Nosh 165: 'Angel Has Fallen', 'The Peanut Butter Falcon' and More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Angel Has Fallen and The Peanut Butter Falcon)

Welcome, plex rats, to the last dog days of summer:

Angel Has Fallen

The really hard guys are stuck in the Petrified Forest. The Rock is a grinning wind-up toy. Steven Seagal looks like a sofa stuffed with Velveeta. Sly Stallone is in the last gasp of his marathon (coming soon: Rambo: Last Blood). Vin Diesel is more bald than ballistic. Jason Stathem is buff but dull. Bruce Willis looks baked. Jackie Chan is a Comic-Con collectible. Liam Neeson lumbers his bulk as Senior Avenger and Tom Cruise is the Fort Knox of Botox. Forget Norris (now 79), Van Damme (a Belgian waffle) and Lundgren (down to Sharknado 5). Their manly master, dear ol’ Charlie Brontosaurus (Bronson), went into the tar pit long ago.

But here comes – tote that gut! – haggard Gerard Butler as Secret Service agent Mike Banning. Angel Has Fallen is Butler’s third blast belch in the medium-costing (Bulgarian locations) but sturdy-grossing Fallen franchise, an ammo dump wired to blow. For director Ric Roman Waugh, five writers honed the alpha-dodo plot. An attack by feral bat drones puts Banning’s beloved President Morgan Freeman in a coma (did Freeman insist?). Falsely accused of treason, Banning burns for patriotic payback despite spinal injuries and an overall AARP aura. He goes on the lam, chased by the deluded feds and also black-op villains led by sadistic war buddy Wade (Danny Huston). He is almost instantly ambushed by “militia” yokels, launching a truck chase that clearly was edited in a Cuisinart.

If you have spent quality time dumpster diving into these body bags you know the rewards: 1. stunts, 2. blowouts, 3. goons frantic to die, 4. veteran actors trying to grab their checks with verve. Butler is just meatloaf on a mission, but Huston channels his father John’s famous ham-rogue inflections into the mayhem. Jada Pinkett Smith is a fierce agent. Piper Perabo is Mrs. Banning, whose wee babe appears truly terrified. Tim Blake Nelson is a mini-Mnuchin (Trump’s dorky Secretary of the Treasury) as the swinish V.P. of Freeman’s noble President. The king of the mountain, literally, is Nick Nolte as Banning’s dad, a raging Viet-vet hairball. His forest refuge, a Bunker Hill of senile libertarian lunacy, blows up real good. The repartee has the special, gastric growl of a bazooka digesting barbed wire. Butler: “You smell like gunpowder.” Huston: “Yeah, you know you love it.”

The Peanut Butter Falcon

Come git yer grub! Served fresh (well, familiar) at the Dixie Bait Snack Café: gators, herons, a big dawg, crab cages, a blind preacher, a goofy baptism, banjo music, the Salt Water Redneck (retired wrestler) and Bubba’s road store where “yer Ding Dongs are two-dollar-a-peece.” The beef entrée is Shia LaBeouf, who plays tough hick Tyler as lookin’ for redemption after a bad mistake – perhaps an echo bounce off LaBeouf’s own legal etc. troubles. Tyler, surly but then sensitive, bonds with a young Downs syndrome guy who ran away from being the mascot of a retirement home. Zak is played by pudgy, cuddly Zack Gottsagen. He wants to swim and drink and shoot and rassle. He gets there as Tyler’s “bro-dog,” while being pursued by Dakota Johnson as a darlin’ caregiver with moon pie eyes. Here, ground zero, is the quicksand of the empathy swamp.

It’s The Peanut Butter Falcon, never (please) to be confused with The Maltese Falcon. Director-writers Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz graduated summa cum sorghum from the Forrest Gump Academy. There is a raft of freedom and a mention of Mark Twain, so naturally a blurb has declared the movie “Twainesque.” Make that Clemensized, fit not for a book club but a Hee-Haw reunion. Amid vistas of coastal North Carolina the cast sweats buckets: John Hawkes as a crabby crabber, Thomas Haden Church as the ex-wrestler, and Bruce Dern in one of his surefire lightning strikes as a codger who aids Zak’s escape. Dern, having a rich revival in small roles (see Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood), gleefully rips off some vintage cuckoo’s nest from his ole bud Jack Nicholson. Slurp it up good, and don’t fur-git to spit. Me, I’m gonna hang at the bait bar and suck worms.   

SALAD (A List)

Sixteen Ripe Ones from the Country South

With main star, director and year:

The Apostle (Robert Duvall, also directed, 1997), Baby Doll (Carroll Baker, Elia Kazan, 1955), Cross Creek (Mary Steenburgen, Martin Ritt, 1993), Deliverance (Jon Voight, John Boorman 1972), The Fugitive Kind (Marlon Brando, Sidney Lumet, 1960), Intruder in the Dust (Juano Hernandez, Clarence Brown, 1949), The Long Hot Summer (Paul Newman, Martin Ritt, 1958), The Member of the Wedding (Julie Harris, Fred Zinnemann, 1952), Mud (Matthew McConaughey, Jeff Nichols, 2012), The Reivers (Steve McQueen, Mark Rydell, 1969), Sounder (Cicely Tyson, Martin Ritt, 1972), The Southerner (Zachary Scott, Jean Renoir, 1945), The Strange One (Ben Gazzara, Jack Garfein, 1957), Thieves Like Us (Shelley Duvall, Robert Altman, 1974), Wind Across the Everglades (Christopher Plummer, Nicholas Ray, 1958) and Wise Blood (Brad Dourif, John Huston, 1979).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In 1940, instinctive showman Orson Welles rapidly pared down Herman Mankiewicz’s bulging script for American, forging Citizen Kane. For example, he “deleted the scene of young Charles crying on the train and in its place used a single shot of his sled covered in snow, while the hollow wail of the whistle on the train, carrying the boy away, can be heard in the distance. Welles illustrated the boy’s loneliness, reinforced the importance of Rosebud in the story (without giving away the secret – the word on the sled is obscured by snow), and set up the chain of scenes that followed.” Magic time! (Quote from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“The early star system of the 1910s and ’20s favored full-frontal personality, codified visually. ‘Almost from the beginning,’ writes James Naremore, ‘movie stars were regarded as aesthetic objects rather than as artists, or as personalities who had a documentary reality. D.W. Griffith and other directors strengthened the ‘organic’ effect by inserting details from an actor’s real life into fiction.’ So, Lillian Gish in True Heart Susie gazed upon a photo of her actual mother cradling baby Lil. What Gish began so sweetly, Brando consummated viscerally in his self-referential Last Tango in Paris (call it True Heart Marlon). All actors tap themselves, though the deepest aquifer eludes many.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter in 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.

Fallen pastor T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), reduced to boozing tour guidance in Mexico, faces the snarly hell of Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall) in The Night of the Iguana (MGM 1964; director John Huston, d.p. Gabriel Figueroa).

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