By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.
APPETIZER (reviews of ‘Midnight Special’ and ‘Hockney’)
Michael Shannon, star of Take Shelter, wanted the lead in Mud (the more charismatic Matthew McConaughey
took it, brilliantly, to an Oscar). Now Shannon stars as Roy, whose marriage is
broken and son is gone. The boy, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), was abducted by a
cult group whose leader (Sam Shepard) uses the kid as an End Time prophet. Alton, whose eyes beam piercing astral lights, and who can “speak in tongues,” lifts the story to
sci-fi strangeness without losing its rooting (Nichols is great with roots).
Spaced faith and earthbound longing are the twin poles of the movie, one of
those “little” sci-fi films – Starman,
Village of the Damned, Strange
Invaders, The Man Who Fell to Earth – that grip the memory
long after you’ve forgotten most big, effects-driven space pictures.
Nichols
bounces off E.T. and Spielberg family
dynamics. Guilty, obsessed Roy and his loyal pal Lucas (very fine Joel
Edgerton) retrieve the boy, then take him to the longing mother (Kirsten
Dunst). The not too verbal tensions never become prosaic as a huge
dragnet tightens on the family. I’m no fan of scenes where people stare at numbers
and have a brainy insight we don’t share. This one, by appealing science nerd
Paul (Adam Driver), reminded me of clueless Paul Newman faking it with physics equations
on a blackboard in Torn Curtain. More limiting is that Shannon, though always credible, is locked
into macho-dad compression, like an angry armadillo with hurt, sensitive eyes.
Clearly the boy is an alien star child,
but Nichols keeps him vulnerably human, a little exile with split loyalties. His
higher powers are naturally trippy,
arriving like earthquakes and fires and meteor showers. Adam Stone filmed beautifully
in celluloid, often at night, and some animated effects at the end are impressively not overdone. These flawed, scared, searching people are, at least, not waiting for Trump.
Nearly always it is the colors that seduce you first, then you notice how they follow the lines in nuptial loyalty. A name seals the marriage: Hockney. Randall Wright's savvy documentary traces the long life (79 years so far) of British expat artist David Hockney with a witty, probing flair that fits his often dazzling evolution. The working class lad (first memory: a Blitz bomb) became the cherub-faced star of '60s London Bohemia, then a totem of New York's gay scene, and then one of the great lovers of L.A.'s warm melon sunlight and it plum harvest of young male flesh. The artist's Picasso versatility, tonic Matisse coloring and fluent weaving of lovers and friends into a creative tapestry find a prevailing tone in Nat King Cole's "L.O.V.E." Our only possible response is y.e.s.
SALAD (A List)
In honor of David Hockney, 12 Top Artist Performances: Isabelle
Adjani as Camille Claudel; Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, Lust for Life; Alec Guinness as Gulley
Jimson, The Horse’s Mouth; Ed Harris as Pollock;
Charles Laughton as Rembrandt; Nick
Nolte as Dobie, New York Stories;
Michel Piccoli as Frenhofer, La belle
noiseuse; Tim Roth as Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent
& Theo; Anatoli Solonitsyn as Andrei
Rublev; Donald Sutherland as Gauguin, The Wolf at the Door; Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner, Mr. Turner, and Geir Westby as Edvard Munch.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de
Chateau Welles)
This week 75 years ago, on May 1,
1941 in New York (RKO Palace Theater), May 6 in Chicago (Woods and Palace
theaters), and May 8 in Los Angeles (El Capitan Theater), Citizen Kane opened after
months of Hearst-hassled delay. At the lavish L.A. premiere, “bleacher
stands opposite the theater were constructed, and thousands of fans crammed
them to watch the entering glitterati. Welles escorted Dolores Del Rio. Among
the sparkling guests were Marlene Dietrich, Janet Gaynor, Maureen O’Hara,
Adolph Menjou, Gloria Swanson, Busby Berkeley, Mickey Rooney, John Barrymore,
Charles Laughton, Olivia de Havilland, Sonja Henie, Geraldine Fitzgerald and
Dorothy Lamour. Though they had already seen the film, Charlie Chaplin, King
Vidor, Leland Hayward, Cedric Hardwicke and Herbert Marshall came again. When
Welles spotted Hedda Hopper getting out of her limousine, he could only shake
his head and smirk.” (From Frank Brady’s excellent Citizen Welles).
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
No scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita disturbed viewers more
than the suicide of the austere intellectual Steiner (Alain Cuny): “Years later,
talking to Studs Terkel in Paris, Cuny avowed that Steiner knew that ‘his life
was a total fake …by the way, my life as an actor is a fake.’ But Steiner has
real poignancy. Scripted by Tullio Pinelli, partly inspired by the 1950 suicide
of poet Cesare Pavese, the sequence so upset producer Angelo Rizzoli that he
told Fellini, ‘You could never have come up with such a thought. You have such
a nice face.’ Fellini said his film needed a mortal shock.” (From the Marcello
Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, now available on Amazon, also on Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
Orson Welles, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins and Dorothy Comingore in Citizen Kane (RKO Pictures; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland)
For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.
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