Nosh 129: 'Free Solo,' 'The Old Man & the Gun'

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Free Solo and The Old Man & the Gun

Free Solo

Some documentaries grab a piece of reality that makes most fictional films seem like spun taffy. Free Solo grabs a huge granite slab, El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold became at 32 the first solo climber to scale its 3,000 feet of sheer, vertical fear, without ropes or grips. His astonishing, almost four-hour ascent is compressed into the final 20-some minutes of Free Solo, among the most nerve-wracking experiences I’ve ever had with a movie. I guessed that Honnold would make it – few documentaries star athletic failure – but as I watched, spellbound, I really wasn’t sure.

Even some veteran camera crew, nerves taut, found it hard to keep watching as Alex, tiny in a red shirt on a vast gray wall, overcame many danger points. He had been a reclusive Sacramento kid, born to a non-hugging mom and a restless, Asperger’s father. Dropping out of Berkeley, Alex found the mountains. On solo climbs, including Yosemite’s Half Dome, “I walk through the fear until it’s just not there anymore.” This requires subtle muscle, steel nerve, cold reflex, eagle sight, perfect timing, laser thinking. One tiny error can bring death (this physically beautiful movie is not for anyone who fears altitude).

The National Geographic production is from Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Vasarhelyi, who made the great Himalayan documentary Meru. Its best tactic is the overlap of two major life tests: the amazing climb, after injuries and delays, and shy-macho Alex finding a girlfriend. With radiant Sanni McCandless the soloist risks ascending that most humanly exposed peak, Mt. Romance. Both fear that their relationship could blunt his edge and alter his crucial focus (Sanni’s effort to mask her anxiety is endearing). Free Solo takes us high, in more than one direction. These heights have depth.     

The Old Man & the Gun

Robert Redford was a virtual anti-Brando. You didn’t go to Redford for raw fury or bared soul, but there was a quiet command in his golden looks, his sculpted assurance, his engaging guy-ness. Now 82, his face a crinkled weather map of sun exposure, he still has his bone structure, his great smile and his wry, infallible charm. Playing bank robber Forrest Tucker (no, not the big, hearty studio actor and totem of dinner theater), Redford is impeccably at home in David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun, based on a 2003 New Yorker piece by David Grann.

This is not an old star’s glory like The Straight Story (Richard Farnsworth), The Two of Us (Michel Simon), The Late Show (Art Carney) or Lucky (Harry Dean Stanton). Still, it’s an enjoyable Bob Redford movie, as Tucker robs banks with a light touch (just showing his smile and pistol) in the 1980s. He was a real guy (1920-2004), since his teen years a crook and escape artist (17 successful breakouts, including once from San Quentin via kayak). Tom Waits and Danny Glover are like two soft shoes as his backup buddies, and as the Texas cop tracking him down Casey Affleck uses his gentle, slow-drag voice as if anticipating old age.

The best (no surprise) is Sissy Spacek. As Jewel, an aging horse lover and smart but not pushy sweetheart, she gets dapper, gracious Forrest to consider retirement. She and Redford are paired aces, even in the creaky scene of them rocking on a porch, chewing some sunset wisdom. The heists are almost endearing, with frisky chases, and we snatch glimpses of young Bob in photos and The Chase (also Warren Oates in Two Lane Blacktop). This picture may have AARP bones, but it sure beats meditating on Golden Pond with Norman and Ethel, waiting for the loons.

SALAD (A List)

Robert Redford’s Ten Best Starring Movies
In my esteemed opinion (with director and year):

1. All the President’s Men (Alan J, Pakula, 1976), 2. The Candidate (Michael Ritchie, 1972), 3. Brubaker (Stuart Rosenberg, 1980), 4. Downhill Racer (Michael Ritchie, 1969), 5. The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), 6. The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, 1972), 7. This Property is Condemned (Sydney J. Pollack, 1966), 8. The Old Man & the Gun (above), 9. The Horse Whisperer (Redford, 1998) and 10. Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney J. Pollack, 1972).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Rumors long circulated about whether publisher W.R. Hearst and famed paramour Marion Davies ever saw Citizen Kane, partly based on them. Respected Hollywood columnist Jim Bacon said Davies “once told me that she and W.R. saw the famous Orson Welles movie seven or eight times. She said ‘Once we even went into a theater in San Francisco, ate popcorn, and watched it with an audience. W.R. loved it, and we laughed at the reference to Rosebud.’ Then she told me that Rosebud was Hearst’s pet name for her genitalia.” Now that’s gossip! (Quote from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

When the unreleased The Producers hit the screen at Paul Mazursky’s small, private “sneak” on Jan. 13, 1968, “Peter Sellers began convulsing with laughter. At the end he phoned Embassy Pictures head Joe Levine in New York, declaring Mel Brooks’s comedy (which Levine had pegged a dud) the funniest movie ever made. Soon Sellers placed trade ads to herald ‘the ultimate film, the essence of all great comedy combined in a single motion picture … a largesse of lunacy with sheer magic.” Sellers’s giddy gladness rescued the movie from the era’s discard pile.” (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.

Robert Redford as novice pol Bill McKay with wife Nancy (Karen Carlson) in The Candidate (Warner Bros., 1972; director Michael Ritchie; cinematographer Victor J. Kemper).

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Nosh 128: 'First Man.' 'Colette' & More

David Elliott

    

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

NOTE: I was a little glib in my treatment of Michael Moore's glib comparison of Hitler and Trump in my Sept. 28 review of Fahrenheit 11/9. For an in-depth comparison, read Christopher R. Browning's essay "The Suffocation of Democracy" in the Oct. 25 issue of the New York Review of Books.

APPETIZER: Reviews of First Man and Colette. 

First Man

The human factor barely factors in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its most famous voice is a computer. In First Man, which builds to the July 20, 1969 lunar landing (15 months after 2001’s premiere), much of the talk is techie but the movie is consistently human. The best element of this work from director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash), scripted by Josh Singer from James R. Hansen’s book, is its thoughtful balance. The space training and brave piloting of the first moon-walker,  Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), interlace with family scenes. Much of the emotive vitality comes from Neil’s wife Janet, played by the slight but substantial, and moving, Claire Foy.

A whole lotta shakin’ is goin’ on, in a lot of rough rides, starting with Armstrong steering the supersonic X-15 plane 120,000 feet (23 miles) down, from the rim of our atmosphere to the flat Mojave Desert. Mission accomplished, he returns to find that his little daughter will soon die of a brain tumor. A shadow of grieving memory follows the methodical, introspective, slightly boring Armstrong. The story is dense with slide-rule guys, men with white shirts, level hair, slim-Jim ties and cool control (the sparky contrast astronaut is Corey Stoll’s “Buzz” Aldrin). As Neil rises to become top space cadet for the Apollo 11 voyage, Janet inhabits the uniform-like demeanor of the good military wife, often kept in the dark yet holding the family (two surviving sons) together. Once June Allyson did this type well. Foy, going beyond type, is better.

Images often echo the Kodachrome snaps and home-movie shots of the time, with JFK grainy on TV and ‘60s racial anxiety venting in Gil Scott Heron’s funny, biting song “Whitey on the Moon” (NASA had a heavy lean to crew-cut Caucasians). Gosling welds his low-key charisma into Neil’s progress, all the way to the wild gray (lunar) yonder. It’s 239,000 miles of dangerous travel (and back) to grab what looks like a sampling of cement dust, yet this is no rocket-nerd manual. Kubrick’s 2001 remains a visionary poem (ambitious, pretentious, gorgeous), but it doesn’t have Janet quietly telling her younger son, “Your dad’s going to the moon.” Pause, then the boy answers, “OK. Can I go outside?”      

Colette

Might as well call it Keira! England’s fair Ms. Knightley is in almost every scene, in wow outfits, in bravura hair-dos. She smokes, drinks, mimes, trans-dresses, seduces women (and men), even flashes some breast. And if you imagine this is a deep portrait of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), still perhaps France’s most beloved woman novelist, then I’d love to show you a “razor-sharp documentary” on the guillotine as “pioneer of the close-cut shave.”

Abandon all hope that the movie will replicate Colette’s impeccable, nuance-scented prose, and you can relax into some fun. Director Wash Westmoreland did the gay-themed The Fluffer, Totally Gay! and the vanishing species film Gay Republicans. His Colette has the oo-la-la oomph of a gay carnival ripping off Victorian corsets, as “Gabri” advances from nature-loving, rustic girlhood to writing her first novels about the provincial and then Parisian lass Claudine. Her pen flows like wine, but her lordly sommelier is first husband Henry. Known high and low as Willy, he is publisher, wit, party dynamo. Alas, Willy never guzzles brandy with Toulouse-Lautrec, but he does pose as faux “author” of Gabri’s scandalously successful Claudine.

The risky arrangement educates Gabri, who will finally proclaim “I am Claudine!” without quite becoming Colette. She remains so very Keira, so English, so cute when scrunching her nose or flashing bold smiles. After she ditches Willy and his wild, wastrel ways, the story loses its stimulating polarity. It is admirable to film a feminist empowerment picture, less so when your male piggy (brash, funny, even poignant) is a more layered life package than your heroine. Dominic West’s supple, often dominant performance means that Colette basically swallows the champagne cork of its payoff: after Willy, Colette claimed immortality by writing her best works. Much later, as the old but still keen-eyed author of Gigi, she noticed and helped lift to fame Audrey Hepburn.  

   

SALAD (A List)

Alfred Hitchcock’s Best Creeps

Peter Lorre as Abbott (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934), Mary Clare as the Baroness (The Lady Vanishes, 1938), Judith Anderson as Mr. Danvers (Rebecca, 1940), Joseph Cotten as Uncle Charlie (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943), Walter Slezak as Willy (Lifeboat, 1944), Leopoldine Konstantin as Mme. Sebastian (Notorious, 1946), Robert Walker as Bruno Antony (Strangers on a Train, 1951), Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald (Rear Window,1954), Anthony Dawson as Charles Swann (Dial M for Murder, 1954), Reggie Nalder as Rien (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956), Martin Landau as Leonard (North by Northwest, 1959), Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates (Psycho, 1960), Wolfgang Kieling as Gromek (Torn Curtain, 1966) and Barry Foster as Robert Rusk (Frenzy, 1972).  His suavest villains? Ray Milland as Tony Wendice (Dial M for Murder) and James Mason as Philip Van Damm (North by Northwest).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The Latin American wartime solidarity project It’s All True, initially sparked by Nelson Rockefeller, was Orson Welles’s downfall in the studio system: “On Nov. 30, 1942, with several producers and potential backers in attendance, (new RKO  head Charles) Koerner held a screening of selections from 23 reels, supplemented with such Brazilian hit songs as ‘Amelia’ sung by Chucho Martinez. There were no takers. Welles sat uncomfortably tight.” Weeks later, fired by RKO, Orson told his Mercury colleagues “we’re just turning a Koerner.” But so ended his high time of upscale Hollywood filming, and so began the years of maverick wandering, with pinched budgets and zero help from Nelson Rockefeller. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Having once aspired to being an artist, my favorite film treatment of one is 1959’s The Horse’s Mouth, which is “never psycho-biographic and only flirts with the possibility of genius. The visual style has some over-lighting (was it felt that deeper chiaroscuro would dampen the comedy bits?). The shifts from comical to serious can seem at times metronomic, yet Alec Guinness pulls it all together. At first he seems dashed on screen like the opening brush strokes (with the titles). But then he presses through the surface impasto to find the rich, complicated interior. The result is much more than a jolly good time.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Even a swank outfit can't keep Reggie Nalder from being a total creep in The Man Who Knew Too Much (Paramount Pictures, 1956; director Alfred Hitchcock, cinematographer Robert Burks).
 

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Nosh 127: 'A Star is Born' and 'Pick of the Litter'

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of A Star is Born and Pick of the Litter. 

A Star is Born

As vapors of serialized show-biz nostalgia rise like incense from the new A Star is Born, here are impious reminders from the queen of take-no-crap criticism, Pauline Kael. On the first Star birth (1937, William Wellman directing Janet Gaynor and Fredric March): “peculiarly masochistic and self-congratulatory.” On the second (1954, George Cukor directing Judy Garland and James Mason): “a terrible, fascinating orgy of self-pity and cynicism and mythmaking.” On the third (1976, Frank Pierson directing Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson): “sentimental without being convincing for an instant (but you can) swoon and weep, and giggle, too.”

All true, yet we rush into the palpitating arms of No. 4, directed by Bradley Cooper to showcase Lady Gaga and himself. La Gaga is not another Esther Blodgett or Vicki Lester or Esther Hoffman, but a pure concentration of workin’ gal named Ally (the crown of her stardom is a Sunset Blvd. billboard, with only her face and “Ally”). She is weirdly naïve about her talent, despite many drag queens gawking blissfully as she slams across her jolting version of Edith Piaf’s “La vie en rose” in a drag club. Country-rock stud Jackson Maine (Cooper) is also awed, and soon charms her into singing at one of his massive concerts. Their love blazes, her shyness shrinks, and Cooper’s ruggedly pleasant singing is swamped by the rising tsunami of Ally’s mega-Gaga voice.

Mostly indebted to Streisand’s version, also to Bette Midler’s The Rose, the movie is formula kitsch but a great podium for Lady Gaga. Nurtured along by Cooper in her dramatic breakout, she is small, girlish but tough, an instinctive feminist. Ally’s street-cred passion is affirmed by Andrew Dice Clay playing her dad (oddly, one of his chums looks like Steve Bannon). Gaga uses her dialog as if shaping lyrics, sifting moods, letting emotions percolate before breaking forth in song. She radiates a beguiling directness, her big eyes taking in the carnival of her rise. The romance is fairly hot but stuck in cliché, in the familiar corn patch of an “ugly duckling” who swans to glory, like Streisand (Funny Girl ) and, briefly, Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing).

Meanwhile Cooper (acting, directing, producing, co-writing, but no Orson Welles) sinks in the sudsy quicksand of Jackson’s decline (booze, pills, coke, steroid injections, loss of hearing, broken family). He is no rival to James Mason’s superb Norman Maine in 1954. Mason remains the main Maine man, blessedly without the urination scene that humiliates Jackson on stage. The best male acting this time is by Sam Elliott, who may get a supporting Oscar bid for fiercely playing Jackson’s manager/older brother. The junkiest touch is a viperish British handler, Rez (Rafi Gavron), who takes control of Ally’s image and recordings. The story suffers once she turns to orange hair and Vegasoidal, pop-video crooning.

More than veteran dazzlers Garland and Streisand, Lady Gaga seems ready for this, still hungry, as if she doesn’t guess the predictable ending (Jackson won’t go into the sea at sunset like James Mason, but gets a garage sendoff that features maudlin shots of his dog). This movie is a rebuilt show-biz limo with some busted springs, but the Gaga octane is fired-up to deliver. She does.

Pick of the Litter

Stars are born in Pick of the Litter. In fact, five. They start as puppies at the California kennel of Guide Dogs for the Blind. Soon the three males are named Patriot, Potomac and Phil, the two females Primrose and Poppet, each one a Labrador darling (those names reveal not what William F. Buckley once called “a suicidal urge to alliteration,” but that they all came from the P litter). From total puppiness they move through a multi-stage program, beginning with early socialization at the facility. For about 18 months each lives with a family that provides basic training. Return to the center brings advanced lessons until the best in sure guidance and life-saving protection are chosen (every critter will find a home, with a few females kept for breeding at the center).

From every 800 candidates about 300 become “seeing eye” dogs. This frisky but methodical documentary, directed by Dana Nachman and Don Hardy Jr., has movingly intimate observations of dogs and people, all admirable. When one pooch flunks his last test (the approved jargon is “career-changed”), the downer leads to one of the most joyous encounters since Lassie came home. It’s a bit jarring when a blind woman, nervous about meeting her new companion, talks of their “blind date.” If you tend to tear-up by gazing into dark doggie eyes, this picture can really lube your ducts. The magical touch is that everyone seems just about equally canine and human. Pick is a warm and informative valentine to the beauty of inter-species bonding, a sustained lesson in love.     

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Always deeply experimental, Welles let the bones of audacity show nakedly in his small-budget, Scottish-brogued 1948 movie of Macbeth: “It was not supposed to look like Olivier’s Hamlet (same year). Orson eschewed the polished, classical approach to Shakespeare epitomized by Olivier in favor of the strangeness (of) his Lady from Shanghai. The controversial barbarism of this Macbeth reflected both the severely limited means at his disposal and the determination to view the classic play from a new angle. Orson had never intended it for a mass audience anyway.” (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles. The moody film has since found a fan base.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Time’s hinge-swing into the 1960s was thrilling and unrepeatable, yet La Dolce Vita has become no relic, no crater of dusty clippings. It has, wrote Robert Hughes, ‘a special place in film history which no Italian painting of the period can conceivably rival, and no Italian movie made in the foreseeable future is likely to equal.” (Hughes, the great art critic who died in 2012, never got to see the film’s worthy heir, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty in 2013. Quote 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.

Orson Welles displays his Big Mac glower in Macbeth (Mercury/Republic Pictures, 1948; director Orson Welles, cinematographer John L. Russell).

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