Nosh 182: 'Just Mercy,' Great "Caged" Performances & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review of Just Mercy)                   

Just Mercy

It doesn’t pay for critics to be jaded, and belittle a movie because it fits a worn, familiar category. That’s a typology trap, a quicksand of presumptive judgment. Still, I admit to wariness before seeing Just Mercy. The title is a tad pleading, with hints of homily. And this is another prison and courtroom drama drawn from facts, about an innocent, condemned man who desperately needs a good lawyer (and gets one). Thus, says jaded reflex: another petri dish for earnest close-ups and speeches, with a niche life on cable television. Well, watch and learn. Also: think and feel.

Just Mercy hits generic marks without sinking into them, because director and main writer Destin Daniel Cretton tells the story with astute focal clarity and patient regard for making lived facts live again. When he puts emotional hooks into you, you don’t feel chumped (they’re clean hooks). There is no hint of budget waste, the Alabama settings shot by Brett Pawlak don’t rely on corn, grits or gravy, and the acting is terrific. Jamie Foxx is Walter “Johnnie D.” McMillian, a middle-aged harvester of pulp wood in the pines outside Monroeville. He had a loving wife and nine kids but was known to have shown interest in a white woman. So in 1987 the local law (virtual shorthand for the White Citizens Council of segregation fame) hustled Walter to the state’s Death Row. This was after cops freaked a forlorn, pathetic con into “confessing” that Walter had killed a white teen girl. No confirming  evidence (indeed the reverse), just righteous Caucasian justice. Local whites felt pretty safe from rebuke. Monroeville, hometown of Harper Lee, takes pride in its To Kill a Mockingbird museum, an image shrine and cordon sanitaire for the town’s racial reputation.

Michael B. Jordan is no Gregory Peck as Bryan Stevenson, the black pro-bono lawyer who went down South, saved Walter from imminent electrocution, opened buried evidence, confronted his framers, even got Walter onto 60 Minutes before his cruelly delayed release. Peck’s Atticus  Finch is a fictional ideal, a Southern knight of rectitude. In his more plodding, dutiful way, Jordan reveals Stevenson as a genuine hero. His tense decency and expressive eyes align with Foxx’s haunted, stellar intensity, in a shared purpose that is totally convincing. The excellent cast has Brie Larson as Stevenson’s associate, Karan Kendrick as Walter’s wife, and Rob Morgan as a PTSD war vet who can’t catch a break.

The chaw-down bonus is veteran Tim Blake Nelson. As Myers, the po-boy cracker who framed Walter, Nelson inherits the lowlife mantle of feral racist Bob Ewell (James Anderson) in Mockingbird. But, for all his snarls (“Yew gonna buy me a Coke, first?”) and face deformed by a childhood fire, Nelson’s Myers is a full person, seen with the alert compassion that gives the movie a special grace. In a few small stretches Just Mercy can feel like reading a thick legal brief in a sweaty room. But everyone in the story is entirely alive, and the hum of its truth resonates without hard-squeezing us like Mississippi Burning or A Time to Kill.

Despite my initial resistance, I had to see the film. I’ve admired Destin Cretton since he made the wonderful San Diego short about a bold, boyish dreamer, Drakmar: A Vassal’s Journey. Cretton advanced to the bravura Short Term 12, then its feature-length version, and then lifted Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson with The Glass Castle. Here is more confirmation that his care for acting, atmosphere and complex motivation is instinctively right. Rarely has a true story better earned its ending info scrolls, or gotten so much from a Death Row “last mile,” or topped its closing court scene with the pretty judge chirping like a Dixie belle, “Well, y’all made my job easier today.” Not an easy movie – yet easy to admire.

SALAD (A List)

17 Ace Performances of the Incarcerated

Paul Muni as James Allen in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Burt Lancaster as Joe Collins in Brute Force (1947), Richard Conte as Frank Wiecek in Call Northside 777 (1948), William Holden as J.J. Sefton in Stalag 17 (1953), Francois Leterrier as Fontaine in A Man Escaped (1956), Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958), Burt Lancaster as Robert Stroud in Bird Man of Alcatraz (1962), Sean Connery as Joe Roberts in The Hill (1965), Paul Newman as Luke Jackson in Cool Hand Luke (1967), Tom Courtenay as Ivan in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1970), Yves Montand as Gérard in The Confession (1970), Robert Redford as Henry Brubaker in Brubaker (1980), Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the Father (1993), Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, also Morgan Freeman as Red Redding and James Whitmore as Brooks Hatlen in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Sean Penn as Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking (1995).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Kane was an intensive, happy shoot, with only a few mishaps. When rehearsing the scene of Kane rushing down a stairwell after Boss Gettys, shouting “I’m gonna send you to Sing Sing!,” Orson “fell heavily on his left ankle, chipping the bone. The crew called Welles’s chauffeur Miss Trosper. She took him to the hospital in a limousine. The day began to descend to drunken highjinks when Welles started to self-medicate, drinking brandy from a flask. He was ‘not blind drunk,’ Trosper reported, ‘just sort of cute drunk.’ At the hospital, still in costume as middle-aged Kane, his finely crafted makeup began peeling off. When Trosper went to sign paperwork, Orson wheeled away on a rolling binge. ‘With a whoop,’ she recalled, ‘he went lickety-split down the hallway in his wheelchair, scaring the hell out of people.” (With no help from brandy, the stairwell scene is very effective. Quote from Harlan Lebo’s book Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As part of his inspired overhaul of Raymond Chandler’s dated, uneven novel The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman “put Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) into a bachelor pad atop L.A.’s High Tower Drive, a pipe-stem street in a skinny Hollywood canyon. Designed by Carl Kay, the Deco-stucco complex is totally noir, with a separate elevator tower rising to decked flats. A European ancestor is found in Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves: ‘And the whole is dominated by a tall slender tower that blossoms out at the top, after the matter of Italian towers, into overhanging machicolations.”  (From the Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) will fetch brownie mix for topless hippie neighbors on High Tower Drive, but otherwise pays them little mind in The Long Goodbye (United Artists 1973; director Robert Altman, d.p. Vilmos Zsigmond). 

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Nosh 181: '1917' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review of 1917)                    

1917

Back when I ushered at the Clark, Bruce Trinz’s great revival theater in downtown Chicago, I noticed a rather fragile old man who often came for the daily double-bills. He preferred comedies and Westerns, yet I once asked if he had seen Kubrick’s stunning World War I movie Paths of Glory. “Just one time,” he said in a frail, papery voice. “It was rather hard for me.” Alfred confided having fought as a Canadian “Tommy” in the trenches, hospitalized after a gas attack. And who was the most famous gas victim (sadly, not fatal) of those trenches? Adolf Hitler, whose payback gift was an even more awful war.

Sam Mendes’s grim and sometimes grisly 1917, elaborated from stories told him by his grandfather, a WWI veteran, tells of two British lance corporals sent as messengers across mostly depopulated but very dangerous ground in April 1917 (the war’s most famous messenger was … Corporal Adolf Hitler). The only two actors with proven star power are at the start (Colin Firth as the puffy general who sends the message) and finish (Benedict Cumberbatch as the haggard colonel who receives it). The one-page message is to two British battalions (1,600 men), set to advance into a salient (wedge in the front line) evacuated by retreating Germans. They don’t know it’s a trap, a deadly new battle line of trenches, guns and grisly barbed wire. As the “Huns” cut the buried phone lines,  personal delivery, mostly by foot, is ordered. A puzzler: since Firth got his new intel from photo “aerials” shot by biplanes (we see some, flying in clear skies), why not parachute the message canister from a plane to Cumberbatch? (Easy answer: no movie.)

Let’s not get hung up on the barbed wire of pesky details, for Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall, the odd Gulf War movie Jarhead) has a vision to stage, lavishly. One promo pitch is that 1917 was shot in a continuous “real time” take, but I don’t believe it. There are obvious blackout moments and time shifts for cuts, and today’s digital editing has a deft way of fusing continuity. The great unbroken tale remains Alexander Sokorov’s Russian Ark (2002), his dream-poetic streaming of Russian history through St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace/Hermitage Museum.

1917 is a stream of set pieces, and its flowing tensions have an almost seamless effect. As messengers Blake and Schofield, Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay have the vulnerable, patriotic bravery of many privates and junior officers in past combat films, though neither has Lew Ayres’s stunning breakthrough in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Here is a heartfelt saga of courage, endurance and loss. 1917 has been a hit, and if it brings this terrible war that changed history to young viewers who don’t know Ayres from Aerosmith, and for whom the Somme and Ypres and the Argonne are more distant than the space battles of Star Wars, then more power to it.

It’s a moving movie, but a great movie? No. The performances are adroit sketches, never rivaling the best in WWI films (see list below). Scenes often feel like storyboards trundled into place by a team of art directors. Bleached skies create a slightly blue-screen effect (and the one aerial dogfight looks like CGI). But Roger Deakins is a terrific photographer whose shots have depth and impact, like the ruined French village, a lunar deathscape of despair. The touches add up (rats, bloated horses, staring corpses, endless trenches, the shock of ambush), though the abandoned German bunkers are too tidy even for Germans, and many uniforms appear remarkably natty for this muddy, blasted hell.

After you’ve seen the waste and carnage in Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, with WWI colorized back into startling life and death, you might find Mendes’s salute to his grandfather’s comrades a touch glib. He resorts to some quaint devices, with bits that echo chipper, derring-do pages in old English magazines like Chums and Boy’s Own Paper, and also silent films. Schofield finds a bucket of clean, drinkable milk in a war-ravaged barn, and later serves it to a sweet French madonna and a baby in that devastated village (at least there is no iris shot of wistful farewell). Corn is a cereal that movies, even big, sincere movies like this, will never exhaust, but 1917 does pack a punch. 

SALAD (A List)

12 Really Strong Movies About World War I

Listed in my order of preference:
The Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir directing Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay), Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean directing Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif), Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick directing Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou), The African Queen (1951, John Huston directing Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn), They Shall Not Grow Old (2019, Peter Jackson “directing” real British soldiers), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone directing Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim), The Spy in Black (1939, Michael Powell directing Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson), Life and Nothing But (1989, Bertrand Tavernier directing Phillipe Noiret, Sabine Azema), La Grande Guerra (1959, Mario Monicelli directing Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman), Westfront 1918 (1930, G.W. Pabst directing Claus Clausen, Gunter Diessl), Gallipoli (1981, Peter Weir directing Mel Gibson, Mark Lee) and King and Country (1964, Joseph Losey directing Dirk Bogarde, Tom Courtenay).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The Germans of World War I were never more generously depicted than by Dita Parlo, as the peasant mother who gives refuge to fleeing French POWs in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. Seeing her in that, and in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Orson Welles decided “that she had the dark, European exoticism that he wanted to play the female lead in his first movie, Heart of Darkness.” Growing costs and dark themes scuttled the RKO project, and Parlo never had an American career. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Orson Welles would work with many exotic European beauties, including Romy Schneider as Leni in The Trial. She “pulls Joseph K (Tony Perkins) into a storage room, drapes a heavy coat over him and vows, ‘I am going to make love to you.’ They slide down a pile of old files and papers, lightning crackles outside and Joseph looks squeamish. Leni asks if he has any physical defects, and then eagerly reveals a translucent membrane on her left hand.” (From the Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

With little combat, The Grand Illusion is the supreme World War I movie, partly thanks to the aristocratic exchanges between Pierre Fresnay’s noble French captive de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Erich von Stroheim’s German camp commander Von Rauffenstein (France, 1937; director Jean Renoir, d.p. Christian Matras and Claude Renoir).

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Nosh 180: 'Bombshell,' 'Uncut Gems' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews of Bombshell and Uncut Gems)                    
 

Bombshell
Last week, the March sisters in Little Women. This week, the Fox sisters of Bombshell. That is, Fox News prime star Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), slightly lesser star Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and a young composite figure, the rising Fox vamp Kayla (Margot Robbie). Feral king of the Fox den is Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), founding brain of the cable news hatchery that gradually buried the Republican Party’s moral compass and helps Donald Trump torture the nation. Ailes, who began by manipulating media for Nixon, is the only important male figure in the film. The others are just nice suits and worried brows: Kevin Dorff as blustering Bill O’Reilly, Richard Kind as Ailes lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Malcolm McDowell as mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Tracing the scandal by which Kelly, Carlson and other angry women overthrew Ailes in a bilious cloud of muck, by exposing sexual predation when they were budding at Fox, Jay Roach’s film often has a hot-cable pulse of breathless, breaking news. It peepholes into network offices and private shames, achieving an authentic aroma of  nausea. Theron’s Kelly, with the most to lose, seeks for a while to stay on board, even after Trump trashes her in his tweet stream. Kidman’s Carlson is the gutsy risk-taker, craving payback (Kidman must have recalled her young role as a local TV news wow in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For). The new dazzler is Robbie, fresh from her luminous Sharon Tate in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. As composite Kayla she gets a queasy turn on Roger’s meat rack. Robbie has the old Harlow and Monroe ability to be vampy without irony (though they winked it more). Kayla’s ambitious evasion of truth cracks once the rumor dirt becomes a legal mudslide and Ailes is fired. No doubt the writers loved giving her a sexy sleepover with the newsroom’s covert lesbian, a Clinton fan.

Bombshell radiates feminist heat. Still, a magnetic villain can take charge, and Lithgow’s Ailes is almost medieval in decay, his huge gut bulging above his walker. He calls himself  “grotesque” and “Jabba the Hutt,” but the ancient Nixonian still wants the pop of making beautiful women squirm and squish for a major TV job. Secretly branding them career sluts, as if by droit de seigneur, brought Ailes a a satisfaction clearly beyond the sexual (never has old, icky arousal seemed quite so dreary). Later the creep feels betrayed and snaps “Glad I’m not in a foxhole with you!,” unaware that his sordid fake-news career is the real Fox hole. The movie gives little attention to the Fox mutation of news, to please its tranced base with a daily dose of dimwit. Ailes is dead and O’Reilly bloviates from a lesser perch, yet the carnival of abuse, of news and women, continues (and Fox is not the only provider). The get-lost  checks given to the fallen men still dwarf the settlement money won by the women.

Uncut Gems

Unusual opening: from a hellish Ethiopian mine shaft, then (zip) into the colonoscopy probe of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler). Despite that double dive, Uncut Gems is not deep. However vile, almost everything has the lurid surface wow of Darius Khondji’s imagery, which takes its cue from a big gem. This movie is so hooked on night glitz and vulgar  bling that natural light dies on contact. Ratner is a sports-mad gambling addict, deep in hock. He risks losing his small biz in Manhattan’s 47^th Street diamond district after he illegally imports a raw, massive “black opal” found in that African mine. It’s his collateral to inflate his bets, con an auction house, and offend tough in-law Arno (Eric Bogosian), a macher who calls in his marker by having ugly thugs terrorize Howard. To further cook the madness, Howard loans the exotic gem to his chief client among the sports-bet crowd, Kevin Garnett of Boston Celtics fame (a presence so lofty that he hardly needs to act).

Uncut Gems is pulpy and not PC. Garnett suddenly sees the glitz-stone as his unique, Afro-roots charm, a fairly primitive plot device. Ratner and his squalling family – wife Idina Menzel steams with rage because Howard has a love-hutch mistress (appealing Julia Fox) – is a cliché clot of downscale Jewish stereotypes. F-bombs are heard at every possible opportunity. There is a memorably bad Passover seder, and about equal piety for Howard’s threatened goldfish. Martin Scorsese was a producer, and though brotherly auteurs Benny and Josh Safdie were raised near the diamond zone, and certainly have every right to crop their turf, they flaunt their debts to Mean Streets and Goodfellas. After such riots of excess as Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Verhoeven’s Showgirls and Aronofsky’s Mother!, why are these 135 minutes of raucous, slumming slam-bam being hailed as bravura?

Because Sandler, showing age marks and a saggy pot, and given many close-ups of sweaty desperation, has left his safety nook as a nice, shallow comedian for (oy vey) Howard Ratner. He achieves some effective sizzles of freak-out and takes real punishment (photo above). But his pleas for pity have the familiar Sandler tone, the draggy vocal timing, the boy-man with infantile insides. In the Sanders fan hive, Oscar talk buzzes. He might get lucky, but I recommend three excellent performances involving keen ambition (two Jewish): young Renee Zellweger as a savvy Hasidic wife who enters the gems trade in A Price Above Rubies (1998); the late ace Robert Forster as an “ice” salesman who flips his game in Diamond Men (2000), and Richard Gere’s superb portrait of a Big Apple hustler hoping to work a mitzvah (good deed) in Norman (2016). The Academy ignored them.  

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable Women in Business

Hard-striving achievers, in order of arrival:
Joan Crawford as waitress turned restauranteur Mildred Pierce (1946 – ditto Kate Winslet’s Mildred, 2011); Jane Wyman as Texas store magnate Lucy Gallant (1955); Jo Van Fleet as bordello madam Kate Trask in East of Eden (1955); Faye Dunaway as star turned Pepsi diva Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1979); Maureen Stapleton as hotel owner Lillian Garber in Sweet Lorraine (1987); Melanie Griffith as secretary turned biz wiz in Working Girl (1988); Juliette Binoche as confectioner Vianne Rocher in Chocolat (2000); Queen Latifah as rising hairdresser Gina Norris in Beauty Shop (2005); Meryl Streep as bossy fashionista Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (2006); Penélope Cruz as chef/manager Raimunda in Volver (2006); Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as the upward Lorkowski sisters in Sunshine Cleaning (2008); Audrey Tautou as couture/perfume genius Gabrielle Chanel in Coco Before Chanel (2009), and Jennifer Lawrence as canny inventor Joy Mangano in Joy.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The most powerful biz-gals of classic Hollywood were gossip news queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, whom new arrival Welles slyly charmed until they ripped into Citizen Kane (to please W.R. Hearst). Welles’s pal Joseph Cotten added a touché, after Hopper ran an item linking him to girlish star Deanna Durbin. As Orson told Henry Jaglom much later, “Jo was a gentleman, which makes this story so good. He came up to Hopper at a party and said, ‘Hedda, if you say that again I’m going to kick you in the ass.’ She didn’t believe it. She kept talking about it, and he just came and kicked her in the ass. The last man in Hollywood you’d think would behave that way to a woman!” (From the Welles/Jaglom My Lunches With Orson. By the way, Jo Cotten did have a hot affair with Durbin.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Few European directors loved American Westerns quite like Wim Wenders: “Most Westerns measure lives in miles, and Ernst Wilhelm Wenders came 6,000 miles to make his modern, romantic ‘Western,’ Paris, Texas. Born three month after Hitler’s exit, he would embrace Americam films, songs, vistas, liberties, and led the ’70s German film revival with Werner Herzog and R.W. Fassbinder. His gorgeous art-noir The American Friend led to Hollywood, where Hammett became a studio mothball tired from nostalgia, not ‘the film I had gone to make.’ Some years later, Paris realized his dream on a much deeper level.” (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 fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Though inevitably shadowed by Joan Crawford’s 1946 Oscar winner, Kate Winslet was a splendid Mildred in the lavish TV remake of Mildred Pierce (HBO/MGM 2011; director Todd Haynes, d.p. Ed Lachman).

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Nosh 179: 'Little Women', 12 Best Movies of 2019 & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Little Women)   
                 

Little Women
It opens with a yarn and closes with a book, each written by Louisa May Alcott. The adapter is Greta Gerwig, who directed. Katharine Hepburn (1933) played the high-spirited Jo March most fans remember – fans of June Allyson (1949) and Winona Ryder (1994) have settled into a sullen pout. Gerwig has tossed the top-Kate mantle onto her terrific Lady Bird star, Saoirse Ronan, who again buries her dear Irish accent to play American. Verdict (mine): Hepburn by a pert New England nose, on sheer star power, but it’s darn close and Ronan rules the moment.

“If I were a girl in a book, life would be so much simpler,” young Jo grouches at one point. It’s a good point, for Alcott, a plain gal who had a fretful, workaholic, sexually covert life, simplified herself but also bottled her fierce spirit inside Jo. Ronan uncorks Hepburnian vim as the brainy, endearing busybody, with her own tonic fizz. When she chops off most of her hair, then cries about losing her only beauty feature, it’s silly-sweet because she still looks adorable. The prettiest sister is Meg, who heads fast for maternity and marriage (time to stop thinking of Emma Watson as That Harry Potter Girl, but as her nice, dull catch, James Norton seems fallen from his hunky priest on TV’s Grantchester). 

Quick snaps: Eliza Scanlen is touchingly fated as Beth, the musical sister; full-faced Florence Pugh stands out boldly as sister Amy, art-minded but also deeply sane; Timothée Chalamet, so lean and pretty he looks like the love child of James Dean and a feminine falcon, flits vividly between Amy and Jo; Meryl Streep is rich “old maid” Aunt March, so sparky she is ready to become Dickens’s Miss Haversham at the drop of a wig, and Laura Dern is splendid as the girls’s careworn, deeply loving mother. It is the Civil War era, and sex seems as rare as a Confederate $3 bill. Gerwig sublimates busy teen hormones into fast, overlapping dialog, smooches, funny dancing, lush costumes and superbly 19^th century moodscapes shot by Yorick LeSaux, whose images recall painters like Winslow Homer, George Inness and Eastman Johnson.

“So I thought,” Gerwig has said, “OK, they were people, so we’re allowed to make them people.” No wax dolls here, but some good curls of Victorian posing, dialog true to the book and times, crafty episodes that flow along confidently. Gerwig trips a bit in letting some talk fly off into air, barely heard, and in slippery back-and-forth phases of girlhood and young womanhood. Viewers who haven’t read the novel (even some who have) might get tangled. But the film rallies, surges, wittily handles the issue of Jo’s sudden marriage (Alcott stayed single), and affirms like a joyful piper her zeal to be a free writer. Alcott wrote a lot of minor pulp fiction, but also fashioned a classic novel from her mind and heart. The arrival at movie’s end of Little Women, bound tight and crammed with life, is a wonderful salute to the age of ink – and women ascendant.    

SALAD (A List)

My 12 Best (Favorite) Movies of 2019
A good year! These I reviewed and relished (closing number is the Flix Nosh of that review; just scroll down to find it). 

1. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

An amazingly vital, hip tour of L.A. and the biz, making an epochal turn in 1969. The fairy-tale revisionism at the end is justified by Quentin Tarantino’s most personal work, his most adult art since Jackie Brown. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are fab-dude leads, vulnerable machos. Margot Robbie is the jewel of a foolproof support cast. Even for those not movie-nostalgic at Tarantino level, this should be an abundant entertainment. Oscar, attention please! (161)

2. Pain and Glory

In his most mature and self-searching work, Spain’s masterful Pedro Almodóvar made his own 8½ (he was 68½ during filming). As the body-afflicted, memory-haunted director Antonio Banderas crowns his own career with consummate depth, in a wonderful movie. (176)

  

3. Shoplifters

Six desperate people in a little Tokyo flat, held together by food, theft and ramshackle love. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s marvel is like an Italian neo-realist picture given an amazingly adroit Japanese revamp. A little lost girl is the family pet, in this petri dish of the lower strata. (139)

4. Motherless Brooklyn

More than a rummage of classic noir hooks, Edward Norton’s teeming NYC take on Jonathan Lethem’s novel brings back the ruthless, bursting era of builder Robert Moses. Norton is excellent as the bold but afflicted gumshoe who steps on a lot of night worms (it’s a fecund plot). Here is Chinatown plus The Cotton Club plus … well, a plus all-over. (173)

5. The Last Black Man in San Francisco

A smart, rueful valentine to the golden city, its small but vital black population and Jimmie Fails, seeking his roots in a grand Victorian home steeped in family myth. Fails scripted and stars, directed by buddy Joe Talbot. Their poem of urbanity may well be the most haunting San Franscape since Vertigo. (158)

6. Little Women

The review is above. (179)

 

7. Ad Astra

One of the few intimately dramatic, and yet spectacular, sci-fi films. In his high-tide year, Brad Pitt is terrific as a bold veteran astronaut seeking his lost father (Tommy Lee Jones), a bitter, distant Ahab who scorns Earth. James Gray directed this utterly felt vision of risky connections in deep astral (and mental) space. (168)

 

8. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Told superbly, Pamela B. Green’s elegant documentary is about French (then American) movie pioneer Guy-Blaché, an almost forgotten master of silent innovation. She made treasure until the new studio system’s patriarchy shut her down. An astonishing window of discovery. (159)

9. The Goldfinch

John (Brooklyn) Crowley’s daring, tricky, stylish treatment of Donna Tartt’s  big novel about an Oliver Twisty boy, his busted family, a painting, Russian hoods and the wild ways of discordant fate. It’s a neo-Dickensian cake, succulent with flavors that are not too literary. (167)

 

10. They Shall Not Grow Old

A very different epic from Peter (Lord of the Rings) Jackson.  He blew the dust off footage from London’s Imperial War Museum, deftly colorized it and brought back alive the warrior bond, courage and horror of those who a century ago went into the grisly trenches for Britain.  (143)

11. The World Before Your Feet

Jeremy Workman follows smart, amiable Matt Green as, on tireless feet, he visits the vistas, nooks, edges and occupants  of big New York City. The best Apple chomp since 1998’s great documentary The Cruise took its own juicy bite. (142)

12. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A non-mawkish homage to TV educator and kids’s best chum Fred Rogers. Marielle Heller concentrates the lessons of Morgan Neville’s fine 2018 documentary. Tom Hanks plumbs Rogers’s wise, gentle depth as he helps an emotionally damaged  journalist (fine Matthew Rhys). (178)

Also aglow in the alluring dark:

The Aeronauts, All is True, Amazing Grace, Apollo 11, Best of Enemies, The Biggest Little Farm, Booksmart, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of Turtles, By the Grace of God, The Chambermaid, Diane, Dolemite is My Name, Downton Abbey, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, The Invisibles, Loro, Meeting Gorbachev, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, Mustang, Parasite, Photograph, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, Stan & Ollie, Them That Follow, Tolkien, Transit, The Two Popes, Welcome to Marwen, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Wild Rose, Woman at War.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is currently tasting the new Paul Masson varieties at a Napa Valley wine cave. He will, if sober, return next week.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Zero Mostel was usually a loud, wild talent, but he could be subtle: “The blacklist cast its shadow again with Zero’s stunning exit in The Front, 1976. As a blacklisted comic he leaves a room, takes a turn – and vanishes. We see the breeze-blown curtain of a high, fatal window. It was his speechless but resonant tribute to his friend Philip Loeb, blacklisted into suicide.” (From the Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

No 2019 film better probed personal life with exciting style than Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), a consummation apex for director-writer Pedro Almodóvar and star (above) Antonio Banderas (El Deseo/Sony Pictures Classics; director Almodóvar, d.p. José Luis Alcaine).

For previous Flix Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 178: ' A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,' 'The Two Popes' & More

David Elliott

         

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

(Note: Nosh 179 will appear on Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.)

We’re “dressed for church” this week, with a movie about two popes, and another uniting two secular saints of popular media, Tom Hanks and Fred Rogers. Happy holidays!

APPETIZER (Reviews: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and The Two Popes)                    

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

After seeing the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in 2018, I thought: very good, but that’s it for me and Fred Rogers. I grew up in the Roy Rogers TV era, and my kids would be attuned to Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Fred Rogers, a religious man turned TV educator with very special gifts, a musical man who found the best rhythm and tone for talking to kids with problems on his children’s show from Pittsburgh, was also an inventive pioneer, commercially astute without merchandising himself. Sixteen years after departure at 74, he is a modern legend, now reincarnated by Tom Hanks. Marielle Heller, who directed Melissa McCarthy to an Oscar bid for her charmingly cranky forger in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, might well bring that honor to the multi-prized Hanks, for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Hanks, Heller and the writers tickle some tears without dipping into the corn syrup of old Hollywood tributes like Pride of the Yankees (Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig), Swanee River (Don Ameche as Stephen Foster) and The Story of Will Rogers (Will Jr. echoing his dad). The movie’s ace card, along with Hanks, is compression. Rather than trot through Fred’s bio (which Morgan Neville’s documentary did very well), this salute centers on Rogers lifting the Esquire profile writer Lloyd Vogel from sneering New York cynicism and acidic rage about his alcoholic father. Fred embraces him with the supple, caring decency that kids sensed intuitively. Much of the pressure on Hanks is relieved by having the adult reactions of excellent actors Matthew Rhys as Vogel, Susan Keleshi Watson as Vogel’s  baby-laden wife, and terrific Chris Cooper as the jarring but finally teachable father.

The story only wobbles in a surreal, confusing scene of Vogel imagining himself as a tiny visitor to the famous TV set, as Fred looms like a godly Gulliver. Fred dispenses calm advice, slightly fuzzy homilies like rescue messages from a centered, pre-Trumped world. We can accept a whole restaurant falling into silence when Fred asks his new, anxious friend to join in a mute minute of reflection. The movie really pauses for a whole minute of pensive silence. If Hanks does not exactly nail the nerdy-pastor quality of Fred’s voice, he has the aura of loving sense and gentlemanly authority. When Fred plays piano (Schumann) with his wife we are spellbound again. Hanks’s work is lovely but not love-me, not a votive candle for him as the Most Adorable Great Guy Since Jimmy Stewart. I sure can’t picture Hanks in Vertigo, but Stewart could never have matched his Mr. Rogers.

The Two Popes

Heavens Above!, a 1963 comedy about a dear English priest (Peter Sellers) who is finally shot into space because the Anglican hierarchy considers his pastoral ideals too naïve and risky, is the oddest “religious” film I’ve ever seen (also quite funny). After 56 years it has a very chatty rival, The Two Popes. A kind of papal peekaboo, a docu-drama with superbly faked Vatican settings abetted by news clips, it examines the relation between Pope Francis (played by Jonathan Pryce) and his stern Bavarian predecessor Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins). Benedict’s stunning 2013 resignation lifted Jorge Bergoglio, Cardinal of Buenos Aires, to become the more liberal and loveable Francis. Not a Catholic, I was moved and bemused. No other film has two aged pontiffs sitting in a lovely room behind Michelangelo’s glorious Sistine Chapel, eating take-out pizza and sipping Fantas before Benedict confides his dark night of the soul and ritually confesses to the startled cardinal. The resulting transfer of power would thunder-clap the Catholic world. Is this history, or fantasy, or a kind of endearingly purgative prayer?

Pryce, sweet but no plaster Jesus, recalls in flashback Jorge’s own long, dark night (tricky dealings with the Argentine junta that persecuted his “radical” priests), and Juan Minujin is very fine as the younger Bergoglio. Hopkins, wearing creaky age and a German accent with flinty precision, provides much of the dramatic tension that makes the conversations more human than pontifical. Director Fernando Meirelles surprises us with abrupt jumps, as he did in City of God. Writer Anthony McCarten flashes the kind of blithe cleverness that propelled his bio-pics about Freddy Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody), Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour). In a quick, glancing way the picture raises the crisis of priestly pedophilia. Mostly we savor Hopkins and Pryce as they shape the challenging friction and then fraternal bond of the lonely, intellectual, primly Benedictine German and the modest, tender-hearted, Jesuit (but truly Franciscan) Argentinean. I will not be converting, but these  are two remarkable men. 

SALAD (A List)

The next list, my 12 Best Movies of 2019, will appear on Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though never a pope, the non-Catholic Orson Welles did play wily Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man For All Seasons, his red-robed bulk truly filling the wide screen. He was not voluble about it to Peter Bogdanovich: “That came right after the Casino Royale caper, so you can imagine how grateful I was to be associated with something decent. I enjoyed acting with Paul Scofield. A wonderful day – that’s all it took.” (From the Welles/Bogdanovich This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No actor was more subtle than Alec Guinness, whose artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth “has a sexual forwardness rare for Alec. He slyly spoofed the machismo of military men, taking that to a high level in Tunes of Glory. He admired alpha-male friends like Jack Hawkins, Bill Holden and Harry Andrews, and envied Richard Burton’s stellar wallop. Piers Paul Read’s biography suggests a closeted gay or bi impulse, but never finds the closet key. Possibly Alec didn’t either, letting the dress-up of acting reveal the ribbons but hide the risks. One can’t imagine a brazen ‘man’s man’ being half so good at depicting Jimson.” (From the Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

On Dec. 12 actor Danny Aiello died at 86. His best film work included Ruby, Moonstruck and (above) Sal the pizza man in Do the Right Thing, in which he is seen between John Turturro and Richard Edson (Universal Pictures 1989; director Spike Lee, d.p. Ernest Dickerson).

For previous Flix Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 177: 'The Irishman', 'The Aeronauts' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Irishman and The Aeronauts)                     

The Irishman

Unlike many towns, mine got a theatrical run of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (bless the Bijou). On the big screen it’s definitely a movie, though taffy-stretched for “epic” TV streaming (three hours, 29 minutes). On a home screen, where I saw it again on Netflix, it seems more uneven, episodic and time-ticking. How Scorsese is it? Very. Top Scorsese? No. It’s a Marty Gras mob rally, and something of a bloated scrapbook. Despite Thelma Schoonmaker’s expert editing there is seldom the potent wallop of Jonathan Hensleigh’s Scorsesean Kill the Irishman (2011).

But Marty has the old gang! Robert De Niro is East Coast Irish hustler turned syndicate gofer, then killer Frank Sheeran. Joe Pesci, sprung from golfing retirement, plays Frank’s Mafia “nice” but icy mentor Russ Bufalino. Original Marty star Harvey Keitel is hood Angelo Bruno (make that Mini Cameo). The royal recruit is Al Pacino, preening as infamous Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic autocrat who got “whacked,” possibly by Frank Sheeran, his bodyguard buddy. Around them is a rogue storm of mostly ugly crooks and creeps. The veteran stars got flashback help from digital “youthing” (no, not Pesci’s “yutes” in My Cousin Vinny). Still, as Steve Zaillian’s script hatchet opens up the rotted wood with abrupt transitions, info bulletins and manly blasts of macho double-speak, these guys are mostly just old. De Niro wears his sturdy, upholstered flesh well, anchoring everything as Frank, doomed to realize that serving two corrupt overlords (Russ and Jimmy) will make him a Judas. As he rots, Frank shows cool nerve, low cunning, few scruples and blank silence for his family. Morally the story is a cesspool, an ash-hole of toxic despair. The almost mute Sphinx of judgment is Frank’s daughter Peggy (when grown, Anna Paquin). Her X-ray stares are unforgiving, and pity is on short rations.

Stride with Scorsese in his goombah work boots and you find predictable rewards: vulgar restaurants, barbaric thugs, mob wives like potted plants, arias of f-talk, croon tunes (salute to Jerry Vale), big cars to die in (don’t take the front seat!) and a brutal hit parade – “Crazy Joe” Gallo has a stunningly fast finish, while Hoffa’s exit gets a long, meditative prelude. Era markers flash: the Albert Anastasia hit, JFK in confetti, Bay of Pigs, Nixon at golf, Dallas ’63. For comedy there is non-boozer Hoffa’s love of ice cream. A solemn shot of Umberto’s Clam House is followed by one of equal piety for the WTC towers. Pesci, using his age superbly, becomes the toughest little clot of cynical conniving since Lee Strasberg in Godfather II. Pacino is not truck-built for Hoffa like Jack Nicholson in Hoffa (1992), yet he is awfully good at bristling, impatient egotism (the Trucker’s Best Friend figured he could beat the mob and the feds).

This pizza is stuffed with old tabloid headlines (a 1992 slice, thinner but juicy, was John Mackenzie’s Ruby, with Danny Aiello oddly touching as Oswald assassin Jack Ruby). The Irishman attains some visceral grip, yet in the last half hour it becomes TV wallpaper, a dull mood-drip of Frank’s dazed, wintry guilt, with a green casket his last gasp of Irish cockiness. Jack Goldsmith, a writer who has turned over many rocks on Hoffa’s death, believes with key FBI agents that Sheeran did not himself cap Hoffa. Well, as the prevailing lingo would say: wha-duh fuh. A necro-nostalgic exhumation, this saga is no genuine comedown for Scorsese, despite being caught in the Netflix net (streaming 24/7 also involves the choking of theaters). No pro lasts in movies without making many deals. But does his spirit sag because he has not equaled Coppola’s The Godfather? “Never put a fish in the car” has a fine ring, but it doesn’t equal “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” (Footnote: This retro crime cafeteria has won the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best movie of 2019. Wha-duh fuh.)
 

The Aeronauts

One of my boyhood thrills was seeing Fogg (David Niven) and Passepartout (Cantinflas) aloft in a balloon over Paris and then the glistening Pyrenees, in Around the World in 80 Days. Mike Todd’s hit, in essence a deluxe travelog, was named Oscar’s best movie of 1956 (few watch it now, but the bravura end-credits are still witty). The Aeronauts uses elements from Richard Holmes’s book Falling Upwards, mostly a gutsy 1862 flight in a coal-gas balloon by England’s James Gleisher and Henry Coxwell. More than Todd’s episodic epic, it has the Victorian storybook charm of the Jules Verne adventures. Eager, red-faced Eddie Redmayne has the role of young scientist Gleisher, seeking to fathom weather by rising high. Felicity Jones, as Amelia Wren, has womanized Coxwell’s job as the bold pilot. Her mourning a dead husband, the balloonatic Pierre, is based on the French spouse of English lighter-than-air pioneer Sophie Blanchard.

Director Tom Harper (of the BBC’s War and Peace) and adapter Jack Thorne make it all work. From the entry of plucky, gung-ho Amelia, with dog and fireworks, the film treats early aerial science as retro but fresh entertainment. CGI enhancements of sky, storm, clouds and a Turner-worthy London sustain beautifully the seven mile rise and then descent. Increasingly cold high-sky spaces are poetic, as when the balloon’s shadow, circled by a rainbow aureole, is seen on a radiant cloud. You might wonder about limited clothing and no parachutes (Gleisher was a fanatic to cut cargo weight). This movie achieves genuine wonder and daring, without camping into ye olde tech-kitsch like Irwin Allen’s silly Verne lark Five Weeks in a Balloon. It is much closer to the fable power of Albert Lamorisse’s Parisian classic The Red Balloon. Amelia pulls off nearly all of the rugged derring-do, so if you have girls from about 8 on up, take them (boys, too).   

SALAD (A List)

My 15 Favorite Gangster Movies

Marvels of organized crime (with star, director, year):

The Godfather (Marlon Brando, Coppola, 1972), Point Blank (Lee Marvin, Boorman, 1967), Scarface (Paul Muni, Hawks, 1932), Drunken Angel (Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa, 1948), White Heat (James Cagney, Walsh, 1949), Casino (Robert De Niro, Scorsese, 1995), Little Caesar (Edward G. Robinson, LeRoy, 1931), Ruby (Danny Aiello, Mackenzie, 1992), Le Samourai (Alain Delon, Melville, 1967), Godfather Part II (Robert De Niro, Coppola, 1974), Key Largo (Bogart/Robinson, Huston, 1948), Al Capone (Rod Steiger, Wilson, 1959), Eastern Promises (Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg, 2007), Mafioso (Alberto Sordi, Lattuada, 1962) and Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, Baron, 1961).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

If Frank Sheeran was a Judas to Hoffa, he certainly never heard the Judas take of Orson Welles: “I think that Judas was the most passionately committed disciple, and that he betrayed Jesus in order to fulfill the prophecies. Well, that’s my theory. I think he took the 30 pieces of silver to convince the Romans that it was a genuine sellout. I think he’s the greatest martyred saint of them all. At least I had a play written on that basis once.” (From Barbara Leaming’s indispensable Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Like gangsters for laffs, Max (Zero Mostel) and Leo (Gene Wilder) are convicted for bilking mostly very old ladies to finance their Broadway musical Springtime for Hitler. When the show is a smash “the producers become convicts (and) soon cons are belting ‘Prisoners of love/ Blue skies above/ Can’t keep our hearts in jail!’ Sing Sing never sang better.” (From the Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Crime king Rico (Edward G. Robinson) plugs another dapper tough in Little Caesar (Warner Bros. 1931; director Mervyn LeRoy, d.p. Tony Gaudio).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 176: 'Pain and Glory' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Pain and Glory)                    

Pain and Glory

“The eyes, those silent tongues of love.” – Cervantes

Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory finds, through personal pain, creative glory. Notably private despite his gossip zest, a party lion but shy of egotism, the Spanish maestro has made his 22^nd feature no vanity project. “Without filming, my life is meaningless,” says director Salvador Mello, played by Antonio Banderas as a slender, sick, tired and retired Almodóvar. In 1981 Pedro, at 32 the bold and impudent Prospero of post-Franco filming, first greeted Banderas in a Madrid café: “You should do movies. You have a very beautiful face.” Pedro was gay, Antonio straight, yet they soon made mutual love to film (first with the campy hoot Labyrinth of Passion). After long separation – Banderas pursued an American career, his mentor didn’t – their shared consummation is Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria).

Start: Salvador Mello in a pool, a long surgical scar tracing his spine. Memories bubble up, of a poor but often bucolic boyhood. Little Salva (Asier Flores) smiles at mama Jacinta (Penélope Cruz) washing sheets in a river. She breaks into song with other women, with flirty touches of flamenco. The sun-soaked warmth evokes both Renoirs (painter Pierre-Auguste, son-auteurist Jean). This movie is a river. It swerves and cascades in the Almodóvar way, as broken currents rejoin with added life. Modern Salva, bedeviled by an agonized back and migraines, is startled by the return of his early macho star Alberto Crespo (virile, almost feral Asier Etxeandia). Now, 32 years after their famous creative rupture, the old boys can still ego-tango. Alberto lusts for a comeback with the one-man show Salva has scripted from his own life. Irritated but amused, Salva offers the script, partly because Alberto brings pain relief with his chalky  caballo: heroin (fortunately only a sub-motif of the plot; Almodóvar has said that he never used “horse”).   

Childhood again: a rustic, whitewashed cave, the home that tireless Jacinta makes beautiful for her brilliant boy. He is a choirboy star, although more hooked on classic movie idols like Marilyn (Pedro chose the same stunning MM clip from Niagara that glows in Bertolucci’s La Luna). As mama sews his sock, using her wooden “egg” (Proust ping for me: my grandmother’s perfectly spheroid darning egg!), Salva asks, “Do you think Liz Taylor sews Robert Taylor’s socks?” The cave dwelling is his imagination crib, the egg a talisman of maternal devotion. Salva will crack mom’s pious shell of Catholicism after he sees the workman Eduardo (César Vicente) nude, washing himself like a Hispano-Roman statue sprung to life. Eduardo’s drawing of the lad (tender but not pedophilic) becomes another talisman, floating in the time stream.

Grown Salva’s supreme Madrid lover, the lost Federico, is the soul hook of the one-man show. Inevitably he returns, now frankly hetero (and a father), played by suave and kind-eyed Leonardo Sbaraglia. Old embers flicker through ash as they talk (photo above) in Salva’s art-filled home, his adult cave and refuge. One of the supremely intimate, barely carnal scenes of gay filming is compact with memories, gestures, words and silences. It’s Pedro perfecto, a chalice of self-mythic elegy. With Federico’s brief return, and actor Alberto having played “Marcelo” in his last Salva movie, the tap root is clearly Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini. Almodóvar was 68½ when he filmed this picture. An 8 ½ poster vamps a wall. That 1963 marvel’s time-foldings of dream, memory, anxiety and desire are even more emotionally loaded in Pain and Glory, yet with no pedantic stuffing.

It’s riveting, without obvious rivets (the medical anxiety scenes are a little generic). Embracing all is the Almodóvarian style jacket of blooming colors, graphics, design and José Luis Alcaine’s almost liquid photography. We could doodle academically, calling this a dialectic of river (time), cave (imagination), egg (love), caballo (false care) and friendship (true care). But as with The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s fluent vision of an aging style maestro in Rome, consummate grace eclipses analysis. In this masculine story Sbaraglia, Etxeandia, Vicente and  young Flores are remarkable. Their terrific eye acting, worthy of Cervantes’s quote, is topped by Banderas’s deepest and most powerful achievement (Salva is no Zorro). Keenly present, since any Almodóvar film must celebrate women, are Nora Navas and Cecilia Roth as Salva’s devoted friends, and lustrous Cruz in her small but moving role of Jacinta.    

Julieta Serrano, now 86, is up to a tough job: following Cruz as Jacinta in her lonely, ritually Catholic dotage (imagine a shift from Sophia Loren to Betty White). After heroin and surgery and the public “reveal” of Alberto’s one-man show, Salva returns to the yolk of the egg and confides to Jacinta his most piercing wound: “I failed you, just by being who I am.” But Jacinta is no homophobic fossil. After all, her loving, pious heart still beats for the beautiful boy of the cave, who became a great Spanish artist.

SALAD (A List)

El Cine Grande de Pedro Almodóvar

In my opinion absolutemente his best:

Volver (2006), Pain and Glory (2019), All About My Mother (1999), Women on the Verge … (1988), Talk to Her (2002), Live Flesh (1997), Bad Education (2004), Broken Embraces (2009), Law of Desire (1987).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles began loving Spain at 18, in a 1933 visit. Biographers cannot decide if, as claimed, he briefly became the boyish matador “El Americano.”  Decades later an Andalusian producer challenged him, saying “he doubted the legend …‘In the history of this towering art,’ he had heard Orson boast, ‘there can be very few people who were as bad as I was.’ But if Orson were as poor a toreador as he claimed, the man said, surely he would have heard of him. Welles roared with laughter.” (His afición for the corrida diminished, yet his ashes would be buried in Spain at the ranch of a friend, a bullfighter. Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s brilliant Young Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita Marcello Mastroianni “extends a mood, he doesn’t posit an agenda. Ambition flagging, religion vacant, pleasures often sterile, Rubini is chalk in a city of bronze, brick and marble. His essential approach was indicated by Joseph Conrad’s preface to Under Western Eyes: ‘The course of action need not be explained. It has suggested itself more as a matter of feeling than a matter of thinking.” (Much like Banderas in Pain and Glory. Quote from the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

From left: Asier Flores, Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Pedro Almodóvar and Nora Navas during the filming of Dolor y Gloria (El Deseo, 2019; director Pedro Almodóvar, d.p. José Luis Alcaine).

 

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