David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: Long Shot and Woman at War)
Long Shot
Seth Rogen, a canny quipster, remarks in Long Shot that “just because you star in
a movie doesn’t mean you’re a movie star.”
The script (which Rogen partly wrote) also mentions how few TV stars have risen
to full big-screen status. Having begun in stand-up and TV before mentor Judd
Apatow made him a film comedy fixture, Rogen is himself an upstart long shot, a
bearded blub with an amiable, doofy-dude edge. Playing journalist Fred Flarsky
in Long Shot, he mostly leaves aside the
honking laugh, motor-mouth joke rhythm and goofy non-sequiters that define his
guest turns on talk shows.
Long Shot works (when it does) because of the amusing contrast
chemistry of Rogen and long-term wow Charlize Theron. She is Charlotte Field,
the idealistic, sexy-swank U.S. Secretary of State (the story’s TV bones stick
out, with skeletal debts to the feminist pol hits Veep and Madam Secretary).
Field wants to replace the dodo President who, like Trump, has TV bonafides. To
polish her hip humor and youth appeal she hires the fiercely anti-corporate
wiseguy Flarsky. In a sitcom touch, he first had a crush (or in modern laff
parlance: boner) on Charlotte when she at 16 baby-sat him, 13. Between global
trips and speeches, an odd-couple intimacy develops, which means sex jokes built
on contrasts of Theron’s glowing, creamy construction with Rogen’s meatloaf bod
(to upscale his appeal, Flarsky shaves off his neck hairs). The charm is that
the stars seem to enjoy a real rapport, much like perky Jack Black and luscious
Kate Winslet in The Holiday, and well
beyond Polly Bergen and Fred MacMurray in 1964’s Kisses for My President.
Long Shot is a packing-the-package job. That includes lazy
filler, like salutes to Game of Thrones
and a mediocre version of “Moon River.” Charlotte’s environmentalism inevitably
offends the Big Money (represented by a Rupert Murdoch media tycoon, played by
Andy Serkis like an angry Smurf). Theron gets stuck with a scene of Charlotte,
high on gonzo party pills, stopping a potential war, which feels like a flop
skit from the SNL mothball closet. But the byplay between Flarsky and his black
buddy (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), when the bud confides being a devoutly Christian Republican,
has topical tang. Director Jonathan Levine keeps the motor running, with a few
burps. There is no wild concession to good taste, and the closure gag involves
online crotch raunch. Rogen and Theron zip this facile but entertaining comedy
along to its expected finish.
Woman at War
It won ten Edda Awards, Iceland’s Oscars, and Woman at War has now become the latest
dream project of Jodie Foster. Continuing an adult career that rallies issues
like a soapbox derby, Foster plans to produce, direct and star in an American
remake of the North Sea island’s rousing art-house hit. Given that she last ignited
meaningful press heat with 2011’s The
Beaver, an oddball platform for her loyalty to scandal-ridden friend Mel
Gibson, my advice is: don’t wait. See the highly original import, with its urgent
eco-message bundled in human charm.
Directed with fey-Nordic verve by Benedikt Erlingsson
(as in “son of Erling”), it stars middle-aged but robust, athletic and zealous Halla,
played by excellent Halldóra Geirhardsdóttir (as in “daughter of Geirhard”). A
one-woman commando unit of green subversion, the chipper, clever Halla sabotages
a Chinese-led energy scheme that plans to convert her cozy thermal nation into
another square on the global Monopoly
board. The Reykjavik government is enraged as Halla’s attacks on power pylons revives
fearless Viking courage in the severely beautiful landscape. As drones circle
and the media salivates about her hidden identity, her only allies are a grumpy
country cousin, his dog Woman, and twin sister Asa, a seeker who would rather be
at an ashram in Asia. Geirhardsdóttir plays both siblings, a binary touch which
sets up a terrific finish. A personal challenge also takes Halla to another
level.
Wagner would suit this intrepid green Valkyrie, but simpler
music is inserted with a Fellini touch of whimsy, which serves both plot suspense and moral drama. There
is something here of the classic British comedy about invention and greed, The Man in the White Suit, and also the
delightful O’Horten, the Norwegian shaggy-dog
yarn about a resourceful old train master. Smiling, as the story’s deft pieces fit
together in your mind, you also realize that this bright movie is serious,
timely and resonant.
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
A worldly
traveler from childhood onward, Orson Welles heard the call of long wanderlust at
the end of World War II: “FDR’s death, rising Cold War paranoia and tax
problems motivated Welles to Europe. As a gypsy-beggar Barnum he acted in
mediocre films (some not: The Third Man,
Princes of Foxes) to finance his projects. His own film marvels were
producer-chopped, some barely released, often reviewed as gaudy tokens of a
myth in ruins. Still, view Leslie Megahey’s 1982 BBC interview. After Megahey
says ‘flawed masterpiece,’ Orson rolls the phrase around in the snifter of his
mood, saving the ambivalence like brandy. Will he swallow, or spit?” (From Starlight Rising; see below.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The
quote about Welles is 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 fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Sgt.
Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) and his stalwart few, including his beloved tank
(camouflaged above), prepare to face a mad-for-water German brigade in the
desert dunes of Sahara (Columbia
Pictures, 1943; director Zoltan Korda; photography by Rudolph Maté).
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