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).

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