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).
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