Nosh 157: 'The Dead Don't Die,' 'Non-Fiction' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Dead Don’t Die and Non-Fiction)

The Dead Don’t Die

Only a very dead, headless zombie would not enjoy the frisky charms of Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, but only a mental zombie would think that Jarmusch is saying anything important. The word “deadpan” rules, led by old maestro of deadpan pauses Bill Murray and young master of deadpan reflection Adam Driver (their rhythms zipper neatly together). They’re police chief Cliff and assistant Ronnie, two square but dimly hip guys in Centerville, “a real nice place” and a joke-yokel variant on the generic but surreal American burgs in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and The Straight Story. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes, a great Lynch veteran, achieves wee gems of atmosphere, but the movie lacks the witty, sexy magic of Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, possibly the most truly stylish vampire vision since Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu.

Earth’s axis is tilting thanks to “polar fracking,” clocks and nature are going bonkers, animals are fleeing. But Cliff and Ronnie tool around town in their squad car, sometimes with adorable, easily scared Officer Mindy (Chloe Sevigny). Slowly they tumble to the fact that dead people, including gone friends and Mindy’s granny, are coming back as ravenous flesh-eaters. The true tilt is from global ecological anxiety to the grisly but campy realm of George Romero, who ignited the film zombie cult with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Jarmusch satirizes addictive consumerism, which Romero already nailed down in his zombie mall movie of 1978, Dawn of the Dead. The pulpy schtick made Romero, who died two years ago, the Grand Old Ghoul of the genre. Jarmusch, a more diverse, urbane talent, is enjoying his hipster’s chow-down on Romero gore and the goofy (“kill the head!”) mystique of the undead. Compared to vampires, the vamps of romantic desire, zombies are only dumb, ugly cannibals. 

Jarmusch’s love of actors provides the party buzz. His cool cast includes many haunters of the indie zone, each chewing a crafty morsel: Tom Waits, Carol Kane, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, RZA, Selena Gomez, Danny Glover, Eszter Balint, Rosie Perez. O blessed Harry Dean Stanton, why hast thou not returned? As in Only Lovers Left Alive, the main reward is the immaculate, pale-hawk beauty Tilda Swinton. As Zelda, a Scottish mortician, she has sword moves worthy of Kill Bill and the floaty aura of a space alien who dropped in to observe the primitives. Swinton gets the big payoff scene. And then Jarmusch, as if blood-bound to the genre, adds some final carnage – a rather dull dessert. 

Non-Fiction

What better gourmet stuffing for a fine French goose than savvy articulations about the crisis of modern publishing and the “end of literature”? In Non-Fiction veteran publishing editor Alain (Guillaume Canet) frets suavely about a corporate threat to his old Parisian firm, and the rising tide of blogs, digital snarkers and self-pub sites. Meanwhile, actress wife Selena (Juliette Binoche) is bored with her hit cop show on TV, always defining her role as “not a policewoman but a crisis management expert” (even though we only see her character firing a gun). Portly novelist Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) fears he is losing Alain’s support, and their talk is a dance of needles. Alain, being naturally a man of affairs, suspects Selena is having one (with tubby-bear Leonard). Leo’s wife Valerie (funny, straight-talking Nora Hamzawi) seeks relief from work anxieties in her own liaison. Being glib and Gallic, everyone sauces sex with discussion (Binoche, always a tonic gift, pulls off at 54 a bed romp with gamine verve).

Despite chatter loaded with timely cultural worries, avoid being an earnest note-taker or you’ll miss the fun. Non-Fiction, written and directed by Olivier Assayas, is a fleet-tongued comical carousel. Vincent invokes Bergman’s wintry Lutheran film Winter Light (his young, Internetty advisor hasn’t a clue), then we hear Selena and Leo talking about past oral sex during a Star Wars viewing. For all their angst à la mode, these people are corks of survival. Tasteful elitist Vincent will cushion literature with a trendy sideline of “adult coloring books,” while Selena must advance from police busts to Racine’s immortal drama Phèdre. Finally the movie escapes from urban rooms to sun-gilded Provence. In this radiant partie de campagne, sly darts and wry gossip will continue, soon crowned by some happy news. Jean Renoir would have been delighted.  

SALAD (A List)

A lesson in contrast …

The Six Best Vampire Movies: Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau 1922), Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch 2013), Vampyr (C.T. Dreyer 1932), Nosferatu the Vampyr (Werner Herzog 1979), Dracula (Tod Browning 1931) and Cronos (Guillermo Del Toro 1993). A sextet of artistic value.

The Six Best Zombie Movies: Night of the Living Dead (George Romero 1968), I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur 1943), Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon 1985), Dawn of the Dead (George Romero) 1979, Dead Snow (Tommy Wirkola 2009) and Land of the Dead (George Romero 2005). A sextet of diverting pulp.   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of the many things Orson Welles learned while making Citizen Kane was that “movie décor was a model for Kane’s life – so much accumulation, lovely for a moment when looked at, but dross waiting to be burned. There is a special emotional charge in the final sequence in the great hall of Xanadu, when we see all the art, rubbish and things Kane has accumulated as they stand waiting to be burned. The scene is like a city of skyscrapers, but it resembles nothing so much as the props department of a movie studio – and that is exactly what was filmed.” (How unlike W.R. Hearst, who made sure that almost everything in his home castle was preserved. Quote from David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“The Cruise is a wee-budget documentary. The star plays himself and is undeniably strange. So, nix it! But I love Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s urban muse and verbal mustard, and his supple, generous, form-bending endorsement by neophyte director Bennett Miller, who went on to bravura dramas (Capote, Moneyball, Foxfire). So I salute bus and foot cruiser Speed, film’s finest New York motor-mouth since Andre Gregory of My Dinner With Andre.” (Intro of The Cruise chapter in 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.

Vampire queen Eve (Tilda Swinton) reigns in Only Lovers Left Alive (Sony Pictures Classics 2014; director Jim Jarmusch, photography by Yorick Le Saux).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 156: 'All is Real,' 'The Biggest Little Farm' & More

David Elliott

         

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

Note: Nosh 157 will arrive on Friday, June 28.

APPETIZER (Reviews: All is True and The Biggest Little Farm)

All is True

Opening with the fiery incineration of London’s Globe Theatre in 1613, Kenneth Branagh’s All is True depicts, via known facts and artful imagination, the three years of Shakespeare’s retirement. The movie finds its Will and its way, although vocally Shakespearean only in snatches. True to Branagh’s crisp modern voice, speaking is clear and quotation rather spare. After his wandering years as playwright and actor-manager, Will was 49 on final return to Stratford-upon-Avon. Country wife Anne (born Hathaway) was 57. Branagh is 58, while Anne is played by Judi Dench, 84 (be glad that he didn’t cast American star Anne Hathaway, 36). Dame Judi does a sly, outspoken and lovable job as the deeply nested and illiterate spouse of England’s most astonishing poet.

Because Shakespeare is also literature’s great honey hive of speculation, Branagh and writer Ben Elton feed their  conjectural appetite. Missing his theater but now proudly a small-town squire, Will tends his garden and savors his handsome house (the atmosphere is all leafy sunlight and Tudor candlelight). Often he broods about his only son, Hamnet, dead at 11 in 1596, believing the eager boy had his literary fire (no thought is given to the crushing weight of such a singular inheritance). Poor Hamnet becomes a looking glass into Will’s fretful soul, now living in the smaller world of his wife and two grown daughters, rising Puritanism, village envy, old gossip and current scandal. Anne and the acerbic, unmarried daughter Judith (fine Kathryn Wilde) crackle with feminist resentment, which seems centuries premature (Shakespeare’s “feminis”" plays were comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the Shrew). However shape-shifting the biographical truths may be (and must be), the vivid sincerity of performed truth serves Branagh’s deep devotion to his hero without camp or pomp.

This pensive but not pedantic tribute includes a magical sequence. Old mentor Henry, now the aged third Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), deigns to visit Will. Decades before the young (and social-climbing) poet enshrined Henry’s youthful beauty (however Platonically poetic some of the lines strike modern ears as gay). Conversing before a warm fireplace, the awed but also condescending nobleman listens to Will recite his immortal “fortune and men’s eyes” lines from sonnet 29. Though greatly moved, Henry snobbishly reminds the genius that he remains a commoner, one who purchased a family crest or 20 pounds. In a wizard’s touch Branagh then has McKellen recite the same lines in his posher, more cultivated voice, which opens thed profound nobility of the words. The earl now lives through the bard. The writer’s bloodline would die out fairly soon, but his name and art are crowning crest of English itself.

The Biggest Little Farm

Before there was Big Pharma (drugs, meds etc.) there was Big Farm, the agro industry that gobbled up most little farms while big cities absorbed most family farmers. The pleasing rebuke to that is The Biggest Little Farm, a sort of green-thumbed Babe about a real farm and farmers and critters. The enlightened dirt movers are John and Molly Chester, who made an Eden of balanced, organic agriculture, including at least nine billion micro-organisms, out of 213 drought-baked acres north of L.A.

Do we detect a little Disney DNA? The buoyant pair, a poster couple of can-do naturalism, left secure jobs as a prize-winning cameraman (John) and health-minded chef (Molly). Their sentimental motive was to keep rescued dog Todd, whose barking provoked their 2011 eviction from a Santa Monica apartment. The Chesters turned parched brown into verdant green with help from gifts, interns and two rooted Chicano workers. Their Prospero of permaculture was Alan York, a practical dreamer with an axiom about animals: “Their poop is our gold.” York’s less-is-not-more advice proved sound through seasonal trials by fire and wind, swarming snails and hungry coyotes. Rebuilt soil and restored orchards become a teeming stage for a bucolic riot of ducks, chickens, sheep, dogs, goats, cows, bees and the extravagantly maternal swine Emma.

It’s The Good Earth submitting to the Whole Earth Catalog, echoing Dryden’s praise of Chaucer: “Here is God’s plenty.” The cornucopian movie shortcuts some sweat labor and mostly ignores vegetable gardens, yet we feel fully enlisted. John Chester directed and, opting to show rather than lecture, led the photo team’s superb harvest, rooted in a unified synergy of film and farm. The long, patient production was in symbiotic sync with the land, now a brand and banquet called Apricot Lane Farms.

SALAD (A List)

12 Effective Movies About Famous Writers:

Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, 2005), A Quiet Passion (Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson, 2016), Before Night Falls (Javier Bardem as Reinaldo Arenas, 2000), Wilde (Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde, 1997), Tales of Ordinary Madness (Ben Gazzara as “Serking”/Charles Bukowski, 1981), Bright Star (Ben Whishaw as John Keats, 2009), Shakespeare in Love (Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare, 1998), Neruda (Luis Gnecco as Pablo Neruda, 2016), Trumbo (Brian Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, 2015), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker, 1995), The Gambler (Michael Gambon as Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1997) and The Last Station (Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy, 2009).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles often played corrupt, domineering men but gave them a bold life force of sensual humanity. He “preferred to think of Falstaff as ‘a Christmas tree decorated with vices.’ He saw those vices, which he shared, as virtues according to another moral code (and) chose to overlook Macbeth’s crimes by calling him ‘a great man who likes good wine.’ Greatness and goodness are alike humanized by the possession of a hearty appetite.” Orson’s creative gluttony also fed a gourmandizing appetite, and corpulence. (Quote from Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Jack Nicholson broke through to stardom as a dissolute Southern lawyer in Easy Rider. Matthew McConaughey’s big break was canny Dixie lawyer Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill, “a meaty melodrama of the kind that can rocket an actor up. Bourbon-smooth but no lush, Brigance was a star platform. McConaughey pulled off an instinctive performance, and steadied his nerves for the courtroom climax with a big party the night before. He avoided being devoured by Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey, earned $200,000 and never forgot the opening: ‘Overnight from Friday to Sunday I became a ‘movie star.’ From Friday, being an observer, to Monday being the one observed.” (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising, easily available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) is a smart lawyer rising in A Time to Kill (Warner Bros. 1996; director Joel Schumacher, photography by Peter Menzies Jr.).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 155: 'Rocketman,' 'Photograph' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Rocketman and Photograph)

Rocketman

Not far into Rocketman you may feel like a python that slithered into Liberace’s wardrobe room, then choked on sequins and rhinestones. The movie is amped so high on show-biz that it makes Elton John seem like the mythic son of Liberace and the spiritual father of Lady Gaga. It opens with a frantic, jaded Elton storming into his first A.A. meeting, not only confiding “I am an alcoholic” but also a drug addict and bulimic shopaholic. He’s wearing a giant bird costume, plus the goat horns of Satan, and can even slip into a New York cab in this rig without damaging his epic wings.

Other alcoholics forget their troubles and fall into awed silence, listening to John tell his life story, using most of the Elton John songbook for ricochet cues and clues. This seems like a Vegas Olympics confessional musical, as vast, blasting concerts spill into stagey intimacies. Sir Elton produced the film, a dizzy appetizer for his coming memoirs. Director Dexter Fletcher is the most wanton pile-driver of Brit kitsch since Ken Russell assaulted many famous books and talents. Lee Hall wrote, both beyond and below his more graceful crowd-pleasing with Billy Elliot. Music often rides to the rescue of weary dramatic devices, songs essentially outing young prodigy Reggie Dwight well before he has gay sex as stellar party bazooka Elton John. Actor Taron Egerton captures John’s rather plain, insecure looks, and has the pipes to rival the singer’s sock-it-home voice. He’s like a nice, balding church usher who can morph into the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Along with some sappy stuff and the surging tunes, there is a heavy tax of giddy montages, split-screens and egotistic exhibitionism. And, of course, rote types: the grimly homophobic father, the cynically distant mother (Bryce Dallas Howard barely ages over 25 years), the “genius” manager (smugly handsome Richard Madden) who becomes a money vampire, the old black rocker who passes quick soul wisdom to the naïve young comer. The one truly sympathetic soul is lyricist Bernie Taupin, a friend in all moods and under huge stress, finely played by Jamie Bell. That Elton’s life turned out quite well is a lame footnote – a Hallmark twinkle after all the jubilation and misery.   

Photograph

Back in 2007 Chris Smith’s The Pool set some critical hearts aflutter. The simple, sensual tale of a young hotel servant in Goa, India, who falls in love with a garden-girdled house and its swimming pool, is mysteriously both factual and elusive, almost a lyrical documentary. But American movie audiences, like most, are sugar-hooked on reliable jolts of melodrama (Rocketman, anyone?). The Pool flopped fast – possibly now the fate also of Ritesh Batra’s Photograph.  

Like fabled compatriot Satyajit Ray, writer and director Batra, whose The Lunchbox won wide praise, will not rush or theme-park his vision. Also like Ray, he does not fear odd bits, such as here including a ghost (brief, and witty). That works because the people and milieu are so real. Rafi, whose commercial street camera photographs people near Mumbai’s Gate of India monument, snaps Milani, a passerby and legal student whose demure grace catches his eye, lens and heart. The swarthy, soulful Rafi, around 30, lives in a packed flat with other struggling chums. He feels pressured by his village grandmother to find a bride. Shy, pretty Milani’s in-laws are pushing an arranged marriage with a rising but boring biz-boy. Rafi and Milani quietly find their deep symmetry. Both are solemnly polite, emotionally reticent orphans – that fateful photo will have to be worth more than a thousand words (other figures, mostly, provide the rich masala of dialog in Marathi and English).  

The matchmaker is Dadi, which means not “daddy” but “granny,” played by blunt scene-stealer Farrukh Jaffar. She’s the practical epitome  of Mother India, frank but loving, even willing to bend old strictures of class and religion to help Rafi find a good woman. Nawazaddin Siddiqi and Sanya Malbotra are the impending lovers who don’t need a sex scene to deliver intimacy with absolute humanity. Rafi gently snarks Bollywood clichés, and there is romantic whimsy involving a defunct cola drink that Milani recalls with Proustean appetite, leading to a tough old guru of cola production. In the colorful maze of Mumbai (Bombay), he is a virtual raga of fizz. It’s a lovely movie.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The unprecedented RKO Pictures contract that Orson Welles, 24, signed on July 22, 1939, which led to Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, was not only unique but a creative prism for expanding Welles’s talents. It was “large enough in scope to match his swelling ideas. Studio head George Schaefer was brilliant. By giving Welles as much liberty as RKO could afford, he was hoping to enlarge his cinematic faculties without allowing the possibility of plunging the studio into ruin owing to possible youthful excesses. Despite the restrictions of the contract, it enabled Orson to be the kind of film professional he wanted to be: bold, broad-stroked, totally in charge on the set, involved with infinitesimal details, the father of his acting family, using all of the experience he had gained from radio and theater.” Kane would lose $150,000 on first release, a small price to pay for such bold and experimental creativity. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Sometimes an intro scroll really helps a movie, like the one in 2006 for Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus: “This is a film about Diane Arbus, but it is not a historical biography. Arbus, who lived from 1923 to 1971, is considered by many to be one of the great artists of the 20^th century. Certainly her pictures changed the face of American photography forever. What you are about to see is a tribute to Diane, a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her extraordinary path.” Had more viewers truly absorbed this, they might have been more open to one of the most beautiful films of Nicole Kidman’s risk-taking career. (From the Kidman/Fur 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.

Chhabi Biswas (center) plays the old aristocrat whose fading fortune and palace must have one last concert of Indian classical music and dance in The Music Room (1958; director Satyajit Ray, photography by Subrata Mitra).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.