, feeding primal soul coal into a furnace of belief. Franklin’s train burned a more sensual and urban fuel.

The wall painting of Jesus is garish, the camera work often ragged (but always authentic), the choir can sound a little under-miked, glimpses of Mick Jagger add nothing but a taste of white admiration, but Franklin fuses it all in herself, as a personal hallelujah. Amazing Grace is a vital sacrament of black musical communion in a ghetto church,  during another hard time (Dr. King was gone, Ali was recently beaten, and the insidious Southern strategy was entrenched under Nixon). Thanks to Franklin and the tenacious Elliott, it is more accessible than ever, and trans-racially profound. When Franklin offers testaments like “Mary Don’t You Weep,” “You’ve Got a Friend” and (singing at the piano) the wonderfully gradual and reflective “Never Grow Old,” the heart comes home to truth. Aretha be praised.

SALAD (A List)

12 Remarkable Movies About Real Singers:

In order of arrival: The Buddy Holly Story (1978, Gary Busey as Buddy Holly); Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980, Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn); La Bamba (1987, Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens); Mahalia Jackson: The Power and the Glory (1997, Mahalia as herself); What’s Love Got to Do With It (2003, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner); Beyond the Sea (2004, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin); No Direction Home (2005, Bob Dylan as himself); Walk the Line (2005, Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash); La Vie en Rose (2007, Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf); Marley (2012, Bob Marley as himself); Florence Foster Jenkins (2016, Meryl Streep as Flo) and Maria by Callas (2018, Maria as herself).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

We’re letting Orson relax this week, knowing he would like our substitute, one of the funniest letters ever sent by a Hollywood screenwriter. Blacklisted but still productive, Dalton Trumbo wrote to a friend on Oct. 6, 1957: “Cecil Blount DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was previewed this week for a company of 263 archangels in a temple of strawberry meringue especially built for the occasion on the Paramount back lot. Y. Frank Freeman led vespers with a reading from the letter of ‘a Protestant church leader’ to the effect that ‘the first century had its Apostle Paul, the 13^th century had St. Francis, the 16^th had Martin Luther and the 20^th has Cecil B. DeMille.’ After heaping portions of the Sacred Host had been served up in a rich sauce with seconds for everybody, DeMille himself, clad in the rosette of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, appeared among them on a Technicolor screen to explain his affection for the Almighty. The picture was then revealed.” (From David Kipen’s new book Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In grand, rocky vistas and bedrock emotions, the ancestor of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is John Ford’s Western The Searchers: “In 1956 The Searchers gripped me with its first shot: a door opening to Monument Valley, the moment that ‘permeates all of Wenders’s films’ (Alexander Graf). Ethan (John Wayne) is like Travis a terse loner embedded in rage. Travis’s bid for redemption is his son. Ethan must save himself by not killing his niece, abducted by Indians. Lean, brooding Harry Dean Stanton was no Wayne, and that massive icon could not have inhabited Travis, but as searchers they are spiritual siblings.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

The Golden Calf receives its due in The Ten Commandments. That’s Edward G. Robinson in white, on the left. (Paramount Pictures, 1956; director Cecil B. DeMille, photography by Loyal Griggs.)

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