Nosh 160: 'Meeting Gorbachev,' 'Pavarotti' and more

David Elliott

         

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

(Note: Nosh 161 will appear on Friday, Aug. 2)

APPETIZER (Reviews: Meeting Gorbachev and Pavarotti)

Meeting Gorbachev

Try to imagine an 1820 documentary of the prematurely aged Napoleon being interviewed on St. Helena, recalling his victories, that damned Waterloo, and his lost dream of an imperial, Napoleonic Europe somehow true to the French Revolution. Impossible, of course, but here up-close is Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who transformed Europe with even more rapid force, and without war. Meeting Gorbachev, from Werner Herzog and colleague Andre Singer, captures the final Soviet president 36 years after the USSR dissolved. Interviewed by the German auteur, Mikhail Sergeyevich at 87 has a big gut and bloated face (his dome’s famous “port wine” birthmark seems faded), yet his pensive words, sly glances and sage twinkles reveal the unique authority of a man who made history on a huge scale. A devout Communist since youth, he yet ended the Red empire most Russians both feared and cherished. He ushered in German reunification, major arms treaties and, after losing power as the system collapsed, two aftershocks: the flop regime of “populist” drunk Boris Yeltsin and the klepto-tsarist rule of KGB man Vladimir Putin (seen moving like a cold eel at the 2015 funeral of Gorbachev’s beloved wife Raisa).

Among the few Herzogian touches is a triple dirge of Kremlin death rites for the “three fossils” (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko). Their failed, geriatric tenures opened up power for the balding but young and energetic Gorbachev, a farmboy who, as a rising Party boss,often hitched rides or even walked his province. Necessity could mother only so much invention in a system as clotted and defective as the 1980s Soviet Union, and while he won the admiration of Reagan, Thatcher and big Western crowds, rigid Russian apparatchiks and bewildered citizens could barely fathom the lurching zig-zag of Gorbachev’s reforms. The easy charm so tonic to Western media never quite seduced a nation of weary, depressed, often alcoholic people still haunted by Stalin and the 25 million Soviet dead of World War II. Gorbachev was both an insider and outlier. He came too late or too soon – and after a great run, he ran out of luck.

The film is Herzog in a fairly official mode, using formal interviews, file footage and pensive pauses, laced with personal moments and memories. This is a moving, lastingly important homage to a humane Marxist whose devotion to peace and democratic change, though often wily, was not cynical (he seems a bit startled when Herzog proclaims his loving gratitude). Gorbachev remains pertinent: “People who don’t understand the importance of cooperation and disagreement should get out of politics” – a nail-hard rebuke to Trump and Putin, the vain, corrupt titans of our current disorder. Certainly neither would choose to recite “I Go Out on the Road Alone,” a lyrical poem about death and hope by the 19th century romantic Mikhail Lermontov. But Gorbachev does.  

Pavarotti

In Pavarotti the fabled tenor, simply Luciano to around two billion fans, is all about la abbondanza Italiana. Abundant in appetite – the meals, the widening girth! Abundant in goodwill – the adulation tours, the charities! Above all, abundant in song – his “Nessun dorma” routs Mario Lanza’s ghost! You don’t so much watch Ron Howard’s documentary as scarf it up, sauced by the positive emotion  of the former Opie’s adult career (Splash, Cocoon, Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, The Beatles, even Frost/Nixon). This tribute reveals the man himself only if you think that the private Luciano can be separated from his lifelong packaging. That began in childhood as a Modena baker’s child, the pasta cherub in a largely female family. Near the end he regretted being an inadequate father, yet he once put his hot career on hold for months to tenderly nurture a very sick daughter (she recovered).

The often astounding heart is the music, its standing-O  chorus including Michael Jackson, the Reagans, Bono, Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana and Joan Sutherland (the grand coloratura Aussie who gave the rising Italian key lessons in breath control). We meet the foxy, iron-willed managers, much of the big family and, of course, Placido Domingo and José Carreras, who joined Pavarotti in the profitable tours of the Three Tenors. We are spared Luciano’s fall into cinema buffa, the 1982 kitsch bomb Yes, Giorgio (he rose in a balloon, the movie sank). We can intuit Howard’s backstage politics to obtain candid talk and clips about the deeply domestic and then heartbroken wife Adua, and a young soprano Luciano mentored into an affair and scandal, then the short reign of adoring young wife Nicoletta (who inherited hugely). Always there is the solar beacon: the epic, toothy smile framed by hair, venting the voice that he called “the prima donna of my body” (in late years, less prima than problematic). Opera’s most stellar male since Enrico Caruso, Luciano was a complex, needy and life-consuming man. Howard’s aria della abbondanza is another obligatory ovation.

SALAD (A List)

10 Movies Concerning the Soviet Union

October (Sergei Eisenstein 1927), The End of St. Petersburg (Vsevolod Pudovkin 1927), Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko 1929), The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov 1957), Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky 1962), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Caspar Wrede 1970), Moscow on the Hudson (Paul Mazursky 1984), Come and See (Elem Klemov 1985), The Russia House (Fred Schepisi 1990) and Stalin (Ivan Passer 1992).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles felt some chagrin that he didn’t direct The Third Man (1949), his greatest hit as an actor. Carol Reed let him shape his magnetically evil hustler Harry Lime: “Carol was the kind of person who didn’t feel threatened by ideas from other people. A wonderful director! In Europe the picture was a hundred times bigger than here, the biggest hit since the war. Europeans could understand (it) in a way Americans didn’t. They had been through hell, the war, the cynicism, the black market, all of that. Harry Lime represented their past, the dark side of them – yet attractive, you know. You cannot imagine what it was, a kind of mania. When I came into a restaurant, people went crazy, my one moment of being a superstar.” (OW to Henry Jaglom in My Lunches With Orson.)   

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Jim Bouton died on Wednesday, July 10 at 80, recalled for his highly debated career in big-time baseball and his funny, provocative memoir Ball Four. But for some of us he remains forever Terry Lennox, the tanned, jaded, smooth-talking killer in Robert Altman’s great 1973 film The Long Goodbye, betraying his pal Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould). Earlier, in Marlowe’s L.A. apartment “the pals joke about baseball’s DiMaggio brothers, a juicy spitball of dialog because Lennox is played by former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton. Gould had pitched his chum to Altman, and Bouton marveled that “It’s like the Yankees reaching up in the stand to some guy and saying we’re putting you at third base today.” He was terrific. (Quote from the Gould/Long Goodbye chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Harry Lime (Orson Welles) hides from the Viennese sewer police in The Third Man (British Lion;/'Selznick 1949; director Carol Reed , d..p. Robert Krasker).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 159: 'Be Natural (Alice Guy-Blache),' 'Echo in the Canyon' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Be Natural and Echo in the Canyon)

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Film archeology, which now firmly embraces the 30 years of silent movies, has found its Tut’s tomb in a little Frenchwoman who lived from 1873 to 1968, won the Legion of Honor and is buried in New Jersey. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is like a reef of coral magic, loaded with treasure from a silent Atlantis.  Pamela B. Green’s documentary uses explanatory graphics and zappy devices for a great purpose. Guy-Blaché was a pioneer in tinted color, rapid cutting, sight gags, depth-of-field, surrealism, pre-recorded sound, gender comedy and unforced acting (“Be Natural” was posted in her studio). She rose not by acting (bourgeois father: “I’d rather see you dead”) but, at first, by way of stenography. Attending a key 1895 demonstration of projected film in Paris with her boss, the emerging mogul León Gaumont, petite Alice found her wonderland. A visionary in a new, still mongrel medium, she would parlay her steno pad into a launch pad of imagination, a prodigious career of scripting, designing, directing, producing and editing.

With similar passion Green and her team tracked down  relatives, colleagues and terrific interviews of old Alice and a surviving daughter. Though not obscure in her prime, Alice never quite joined the primal pantheon of Lumière, Pathé, Porter, Mélies, Friese-Greene, Edison and others (you know: the guys). Gaumont was a good but patriarchal boss, and once the “flickers” became a world industry Guy-Blaché’s energy and authority were largely siphoned into marriage and motherhood. This movie is Alice Guy shedding her corsets to dance her cancan. Losing her marital Blaché would be a topping reward, for Herbert Blaché (English, not French) muscled into her art, took office control after they moved to Fort Lee, N.J., to make longer films, ran their studio aground and killed their marriage by philandering. Masterful Alice was nobody’s fool, yet still a woman in her time, and she was sidelined. It would take Leni Riefenstahl to make “woman auteur” an undeniable fact, although her mentor was Hitler.

Green has populated her devotional salute with a hallelujah chorus (Geena Davis, Julie Delpy, Martin Scorsese, Kevin Brownlow, Diablo Cody, Agnes Varda, Julie Taymor, Ben Kingsley etc.). Jodie Foster narrates. A key backer was flesh-peddler Hugh Hefner, now making amends from his grave. Most of the best talk is French, full of technical insights and suspenseful discoveries. The academic hive buzzes, with an American prof declaring that Alice’s bold improvs and meta-filmic tangents are the DNA of YouTube (would that make her Playing Trumps a Gallic premonition of Trumpism?). More of her prolific work is being saved from nitrate oblivion, and yet we see only tauntingly delicious fragments. Alice mothered more than she knew – in remaking her whimsical first hit The Cabbage Fairy, twice, she pointed the way to serial franchising.

The film has a haunting figure, barely mentioned: D.W. Griffith. Given too much credit in his time, the American master may now, by will of fate and fad, get too little. He is seen briefly but mentioned only in a Hitchcock quote praising him and Alice as early inspirations. Griffith’s impact on acting, genre, narrative and the biz was massive, but today’s revisionism must wonder if Guy-Blaché’s folksy, funny use of a black cast led by “cakewalk king” William Russell, in A Fool and His Money, is the forgotten antidote to Griffith’s patronizingly racist treatment of blacks in The Birth of a Nation. Did Alice ever contemplate the contrast between her short charmer and Griffith’s seismic event? Now, in tandem, their dialectic cannot be silent.   

Echo in the Canyon

“It was just ’66 and early ’67,” music producer Terry (Peter Fonda) said to an awed young lover in 1999’s The Limey. “That’s all (the hip, positive Sixties) really was.” Echo in the Canyon opens a slightly wider window on that era,  when a foaming surf of California rock, cross-fed by folk and pop, flowed from musical wizards sharing ideas and guitars in their homes in L.A.’s lotus-dreamy Laurel Canyon. Though Jackson Browne calls it “the antithesis of the plastic straight world on television,” bless the TV archives of Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark for period performances of The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and more. Andrew Slater’s documentary is hosted by singer and producer Jakob Dylan, whose demurely attentive interviews often star his handsomeness (courtesy of mama Sara, not papa Bob), his profile a camera beacon much like Fonda’s in The Limey.

This nostalgic package barely explores the famous canyon, yet loves the songs and musicians, guitars and studios. We learn that the Beatles’s Rubber Soul inspired Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds, which in boomerang return inspired the Beatles’s Sergeant Pepper, and so forth. A less epochal echo is Jake Dylan’s whisper-glide voice in tribute versions, boosted by songbirds Fiona Apple, Norah Jones, Cat Power. The real gold is old clips and recent, dig-this memories from Eric Clapton, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, John Sebastian and Wilson. The au-courant sex life of Michelle Phillips helped end the heavenly harmonic Mamas and Papas. Post-sylph she still looks good, impishly telling Dylan “I was a very busy girl.” Bonus for film buffs: slices of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, a footloose time capsule of hipster L.A. in 1968 that is beyond imitation. Remember star Gary Lockwood? Here he is, like a hunky, tanned astronaut on planet Cool.

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable Movies about Silent Filming

In order of arrival (with year, director):

Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton 1924), The Cameraman (Buster Keaton, Ed Sedgwick 1928), Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga-Vertov 1929), The Magic Box (John Boulting 1951), Nickelodeon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1976 but see 2009 “director’s cut” DVD), A Slave of Love (Nikita Mikhalkov 1976), Unknown Chaplin (Kevin Brownlow, David Gil 1983), Lyrical Nitrate (Peter Delpeut 1991), The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011), Hugo (Martin Scorsese 2011) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison 2016).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is busy this week devising a new magic show in Vegas.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Born upscale in 1899 to a Manhattan doctor and illustrator, Humphrey Bogart still had a steep climb to fame. His first Hollywood campaign in the early 1930s inflicted ten flops, but Broadway success in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest led him to Warner Bros. to re-create his Duke Mantee. Mentored by friend and co-star Leslie Howard, the triumph was his last for years. English movie critic Graham Greene called Mantee ‘the sad simian killer, the best character in the play,’ without mentioning Bogart.” (From the Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Humphrey Bogart’s gangster Duke Mantee looms over Leslie Howard and Bette Davis on a rather stagey studio set of The Petrified Forest (Warner Bros. 1936; director Archie Mayo, d.p. Sol Polito).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 158: 'Last Black Man in San Francisco' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco)

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

No need to leave your heart in San Francisco. Once smitten, you carry it in your heart as a sentimental compass. I only lived there in 1976, yet recently felt a certain compass magnetism when I went with my son Travis for a return visit. Although our best new discoveries were just outside S.F. (architect Timothy Pflueger’s superb Paramount Theater in Oakland, central Alameda on its island, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center), the old, peninsular spell of the siren city took hold again: the tonic light and lyric air, the fog, the hills and parks, the bay views, the prim rowhouses and the whispering call of old movies (see list below). San Francisco is always a little too much, and we can never quite get enough.

Rarely has the mystique been so well caught on film as in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a remarkable feature debut by director Joe Talbot. He scripted with Jimmie Fails, a fellow San Franciscan and friend since childhood. Fails’s African-American family once lived in a big Victorian home in the Fillmore District, formerly Japanese, then largely black until the area was clobbered by gentrification. The story’s 1889 house is a lofty beauty not far away on South Van Ness, in the upper Mission District. It rules the film much like the bigger mansions in Sunset Boulevard and The Magnificent Ambersons, its “witch’s hat” topping its gingerbready carvings of Queen Anne décor. The story has similar filigree, its social and family themes gripped by the fierce desire of Jimmie (playing himself) to get back the family home lost by his father (hard, angry but not simple Rob Morgan). His Quixotic San Fran dream has a Sancho Panza: Jimmie’s pal Montgomery (gentle, highly expressive Jonathan Majors), an artist and aspiring playwright.

Skateboarding across town to visit the old marvel, they touch it up with fresh paint and flowers, irritating two aging white residents. Somehow Jimmie devoutly believes that his great-grandfather built the home in 1946 despite its retro style, using materials and craft skills almost impossible to find and finance in the postwar recession. Emotionally we also wish to believe. The chums are encouraged by Jimmie’s sweet, blind grandfather (Danny Glover), and when the whites suddenly decamp, the dreamers invade like royal squatters or stake-holders of racial justice. Jimmie’s covetous yearning to rectify his father’s loss becomes a fertile fusion of urban legend, family history and private quest. There could be no better locale for this haunted story than San Francisco, with its lush, cosmopolitan but insular self-regard as the golden town at the end of the western rainbow (for a pure fix of the myth, view the bookstore scene in Vertigo).  

When a movie pierces the heart, you should admit it.  Jimmie is stunned to briefly encounter his pretty mother (who’d moved to L.A.) on a bus. Her smiling, almost ghostly intensity stirred memories of my mother, who spent her final years in San Francisco, renting half of a vintage Victorian on South Van Ness. Such echo effects carry a movie beyond formulaic or objective appeal, and Talbot and Fails have built their intuitive life-poem on a powerful sense of place, caught by the fleet, shimmering contrasts of Adam Newport-Berra’s imagery. Some scenes of Jimmie’s former street posse of angry, trash-talking buddies are somewhat generic, yet reveal why he left them, why the house is his seductive refuge, and why he needs such a sensitive, challenging friend as Monty. In his moods and moves Jimmie Fails, who looks like a young, taller Don Cheadle, is the story’s pensive core of soul.

A scene with two glib white girls feels rather editorial, but naming a white-yuppie realtor Clayton Newsom (a snip at Gavin Newsom, the former mayor and now state governor) has some sporty sass. The entirely human tale breathes with few gusts of rhetoric, and the pathos of elegy is kept under subtle control. This is a good urban, black, house and family movie, and a great San Francisco movie. (Offered in fond memory of Pauline Kael, the brilliant critic shaped in youth by San Francisco and Berkeley. Her birth centennial was on June 19.)

                                                                       

SALAD (A List)

16 (+1) Memorable San Francisco Movies, each a cable car worth riding: 

The Maltese Falcon (director John Huston, 1941), Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1979), Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947), The Killer Elite (Sam Peckinpah, 1975), The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), The Conversation (Francis Coppola, 1974), Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976), Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008), Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Judy Irving, 2003), Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), The Man Who Cheated Himself (Felix Feist, 1950), D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949), Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949) and Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968). And on its lyrical suburban line: Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, 2006). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles used San Francisco and Sausalito for his Rita Hayworth noir The Lady From Shanghai, employing downtown and “three city landmarks: the Steinhart Aquarium, the Mandarin (Chinatown) Theater and Whitney’s Playland at the beach,” though interiors for the violent fun-house nightmare were shot at the Columbia studio in L.A. “The hall of mirrors is a transformations set, the mirrors arranged shot by shot to achieve the desired effect, which entailed a much longer and more costly shoot than anticipated.” Welles “increased the sense of disorientation by using many multiple exposures and other effects, and by increasing the number of ‘impossible’ frames, as in the composite shot of two Elsas (Hayworth) facing us in close-up.” No doubt the Chamber of Commerce was bewildered. (Quotes from Orson Welles at Work, by Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman “put Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) in a unique bachelor pad atop High Tower Drive, a pipe-stem street in a skinny Hollywood canyon. Designed by Carl Kay, the Deco-stucco complex is totally noir. Its rival is Irving Goldstine’s Malloch Apt. Bldg. in San Francisco, Lauren Bacall’s nest in Dark Passage.” On our trip Travis and I returned to the Malloch at 1360 Montgomery, still a glory of applied metallic art and Moderne glasswork (interior rooms were shot at the Warner Bros. studio). We rode the shining, glassy elevator as Bogie and Bacall did in 1947. (From the Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt and a mighty big car at Fort Point below the Golden Gate, in The Man Who Cheated Himself (20^th Century Fox, 1950; director Felix Feist, d.p. Russell Harlan).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 157: 'The Dead Don't Die,' 'Non-Fiction' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Dead Don’t Die and Non-Fiction)

The Dead Don’t Die

Only a very dead, headless zombie would not enjoy the frisky charms of Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, but only a mental zombie would think that Jarmusch is saying anything important. The word “deadpan” rules, led by old maestro of deadpan pauses Bill Murray and young master of deadpan reflection Adam Driver (their rhythms zipper neatly together). They’re police chief Cliff and assistant Ronnie, two square but dimly hip guys in Centerville, “a real nice place” and a joke-yokel variant on the generic but surreal American burgs in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and The Straight Story. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes, a great Lynch veteran, achieves wee gems of atmosphere, but the movie lacks the witty, sexy magic of Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, possibly the most truly stylish vampire vision since Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu.

Earth’s axis is tilting thanks to “polar fracking,” clocks and nature are going bonkers, animals are fleeing. But Cliff and Ronnie tool around town in their squad car, sometimes with adorable, easily scared Officer Mindy (Chloe Sevigny). Slowly they tumble to the fact that dead people, including gone friends and Mindy’s granny, are coming back as ravenous flesh-eaters. The true tilt is from global ecological anxiety to the grisly but campy realm of George Romero, who ignited the film zombie cult with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Jarmusch satirizes addictive consumerism, which Romero already nailed down in his zombie mall movie of 1978, Dawn of the Dead. The pulpy schtick made Romero, who died two years ago, the Grand Old Ghoul of the genre. Jarmusch, a more diverse, urbane talent, is enjoying his hipster’s chow-down on Romero gore and the goofy (“kill the head!”) mystique of the undead. Compared to vampires, the vamps of romantic desire, zombies are only dumb, ugly cannibals. 

Jarmusch’s love of actors provides the party buzz. His cool cast includes many haunters of the indie zone, each chewing a crafty morsel: Tom Waits, Carol Kane, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, RZA, Selena Gomez, Danny Glover, Eszter Balint, Rosie Perez. O blessed Harry Dean Stanton, why hast thou not returned? As in Only Lovers Left Alive, the main reward is the immaculate, pale-hawk beauty Tilda Swinton. As Zelda, a Scottish mortician, she has sword moves worthy of Kill Bill and the floaty aura of a space alien who dropped in to observe the primitives. Swinton gets the big payoff scene. And then Jarmusch, as if blood-bound to the genre, adds some final carnage – a rather dull dessert. 

Non-Fiction

What better gourmet stuffing for a fine French goose than savvy articulations about the crisis of modern publishing and the “end of literature”? In Non-Fiction veteran publishing editor Alain (Guillaume Canet) frets suavely about a corporate threat to his old Parisian firm, and the rising tide of blogs, digital snarkers and self-pub sites. Meanwhile, actress wife Selena (Juliette Binoche) is bored with her hit cop show on TV, always defining her role as “not a policewoman but a crisis management expert” (even though we only see her character firing a gun). Portly novelist Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) fears he is losing Alain’s support, and their talk is a dance of needles. Alain, being naturally a man of affairs, suspects Selena is having one (with tubby-bear Leonard). Leo’s wife Valerie (funny, straight-talking Nora Hamzawi) seeks relief from work anxieties in her own liaison. Being glib and Gallic, everyone sauces sex with discussion (Binoche, always a tonic gift, pulls off at 54 a bed romp with gamine verve).

Despite chatter loaded with timely cultural worries, avoid being an earnest note-taker or you’ll miss the fun. Non-Fiction, written and directed by Olivier Assayas, is a fleet-tongued comical carousel. Vincent invokes Bergman’s wintry Lutheran film Winter Light (his young, Internetty advisor hasn’t a clue), then we hear Selena and Leo talking about past oral sex during a Star Wars viewing. For all their angst à la mode, these people are corks of survival. Tasteful elitist Vincent will cushion literature with a trendy sideline of “adult coloring books,” while Selena must advance from police busts to Racine’s immortal drama Phèdre. Finally the movie escapes from urban rooms to sun-gilded Provence. In this radiant partie de campagne, sly darts and wry gossip will continue, soon crowned by some happy news. Jean Renoir would have been delighted.  

SALAD (A List)

A lesson in contrast …

The Six Best Vampire Movies: Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau 1922), Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch 2013), Vampyr (C.T. Dreyer 1932), Nosferatu the Vampyr (Werner Herzog 1979), Dracula (Tod Browning 1931) and Cronos (Guillermo Del Toro 1993). A sextet of artistic value.

The Six Best Zombie Movies: Night of the Living Dead (George Romero 1968), I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur 1943), Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon 1985), Dawn of the Dead (George Romero) 1979, Dead Snow (Tommy Wirkola 2009) and Land of the Dead (George Romero 2005). A sextet of diverting pulp.   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of the many things Orson Welles learned while making Citizen Kane was that “movie décor was a model for Kane’s life – so much accumulation, lovely for a moment when looked at, but dross waiting to be burned. There is a special emotional charge in the final sequence in the great hall of Xanadu, when we see all the art, rubbish and things Kane has accumulated as they stand waiting to be burned. The scene is like a city of skyscrapers, but it resembles nothing so much as the props department of a movie studio – and that is exactly what was filmed.” (How unlike W.R. Hearst, who made sure that almost everything in his home castle was preserved. Quote from David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“The Cruise is a wee-budget documentary. The star plays himself and is undeniably strange. So, nix it! But I love Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s urban muse and verbal mustard, and his supple, generous, form-bending endorsement by neophyte director Bennett Miller, who went on to bravura dramas (Capote, Moneyball, Foxfire). So I salute bus and foot cruiser Speed, film’s finest New York motor-mouth since Andre Gregory of My Dinner With Andre.” (Intro of The Cruise chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Vampire queen Eve (Tilda Swinton) reigns in Only Lovers Left Alive (Sony Pictures Classics 2014; director Jim Jarmusch, photography by Yorick Le Saux).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 156: 'All is Real,' 'The Biggest Little Farm' & More

David Elliott

         

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

Note: Nosh 157 will arrive on Friday, June 28.

APPETIZER (Reviews: All is True and The Biggest Little Farm)

All is True

Opening with the fiery incineration of London’s Globe Theatre in 1613, Kenneth Branagh’s All is True depicts, via known facts and artful imagination, the three years of Shakespeare’s retirement. The movie finds its Will and its way, although vocally Shakespearean only in snatches. True to Branagh’s crisp modern voice, speaking is clear and quotation rather spare. After his wandering years as playwright and actor-manager, Will was 49 on final return to Stratford-upon-Avon. Country wife Anne (born Hathaway) was 57. Branagh is 58, while Anne is played by Judi Dench, 84 (be glad that he didn’t cast American star Anne Hathaway, 36). Dame Judi does a sly, outspoken and lovable job as the deeply nested and illiterate spouse of England’s most astonishing poet.

Because Shakespeare is also literature’s great honey hive of speculation, Branagh and writer Ben Elton feed their  conjectural appetite. Missing his theater but now proudly a small-town squire, Will tends his garden and savors his handsome house (the atmosphere is all leafy sunlight and Tudor candlelight). Often he broods about his only son, Hamnet, dead at 11 in 1596, believing the eager boy had his literary fire (no thought is given to the crushing weight of such a singular inheritance). Poor Hamnet becomes a looking glass into Will’s fretful soul, now living in the smaller world of his wife and two grown daughters, rising Puritanism, village envy, old gossip and current scandal. Anne and the acerbic, unmarried daughter Judith (fine Kathryn Wilde) crackle with feminist resentment, which seems centuries premature (Shakespeare’s “feminis”" plays were comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the Shrew). However shape-shifting the biographical truths may be (and must be), the vivid sincerity of performed truth serves Branagh’s deep devotion to his hero without camp or pomp.

This pensive but not pedantic tribute includes a magical sequence. Old mentor Henry, now the aged third Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), deigns to visit Will. Decades before the young (and social-climbing) poet enshrined Henry’s youthful beauty (however Platonically poetic some of the lines strike modern ears as gay). Conversing before a warm fireplace, the awed but also condescending nobleman listens to Will recite his immortal “fortune and men’s eyes” lines from sonnet 29. Though greatly moved, Henry snobbishly reminds the genius that he remains a commoner, one who purchased a family crest or 20 pounds. In a wizard’s touch Branagh then has McKellen recite the same lines in his posher, more cultivated voice, which opens thed profound nobility of the words. The earl now lives through the bard. The writer’s bloodline would die out fairly soon, but his name and art are crowning crest of English itself.

The Biggest Little Farm

Before there was Big Pharma (drugs, meds etc.) there was Big Farm, the agro industry that gobbled up most little farms while big cities absorbed most family farmers. The pleasing rebuke to that is The Biggest Little Farm, a sort of green-thumbed Babe about a real farm and farmers and critters. The enlightened dirt movers are John and Molly Chester, who made an Eden of balanced, organic agriculture, including at least nine billion micro-organisms, out of 213 drought-baked acres north of L.A.

Do we detect a little Disney DNA? The buoyant pair, a poster couple of can-do naturalism, left secure jobs as a prize-winning cameraman (John) and health-minded chef (Molly). Their sentimental motive was to keep rescued dog Todd, whose barking provoked their 2011 eviction from a Santa Monica apartment. The Chesters turned parched brown into verdant green with help from gifts, interns and two rooted Chicano workers. Their Prospero of permaculture was Alan York, a practical dreamer with an axiom about animals: “Their poop is our gold.” York’s less-is-not-more advice proved sound through seasonal trials by fire and wind, swarming snails and hungry coyotes. Rebuilt soil and restored orchards become a teeming stage for a bucolic riot of ducks, chickens, sheep, dogs, goats, cows, bees and the extravagantly maternal swine Emma.

It’s The Good Earth submitting to the Whole Earth Catalog, echoing Dryden’s praise of Chaucer: “Here is God’s plenty.” The cornucopian movie shortcuts some sweat labor and mostly ignores vegetable gardens, yet we feel fully enlisted. John Chester directed and, opting to show rather than lecture, led the photo team’s superb harvest, rooted in a unified synergy of film and farm. The long, patient production was in symbiotic sync with the land, now a brand and banquet called Apricot Lane Farms.

SALAD (A List)

12 Effective Movies About Famous Writers:

Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, 2005), A Quiet Passion (Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson, 2016), Before Night Falls (Javier Bardem as Reinaldo Arenas, 2000), Wilde (Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde, 1997), Tales of Ordinary Madness (Ben Gazzara as “Serking”/Charles Bukowski, 1981), Bright Star (Ben Whishaw as John Keats, 2009), Shakespeare in Love (Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare, 1998), Neruda (Luis Gnecco as Pablo Neruda, 2016), Trumbo (Brian Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, 2015), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker, 1995), The Gambler (Michael Gambon as Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1997) and The Last Station (Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy, 2009).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles often played corrupt, domineering men but gave them a bold life force of sensual humanity. He “preferred to think of Falstaff as ‘a Christmas tree decorated with vices.’ He saw those vices, which he shared, as virtues according to another moral code (and) chose to overlook Macbeth’s crimes by calling him ‘a great man who likes good wine.’ Greatness and goodness are alike humanized by the possession of a hearty appetite.” Orson’s creative gluttony also fed a gourmandizing appetite, and corpulence. (Quote from Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Jack Nicholson broke through to stardom as a dissolute Southern lawyer in Easy Rider. Matthew McConaughey’s big break was canny Dixie lawyer Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill, “a meaty melodrama of the kind that can rocket an actor up. Bourbon-smooth but no lush, Brigance was a star platform. McConaughey pulled off an instinctive performance, and steadied his nerves for the courtroom climax with a big party the night before. He avoided being devoured by Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey, earned $200,000 and never forgot the opening: ‘Overnight from Friday to Sunday I became a ‘movie star.’ From Friday, being an observer, to Monday being the one observed.” (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising, easily available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) is a smart lawyer rising in A Time to Kill (Warner Bros. 1996; director Joel Schumacher, photography by Peter Menzies Jr.).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 155: 'Rocketman,' 'Photograph' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Rocketman and Photograph)

Rocketman

Not far into Rocketman you may feel like a python that slithered into Liberace’s wardrobe room, then choked on sequins and rhinestones. The movie is amped so high on show-biz that it makes Elton John seem like the mythic son of Liberace and the spiritual father of Lady Gaga. It opens with a frantic, jaded Elton storming into his first A.A. meeting, not only confiding “I am an alcoholic” but also a drug addict and bulimic shopaholic. He’s wearing a giant bird costume, plus the goat horns of Satan, and can even slip into a New York cab in this rig without damaging his epic wings.

Other alcoholics forget their troubles and fall into awed silence, listening to John tell his life story, using most of the Elton John songbook for ricochet cues and clues. This seems like a Vegas Olympics confessional musical, as vast, blasting concerts spill into stagey intimacies. Sir Elton produced the film, a dizzy appetizer for his coming memoirs. Director Dexter Fletcher is the most wanton pile-driver of Brit kitsch since Ken Russell assaulted many famous books and talents. Lee Hall wrote, both beyond and below his more graceful crowd-pleasing with Billy Elliot. Music often rides to the rescue of weary dramatic devices, songs essentially outing young prodigy Reggie Dwight well before he has gay sex as stellar party bazooka Elton John. Actor Taron Egerton captures John’s rather plain, insecure looks, and has the pipes to rival the singer’s sock-it-home voice. He’s like a nice, balding church usher who can morph into the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Along with some sappy stuff and the surging tunes, there is a heavy tax of giddy montages, split-screens and egotistic exhibitionism. And, of course, rote types: the grimly homophobic father, the cynically distant mother (Bryce Dallas Howard barely ages over 25 years), the “genius” manager (smugly handsome Richard Madden) who becomes a money vampire, the old black rocker who passes quick soul wisdom to the naïve young comer. The one truly sympathetic soul is lyricist Bernie Taupin, a friend in all moods and under huge stress, finely played by Jamie Bell. That Elton’s life turned out quite well is a lame footnote – a Hallmark twinkle after all the jubilation and misery.   

Photograph

Back in 2007 Chris Smith’s The Pool set some critical hearts aflutter. The simple, sensual tale of a young hotel servant in Goa, India, who falls in love with a garden-girdled house and its swimming pool, is mysteriously both factual and elusive, almost a lyrical documentary. But American movie audiences, like most, are sugar-hooked on reliable jolts of melodrama (Rocketman, anyone?). The Pool flopped fast – possibly now the fate also of Ritesh Batra’s Photograph.  

Like fabled compatriot Satyajit Ray, writer and director Batra, whose The Lunchbox won wide praise, will not rush or theme-park his vision. Also like Ray, he does not fear odd bits, such as here including a ghost (brief, and witty). That works because the people and milieu are so real. Rafi, whose commercial street camera photographs people near Mumbai’s Gate of India monument, snaps Milani, a passerby and legal student whose demure grace catches his eye, lens and heart. The swarthy, soulful Rafi, around 30, lives in a packed flat with other struggling chums. He feels pressured by his village grandmother to find a bride. Shy, pretty Milani’s in-laws are pushing an arranged marriage with a rising but boring biz-boy. Rafi and Milani quietly find their deep symmetry. Both are solemnly polite, emotionally reticent orphans – that fateful photo will have to be worth more than a thousand words (other figures, mostly, provide the rich masala of dialog in Marathi and English).  

The matchmaker is Dadi, which means not “daddy” but “granny,” played by blunt scene-stealer Farrukh Jaffar. She’s the practical epitome  of Mother India, frank but loving, even willing to bend old strictures of class and religion to help Rafi find a good woman. Nawazaddin Siddiqi and Sanya Malbotra are the impending lovers who don’t need a sex scene to deliver intimacy with absolute humanity. Rafi gently snarks Bollywood clichés, and there is romantic whimsy involving a defunct cola drink that Milani recalls with Proustean appetite, leading to a tough old guru of cola production. In the colorful maze of Mumbai (Bombay), he is a virtual raga of fizz. It’s a lovely movie.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The unprecedented RKO Pictures contract that Orson Welles, 24, signed on July 22, 1939, which led to Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, was not only unique but a creative prism for expanding Welles’s talents. It was “large enough in scope to match his swelling ideas. Studio head George Schaefer was brilliant. By giving Welles as much liberty as RKO could afford, he was hoping to enlarge his cinematic faculties without allowing the possibility of plunging the studio into ruin owing to possible youthful excesses. Despite the restrictions of the contract, it enabled Orson to be the kind of film professional he wanted to be: bold, broad-stroked, totally in charge on the set, involved with infinitesimal details, the father of his acting family, using all of the experience he had gained from radio and theater.” Kane would lose $150,000 on first release, a small price to pay for such bold and experimental creativity. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Sometimes an intro scroll really helps a movie, like the one in 2006 for Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus: “This is a film about Diane Arbus, but it is not a historical biography. Arbus, who lived from 1923 to 1971, is considered by many to be one of the great artists of the 20^th century. Certainly her pictures changed the face of American photography forever. What you are about to see is a tribute to Diane, a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her extraordinary path.” Had more viewers truly absorbed this, they might have been more open to one of the most beautiful films of Nicole Kidman’s risk-taking career. (From the Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Chhabi Biswas (center) plays the old aristocrat whose fading fortune and palace must have one last concert of Indian classical music and dance in The Music Room (1958; director Satyajit Ray, photography by Subrata Mitra).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 154: 'Booksmart,' 'Red Joan' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Booksmart and Red Joan)

Booksmart

If Booksmart were a book it would be spoken. L.A. teens Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are studious and literate. Amy’s bedroom door has a Virginia Woolf welcome, and warning:  “A room of one’s own.” But mostly they talk – even in Mandarin to a taxi driver. Their silences hum with coming verbiage, and Molly’s big, friendly face is like a thought bubble elevated by her snappy lines. She and slender, shyer Amy are high school pals, bonded grinds. Though not unpopular (Molly is class president), they have no party plans for the night before graduation. What shatters their smug but also envious aloofness is when Molly reveals that she’s been accepted by Yale, and finds that classmates she considered party-happy slackers are also heading to top-rank schools (or, for one dude, high-paying Google).

Filmed with funny, adolescent sass, Booksmart was directed by Olivia Wilde and written by four women, so a male critic is likely to miss a few of the nuances. The story’s brisk, generic situation keeps the fun accessible, rooted in the grad-night classics American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused but with a key difference. In those movies the teen ensemble is the star (several talents later rose to stardom). Here the big, pulsating group pivots around the reactions of Amy and Molly, who jump onto the wild-night party scene with awkward zeal, revealing cross-currents of rivalry and sexuality (Amy is verbally out as lesbian but still a virgin, while Molly covets a cool jock).  The finish smiles, and perhaps green-lights a sequel. 

Jason Sudeikis and Lisa Kudrow, now virtual old-timers, have minor, doodled roles as the school principal and a mom. Booksmart is a giddy carousel of up-and-comers, each with behavioral markers, glib attitudes and a rash of references (Avril Lavigne, Malala, Sasha Obama, Harry Potter, etc.). The hip music hops, and the visuals crackle, including maybe the best party pool scene since Boogie Nights. Everyone gets some shine time, notably Jessica Williams as a popular teacher, Skyler Gisondo as a party boy who proves to be charmingly decent, and Molly Gordon as a slut-shamed girl with true grit. This could easily spawn a cable TV series (Amy and Molly’s Wild Gap Year!), a bubble spree of more young faces, but Wilde has zestfully freshened the template.    

Red Joan

The stage and TV director Trevor Nunn, now 79, brings to Red Joan movie tactics that were going stale in his childhood, the WWII era of Hollywood’s Stalin-praising solidarity film Mission to Moscow, which soon got its makers in trouble during the Red Scare. Judi Dench plays old Joan Stanley, looking back. Sophie Cookson, who has traces of Dench’s faintly Pekinese features, plays young Joan, wooed in 1937 at England’s Cambridge University by sexy Leo Galich (Tom Hughes), a Jewish expat student so high on Stalinist Russia that he wears a red shirt while making another pass at red-haired Joan. A brilliant science student, Joan becomes brainy secretary to a top man in Britain’s wartime atomic program, and also a virtual kiosk:  committed socialist, patriotic idealist, emerging pacifist and proto-feminist (while typing, she also offers bright ideas).

The film, like Warren Beatty’s Reds, traffics in rather naïve notions of history. Dashing Leo is the chief naif. On missions for Moscow he keeps returning seductively, and while Joan’s alert brain warns her, her warm lips often give way. There is another Red recruiter, vampy Sonia (Tereza Svbora), an engaging but cynical fanatic. The actors are capable, the period touches credible, yet Nunn directs the script like a retro rally of hushed reveals, furtive risks, spy-craft on the level of Dick Tracy’s wrist radio. Dench at 84 still has touching nuances. But she is almost blind, so nearly all the action and passion rely on the rather overloaded Cookson, caught in a turnstile of conflicting lovers and loyalties (including her very non-proletarian loyalty to her mink coat).

Drawn from a novel, Red Joan romantically embroiders the faithful Communist spy Melita Norwood, who after 60 years of loyal Kremlin service was exposed by British intel, but not prosecuted because of age (87). One can feel for scientists and intellectuals who saw the Soviet Union as a rampart against fascism, and share their ambivalence about the new nuclear weapons, but Joan’s final defense is squishy. She believed that giving Russia bomb secrets would balance the two sides, for world peace. The Soviets had excellent atomic scientists and the stolen secrets bought them at most around two years of catch-up time, years in which neither the war-weary U.S. nor the war-ravaged U.S.S.R. had the will or means to launch a third world war. Nunn’s movie does not freshen the espionage template, and indeed scarcely advances beyond Greta Garbo’s old Mata Hari.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Excellent Teen Movies

In my ranking (with main star, director, year):

1. Rebel Without a Cause (James Dean, Nicholas Ray, 1955), 2. American Graffiti (Richard Dreyfuss, George Lucas/Francis Coppola, 1973), 3. Murmur of the Heart (Benoit Ferreaux, Louis Malle, 1971), 4. Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, Greta Gerwig, 2017), 5. Dazed and Confused (Matthew McConaughey, Richard Linklater, 1993), 6. Caterina in the Big City (Alice Teghil, Paolo Virzi, 2003), 7. The Last Picture Show (Jeff Bridges, Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), 8. Election (Reese Witherspoon, Alexander Payne, 1999), 9. The Warriors (Michael Beck, Walter Hill, 1979), 10. Colma: The Musical (H.P. Mendoza, Richard Wong, 2006), 11. Zebrahead (Michael Rapaport, Anthony Drazan, 1992) and 12. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Matt Broderick, John Hughes, 1986).

 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In a venture not predictive of his later film career, Orson Welles at 11 was taken by his often absent father Richard on a summer trip to New York, “where they would catch the premiere of Don Juan (1926), the first feature-length motion picture with a sound track for sound effects and music. Dick Welles’s friend John Barrymore played the title role, but Dick lasted only half an hour into the show, Orson recalled, before the horror of it all drove him up the aisle and out of the theater. ‘This,’ he grumbled, ‘ruins the movies forever.’ (This) ‘must have  been the very worst Jack ever was,’ Orson remembered, ‘They’d put this little curly blond wing on him – and he just looked diseased.” (Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane. YouTube slices of Don Juan reveal that Dick’s revulsion was quite personal. Despite a fancy wig, Barrymore’s Don Juan has ripe moments with his young real-life paramour Mary Astor.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Having revived John Travolta with Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino pulled off in Jackie Brown a double-rescue, for 1970s veterans Pam Grier and Robert Forster:  “Forster, 56 in 1997, had found theater in high school, soon became Arlene Francis’s stage stud in Mrs. Dalley Has a Lover. At 26 he appeared naked on horseback, ogled by furtive officer Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye. He was a radicalized newsman starring in Medium Cool, then burrowed into TV (Banyon, etc.) and junk films noticed only by scavengers like Tarantino. ‘Robert Forster’s face is back story,’ said QT, as was Grier’s: ‘They’ve had had breaks and success and failure and money and no money, and it’s right there.” It was there so rightly for Jackie and bail bondsman Max Cherry. (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

The richly weathered face of Robert Forster, as bailsman Max Cherry, is one of the glories of Jackie Brown (Miramax Films 1997; director Quentin Tarantino, photography by Guillermo Navarro).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.