Nosh 164: 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Where’d You Go, Bernadette)

Note: Nosh 165 will appear on Friday, Sept. 6.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

“The world is too much with us,” wrote Wordsworth, which is certainly true for Bernadette Fox, Seattle wife and mom in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. She is also too much for many people, being a control-freaky compulsive and a temperamental loner. Her obsession after four miscarriages is brainy teen daughter Bee, recently accepted at a prep school. Bee’s departure would leave mom more solo than ever, as her loving but heavily distracted husband Elgin is a Microsoft wiz. Elgin, though acted by very engaging Billy Crudup, seems a little macrosoft mentally. He reveals a new wonder ap that, when stuck to the forehead, can read your thoughts, not realizing (to giddy applause) that the cute little thing is a perfect gift for spooks, interrogators and brainwashers.

Bernadette, not always likeable, is the motor of this impish, well-designed comedy, and Cate Blanchett is inspired casting. With her hawk gaze and instant aura of authority, and an adopted American accent supported by her Aussie-Brit rhythmic fluency, Blanchett gives us a singular woman. She makes the backstory buzz: Bernadette the MacArthur “genius grant” winner, then an architectural visionary whose eco-smart design sets a bold new standard, until it is destroyed by a Trumpy vulgarian. Now she’s a martyr to motherhood, picks snarky fights with a neighbor (Kristen Wiig), and lives neurotically in a dumpy Victorian home. It would be a rank spoiler to reveal how she breaks out, though Laurence Fishburne (as her architectural mentor) gives the best advice: get back to serious, creative work.

Director Richard Linklater and his writers eliminated some bits of Maria Semple’s novel (such as Bernadette’s agoraphobia, and an office sex scandal). They have made a screwball comedy with zippy modern themes. At moments it feels as if The Fountainhead is wrestling with Nothing Sacred. Some of the family tensions are facile, some Seattle stuff is a tangent of Portlandia, but the use of Antarctica (yep, that’s right) is quite a capper. In a remote scientists’s lounge, amid epic white vistas, the signature cocktail is the “pink penguin.” This goofy but not airheaded movie hardly tops Linklater’s remarkable career, but it is a fine showcase for Blanchett, all spark and spit (hauling pieces of Blanche Du Bois through Woody Allen’s fragile Blue Jasmine, she was riding a streetcar named Derivation).  In the fine cast Emma Nelson is an excellent Bee, but Blanchett is in sure command. As her talent joins her brain for a true feminist revival, hoist a pink penguin.  

SALAD (A List)

Richard Linklater’s Dozen Best

By my taste, with main star and year:

1. Before Sunrise (Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke 1995), 2. Before Sunset (Delpy/Hawke 2004), 3. Dazed and Confused (Matthew McConaughey 1993), 4. Boyhood (Ellar Coltrane 2014), 5. Me and Orson Welles (Christian McKay 2008), 6. School of Rock (Jack Black 2003), 7. Before Midnight (Delpy/Hawke 2013), 8. Slacker  (ensemble 1990), 9. The Newton Boys (Matthew McConaughey 1998), 10. Bernie (Jack Black 2011), 11. Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Cate Blanchett 2019), 12. Bad News Bears (Billy Bob Thornton 2005). Blithe experiment: Waking Life (animated ensemble, 2001).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

For his farce Too Much Johnson in 1938, Orson Welles chose to make a silent slapstick film for insertion into the stage action, flirting with a medium he would soon command. The stock was easily flammable nitrate, and colleague John Berry recalled that “one time the film caught fire. What I remember most remarkably is me running with the projector in my hand, burning, trying to get out the door into the hallway, and John Houseman racing for the door at the same time – so we had one of those comic who-gets-out-first moments … While Orson, with absolutely no concern whatsoever, was back inside, standing and looking at some piece of film in his hand, smoking his pipe.” (Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Stars often define their context. Buster Keaton rules any comical space he enters, and Kim Novak fulfills the Golden Gate in Vertigo. Stars also surprise, like Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, giving depth to campy Ed Wood. They can even invade sleep, as in Mac, when John Turturro is startled from his nap by Burt Lancaster on TV in From Here to Eternity. Eyes widening, Mac declares ‘Get him, Burt! Get that Fatso! That’s Burt, Burt Lancaster!’ – and then smiles back into slumber.” (From the Introduction 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.

As Bela Lugosi, Martin Landau (in white coat) becomes the crazed soul of pulp-camp cinema in Ed Wood, and won an Oscar for it (Buena Vista Pictures 1994; director Tim Burton, d.p. Stefan Czapsky).

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Nosh 163: 'Them That Follow,' 'Maiden' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Them That Follow and Maiden)

Them That Follow

Movie heaven and hell have had many pastors, prophets, priests and preachers (see list below).  Into their ranks comes Lemuel, the Appalachian soul shepherd and snake diviner in Them That Follow. His charismatic spirit comes from actor Walton Goggins. After a little role in Robert Duvall’s The Apostle (1997), the scrawny Alabaman graduated to stellar TV parts in Justified and Vice Principals. There’s something very ’70s about Goggins, both 1870s and 1970s. With his high forehead, laser gaze, blazing grin and slicing voice, he’s like a bantam digest of Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Warren Oates in their yeasty young primes.

Lemuel’s tiny flock lives in a rural outback (lovely in nature, a slum with people). His church is a crude, wooden crib of purified fanaticism with a cold neon cross for greeting. He is very sincerely nuts, loving his flock but insisting that handling poisonous snakes is the true test of faith. His chief follower, Hope, is played with demento devotion by fine British actor Olivia Colman (The Favourite, The Night Manager). With loving lunacy she views her snake-bit son swelling and moaning for a long, hard time (over a hundred preachers of this small, fanged faith are thought to have died from venom). Writer-directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage do not cartoon the rubes. Lemuel and Hope are often savvy and caring, but soaked in scriptural notions (Mark 16:18: “They shall take up serpents”) that includes sadistic faith healing. They imagine that Old Satan prefers to hook and torment us through slithering, primeval critters who are pure instinct.  

Earthy, rooted, its tensions coiling and rattling, the movie also employs the familiar soaper elements of a teen pregnancy crisis. Still, the young players (Thomas Mann, Kaitlyn Dever, Lewis Pullman, especially Alice Englert as Lemuel’s confused daughter) approach the level of Goggins and Colman. None of this seems very commercial. The last director to reap serious profit from religious fervor plus snakes was Cecil B. DeMille, at hunky pharaoh Yul Brynner’s  palace in The Ten Commandments. Movingly intimate, Them That Follow blends the chills of the hissing pulp horror Ssssssss with the mad-preacher fevers of John Huston’s Wise Blood.  The main taste is venomized moonshine, but there is also love in the brew.  

Maiden

“The ocean is always trying to kill you,” says Tracy Edwards in Maiden, sounding a dire note soon submerged but not tamed in the vivid nautical documentary by Alex Holmes (Dunkirk, House of Saddam). Anxiety often leaps like dolphins, but here’s the deal: first-time skipper Edwards, 24, and her brave crew of 12 women became the first females to compete in the 33,000-mile Whitbread Round the World Race. Though not winning, the Maiden performed high in its size class and led on two legs of the long route, including the viciously cold, risky voyage from Uruguay past Antarctica to Australia. Edwards lost her dad at 10, then endured an alcoholic stepfather. The angry, hurt teen saved herself by sailing. After being an unhappy cook on very masculine vessels, Edwards found a battered, 58-foot boat and fixed it with her chosen crew of “girls,” who all became exceptionally skillful sea-mates. Principal financing came from sporty King Hussein of Jordan, ruler of a sea-less desert realm who sponsored the ocean trip through … Jordanian Royal Air! After the crew’s first mate bailed during the trials, Edwards skippered and navigated for 167 days at sea.

In this macho-marine world, scoffers included a plum-voiced sailing expert who called  the Maiden a “tin of tarts” (decades later, he admits that the women proved themselves “as men” – give this ass the Commodore Vanderbilt Regatta Snob Award for 1910). Vintage, almost Impressionist footage of the race joins crisp modern interviews of the now middle-aged, engagingly articulate “salts.” The late, seafaring actor Sterling Hayden would have loved this movie, and the fact that five years ago Edwards, now an innovative educator, found the old Maiden rotting in a dock. She uses the restored craft to train young women, including her own grown daughter.  

(Missed my best recent review? Check out below my eager comments on Tarantino's Once Upon at Time ... in Hollywood. Nosh 161 on Aug. 2).    

SALAD (A List)

Excellent Portraits of Priests and Preachers

Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry (Elmer Gantry 1960), Robert Duvall as Sonny Dewey (The Apostle 1997), Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell (Night of the Hunter 1955), Pierre Fresnay as Vincent de Paul (Monsieur Vincent 19478), Walton Goggins as Lemuel (That That Follow 2019), W.G. Fay as Father Tom (Odd Man Out 1947), Claude Laydu as the young priest (Diary of a Country Priest 1951), Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes (Wise Blood 1979), Peter Sellers as Rev. Smallwood (Heavens Above! 1963), Raul Julia as Oscar Romero (Romero 1989), Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan (Boys Town 1938), Montgomery Clift as Father Logan (I Confess 1953) and Robert Morley as Rev. Sayer (The African Queen 1951). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is away this week, busily planning Citizen Trump. It stars John Goodman and a shrill cockatoo trapped at Mar a Lago.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As AIDS-denying, then bravely afflicted Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey lifted his career to major drama and an Oscar, joining such depicters  of the afflicted as Javier  Bardem, The Sea Inside; Nicolas Cage, Leaving Las Vegas; Julie Christie, Afterglow; Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot; Patty Duke, The Miracle Worker; Colin Firth, The King’s Speech; John Hawkes, The Sessions; John Hurt, The Elephant Man; Jessica Lange, Frances; Charles Laughton, The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Peter Mullen, My Name is Joe; Joaquin Phoenix, The Master, and Billy Bob Thornton, Sling Blade. (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club 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.

Despite his brimstone temper, Sonny Dewey (Robert Duvall) is Gospel-driven in The Apostle (October Films 1997; director Robert Duvall, d.p. Barry Markowitz).

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Nosh 162: 'Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw' & 'Wild Rose'

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Fast & Furious Presents Hobbs & Shaw, and Wild Rose)

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

Every dweeb who haunts a Comic-Con must love a franchise film title that includes two ampersands. In that spirit, & with only hit-&-run acquaintance with the Fast & Furious lineage, I offer this dazed analysis. F&FP: H&S is a multi-pecs multiplexer, a CGI cotillion of effects and killings starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jason “The Stubble” Statham and Idris “The Glare” Elba. What, you were expecting Paul “The Panic” Giamatti, Timothy “The Chin” Spall and Danny “The Face” Trejo? That’s another franchise (and probably more fun).

“I’m what you call an ice-cold can of whip-ass,” says Johnson as Hobbs, snarking a goon before crushing him like a can. He teams with ass-whip buddy and rival Shaw (Stathem), seeking to stop a global conspiracy to convert humanity into futurist cyborgs by, first, killing most of us with a terror-lab virus. On a time-release basis it’s already inside fearless Brit agent Hattie (Vanessa Kirby, previously Princess Margaret in The Crown). She weighs about 107 but can whup big male butt like a slithery sidewinder of  mayhem. She is a fine bonus. Mostly director David Leitch is grunting the $200 million budget across a vast terrain of what-the-hell madness, smashing through London, L.A., Moscow. He judo flips from gray, nuked-out Chernobyl to Hobbs’s lovely birth turf Samoa, where the natives run a huge car-upgrade garage (serving the posh Guam market?). Hobbs’s super-sized mom is like a beached Disney toon of Bloody Mary in South Pacific (Bloody Marys would really help us survive this summer ride). 

Jerking from climax to climax on tiny vapor trails of plot, rife with squelchers featuring the word “balls,” this man-cave meatloaf pile is too exhausting to be exhilarating. There is a whopping, silly-fun duel between an evil helicopter and five trucks. Stathem makes a sly nod to his much better 2003 hit The Italian Job. Hattie is saved, but the last look on Kirby’s face says thank God this job is over. I felt sorry for the gifted Elba, grinding out his crazed, robotic villain. We get, within living memory of the Holocaust, the line “genocide shmenocide.” Hip to self-parody, less hip to moviemaking, this show is big & loud & long & dumb & … enough.

Wild Rose

After you Walk the Line and, craving some Tender Mercies, give your Crazy Heart to Country Rose, and then lose Your Cheatin’ Heart to W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, how much country twang on screen do you need? Trouble is, you will have missed the three best: Nashville, Pay Day and Coal Miner’s Daughter. Add now a fourth: Wild Rose, which is from … Scotland. That last oddity makes perfect sense when you watch Jessie Buckley’s star performance as Rose-Lynn. Buckley, 29, is Irish and not a novice. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, came second in a national music contest, had sizeable roles in the TV dramas Chernobyl and The Woman in White and now has five movies finished or in prep. But if you first discover her in this star-is-born film, it’s a swell way to start.

Rose-Lynn (“Rose”) gets out of prison (bum rap for drug possession). She has an alley-cat aura and a tracking collar “tag” on one ankle. A fast-chug drinker, she has been the musical magnet at a Glasgow performance bar named Grand Ole Opry. She dreams of thrilling the original Opry in Nashville, but has two young kids from a gone lout, and her mother thinks she is a trashy party girl. If you recall Julie Walters’s youthful starburst in Educating Rita (1983), there is wistfulness in seeing her as the demanding, judgmental mom of a wayward mom. She is, as usual, excellent. The story’s feminist tripod is completed by Sophie Okonedo as Susannah. Up from London, a rich wife living in a Glasgow mansion, she becomes the ebullient mentor of her cleaning woman, Rose. Overly domesticated, she envies the young redhead’s dream and talent.

With workaholic Mom to criticize her, and Susannah to goad her with vicarious zeal, Rose will, of course, bloom. The script has knots. Doesn’t Rose have at least one or two fem-friends who could help her when she so desperately needs a sitter? Must she be so barb-wired by maternal guilt?  But director Tom Harper (from the BBC’s mini-series War and Peace) finds living nuances and makes  textured use of Glasgow and briefly Nashville. Above all, Buckley floods the movie with herself, without hamming. Going deeper than Lady Gaga’s recent A Star is Born, she carries unaffected prettiness with fierce sincerity into this hard-pressed, jaunty striver. Her dialog flows like her lyrics, going beyond the country sounds achieved in other films by Meryl Streep and Gwyneth Paltrow. If your ears fuzz on some of the Glaswegian dialect, never mind – just fold it into the music. The topper is Buckley’s “Glasgow,” a rousing anthem from actor and songsmith Mary Steenburgen.

SALAD (A List)

Ten Exciting High-Adrenaline Action Pictures

In order of my taste (with star, director, year):

Jaws (Richard Dreyfuss, dir. Steven Spielberg 1975), The Fugitive (Harrison Ford, dir. Andrew Davis 1993), Die Hard (Bruce Willis, dir. John McTiernan 1988), Kill Bill I and II (Uma Thurman, dir. Quentin Tarantino 2003-04), Run Lola Run (Franka Potente, dir. Tykwer 1999), The Italian Job (Mark Wahlberg, dir. F. Gary Gray 2003),City of God (Alexandre Rodrigues, dir. Fernando Meirelles 2002), The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde, dir. Wilde 1965), Predator (Arnold Schwarzenegger, dir. John McTiernan 1987), Mad Max: Fury Road (Charlize Theron, dir. George Miller 2015) and Speed (Keanu Reeves, dir. Jan de Bont 1994).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The artistic triumph of Citizen Kane hounded Orson Welles for the rest of his life. Contributing much to the 1959 hit Compulsion, his resentment about not directing it spilled open when he and director Richard Fleischer “had several drinks and Orson blurted out his conviction that he, not Fleischer was responsible for the success. Fleischer of course hotly denied it and Orson apologized after a long, painful pause. Fleischer tried to ease tension by saying how much he admired him: ‘I think I really won him over when I told him in all sincerity that he’d done the greatest movie ever made and that was good enough.’ It was not good enough. Perhaps it might be for history, but not for Orson, at 44 not about to start thinking about himself in the past tense.” (Quote from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Among Nicole Kidman’s many fans, no one ever got more savvily smitten than critic David Thomson: “Kidman lights the rose window of his imagination, and his ornate valentine (the book Nicole Kidman), not a rom-com but a crit-rom, is often affectionately discerning. Thomson is criticism’s Lord of Conjecture, the Speculator General of smart movie daydreams and night sweats (his pinnacle, for me, is ‘James Dean at 50’ in Beneath Mulholland). For his larger opus The Whole Equation Nicole served as back-cover girl and inspired further spasms of delight.” (From the Kidman/Fur 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.

Accused killers Jud (Dean Stockwell, left) and Artie (Bradford Dillman) confer with Clarence Darrow-like defense attorney Wilkes (Orson Welles) in Compulsion (20^th Century Fox 1959; director Richard Fleischer, d.p. William Mellors).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 161: 'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood'

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood )

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

Partly inspired by his big poster collection, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood reveals the West Coast’s supreme movie fanatic (Scorsese owns the East Coast) packing a consummation basket. Set in 1969, when QT was a wide-eyed 6, the story pivots on the buddy bond – “bromance” in modern argot – of rugged but fading star Rick Dalton and his devoted pal, driver, gofer, fixer, ego-masseur, stand-in and stunt man, Cliff Booth. Rick is acted by Leonardo DiCaprio and Cliff by Brad Pitt, two still hunky and (by abundant evidence) zealously straight stars. But in swingin’ but hardly liberated Hollywood ’69, post-Cary/Randy and more freshly post-Tab/Tony, two such adhesive studs would have been rumor-milled and even column-nipped as having a closeted connection. That, of course, is not the QT game, and he zestfully winks it away with a tossed line (“more than a friend, less than a wife”). 

The guys relish bad movies, old TV shows, booze, broads, cigars and Cliff’s pit bull Brandy (the scene featuring Wolf’s Tooth dog food joins a very special shelf next to “Couri brand” cat food in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye). As retro-macho dudes they are wary of marriage, hippies, drugs and guys like Al Pacino’s Marvin Schwarzs, a vintage agent who urges Rick to reboot via spaghetti Westerns (proud of his buckskin bonafides, Rick sneers – at first). With youth fading, Rick and Cliff are, in essence, lonely alcoholics.

His own tequila being nostalgia, Tarantino gleefully guzzles Rick’s career, in queasy decline since his early ’60s TV Western hit, Bounty Law. He had a cultish war movie but also endured “a Ron Ely Tarzan” and is becoming a plug-in villain. This all happens on the pilgrim map of QT’s memory tour: Capitol Records, Hef’s mansion, the mellow airport wall enshrined in Jackie Brown, the Bruin Theater and Van Nuys Drive-in, the Musso & Frank Grill (50 then, now a century old). History shadows Rick’s house and pool, which lie just below the hilltop mansion leased by newly A-listed Polish director Roman Polanski and his adorable new wife Sharon Tate. Tate’s fate date is, of course, Aug. 9, 1969, when Charles Manson’s berserk “family” slaughtered her and four others.

Manson is only briefly seen, but Tarantino coddles our shivers by making Sharon (Margot Robbie) a bouncing sunbeam of California dreamin’. Only he would follow her purchase of a Thomas Hardy first edition with her dropping into a Westwood theater to enjoy her dippy highjinks in Dean Martin’s The Wrecking Crew. Sharon parks her peachy bare feet on the seat ahead of her, setting up a later ricohet: a Manson slut’s “dirty hippie” feet, splayed on the windshield of Cliff’s car (but Margaret Qualley, as the lewd lollipop, inhabits her role as vividly as Robbie does Sharon).

Above all we relish the grooved binary of Rick & Cliff (Leo & Brad). DiCaprio, with a corn-bin accent and some added weight, seems at a disadvantage. And yet he goes into the man cave of this vain, shallow trouper, blending comedy and vulnerable exposure. During a studio shoot panic his ally is child scene-stealer Julia  Butters, a wee pro (and biz-bud feminist who scorns “actress”). All muscled cool, with nerves smooth as Shantung silk, Pitt drives hot, flashes his bod and even humiliates an amusingly pompous Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). Film-fan morsels hang like ripe fruit, offering juicy bites for Clu Gulager, Timothy Olyphant, Kurt Russell, Emile Hirsch, Michael Madsen and Brenda Vaccaro, also Austin Butler as Manson’s creepy enforcer Tex.

Bruce Dern (who replaced the late Burt Reynolds) is a real wolf’s tooth in his spooky cameo as George Spahn. The Spahn Ranch was a fabled stable for Westerns, and the Manson bunch roach-nested there. The Spahn episode is a kind of spaghetti Western Psycho, with Dern a virtual Pa Bates and looney Norman fragmented into a fox posse of slutty dirtballs (as nut case Squeaky Fromme, Dakota Fanning is a long way from Uptown Girls). Pitt attains pinnacle form and may be the movie’s golden ticket of success. Like Bob Mitchum, he can register dry wit simply by listening, and he still can flash the abs that boosted him to stardom in Thelma and Louise. An acting Oscar at last for ol’ (55) Brad?

 

Once Upon a Time, which milks a few scenes but not stupidly, bends and swoops, held to its roller-coaster rails by Tarantino’s instincts as writer and director, basking in the shimmer and edge of Robert Richardson’s 35 mm. celluloid imagery. The music is a whirling festival, from Western themes to the Mamas and Papas to Bernard Herrmann. The Italian sequence (yep, Rick succumbs) adds a funny tangent, though the title bounce off Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time films feels less germane than the teeming L.A. sprawlers of Altman (Short Cuts), Schlesinger (Day of the Locust), Landis (Into the Night) and Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). The film is a supple, circulating moodscape which, like Jackie Brown, goes beyond the QT corral of genre satire even while it fondly fondles numerous genres. This layered vision is Tarantino’s most personal. 

There could be too much snarling hippie-phobia (though many industry veterans felt that way at the time). Viewers may evaluate the picture on how it delivers the Manson nightmare. It does so in a jolting revisionist pipe-dream that flips the grisly old tragedy into a  thrilling and yet strangely consoling finale. This twist may be a jokey, violent coup de QT, but it is also a great relief valve for the audience. Not really the man for tragedy, Tarantino leaves us with a rather wistful pathos. If only life could be a movie (and don’t B-stars and stunt men deserve some magic?). The artistic showman is capping off his youth and roots, his signature obsessions and his dear, dreamy City of Movies Forever. Few such dazzling entertainments have been so remarkably human at heart.

SALAD (A List)

Ranking Tarantino’s Movies by Quality

By my taste, rating top to bottom:

Jackie Brown (1997), Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019), Pulp Fiction (1994), Kill Bill I and II (2003-04), Django Unchained (2012), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Inglourious Basterds (2009), The Hateful Eight (2015) and Grindhouse: Death Proof (2007). Can he really be serious about making only one more?

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Having once led Martians to Earth for his Halloween 1938 radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, which roused panic among the nervously gullible and inattentive, Orson Welles also made a vocal contribution to the July 1969 moon trip of Apollo 11. Space buff Walter Cronkite’s TV coverage of the epic event included the documentary A History of Space Journeys, narrated by Orson. And newsman Mike Wallace looked back with Welles at the 1938 Mars broadcast. From there it was very earthwardly downhill, to Orson narrating a pseudo-documentary of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth in 1979. 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Steven Soderbergh saw in Jackie Brown ‘a very gentle piece, in a weird sort of way.’ Jackie and Max, who remain Tarantino’s most adult, dimensional figures, are not out to screw each other despite obvious opportunities (in both senses). Their deepening regard gives the story a core as the actors, in all their zigs and zags and zaps, achieve a flowing equilibrium of speech and silence, volition and reaction. Pulp Fiction was a hot dance floor. Pam Grier and Bob Forster take that upstairs for more soulful moves. The film has remarkably little mayhem for a modern crime story.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown 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.

Mr. Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s silly neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is a suicidal leap into ethnic stereotyping, but Mickey Rooney is still pretty funny (Paramount Pictures 1961; director Blake Edwards, d.p. Franz Planer).

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