By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Eighth
Grade and The King
Eighth
Grade
Jean-Pierre Léaud was 14 when he entered film history
as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s The 400
Blows in 1959. He has been in over 70 features, going from lean poster boy
of the French New Wave to a crusty old chub. Hardly anyone gets that kind of
career now, even with a vivid teen start. But I think Elsie Fisher, 14 when filming
Eighth Grade last year, has entered
teen-movie history as Kayla Day. It’s a great performance in a “small” film
made full and true by Fisher. And by Bo Burnham’s script, and his feature-debut
direction at 27 (Truffaut’s age when Blows
appeared). Burnham’s accuracy, subtlety and humane sense of adolescence would
have made Truffaut say, smiling, “Marveilleux, mon frère.”
Concerning Kayla’s last phase of eighth grade, it
pivots on the lonely girl reaching out with her new podcast (her verbal tic,
“you know,” is like a flare for “please know me”). Middle school, “junior high”
in my shy, distant youth, is generally seen as a kind of hormonal whirlpool of
pain between childhood and full-steam adolescence. Kayla, very bright and a
little pudgy, has image-subversive pimples and an aura of hopeful innocence that
invites snarking. With her mother long gone, her dad (fine Josh Hamilton) is
loving but struggles to find the lines of connection, and Kayla’s insecurities are
like a Maginot Line. She has fairly hip interests, and some gumption, but her identity
anxiety almost invites rejection (that she has no pals from earlier years is
rather hard to fathom).
Burnham found the right, videographic approach. So
much of Kayla is internal but brimming close to the surface, and Fisher’s
acting is all intuitive nuances. The fake-jaunty podcasts, mirror glances, willful
silences, gutsy but masochistic attempts at winning over some “cool” girls
(snobs, perky in their cruelties) require the granular use of close-ups to
capture all the mood weather. This is not the sleek, joke-driven suburban world
of John Hughes’s teen movies. Hughes’s modular clichés have been overdone. So
Burnham, on a tight budget, provides a more subtle interplay between Kayla, her
fretful dad, an older high school girl (Emily Robinson) who boosts Kayla
because she can recall her own mid-school agonies, and a brainy nerd (funny Jake
Ryan) who has a Woody Allen sense of small talk: “Do you believe in God?” Kayla
is trying to believe in herself (in a
nifty irony, the quiet girl plays the school band’s loudest instrument: the
cymbals).
All the parts converge and click without turning into plastic
flash cards of familiarity.There are real danger tensions, as when Kayla
desperately surveys a soft-porn site, and later must deal with a boy whose
brain has gone to his crotch. After far too many generic teen movies, Eighth Grade graduates with honors. Elsie
Fisher may not be an expressionist wow like Brooklynn Prince, the fierce moppet
of The Florida Project, but the actor
makes her first major part a starring triumph. May her zits vanish, and more
good roles appear.
The King
We first hear Elvis in weary, wistful voice-over: “You can have everything and if you’re not happy, what have you got?” That sad strum is the heartbeat of The King, a tabloid docu-dossier on Elvis Presley’s impact, aura, myth and bankability (dead 41 years, he still sustains a Southern tourist industry). File-footage glutton Eugene Jarecki (Reagan, Why We Fight) had the small-bulb idea of getting hold of Elvis’s old Rolls Royce. He brought on board, for short drives and reflections, celebrities like Ethan Hawke, Emmylou Harris and Alec Baldwin. One good ol’ musician cries, imagining the car as Elvis’s jail or coffin. Some of the movie’s cruising wisdom is road kill, some is juicy chaw, with welcome intervals from little twang-canary Emi Sunshine and her roots band.
As aging fans liposuction dead Elvis for blobs of the American
Dream, Jarecki lingers on young Elvis dazed by fame, mourning his mom, manning up
for the U.S. Army. After soft service he was unmanned by celebrity, wealth, drugs,
movies, fried food and the money vampire “Colonel” Tom Parker. Set among clips
of Ali, Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton, Elvis is the Ghost of Paleness
Past. Jarecki taps enduring black resentment of Presley as a gifted cribber. “Muthafu’ Elvis!” explodes rapper Chuck D,
before admitting the value of musical crossover. At times a great singer, Elvis
also became a fat, gilded tenement of Vegasoid indulgence.
He was non-political, but Jarecki suggests that the
Trump movement, full of racial
resentment, draws upon the Elvis cult. When
the Rolls breaks down, it clearly represents the dying dream of white hegemony.
The dream included a Klan kracker who denounced Elvis’s “vulgar animalistic
nigger rock ’n roll bop” (the “bop” is priceless). Such stuff doesn’t lead to
very deep reflections. Among the testifiers, Mike Meyers is sharp, funny and
Canadian. Old Dan Rather goes up the Empire State Building to gain some
perspective. The enduring value, the legacy, is in Elvis’s early songs.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Most
of Orson Welles’s films can be seen as poetic, kaleidoscopic fusions of powerful,
beautiful fragments. He attempted many unfinished projects, as he reflected
with melancholy late in life: “I’ve wasted an awful lot of my life trying to
finish them, rather than letting them go as I should have done … I deeply
regret this steadfast and stubborn loyalty, now that I look back on it. If
people see it the other way, I can understand. But God, what I’ve been through
trying to get ‘em done! What I’ve never
done was to leave a film because I was tired of it, or angry at somebody or fed
up. I’ve only left a film when there wasn’t any way to shoot it, no money.”
(Quote from Joseph McBride’s What Ever
Happened to Orson Welles?)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
While
never a major actor, Anita Ekberg was immortally right to play the visiting
star Sylvia in La Dolce Vita: “At Rome’s
Baths of Caracalla, shadow-carved by torches for Sylvia’s party, Rubini
(Mastroianni) dances with her, gushing an awe to which she, lacking Italian, is
indifferent: ‘You’re everything, Sylvia. You’re the first woman of creation,
the mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, the earth, the home.” No
female was more flattered by ruins, or so unlike Ingrid Bergman sickened by
Pompeii in Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia.”(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.
Anita
Ekberg leads one of film’s great dances in La
Dolce Vita (Cineriz/Astor Pictures, 1960; director Federico Fellini,
cinematographer Otello Martelli.)
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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