Nosh 12: 'Krisha,' 'Marguerite' and 'City of Gold'

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of Krisha, Marguerite and City of Gold)

Krisha is not one of the gummy feel-goods for seniors. At the start, Krisha is a mask of ravaged endurance. By the end, she is devoid of cover. In her 60s, Krisha goes to her sister’s comfy Southern California home for Thanksgiving, facing a family rich in resentment of her busted marriage, alcoholism, pills, rampant insecurity. Her grown son won’t even look at her.

The cynical husband of Krisha’s sister, played by scene-grabber Bill Wise, uncorks Nicholson-ian zingers (fireballs like “I eat leather and shit saddles”). Dogs run around, underscoring the family tensions. When Krisha suffers a humiliating turkey moment, everyone appears to be considering how to carve her up. Everyone occupies an ego cage, but only Krisha is truly alone.

Trey Edward Shilts wrote, directed and plays the son. Employing his aunt Krisha Fairchild and a few other relatives, he has carved a digital bar of soap with great intimacy. He found just the moment to unleash Nina Simone’s “Just in Time,” and his movie recalls, in its hunger for thespian catharsis, actor-loving auteur John Cassavetes. Fairchild, using every mood and unflattering close-up as if cashing in a bucket of career tokens, ranks close to Cassavetes spouse and star Gena Rowlands. Krisha is almost a “reality show” pilot, yet with the cutes and compromises removed, exposing moments so vulnerable that you may wish to turn away, but can’t.

Director-writer Xavier Giannoli floods Marguerite with beautiful music, as if to emphasize that Baroness Marguerite Dumont can’t sing (echo of Groucho’s Margaret Dumont, and also the chanson “Si Tu Vuex Marguerite” in Renoir’s The Grand Illusion). Though her estate’s peacock screeches better high notes, Marguerite is drunk on music. At lavish private performances, invited listeners cringe, suppressing laughs because she sounds like a constipated parrot from a tone-deaf planet. In 1920s Paris, her public demolition of “La Marseillaise” provokes a scandal.

Somewhat inspired by fabled awful singer Florence Foster Jenkins (whom Meryl Streep portrays in a coming movie), the film is wonderfully populated. While Marguerite’s husband (subtle André Marcon) squirms in embarrassment, and comforts himself with a mistress, her huge black servant (formidable, Congo-born Denis Mpunga) sustains her mad fantasy, like Erich von Stroheim did for Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. A fading Italian tenor (funny Michel Fau) is bribed to prepare her for a public recital. Though he doesn’t say “Some people can sing, some people can’t,” like exasperated opera coach Fortunio Bonanova in Citizen Kane, he does prompt her to sing “like a Chinese whore.”

Marguerite has a Parisian taste for overstated concepts, but Giannoli’s almost satirical approach finds a poignant, sobering metronome: Catherine Frot as delicately dreamy Marguerite. She cannot hear her vocal sound (a case of psychic ear wax), but her love of great music surpasses deluded egotism. In her head, her rendition of Mozart’s aria “Queen of the Night” is sublime. Frot makes us want to hear what she does – at least in the shower.      

Not since Jiro Dreams of Sushi has food been so humanly garnished as in City of Gold. Laura Gabbert’s documentary salute to prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold. A Los Angeles native, Gold raises small,, often ethnic eateries to fame and profit (dining pundits can impact more potently than movie critics). Sampling dishes on repeat visits, Gold opens up a vast diaspora of nabes, cuisines and kitchen crews. He is an aesthetic anthropologist, a gourmand whose taste buds of  reflective curiosity devour Ethiopian banquets, glorious pastas, Oaxacan grasshoppers, Thai pepper dishes that napalm the tongue. Gold's romantic, cruising feel for L.A.’s ugly-duckling beauty is the film’s dominant spice, and we stuff it all in.  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In 1941, in an elevator at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, Citizen Welles met up with Citizen Hearst and said: “Mr. Hearst, my name is Orson Welles …A movie of mine called Citizen Kane is opening tonight here in town, at the Geary Theater on Mason St. If you’d care to attend I’d be glad to have some tickets sent to your room.’ Hearst ignored the speaker. The elevator doors stopped, the doors opened, and he stepped out. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Hearst,’ Welles couldn’t resist calling out, as the doors closed. ‘Kane would have accepted!” (From John Evangelist Walsh’s vivid, under-sung Walking Shadows.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

After Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, Kay Thompson topped Funny Face: “Loud, tall and long-jawed, Kay at 48 was a queen bee thrilled by her royal jelly. She had dropped the name Cathy Fink, gotten a nose job, and become a swing band canary. After MGM service, she left to form an act with Andy Williams and his brothers, and they dazzled fans into a cult. She educated the Williams boys, and in his memoir Andy would say, ‘whatever it was, I loved everything about her.” (From the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, coming next month).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Kay Thompson in Funny Face, 1957 (Paramount Pictures; director Stanley Donen,  cinematographer Ray June)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 11: 'My Golden Days' & More

By David Elliott

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

 

APPETIZER (review of ‘My Golden Days’)

The word “cinema,” still so resonant in Paris, means very little in American multiplexes. There, Paris is mainly a site for whiz-bang thrillers and soft pleasures like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. A film import like My Golden Days, a compact cinematheque of nostalgia, throbbing with vitality, gets tucked into small theaters, mostly seen by aging fans of a French New Wave far past nouvelle.  

Director and writer Arnauld Desplechin’s new movie overlaps, in the protagonist’s name and the main setting (provincial Roubaix, Desplechin’s  native town), his previous work. In this excitingly complicated carousel of themes and allusions, Desplechin favorite Mathieu Amalric is Paul, a French anthropologist recently back from long residence in Tajikistan. The lonely middle-ager is ambushed by memories of his great, first love of the late ’80s and early ’90s. His inner candle for lovely Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet) flames up again, in flashback. Amalric is stuck doing book-end service, once handsome Quentin Dolmaire takes over as young Paul. He finally gets a scene of angry summation, the last gasp of futile heartbreak.

My Golden Days is about the teen Paul’s driven, awkward obsession with blond, peachy Esther. The sexy actors spin like silk their febrile feelings and vulnerable vanities, the brittle pretensions of bright young provincials who aspire to Paris. Esther reads to Paul in classic Greek. He improvises a blithe valentine of love as they stand in front of a Hubert Robert landscape of Rome. There is also a Greco-Joycean conceit: Paul’s last name is Dedalus. Doing cinematic archeology, with admirable fluency, Desplechin and cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky plunder the old New Wave storehouse of jump cuts, split screens, circular iris shots, solemn narration a la Truffaut, Godardian frissons of playful quotation.

The Hitchcock echoes include a furtive, daring sequence in the Soviet Union, though Paul finding there his Dostoevskian “double” never adds up to more than a quirky riff of irony. More crucial are the roots in Truffaut’s romantic marvel Jules et Jim, although Esther’s decline from witty hauteur, as she becomes a moody love sponge, is hardly up to Jeanne Moreau. Nobody tweets or texts. Being blessedly pre-Web, the lovers write fervent letters almost as if they were back in the 18^th century. Their dangerous liaison (Esther’s mother denounces her as a whore, Paul’s jealous pal beats him up) achieves the ache of a love fated for nostalgia, casting more than a few Proustian rays.  

SALAD (A List)
For what it’s worth – a sip of absinthe? – My 12 Favorite French Films:

The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939), Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1963),  Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971), La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1936), The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953), A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956), The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956), Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), French Can-Can (Jean Renoir, 1955), Le Feu Follet (Louis Malle, 1963) and Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986).
 

And these, an extra dozen, are each in a class by itself: The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo,  1966), Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946), Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945), Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Get Our Your Handkerchiefs (Bertrand Blier, 1978), Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), Menilmontant (Dmitri Kirsanov, 1924), Mon Oncle d’Amerique (Alain Resnais, 1980), The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927), The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1970) and Zazie dans le Métro (Louis Malle, 1960).
 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Citizen Welles’s most memorable film speech was one that he wrote for his charming scoundrel Harry Lime, in The Third Man: “You know what the fellow said: in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michlangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Years later Orson told Peter Bogdanovich that “when the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks. They all come from the Schwarzwald in Bavaria.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Bogdanovich.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
On the Gray Line tour bus in New York, director Bennett Miller noticed that “the ‘blank stares’ of some tourists showed that they ‘they didn’t see the charismatic soul’ of Tim Levitch. Through 150 hours of footage Levitch stayed brave, depth-charging himself. Here was a traveler who would have gladly joined Carol (Joanne Woodward) on her cruise in The Fugitive Kind to ‘go jukin’ on the Dixie Highway and reveal ‘just how lewd a lewd vagrant can be’ … Levitch could, like Charlie Parker, loose the goose of improvisation and set the wild bird free.” (From the Tim Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, soon to be published.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

 Timothy Levitch in The Cruise (Artisan Entertainment; director and cinematographer, Bennett Miller)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 10: 'Eye in the Sky,' 'I Saw the Light' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (reviews of ‘Eye in the Sky’ and ‘I Saw the Light’)

Alan Rickman was great even as a one-scene hotel clerk in Smiley’s People, then fully great as a smug villain (Die Hard), a dour swain (Sense and Sensibility ), a goofy space man (Galaxy Quest), a ghostly dreamboat (Truly, Madly, Deeply), a sinister master of magic (the Harry Potters), etc. Rickman imposed his moody power with a silky, stretched, often baleful voice, his wit could purr charm or fell like a guillotine slicing ice. Eye in the Sky is dedicated to him (he died Jan. 14), and his Gen. Benson, so bunkered in melancholy but ruthless in duty, is a wonderful curtain drop on a fascinating talent.

The British general oversees a drone operation reliant on American technology, and he is balanced by that other pillar of English acting authority, Helen Mirren, She’s Powell, the mission commander near London, though the drone’s “pilot” is a young Yank (Aaron Paul) based in Nevada. Powell is eager to kill a turncoat Brit plotting terror slaughter in Kenya. She is willing to bend the rules for it, but higher-up Benson must deal directly with nervous politicians seeking legal cover on slippery ethical slopes (and with enough voyeurism to satisfy any Hitchcock film). Rickman has, to perfection, a military man’s suspicious regard for civilian authority.

To the credit of writer Guy Hibbert and director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), it is humanly revealing, not just cloying, that the escalation to a kill-or-not decision pivots on a little Kenyan girl (Aisha Takow) and a brave Somali agent (Barkhad Abdi of Capt. Phillips). Yes, it’s Screenwriting 101 when the girl’s love of a humble hula hoop (an offense to Islamic fanatics) balances Benson’s purchase of a lavish doll for his grandchild. The enemy remains essentially faceless, but the faces on our side do not hide behind astonishing technology (including a spy-cam that mimics a flying beetle). Vivid, real-time suspense, not just video-game kicks, involves stricken choices and complex feelings. Rickman and Mirren, those national treasures, were never more internationally resonant.

Does anyone recall George Hamilton’s 1964 portrayal of singer Hank Williams in Your Cheatin’ Heart? Will anyone in 2068 recall Tom Hiddleston’s Williams in I Saw the Light? The best Williams songs will endure, until country music is paved over by suburban sprawl. In singing those famous songs, Hiddleston has (despite criticism from Hank Williams III and other purists) gotten close to the essence, his voice and heart rooted in down-home feeling. Given that Hiddleston is another brainy Brit (a classics wiz at Cambridge), his performance is a credibly devoted tribute to the short-lived Southern king of what used to be called redneck, hillbilly or honky-tonk music (urban snarkers called it “shitkicker music”).

Writer, director, producer Marc Abraham has forged a labor of love, but sadly his labor grinds the love. Abraham, who made the small, appealing Flash of Genius with Greg Kinnear, offers pain-filled  songs more eloquent than long passages of malaise: Hank drinking, raging, smoking, chugging pills, suffering from spina bifida. His holy grail, the Grand Ole Opry, barely interrupts the down-spiral for him, his band and his great love and first wife, Audrey, well-acted by Elizabeth Olsen. I Saw the Light lacks style, fresh tangents, and freedom from the fan piety suggested by its come-to-Jesus title. Lean, vivid and commited, Hiddleston goes beyond his dark marcho narcissism in The Deep Blue Sea, but this plodding script never leads him to the jambalaya.

SALAD (A List)

My take on the Twelve Best Portraits of Real Musicians, roughly in order of quality: Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter; Geoffrey Rush as David Helfgott, Shine; James Cagney as George M. Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy; Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose; Gary Busey as Buddy Holly, The Buddy Holly Story; Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious, Sid and Nancy; Kurt Russell as Elvis Presley, Elvis; Angela Bassett as Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do With It; Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea; Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist; Jessica Lange as Patsy Cline, Sweet Dreams, and F. Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri, Amadeus. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

From the start, the Welles vision was “ironical, urbane, as lordly as the thundering voice and as bemused as the arching eyebrows. It drew upon the passions of tragedy and the trickster zest of magic. OrsonWelles loved film because it, like his god Shakespeare, was so consumingly open to life, so potentially equal to his own appetite. He was in thrall to the way that image and sound, film and theater and radio and magic, can be fused in the startling purity of a dream. To get that deep-focal dream intensity, he shattered the box frame, used oblique angles, played boldly with twists of pace, pulse and mood. But to a public raised on the tasty and often trite recipes of ordinary movies, his art can seem ‘arty’ and cold.” (From my 1987 attempt to get a handle on Welles, in the San Diego Union.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As a rising star in the 1950s, Anthony Perkins felt shadowed by his private self: “Perkins had been inanely touted as Paramount’s James Dean, although his ‘rebel’ streak consisted mainly of walking barefoot down Sunset Blvd. Like Dean he enjoyed manipulating gossip dragons Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, who saw a nice lad of opaque, studio-guarded sexuality. Tony triumphed as Gary Cooper’s scrupulous Quaker son in Friendly Persuasion, 1956. ‘Coop’ could read the clues, and mentioned that Perkins ‘might do well to spend a summer on a ranch.” (From the Perkins/The Trial chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, to be published soon.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Anthony Perkins in The Trial (Astor Pictures, 1962; director Orson  Welles, cinematographer Edmond Richard)

 

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below 
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Nosh 9: 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,' 'Knight of Cups' & More

By David Elliott

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

 

APPETIZER (reviews of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and Knight of Cups)

Nothing occupies the modern film industry more than the redundant “art” of recycling. Here are two new examples, one amusingly corny, the other an artistic dead end.

After she made My Big Fat Greek Wedding in 2002, writer and self-made star Nia Vardalos could have sat on her Greek laurels forever. Her comedy made $250 million. After 14 years, she unleashes another “Opa!” for the Portakolos family of Chicago: Toula (Vardalos, still a pleasure); her WASPy catch as husband, Ian (John Corbett, still a genial hunk); their adorable teen daughter Paris (delightful Elena Kampouris); Toula’s enjoyably pushy mom Maria (Lainie Kazan, her role and presence both enlarged); Maria’s husband Gus (basset-eyed Michael Constantine, still an endearingly pesty grump). Add Andrea Martin as Aunt Voula, who still has the best comic timing, and enough other relatives to staff at least three sitcom spinoffs and a Greek sailing expedition to Milwaukee.

No need to think much here, but it does occur to us that a culture which gave the world so much beauty has perhaps never before been associated with so much bad taste (what, no gilded nude statues of Michael Dukakis and Spiro T. Agnew?). And the sweet little nod to a gay couple is not exactly an adequate statement on what the prim Victorians called “Greek love.” MBFGW 2 is like diving into an Olympic pool of re-baked moussaka (the crunchy bits are the laughs). Under all the jolly loudness of its family, uniting again for another wedding, we hear the nostalgic murmur of a wheezing “Opa!,” the last ethnic sunset of Zorba the Greek.

No moviemaker since Stanley Kramer has laid down more golden tiles of heavy, searching themes than Terrence Malick. Kramer was an industry insider, but director-writer Malick is more of an A-list maverick, a visionary prowling the hills like a princely coyote. He has won some biz-town respect (for Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Tree of Life) and some sizeable budgets (The Thin Red Line, The New World), but there is always the aura of a shaman who can stare at a rock and see a mandala.

Malick has finally zeroed in on Los Angeles, and made a zero: Knight of Cups. True to title, there is a Tarot reader, babbling like Hollywood’s finest old gypsy crone, Maria Ouspenskaya. Also an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, a lusty pole dancer and a wounded pelican. Mostly there are streaming, almost tranced vistas of Greater L.A, which is where hypnotic becomes sedative. Nearly all the sights are familiar (the towering palms of Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip, swank showcase homes, the river control channels, Venice beach). Malick probably never imagined that his glowing pictorials would often remind us of better movies which used the same locations.

It is dodo crazy to hire such a daring actor as Christian Bale to impersonate driftwood. As melancholy screenwriter Rick, his almost toneless voice-overs arrive like solemn whimpers. As his angry dad, Brian Dennehy appears to be burying the last remains of his acclaimed Willy Loman. Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman play Rick’s lovers as if searching for an invisible script in the air. Malick keeps returning to water elements, but Paolo Sorrentino found more poetry with two Roman walks along the Tiber in The Great Beauty. Sofia Coppola’s stripped-down Somewhere, about a bored young star (Stephen Dorff), nailed down the glam-blues of L.A. far more smartly than this empty Cups.

SALAD (A List)

Whatever its worth in deflated drachmas, here is my list of Ten Top Greek and Greek-Themed Films: Zorba the Greek (Cacoyannis, 1964), Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969), Ulysses’s Gaze (Angelopoulos, 1995), The Trojan Women (Cacoyannis, 1968), Agora (Amenabar, 2010), High Season (Peploe, 1987), Pascali’s Island (Deardon, 1988), Eternity and a Day (Angelopoulos, 2008), Ulysses (Camerini, 1954) and Troy (Petersen, 2004). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Orson’s great hero was Shakespeare, yet without glazed piety. As critic Brooks Atkinson noticed in the 1936 Harlem production of Macbeth: “The witches scenes from Macbeth have always worried the life out of the polite, tragic stage. The grimaces of the hags and the garish make-believe of the flaming cauldron have bred more disenchantment than anything else that Shakespeare wrote. But ship the witches into the rank and fever-stricken jungle, stuff a gleaming, naked witch doctor into the cauldron, hold up Negro masks in the baleful light – and there you have a witches’ scene that is logical and stunning and a triumph of the theater art.” (From James Naremore’s brilliant book The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The one charismatic rival of Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935) is the family’s hired cook, Malena, the “ancestor of Octavia Spencer’s payback pie in The Help. Cramming surly, sullen rage into every ‘Yas’m,’ Malena is a racial comedy gargoyle, funnier then than now. And superbly played. Hattie McDaniel, abundant (and abundantly employed) stated her reality principle: ‘Why should I complain about making seven thousand dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn’t, I’d be making seven dollars a week being one.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, coming soon.)  

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray in Alice Adams (RKO Pictures; director George Stevens, cinematographer Robert De Grasse)

For previous Flix Nosh posts, scroll below.

Nosh 8: 'Pee-wee's Big Holiday' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (review of Pee-wee’s Big Holiday)
Actor Paul Reubens’s arrest for indecent exposure, in a Sarasota theater in 1991, sparked a media storm that was like a juvenile joke on the old, sordid carnival of celebrity scandals. On leave from his popular, cultish gig as infantile but weirdly hip Pee-wee Herman, Reubens had gone to the local theater as himself. His dazed mug shot, in beard and T-shirt, was a career crusher. Crazed moralists clearly didn’t share the ironic recognition of some fans: that the winkingly suggestive but sexually neutered Pee had, at least, discovered masturbation. Reubens’s little empire collapsed.

In 1978 he had created Herman as a skit figure, who went viral (in pre-Web terms). Fans loved his silly, goof-dork version of their lost childhoods. He hired Tim Burton to perfect Pee-wee’s style package, and in 1985 their elegant comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure earned six times its $7 million budget (a 1988 sequel flopped, its Big Top humor having reached an apex when Chaplin made 1928’s The Circus). The saddest scandal victim was Pee-wee’s Playhouse, after five TV seasons of inventive, whimsically edgy comedy that kids loved (so did their parents, from a different angle).

Reubens, in and out of Pee-wee, has had many gigs since, including a Broadway show that rallied diehard fans. In the Netflix production Pee-wee’s Big Holiday he is, at 63, twice his age when he made Big Adventure. Despite great make-up and some digital nip-tuck, he seems both ageless and a bit baked (hints of midriff bulge, a touch of sag in profile). Director John Lee is no master of quirky revels like Burton, but he shows devotion with this genial throwback. The hero’s obscure sexuality remains hidden somewhere in the seam line where Herman merges with Reubens (who might as well, by now, change his first name to Paul-wee or Pee-Paul).

This time, the dapper little guy has a bromantic but innocent crush on massive Joe Mangianello, the HBO werewolf star and Magic Mike beef-dish. In Herman’s cozy Ike Era town, Joe reveals that he shares enthusiasms just as childish. Their fast bond lures Pee-wee to New York, which doesn’t work for him a whole lot better than for Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Still, the fun includes a snappy send-up of the  opening of On the Town, and before NYC another retro bundle has Pee-wee fending off aggressive hick chicks, like Tony Perkins nervously afflicted by similar cornballs in Friendly Persuasion. The episode of Herman making balloon fart-music sounds for Amish yokels achieves real purity of Pee.

Big Holiday provides overdue compensation for the cheesy scandal, that rather asinine fit of hysteria. There are some flat patches and the subversive streak is fairly anemic. I miss Pee-wee’s bike! But the soft laffs and numerous chuckles include the funny return of Diane Salinger, who was sexy Simone in the 1985 film. The new movie is a fond smile, like coming upon a Pee-wee doll that you lost years ago in the attic. You pick it up and giggle.    

SALAD (A List)

As usual there was debate about the latest top Oscar winner, though Spotlight was a good choice (if not, to my taste, better than Brooklyn, The Martian or the un-nominated Joy, Carol and Trumbo). Oscar has made plenty of mistakes, and as a sample here are 20 Best Pictures (and the Better Films They Beat):

You Can’t Take It With You (over Grand Illusion, 1938), Rebecca (over The Grapes of Wrath, 1940), How Green Was My Valley (over Citizen Kane, 1941), Mrs. Miniver (over The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942), Going My Way (over Double Indemnity, 1944), Gentleman’s Agreement (over Great Expectations, 1947), Hamlet (over Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948), All About Eve (over Sunset Boulevard, 1950), My Fair Lady (over Dr. Strangelove, 1964), In the Heat of the Night (over Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), Rocky (over Taxi Driver, 1976), Ordinary People (over Raging Bull, 1980), Chariots of Fire (over Atlantic City, 1981), Out of Africa (over Prizzi’s Honor, 1985), Forrest Gump (over Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, 1994), Braveheart (over Sense and Sensibility, 1995), A Beautiful Mind (over Gosford Park, 2001), Million Dollar Baby (over Sideways, 2004 ), Crash (over Capote, 2005) and Slumdog Millionaire (over Milk, 2008). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In “Raising Kane,” her flawed but hugely readable 1971 essay on Citizen Kane, Pauline Kael had this to say about young Citizen Orson: “What I had once enjoyed but now found almost mysteriously beautiful was Orson Welles’s performance. An additional quality of old movies is that people can be seen as they once were … Many years later, Welles remarked, ‘Like most performers I prefer a live audience to that lie-detector full of celluloid.’ Maybe his spoiled-baby face was just too nearly perfect for the role, and he knew it, and knew the hostile humor that lay behind (writer Herman) Mankiewicz’s  putting so much of him in the role of Hearst, the braggart self-publicist.” (From The Citizen Kane Book, also found in Kael’s compendium For Keeps).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Nobody packed more versatile creativity into his movie breakout years than Alec Guinness. His finest role until The Horse’s Mouth was master thief “Professor” Marcus in Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing gothic The Ladykillers, in 1956: “His genius is foiled by an almost oblivious old doily (Katy Johnson) and, huge scarf trailing, buck teeth protruding, he is like a William F. Buckley vampire (closer to home: critic Kenneth Tynan). Devilishly sardonic, infallibly detailed, too refined for camp but too mordant for simple chuckles, he is perfection. Poor Tom Hanks got stuck with doing the pointless Coen Bros. remake.” (From the Guinness/Horse’s Mouth chapter in my book Starlight Rising, coming soon.)  

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers (Lionsgate; director Alexander Mackendrick, cinematographer Otto Heller)

For previous Flix Nosh posts, scroll below.

Nosh 7: 'Embrace of the Serpent,' 'Room' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (Reviews of  Embrace of the Serpent and Room)
Jungle films are usually dense with hot, humid colors. Embrace of the Serpent, from Colombian director and writer Ciro Guerra, has a look of impeccably engraved silver, its black and white images of the upper Amazon basin giving the story a memorial glow, a shimmer of enraptured lamentation.

The star, both a superb camera object and a fully present actor, is Nilbio Torres as Karamakate, a virtual 'last of the Mohicans' to his tiny, dying tribe. He is a young, wandering, heartsick shaman, a remnant of the ecological wisdom of an Amazonia ravaged by rubber exploitation and colonial Catholicism. In1909 he grudgingly helps a deeply ill, German ethnographer (Jan Bijvoet) to find a rare plant that has curative and hallucinogenic properties. The searchers bond through the virile, often accusing pride of the shaman and the vulnerability of the scientist, who hauls along his precious collection like a millstone of cultural guilt.

When the Indian says things like "All your science leads to violence" we detect the heavy cargo of Universal Significance. Guerra doubles down on that, jumping the story ahead 40 years (with different actors) to the old, lonely, bitter Karamakate, who guides a haughty young scientist deeper into the shrinking forest. As the two stories twin in overlap we get more lessons in brutal white imperialism. At times, Serpent is a snake engorging a prey too stuffed with big ideas for lucid digestion.

At its best echoing Aguirre, Wrath of God and Apocalypse Now, at its worst recalling the slacker Dennis Hopper bits in the later film (and Hopper's cracked South American vision The Last Movie), this picture maintains the magnetic allure of themes that seem both timely and timeless. The final, revelatory head-trip, on a holy mountain, is a little limp. But by then you're either hooked or you have slumped into slumber.

There was surprise last month when young Brie Larson took the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Room. I saw it later and was disappointed. Larson plays an Akron mom, abducted and kept in a drab shed locked down by Nick, the creep who drops in almost every night for some forced sex and intimidation. The extra torment is that her son by him, now 5, thinks the room is life, with the larger world reduced to a blurry TV and a small skylight.

Lenny Abrahamson's movie, with its mood-dripping claustrophobia and TV-scaled realism, veers into trauma-therapy soap (with modest appearances by Joan Allen and William H. Macy as relatives). Downplaying her prettiness, Larson is quite effective, yet
most of the expressive power is from Jacob Tremblay as the imaginative boy. He certainly has visiting rights to that Oscar. Even better, pass the gilded baldie to Jennifer Lawrence for her exciting, surefire wok in Joy, or to Cate Blanchett for her immaculate subtlety in Carol.

SALAD (A List)
The recent death (Feb. 28) of George Kennedy brought to mind a rich memory. No, not his amusing Oscar role in Cool Hand Luke, but his big Herman Scobie in Charade, terrifying Audrey Hepburn with his industrial-strength hook hand and almost dispatching Cary Grant off a Paris roof. In his honor ...

My Favorite Movie Villains: Eddie Albert, Attack!; Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men; Alfonso Bedoya, Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Steve Buscemi, Fargo; Bette Davis, The Little Foxes; Dan Duryea, Ride Clear of Diablo; Ben Gazarra, The Strange One; Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, The Maltese Falcon; Alec Guinness, Oliver Twist; Bob Gunton, The Shawshank Redemption; Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet; John Hurt, 44-Inch Chest; Jeremy Irons, Reversal of Fortune; Samuel L. Jackson, Jackie Brown; Ben Johnson, One-Eyed Jacks; Leopoldine Konstantin, Notorious; Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate; Charles Laughton, Mutiny on the Bounty; George Macready, Paths of Glory; Lee Marvin, Seven Men From Now; James Mason, North by Northwest; Ted De Corsia, Crime Wave; Robert Mitchum, Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter; Agnes Moorhead, Dark Passage; Jack Palance, Shane; Parnell Roberts, Ride Lonesome; Robert Ryan, Billy Budd and Crossfire; George Sanders, All About Eve; George C. Scott, The Hustler; Conrad Veidt, Casablanca; John Vernon, Point Blank; Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; J.T. Walsh, Breakdown; Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds, and Orson Welles, The Trial. And, of course, the Dark Lord himself: Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort, Harry Potter. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
I always thought that the black singer's "picnic" song in Citizen Kane was a simple fragment contrived for the movie. In fact in 1940 Citizen Welles went "to see Nat 'King' Cole (and his trio) playing at the Radio Room, the club across the street from NBC in Hollywood. Orson went away humming Cole's version of 'This Can't Be Love' ... (He) developed it into something else entirely: an extended interlude of carousing picnickers serenaded by Cee Pee Johnson's ensemble, performing a louche-sounding pastiche of Cole's song ... 'I kind of based the whole thing around that song." (From Patrick McGilligan's fine book Young Orson)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
"I had been hooked on Arbus's art for years, but it took Fur to open for me Patricia Bosworth's great Diane Arbus. Inspired by her book, the movie became its poetic distillate. A ledge-walker, Fur never loses poise. 'I don't see Fur imitating life as a bio-pic might,' remarked actor Jane Alexander, because 'if you're going to talk about the creative spirit of somebody, what better way to go than nto the realm of the fantastical, magical world of her mind." (From the Fur/Nicole Kidman chapter of my book Starlight Rising, coming soon from Luminare Press.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it's a distillation.

Nicole Kidman and Ty Burrell in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Picturehouse; director Steven Shainberg, cinematographer Bill Pope)

For previous Flix Nosh posts, scroll down.

Nosh 6: 'Son of Saul' & More

By David Elliott

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

APPETIZER (Review of Son of Saul)
The Hungarian film Son of Saul, having won the Cannes festival's top jury prize last summer, recently took the foreign film Oscar. The victory prompted from director Laszlo Nemes one of the more candid comments ever sparked by an Oscar: "It can be a poisoned gift ... maybe I'll never make a normal film again." And another from his star, Geza Rohrig, who called the Hollywood ceremony "not my world ... a near-clinical case of idiocy." If that sounds a bit ungrateful, it is also refreshingly sane.

Not a "normal film," Son of Saul is the first undoubtedly great movie I've seen since The Great Beauty two years ago. It is hard to take and impossible not to take seriously. Saul Auslander (Rohrig) is a Jewish worker in a Sonderkommando unit of men made to do the soul-crushing work at a Nazi Hungarian death camp, herding other Jews into gas rooms and open pits, coal-stoking the crematoria, stripping valuables for the kapos (overseers). For the Nazis the Jews are "pieces," raw material for looting.

Nemes shot almost every scene quite close to Saul (as a close-up film this rivals 2013's Locke), and his turbulent surroundings often turn blurry. In a maelstrom of fear, exhaustion, despair and hopeless empathy, the slave workers are "bearers of secrets," condemned to short service. Saul's dazed humanity awakens when a boy briefly survives gassing, but is then killed. He seeks to find a rabbi to recite kaddish over the body. This bewilders everyone else, but the mad mission is Saul's raft of moral sanity.

Nemes never tightly nails down Saul's orthodoxy or his precise relation to the boy and a woman in the camp. As a slave revolt becomes a sideline to his quest, Rohrig's fine, harried face never reaches for big effects. That is central to the story's rise above familiar formula. After Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift got all expressive in Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961, so sincerely translating Jewish suffering into an Oscar derby, Holocaust acting never fully recovered.

Possibly no other Shoah drama on film has been this present, this immersed in personal hell and crucified choice. The fiercely subjective style echoes Sokorov's Mother and Son, and the great battle scenes of Welles (Chimes at Midnight), Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) and Peckinpah (Cross of Iron).  The ending struck me as a bit too "poetic," but why quibble? Compared to this amazing vision, the popular vampire, zombie and android movies are just more popcorn at the plex.

SALAD (A List)
What does the word "best" mean, regarding a Holocaust film? The barbed question leads to thorny answers, but here is my selection of the Twelve Best Holocaust Movies: A Film Unfinished (Hersonski, 2010), Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955), Son of Saul (Nemes, 2015), In Darkness (Holland, 2010), Schindler's List (Spielberg, 1993), Lacombe, Lucien (Malle, 1974), The Pianist (Polanski, 2002), The Wannsee Conference (Schirk, 1984), Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), The Quarrel (Cohen, 1991), The Truce (Rosi, 1997) and Hotel Terminus (Ophuls, 1988).  Honorary mention, for so credibly bending the prison action genre: Escape From Sobibor (Gold, 1987).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Like many moviemakers, Citizen Welles esteemed France's supreme director, Jean Renoir: "His friends were without number and we all loved him as Shakespeare was loved, 'this side idolatry.' Let's give him the final word: 'To the question 'Is the cinema an art?' my answer is 'What does it matter?' You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix. Art is making." (Orson Welles, interview, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 18, 1979)

ENTREE (Starlight Rising)
Jackie Brown became Pam Grier's great comeback, and Quentin Tarantino had, like Welles, a debt to Renoir: "How fervently the boy Tarantino had savored her 20s prime as 'queen of blaxploitation.' Pam put on that tiara with The Big Doll House in 1971 and said, 'I took on a statuesque demeanor, clean-faced but no makeup, and gave off the aura of I'm not here for the usual bullshit' ... Tarantino left his heroine off the screen for 23 minutes to introduce other figures, because 'I treat actors as stars, and stars as actors.' Tarantino's creative yeast was Jean Renoir's dictum that everyone has their reasons, and like Renoir he is not prone to heavy judgments." (From my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, coming soon from Luminare Press.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it's a distillation.

Pam Grier in Jackie Brown (Miramax Films; director Quentin Tarantino, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro)