Nosh 57: 'Kong: Skull Island,' 'Logan' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.
Note: Nosh 58 will arrive on Friday, March 31. 

APPETIZER: Reviews of Kong: Skull Island and Logan

Kong: Skull Island

In the not exactly lyrical Kong: Skull Island the star gorilla could polish off an entire planet of the apes for breakfast. Science visionary John Goodman wants to get to Skull Island, a Pacific paradise gone to hell. He does not anticipate Kong and the prehistoric lizard creeps the ape feeds upon. He is not meteorologically bothered that epic storms keep circling the island but oddly leave it alone. And in the Watergate era he is no prophet: “Mark my words, there’ll never be a more screwed-up time in Washington.” Don, send him a tweet.

I try to think about the war fever of Major Samuel L. Jackson, bitter but still gung-ho after losing Vietnam, thrilled to settle for slaughtering exotic animals. Also, thinking about how Tom Hiddleston demurely slips the fine blade of his Britness into the pulp script, nailed to the screen by director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. And about how photographer Brie Larson is the new Fay Wray, wowing the ape, although few in a young crowd would recall Wray’s great damsel in distress in King Kong (1933). That movie saved RKO, this one saved its nostalgia kit:  old planes, uniforms, Nam choppers, ’70s rock songs, a Nixon bobble-head.

The best collectible is John C. Reilly as a downed WWII pilot stuck on the island for 28 years, still patriotic, still a Cubs fan, and maybe the funniest role for Reilly since his dopey porn slob in that better ’70s time capsule, Boogie Nights. As an extravagant mash-up of King Kong, Apocalypse Now, Swiss Family Robinson and Valley of Gwanji, this new Kong offers the biggest primate ever, vivid jungles and a bloody showdown (ape vs. lizard) that could make you yearn to be a parakeet in a nunnery. Maybe Reilly can rally his old Boogie buddies and star in Thong of Kong: The Total Package.

Logan

I probably missed a few delicate threads of Logan, not being a ritual fan of the X-Men franchise. But “delicate threads” hardly define a massively expensive action film, harvesting giant income as it climaxes the saga of mutant Wolverine (or Logan). He has a startling heir apparent, Laura, a Swiss army knife of a lassie, extruding deadly blades from her hands. Her feral stare will one day make kid actor Dafne Keen one hell of an imposing woman. This is not the Little Rascals, and director James Mangold knows how to grease his adrenaline grinder: many violent climaxes, with enough dead goons to be the meat supply of a small country.

The film’s heart is not hairy, aging Logan (Hugh Jackman), who is prone to nodding off. It is lethal but loveable Laura. And Logan’s dying teacher, Charles (Patrick Stewart, reaching for wit and pathos, sometimes finding a little). A loving black family is inserted to tenderize the plot and then, naturally, pay an awful price. Fugitive X-kids live like Peter Pans atop a mountain refuge, cheerful despite their wretched upbringings. Mad scientist Richard E. Grant is destined for brutal dispatch – surrounded by big muscle men, he’s like a floating doily.

What else? Nostalgic clips of Shane. Horses in a highway panic. Mute Laura suddenly speaks, bilingually. Logan needs bifocals and hates comic books. A burial cross is shifted to become an X (what will evangelicals say?). An impressive, rotting water tower. Dialog so urgent with vim (very insistant messages) that the native X-tongue must be Twitter jabber. In sum: another loud Marvel spectacle at the plexes.

SALAD (A List)

Best 12 Movies About Disturbing Critters (critter, director and year): Jaws (shark, Steven Spielberg 1975), Forbidden Planet (Krel monster, Fred Wilcox 1956), King Kong (gorilla, Cooper-Schoedsack 1933), Cat People (ghostly cat, Jacques Tourneur 1942), Jurassic Park (dinosaurs, Spielberg 1993), Ssssss (snakes, Bernard Kowalski 1973), The Naked Jungle (army ants, Byron Haskin 1954), The Fly (man-fly, David Cronenberg 1986), Tremors (giant worms, Ron Underwood 1990), King Kong (gorilla, John Guillermin 1976), Arachnophobia (spiders, Frank Marshall 1990) and Mighty Joe Young (gorilla, Ernest Schoedsack 1949).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson’s beloved but cursed South American project, It’s All True (1942), withered to a wet, pathetic end: In 1944 “Welles signed a promissory note for $197,000 and took possession of 375,000 feet of Technicolor film, 90,000 feet of black-and-white. He paid $17.50 a month storage fee in Salt Lake City … In 1946 RKO sued him and repossessed … when the hoard of film was passed on to Desilu Productions and then Paramount, some of it was destroyed and some dumped, they say, into the Pacific.” O fateful dreams! (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The personal factor cannot be left out of filmgoing. Those who rejected The Cruise in 1998 were mainly rejecting its subject, tour guide Tim Levitch, as a crackpot, “and the skeptics who questioned my own enthusiasm were asking, in essence: Do you really like Levitch? I certainly do. The finest validation is from 1945, in Michael Powell’s splendid I Know Where I’m Going! Joan (Wendy Hiller): ‘A little odd, isn’t he?’ Torquil (Roger Livesey): ‘Who isn’t?” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starling Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Buster Keaton strikes a vampy pose in The Navigator (MGM 1924; directors Buster Keaton, Donald Crisp; cinematographers Byron Houck, Elgin Lessley).

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Nosh 56: 'Paterson' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Review of Paterson

It opens with a dream, as Paterson’s pretty partner tells of dreaming about twins. Shaking off sleep, he replies in his wry, subdued way, “One for each of us.” Paterson is one for all of us, a dream of a poem of a movie.

It is about Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson, N.J. He’s a rather dreamy driver, mulling his poems. He lives with cheerful, artistic Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), excited by her new and almost Picasso-styled guitar, and also with their willful, grumpy bulldog, Marvin (whose notion of urban poetry is a long walk with a thousand sniffs). The movie is nested into old Paterson, a working-class town (pop. 145,000) of weary but enduring brick, many streets interlaced by streams and falls of the Passaic River – and by the flowing legend of Dr. William Carlos Williams, whose epic poem is “Paterson.” Poetry sprouts wings when Paterson, walking to work, spots a haiku-worthy waterfall through the open backside of an abandoned building. Later he will meet a Japanese tourist who loves water, poetry and Williams.

As Paterson, tall, sober Adam Driver is the driver this movie needs. He has one of those forget-me-never faces like Jeff Goldblum, John Turturro, Paul Giamatti (and like them a line-biting voice). Driver was shunted to a side-spur of Scorsese’s Silence. He doesn’t reach for stardom here, but he is central, dominant and even winsome (without cutes). Paterson speaks pensively and recites cleanly; his sly, gentle verses were written by Ron Padgett. His relations with lovely Laura and burly Marvin, with a veteran bartender (Barry Shabaka Henley) and a heartbroken Romeo (William Jackson Harper), arrive as segments of soul. Nothing is overdone, including the poems printed on the screen image. The only “melodrama” involves a toy gun, and the dog adds a segment of suspense. This could have all been wistful and precious, an arty doily. Not so.

Flawlessly in command is writer and director Jim Jarmusch (now 64 – hard to believe!), once an ’80s indie-movie prince with Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train and others. He seemed to take a long hiatus, springing back with the elegant vampire reverie Only Lovers Left Alive in 2013. With alert simplicity, Jarmusch  absorbs old Paterson and visually feasts even on a box of matches, along with David Lynch's great cinematographer Frederick Elmes. A movie that celebrates the working-stiff demographic without dumb populism, that salutes both Petrarch and comic Lou Costello, that honors poet Williams without becoming pedantic – it all add up to what I think is  Jarmusch’s best film.

When Paterson hears a solitary rapper, practicing in a laundromat, he backs out of sight to demurely listen (he’s always listening, looking, pondering). Like its hero the film can seem shy but is creatively no wimp. Each month of this cold, wet winter has brought an artistic keeper: Aquarius in November, Rules Don’t Apply in December, Jackie in January, The Salesman in February. And now Paterson. As Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton said and sang in Nashville: Keep a-goin’.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Impeccably Poetic Movies, in order of arrival (director, year): Ménilmontant (Dmitri Kirsanov, 1926), L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1949), Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954), The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1955), Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1960),  L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1963),  The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung, 1993),  The Cruise (Bennett Miller, 1997), Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002), Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Steven Shainberg, 2006) and Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson’s casual moviegoing never achieved cinephile purity, for in youth he often walked into a film after it had begun: “We’d leave when we said ‘This is where we came in.’ Everybody said that. They didn’t cost that much, so if you didn’t like one, it was ‘Let’s do something else, go to another movie’ ... walking out of a movie was what for people now is like turning off the television set.” He never saw the Internet’s omni-plex of perusal. (Quote from My Lunches With Orson by Welles and Henry Jaglom, editor Peter Biskind.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In Dallas Buyers Club, hustling conniver Ron Woodroof “fits into the populist-pest tradition of Ernie Kovacs, subverting military orders in Operation Mad Ball; Paul Newman, rousing the chain-gang rubes of Cool Hand Luke; Jack Nicholson, sabotaging medical fascists in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Julia Roberts, finger-flipping the law in Erin Brockovich. His rude, crude sanity is tonic for the afflicted.” (From the Matthew Conaughey / Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Kindle, Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Nadia Sibirskaya in the silent, surreal Paris of Ménilmontant (France, 1926; creator Dmitri Kirsanov).

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Nosh 55: 'I Am Not Your Negro' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Review of I Am Not Your Negro

Despite its almost funereal roots – in writer James Baldwin’s proposed, never-written book about his three martyred friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. – the  documentary I Am Not Your Negro has an amazing life presence. The undertow of tragic sadness cannot depress the enduring legacy of those slain heroes. At the film’s core is another charismatic star: little Jimmy Baldwin, with his huge, sad-owl eyes, radiant smile of gapped teeth, and a voice so eloquent that we are spellbound by his sincerity.

This tribute is overdue, Baldwin having died at 63 in 1987. In 95 minutes Raoul Peck’s movie packs in the era of The Movement, when civil rights was America’s internal Vietnam. Baldwin was back from Paris, his expat refuge from the racial pressure cooker of American life. We hear his thoughts (voiced without jive by Samuel L. Jackson) gleaned from his work, including the book proposal. And we hear Baldwin speaking, as in the quiet, meditative thunder of his presentation at a Cambridge Union debate (his opponent, unseen in the clip, was William F. Buckley Jr.). There are many heroes, not only the three gunned-down leaders but also Harry Belafonte (more eloquent than I recalled), the brave teen Dorothy Counts who faced down brutal taunting, and fearless playwright Lorraine Hansberry (whose meeting with Baldwin and Robert F. Kennedy is a startling element).

Peck, a Haitian, directed Lumumba, the moving 2000 film with Eriq Ebouaney’s great performance as Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Peck’s key collaborator is editor Alexandra Strauss, cross-pollinating clips from news shows, TV chats, race kitsch, songs, ads, forgotten movies like Dance, Fools, Dance (Joan Crawford’s sexiness dazzled young Baldwin) and They Won’t Forget (Clinton Rosemond’s terrorized black janitor became a lasting memory). It is surely time to give Stepin Fetchit a long rest, and the view of Doris Day is shallow, but there is a surreal, oddly menacing (in context) episode from The Pajama Game, of a union picnic giddy with colors and music but everyone is so cheerfully white.

This is not a Baldwin bio-pic, but we could stand to get more on the writer’s broken family, his abiding love of black church speech and music, his deep friendships with Marlon Brando and Nina Simone and his gayness (only mentioned in an FBI report). Still, we get riches. Baldwin was not a mover and shaker, but he had soul-true connections and he knew how to think, write and talk about them without losing any nuances. He felt almost crucified by his belief that black America is caught on a treadmill of white entitlement and forever fated to be Other and Under, sacrificed to a Caucasian race obsession bleached by fear and guilt. Billie Holiday’s “strange fruit” hangs on a white tree.     

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Major Documentaries About Remarkable Americans (subject, director, date), in order of their arrival: Hail, Hail, Rock ’n Roll! (rock musician Chuck Berry; Taylor Hackford 1987), Let’s Get Lost (jazzman Chet Baker; Bruce Weber 1989), When We Were Kings (boxer Muhammad Ali; Leon Gast 1996), The Cruise (brilliant guide Timothy Levitch; Bennett Miller 1997),  Frank Lloyd Wright (the architectural genius; Ken Burns, Lynn Novick 1998), Tesla: Master of Lightning (science wiz Nikola Tesla; Robert Uth 2000), My Flesh and Blood (super-mom Susan Tom; Jonathan Karsh 2003), My Architect (architect Louis Kahn; Nathaniel Kahn 2004), Buck (horse master Buck Brannaman; Cindy Meehl 2011);  The Internet’s Own Boy (computer prodigy Aaron Swartz; Brian Knappenberger 2014), Magician (film master Orson Welles; Chuck Workman 2014) and Finding Vivian Maier (the obscure photographer; John Maloof, Charlie Siskel 2014).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Biographer Charles Higham hurt Orson Welles by proposing an unconscious “fear of completion” which hobbled his career. Barbara Leaming put the opposing case well: “If indeed Orson feared completion, why would he have tried to finish It’s All True at his own expense? Why would he have subsidized his films with his own acting money? And how does one explain the struggle to finish Othello at such great personal cost?” In his late years, Welles even sought to film a new ending for The Magnificent Ambersons. Alas, no way. (Quote from Orson Welles by Barbara Leaming.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Diane Arbus had (furrier father) David’s eyes and, said her mother, ‘didn’t just look at you. She considered you.’ The cosetted girl would lament being ‘treated like a crummy Jewish princess.’ Jewish only on holy days, to please grandparents, Diane escaped anti-Semitism and in time photographed American Nazis who were ‘charmed by her’ … Her eyes equally devoured the Metropolitan’s paintings and afflicted people on the streets (but) ‘I didn’t inhabit my own kingdom for a long time.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Jack Nicholson and his wounded nose visit Catalina Island for Chinatown (Paramount Pictures 1974; director Roman Polanski, cinematographer John Alonzo).

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Nosh 54: 'The Great Wall,' 'The Salesman' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Great Wall and The Salesman

The Great Wall

Maybe to prep for the coming thrills of summer, I found myself gaping up at The Great Wall. The $150 million Chinese production is stuffed with the retro values endemic to modern, big-deal Chinese cinema, but this time that felt just fine. As throwback adventure entertainment, The Great Wall is better than anything we are likely to see strung out along the Mexican border.

Matt (The Martian) Damon must have thought, “Wow. Mars this isn’t.” The reds are much redder, as Chinese troops in stylish, color-coded uniforms defend the medieval Great Wall, a set-built and CGI masterwork. Matt’s mercenary William has come from the West to steal some “black powder” (gunpowder), even though that doesn’t give Chinese imperial forces much of an edge against Siberian swarms of  green-blooded leapin' lizards, storming the Wall (the edge proves to be William's archery skills). Bill finds time to test his buddy bond with sidekick Tovar (Pedro Pascal), to gaze hormonally upon the rising Commander Li (spitfire beauty Tian Jing), and to say things like “I have been left for dead twice.” More time is given to swarming tides of voluptuous violence. No time at all for historical or scientific accuracy, but even in China who cares?

Director Zhang Yimou carries forward the lavish pictorial talent of his past hits. A titan of stress and excess, Zhang will no doubt some day remake The Good Earth as The Great Earth: Golden Topsoil! For those of us far from young, there are fond, flickering memories of Destination Gobi, The Naked Jungle, Genghis Khan, etc. This new epic is silly but fairly thrilling. Every cliché is nicely honored, and John Myhre’s production design binds it all superbly. I came away from this with a thrilling new emotion: I want to build a Great Wall – around Trump.

The Salesman

The steady drip, drip eating away the cold wall between the U.S. and Iran has been Iranian films. Many are pearls of humanity, deft in technique and pellucid in vision (and seldom drippy). Movies like The Salesman, from writer-director Asghar Farhadi.

Emad, a Teheran schoolteacher and actor – he and his wife Rana are the leads in a new staging of Death of a Salesman – returns to their new apartment to find Rana bleeding, brutalized. She is mystified about a lustful stranger who entered as she was bathing. Emad suspects a hidden connection with the previous tenant, a sex worker, and her many clients. The childless couple, cosmopolitan and not religiously orthodox (an Audrey Hepburn portrait is on display), suddenly feel as vulnerable as kids without parents.

Rana, ashamed, refuses to see the police. Emad internalizes her fear and begins to feel a primal male rage (night after draining night, his Willy Loman is losing male status on stage). The marriage clots. Inevitably Emad will seek revenge, but forget about Liam Neeson or Charles Bronson. In a manner slow-going by U.S. action standards, Farhadi tightens the fine-grained plot with tremendous assurance and no slick melodrama. The very fine, natural work by Shahab Hosseini (Emad) and Taranieh Alidoosti (Rana) is joined by superlative Babak Karimi, who gives one of the best performances of an old, sick man I have ever seen.

Farhadi won the foreign movie Oscar in 2011 for A Separation, and this new picture is also subtle, tense, devoid of hokum and squeeze. He won’t be coming to Sunday’s Oscars (The Salesman is nominated as foreign film) because of Trump’s travel ban against Iran and six other Islamic countries. If our Maximum Leader could view just three or four of the best, deeply humane Iranian films from recent decades, he might be less prone to snarl us into conflict with Iran. Well, no – he’d fall asleep from boredom, or start tweeting. Such a big man, such a tweety bird.

SALAD (A List)

Ten Absorbing American or Brit Movies Set in China, in order of arrival (director, year): The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933), The General Died at Dawn (Lewis Milestone, 1936), The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), The Shanghai Gesture (Joseph von Sternberg, 1941), The Left Hand of God (Edward Dmytryk, 1955), The World of Suzie Wong (Richard Quine, 1960), Mulan (Disney: Bancroft and Cook, 1998), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000), The White Countess (James Ivory, 2005) and The Painted Veil (John Curran, 2006). The retro worst was Blood Alley with John Wayne (Bill Wellman, 1955).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Peter Bogdanovich gave his opinion on why Citizen Kane and its lordly citizen maintain their grip: “All (of Welles’s) passions – theater, magic, circus, radio, painting, literature – suddenly fused into one. This may explain why to so many people, even those who’ve seen Welles’s other pictures (not so many have, actually), Kane remains the favorite. It is not his best film – either stylistically or in the depth of his vision – but its aura is the most romantic (thanks to) the initial courtship of the artist with his art.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Bogdanovich. My opinion: It is his greatest work, but not by a mile.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Quentin Tarantino knew that Jackie Brown (1997) was a big creative leap: “Miramax optioned three Elmore Leonard novels for Tarantino, who almost passed on Rum Punch. Once he saw its riches, as he told me in an interview, ‘I did what I wanted with it. Oh, the full-out fans, the kind who start Pulp Fiction Web sites … Jackie was not necessarily for them.’ He wanted ‘a more mature character study. I’m a writer, most of all.’ As a teen he had loved Leonard’s work so much that he was nailed for shoplifting a paperback, and he thought that ‘when I become a director I can see every other movie I do being an Elmore Leonard novel.” That didn’t happen, but he made a great one. (From the Pam Grier/ Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

James Whitmore and Sterling Hayden face hard choices in The Asphalt Jungle (MGM, 1950; director John Huston, cinematographer Harold Rosson).

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Nosh 53: 'Fences,' 'Things to Come' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie meal, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Fences and Things to Come

Fences 

I put off seeing Fences – maybe too much early Oscar buzz? – but have gladly caught up. Denzel Washington has a career capper in the sort of stage-rooted showcase which Sidney Poitier had in A Raisin in the Sun (1961). Both actors had meteor-impact virility, and largely defined what black star acting can be on screen. In recent years Washington’s career has suffered too many disposable films, but he storms back as Troy Maxson in Fences. He anchors the story with work so rich and ripe that even a few touches of excess make you want more. He is Troy in truth.

Having done August Wilson’s drama on Broadway in 2010, he also directed this film, employing mostly the same cast (the late Wilson’s screenplay of his 1987 play was finished by Tony Kushner). At 62 Washington is no longer a stud prince, but his meat-packed, rampant force remains amazingly potent. Troy, an ex-con, is bitter about being a poor garbage man in 1950s Pittsburgh ($76.22 a week). His proud, bravura style taps his rage and unexamined self-pity, and he offsets illiteracy with surges of verbiage both jovial and menacing. His old, loyal friend (Stephen Henderson, wonderfully subtle) and his jazz-man son (reflective Russell Hornsby) often fall silent in his shadow. Having lost his past dream of baseball glory, Troy is determined to kill the football hopes of his bristling teen son (Jovan Adepo, at moments Poitier-like).

Viola Davis is an actor cowed by nobody. As Troy’s wife Rose, she seems chained to her stove (white Jesus glows on a plate above the sink). But as the lacerating, self-haunted Troy fracks their marriage, she delivers a soul as profoundly female as Claudia McNeill, the matriarch in Raisin. She so desperately wants to believe in her man and their dowdy little nest that she takes a ton of crap, yet she won’t play victim. Davis and Washington are weathered into their roles, beyond calculation. With performances like these, we can endure the dinky pathos symbol of a fallen rose, and the scenes of Troy’s brain-damaged brother (Mykelti Williamson), who hauls around a useless trumpet. Ah, theater.  

Washington skillfully evokes a vintage Pittsburgh, hard-bitten but with lyrical touches (Mozart Savings and Loan!). It feels good to get out of that house, especially when the crowded speeches stop and we hear Little Jimmy Scott singing “Day by Day.” What feels best is Washington mastering the kind of role that most actors aspire to, but that only a veteran star can fill  supremely. A Denzel Oscar on Feb. 26 would be just.

Things to Come

Not to be confused with the visionary, British sci-fi movie of 1936, Things to Come (or L’Avenir) includes a visit to Chateaubriand’s seaside grave, and swift talk about Rousseau, Arendt, Pascal, Adorno, Schopenhauer, and a breezy, five-way conversation in French, German and English. The French heroine admits to having been a Stalinist “for three years – until Solzhenitsyn.”

No, Dottie, we’re not in Kansas, not even the University of Kansas. We’re in Paris, where every pensee works overtime and every cigarette smokes existentially. But also on the seashore, and in a lovely Alpine valley, and with Isabelle Huppert. Her Nathalie is a brilliant but open, brisk, never pompous teacher of philosophy. She struggles with being past 50 and with: Heinz (Andre Marcon), her lover of 25 years, now itchy for exit; Fabien (Roman Kolinka), her best student and an intellectual dreamboat, and her mother Yvette (Edith Scob), a dying beauty – Scob found fame back in 1959, as the disfigured daughter in Eyes Without a Face. Let’s not forget Pandora, Yvette’s fat cat, who gives Nathalie a mouse as if it were a Croix de Guerre.

The direction by Mia Hansen-Love (Father of My Children, 2009) is fluent and observant (ditto Denis Lenoir’s cinematography). The Euro-smart talk is rich, but the living is even richer, vibrant with nuances. Huppert is the movie-heating heart, entirely genuine. And never better than when, on a crowded bus, she tries to throttle pent-up tears and then, spotting the portly Heinz with another woman, starts laughing. Huppert confirms all the admiration we have ever felt for her, without milking it. Like Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep and Charlotte Rampling, she is enjoying a great senior career. (For Huppert as an aging but supple minx of mystery, see Elle in Nosh 50, by scrolling below).  

SALAD (A List)

My choices for Denzel Washington’s Ten Best Film Roles, in order of preference: Malcolm in Malcolm X, 1992; Troy Maxson in Fences, 2016; Rubin Carter in The Hurricane, 1999; Alonzo Harris in Training Day, 2001; Easy Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress, 1995; Pvt. Trip in Glory, 1989; Frank Lucas in American Gangster, 2007; Melvin Tolson in The Great Debaters, 2007; Dr. Davenport in Antwone Fisher, 2002, and Jake Shuttleworth in He Got Game, 1998.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
After the dark but tasty Viennese intrigues of Carol Reed’s The Third Man gave him (as Harry Lime) a new surge of stardom, Orson Welles tried to extrapolate that success into a more baroque, international variation, Mr. Arkadin: “For a plot, he jumbled together some episodes of a radio show, vaguely inspired by the millionaire arms dealer Basil Zaharoff. Towards the end of Zaharoff’s life in 1936, the manuscript of his memoirs, widely expected to reveal some embarrassing truths, was stolen by his valet. Zaharoff paid a large sum for its recovery, and then burned it before anyone could learn more of his mysterious life.” Using that wisp as his genie, Welles again launched his magic carpet. (Quote from John Baxter’s intro to the novel Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
In 1972 Robert Altman brought keen interest but not piety to filming Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye, and “those who feel that he sabotaged Chandler should ponder the writer’s statement to his agent: ‘I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about the strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.’ Elliott Gould gave that a spin and a bounce like no other star.” (From the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable from Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) and her mother (Edith Scob) in Things to Come (Sundance Selects, 2016; director Mia Hansen-Love, cinematographer Denis Lenoir).

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Nosh 52: 'The Comedian' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of The Comedian

Praising Mickey Rooney’s performance as Dick Van Dyke’s partner, in Carl Reiner’s The Comic (1969), Pauline Kael wrote that he “creates a character out of almost nothing, and lives it on the screen so convincingly that you fully expect to see him again after the movie is over.” The same could be said of Robert De Niro as the aging but not whipped comedian Jackie Burke, in The Comedian. You can bet funny money that Kael, the great critic who died in 2001, would have relished this crass, canny picture, and especially De Niro. Now 73, the actor has since 50 often seemed to be punching a time clock, but Jackie joins his best work.  

Ronnie Raunchy would be a valid club name for Jackie (how many recall pro golfer “Jackie” Burke? Well, Jack Burke Jr., is still alive at 94). De Niro’s Jackie B often “works blue” and is happy to go purple. His crude, caustic wit is hardly Kind Hearts and Coronets, but only the Amish or squeamish need be scared away. Burke is not one of those antique Catskills dearies beloved by Woody Allen. His rude humor is in the kill-or-die line of Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Zero Mostel, Jack E. Leonard, Don Rickles and Gilbert Gottfried (who has a smiling cameo).

Jackie is haunted by his past big hit, the TV sitcom Eddie’s Home, a safe harness he came to hate. When old fans demand Eddie’s shtick, Jackie squirms, tries to beg off, then savages them. De Niro nails the aggression of comical dinosaurs, the embittered champs who seem equally rancid about success and failure. We can see mental notes coming to life from his testing time with Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy. Although less royal than late-prime Lewis, he is funnier. The predatory integrity of Jackie Burke is that he refuses to soften with age, to become a beloved entertainer. The film is less a story than a portrait, richly ambivalent about its “hero.”

When a heckler turns nasty, Jackie decks him (this violates one of his rules: “I don’t do physical comedy”). What saves Jackie from crushing the movie with his vulgarity are his smartly timed, watchful nuances, the sense of a pro at work, scanning life for its performance ops and covering his insides.. A great enabler is Leslie Mann as Harmony, the wised-up beauty who is no pushover. A very womanly “straight man,” Harmony can toss Jackie off his stride. The Comedian has a bunch of vividly fine performances: Edie Falco as Jackie’s dogged, weary manager, Danny DeVito as his long-suffering brother, Patti LuPone as De Vito’s wife who despises Jackie (she looks like a pit-bull Ayn Rand). Harvey Keitel, De Niro’s old Scorsese buddy, oozes smarmy machismo as Mann’s father.

When Jackie sprays zingers at his gay niece’s wedding, PC values die like flies. The movie’s posse of writers and director Taylor Hackford savor what is cheesy and old-time about Jackie, but also enjoy his complex ego, even when he is reduced to poop gags at a Florida rest home. Hackford has done crafty work – not only his big hit An Officer and a Gentleman but Ray, Love Ranch, Dolores Claiborne and a rich Chuck Berry film – but never anything quite this keenly focused yet free-spirited. He loves New York, uses jazz as propulsive links, is hip to junk TV and the insane Internet, and celebrates his troupers (Charles Grodin, Freddie Roman, Jimmie Walker and, at 90, a game Cloris Leachman).

In one stretch, Hackford and De Niro score a trifecta: Jackie inflicts a chow mein joke on a savvy Chinese waiter (Lyman Chen), then encounters wry Billy Crystal in an elevator, and then squelches Grodin’s bossy pomposity at the Friar’s Club. Jackie shows up for his niece’s lesbian wedding wearing a tie imprinted with cocktail glasses, then blitzes the stunned crowd. He rules this hip, corrosive movie. I have a fantasy that past zing kings – brainy wizards like Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Sam Kinison, George Carlin – might return to laugh us out of the Trump dump. No chance of that, but Jackie Burke is a guy for the ramparts.        

SALAD (A List)

Here are Ace Comical Performances by Dramatic Actors, in order of their arrival: John Barrymore in Twentieth Century (1934), Clark Gable in It Happened One Night (1934), Charles Laughton in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Lew Ayres in Holiday (1938), Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers (1955), Orson Welles in The Long Hot Summer (1958), Vittorio Gassman in Il Sorpasso (1962), James Mason in Lolita (1962), Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce, Italian Style (1962), Albert Finney in Tom Jones (1963), Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982), Peter O’Toole in My Favorite Year (1982)  and Warren Beatty in Rules Don’t Apply (2016).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

It is widely agreed that the second genius on Citizen Kane, after Orson Welles, was cinematographer Gregg Toland, who came to Welles voluntarily and “said that he felt miserable after working on many run-of-the-mill assignments and that he wanted to collaborate with Welles because of the young director’s experience: ‘I want to work with someone who’s never made a movie. That’s the only way to learn anything.” It should be noted that Welles had overwhelmed both Broadway and radio in his early 20s, and that Toland’s prior assignments included his stunning imagery for The Grapes of Wrath, Wuthering Heights and The Long Voyage Home. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A torture sequence in Kafka’s The Trial got a whole new shock of  sick life in Welles’s 1962 film, where in a storage room “under a lashing belt the men writhe … a naked light bulb invokes Picasso’s Guernica, and the hand-held camera is like a mad bat from Goya’ black paintings. Joseph K shrinks back into the door, stutters a bribe (refused) and then oozes away. Welles extends an amazing shot of his body extruding through the door crack.” (From the Anthony Perkins/ The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis, show-bizzy in The King of Comedy (20th Century Fox, 1983; director Martin Scorsese, cinematographer Fred Schuler).

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Nosh 51: 'Gold,' 'Hacksaw Ridge,' John Hurt

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Gold and Hacksaw Ridge
Gold
Matthew McConaughey emaciated himself to play AIDS-afflicted Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club. The gaunt performance was so good he not only won an Oscar, he even sustained his sex appeal. Then came cash-in gravy, but a talented actor can only do Lincoln car commercials for so long. So McConaughey shaved his hair to a balding mess, twisted his spine into a swayback to swing a pot gut of around 15 pounds, slum-dumped his teeth and obliterated his sex appeal, as rogue prospector Kenny Wells in Gold. Did Matt not recall starring in Fool’s Gold, in 2008?

Wells is a Reno slob, sucking cigs, snorting whiskey, oozing a kind of yokel cunning. He is often drunk, and we get a butt shot that is, well, remarkable. The script, loosely bundled from real events, is about an international gold-mining scheme that became a turnstile of dubious gambles. Gaping holes remain unfilled, and director Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) doesn’t master surreal plot loops like David O. Russell, the Coen Bros. and Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s closer to the gilded-gonzo excess of Martin Scorsese’s exhausting The Wolf of Wall St. In that one, McConaughey’s highrise hustler was a flashing diamond of star presence. Kenny Wells is like a swacked barfly hoping to extract gold from his armpits. There are only so many close-ups of Kenny an audience can take, and the script never allows a credible relation with his lover (jaunty fun-gal Bryce Dallas Howard) or his mining partner (macho but dull Edgar Ramirez). 

Gold has some adventure zest, a beautiful tiger, some stunning Indonesian jungles and weird, pulpy hints about the obscure business connections of Gerald Ford (the post-Nixon president). Not much gold there. To compare this creaky jalopy with the great gold-fever classics, Greed and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, would be fatuous. It is, for sure, better than Gold (1974), one of those vehicles which revealed that Roger Moore was, despite James Bond, a very limited star.

Hacksaw Ridge

So Mel Gibson, after years in shamed shadow, is heading back to the red carpet. No boozed, anti-Semitic rants, enabled by his fringe faith, have scared away this year’s Academy voters. They gave his factually derived war film Hacksaw Ridge six Oscar nominations: best film, director (Gibson), actor (Andrew Garfield), plus editing and two sound awards. I went to the movie out of morbid curiosity, wondering if Gibson, once a fine actor, has changed his stripes. For me, this picture is a totally schizoid Yes vs. No, at times a moving tribute but also a torture lab (and I’m not very squeamish).

The early Virginia scenes of Desmond Doss, a gangly Seventh-day Adventist (the movie begins with Bible quotes), are often so starchy with dated film tactics that they might embarrass Sergeant York, the piously sincere 1941 film about Alvin York, a conscientious objector turned WWI hero (a hit, it got Gary Cooper a best-actor Oscar). But Rachel Griffiths and Hugo Weaving are quite fine as Doss’s gentle mom and angry, WWI-guilty dad. Ditto  Teresa Palmer, as his girlfriend. And Garfield, having left his flowing Jesuit hair and crucified aura in Scorsese’s Silence, wins our fond loyalty as Doss, like a fresh hybrid of young Cooper and the pre-Psycho Tony Perkins. Garfield doesn’t merit an Oscar, but he puts a hero inside this movie, even as it churns into Mel’s hell.

After objector Doss survives ugly hazing in boot camp, he is shipped off to the Okinawa invasion in 1945, as an unarmed medic who won’t use a gun. Okinawa brings the full Gibson treatment, the blood obsession made notorious by Braveheart, Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ. The movie could be the die-orama in a sadistic Slaughter Museum, run by a demented butcher: acres of suicidal, anonymous “Nips” charging at desperate Yanks, blown guts, crushed skulls, severed limbs, human torches writhing and screaming. Gibson’s notion of carnage relief is to show us Doss’s nightmare of being bayoneted. Doss was a great hero, saved 75 men, and won a Medal of Honor. Sadly, this patriotic blood bonanza reveals that Gibson is still our leading purveyor of expensive sadism. Mel, stick with the Globes – and go as a vampire.

SALAD (A List)

John Hurt, who died at 77 on Jan. 27, in England, was a stellar talent despite his famously homely face. one that became magnetically hideous but so poignantly human as John Merrick, “the Elephant Man.” I met him just once, on board the old Queen Mary in Long Beach, after a 1986 press showing of the instantly forgettable Jake Speed. We quickly agreed that the movie stunk, and then had a delightful conversation. My favorite Hurt performance was Giles, the snobbish cruiser who blithely desires and then touchingly befriends Jason Priestley in Love and Death on Long Island.

Let us salute 18 Outstanding John Hurt Film Roles over 50 years, in the order of their arrival: Richard Rich (A Man for All Seasons, 1966), Timothy Evans (10 Rillington Place, 1971), Quentin Crisp (The Naked Civil Servant, 1975), Caligula (I, Claudius, 1976), Max (Midnight Express, 1978), Kane (Alien, 1979), Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment, 1979), John Merrick (The Elephant Man, 1980), The Fool (King Lear, 1983), Braddock (The Hit, 1980), Winston Smith (1984, 1984), Stephen Ward (Scandal, 1989), Bird O'Donnell (The Field, 1990), Giles de’Ath (Love and Death on Long Island, 1997, see photo below), Garrick Ollivander (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 2001), Old Man Peanut (44-Inch Chest, 2009), Christopher Marlowe (Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013) and The Priest (Jackie, 2016).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Criticism has often smirked at Charlton Heston, for playing the stolid Mexican cop Vargas in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). Big star Chuck was somewhat confused, as Orson observed: “He has a theory that what went wrong with the film is that my part (Sheriff Quinlan) turned out to be too good. He forgot that it was the best part (from the start). And it was the most I could do to turn Heston’s part into anything at all, because he was just the leading man, with absolutely no character. I had to make him a Mexican, had to give him 20 problems, everything to make him good … but now, as he remembers it, I built up my part and that’s the only thing wrong with the picture!” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For Wim Wenders, one of Europe’s great young directors in 1984, Paris, Texas was a big emotional test and an American leap for his chosen specialty, the road movie: “His male travelers, as in the great Kings of the Road, are bound by (and bond through) their eroticized fear of women. Other Wenders signatures included long takes, eloquent silences, introspective tangents, portentous vistas, kitsch, hard rock, film allusions, busted plotlines and angry love. ‘He can be very slow,’ said director Sam Fuller, ‘but the mood is going like fire.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

John Hurt, elegant as Giles in Love and Death on Long Island (Skyline Films, 1996; director Richard Kwietniowski, cinematographer Oliver Curtis).

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