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 20th 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).
For previous Flix Noshes, scroll below.
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