Nosh 153: 'Tolkien,' 'Ask Dr. Ruth' & More

David Elliott

         

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

Note: Nosh 154 will arrive on Friday, May 31.

APPETIZER (Reviews:  Tolkien and Ask Dr. Ruth)

Tolkien

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings saga wore me down with its tick-tock metronome of epic violence and long intervals of dialog (I relished more the inventive Harry Potters). Tolkien has now made me admire Jackson’s source writer. In its elegant construction of times past, Dome Kurokoski’s movie has some pious glazing, yet it stirringly revives the youth of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. We follow him as a poor, bookish, then orphaned lad, taken from a Hobbit-worthy countryside to the industrial vistas of Edwardian Birmingham, and then that fearful English furnace of snobbery: the male boarding school.

The film echoes the old Ivory-Merchant mix of crafty, nostalgic display and earnest plot pacing, yet life takes charge as Ronald bonds with three schoolmates of higher “breeding” but artistic interests. With good actors in each role, the sense of testing rivalry and comradeship is beautifully developed (no American teen movie compares to their interests and talks). What saves Tolkien from turning into a rather insular schoolboy drama is the struggling evolution of brilliant but insecure Ronald. After childhood, actor Nicholas Hoult takes over the role with solid sincerity (he resembles the mid-century American actor Jeffrey Hunter, of The Searchers and King of Kings). Ronald’s rich imagination finds its mate and goad in Edith Bratt, an artistic orphan and lady’s companion played by Lily Collins, who was so good in Warren Beatty’s daring but little-seen Rules Don’t Apply. Collins is both very sane and very fanciful. The virginal romantics join their fates in a scene of backstage infatuation with Wagner’s Ring Cycle (a seed for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels).

At Oxford University Ronald’s other raft arrives: the linguistics master Prof. Wright, whose rapt, eager speech comparing trees to language and culture is a career capper for Derek Jacobi. There is a fine curlicue touch, when he is thrilled to find Finnish roots in Ronald’s made-up fantasy language – director Kurokoski is Finnish, and did a movie about the gay-porn icon Tom of Finland. But Tolkien reaches well beyond academics, as it heads into the terrible test of Tolkien’s generation, World War I, for which each of the four friends volunteers.

If the Somme battle hell seems to combine aspects of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Spielberg’s War Horse and old service-buddy pictures, it also tallies the tragic reckoning with true power. In its last 20 minutes Tolkien becomes one of the most heartfelt, beyond sentimental memorials to the Lost Generation of 1914-18. Ironically its best companion came out recently, and from Peter Jackson: his amazing documentary on Britain’s wartime sacrifices, They Shall Not Grow Old (see Nosh 143, by scrolling down).

Ask Dr. Ruth

Good documentaries, even those of minor artistic interest, show us something valuable. If they center on a strong personality, all the better – as in Ask Dr. Ruth. Ruth Westheimer will turn 91 next month, and on the evidence of Ryan White’s film she is still the best German-Jewish, Israeli/American powerhouse of concentrated vigor that modern media has clad in limelight. If she and Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be inserted together into one of those giant super-colliders of particle physics, Einstein’s coveted Unified Field Theory might finally emerge as a fabulous new equation: E=2R3 (Energy equals two Ruths cubed).

A towering four feet, seven inches under a frothy mane of hair, Westheimer delivers opinions with a Teutonic crunch, but also the salt of the smartest old dame in a kosher kitchen. The middle-aged Ruth, a strenuously educated émigré, gained fame on New York talk radio in the ’80s as a sex-advice guru. She was always frank but gracious (imagine Howard Stern minus all the crude guy guff). She’s still a ringing anvil of good sense and goodwill about dating, love tactics, protection, abortion and (above all) two-way affection as the sexy nexus of satisfaction. Ruth was a beacon of humane sanity during the early, anti-gay AIDS years. Like some other short, Jewish, willful and verbose intellects (Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, Ayn Rand), Ruth doesn’t entirely welcome the accolade “feminist” (too au-courant or political?), probably due to  flinty individualism. But a feminist she is.

The movie’s heart, eclipsing all the media jive with Johnny, Jay, Howard, Merv, David, Arsenio and other gone or aging yakkers, is in the often tragic backstory: little Karola Ruth Siegel, losing her close, happy family in Frankfurt to join one of the last kindertransport trains from Hitler’s Reich; lonely years in a Swiss orphanage; parents killed in the Holocaust; postwar revival in new Israel (nearly killed in the 1948 war); hard, studious Paris years, then New York. Two brief marriages to handsome studs left few scars, then came lasting devotion with her beloved Fred Westheimer, an engineer (“I still remember those first kisses”) and children. To fill in much of that, Isaac Rubio’s animation sequences can be criticized as too golden with light (as if to fend off Nazi shadows). I found them intimate and moving. Ruth, who has seized life with great courage, infuses this movie with her very special self. 

SALAD (A List)

Strong Films About Real, Strong Women

In order of arrival (with subject and star):

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Joan, Marie Falconetti), Queen Christina (Christina of Sweden, Greta Garbo), The Nun’s Story (Sister Luke/Marie Louise Habets, Audrey Hepburn), Coal Miner’s Daughter (Tammy Wynette, Sissy Spacek), Gorillas in the Mist (Dian Fossey, Sigourney Weaver), What’s Love Got to Do With It (Tina Turner, Angela Bassett), Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett), The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (herself), Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts), The Passion of Ayn Rand (Helen Mirren), Frida (Frida Kahlo, Salma Hayek), My Flesh and Blood (Susan Tom, herself), Fur (Diane Arbus, Nicole Kidman), Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch), Agora (Hypatia of Alexandria, Rachel Weisz), The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep), Finding Vivian Maier (herself), Joy (Joy Mangano, Jennifer Lawrence), Marie Curie: The Passion of Knowledge (Karolina Gruszka).    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Probably film’s finest escalating speech is the stunning reply of Kane (Orson Welles) in Citizen Kane, after his cold, rich guardian (George Coulouris) tells the novice publisher that he’s wasting his lavish inheritance:

“The trouble is, you don’t realize you’re talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who owns 82,364 shares of Public Transit Preferred – you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings – I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town, a committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars … On the other hand, I am also the publisher of the Inquirer. As such it is my duty – I’ll let you in on a secret – it is also my pleasure, to see to it that the decent, hard-working citizens of the community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates, just because they haven’t anyone to look after their interests. I’ll let you in on another little secret, Mr. Thatcher. I think I’m the man to do it. You see, I have money and property. If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property.” (Thatcher sputters that Charles is losing a million a year, setting up the squelch supreme.) … You’re right, Mr. Thatcher, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in … sixty years.” (Any chance we can get Mr. Kane to run against Trump next year?)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No one else discerned the special flux and tang that director Robert Altman got from actors quite like critic Pauline Kael: “He has abandoned the theatrical conventions that movies have generally clung to, of introducing characters and putting tags on them. His approach entails losses (like) some plot holes that don’t get filled, (but) the inconveniences are inseparable from Altman’s best qualities.” Square viewers “were used to the Broadway sound where you get a line and then a dead space. What Altman did was get rid of the dead spaces.” (From the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye 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.

In a bad portent of their future, guardian Walter P. Thatcher (George Coulouris) greets new ward Charlie Kane (Buddy Swan), under the gaze of mom (Agnes Moorehead) and dad (Harry Shannon) in Citizen Kane. (RKO Pictures, 1941; director Orson Welles, photography by Gregg Toland).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 152: 'Long Shot,' 'Woman at War' & More

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).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 151: 'Amazing Grace' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Amazing Grace)

Amazing Grace

In the 1960 film The Entertainer English music hall comic and jaded hack Archie Rice (Laurence Oliver) recalls hearing an old black woman sing a spiritual: “If I ever heard any hope or strength in the human race (it was from her) singing about Jesus, or something like that.” But Archie never heard Aretha Franklin. In the sphere of music, by now the music of the spheres (she died last year at 76), there is no other Aretha. Amazing Grace must be her best memorial, yet it isn’t funereal.

Her double-record “Amazing Grace” (1972) is still the top-selling gospel album. Alan Elliott, future music man (Atlantic Records), heard it first at age 8, felt heaven’s tectonic plates shifting, and after long effort delivers his joyful thanks. Elliott rescued the unfinished, unreleased film from mythic limbo. It had “technical problems.” Hollywood pro Sydney Pollack (Tootsie), directing this labor of love at a black Missionary Baptist church in L.A. in January, 1972, lacked docu-savvy. He didn’t use a clapper slate to sync image edits with the audio. Franklin felt bitter about it (there had been giddy talk about a “gospel Woodstock”). Although Pollack, before dying in 2008, gave Elliott his OK, Aretha was very tetchy about legality and legacy (and money) and even sued the devoted rescuer. Finally her estate made a deal, and Elliott assembled this anthem of Arethanosity (want an auteur credit? Call it an Aretha Franklin film).

Not so much backed as embraced by a small, rootsy band and the Southern California Community Choir of Rev. James Cleveland (unleashing his rugged soul pipes and playing piano), Franklin was almost 30. She is in control but shows the pensive dignity she probably had in girlish gospel days for her preaching dad (who appears on film). Aretha’s loose, flowing outfits are church-right, though no make-up could withstand the coming sweat in a hot church. Soon she has everyone sweating, shaking, rising, calling, responding (a joy-flung hankie will come flying past Aretha’s head to the camera). Her shout notes are rousers, breaking through the floorboards of heaven, calling Jesus for love and mercy. The climax of the first night (maybe the movie) is the title song. She gives it new life, prepping the coming of the glory with softly sung intervals, repeats, high notes like rockets. Old master Cleveland, overcome, leaves the piano briefly to pour his tears into a cloth.

“She’s the reason why women want to sing,” said singer Mary G. Blige, with pardonable excess (say amen always for song sisters Bessie, Billie, Ethel, Rosetta, Ella, Mahalia, Dinah, Nina, Etta, Betty, Eartha and Aretha’s mentor seen up-front, Clara Ward). This is never the conquering show-biz swagger by which Aretha reduced Belushi and Ackroyd to awed gapers with “Think” in The Blues Brothers (Pauline Kael wrote that she “smashes the movie to smithereens”). This is young Aretha looking back to when she was really young, but now a mature artist whose blazing power extends the fervent, swinging tradition of black worship. Mahalia Jackson was a spiritual locomotive, feeding primal soul coal into a furnace of belief. Franklin’s train burned a more sensual and urban fuel.

The wall painting of Jesus is garish, the camera work often ragged (but always authentic), the choir can sound a little under-miked, glimpses of Mick Jagger add nothing but a taste of white admiration, but Franklin fuses it all in herself, as a personal hallelujah. Amazing Grace is a vital sacrament of black musical communion in a ghetto church,  during another hard time (Dr. King was gone, Ali was recently beaten, and the insidious Southern strategy was entrenched under Nixon). Thanks to Franklin and the tenacious Elliott, it is more accessible than ever, and trans-racially profound. When Franklin offers testaments like “Mary Don’t You Weep,” “You’ve Got a Friend” and (singing at the piano) the wonderfully gradual and reflective “Never Grow Old,” the heart comes home to truth. Aretha be praised.

SALAD (A List)

12 Remarkable Movies About Real Singers:

In order of arrival: The Buddy Holly Story (1978, Gary Busey as Buddy Holly); Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980, Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn); La Bamba (1987, Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens); Mahalia Jackson: The Power and the Glory (1997, Mahalia as herself); What’s Love Got to Do With It (2003, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner); Beyond the Sea (2004, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin); No Direction Home (2005, Bob Dylan as himself); Walk the Line (2005, Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash); La Vie en Rose (2007, Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf); Marley (2012, Bob Marley as himself); Florence Foster Jenkins (2016, Meryl Streep as Flo) and Maria by Callas (2018, Maria as herself).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

We’re letting Orson relax this week, knowing he would like our substitute, one of the funniest letters ever sent by a Hollywood screenwriter. Blacklisted but still productive, Dalton Trumbo wrote to a friend on Oct. 6, 1957: “Cecil Blount DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was previewed this week for a company of 263 archangels in a temple of strawberry meringue especially built for the occasion on the Paramount back lot. Y. Frank Freeman led vespers with a reading from the letter of ‘a Protestant church leader’ to the effect that ‘the first century had its Apostle Paul, the 13^th century had St. Francis, the 16^th had Martin Luther and the 20^th has Cecil B. DeMille.’ After heaping portions of the Sacred Host had been served up in a rich sauce with seconds for everybody, DeMille himself, clad in the rosette of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, appeared among them on a Technicolor screen to explain his affection for the Almighty. The picture was then revealed.” (From David Kipen’s new book Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In grand, rocky vistas and bedrock emotions, the ancestor of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is John Ford’s Western The Searchers: “In 1956 The Searchers gripped me with its first shot: a door opening to Monument Valley, the moment that ‘permeates all of Wenders’s films’ (Alexander Graf). Ethan (John Wayne) is like Travis a terse loner embedded in rage. Travis’s bid for redemption is his son. Ethan must save himself by not killing his niece, abducted by Indians. Lean, brooding Harry Dean Stanton was no Wayne, and that massive icon could not have inhabited Travis, but as searchers they are spiritual siblings.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas 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 Golden Calf receives its due in The Ten Commandments. That’s Edward G. Robinson in white, on the left. (Paramount Pictures, 1956; director Cecil B. DeMille, photography by Loyal Griggs.)

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 150: 'The Brink,' 'The Mustang' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Brink and The Mustang)

The Brink

Reviewing a movie about firebrand Stephen K. Bannon is low work. You feel like a cat who finds a fat, dead roach in his hairball. The Brink, from documentarian Alison Klayman, is a rapid montage of her Bannon interviews, also his speeches, meetings, rants and moods. It follows the “architect” of Donald Trump’s election after his quick 2017 exit from the White House which, even as Trump’s free-form playpen, cramped Bannon’s gonzo impulses.

He swaggers onward, suffering defeat with one of the worst candidates ever to stain old Alabama, Judge Roy “Gimme a Filly” Moore. Next he becomes the free-lance prophet of a multi-national pirate crew of power grabbers, his chosen chevaliers de Steve for a crusade against elitist “globalism.” Everything boils down to fear, tactics and propaganda, the harbingers of strife, chaos and coming klepto-regimes. Once a pet favorite of the ultra-right Mercer family, Bannon knows how to follow the money.

Most of us have encountered the Steve type: the aging, hefty dude at the bar, with grotty skin and an avuncular smile, happy to clamp a bear paw on your shoulder as he pours a crackpot cascade of nonsense into your ear. Canny and funny (he fed rich diss to Michael Wolfe’s book on Trump), Bannon has seldom met a group he couldn’t affront, bemuse, befuddle or rouse with paranoid hormone injections about God and country, about the outraged Us vs. the alien Others. His young debut gig was being elected macho class president, soon ousted by the administration. Before the Web gave him the crank’s megaphone of Breitbart, he was a fringe pest and Hollywood barnacle. Now he confers with oil-slick English demagogue Nick “Brexit” Farrage, raises money for rising stars of angry nativism, plays foxy for Fox and touts Trump as the Great Oz of our times. Both men seem involved in a crazy crusade to make America less American.

Bannon is vague about the cheap, alarmist movies he made, though still pleased that in one “my shit at Auschwitz really rocked” (he praises the hellish camp’s Germanic engineering). Batting away accusations of fascism, he also does a giddy frat-boy riff about Nazi director Leni (Triumph of the Will) Riefenstahl. In a funk of self-pity he compares himself to suffering Lincoln, and Abe’s portrait oversees his condo living room. A crafty hustler with no compass of moral maturity, Bannon can always deliver a sound bite, yet never approaches a credible, viable ideology. The future he promises is pure backwardness, a dystopian, predatory world of combative fools. Its big novel will be Atlas Mugged.

The Mustang

The horse movie is a lariat tangent of the Western, though my faves are not Westerns: Carroll Ballard’s boyhood classic The Black Stallion and Cindy Meehl’s portrait of a horse (and rider) trainer, Buck. A prison equine movie set in Nevada, The Mustang is about a furious, repressed con, Roman Coleman. No Ronald Colman, he is played by Euro-macho star Matthias Schoenaerts like a bald bullet (with a trim beard for extra ballistic effect). Swollen with muscle and guilty rage about past family mayhem, Roman faces a newly caught, pale mustang only slightly less taciturn than himself. In the inmate program which “tames” wild creatures for border patrols (or adoption), angry man and angry beast start to breathe together, finding trust. Riding his steed, after learning the limits of fists, Roman gains mental release from his alpha-male cage. And connects with his slowly forgiving daughter, played very well by Gideon Adlon.

The feature debut of director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, daughter of a French count, The Mustang has some of the  he-manly poetry of Claire Denis’s Foreign Legion film Beau Travail. She and cinematographer Ruben Impens craft a vision of stark Nevada hills, taut con bodies, fast horses and the severe modern prison. Schoenaerts uncoils from Bronson/Stathem silence without mushing too far, with expert support from Jason Mitchell as an impish inmate and veteran Bruce Dern, 82, as the seen-it-all buckaroo who bosses the program. High moment: toothy Dern biting off “Not only do it – get it done.” The story fuzzes a couple of plot points. It could have used more time with Roman and his mustang as they bond and learn. But it puts us in a tough, touching place.

SALAD (A List)

Ten Ace Depictions of Political Villains

In order of arrival, with star, film, date: Hynkel, i.e. Hitler (Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940); Cesare Borgia (Orson Welles, Prince of Foxes, 1949); Willie Stark, i.e. Huey Long (Broderick Crawford, All the King’s Men, 1949); Aguirre (Joseph Wiseman, Viva Zapata!, 1952); King Richard (Laurence Olivier, Richard III, 1955); Boss Finley (Ed Begley, Sweet Bird of Youth, 1962); Hitler (Noah Taylor, Max, 2002); Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland, 2006); Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo, Il Divo, 2008); Mussolini (Filippo Timi,  Vincere, 2009).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In his diary (April 2, 1957) Charlton Heston fondly recalled the wrap on Touch of Evil: “We finished work with a final dawn shot, of Orson’s death in an overturned chair on a dump heap, then had a celebrant drink or two in the trailer. Orson and I took along the last magnum of champagne and found a place still open, to give us bacon and eggs to go with it. A hell of a picture to work on. I can’t imagine it won’t be fine. We saw Orson’s Lady from Shanghai on TV. It’s good, but not as good as ours, I think.” (Heston was right about that. From David Kipen’s new book Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Scripted and rehearsed, the ricochet rhythms of Max (Zero Mostel) and Leo (GeneWilder) found in The Producers a wild spritz of freedom: “The tango of shared anarchy is acting so free (but precise) that the players must fly or die as they ‘wing it.’ Expense of energy allowed few takes, and the verbal duel surpassed, that same year, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple (equation: Mostel’s flung coffee, Matthau’s hurled spaghetti). Cornered by close-ups, we smell the sweat, feel the spittle, taste the adrenaline. The ‘60s fibrillation of ‘30s screwball had found more style, but not more humor, in Dr. Strangelove, four years before.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers 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.

Cynical opportunist Aguirre (Joseph Wiseman) tries to steer rebel idealist Zapata (Marlon Brando) in Viva Zapata! (20^th Century Fox, 1952; director Elia Kazan, photography by Joseph MacDonald).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 149: 'The Aftermath,' 'The Hummingbird Project' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Aftermath and The Hummingbird Project)

The Aftermath

There is a juicy role calling to Lana Turner or Ava Gardner in The Aftermath – or there would have been, if the film had been made in the year of its story, 1946. Instead, Keira Knightley plays Rachael Morgan, the remarkably chic wife of a stolid, war-worn British army officer, Lewis (Jason Clarke). Sent to the Brit zone in defeated Germany, they are haunted by the death of their son in the Blitz, with Rachael feeling abandoned because reticent Lewis buried his grief in war duties. Now, chasing down fugitive Nazis in ruined, occupied Hamburg, Lewis tries to be kind to civilians but is brutal with fanatics of a secret group called 88 (8 being the eighth letter of the alphabet, thus 88=HH, as in Heil Hitler).

Away from vast ruins, the Morgans nest into the posh villa of modern architect Stefan Lubert, a sort of Mies van der Roark (as in Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark). Lubert is no Nazi but lost his wife in the bombing, and his daughter is still dazed by Hitler Youth training. He is rakishly handsome, lonely Alexander Skarsgard (totally unlike his role in the film reviewed below). With Lewis away on hard duty, Stefan and Rachael kindle with desire. Director James Kent treats the affair as if channeling old studio writers, and though the candid sex would not have been filmed in the Forties, the story’s ending (with a vapor of Casablanca) would have pleased the moralizing Production Code. Lewis’s military ventures grimly contrast with love meets that flash a certain hauteur. Stefan signals his yearning availability with an operatic aria on the gramophone, Rachael (at the piano) replies with the more delicate hormones of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” 

The movie, which spends more time on swank dinners than hunger riots, is not a tiresome dud like 2006’s The Good German, but never rivals postwar classics like Germany Year Zero and The Third Man. Richly photographed, it uses many melodramatic devices. Skarsgard is quite fine, Clarke excellent despite his rather constipated role. Mainly this is a retro package for Knightley, a true talent but also a beauty bonanza. We’re so aware of her creamy complexion, pert profile and toothy smile (she seems, like Gene Kelly in his prime, a billboard of dental and dermatological perfection). Still, she makes the camera swoon, and makes her Hamburg romance more than a hamburger patty.

The Hummingbird Project

If you can’t find oil below your lawn or field, you might as well hope for a fiber optical cable tunnel, dug to zoom data in a straight line that cuts the delivery time of high-frequency trading data from Wall Street markets. After all, “16 milliseconds is one flap of a hummingbird’s wing,” as  dorky wizard of fiber optics Anton Zaleski says in The Hummingbird Project.” Unless you are a hummingbird, the tiny gained time means profitable millions!

Bald, blobby Anton (Alexander Skarsgard) is a nerdy work maniac who often ignores his lovable family. Brother Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg), a plumber’s son who doesn’t know how to fix a flat tire, is the obsessed entrepreneur determined to build a linear cyber tunnel from NYC to a massive electronics hub in Kansas. Both are vulnerable compulsives, Anton a geek squad unto himself, Vincent willing to delay cancer treatment so he can install the tunnel. Their big investor is less technical: “Don’t fuck us, Vinny.” Anton's ex-boss is biz witch Salma Hayek, as far from Frida Kahlo as she can get, building transmission towers to beat the brothers.

Scrawny Eisenberg, who seems to have fiber optics in his vocal cords to speed up dialog, and goofy Skarsgard, an amusingly driven dreamer, provide vivid moments. But director and writer Kim Nguyen is dealing with physics beyond common understanding, while connecting feelings and ideas like simple Lego blocks. There is an Amish farmer along the route, representing Ye Olde Native Virtue much as Hayek personifies Mad Modern Greed. This odd film starts to seem like a vintage ticker tape machine trying awfully hard to be digitally hip.      

SALAD (A List)

Ten Fine Movies of Invention and Science

With their star and discipline: Agora (Rachel Weisz, Greco-Roman science), The Aviator (Leonardo DiCaprio, aircraft design), Bombshell (Hedy Lamarr, spectrum technology), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (Edward G. Robinson, medical research), Hidden Figures (Henson-Monáe-Spencer, rocket math), Hugo (Ben Kingsley, cinema), The Imitation Game (Benedict Cumberbatch, computer decryption), The Magic Box (Robert Donat, film technology), Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge (Karolina Gruzska, radium physics) and Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender, personal computers).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Preparing for his movie debut at RKO, Orson Welles at 24 “went to film school” principally with the work of John Ford: “Using what André Bazin has called ‘invisible editing,’ Ford created poetic moments of mood with his camera. This continuous, seemingly effortless flow, scene to scene and within scenes, was what arrested Welles … He began to see the development of a nostalgia, a sentimentality, a romantic vision of history, that seemed to permeate all of the man’s films, the beginnings of what critic Andrew Sarris once called a cinema of memory, and Welles, perhaps unconsciously, wanted membership.” (From Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles. Making the supreme memory film, Citizen Kane, Welles would later say, “Ford was my teacher. My own style has nothing to do with his, but Stagecoach was my textbook.”)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Alec Guinness built surfaces to delve inside the character, as with artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth: “The paint-crusted clothes, choppy beard and recent-prison pallor were easy strokes. His seal of possession was the voiee, like rusty gears grinding in an old Thames mill, yet able to purr and seduce. His speech is ‘like air passing out of gravel,’ and from the gravel pit came unexpected modulations, and silences worthy of the fabled Tramp. Ian Christie noted that ‘Chaplin’s calculated clowning and faux-naïve sexuality may be one source.’ ” (From the Alec Guinness/Horse’s Mouth 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.

John Wayne found major stardom as Ringo in Stagecoach (United Artists, 1939; director John Ford, photography by Bert Glennon).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 148: 'The Best of Enemies,' 'Diane' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Best of Enemies and Diane)

The Best of Enemies

Best of Enemies was a swell title for 2015’s documentary about the snobby, cat-claw feud of writers Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. Now The Best of Enemies suits the directorial debut of writer Robin Bissell. He does it by the book (Osha Gray Davison’s is the source), using well-stitched plot seams and a history lesson not written in shiny crayon. If you don’t know about the 1971 school integration crisis in Durham, North Carolina, here’s your chance, delivered by an excellent cast.

Taraji P. Henson, 12 years beyond her saucy dish Vernell (“fine as frog’s hair”) in Talk to Me, is the buxom motor of protest Ann Atwater. Her ramrod fury at white racism finds a perfect lightning rod: Claiborne “C.P.” Ellis, the bantam-cock head of the Durham Klan. That means Sam Rockwell in high strut of prime, already Oscar-crowned by his rascal rube Dixon in Three Billboards. Slouching his lean body, slurping cornmeal dialog, casting foxy-yokel glances, C.P. is a nest of ill-educated insecurities, but no fool – he’s like the Last Gift of William Faulkner. As the story pivot he will learn to face his Dixie-dosed racism through empathy (and his resentment of the White Citizens Council squires who lord over his fellow rednecks). He and Ann head opposing sides of a biracial conciliation group forged by a brave black organizer (Babou Ceesay). Most whites clearly consider the effort a delaying tactic.

Over 133 minutes, the rooted atmosphere and solid pacing allow the characters to evolve. The one forcing touch is famous songs, to cue episodes (like Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” for a Klan terror shooting). The old class structure looms heavily over gas station manager C.P.’s near-poverty. His loyal wife (Anne Heche) doesn’t really care for the white-sheet gang, but she knows the Klan gives him status among larger males. Henson’s bold-eyed power remains humanly scaled, while Rockwell fulfills one of his best roles. His scene with a thoughtful Vietnam vet and his closing speech at the tense vote on integration are absolutely true, without any ham drippings. It happened, and it still resonates.

Diane

Mary Kay Place is the heart and soul of Diane. It’s been a long road since her cute, chipper Loretta on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Meg in The Big Chill. As Diane, Place at 70 gets the kind of crowner that Harry Dean Stanton found at 57 in Paris, Texas. This is no art triumph like that picture, but still a fully realized work. Critic Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut and A Letter to Elia) wrote it for Place, and directed with savvy, granular admiration. You can see Kazan roots in it, also bits of Cassavetes and Altman and Ken Loach. Jones and Place lace a double helix of intimacy and candor that movies seldom achieve, and without any  “chick flick” safety bumpers.

We plunge into Diane’s tired, aging life in some wintry-rainy New England town. A giver, she cares greatly for her gallant, dying friend Donna (Deirdre O’Connell). She frets about her sorta grown son Brian (Jake Lacy), who’s into his latest drug crisis, masking it badly, driving her half-crazy. Diane, while no saint, is devoted to helping the needy, and to funny chat sessions with a close-knit spread of very living people. This film might not win highly aesthetic critics, but they should see how every shot serves these people, their milieu and beat-up fortitude. As the junkie son, Lacy doesn’t go for sob appeal. O’Connell has a touch of an angel readying for takeoff, but also carries an old beef about Diane. There is a splendid small job by Andrea Martin, that hip bird of comedy on SCTV, still beaky and sharp-tongued, yet gazing at pal Diane with total, loving sympathy.

When Brian bunkers into born-again religion, hectoring his resistant mother, the movie wobbles but recovers its poise. In a wonderful scene, feeling her losses, Diane gets soused in a bar and dances alone to an old rock favorite. She feels nagged by guilt about a ruined marriage, the betrayal of a friend, and Brian’s judgments. The film doesn’t indulge in flashbacks to lay all that out for us, like soapy testimonials. Diane is neither drama nor documentary, but some sort of tonally superb hybrid. Place affirms her place, at last, among the greats of movie acting.   

SALAD (A List)

The salad is listless this week – but more to come!

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles’s ticket to rise, most potently in theater and film, most profitably in radio, was his amazingly supple voice. It declared “his prodigal gifts, speaking in complete sentences at age two, supposedly analyzing Nietzsche by ten, performing Shakespeare in his teens, staging the ‘voodoo Macbeth’ at 20. The preternaturally mature instrument helped enable the orphaned, 16-year-old, rather baby-faced Welles to literally talk his way into roles with Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Listen to the talk of an average teenage boy, even one who’s an actor, and ask yourself if anyone in their right mind would cast him in a commercial stage production as the evil Duke in Jew Süss, Welles’s first role at the Gate.” (From Farran Smith Nehme’s essay “The Voice of Orson Welles,” in the info booklet for Criterion’s blu-ray of The Magnificent Ambersons.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In 1960 ambush photographers got the glamor peg of a new name, paparazzi, from the frisky, furtive Paparazzo (Walter Santesso) in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. But the lens pest had long roots: “When Mark Twain visited England in 1907, Rudyard Kipling saw press cameras ‘click-clicking like gun locks.’ In 1920s London, Aldous Huxley noticed ‘newspapers men, ramping up and down like wolves.’ The definitive New York photo-prowler was Weegee (Arthur Fellig), ruthless noir scavenger of the hard-living and newly dead, often murdered. In 1933 James Cagney grinned and pounced in Picture Snatcher, its rhymed promotion anticipating Weegee: ‘He’ll stop at nothing for a shot/ At something sexy while it’s hot / Your sins to him are bread and butter/ He’s right behind you, lens and shutter.” (From the Marcello Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita 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.

Arnold Moss and Alfonso Bedoya are terrific Mexican villains in the danger-packed Border Incident (MGM, 1949; director Anthony Mann, photography by John Alton).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 147: 'Hotel Mumbai,' 'The Beach Bum' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Hotel Mumbai and The Beach  Bum)

Hotel Mumbai

Let us pull the grenade pin on the key thought about Hotel Mumbai: What’s the point of lavishly staging an epic true-life tragedy, if you’re going to reduce it to the grinding  tactics of an old Rambo or Death Wish, but minus the macho hero who alone makes such blowouts viable? Clearly this movie about the deadly jihadist attack (Nov. 26, 2008) on Mumbai’s historic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel had no hopes for the star glamour of Grand Hotel or the mothball charm of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It is a visceral autopsy of a nightmare, filmed with vivid realism but also the docu-drama mechanics of a lurid TV special. Anyone recall Nine Hours to Rama? That 1963 film stacked much more suspense (and context) about another Indian tragedy, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.

While fanaticism is on one side, in the rather small force of suicidal boy-men who think that shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is most great!”) is a combat strategy, stupidity remains more balanced. Never employing a camera shot he can’t repeat (partly because they were done by others long ago), director Anthony Maras indicates that the killers came with inadequate ordnance, a zeal for arson and poor language skills. They remain slavish to the phone orders of their death-cult leader but, weirdly, fail to take over the video security room. The mighty Taj exists in such a gilded bubble that on film it takes quite a while before those inside, despite TV and cellphones, to notice that the city is under savage attack at many points. The staff is amazingly loyal, yet there’s no armed security detail. Police hover outside, waiting for troops from distant Delhi (why none in Mumbai, the former Bombay that remains India’s chief port and financial center?).

The story is a gridlock of fear, of victims hiding, skulking, weeping, begging and dying. It has three positives: the fabled hotel (dating from 1903) suffers grandly; Dev Patel invests his engaging humanity in a Sikh waiter who finds movingly non-macho courage; and veteran Anupam Kher, as the Taj’s head chef, is a pillar of sense, dignity and service (“the guest is god”). Jason Isaacs is stuck playing a rich Russian boor whose key moment is to spit at a jihadist before biting his Achilles tendon. Reaching for a western market, Hotel Mumbai puts heavy focus on white guests, notably a handsome American architect (Armie Hammer), his very pale Indian wife, and their baby and nanny. Never probing deeply into anyone, never very informative about political context, the film simply hurls us into chaotic violence. Filmed in at least six previous versions, the Taj’s story here finds no better seventh.  

  

The Beach Bum

You can count on your little pinkies those viewers who will see Matthew McConaughey’s The Beach Bum and think back longingly to Charles Laughton in The Beachcomber (1938), to David Niven in The Little Hut (1957), to James Mason ogling teen beach-wow Helen Mirren in Age of Consent (1969). No, this soused, shambling comedy is for people who just want to get hammered stupid every day. Put this Florida seashell next to your ear, and you can hear a manatee belching.

From the way McCon says “Hey hey hey hey” to a kitten, we guess he is invoking his fabled “Alright alright alright” mantra, as party animal Wooderson in Dazed and Confused. But that guy was cool and smart. Slob Moondog is just a sponge faking hippie vibes (for the real retro on that, see Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice). Horny and buff-built, with a seaweedy crown of blond hair, he spouts inane poems. Isla Fisher as his spritzy, separated, still smitten wife adores him as a kind of gonzo-ganja Whitman (her cabana hamper must contain thin, flaking volumes of Rod McKuen). Moon dogs around with wealthy doper Lingerie (Snoop Dogg, the rap-pimp Slinky), and he has a jolly stooge agent (Jonah Hill, his bloated Southern accent making up for lost weight). As the wild “poet” hurls himself upon women like the Moby Dick of mashers, the film dilutes his obvious alcoholism by emphasizing canabis, bongs and “fun” beer (Pabst Blue Ribbon, crazy Dennis Hopper’s fave in Blue Velvet).

Depend on McConaughey’s foxy-dude charm and body lingo to deliver some amusement, but Harmony Korine’s script is a toy boat in a toilet. Russ Meyer and John Waters never fell to this. Crass larks lead to a wretched rehab sequence, where the beach bard hooks up with a sociopath (Zac Efron) and, clueless as a clam, simply goes along with his creepiness. Director Korine (Gummo, Kids, Trash Humpers) has packed and then popped a piñata for McConaughey’s midlife (49) crisis. This film is a dawg mooning its turd.    

SALAD (A List)

Tonic Free Spirits on Film

Gulley Jimson (Alec Guinness) in The Horse’s Mouth, Timothy “Speed” Levitch (as himself) in The Cruise, The Kid (Sam Rockwell) in Box of Moonlight, Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) in A Bigger Splash, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Alexis Zorba (Anthony Quinn) in Zorba the Greek, Sally Bowles (Julie Harris) in I Am a Camera, Charles Serking (Ben Gazzara) in Tales of Ordinary Madness, Randall P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Dude (Jeff Bridges) in The Big Lebowski, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole) in My Favorite Year, Doc Sportello (Joaquine Phoenix) in Inherent Vice, Jerry Baskin (Nick Nolte) in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Annie (Amanda Plummer) in Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Larry Poole (Bing Crosby) in Pennies from Heaven, and Samson Shillitoe (Sean Connery) in A Fine Madness.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Never yearning for movie stardom, and only once a big commercial star (as Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man), Orson Welles talked about the curious case of his (but even more Joseph Cotten’s) co-star in that film, Alida Valli: “She was the biggest star in Europe. She was huge during the fascist period, all through the war in Rome. Then Selznick destroyed her. He brought her to America to make a big star out of her here, thought he’d have another Bergman. (After Third Man scored he put her in) a terrible trial movie, Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case. Then something else terrible. She came back to Europe and nobody would hire her, they said ‘She can’t be any good. She failed in Hollywood.’ After that it was just a special appearance by Alida Valli.” (Welles to Henry Jaglom in My Lunches With Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

One of Matthew McConaughey’s best (and brief) roles is  stock trading shark Mark Hanna, the “insanely glib boss of new hustler Jordan Belfort (Leo DiCaprio) in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Impeccably suited in a skyscraper restaurant, he gazes upon the awed recruit like a mentoring vulture. He bulldozes him, ordering serial martinis, inhaling cocaine, defining the market as ‘a Fugazi, a wazi, a woozy, it’s fairy dust, it doesn’t exist,’ except to suck money from clients. Hanna’s menu: greed, whores, drugs and metronomic masturbation. He is like a mad merger of Rene Auberjonois’s avian nut in Brewster McCloud and Brad Dexer’s chanting senator who stuns an election party in Shampoo.” (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club 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.

Life unfreezes for engineer Al (John Turturro) with The Kid (Sam Rockwell) in Box of Moonlight (Lakeshore Entertainment 1996; director Tom DiCillo, photographed by Paul Ryan).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.