Nosh 84: 'The Foreigner,' 'Faces Places' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Faces Places and The Foreigner

Faces Places

Though film-struck, I was too youthfully ignorant of French cinema in 1955 to know about Agnès Varda making her first movie. Her latest, Faces Places, was filmed at age 88. Varda has probably toppled eternally controversial Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s choice!) as the greatest female director. Nominate Jane Campion, Agnieszka Holland or Chantal Akerman, and you’d better make a fantastic case.

Faces Places is a road-tripper like Varda’s The Gleaners and I, another loosely built documentary essay. Her compelling partner is the roving photo-site artist called JR, then aged 33. The tall hipster, a former tagger, wears dark glasses (Agnès keeps urging him to remove them) and has a terrific eye. They first met on Paris’s Rue Daguerre (long ago the locale of Varda’s Daguerrotypes). Delighted by the tiny, round auteur, JR invites her to hit the roads in his van, which is made to look like a camera. With it he creates, often first using a 28mm. wide-angle lens, black-and-white portraits of people he finds. Like Varda he is a humorous gleaner of life and humanity.

JR “blows up” many pictures, expanded for sectional pasting onto buildings, trains, ruins. These visions confer a local fame closer to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland than Orwell’s Big Brother. A shy villager feels conflicted about her wall-sized celebrity, while a wry down-and-outer is bemused and thrilled by his elevation from obscurity. The stimulating talk of Agnès and JR adds Gallic sauce to their trip, as they ponder art, age and film. Two splendid creations rise near waves. In one, a snap that Agnès took in youth, of her late friend the photographer Guy Bourdin, is JR’d onto a fallen German bunker on a Norman beach. The other lofts epic snaps of three women onto stacked cargo containers in Le Havre (they’re among the port’s few female harbor workers). One episode spills open love, time, loss, transience, while the other is a towering feminist statement.

Like other New Wave talents, even Truffaut, Resnais and Varda’s beloved husband Jacques Demy, Varda was always crowded by the cerebral éclat of Jean-Luc Godard. There is a clip of young Godard with her, and a fond, merry salute to his Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). Agnès chose to end with a Godardian topper, which proved to be less than the celebration she wanted. But the finish is still a touché. Varda remains triumphant, the great surviving surfer of the New Wave.

The Foreigner

One asset of The Foreigner, a strong action movie, is that Jackie Chan at 63 uses his age well. At least his face does, as Chan sustains the battered, angry grief of a man who has lost his daughter in a London terrorist bombing. This being a Chan film, we know that the body will out-perform the face. The moves are less flamboyant now, and may have stunt support, but Chan is in charge. He plays a London restauranteur with a covert military past (Vietnam and beyond), and he goes on the revenge path against a viciously rogue I.R.A. unit that detonated the bomb (as for more current evil, there is one mention of Isis and Al-Qaeda).

Despite his Vietnamese name our hero is Chinese, even gets called “the Chinaman” (I thought the term faded with Charlie Chan and chop suey). The source is Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman, a title that must still be PC in Britain. Giving old, Bronson-trashed action clichés some fresh zest is director Martin Campbell, a proven wiz with mayhem, suspense, torture, the whole kit. The action in Belfast and London is grimly exciting, though it does seem that both cities are mainly platforms for surveillance cameras. Jackie’s fists and tricks, leaps and traps will, of course, lay high-tech low.

In essence The Foreigner is a duel of two aging men. The acting edge belongs not to Chan, for all his grizzled-cherubic intensity, but to nemesis Pierce Brosnan. As a former I.R.A. war chief turned into a peace-pious politician, while playing his own dirty game, Brosnan (Irish-born, now 64) swings a St. Pat’s Irish accent like an emerald flame thrower. He schemes, simmers and unleashes profane, Piercing rages. It’s a show in itself, and more than makes up for Brosnan’s singing in Mamma Mia! 

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Other Important Agnès Varda Movies:

La Pointe Corte (1956), Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962), Salut les Cubains (1963), Le Bonheur (1965), Lions Love (and Lies) 1969, Daguerrotypes (1976), One Sings the Other Doesn’t (1977), Murs Murs (1981), Vagabond (1985), Jacquot de Nantes (1991), 101 Nights (1995), The World of Jacques Demy (1995), The Gleaners and I (2000).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles: “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus. It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world, a world that is not ours, that brings us to the heart of the great secret. Here magic begins. A film is a ribbon of dreams.” (From Peter Cowie’s The Cinema of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“And then – shazaam! – a shining key plops into the dirty water. Diane places it in the trash, but later finds her nerve and presses the buzzer of her new neighbor: ‘Are you washing a dog?’ (Lionel: ‘Excuse me?’) ‘Your dog’s hair is in my pipe.’ (Lionel: ‘Perhaps you should check out the basement’). In 2015 some of us chuckled when Kidman, in Paddington, spoke of ‘drains clogged with hair.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus 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.

Lily Tomlin, Art Carney and Bill Macy wash a lot of noir laundry in The Late Show (Warner Bros. 1977; director Robert Benton, cinematographer Charles Rosher Jr.)

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 83: ''Battle of the Sexes,' 'Rebel in the Rye' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Battle of the Sexes and Rebel in the Rye

Battle of the Sexes

A time capsule for those who don’t recall the challenge tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in the Houston Astrodome (Sept. 20, 1973), Battle of the Sexes lumbers along dutifully for its first hour. In 2001 an ABC-TV movie, When Billie Beat Bobby, had Helen Hunt as King and Ron Silver as Riggs. Now we’ve got Emma Stone as King, then 29, rising fast in a career that pushed female pro tennis into feminism. Steve Carell plays Riggs, at 55 way past his early prime (at 21, male singles winner at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open). Stone and Carell provide good facial matches, though she seems slight, almost girlish. In long shot, gifted players reproduce the action which led to King’s triumph (6-4, 6-3, 6-3). She got the $100,000 purse. Riggs, notoriously a gambler, likely profited from side-bets.

Director Valerie Feris and Jonathan Dayton stage obligatory wind-ups about the families, Billie Jean’s anchoring the new Virginia Slims tournaments, and male piggery from the old tennis elite and press (BJK is called “this little lady” and Howard Cosell praises her for playing like a man). No fella wore his hog bristles more keenly than Riggs, though that was often just porky bunting for his   hustle. Carell revels in every stunt, goad and gambit, and Elisabeth Shue not only looks terrific but is subtle as his wife, alternately patient and fed-up. There are plot conveniences. Did Bobby really show up at Billie Jean’s hotel to pitch the big “battle” on the very morning after the married King embraced her first lesbian love, a dewy hairdresser? She later came out as a gay icon, but Stone often seems trapped in the script’s netting of sexual and political points. As for tennis, well, Stone’s court action is on a par with her dippy-trippy dancing in La La Land.

Battle earns points for bringing back a remarkable sliver of the ’70s, when tennis had cultural edge. The match ended rather predictably: a superb young athlete had everything to prove, and she did, by exhausting and out-smarting a brash has-been who confused chutzpah with training. For the history lessons, this is Billie Jean’s movie. As entertainment it belongs, as in 1973, to Bobby. His new rival is the tennis outfit stylist for the Virginia Slims players, played by Alan Cumming as a queenly composite of Noel Coward and Project Runway’s Tim Gunn. He intones the final lesson, royally. 

Rebel in the Rye
J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye never had much of a chance with me, given that the young sourball hero, Holden Caulfield, says this on page two: “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” O.K., kid, but in my book you’ll never be William Holden. Now that the novel has sold over 60 million copies, and Salinger has been dead since 2010, we get the movie Rebel in the Rye (its literary wit is more like Dabble in the Wry).

Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski contributed to the script, a studious rummage through “Jerry” Salinger’s early writing ordeals and then the cultic fame that turned him into a fabled recluse. The details, 1939 to early ’50s, are credible, and Kevin Spacey is skillfully engaged as an early writing mentor, Whit Burnett. There’s something O’Neill about this scrappy idealist, as if extracted from Spacey’s work in The Iceman Cometh (Salinger’s first big love was Oona O’Neill, the playwright’s daughter, who married Chaplin).

As Salinger, British actor Nick Hoult has a small touch of Jack Nicholson, but perhaps maintaining a flat American accent limited him to about three facial expressions. None of the more adult figures add much drama, though Spacey is touching and Bernard White is appealing as Jerry’s Vedantic guru (still, “overcoming distractions” hardly sums up this great religious philosophy). It’s a movie in which the hero’s rich dad (Victor Garber) stiffly insults his son’s artistic dreams, but later, near the finish, confides that he had yearned to become a musician. Director Danny Strong is strong with the WWII scenes, yet Jerry’s combat trauma just sort of dribbles into his Vedantic meditations and his phobia about fame. Salinger now seems buried inside Caulfield. Holden may still live, yet not much in this movie. 
      

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Good Movies About Real Sports Figures (with lead subject, director, date): Olympia (Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1937), The Pride of the Yankees (Lou Gehrig, Sam Wood, 1942), Pumping Iron (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Butler/Fiore, 1977), Raging Bull (Jake LaMotta, Martin Scorsese, 1980), Cobb (Ty Cobb, Ron Shelton, 1994), When We Were Kings (Muhammad Ali, Leon Gast, 1996), The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Greenberg, Aviva Kempner, 1998), Ali (Muhammad Ali, Michael Mann, 2001), Riding Giants (Laird Hamilton, Stacy Peralta, 2004), Unforgiveable Blackness (Jack Johnson, Ken Burns, 2004), Senna (Ayrton Senna, Asif Kapedia, 2010) and Moneyball (Billy Beane, Bennett Miller, 2011). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Standard popcorn chompers decided the Hollywood fate of Orson Welles at a March 17, 1942, Pomona preview of The Magnificent Ambersons. Most hated the dark, demanding film. RKO chief and Welles advocate George Schaefer was aghast, and a committee effort hacked the melancholy beauty, adding some weak inserts. Welles, on location in far-off Brazil, “simply assumed – as he had every right to – that he would have an opportunity to rework the film himself (and) cabled 37 pages of revisions …’I had no idea that (my enemies) would prevail.” The bad fix was in. (Quote from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Pam Grier’s apex role as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) had been a long time coming: “In Roger Corman’s Filipino quickies, with sweaty, under-clad women staging cat fights, Grier was the only one reading Stanislavsky on the set. Pam shaped her image, enjoyed doing stunts, asserted some independence. Violence was obligatory, but ‘my movies featured women claiming the right to fight back.’ Her innate dignity and force gave her leverage, despite promo like ‘A chick with drive who’ll take no jive!” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown 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.

Villain Raymond Burr (top) watches his goons subdue Robert Mitchum (bottom) in His Kind of Woman (RKO, 1951; director John Farrow, cinematographer Harry J. Wild).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 82: 'Brad's Status,' 'Polina' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Brad’s Status and Polina

Brad’s Status

Ben Stiller’s got the whole world of Brad in his hands, as well as Brad’s Status. His Sacramento life is quite nice: good job serving not-for-profit enterprises; a lovingly supportive wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer); a late-teen son, Troy (Austin Abrams), flying  with dad to apply at Harvard and other posh Eastern schools. This lad is so cool and thoughtful, such a budding mensch, I’d say he should drop his musical dream and become a diplomat.

The movie, largely narrated and thought-spoken by Stiller, is mainly about the algae bloom of neurotic anxiety in Brad’s head. The trip reminds him of his college days, when his future beckoned like God’s red carpet. Now Brad not only envies his blithe, sturdy son, he suffers midlife jealousy of old buddies, alpha-males in the fast lane. The movie, written and directed by Mike White (script shaper of Chuck & Buck and School of Rock), has cartoonish fun with these over-attainers. One (White) is in Hollywood gay, party bliss mode. Another (Luke Wilson) is piling loot as a shady investor. Another (Jemaine Clement) lives a Hawaiian beach dream with micro-bikini sexpots. The chief piece of work is Craig (Michael Sheen), a celebrated White House intimate who preens in a restaurant like Achilles admiring himself in a battle shield.

Most of the best humor, and seriousness, comes from Stiller. He again puts the accent in “comic actor” on “actor.” He’s as nakedly exposed as a Woody Allen noodle, yet with real insides. Even his near choke-up, listening to Dvorak’s Humoresque, has validity. True, the movie’s “issues” are a little la-di-da in this stormy, Harvey-Irma-Maria time. And at moments the film seems like a weird double promo for Harvard and Pringles. It’s a small work, rather glib, but the father-son combination unpacks some credible ideas and feelings, all finely performed. 

Polina

Polina in Polina is not Polish but Russian. Part of the film’s lure is the musical flow of Russian speech, sprinkled with French. The effect is fairly Tolstoyan, and there is a touch of Tolstoy’s Natasha in Polina at 8, played by delicate Veronika Zhovnytska. Her doting dad takes her to the snowy woods to hunt rabbits, and the fawn-like girl sees a proud elk, rivaling the majestic Scottish stag in The Queen. Alas, dad could be hunted himself, since he’s a minor figure in one of the criminal operations of the post-Soviet era.

Polina’s passion is ballet (hence the French). Her dance teacher into adolescence (Alexei Guskov) sternly shapes her to become a ballerina at the great Bolshoi in Moscow. We expect the film to exalt the continuance of that old, imperial heritage. But not long after pencil-thin Polina is taken over by teen sylph Anastasia Shevtsova, she pirouettes towards the West. Lured to lusty Provence by a lofty dance hunk (Niels Schneider), Polina faces the challenge not only of debut sex (softly gauzed by hanging tutus) but a different dance culture. For a while, having left the Bolshoi academy’s barre, she is doing bar work (yep, serving beer) in Brussels. Soon, a new partner stirs new moves. 

Lovingly detailed, dance-driven and mood-spun (by director Valerie Müller and choreo-director Angelin Preljocaj), the film charms. Despite one clear handicap. Although she’s a camera vision worthy of Degas, Shevtsova and her male partners dance better than they act. When Juliette Binoche turns up as a modern dance mentor, passionately engaged, the film matures. Like most dance movies, Polina is exciting in motion but otherwise a touch static. Some clichés land en pointe, but Franco-Russian graces still cast a Tolstoyan spell.

 

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Strong Movies About Dance and Dancers:

Shall We Dance (Sandrich-Astaire, 1937), The Red Shoes (Powell, 1948), Invitation to the Dance (Kelly, 1956), Black Orpheus (Camus, 1959), Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977), Dirty Dancing (Ardolino, 1987), Shall We Dance (Suo, 1997), Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000), Mad Hot Ballroom (Agrelo, 2005), La Danse (Wiseman, 2009), Pina (Wenders-Baush, 2011) and The Fits (Holmer, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles, an inspiration even for Ed Wood Jr. (see Tim Burton’s Ed Wood), made art even at humble Republic Pictures, with Macbeth (1947). Having prepped with a stage production in Salt Lake City, Utah, he filmed at the studio, sometimes using horse-opera sets dressed up as dark, dank, medieval Scotland. They included “the salt mine that the cowboys always used to get lost in. That became the great hall of the castle. Our costumes, lamentably, were rented from Western Costume, except for Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth … mine looked like the Statue of Liberty, but there was no dough for another, so I was stuck with it.” (Welles, a bit  painfully amused, to Peter Bogdanovich in This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Robert Altman filmed The Long Goodbye precisely because he wished to update Raymond Chandler’s tired, baggy novel to 1972, and use Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe: “Source piety never had a chance, and those who feel that Altman sabotaged Chandler should ponder the novelist’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.’ Gould, working with Altman, gave that a spin and a bounce like no other actor.” (From the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Angora-sweatered Ed (Johnny Depp) strikes a rather Wellesian note in Ed Wood (Touchstone 1994; director Tim Burton).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 81: 'Mother!,' 'Neither Wolf Nor Dog'

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Mother! and Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Mother! 

The movie opens with Jennifer Lawrence’s face on fire, like a Barbie-cue doll. We guess that Mother! isn’t going to be lots of fun. Darren Aronofsky also directed Black Swan, which I loathed. The creepy ballet fantasy won Natalie Portman an Oscar (beating Lawrence in her breakthrough, Winter’s Bone). But never mind Oscars, let’s talk concepts.

Aronofsky, who also gave Mickey Rourke his glory revival with The Wrestler, is a kitsch dynamo. He confuses ding-dong concepts with ideas, and silly shocks with emotions. He puts Lawrence to work as Mother, even though she’s not yet a mom. She sure is working, rehabbing a big Victorian house that must be the future Bates Hotel (“ho” as in horror). It isn’t so much the blood in the floorboards, or the bizarre toad, or the icky thing in the toilet that bothers Mother, it’s all the collateral mess. As her new “paradise” goes to hell, she’s like a demented renovator on Love It or List It.  Her home obsession annoys her husband, a poetic genius now bereft of muse (he turns for inspiration to a lustrous crystal). Impotence is a tough role for Javier Bardem, who rams scenes with his great, Picasso bull’s head.

Ed Harris plays a coy, weird visitor, dying from smoking, and Michelle Pfeiffer is his wife, dying to steal scenes from Lawrence. The former Catwoman claws the younger beauty with “You’re not going to be so young forever.” Family violence somehow sparks Bardem into renewed virility, Lawrence gets pregnant, and the script spawns a litter of bad ideas. We detect fragments of the Book of Genesis, the mythic system of C.G. Jung, and about half the dumb papers written for middle-school English classes.

Aronofsky’s reliance on close shots by a dizzy camera builds to panic, then pandemonium. Bardem, thrilled by his revived cojones and a new poem, lets in a horde of crazed fans. They trash the home (this is not a spoiler; the movie continually spoils itself). A riotous orgy escalates to fire, terror, even symbolic cannibalism. Conceptually Mother! is all over the place, but nowhere. Maybe not since George C. Scott gave the world The Savage Is Loose has serious talent so ludicrously embarrassed itself.  

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

The “white rage” fueling Trumpism should take a respite from angry self-pity. One way to gain perspective is to think hard about Native Americans. Start by watching Steven Lewis Simpson’s cheaply made but finely observed Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Kent Nerburn scripted from his 1996 novel, about a writer (yep, Nerburn) who is asked by a tribal elder, Dan, to come to the Lakota Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Dan offers memories and wisdom for Kent to write a book. Kent faces testing travels on “the res,” where stark landscapes are foregrounded by family love but also poverty, alcoholism, and a chicken shack called Buster’s Last Stand.

The leisurely pace builds pressure. Uneasy, self-doubting Kent begins to understand. This road movie, mainly about tragic Indian history, has very intimate tensions, especially when Kent deals with his Lakota driver, old Dan’s bluntly angry friend Grover (Richard Ray Whitman, with a touch of Jack Palance). Not even Brando, famously a friend of Native Americans, could have kept Kent from seeming rather like a test tube in which latent white guilt is shaken into honest, emotional shame. But actor Christopher Sweeney is very credible in absorbing the lessons, including a haunted visit to the cemetery of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.

The film’s special treasure and enabler of insight is David Bald Eagle as Dan. If you could overlap Chief Dan George in Little Big Man, Russell Means in Last of the Mohicans and Sam Jaffe’s High Lama in Lost Horizon, you’d come near this small, round monument to endurance. His eyes and voice express the pained heart of a conquered people whose pride will never surrender. No tom-tom hokum, no rhetoric, just straight news. Bald Eagle saw the film before dying at 97 this summer, and was rightly pleased.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Horror-Fright Films of Lasting Quality, in order of arrival:

Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932), Island of Lost Souls (Kenton, 1932), Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956), Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960), Village of the Damned (Rilla, 1960), The Innocents (Clayton, 1961), Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), The Shining (Kubrick, 1980), Cronos (Del Toro, 1993) and In My Skin (De Van, 2002). Bonus No. 13: Phil Kaufman’s fine 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Even Big O sometimes faltered: “Orson Welles described a time he was filming Touch of Evil and felt he was flailing as both actor and director. When the camera was on he kept flubbing his lines. His co-star Akim Tamiroff was in the scene, just off camera. When Orson yelled ‘Cut’ on his own scene, Tamiroff came over to him and whispered, ‘You’re the man.’  That’s all it took. Welles said he never looked back from that moment. The praise clinched it. This is how he put it: ‘You have to make the actor believe he is better than he is. That is the job. More than confidence, give him arrogance.” (From Jeffrey Tambor’s new memoir Are You Anybody?)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Perhaps Akim Tamiroff’s finest work for Welles was as Bloch, the sad, stooging client of the advocate Hastler (Welles) in The Trial, a Kafka tour-de-force (and farce): “Bloch squirms, bug-on-pin. Hastler confides mentioning his case to a judge, but ‘in these matters there are so many conflicting opinions that the confusion is impenetrable.’ His tone is almost deadly, and poor Bloch falls to his knees. Joseph K, appalled, tries to lift him as Hastler demands ‘Who is your advocate?’ Bloch squeals ‘You, you!’ and crawls over the huge bed to kiss his monstrous master’s hands. Bloch’s rear rises, as if mooning his own abasement.” (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) attempts to steer Quinlan (Orson Welles) in Touch of Evil (Universal, 1958; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Russell Metty).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 80: 'Close Encounters of Third Kind,' Harry Dean Stanton

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Almost 40 years ago, in November, 1977, I enjoyed the most star-gazing press preview of my life. Afterwards I called home to Chicago from New York, as thrilled as a space visitor. Sure, New York is always another planet, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one-of-a-kind, a celestial trip that gives us a cosmic lift without leaving Earth. Of course it’s really about earthlings, not space visitors, and remains Spielberg’s most elating and high-spirited movie.

I went to our best plex for the film’s revival, wanting to see it again on a big screen (smaller framings dim the luster). I got smacked again by Spielberg’s youthful power. His confident sense of entrancement, as people try to decipher why UFOs are popping up like cheerful light bandits, even in Muncie, Indiana, pulls us in at once. There is a brilliant French scientist, played by that humane beacon Francois Truffaut, who lucidly collates the sightings and sounds (the alien signals become John Williams’s inspired theme, worthy of 2001: A Tinkerbell).There are dazzled hicks, stunned peons, Indian chanters and Indiana guy Roy, played by Richard Dreyfuss (Roy’s wide appeal probably clinched the actor’s Oscar a few months later, for the sudsy romance The Goodbye Girl).

A close alien sighting, using a truck with the visual wit of Spielberg’s early film Duel, sunburns half of Roy’s face and colonizes his imagination. He compulsively builds a mystery mound (with shaving cream, then mashed potatoes, then soil), which will lead him on a frantic dreamer’s drive to Devil’s Peak, Wyoming. Spielberg turns cartoonish when Roy rips up the garden and house, shocking his wife (Teri Garr). But his obsessive quest carries us along, as he and other believers converge at the peak to welcome the giant “mother ship” along with Truffaut and government reps. If you argue that Spielberg oversells the big light show and the escalating music, you’re outside the movie without a ticket, as sad as an alienated alien.

Close Encounters, superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond (who had done another Aladdin job with light in The Long Goodbye), became pure magic for me with little Cary Guffey, 3. As beam-eyed Barry, who sees the luminous alien craft as fabulous toys and playmates, he runs in bliss below the stars, childhood’s perfect envoy. Spielberg touches genius with the scene of Barry’s abduction in a fiery visitation both playful and terrifying, like a modern fairy tale. Guffey is forever this enchanting mascot of the movie’s myth (add depth of love from Melinda Dillon as his mother). The Barry scenes and the grand finale move me much more than E.T. One can fathom why Spielberg had to reach for work like Schindler’s List and Lincoln. but his talent was at its wide-eyed best when he brought the heavens to Indiana and Wyoming. He made gaping up at the mother ship the perfect metaphor for our old habit, gazing up at the movies.

You can be cynical about the big product plugs, and call this show a gaga party for moonbeams. But remember that the film came right after Vietnam and Watergate, and that in 1977 Jimmy Carter was providing a sort of Jiminy Cricket hopefulness. Now, in the  time of Harvey and Irma and Don and Vlad, Close Encounters seems from another time and better world. If you go to this thrilling entertainment for escape, hoping that benign aliens and giddy dreamers can lift you from doldrums, you’re no fool. Revel in the rise.   

SALAD (A List)

Harry Dean Stanton’s Ten Best Roles in a long film career, by my estimation: Travis in Paris, Texas (1984), Bud in Repo Man (1984), Jerry in Straight Time (1978), Asa in Wise Blood (1979), Philo in The Black Marble (1980), Kiser in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974), Jack in Pretty in Pink (1986), Johnnie in Wild at Heart (1990), Brain in Escape From New York (1981), Jack in Cockfighter (1974). And, of course, his best victim role: Brett in Alien (1979).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is taking the week off, and not drinking.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Singular actor and presence Harry Dean Stanton died on Sept. 15 at 91, two months after the death at 84 of Sam Shepard, author of Stanton’s finest role (in ‘Paris, Texas’): “Wim Wenders worried about Harry Dean’s age (he turned 57, Nastassja Kinski was 24), and then felt ‘it makes no difference, in fact it’s better.’ Stanton and Sam Shepard bonded over drinks in Santa Fe, Harry telling him that ‘I wanted to play something of beauty or sensitivity.’ Getting the unfinished script, he accepted pronto, craving to play Travis Clay Henderson. Wenders believed he ‘was frightened of playing a lead. The great thing for him was Travis’s innocence, even if it’s rather abstract … he has managed to retain that certain innocence.’ Dean Stockwell saw that ‘Harry had enormous difficulties because all the workings of character were internal,’ and helped Harry Dean find his groove. The result streams, yet ‘seamless’ is too smooth a term for both the process and the result. Truth rises as vents of inner pressure, a tri-tonality of silence, speech, music. After the shoot, Stanton happily told reporter Patrick Goldstein of ‘finally playing the part I wanted to play … It’s the story of my life we’re talking about.” (From the Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Harry Dean Stanton in his great romantic role, with Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (Road Movie, 1984; director Wim Wenders, cinematographer Robby Müller).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 79: 'Tulip Fever' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Tulip Fever

When you attain fame and win two supporting Oscars (for     

Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained) by nailing Quentin Tarantino lines with an Austro-German accent, the lack of such crackling lines can be a handicap. Still, Christoph Waltz is echt pro. Playing a sturdy Dutch burgher in Tulip Fever, with only a few sharp-tongued remarks, doesn’t stop him from being the best actor in the movie.

What an odd, spotty, almost sophisticated movie it is. A throwback to old studio history pictures, when bulging cargos of plot were hauled across a shining Bijou screen in galleons of melodrama. In this busy plot, the rich Amsterdam trader Cornelis (Waltz), mourning his family lost to sickness, virtually buys himself a virgin bride, Sophia (Alicia Vikander). Fresh from a convent orphanage, where the head nun (Judi Dench) has the sly cunning of a Vatican-worthy Gordon Gekko, Sophia always looks a bit underfed. She can’t get pregnant, maybe because aging Cornelis has trouble perking up his “little soldier” (his phallic metaphor – a wry wink, but not a Tarantino zing).

Cornelis is cuckolded by his (and Sophia’s) young portrait painter, Jan, who is no Rembrandt or Vermeer. But Dane DeHaan does have facial echoes of a Leonardo: Di Caprio, circa 1995. There is a parallel plotline about Sophia’s servant and a bold, studly fishmonger. The painter plunges into the Dutch tulip craze, circa 1637, a speculation fever for exotic flowers with rare color striations (caused by a plant virus). The more intimate plunges of Jan and Sophia feature limited acting but lovely vistas of nudity, enshrined in what Hollywood used to call “Rembrandt lighting.” Cornelis becomes both a gullible dupe and an endearing hopeful, although Waltz often seems half-buried in his fabulous neck ruff.

Playwright Tom Stoppard, adapting a popular novel, may have let down director Justin Chadwick with his juicy but hectic script. They should have studied how Antonioni filmed stock trading mania in Eclipse, and how Jacques Feyder piled on Old World exhuberance in Carnival in Flanders. It doesn’t help that lean, pretty Vikander is less vitally sexy and light-catching than Holliday Grainger (the high-spirited servant Maria). Still, there are splendid sets wrapped around a canal, impressive photography by Eigil Bryld, and even a fat, drunken Bacchus on a donkey. Climaxes plop into place with an “OK, now I get it” resolution. Waltz is quite fine, though he isn’t starring in Rembrandt. Charles Laughton did so brilliantly, in 1936, but didn’t get an Oscar nomination.  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, Janet Leigh has a special spark that she doesn’t quite have even in Hitchcock’s Psycho, and she explained why: “We rehearsed for two weeks prior to shooting (and) rewrote most of the dialog, all of us, which was also unusual. Mr. Welles wanted our input. It was a collective effort, and there was such a surge of creativity, of energy. You could feel the pulse growing … felt you were inventing something. Mr. Welles wanted to seize every moment. He didn’t want even one bland moment. He made you feel involved in a wonderful event.” (From Marc Eliot’s new book Charlton Heston).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

It could well be the funniest American movie, but Mel Brooks’s The Producers received, like most comedies, modest attention at the Academy Awards: “Zero Mostel got no Oscar nomination. Gene Wilder lost, as supporting actor, to Jack Albertson in The Subject Was Roses, but Mel provided him with excellent compensations, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Brooks won the 1968 original script prize, probably for the bravura of his risk-taking. Surpassing any award was this puff by Gene Shalit, which justified his entire career as a TV blurbster: “No one will be seated in the last 88 minutes of The Producers. They’ll all be rolling around on the floor.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Mischa Auer (left) and Robert Arden eyeball each other in Mr. Arkadin (Mercury Productions, 1955; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Jean Bourgoin).  

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 78: 'Wind River,' 'Columbus' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Wind River and Columbus

Wind River

With his compact, rather beaten-up fist of a face, Jeremy Renner is exactly right for Corey Lambert, his best role since breaking through in films with The Hurt Locker. Corey is a federal tracker and hunter (wolves, big cats) on the raw slopes of the Wind River Reservation in Montana. Looking for a mountain lion, he finds a murdered young woman’s remains. She is the daughter of a proud but now broken Native American (her fate echoes a tragedy in Corey’s own past). Gil Birmingham as the grieving father, Martin, rises next to Renner. When did you last see a big Indian man cry in a film? Martin is not Iron Eyes Cody, shedding a symbolic tear in a TV commercial.

The writer and director is Taylor Sheridan, who scripted Sicario and Hell or High Water. In this movie so full of pain and winter, the only cop-show touch is Corey guiding and helping a young FBI agent, though Elizabeth Olsen doesn’t flounder into tenderfoot clichés as she absorbs his lessons (“This isn’t the land of back-up, Jane. This is the land of you’re on your own”).We know there will be primal violence, yet even the rape scene doesn’t unhinge the story’s intricate balance of elements. Wind River, “inspired by actual events,” is a sort of Western with snowmobiles (just one horse). It is also a stark lancing of family tragedy and, without pushing, a view of Native American life as a rustic depresson where exploited poverty easily tips into drink, drugs and crime (the key villains are white).

Renner is exactly the man needed for this duty. Without macho brag and strut, he has the intuitive, manly presence that Randolph Scott and Robert Mitchum once had in the high saddle. The film would make a fine partner with Track of the Cat, William Wellman’s strange 1954 Western in which Mitchum hunted, and was hunted by, an almost mythic cougar. Wind River delves into people, astutely invading the inner wilds that so often bewilder them.     

Columbus

Curious, how modern architecture fits into movies: for futuristic menace (Metropolis) or exaltation (Things to Come), for vaulting ambition (The Fountainhead) or high-top luxury (North by Northwest), for morally suspect status (La Notte), for satirical wit (Playtime), for enigmatic display (Contempt). Famous structures resonate oppressively in Blade Runner but frame hopes of transformation in Gattaca. Also powerful are splendid documentaries like Ken Burns’s Frank Lloyd Wright, Yeshiro Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí and My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn’s brave tribute to his father Louis.

Which brings a curiosity: Columbus, not about the explorer – has there ever been a good movie about him? – but Columbus, Indiana. The modest town (pop. 44,000) has a constellation of “mid-century modern” edifices that place it on the aesthetic pilgrimage map. Cinephile and video essayist Kogonada’s first feature, set in Columbus, tells about the young architectural guide Casey, loyally bound to her recovering (addiction) mom. And a visiting Korean translator, Jin, who feels alienated from his stricken (comatose) father, an architectural scholar. Walking and talking, they twine like tendrils as she shows him Columbus and they mull the buildings. Notably masterworks by Finland’s Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero, but also a covered bridge, an old inn, even an alley. And each other.

The shifting perspectives of mood and challenge, of imposing buildings and embracing sites, has the kind of circling, space-shaped drama you can explore in big Japanese screen paintings. One-named Kogonada and his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, lace angles and details and surprises without plot rigging. Excellent Haley Lu Richardson’s searching growth as Casey is stimulated by the more worldly Jin of John Cho, far from Harold and Kumar. The film is an elegant drafting board on which all the lines connect (as in the recent, architecturally smart Paterson). The characters and the elegant art can lure you, like Columbus crossing an inland sea both provincial and cosmopolitan.    

SALAD (A List)

Ten Movies That Impressively Use Modern Architecture

(with director and year): North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), A Summer Place (Delmer Daves, 1959), The Bellboy (Jerry Lewis, 1960), Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964), Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967), The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), My Architect (Nathaniel Kahn, 2003) and Visual Acoustics (Eric Bricker, 2008).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles played only Claudius in Hamlet, but on BBC TV in 1963 he “and Peter O’Toole discussed Hamlet. While O’Toole proposes a textually underfunded theory that Gertrude is a lesbian, Welles propounds something more interesting. That the principal fact about Hamlet is that he is a genius, a Mozartean prodigy of thought and feeling out of step with his own world, (an idea) which cannot help spilling thought and insight. It is a very Wellesian insight, a true one, and a significant instruction for the whole play.” (From writer-director Dominic Dromgoole’s new book Hamlet Globe to Globe). 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Alec Guinness as the painter Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth gives a wonderful art lesson to a philistine friend, staring at a Jimson painting: “I’ll show you how to look at a picture … Don’t look at it. Feel it with your eyes. First feel the shapes in the flat areas, like patterns. Then feel it in the round. Feel all the smooth and sharp edges, the lights and the shades, the cools and the warms. Now feel the chair, the bathtub … the woman. Not any old tub or woman, but the tub of tubs, the woman of women.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth 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.

Sanctuary ceiling of Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church, seen in Columbus (Front Row, 2017; director Kogonada, cinematographer Elisha Christian).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.