Nosh 186: Olympic Dreams, Jojo Rabbit & More

David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (Olympic Dreams and Jojo Rabbit)

Olympic Dreams

There are “small” romantic movies that sneak up and plant a lasting kiss. Movies like Roman Holiday, Brief Encounter, I Know Where I’m Going, Marty, The Whole Wide World, Ghost, Before Sunrise, Once and Southside With You. In cozy smallness Olympic Dreams is closest to the last two. It has some obvious touches to go with the generic title, but this shy, gentle, pensive valentine is enjoyably heartfelt.

Here’s the signature extra: it takes place at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Penelope (Alexi Pappas) is a cross-country skier with big, needy eyes, her face a strong echo of Jennifer Gray in Dirty Dancing. Penelope faces brutal weather and gets no medal, but she’s an Olympian! She is also lonely, prone to feeling out-of-it. Ditto for Ezra (Nick Kroll), a voluntary dentist for the Olympics. He has nice, nerdling looks and some verbal cavities (before Penelope’s big ski race he says “break  a leg”). They meet, not too cute, then keep meeting. The hitch is that he still carries a flickering torch for a woman back in America. Penelope quavers but calls up her emotional courage, pushing through his resistance. There are endearingly odd moments. She: “You have such adult hands.” He: “They’ve been in so many mouths.”

Kroll, who has done stand-up comedy, avoids shtick as Ezra. Pappas is a long-distance runner, a 2016 Olympian (for Greece) and the American-born wife of director, writer and cinematographer Jeremy Teicher. Their seemingly impromptu movie is anecdotal, yet remarkably touching. It doesn’t try to wow us with athletics (there’s a wry salute to curling), or Korean tourism, or Olympics glory, or sex. This sweet, droll movie is about two people who find their bearings shakily, but honestly. The ending seems tenuous, then stronger as you think about it. Charm takes the gold.        

Jojo Rabbit

A comedy much talked about, Jojo Rabbit is not to be confused with Richard Pryor’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, a debacle. This movie is … what? Original, if you don’t know the derivations. Brave, if you don’t mind historical evisceration (the Nazi terror blitz is reduced to a few partially seen Gestapo hangings). Funny, maybe, if you never knew the primal impact of crazy-time Hitler humor in Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968). Reportedly Brooks, now 93, gave an approving smile to Jojo Rabbit, and why not? The Fuhrer-goof genre is always in short supply. The new wacko-meister is director Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), whose very bloodline – New Zealand Maori and Ashkenazi Jewish – is Hitler’s nightmare.

Classic Mel can still cast a spell of hilarity. Jojo gave me scattered chuckles and iffy giggles. Set in a quaint Bavarian town near war’s end, it centers on little Johannes, “Jojo” (adorable and talented Roman Griffin Davis; another good find is Archie Yates as his pudgy pal Yorki). Father is gone, mother is present though often taffy-headed (Scarlett Johansson sprinkles Deutsche sparks like “Heil me, kid,” and Sam Rockwell slouches as a lazy-slob Nazi bigshot). Jojo, 10, is mad-keen for Hitler Youth, but is named “rabbit” by Aryan bullies after he tries to protect a bunny. Here we are, meine Herren und Damen, in the worst time (1944-’45) of the 20^th century and many Jojo viewers will feel most worried about the fate of a rabbit. The top conceptual device is a curveball: Jojo’s imaginary paternal advisor is his very own Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi as a chipper, vaguely gay wise-ass who sometimes (oops) explodes into rants. Waititi has some fun, but never the wild inspiration of Dick Shawn’s hippie Hitler in The Producers. The escalating “Heil Hitler!” routines are closer to Hogan’s Heroes (no need for inspiration from early Nazi-busters Chaplin, Lubitsch and Wilder).

Waititi’s fizzy lampoon comes in comic-strip colors, notably Nazi flag red and Wehrmacht green. The story’s “lessons” seem to be that kids are susceptible to conformist propaganda and that sadists love company. There is an achingly symbolic Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), hiding in Jojo’s attic.  If you ever imagined Ann Frank as a John Hughes comedy teen from a Chicago suburban shtetl, Elsa is your reward. In The Producers Mel Brooks twisted his satirical swastika in four synchronized angles, spoofing Broadway kitsch, Damon Runyon hucksters, gay camp and the infernal cult of Hitlerism. He also had Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder achieving mutual genius. Waititi’s daffy-dark ironies and simple gags never reach beyond the g-golly surface. Trivialization is never a good foundation, and tropes can be traps. Jojo Rabbit is a silly bunny with a swastika tail.

SALAD (A List)

My 15 Favorite Movies of the 2010s

The limiting element is that I was away from reviewing for most of 2012-2015. By preference, with director and year:

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino 2013), Roma (Alfonso Cuaron 2018), Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino 2019), The Kid With a Bike (Dardenne bros. 2011), Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar 2019), The Florida Project (Sean Baker 2017), Inherent Vice (P.T. Anderson 2014), Shoplifters (Hirokazu Koreeda 2019), American Hustle (David O. Russell 2013), Jackie (Pablo Larrain 2017),  The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper 2010), Norman (Joseph Cedar 2016), Aquarius (Kleber Mendonca Jr. 2016), Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2013, Paterson (Jim Jarmusch 2017) and Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson 2012).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of Orson Welles’s money-grab gigs was as Gen. Dreedle in Mike Nichols’s big 1970 dud Catch-22 (its hopes largely dashed by Robert Altman’s MASH). Having wanted to direct, Welles had tensions with the new wonder boy. Actor-writer Buck Henry recalled the scene when Dreedle pins medals on WWII airmen: “So we’re all standing in line. Orson does a throat-clearing Aaagggrrhh, then says to Nichols, ‘Mike, listen, there’s a lot of words in this scene and a lot of them don’t mean much, they’re just gags. What would be helpful, and make us move twice as fast, is if you read the script and say the lines the way you hear them in your head, then I will repeat them.’ (Henry): I thought, Jesus, what will happen if Mike gives a reading Orson says is stupid? How messy can this get? But it didn’t. Orson repeated every syllable, every uptick and downtick. It was fabulous. Line readings are generally poisonous to an actor, but Orson figured he’d get back to the hotel sooner – and to the bottle of brandy waiting for him.” (Quote from Ash Carter and Sam Kashner’s Nichols book Life Isn’t Everything.)  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In essence Wim Wenders’s great Paris, Texas (1984) is about Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) trying to save his past love and their child. Those who made the movie knew all about the fault lines: “Wenders had married four times. (Writer) Sam Shepard had left his wife for Jessica Lange. (Child star) Hunter Carson came from (writer) Kit Carson’s failed union with Karen Black. Nastassja Kinski had survived her almost demonic father Klaus and several hard romances. Dean Stockwell’s second marriage brought two kids, then divorce. Roving coyote Stanton, never married, had one or two offspring he had not seen. Caringly, the gods of art saved Paris from going down the soap drain.” (From the Paris,Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

Orson Welles looms as Gen. Dreedle over Richard Benjamin and Austin Pendleton and (in front) Martin Balsam and Buck Henry, in Catch-22 (Paramount Pictures 1970, director Mike Nichols, d.p. David Watkin).

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Nosh 185: 'Parasite', 'Weathering with You' & More

David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (Parasite and Weathering with You)

 

Parasite

Why Parasite now? It opened months ago, and on Jan. 3 was among the worthy also-rans below my Top 12 list for 2019. It has obvious virtues (ace photography, design, acting, direction, themes), but as other movies crowded into the year-end line I lost the thread. On Feb. 9 the South Korean art film dominated the 92^nd Academy Awards, grabbing baldies for best movie, international feature (formerly foreign film), direction and original screenplay. The real show ribbon was director-writer Bong Joon-ho, in accepting so blithely gracious, sly, charming, funny, stunned but never speechless. Academy Town has never heard so much Korean, and no foreigner had so vamped it since goofy Roberto Benigni in 1999 (Life is Beautiful). A smash, but vote tallies, which are never released, would probably reveal that Parasite barely slipped past 1917 and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.

Feeling a little neglectful, I streamed into re-viewing with a home encore. Again I found the look, moods and timing excellent.  Bong (The Host, Snowpiercer) is a high-craft auteur. The title parasite is the scrounging Kims, a family reduced to living in a septic basement flat (Dad welcomes street fumigation sprays, blowing through the window). Despite high IQs, Kim prospects are bleak. By luck, pluck, smiles and guile the Kims leech onto the Park family as servants. The Parks live la vie de luxe in a fab modern home perched above Seoul. The contrast between fathers (furtive, amoral Kim and smug, radio-voiced Park) and moms (Mrs. Kim a truck of hustle, Mrs. Park a sweetly vapid princess) echoes through their kids. The families virtually merge, like a mutant hybrid of Korean tensions and options (there is brief, black laughter about the hell regime up north). Story and dialog rhythms often have a dry comical edge, yet many reviewers have downplayed that, instead truffling for message tropes about extreme class division in urban capitalism. Few noted debts dated 1963: Akira Kurosawa’s great High and Low, in which that division is analyzed with a less gothic mastery, and Joseph Losey’s sinister Pinter drama The Servant.

Parasite purrs seductively, subversively, and its portents darken on smooth arcs of suspense. But the climax violence, shot in ironic sunlight, broke (for me) the spell. After long passages of tricky build-up, we get ambushed by morbid pulp, a generic squish. And for all the good acting, the virtual star is the grand modernist home (architect: production designer Lee Ha-jun). I couldn’t help wondering if the movie vamped the Academy because so many of its voters live in such trophy homes, or aspire to them, or fear losing them to the grubby groundlings down in the crowded Valley. When, in Zabriskie Point, Antonioni blew up (repeatedly) a modern desert home, it was a cartoonish overload of radical chic. Bong is playing a smarter game, yet for my taste Parasite rides clever, calculated rails to an over-determined payoff. I was never bored, but I felt played. But hey, I’ve never had an Oscars vote.

Weathering with You    

A brief Seoul flood in Parasite is a drop in the bucket next to the torrents hitting Tokyo in Makoto Shinkai’s often astonishing animation, Weathering with You. In Shinkai’s 2016 hit Your Name, Japan faced a “millennial comet.” Now the immense city endures a summer-long monsoon in which Shinkai’s team creates fantastic skyscapes and city vistas, tropically fluent with downpours, magical drops, seepage, rust, rot, rainbows and spells of radiance. It all pivots on a magical teen girl. She has a miraculous Buddhist rooting in the highest, puffiest clouds of dream, myth and meteorology. The nature raptures recall Miyazaki’s  animations and, ancestrally, the pounding rain at the grand gate which opens and closes Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

I loved the context (of watercolor deluge) and textures (from Turner clouds to rusted iron) but the conceptual subtext is sodden and dippy. The people are caught in the pop taffy of Japanese animé kitsch: jittery teen romance, twinks of flesh, big-eyed nymphets, toys, kittens, even an odd salute to McDonald’s burgers. For a story this fluent such goo is a weak foundation. My advice: turn off the subtitles, swim in the visuals, surf the beauty that Shinkai makes from his morphing of classic Japanese anxieties (storms, earthquakes, atomic power) into the anxieties of  global warming and flooding. Tokyo can take it – maybe.  

SALAD (A List)

My 15 Favorite Asian Movies

In order (with nation, director and year):

Seven Samurai (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1954), The World of Apu (India, Satyajit Ray 1959), Offside (Iran, Jafar Panahi 2006), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Japan, Mikio Naruse 1960), Ikiru (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1952), The Music Room (India, Satyajit Ray 1958), An Actor’s Revenge (Japan, Kon Ichikawa 1963), Rashomon (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1950), The White Balloon (Iran, Jafar Panahi (1995), Ugetsu (Japan, Kenzi Mizoguchi 1954), Shoplifters (Japan, Hirokazu Kore-eda 2018), Taste of Cherry (Iran, Abbas Kiarostami 1997), High and Low (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1963), The Scent of Green Papaya (Vietnam/France, Tran Anh Hung 1993) and The Twilight Samurai (Japan, Yoji Yamada 2002).      

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles was often fond of, and patient with, lesser directors for whom he worked in his check-chasing years. Like English gent Anthony Asquith (The Winslow Boy, The Importance of Being Earnest), the son of a prime minister, for whom he did a small, silly role in the Burton and Taylor star vehicle The VIPs: “He was one of the nicest, most intelligent people ever in films. His nickname was Puffin. I was very happy to be with him, though he wasn’t in real control of that picture. And, my God, he was polite. I saw Puffin all alone on the stage once, trip over an electric cable, then turn around and say to it ‘I beg your pardon.’ ” (Quote from the Welles and Peter Bogdanovich book This is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The money angel for Mel Brooks’s best film, The Producers, was showman Joseph E. Levine: “Up from the garment trade, Levine hustled imported schlock (Godzilla) and elite caviar (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), artistic magic (Fellini’s 8½) and hambone schlock (The Oscar). In 1967 Levine also had something new cooking with Mike Nichols, a quirky comedy called The Graduate (which so enthused him he would sour on Brooks’s film). Brooks took Levine’s $941,000 for a slam-it-in-thc-can, 40-day shoot.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

The feeling for men in spaces of action is almost encyclopedic in Seven Samurai (Toho Film 1954; director Akira Kurosawa, d.p. Asakazu Nakai).

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Nosh 184: 'Harry Potter' (Revisited), Kirk Douglas & More

David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (Harry Potter Revisited)

Back to a mythic past that has not aged, and which recently came back to me in a very pleasing way:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Revisited)

Some movies spawn much more than sequels. Definitive example: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Perfectly timed, it arrived as generous British balm two months after the trauma of 9-11-01. It also perfectly fit my family’s timetable. As Harry Potter’s movie adventures began at age 11, my daughter Sabrina was a year older, son Travis a year younger. Their adolescence would evolve in parallel sync with their movie heroes. Orphan Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), destiny’s tot, will eventually confront and confound destiny’s rot, the evil genius Lord Voldemort. New school pal Ron (Rupert Grint), a delightful rubber-faced worrier, will prove a warrior under pressure (and ace at chess). Classmate Hermione (Emma Watson), her prim Pekinese face under a bushel of hair crowning a superb brain, is the feminine elixir in the story potion. Raising a proud grind’s hand for every school question, preening her spells and witch’s wand (a rather Freudian challenge to soon-pubertal boys), she often serves as the saga’s mascot, guide and evaluator.

In a San Diego theater on Nov. 15, 2001, the glory started with a rescue, a train ride and Harry’s gaping arrival at the castle of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Scotland. Hogwarts, as packed as a Victorian fruitcake, is Harry’s providential such-muchness after lean years with his crazily mean foster family of muggles (non-magic folk). My kids, at heart never muggles, were eagerly mugged by the movie’s plenitude, and the bond with Harry and his pals was sealed for life. Potter fervor was kept bubbling by book purchase events, part of author J.K. Rowling’s growing empire. With mother Valerie’s guidance everyone was soon dutifully reading except … me. I knew the coming movies were honor-bound to tell the tale faithfully, and as a critic I waved one magic wand: free tickets. Never bothering to learn all the Britannic Talmudic intricacies, I simply enjoyed the brilliant, cascading entertainment with the happiest audience I had joined since the 1977 Christmas feast of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A month later the kids would be dazzled (if never so loyally) by the first Lord of the Rings, a visually impressive series but, to my mind, hurt by its almost metronomic tick-tock of big violence and plot palaver.

Onward with Harry! Six more Potters arrived, including two for the teased-out climax, each film imposingly offered and piously received, with loads of foreshadowing and nearly Wagnerian repetition. I worried that some nerve-gnawing scenes and creatures were too much for young children. But kids like danger, if safely screen-contained (and for many in this case, book-primed). In my prehistoric youth I survived the dog death of Old Yeller, a man consumed by army ants in The Naked Jungle and the freaky Martian death-rays of War of the Worlds. Now we feasted on Rowling’s Voldemort myth (finally revealed as bald, evil-grinning Ralph Fiennes) in a fairy weave of curses, spells, mutations and showdowns. We were in good hands, Sorcerer’s Stone directed with British high craft more than theme park tropes by an American, Chris Columbus (good name to launch a franchise!). There is a titanic troll (but stupid, thus funny). Some blood-draining of a dead unicorn, seen at a rather Disney distance. A gigantic chess match is paced by John Williams’s stirring score, Holst-like, with an Alice in Thunderland quality.

Nothing to come, however lavish or anticipated, could ever entirely match that first cornucopia, the revelation of 11-15-01: Santa-bearded headmaster Albus Dumbledore, most humane of wizards (parch-voiced but resonant Richard Harris, whose death after two Potters brought the role to stately Michael Gambon); the Hogwarts owls, flying fluffballs of mail delivery; immense oil portraits that speak and move; Hermione’s snippy tartness (“It’s Levi-ó-sa, not Levios-á”) masking a bookworm’s loneliness; the slashing Quidditch match of aerial combat on magic brooms; the kindly giant Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), his very bulk a safe house; the great piggy awfulness of Richard Griffith’s Uncle Vernon; the stern but loving acerbity of Prof. McGonagall (Maggie Smith); Ron’s charming fretfulness, before he merges chess and courage; gnarly John Hurt as wand master Ollivander; the pure, simple marvel of train platform 9¾ in London. Any nits are barely zits, though I was surely not alone in finding Harry a bit generic, a wonder lad more Tom Sawyer than Huck Finn – but adorable, and deeply cherished.

For the Elliotts one figure stood out like a strange knave in a Gothic nave, the sexy and menacing, black-robed and raven-haired Professor Snape. Alan Rickman pours his shadow-crepe voice through ironclad diction, his every moody pause a gulf of mystery. The potions master knows more than he can tell, and polishes every sentence. “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory and even put a stopper in death” was as near Shakespeare as any childhood classic need go. Rickman, who once purred “I have a love-hate relation with white silk,” made it through the series quite poignantly, then died in 2016. Far more than a villain, Snape is his marker of immortality.   

Inevitably the franchise, profit-gorged (total take now over $10 billion), would wobble some, resorting at last to a rather conventional battle crescendo. We remained as devout as sworn knights, and the binders of our fidelity were the central triple, the Hogwarts chums. The showmanship felt very wand-spun, more Arthurian than 21^st century (none of the groaning futurism of the Star Wars and Star Trek series). As Voldemort’s cold spirit became more visible, we bunkered more into the beneficent warmth of the Hogwarts spirit (an attack on the school is almost unbearable). To absorb this fantasy is to live it, and we were lucky. We were the first Potter generation.

On Jan. 31, 2020, it all came back, like a potion of nostalgic nectar. The grown “kids” provided Valerie and me with a concert hall viewing, the Eugene Symphony briskly hitting its orchestral marks below the screen, with music-stand lights twinkling up at Hogwarts. Looking around at the captivated crowd, often cheering or villain-booing, I knew that some fans were, like us, vets of the first-gen. And some had brought their children to discover the joy, for Harry Potter’s gold is not the billions earned but the many millions pleased. Once again a storm of imagination blessed our hopes, shivered our nerves, widened our eyes, gladdened our hearts, made magic seem not only real but everlasting.

SALAD (A List)

The Best Movies of Kirk Douglas (1916-2020)
Quite a man, well beyond movies. My choices (with director, year):

Paths of Glory (Kubrick 1957), The Bad and the Beautiful (Minnelli 1952), Lust for Life (Minnelli 1966), Spartacus (Kubrick 1960), Out of the Past (Tourneur 1947), Strangers When We Meet (Quine 1960), Ace in the Hole (Wilder 1951), Seven Days in May (Frankenheimer 1961), Champion (Robson 1949), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Fleischer 1954), The Juggler (Dmytryk 1953), In Harm’s Way (Preminger 1965), Detective Story (Wyler 1951), The Fury (De Palma, 1978), Lonely Are the Brave (Miller 1962) and The Vikings (Fleischer 1958).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Devoted liberal Kirk Douglas was not hounded by the McCarthyite Red hunters, but he helped end the terror when he hired blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus (photo above, with Douglas and Jean Simmons). Orson Welles dealt with the trauma 18 years earlier, when the Hearst press and the American Legion smeared him as a Party member. Welles fired back: “William Randolph Hearst is conducting a series of brutal attacks on me. It seems he doesn’t like my picture Citizen Kane. I understand he hasn’t seen it … I am not a Communist. I am grateful for our constitutional form of government, and I rejoice in our great American tradition of democracy. Needless to say, it is not necessarily unpatriotic to agree with Mr. Hearst … If it weren’t sad, it would be silly. William Randolph Hearst is piqued with Orson Welles. The rest is camouflage.”  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As an art-mad  boy I “fell hard for Hollywood’s gospel of art. John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) iconized Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) enshrined Vincent van Gogh. Lautrec was José Ferrer, with a voice like burning brandy. Van Gogh was Kirk Douglas, flame-haired volcano. Art lover Vincent Price would call Lust ‘the most moving moving picture I ever saw.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

One of the longest surviving stars from Hollywood’s classic studio era, Kirk Douglas died on Feb. 5 at age 103. As an architect, his secret, hopeless romance with Kim Novak in Strangers When We Meet featured one of his more sensitive performances (Columbia Pictures 1960; director Richard Quine, d.p. Charles Lang).

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