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

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Great Wall and The Salesman

The Great Wall

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

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

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

The Salesman

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

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

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

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

SALAD (A List)

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

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

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

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

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

DESSERT (An Image)

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

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

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

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Fences and Things to Come

Fences 

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

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

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

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

Things to Come

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

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

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

SALAD (A List)

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

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

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

DESSERT (An Image)

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

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

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Nosh 52: 'The Comedian' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Review of The Comedian

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

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

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

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

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

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

SALAD (A List)

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

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

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

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

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

DESSERT (An Image)

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

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

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

By David Elliott

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

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

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

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

Hacksaw Ridge

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

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

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

SALAD (A List)

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

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

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

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

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

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

DESSERT (An Image)

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

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

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Nosh 50: 'Silence,' 'Elle' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Silence and Elle

Silence
I put off seeing Martin Scorsese’s Silence, out of admiration for the novel by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Christian writer of great subtlety. And I didn’t really care to witness Scorsese, at 74, again scourging himself with his  whip of Catholic doubt and hope (its bloody drops sprinkle much of his work, most potently The Last Temptation of Christ). Endo’s book gave him “the kind of sustenance that I have found in only a very few works of art” – so attention is owed.

What is meditative and finely layered in Endo’s prose can easily become, on screen, a Stations of the Cross travelog. Silence, filmed in Taiwan, takes two Portuguese Jesuit priests into 17^th century Japan, hoping to find their possibly faith-fallen mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield, with terrific hair) and Garupe (magnetic, rodent-faced Adam Driver) find their spiritual ardor shaken by tiny villages of persecuted Christian converts. Japanese imperial authorities feel that their entire, insular world is at stake, and unlike Native Americans they have the best weapons. The history fascinates, but in its first half the film keeps repeating itself, grindingly. The hunted priests are almost buried by the pictorial grandeur of rugged coasts, mists and dark woods. Competing with great Japanese painters (and directors), Scorsese can’t win.

Silence gets richer when Garupe peels away and Rodrigues, hauled to the city for agonizing trials, must choose between martyrdom or saving simpler believers from torture and execution. One is a ragged God’s fool who keeps turning up like a terrier of guilt, demanding confession and absolution (mechanical Catholicism, dramatized emotionally). Scorsese sifts Endo’s fine grains of public and intimate faith, emphasizing the Jesus/Judas dichotomy and what “apostasy” means in this fierce context. Garfield, touchingly earnest, falls short of the nuances needed. Driver has a great look and voice, but not much of a role.

Liam Neeson appears, gaunt and haunted, like an Oskar Schindler without a cause. Oddly for such a wizard of film history, Scorsese doesn’t seem to mind that the crafty old Chief Inquisitor (Issey Ogata) has the grinning, playful sadism of the “beastly Japs” who tormented Yank prisoners in American WWII movies. Usually the suave creeps were played by Chinese-American actors – and now here is Taiwan, subbing for Japan!

Tending to make even torture seem grotesquely picturesque, Silence is still an imposing display of Scorsese’s mature skill and moral passion. Perhaps the most disturbing element is the frequent mention of Nagasaki, so that the old brutalities seem to foreshadow the deadly mushroom cloud of Aug. 9, 1945. Up to 80,000 died in the atomic blast, mostly civilians who never had the time for prayer or penance. (Footnote: today about 2% of Japanese are Christian.)

Elle

At 63 Isabelle Huppert is still svelte and feline. Her acting has often had the effect of a cool, smart kitty on the prowl. So it seems right that her brutal rape, which opens Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, is calmly observed by a cat. While viewing this movie, it might occur to you that the animal was transfixed by a lesser species: ours.

As a Frenchwoman no longer young but still a bonanza of erotic and predatory kinks, Huppert coughs up a virtual hairball of crypto-feminist sensationalism. Her Michele is a hybrid, both victim and dominatrix, wired for abuse but also ripe for sinister payback. Michele is attacked by the big, masked intruder four times during the story, and yet remains in her ground-floor flat with 20 windows and scarcely any security. She always rebounds quickly and seems almost unfazed, as if savoring a cruel sport.

Destined for elite sado-masochism, Michele was the daddy’s girl and disciple of an infamous serial killer, now dying in prison. She heads a company that makes video games full of erotic violence. With sinister blitheness, Michele seduces a friend’s husband, toys with her hapless son, torments her ex-husband and stokes the fantasies of her rapist, first seen as a cordial, Christian neighbor (the actor, handsome Laurent Lafitte, is “de la Comedie-Francaise” – not a very important honor in this particular context).  The story’s rampant perversity oozes suspicion and vicious betrayal. Although director Claude Chabrol poured some similar menace in his films, his did not arrive sour from the bottle.

Verhoeven, now 77, seems very eager to be again a top provocateur if not (quite) pornographer. But Elle is too loaded with glib, Franco-fishy ideas about family, gender and power to get him back to the pulp heat of his crude hits Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Although Huppert’s witty expertise oils the screws of manipulation, the story’s chic rot gains nothing from references to Medea, Beethoven, Simone de Beauvoir and Pope Francis. Pundits who preen for this ugly contraption are fooling themselves. The most honest scene in Elle is Michele’s cat, simply true to its nature, pouncing on a wounded sparrow.

SALAD (A List)

From my not very lofty perspective, these are the Twelve Best Films of Christian Religious Life (with date and director): The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc (C-T. Dreyer, 1928), The Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951), Monsieur Vincent (Maurice Cloche, 1947), The Nun’s Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959), The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950), Barabbas (Richard Fleischer, 1961), Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1948), Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois, 2006), Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks, 1960), The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), Romero (John Duigan, 1989) and The Apostle (Robert Duvall, 1997).

Smaller blessings include Robert Morley in The African Queen (John Huston, 1951), Peter Sellers in Heavens Above! (John and Roy Boulting, 1963), Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (John Huston, 1957), Meg Tilly in Agnes of God (Norman Jewison, 1985) and John Hurt in Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

New York drama critic Percy Hammond suddenly died soon after reviewing Orson Welles’s Macbeth in 1936. The production’s imported witch doctors had put a Haitian hex on him. Ten years later, when some critics denigrated his extravagant stage show Around the World in 80 Days (into which he poured most of his own money), Orson got cheeky on the radio: “My voodoo friends are still in New York. I can always get them together for a special event …. I’m not threatening you, I just thought I’d mention it.” (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In the 1960s, “movies got hip in a hurry, though today the laughs are lean in Barbarella, Candy, Cat Ballou, Enter Laughing, Expresso Bongo, Greetings, Head, Help!, The Knack, Lord Love a Duck, The Magic Christian, The Maltese Bippy, Morgan!, Pound, The President’s Analyst, Putney Swope, Watermelon Man and (the dead-worst) Casino Royale. Despite reserves of taste, Mel Brooks and Zero Mostel were not about to amen Sholem Aleichem’s declaration on arriving in America; “I will never permit myself to give in to American taste and lower the standards of art.’ Lows can be highs, and compared to most competition, The Producers was Beluga caviar.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers 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.

In the Belgian Congo, Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn) reveals a maternal instinct in The Nun’s Story (Warner Bros., 1959; director Fred Zinnemann, cinematographer Franz Planer).

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Nosh 49: 'Jackie' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Review of Jackie

The most stunning moment in Jackie, a stunning film, has Jacqueline Kennedy finally stripping off the fabled pink dress, the one she wore to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. She wore it spattered by Jack’s blood during the frantic rush to the hospital after the president’s shooting, and sitting next to his coffin on the flight to Washington, and when attempting to visit his autopsy, and in the White House she would soon have to leave. Now the dazed and exhausted Jackie stands naked in the shower, and blood runs down her back. Never mind that it couldn’t have seeped sufficiently through the rather heavy dress (she had cleaned her face earlier), for in this startling image the film concentrates the Greek-tragic shock which has never entirely subsided. This has nothing to do with politics or conspiracies. While hard to watch, Jackie is a kind of balm, even after 53 years, for anyone old enough to have deeply experienced that most terrible event.

Perhaps this American nightmare has always required a brilliant foreign director. Pablo Larrain, from Chile, peels open our collective myth to make Mrs. Kennedy live again in her most awful but heroic days. Larrain found the right star: Natalie Portman. Well past her popular cuteness, her mature beauty is a half-shattered mask of tremendous expressiveness. This is a crowning role, more deserving an Oscar than her win for Black Swan (but credit Darren Aronofsky, who directed that lurid hit, for producing Jackie and hiring Larrain). Portman uses details both layered and exposed to reveal a woman suddenly at the border of both her own and national sanity, trying fiercely to understand. Her raft for survival was the Camelot myth, which she gave to journalist Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup). Larrain and writer Noah Oppenheim use this misty fantasy, one that is now half-forgotten, without irony, and we understand Jackie’s fierce need for it.

Larrain, 40, made a great movie about celebrity craziness (Tony Manero, 2008) and a thrillingly effective film about Chilean politics (No, in 2012). Working in America with a fairly big budget, on a profoundly freighted subject that has been infected by pulp (chief case: Oliver Stone’s JFK), Larrain does not falter. His regard for Mrs. Kennedy is fearless but compassionate, and he treats the assassination with powerful freshness. Portman has so personalized her role that the horror hits intimately. The folding of classic clips (not the Zapruder film) into re-staged events is seamless, vivid and factually credible. With cinematographer Stephane Fontaine, Larrain keeps everything rooted in Portman’s often benumbed or distraught but charismatic responses.

Larrain has said that a good director is “like a kid with a bomb.” Inevitably, any detonation sets off some quibbles. White’s interview is stretched out as a tense counterpoint. Teddy White, whose campaign book had exalted Jack’s election in 1960, would never have shown up for a talk with the grieving widow wearing a loose tie and a fairly remote manner. The segments of Jackie’s famous 1962 White House tour on TV are touching (her breathy nervousness is wonderfully caught by Portman), yet the value diminishes. Peter Sarsgaard, an actor of wispy, ironic nuances, struggles to capture Bobby Kennedy’s special blend of fire and ice (he’s also taller than Jack, an odd reversal). Excellent are Greta Gerwig, as Jackie’s devoted assistant Nancy Tuckerman, and – a bold, original addition – John Hurt as a profoundly caring but never sentimental priest.

Jackie is probably the best movie ever made (or likely to be) about the awful blow of 1963. Now, knowing her future (the Jackie O phase, the quieter New York years, the tragic death of her beloved son after her own), we can lay more dark laurels on this woman who, as Portman says with almost pleading pathos, “never wanted fame. I just became a Kennedy.” Larrain and Portman have restored her as a living person, swamped by history but entirely human, enduring her brutal fate as well as any figure not scripted by Racine or Euripides. What matters is to watch the film with total attention. And pity. 

SALAD (A List)

The Best Kennedy Films, by my appraisal: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016), Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000), Ruby (John Mackenzie, 1992), Primary (Robert Drew, 1960), Oswald’s Ghost (Robert Stone, 2007), Love Field (Jonathan Kaplan, 1992), Bobby (Emilio Estevez, 2006), Parkland (Peter Landesman, 2013) and PT 109 (Leslie Martinson, 1963).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

I Love Lucy remains a beloved TV show, and “Orson Welles did a guest shot in the 1950s. During rehearsals he had sat in the wings, staring at the star. Asked what he was doing, Welles, enchanted with Lucy’s skills since the 1940s, explained ‘I am watching the world’s greatest actress” (quote from Ball of Fire, a Lucille Ball bio by Stefan Kanfer).Welles had used Ball on radio and briefly on stage. In a different mood and moment, he probably would have given that praise to his great collaborator Agnes Moorehead. You can see his funny appearance (Oct. 15, 1956) as Lucy Meets Orson Welles on YouTube.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Movie music really matters, as in The Horse’s Mouth: “After a score by Joyce Cary’s son Tristram was found too heavy for a frequently comedic project, (director) Ronald Neame had a great flash: Prokofiev’s concert suite Lieutenant Kije. One of the century’s most inventive composers, Sergei Prokofiev fled Soviet Russia but later became a culture toy of Stalin and died the same day, his obituaries quashed by the dictator’s. Kije was written for a 1933 film of Yuri Tynyanov’s comic novel about an imaginary soldier and a mad czar (Stalinist analogies apply). Witty, jazz-free in instrumentation but romantically yearning, it fully met the challenge of Guinness’s Gulley Jimson.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth 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.

Jack Ruby (Danny Aiello) and Candy Cane (Sherilynn Fenn) face the 1963 Dallas trauma in Ruby (Sony Pictures, 1992; director John Mackenzie, cinematographer Phil Meheux).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 48: 'Hidden Figures,' "Lion' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Hidden Figures and Lion

Hidden Figures

For half a century a running gag in sci-fi has been Mars Needs Women, a dopey TV film in which Tommy Kirk leads an ambassadorial delegation from Mars. NASA Needs Black Women would certainly have been a catchier title than Hidden Figures, but the aim here is not satirical kitsch. At times formulaic, and fairly prim in its archival nostalgia, this retrieval of almost forgotten history is also smart and human, a salute that deserves its success.

Ostensibly the star is hefty, high-smiling Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, a keg of sass and savvy who heads a team of gifted black women recruited to work on the space agency’s computation force. Not given a formal rank, she is isolated with her “girls” in a drab section of the NASA compound in segregated Virginia. Spencer steals any scene she cares to, but director Theodore Melfi keeps her under control, with no loss of buzz. He gives time to pretty Janelle Monae as spark-tongued Mary Jackson, who goes for a degree in engineering despite racist obstacles. And gives even more time to Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, a math wiz who became the Apollo 7 program’s secret intellectual weapon. Meanwhile, the Russians were in Sputnik heaven and IBM was installing a huge, main-frame computer that would threaten many of the women’s jobs.

It is Henson, ripened beyond Shug in Hustle & Flow (2005) and her sexy Vernell, “finer than frog’s hair” in Talk to Me (2007), who most rivets attention. Her facial lines angle complex feelings in multiple directions, and when she runs (in heels) across the NASA campus to find the one “colored women’s” rest room, the story eviscerates the stilted absurdity of complacent racism in the JFK era (1961 and ’62). Katherine stuns the white males of the top brain team with her rapid brilliance; her dead-on calculations saved astronaut lives. Crucially she impresses big boss Al Harrison (Kevin Costner, whose flat-top hair and terse, gum-chewing manner accent an ace portrait of authority under constant pressure). And as a tough, snippy manager who is also a blithe racist, Kirsten Dunst abandons her previous girlishness for real maturity.

Some of the scenes of family life and romance lock in snugly, a little too polished for period display. Many of the white nerds in white shirts are interchangeable, and maybe a balding actor should have been chosen to play John Glenn (he went into orbit at age 40 and was charismatic even without much hair on top). Clearly, the math-driven science is flashed at us with small hope of our comprehension, and Melfi is a crafty but custodial director. Such limits do not deflate the story’s moving power. Really, who knew? And who back then, apart from insiders, cared? Hidden Figures brings back the triumph and tensions of unique women in a very special era of routine fear and brave optimism. In space the planet that Glenn sees is neither black nor white. It is, beautifully, our very own wild, blue yonder.

Lion

There have been plenty of good movies about lost children – The Kid, The Wizard of Oz, The Search, Oliver Twist, The Quiet One, Shoeshine and Pixote come fast to mind – but Garth Davis’s film Lion has a special bite. It’s the real story of Saroo, a poor Indian separated from his older brother at age 5. He got on a train that happened to be a “ghost train” rumbling, without passengers (except for Saroo), to distant Calcutta. After avoiding potential sex slavery, he was dropped into a dismal orphanage, until a welfare worker secured his adoption by a loving Australian couple in Tasmania. Saroo is played as a boy by Sunny Pawar, whose dark, troubled face justifies his first name with a remarkable smile. This is certainly no Apu Trilogy, but the Indian scenes of the homesick boy are vividly tense and disturbing, and very well photographed by Greig Fraser.

Lion (the title translates Saroo’s birth name) loses some power in comfy, bourgeois Tasmania, where the child grows into buffed stud Dev Patel, Hollywood’s favorite British Indian actor. The Aussie payoff is Nicole Kidman as Saroo’s new, very committed mother. In two key scenes Kidman, with no reach for glam, shows just what an experienced star talent can bring to a movie. Dev Patel sometimes looks like a wandering Jesus who misses Mary, but he sustains interest. How Saroo gets back to India, and what he finds, makes an emotional climax as satisfyingly heartfelt as any film has recently had. 

SALAD (A List)

These 32 Little-Seen Marvels merit more of an audience. In order of arrival: Menilmontant (Dmitri Kirsanov, 1924), Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931), Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935), The Sea Wolf (Michael Curtiz, 1941), Monsieur Vincent (Maurice Cloche, 1947),  Last Holiday (Henry Cass, 1950), Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951), Five Fingers (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1952), Crime Wave (Andre de Toth, 1953), French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955), Men in War (Anthony Mann, 1957), The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1958), Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959), Blast of Silence (Allan Baron, 1961), High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963), Crime and Punishment (Lev Kulijanov, 1970), Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971), Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann, 1973), The Outfit (John Flynn, 1973), California Split (Robert Altman, 1974), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976), Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979), Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979), High Season (Clare Peploe,1987), Big Night (Stanley Tucci, 1996), The Whole Wide World (Dan Ireland, 1994), Mac (John Turturro, 1997), Catarina in the Big City (Paolo Virzi, 2005), Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, 2006), Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain, 2008) and Aquarius (Kleber Mendonca, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In 1982 Citizen Welles recalled a special instance of Hearst retribution in the wake of Citizen Kane: “I was lecturing, I think it was Pittsburgh… and a detective came up to me as I was having supper (and said) don’t go back to your hotel … I said ‘Why not?,’ and he said they’ve got a 14 year-old girl in the closet and two cameramen waiting for you to come in. And of course I would have gone to jail … I never went back to the hotel. I just waited until the train in the morning. I’ve often wondered what happened to the cameramen and the girl waiting all night for me to arrive.”  (From Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst and Citizen Kane, by John Evangelist Walsh).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The personal impact of a great film from a great town: “Facing Rome’s Trevi fountain in 1972, I expose a Polaroid print of memory: Houston’s Tower Theater, ablaze in light for the 1961 premiere of La Dolce Vita, as my teenage self sneaks into the throng. The Vatican had denounced an ‘epic debauch,’ and debate steamed like lava. I still agree with critic Robert Hughes who, decades after first exploring Rome, avowed that ‘no film has ever fascinated me more.” (From the Marcello Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita 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.

Harry Dean Stanton and Brad Dourif in the crazy Dixie of Wise Blood (New Line Cinema 1979; director John Huston, cinematographer Gerry Fisher).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.