Nosh 77: 'Logan Lucky,' Jerry Lewis & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Logan Lucky, salute to Jerry Lewis

Logan Lucky

I pegged Logan Lucky as slumming for summer suckers. West Virginia hicks! NASCAR racing! Beef slab Channing Tatum! Even after guessing that director Steven Soderbergh must have ended his brief retirement and painter's easel time for something pleasurable, hesitation remained. Soderbergh’s slop-around Danny Ocean crime comedies included mediocre heists, and this is a heist movie. As it turns out, a sharp, funny one.

Tatum is Jimmy Logan, former coal miner, divorced but still a loyal dad, and savvy enough to plot a big steal from a hot car race’s cash haul. Tatum’s bulk becomes beef jerky with a dry twang. But chief yokel honors go to Adam Driver as brother Clyde, a bartender with a prosthetic left arm (Iraq service). Driver, recently the gentle, reflective poet in Paterson, speaks in metronomic blips of deadpan, as if distilling hillbilly diction into rare moonshine. There is some vocal DNA from Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl in Sling Blade.

Without utterly patronizing its folk, the movie approaches West Virginia on the familiar gravel road of hee-haw satire (the script is by Rebecca Blunt, perhaps a pseudonym). Trump is not mentioned, but the red subtext looms. To the Tatum/Driver anchor Soderbergh adroitly barnacled Katie Holmes, Dwight Yoakam, Hilary Swank and singer LeAnn Rimes. Plus Daniel Craig as Joe Bang, a snow-haired convict who moves like constipated muscle. Finally, we get James Bond chaw-drawling “Gimme two packs of those Gummi Bears.” The movie has a sunny, frisky spirit, and the heist action does not depend on heavy violence. The retro-toony flavor (very Coen Bros.) includes the bravura use of pneumatic tubes. The Robin Hood angle is maybe a touch much, or not. Logan Lucky is a hoedown, not a letdown.  

Jerry Lewis, 1926-2017

My pal Albert cried. My buddy Gary looked shaken. I felt lousy, although my reverence had largely switched to other idols (Bogart, Peck, Lancaster, the new dazzler Audrey Hepburn). We movie-hooked buddies were age 11 when we heard (July, 1956) that Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were ending their act. This felt like an atomic disaster, a mushroom cloud beyond Ike's control, crushing laughter. Although comedy was getting smarter (Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Jonathan Winters, Mort Sahl), the giddy gift of Martin & Lewis would never come again. And no one held a fan base in thrall like Jerry the Brat, so crazy and loveable (singer Dean was his blithe, canny foil, if not stooge). 

After the epic rupture, Jerry Lewis took a long time to exit. He departed on Aug. 20, at 91. His long journey to tabloid fossil celebrity included many mediocre films, heaps of poor TV, squirm-inducing telethons, spats, illnesses, Percodan addiction, a TV “reunion” with Dean that was really an ego trip for Frank Sinatra. But on the gut level where belly laffs rule, Jerry remained the king of comedy. The shrine custodian of that truth was Martin Scorsese, who cast Lewis as a shrewd, petulant show-biz god in The King of Comedy. Subtle at last, Jerry made Robert De Niro seem much too busy acting.

The tiresome cliché was that the French loved Jerry, we tolerated him. Nonsense (c’est absurdité). Only Americans of a certain vintage truly appreciated M & L’s glory. The team was our tonic rebuke to polio, TB, Stalin, McCarthy, Korea, the Cold War, Abbott and Costello. We felt on top of the world because Jerry and Dean were on top. After their split, fame endured. Dean crooned, acted, ruled prime time TV for a while, sported with Sinatra’s Rat Pack, died in 1995. Jerry, a control freak driven by a rat pack of neurotic compulsions, became his own kind of movie master (best evidence: The Bellboy and The Nutty Professor). His allure was lessened by a gain: weight. The beanpole frame, so essential for his manic goofs and vivid contrast with Dean, filled-out maturely (and took on a veneer of show-biz smugness). The aging Jerry was less fun, less likeable, at times a jerk.

What gave Lewis’s definitive work its slam-bam power was a fearlessness that said: I do it like this – watch me! His chutzpah went beyond Jewish, it was Olympian (after a decade, Dean’s cocky loner’s spirit had to break away). Jerry tended to make taste fall on its fancy ass. So did Dean, for all his swank threads and buttercream cool. As partners they were the Boffo Boys, although their luster seldom had Sinatra’s swinging brilliance. Frank, who could also trample taste, found a late-career vanity anthem, My Way. That bugle belch of boastful self-pity may have more closely suited Lewis, the proud, cranky wizard of fun who must have increasingly missed the go-for-broke kid he had been. He was very easy to criticize, but he remains the Jerry of Jerries.    

SALAD (A List)

16 Satisfying Heist Movies:

The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), Crime Wave (André de Toth, 1952), The Ladykillers (Alex Mackendrick, 1955), Bob Le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956), The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956), Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958), Seven Thieves (Henry Hathaway, 1960), Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960), Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964), Robbery (Peter Yates, 1967), The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996), The Thomas Crown Affair (John McTiernan, 1999) and The Italian Job (F. Gary Gray, 2003).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Nobody has been criticized more for The Magnificent Ambersons than Tim Holt as spoiled, immature George. The Westerns actor was coached by Orson Welles into a nuanced performance, but suffered from studio cutting. Holt was “given a difficult role (and) is supposed to remain stiff, arrogant, somewhat ridiculously old-fashioned. Some of his more powerful scenes were reshot or cut entirely. As a result, he becomes an exceedingly bland presence.” How appealing Holt could be in a top movie was made clear six years later by his Bob Curtin in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (Quote from James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In 1960 Fellini’s La Dolce Vita lifted Marcello Mastroianni to world stardom. Previously “his niche was playing amiable pals, disposable lovers, wayward charmers. He wasn’t a virility totem like Vittorio Gassman, did not flash Rossano Brazzi’s cashmere elegance. He gained serious attention from Visconti’s White Nights, but Fellini was his express train to become Italian film’s male face for over three decades. Sophia Loren was the female face, and she would exult ‘What a couple we were! Simple, beautiful, real!” (From the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Jerry Lewis cooks colorful comedy as Julius Kelp in The Nutty Professor (Paramount Pictures 1963; director Jerry Lewis, cinematographer W. Wallace Kelley).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 76: 'The Glass Castle,' 'An Inconvenient Sequel' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.
(Note: Nosh 77 will appear on Friday, Sept. 1)

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Glass Castle and An Inconvenient Sequel 

The Glass Castle

Pulling off a strong family film is tough work. Many slop into suds, or browse through an album of clichés. The Glass Castle is based upon Jeannette Walls’s crowded 2005 memoir of growing up as the bright, literary child (with two sisters and a brother) of Rex and Rose Mary Walls. This saga rarely sags, and is rich in human moments.

Rex is a rude drinker and a dream hustler (that’s his double helix of hope and despair). His mind bursts with plans, but, as we learn, he is a boozer with a deep inner wound, hauling the family into his flighty fantasies. He envisions building a glass home, a “castle,” clearly a pipe dream when you see the dumps he can afford (the Walls barely have walls). And yet, Rex is inspiring, funny, a dynamo of gusto. And he is Woody Harrelson’s best performance since The Messenger in 2009 (the hair is iffy; like Ed Harris and Robert Duvall, Woody looks better without a rug). Rex’s tumbleweedy wife Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) is fretful but loyal, and he supports her painting (some is not bad, though her comment about Picasso is inane).

Don’t be a prune and ask why Watts and Harrelson, over 20 years, barely age. The film’s heart is not the marriage but family life, anchored by Rex’s very demanding bond with Jeannette. She is acted by hug-bug Chandler Head in childhood, in early adolescence by Ella Anderson, and by nuanced Brie Larson in maturity (Anderson’s teen or pre-teen performance rivals Jacob Lofland in Mud). When director Destin Daniel Cretton really plunges into the family – as in Rex’s cold-turkey crisis, a swimming lesson, and a screaming blow-up – he approaches the vitality of Alan Parker’s best film, Shoot the Moon. Cretton stuns us at the start, showing a child in peril as the soundtrack wails “My Wild Irish Rose.” He sustains a forceful dramatic line through many changes (crucial supports were designer Sharon Seymour and cinematographer Brett Pawlak).

Inevitably this busy movie simplifies an unusually dense memoir, and some reviews have tried to slot the messy family (immature parents, maturing children) into snug TV and PC cubicles. Some of the story’s hurly-burly comes close to soap opera, and a reunion dinner shades towards Norman Rockwell (was this added late, under pressure?). Forget minor demerits. The Glass Castle is engrossingly alive. I first knew and wrote about Destin Cretton when he was a bright student filmmaker in San Diego. His progress is less surprising than confirming, and may it continue.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

If the world is going to hell, Al Gore is not going to spare us the Dantean downside. Eleven years after An Inconvenient Truth spotlighted our daily, guilty contributions to global warming, he’s back full of scientific fire, informative brimstone, stunning footage and more Gore than before (is body bulk his stress relief?). Anyway, the calories that count are global. The crisis is vast, growing and only marginally impacted, so far, by big advances in clean energy (solar is booming, even in China).

The subtle but devastating reaction on Gore’s face when he realizes Trump has been elected is a logo for international nausea. Only months earlier, the Nobel winner and 2000 presidential “loser” used his political skills to broker India into the Paris climate accords. If you consider what President Gore could have done from 2001 to 2009 (and not have done: Iraq), you might feel disposed to let Florida go under without a snorkel. But the seawater sloshing into Miami Beach, our treasury of classic Deco, is sickening.

Most likely this film preaches to the choir (how many Trump districts will see it theatrically?). But maybe it’s time for the stupefied congregation to notice that the choir is screaming “Wake up, the church is on fire!” Gore’s smart, angry, honorably passionate warning reminds us that humanity has always been in a tense contest of “by tooth and claw” versus “by the skin of our teeth.” Al Gore makes a good case that his skin in the game is ours. All of us.

SALAD (A List)

20 Dramatic Movies About American Families (with director and year): Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935), The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942), Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (Roy Rowland, 1945), The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945), East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), Friendly Persuasion (William Wyler, 1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), Home From the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1960), A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, 1961), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962), Sounder (Martin Ritt, 1972), The Godfather (Francis Coppola, 1972), Shoot the Moon (Alan Parker, 1982), Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988), Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990), What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallstrom, 1993), Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) and Fences (Denzel Washington, 2016).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Nothing detonated Orson’s firecracker quite like Irving Thalberg, the famous MGM producer who infamously ruined Erich von Stroheim, John Gilbert and Buster Keaton: “In his whole career he didn’t make a picture that will last 50 years from now, and still he’s revered. Romeo and Juliet produced by Thalberg, directed by Cukor, was the cultural high point of his years of moviemaking. Now, you cannot sit through four minutes of it, it’s so terrible! Norma Shearer (Mrs. Thalberg) with those tiny eyes, and Leslie Howard, a Hungarian Jew, as Veronese teenagers?” (Orson Welles, in Henry Jaglom’s My Lunches With Orson. Howard, born in England to a Hungarian Jewish dad and German Jewish mum, became the quintessential, quick-tongued Englishman.)    

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Stanley Donen could pop pizzazz. Small, cocky, alert as a ferret, he had survived Gene Kelly’s armored ego and, irking Cole Porter, had filched ‘Be a Clown’ from The Pirate for revamping as ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ in Singin’ in the Rain (in that he turned sound’s traumatic arrival into pure joy). Donen’s Hepburn trilogy – Funny Face, Charade, Two For the Road – are unique entertainments. With the pragmatic oomph of a South Carolina Jewish dance addict turned studio politician, he was genetically show-biz. At 73 he topped the 1998 Oscars by tap-dancing ‘Cheek to Cheek.” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face 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.

James Mason and Kathleen Ryan approach the fateful end of Odd Man Out (Rank, 1947; director Carol Reed, cinematographer Robert Krasker).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 75: 'Atomic Blonde,' 'Maudie' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Atomic Blonde and Maudie

Atomic Blonde

It opens with the famous TV clip of Ronald Reagan in Berlin, demanding “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” As Atomic Blonde pinballs its dizzy plot, I kept thinking “please, tear down these clichés.” A little desperately, I tried imagining Reagan as English undercover agent Lorraine, the “atomic blonde.” No way! She’s Charlize Theron: sleek, buff, lethal, freeze-dried emotionally. She is hunting for “the list,” a secret “atom bomb of information that could extend the Cold War another 40 years.” But it is late 1989 and the Berlin Wall, at just 28, is about to fall and take down the Cold War.

Director David Leitch filmed an East Berlin so grimly gray that he makes The Spy Who Came in From the Cold seem like a Carmen Miranda musical. Did the brutal DDR (East German) regime died from color anemia? Theron, in zippy black-and-white, kills with kinetic panache. But her flatlined acting draws no expressive blood from the source, a graphic novel. Caught in a frenzied turnstile of violence and loud song blasts, Theron is zombified along with James McAvoy as a snappy punk-hunk. Also Eddie Marsan, John Goodman, Toby Jones and, as the British spy chief, James Faulkner (my nominee to star in Trapped With Trump: The Gen. John Kelly Story). French agent Sofia Boutella salivates carnality with Theron, whose sexiness arrives from a cold tap.

On its barnstorming terms Atomic Blonde “works,” but is so over-determined as a plex thriller that it has no dimensions except ballistic wow and plotted murk. Blood splashes the lens, and derivations clobber everything: bits of Tarantino, Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), franchises (Bond, Bourne, Matrix) and, ancestrally, John Le Carré’s spy fictions. Even the most drip-dry  passages of Le Carré’s great TV movies, Tinker, Tailor… and Smiley’s People, both starring infallible Alec Guinness, had more life, wit, suspense and depth than any part of Atomic Blonde. But for fans of atomic mayhem, such slow, talky shows are tepid tea at a dull hotel. 

Maudie

It’s called Maudie, though she calls herself Maude. That lean to cuteness in a fact-rooted film doesn’t overwhelm Sally Hawkins as Maude Lewis, who was “born funny” (juvenile arthritis). Abusively ostracized, she found another loner: Everett, a fishmonger on the Nova Scotia coast. He wanted a housekeeper for his simple shack. Overcoming his sometimes grim machismo, Maude charms, pecks and steadies him into marriage, and she gaily decorates the place with her simple, vivid paintings. They puzzle Everett, no aesthete, but win an enthusiastic patron from New York.

Let’s avoid curatorial labels like “naif” for Maude’s art, which looks like a childish variant on the famously (in my youth) nostalgic pictures of Grandma Moses. In Aisling Walsh’s film art is clearly Maude’s life raft, and Hawkins makes it credible. Her Maude is savvy, flashing some of the sardonic smarts that made Hawkins a sensation in Happy Go Lucky. The Hawke and Hawkins match is a fine pairing of thespian wings, in a tale of survivors that has been accused of softening the original story. But the actors bring real integrity to it, and the Canadian settings resonate.

As the couple ages, turning more creaky and cranky, the story takes on a gravity of real pathos. True, you might laugh when Everett, who first ranked Maude below the chickens in his (pardon me) pecking order, now places her above the dogs. At moments the movie verges on lampoon, like Ethan Frome headin’ down the La Strada road to find a new life On Golden Pond. Still, here is a piercingly humane view of a marriage that, if not made in heaven, rose above hell. 

SALAD (A List)

Fifteen Outstanding Canadian Films (with director, year):

The 49^th Parallel (The Invaders; Michael Powell, 1941), The Luck of Ginger Coffey (Irvin Kershner, 1964), Goin’ Down the Road (Donald Shebib, 1970), Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971), The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Ted Kotcheff, 1974), The Silent Partner (Darryl Duke, 1979), The Grey Fox (Phillip Borsos, 1982), I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (Patricia Rozema, 1987), Dead Ringer (David Cronenberg, 1988), Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989), 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (Francois Girard, 1993), Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2006), My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007), Barney’s Version (Richard J. Lewis, 2010) and Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falandreau, 2011).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

As a virtuoso director Welles never surpassed the sequence in The Trial (1962) of K (Anthony Perkins) in panic flight down a wooden corridor, hounded by a swarm of girl “groupies” who “pursue him, their screams filling the soundtrack. Stripes of light flood through the slatted walls and make a dancing abstract pattern on K’s body as he dashes towards the camera, which was being pushed by a Yugoslav runner. Welles: ‘We put the camera on a wheelchair, it was the only way to move it along the wooden planks.’ Reverse tracking shots sweep back alternatively in front of K and the girls, their shadows writhing on the walls …The sequence runs less than half a minute but contains 25 closely knit shots.” (From Peter Cowie, The Cinema of Orson Welles.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For John Huston, filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre mostly in Mexico meant few studio comforts: “He chose as base two villages in primal Michoacán. Local extras were so humbly respectful that when he shouted ‘Silencio!’ they covered their mouths. Anti-Yanqui press roiled the filming in Tampico, until an editor received his mordita (bribe). Artist Diego Rivera intervened with federal authorities busy protecting the national honor (dollars helped).” (From the Humphrey Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, serving your attentive pleasure on Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Ida (Katherine Helmond) beauties-up in Brazil (Universal, 1985; director Terry Gilliam, cinematographer Roger Pratt).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 74: 'Marie Curie,' 'Letters from Baghdad' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Marie Curie and Letters From Baghdad

Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge

You don’t expect a film about a great female scientist to include a pistol duel in the woods, but then you haven’t seen Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge. Curie (b. Maria Sklodowska) was surely Poland’s greatest export to France since pianist Frédéric Chopin (b. Fryderyk Chopin). She married the brilliant French chemist Pierre Curie, co-shared (by his insistence) the Nobel Prize, and after his tragic death became the first person to win a second Nobel. She co-discovered radium and polonium, pioneered the crucial theories of radioactivity (and cancer treatments), designed and conducted experiments (which finally killed her), uplifted female scientists and – touché!—was the Sorbonne’s first female prof, and the first woman buried in the Panthéon.

Marie Noelle’s bravura film makes us forget Greer Garson’s Madame Curie (1943), who hugged her nobility like a tragic fur from Bonwit Teller. In this Franco-Polish production (German financing), Noelle and photographer Michal Englert achieve French light of such Impressionist impact that we can almost believe radium is the source. Noelle gives us the scientific excitement, the work, the friendship with Einstein, the misogynist opposition including imbecilic anti-Semitism (she wasn’t Jewish), and Marie’s love of Pierre and their kids, notably Irene (who went on to her own Nobel). The couple stand before luminous vials of radium. Pierre: “It is glowing from inside.” Marie: “Like you.” OK, a touch corny, but great, radiant corn!

Noelle’s first film was Obsession (1997), with Daniel Craig, and Marie Curie goes well beyond. There is high fixation in Marie’s science, her feminism, her love of Pierre, her recovery from his death (street accident), her compensating love for Pierre’s great assistant Paul Langevin, which caused scandal. Noell has expert instinct for vividly cross-stitching the creative and personal, as Robert Altman did in his Van Gogh film Vincent and Theo. If Karolina Gruszka doesn’t quite have the Garbo intensity of Poland’s great Maja Komorowska, she attains her own erotic power, salted and served with innate dignity and intellect.

I haven’t seen Daniel Olbrychski in many years (he seemed to be in half the Polish films of the '70s), but here he is, excellent as a preening swine. Also terrific: Charles Berling as Pierre, and Arieh Worthalter as Paul (who fights the duel). Piotr Glowacki’s Einstein easily rivals the recent TV saga Genius. It is really Gruszka’s movie, by way of Noelle. When Paul calls Marie “my beaming radium queen,” we can believe it. Of course, there is also an old-school male to grunt, “Not bad for a woman, eh?” That “eh” is from the periodic table of macho piggery.  

Letters from Baghdad

The masters of war who took us into the Iraq quagmire, in 2003, probably would have cared little for a British film that is a feminist history lesson, poetically realized. Or cared more than a dry, dusty fig for the movie’s subject: Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). In any case, the beautiful and stirring documentary Letters from Baghdad was not made until 2015, a dozen years after the start of our Bush-born misadventure.

Bell came from a wealthy if declining Yorkshire family, and tore herself from her roots (a lovely estate, a cherished father) after a youthful trip to Persia (Iran) besotted her. One of the great Victorian travelers, Bell applied her Oxford-honed brain to mastering Arabic (“I am so wildly interested in Arabic – and the fun of it!”). Alarming the Ottoman Turks, she led her own camel troupe into the baking interior of Saudia Arabia. Her enchantment with Brit-run Mesopotamia, once fabled Babylon, would lead to her advising Winston Churchill (as did her friend T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia”) into forging the kingdom of Iraq after WWI. The acerbic, tireless Bell became a power, “one of the boys” in a blunt but feminine way. The man she loved was killed in World War I and Gertrude became, in essence, betrothed to exotic history. After Iraq was born, she founded and guided Baghdad’s museum of antiquities.

An excellent tribute and time capsule, Letters touches greatness with its form: an almost Arabian Nights streaming of old news clips, travelogs, personal movies and Bell’s often wonderful photos, in a shimmering cascade of times reborn. The film has a haunted fluency, Bell’s strong face looming among sandy vistas. Her letters are read with High Victorian grace by Tilda Swinton. Actors speak as other key figures, studio-posed in period costume. The makers, including editor Sabine Krayenbuhl (who co-directed with Zeva Oelbaum) and designer Erik Rehl, achieve perhaps the most poetic use of vintage film since Peter Delpeut’s entrancing salute to proto-cinema, Lyrical Nitrate.  

SALAD (A List)

Memorable Women Starring in Documentaries:

Pina Bausch in Pina, 2011; Antonia Brico in Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, 1974; Louise Brooks in Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu, 1998; Marlene Dietrich in Marlene, 1984; Traudl Junge in Hitler’s Secretary, 2002; Vivian Maier in Finding Vivian Maier, 2013; Carmen Miranda in Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business, 1995; Ayn Rand in Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, 1996; Leni Riefenstahl in The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, 1993; Eleanor Roosevelt in The Eleanor Roosevelt Story, 1965; Nina Simone in What Happened, Miss Simone?, 2015; Patti Smith in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, 2008; Susan Tom in My Flesh and Blood, 2003; Amy Winehouse in Amy, 2015; Gwen Welles in Angel on My Shoulder, 1998.      

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Partly for legal reasons, partly from pride-of-inspiration, Orson Welles always tried to deflect the idea that Citizen Kane is centrally about William Randolph Hearst. In 1941 he sought to elude that notion in an article: “The easiest way to draw parallels between Kane and other famous publishers is not to see the picture. It is the portrait of a public man’s private life. I have met some publishers, but I know none of them well enough to make them possible models. Constant references have been made to the career of Hearst, drawing parallels to my film. That is unfair to Hearst and to Kane.” His viewpoint has not prevailed. (Quote from Frank Brady’s fine biography Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Among those thrilled in 1935 by Katharine Hepburn’s moving Alice Adams was young Pauline Kael: “Hepburn made her feel ‘as if you were inside her skin.’ The Bay Area girl ‘was 16 when the film was first shown, and during the slapstick dinner-party scene, when Alice was undergoing agonies of comic humiliation, I started up the aisle to leave the theater, and was almost out the door before I snapped back to my senses.’ Alice Adams still snaps our senses.”

(From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable from Amazon, Nook, Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

A Pina Bausch dancer in Pina (IFC Films, 2011; director Wim Wenders; cinematographers Helene Louvart, Jorg Widmer).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Noh 73: 'Dunkirk' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Dunkirk

Dunkirk is a French port city just south of the Belgian border. From May 24 to June 4, 1940, it was the center less of a battle than a disaster, one converted by British luck, pluck and propaganda into a national resurrection. Nearly 400,000 men were cornered by German forces, and for obscure reasons Hitler held back his Panzers (probably for later Blitzkrieg-ing in central France). Churchill committed only a fraction of the Royal Navy and RAF, both precious for the coming Battle of Britain. About 338k of the 400,000 were rescued (though many of the French were later repatriated). Their saviors were often small, civilian vessels, voluntarily crossing the Channel. It was like Agincourt minus arrows, but more flags.

Much of the context remains a shade vague in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. First known for clever, conceptual films (Following, Memento, Inception), then the box office champ The Dark Knight, Nolan wrote and directed this somewhat conceptual but also docu-granular war saga. It starts with a lost British soldier joining the forces massed on the beach. First he goes to a dune and squats (must I draw a picture?). His name is Tommy (British troops were called Tommies in WWI). He and the other men are caught in grim suspense, then panic, as German planes strafe and bomb. Most of the movie is about small groups deep in harm’s way. The faces are movingly real, but their identities (even Tom Hardy’s) are oddly generic. Sound effects (and accents) are so potent that much of the speech becomes hard to follow.

Shot with brilliantly sharp film, not digitally, and fully alert to all issues of survival, this is not one of those old war epics jammed with famous stars. Subbing for all the gone Sirs is Sir Kenneth Branagh as a naval commander. Yes, the former Henry V is back in France (his model as Mr. Stiff Upper Lip must be Noel Coward in In Which We Serve). Nolan’s spotlight hero is a doughty yacht captain, played by Mark Rylance as Britain’s Indomitable Spirit. Between action storms we get tense, meditative pauses, and can ponder why the Brits make so many movies about their disasters and ordeals. Like A Bridge Too Far, The Malta Story, Fires Were Started, In Which We Serve, Bridge on the River Kwai, Zulu, The Cruel Sea, Khartoum and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Though most attentive to fierce desperation, Nolan reaches for some heroics. When the rescue fleet of little boats appears on the horizon, someone asks Branagh what it is. With moist eyes he answers “Home,” and the score surges with the Nimrod theme of Elgar’s Enigma Variations. There is plenty of air combat, as bold RAF pilots shoot down nasty Heinkels (the Germans remain faceless terrors). Most movingly to me, an English pilot is shot down, glides his expiring plane elegantly to the beach, and then sets it on fire – up yours, Adolf!

Dunkirk is often too scary, or just noisy, to be quite exciting or stirring. The big budget appears to skimp on the gallant rescue fleet, with terse and gracious Rylance made to carry too much emblematic weight as the yacht skipper. Nolan achieves moments of nerve-racking realism, yet without challenging film’s great battle episodes (Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, Klimov’s Come and See, Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Branagh's Henry V, Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Kurosawa’s Ran and Seven Samurai – each a stylized stunner). Ten years ago we went to this beach with powerful brevity, in the Dunkirk sequence of Joe Wright’s Atonement. Back we go. Keep calm and carry on.   

SALAD (A List)

Ace Performances in British WWII Movies:

Laurence Olivier in The 49^th Parallel, 1941; Noel Coward in In Which We Serve, 1942; Roger Livesey in The Life and Death of Col. Blimp, 1943; Michael Redgrave in The Captive Heart, 1946; James Mason in Five Fingers (Code Name Cicero), 1952; Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, 1953; Robert Newton in The Desert Rats, 1953; Gregory Peck in The Purple Plain, 1954; Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957; Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun, 1987; Sarah Miles in Hope and Glory, 1987; Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in The English Patient, 1996.

 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Often undervalued in shaping Orson Welles as one-man extravaganza is a tradition long preceding radio and movies, that of the “great actor-managers in the twilight of their lifelong tours. (Orson had) been privileged to (see and) shake the hands of more than a few. He devoured books about David Garrick, Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sir Ben Greet, who did it all: played leads, designed the sets, lighting and costumes, staged and produced … (the teen) was talking about presiding over his own repertory troupe.” And so he did, by 22. (Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s fine Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A tribute: “In Chicago, war veteran and cheerful cinephile Bruce Trinz (1917-2011) owned and ran the Clark Theater, where I ushered. Each day’s new double-bill lured sunrise pilgrims, tired shoppers, students, buffs, loners, daters, seniors, cruisers, nighthawks. For each picture Bruce wrote a rhymed couplet, like this one for Cagney’s White Heat: ‘A grim human bomb/ Who worshipped his mom.” (Quote from Intro to my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable from Amazon, Nook, Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image) great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Even Peter Lorre is stunned, in The Beast With Five Fingers (Warner Bros., 1946; director Robert Florey, cinematographer Wesley Anderson).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 72: 'The Big Sick,' The Exception' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Big Sick and The Exception

The Big Sick

As the lead in The Big Sick, comedian Kumail Nanjiani tries to impress a date with his movie taste: The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Night of the Living Dead … But I’d bet that star and co-writer Nanjiani has a deeper source in his head: Buster Keaton, the funniest stone-face, the silent king of deadpan. As a modern comic and actor, Nanjiani relies on words as Buster didn’t, but he also has a watchful stillness, a shy gravity, a gift for pauses and gulpy silences. They resonate his gags, and let us peer into the thinker (and feeler) behind them.

Kumail, as everyone calls him, is an aspiring Chicago stand-up, and Michael Showalter’s movie heads back often to the club, the funny buddies, the sitcom rhythms. My response: move on (even Robert De Niro did it, recently, in The Comedian). But as the title implies, The Big Sick is not all laffs. The club stuff is periodic stress relief. So is Kumail’s émigré family, trying to marry him to a nice, Muslim, Pakistani woman (that’s funny, much like My Big Fat Greek Wedding). More stressed, yet also funny, are the parents of his new, very American girl: experts Ray Romano, as the big, good shlub of a dad, and Holly Hunter as her mom (decades after Raising Arizona, Hunter still has the best fem-twang in the biz, and the timing of her scenes with Kumail is perfection).

I offer the “c” word: coma. Pale, bird-cute Emily (Zoe Kazan), Kumail’s new squeeze, is dear, funny and charming.As Kumail is good at guilty confessions, I confide one myself. When an infection puts Emily into the hospital, then a coma, I felt: good, a break from the rock-drill undertone of her voice. Emily rebounds after much suspense, heartache and medical consultation. You might see the finish coming (no, not death or paralysis), yet it is timed so that it almost sneaks up on us.

The movie has filler, like the riff between Emily’s parents. But Nanjiani hubs the fine cast, and there are very funny lines, from “He’s like Daniel Day-Lewis, except he sucks,” to the way Hunter, sauced, dribbles “I like wine because of the buzz.” Co-written by Nanjiani’s wife Emily Gordon, this is not a mere comic’s film, or a rom-com, or a TV pilot looking for a slot. The Big Sick is enough of a big deal, modestly, to be a winner.

The Exception

Half a century after his Anglo-Austrian accent as Capt. Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, here is Christopher Plummer at 82, rumbling an Anglo-Prussian accent in The Exception. Alas, no singing kids, no Alps, no edelweiss. Plummer is Kaiser Wilhelm II, living in dull Dutch exile. France has just fallen to Hitler (1940), and Wilhelm’s snobbish disdain for Adolf marches in goosestep with his dream that maybe, with luck, he will again rule Deutschland! Leaving Hitler as what? Court painter? Keeper of the beer steins? The fantasy of return fixates Wilhelm’s wife, played by Janet McTeer as a wax echo of old Helen Hayes in Anastasia.

A bull-built German soldier, Capt. Brandt (Jai Courtney), is installed by the Nazis to “protect” Wilhelm, by spying on him. He develops a Blitzkrieg lust for a Dutch Jewish maid, Mieke (Lily James). His inner doubts about the Fuhrer delight the sexy British spy in her, and they rut with fierce solidarity. Cooler episodes feature the imperial feeding of ducks, and old memories served like rare wine (“remember, at four he bit the Prince of Wales in the leg!”). As usual the Nazi uniforms are superb, but the Kaiser’s wardrobe is a Reich unto himself.  

Evil enters the royal chateau as S.S. devil Heinrich Himmler, acted by Eddie Marsan as a small, frigid, poisonous turd. Marsan is terrific, and Plummer remains fairly plummy. Aussie-born Courtney’s machismo is often subtle. But then the plot fabric unravels into a flying hairball of gee-wiz, what-the-hell und Mein Gott! At some point between the schnitzel and the schnapps, the script fell dead from indigestion.

SALAD (A List)

Christopher Plummer’s Best Ten Filmed Roles (my choice): Walt Murdoch in Wind Across the Everglades, 1958; Commodus in Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964; Atahualpa in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, 1969; Herod Antipas in Jesus of Nazareth, 1977; Harry Reikle in The Silent Partner, 1979; Vladimir Nabokov in Nabokov on Kafka, 1989; Abakumov in The First Circle, 1992; Mike Wallace in The Insider, 1999; Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station, 2009, and John Barrymore in Barrymore, 2011. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson’s postwar production of Macbeth, first on stage (in Utah!) then filmed low-budget, had a religious subtext: “The main point is the struggle between the old and new religions. I saw the witches as representing Druidical pagan religion, repressed by Christianity … that’s why the screen is choked with Celtic crosses. The witches are the priestesses. I only wish I hadn’t failed so badly with the witches themselves. They were lousy.” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Speed Levitch, circa 1996, fills the frame: his arrest mug, wide-eyed, cornered, Raskolnikovian. ‘I was runnin’ hard at that time,’ he recalls, ‘the anti-cruise was breathing down my neck … It never occurred to them that I am running from the anti-cruise every day! And I’m gonna keep running!” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

 

Atahualpa (Christopher Plummer) stands in buff majesty before Pizarro (Robert Shaw) in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (National General, 1969; director Irving Lerner, cinematographer Roger Barlow).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 71: 'The Beguiled,' 'The Hero' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Beguiled and The Hero

The Beguiled

What do I recall of Don Siegel’s The Beguiled in 1971, my first full year as a film critic? I remember Clint Eastwood in one of his early efforts to actually act, as the wounded Union soldier at a Dixie women’s school run by Geraldine Page, who lady-lords over him and the smoldering (for Clint) girls. I remember some Southern flavoring of erotic tension, ripening into sadism. But mostly it’s vague – more misty than Play Misty For Me (same year, Eastwood directing) with Clint as the cool DJ fending off a crazy lover (Jessica Walter) straight from bachelor hell.

Now Sofia Coppola re-makes The Beguiled, her script modestly rehabbing the original by Albert Maltz (fabled blacklist victim) and novelist Thomas Cullinan. Colin Farrell is the leg-wounded Yank, McBurney, found bleeding by an academy girl. There are five students, plus headmistress Nicole Kidman and teacher Kirsten Dunst (the men are off serving Gen. Lee, the slaves have fled). The soldier’s wound is seen more viscerally than in 1971, if not 1864.

Mainly Coppola lays on her proven skill with female options and detailed atmosphere. Some images recall old photos by Julia Cameron and Clarence J. Laughlin. The school’s white Corinthian columns seem the last, imperiled totems of a racist nation, dying like the slave empires of Greece and Rome. The females wear lovely white, and their maidenly Christian piety (prayers, candles) is foreplay for lust.

As long as it is subtle and suspenseful, the new Beguiled is good work. Farrell radiates sly Irish charm as each fem (even the girls) schemes for his attentions. But then – the signal is Kidman barking “Bring me the anatomy book!” – it jolts into Dixie gothic gumbo: mutilation, rape, and Farrell in a manly storm of bad acting. We’re back on the plantation veranda with James Mason in Mandingo as he sips a mint julep, fondles a whip, and awaits his dear friend Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.   

The Hero

With his flowing silver hair, droop moustache and voice of a Marlboro cave man, Sam Elliott is less icon than logo. He’s an Old West brand, as potent as bull semen (and played a fine, hateful villain on TV’s Justified). In The Hero he is Lee Hayden, 71, a fading Western star. There are no movies to ride, and the golden voice is bored, recording a radio pitch for Lone Star BBQ sauce. Lee’s cancer (revealed early) promises no remission. No John Wayne “big C” bravado from Lee. But two good things happen: He gets a career award from a nostalgia group, and he meets a woman.

Savvy Charlotte (Laura Prepon) seems to be the sex sunset he needs, a hip-as-now wow, Bacall to his Bogart. Buzzed on desire, drink and her gift of “fairy powder,” Lee gives a unique acceptance speech, which goes viral. But then Charlotte (really director Brett Haley’s script) sinks it all with a crass, public faux-pas. Neither the movie nor the romance recover. You can’t heal a humiliation so wounding with Hallmark chatter about death, lovely shots of waves bubbling at the beach, or even Charlotte’s tender verse from Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Solid footnotes are Katharine Ross as Lee’s ex-wife, Krysten Ritter as his angry daughter, and Nick Offerman as a ganja-sharing, Buster Keaton-loving pal. Elliott does heartfelt underplaying as the old saddle champ haunted by his one mythic movie. In flashback it looks generic, like a TV dream of a weed trip fantasy. Any bid for Elliott’s late-career Oscar had better come with terrific BBQ sauce and a fat Jamaican spliff.

SALAD (A List)

Major Dixie Females of Film: Baby Doll (Carroll Baker, Baby Doll), Blanche (Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire), Carrie (Geraldine Page, The Trip to Bountiful), Clara (Joanne Woodward, The Long Hot Summer), Clio (Ingrid Bergman, Saratoga Trunk), Daisy (Jessica Tandy, Driving Miss Daisy), Ella (Jo Van Fleet, Wild River), Frankie (Julie Harris, The Member of the Wedding), Julie (Bette Davis, Jezebel), Lady (Anna Magnani, The Fugitive Kind), Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Marjorie (Mary Steenbergen, Cross Creek), Minny (Olivia  Spencer, The Help), Pursy (Scarlett Johansson, A Love Song For Bobby Long), Rebecca (Cicely Tyson, Sounder), Regina (Bette Davis, The Little Foxes) and Scarlett (Vivien Leigh, Gone With the Wind). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

As Orson Welles in Me and Orson Welles, English actor Christian McKay was “a gift of the gods to the movie. Not quite as tall, nor as vocally supple, he is still the Big O in many ways: moon-faced Svengali charm, sardonic lift of the eyebrow, tantrums and endearments, blazing ego, the Borgian greed for food and work and women. Above all, McKay generates the almost un-matchable excitement that made many proud, gifted people ready, even eager, to eat some dirt for Wellesian creative gold.” (From my 2009 review.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

To young Matthew McConaughey’s clear strengths add “the virtues of absence: not agingly boyish like Tom Cruise, not middle-weight McQueen like Brad Pitt, not preppy-cute like Ben Affleck, not macho-stolid like Matt Damon, not fetchingly fey like Johnny Depp, not a goofball like Nicolas Cage, not a beef buffet like Channing Tatum, not a red-carpet media totem like George Clooney. Here was the best Texan for movies since Tommy Lee Jones, and far more likeable.” (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club 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

 

Christian McKay as Welles as Brutus, in Me and Orson Welles (Isle of Man Films, 2009; director Richard Linklater, cinematographer Dick Pope).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.