DER SPINNEWAGON

The Wife, The Kid and I spent last weekend in Palm Springs, for the annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. More about that later, but…

Monster-of-the-Week: …we also saw this splendid arachnid…

…repurposed from a Bug into a bug.

THE BALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

He’s been a natty and impressively businesslike 007, he’s dutifully played supporting parts in stuff like Mrs. Doubtfire and The Mirror Has Two Faces, and he’s been superb in a couple of leading roles, notably The Tailor of Panama. He even holds the distinction, in a cast full of embarrassments, of having given the most embarrassing performance in Mamma Mia!

Yet at some level I’m not sure that Pierce Brosnan has ever completely shaken the initial image we’ve had of him, as a pleasantly suave romantic-comedy lightweight, on TV’s Remington Steel. His turn in writer-director Susanne Bier’s Danish film, titled Love Is All You Need in English, could change that, however—if enough people see it.

Or, on the other hand, maybe not. Even if the movie, opening this weekend at Harkins Camelview, was a hit, Brosnan might not get the acclaim he deserves for this performance. He plays the role of a bereaved widower with such honorable restraint and low-key balance, such a lack of histrionics, that his excellence might get overlooked.

Brosnan is Philip, a high-powered expat produce broker in Copenhagen. It’s 26 years since the death of his wife, but Philip is still furious about it, and Brosnan manages to make us feel that anger without ever resorting to actorish telegraphing. He doesn’t grit his teeth or narrow his eyes; he’s too accustomed to his fury for that. It’s just there, in the faintly rising tension in his voice, in the little smile that you often see on somebody when they’re about to explode.

His vents his rage through belittling insults and brutal honesty, heavy on the brutality, to his employees. When hairdresser Ida (Trine Dyrholm) backs into his car in an airport parking lot, it’s a great opportunity for him rave at her—but she’s so shell-shocked and vulnerable that he can’t keep it up. His manner toward her softens at once. Then he finds out that she’s catching the same flight he is, to Italy, for a wedding. He’s the father of the groom, and she’s the mother of the bride.

This seemed to me at first like a contrived specimen of the romantic-comedy “meet-cute,” but the actors make it convincing. By the time Ida and Philip have reached southern Italy, and are sharing a car from the airport to Philip’s beautiful-but-disused old coastal lemon farm that his son (Sebastian Jessen) and Ida’s daughter (Molly Blixt Egelind) are fixing up for the wedding, Philip even makes a clumsy try at complimenting Ida.

Before long he’s opened up to her about the circumstances of his wife’s death. Philip is awkward and uncomfortable around his son, and he openly loathes his sister-in-law (Paprika Steen), who’s shamelessly trying to get her hooks into him. But something about Ida brings out the best in him—and something about the role brings out the best in Brosnan. It may, indeed, be personal experience—it wasn’t until days after I saw the film that I remembered that Brosnan’s real-life first wife died of cancer in the early nineties.

For English-language audiences, Brosnan’s work here is the story about the film, but he isn’t really the star of Love Is All You Need. Trine Dyrholm’s Ida is. Indeed, in Danish Ida is the title character: Den Skaldede Frisor, or, The Bald Hairdresser.

Ida’s bald—under a fine blond wig--because she’s a cancer and chemo veteran. She’s gone to her daughter’s wedding alone because a few days earlier she came home to tell her husband Leif (Kim Bodnia) that she was in remission, only to find him fooling around with a much younger woman. She’s confident that Leif will return to her, until he shows up at the wedding with the young mistress as his date.

I was unfamiliar with Dyrholm, a major star in Denmark, but she’s a revelation. Wide-eyed and gently smiling, she radiates kindness and honesty. Ida’s misfortunes have left her soul as exposed as her scalp, but both remain beautiful.

Nothing that ensues in the plot is especially surprising, but Bier’s touch, both with the dialogue and the direction, is strikingly observant. There are moments—cringe-inducing toasts, bungled propositions, arguments between mortified people—that feel almost painfully naturalistic. This movie has loose ends and rough edges, and may not convince you that love is truly all you need. But it makes a good case that love is, finally, what matters most.

GORN BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Starting today and continuing through Sunday is the 14th Annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, at the Camelot Theatre in Palm Springs, California. Among the obscurities—and some over-familiar selections like Champion and The Asphalt Jungle—on this year’s schedule is the way-too-little-known 1950 effort Try and Get Me (aka The Sound of Fury).

It features Lloyd Bridges in a flashy role as a fast-talking, hyper-confident stick up man and the underrated Frank Lovejoy in a heartbreaking performance as an unemployed family man who, desperate for money, gets sucked into a kidnapping scheme. The director was Cyril “Cy” Endfield, just before he was blacklisted, and it’s not hard to see why the Red-baiters might have thought the guy was a Commie—for its first two-thirds, it’s an angrily anti-capitalist drama, then it shifts into a startling critique of how irresponsible journalism can lead to mob violence.

The story is based on the same California lynch-mob incident that inspired Fritz Lang’s 1936 American debut Fury, but it’s a better, more honest, less sentimental movie than Fury. In its final stretch (shot in downtown Phoenix) it becomes truly epic—amazingly so, considering its budget. It has the feel of something from the early Eisenstein. Despite the clumsiness with which the movie presents its high moral values—placing them in the mouth of a visiting Italian academic—I think it’s a neglected classic, and the Palm Springs festival is to be commended for showcasing it.

I wasn’t able to attend the Phoenix area screening of Star Trek—Into Darkness, and therefore the multitudes breathlessly awaiting my take on it will have to wait until I'm able to catch up with it. I was excited to learn, however, that the new Star Trek video game involves the Gorns, the reptilian race that Kirk encountered back in the original series episode “Arena.” So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s recognize the Gorn Captain with which Kirk was forced into one-on-one combat in that episode…

“Arena” is my earliest memory of Star Trek, when I was five or six years old, and the Gorn—who politely offers to kill Kirk quickly and mercifully—remains my favorite Star Trek alien. Can’t wait to see what the game's version looks like, but I very much doubt it can rival the original in my affections. I even have this bobble-head…

…sitting on my desk. Anytime I need some validation, I just tap his head. Think I’ll do it right now: “Is this a good post, Gorn?”

Man, that’s a load off.

TO GATSBY OR NOT TO GATSBY

It sounds like a joke: “The Great Gatsby, in 3-D.” What’s next, The Grapes of Wrath in 3-D? The Old Man and the Sea in 3-D? Catcher in the Rye in 3-D? What other high-school English class assignment classics could we watch in dorky dark glasses?

Oddly, though, it sort of works in the case of this Gatsby. The director of this new version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald tale is Baz Luhrmann, and he takes more or less the same approach to it that he did to Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom—which is to say, a combination of Bollywood and Busby Berkeley on speed. So his lunging, plunging, swooping camera seemed to pack a little extra punch from the 3-D in a way that most recent offerings in the format—the superhero and animated flicks—have not.

Strictly in terms of plot, it’s a pretty faithful retelling of the 1925 novel about the title mystery man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who shows up at the ritzy end of Long Island. But it couldn’t be much farther away in tone from Fitzgerald’s famously balanced, plangent prose. Despite the solemn narration by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the style is all wild whip pans and fast cutting and undulating aerial shots that carry us from new money “West Egg” to old money “East Egg” and back, and sometimes all the way in to Manhattan.

Gatsby, a West Egger, throws decadent jazz-and-flapper parties in which he doesn’t usually participate. His neighbor and tenant Nick sees Gatsby gazing longingly at the “green light” across the bay, on the dock of the East Egg estate where Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) lives with her blueblood ape of a husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton). Needless to say, there’s some history there.

I’ve always been fond of this yarn, with its fairy-tale backstory. Like many durable American fables, it’s rooted in seriously adolescent notions, about reinventing yourself and impressing the girl of your dreams with grand gesture, but what gives it its power was that Fitzgerald knew, first-hand, that the fix was in when it came to Gatsby’s dream of making himself acceptable to the old money class—if he’d simply wanted to be rich or famous, he could have managed it easily enough, but he wanted to be One Of Them. That he wanted this for, from his point of view, the most gallant and romantic of reasons mattered not at all.

Once you’ve accepted that this is Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby, not Fitzgerald’s, you’re likely to feel that this is the most successful adaptation of the story. It’s highly uneven—in particular, it runs out of steam toward the end—but it’s more satisfying, overall, than the drab 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, and much more than the plodding 1974 version starring Robert Redford, and this has at least as much to do with the leading man as it does with Luhrmann.

Neither Redford nor Ladd was the real problem with their respective productions; both did their level best with the part. But neither of them captured the subtly frantic, terrified side of Gatsby’s psychology like DiCaprio does. This makes it possible, as it usually isn’t, to find some pity for Daisy, to see how even life with the cloddish, philandering Tom might offer her more breathing space than Gatsby’s obsessive devotion.

Even more than this, though, for the story to be convincing, Gatsby must have a radiant glamour that transcends acting, or even beauty. In one of the book’s most famous passages, Nick describes Gatsby’s smile:

“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”

When DiCaprio smiles into the camera here, he comes closer to capturing this quality than any previous Gatsby I’ve seen. Maybe it was just the 3-D.

ROC STAR

Obviously this week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a Ray Harryhausen monster was in order. But which, out of all his wondrous fauna, ought to get the nod? Then it occurred to me—this weekend is also Mother’s Day. The choice is clear: The Roc, the awe-inspiring two-headed bird from my personal favorite Harryhausen movie, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

 

The Roc comes flapping back to her lofty nest, to the accompaniment of vertigo-inducing Bernard Herrmann music, to find that a couple of scurvy sea-dogs of Sinbad’s crew have cracked open one of her eggs and are enjoying a drumstick of the sweet two-headed chick that emerged. Bad luck for those guys.

A very Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms everywhere.

RAY

One of my best friends just called me from Back East, seriously in tears, to tell me that Ray Harryhausen has passed on, at 92. I’d already heard, from another friend, but I was glad he called just the same—we talked about Harryhausen’s movies for more than an hour.

It’s hard for me to know quite where to begin with regard to Harryhausen. Anyone who’s read my writing for any length of time may already know that the special-effects sorcerer, along with his great mentor Willis O’Brien (of King Kong) before him, was responsible for a really high percentage of the images that turned me into a movie lover.

Harryhausen was the greatest of the stop-motion animators, that small class of movie artists who photograph articulated puppets one frame at a time, then painstakingly move them the tiniest bit before shooting the next frame, to create the illusion of motion when the film is run at full speed. He hadn’t made one of his fantasy spectacles, made up of various set-piece sequences of monsters and other fanciful beings strung along an episodic plot, in over thirty years, since Clash of the Titans in 1981. He’d spent his long retirement sculpting—he designed this…

…dramatic statue of David Livingstone, his wife’s great-great-grandfather, in Blantyre, Scotland—doing interviews and DVD commentaries, playing small roles in John Landis movies, accepting awards and generally soaking up much-deserved adulation.

Computer-generated imagery had made him technically obsolete, but he never became aesthetically obsolete. Computer effects, even at their formidable best, have never had the warmth or soul of Harryhausen’s creations. In recent years stop-motion has been used almost exclusively for stylized, cartoony stories, like The Nightmare Before Christmas or the recent Frankenweenie and ParaNorman.

But the skittish, haywire, obsessive flavor of old-school stop-motion—the familiar “jerkiness” that resulted from each frame being a still image rather than a picture of a body in motion—meant that it had an air of whimsical stylization even when it was used in a supposedly realistic setting. I think that as kids, we loved stop-motion creatures not because they were so real but because they so obviously and enchantingly were not.

Harryhausen claimed that the director Eugene Lourie once told him that he always made his monsters die “like the tenor in an opera,” piteously rising and re-collapsing. I can attest that the death of the “Rhedosaur” at the end of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms always put a lump in my throat when I was a kid. Here, perhaps, is a clue to what made Harryhausen special: I think he was, in a sense, an actor, channeling carefully-wrought performances into the faces and limbs of his models.

I defy anyone to watch several of his films together and not see distinctive personality types emerge from the “acting” of his creatures. He specialized in rampaging comic thugs, like the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth, Talos in Jason and the Argonauts, the Kraken in Clash, or the Troglodyte in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger—slow-thinking, with loutish, irritable faces (subconscious parodies of the bullies who pick on the kind of little kid who grows up to be an animator, maybe?). He could also create manic, demonic characters, like his animate, sword-wielding skeletons, and animals, like the Rhedosaur, the title tyrannosaur in The Valley of Gwangi, or the Dragon in 7th Voyage, with its oddly canine manner—when I showed my kid that movie, she was furiously indignant at Sinbad for shooting this guileless beast with a giant arrow.

But that’s the point. All of these creatures, benign or menacing, were endearing, touched as they were both by the hands and the spirit of the unassuming California boy who gave them life. RIP to him—he may have come to a stop, but his creations will long remain in motion.

FREEZE FAME

It’s often a hundred and twelve degrees here in the Valley. For years, I’d spend much of the day working outside, reflecting that the cliché was true—it is a dry heat. Like a kiln. By the time I’d collapse on my couch, I’d feel as dried out as a clay pot, and as fragile.

On Arizona summer days like this, I would lament the lack of a cure readily available to citizens of my beloved home town of Erie, Pennsylvania: Rita’s Italian Ice, in my never-very-humble opinion America’s greatest frozen dessert chain. Why, I’d wonder, was this chilly ambrosia not available out here in the sweltering land of the Zonies, where we could really use it? But almost two years ago, I became aware that a few Rita’s franchises had indeed opened around the Phoenix area.

The dish we call Italian Ice—or sometimes, rather redundantly, “water ice”—comes by its name honestly; it really does go way back in Italian history. It’s claimed that Nero himself would send slaves to the mountaintops near the Eternal City to collect snow, which would then be hustled back to the feast and mixed with fruit and other sweeteners. Back in dear old Erie, at least during the brief summers, we never had to resort to such hassles to enjoy this refreshing treat.

We just had to betake ourselves to the Rita’s on Gore Road, just off upper Peach Street, and walk up to the little window, and for a ridiculously low price a sweet-faced teenage girl would hand us a cup of Italian Ice fit for a Roman Emperor. If it was a particularly lucky day, the menu would include Wild Black Cherry. If so, I might buy a large, and sit on the concrete step and luxuriate in the scrumptious flavor and the humid but comparatively pleasant Pennsylvania afternoon. The sign at Rita’s reads “Ice Custard Happiness,” and I’d be hard pressed to disagree.

Rita’s menu has, within its limited scope of cool treats, a lot of variety. A dozen or so different flavors of ice are offered, some daily, others every few days, along with chocolate or vanilla soft-serve custards—my ten-year-old favors the chocolate, straight up. These may be blended with the ice for a “Misto” drink, or for a “Blendini,” which may be topped with Reese’s cups, M&Ms, Oreos and other such goodies.

Polluting pure, innocent Italian ice in this manner is acceptable for a little kid, I suppose, but for an adult it’s an appalling vulgarity. The same goes for some of the queasy, gimmicky flavors of ice that show up under Rita’s glass from time to time, like Swedish Fish or Red Velvet Cake or Cotton Candy or Peeps. Don’t misunderstand; Peeps are the greatest Easter candy ever invented, but delicious as they are, they aren’t what you’d normally call refreshing.

I always make a point of asking for a sample of these freaky, rich flavors when I see one I haven’t encountered before, and the gracious staff always obliges me with a tiny cupful and a tiny spoon. Every time, I have the same reaction—that they taste amazingly like what they’re called, in frozen liquid form, and that while one taste is a delight, a whole cup would be oppressive to a mature palate.

Not every adult shares this view, however. Asked to name his favorite flavor, Zach Cobian, co-owner of the Tempe Rita’s at McClintock and Elliot, says “Birthday Cake. I don’t even like sweet things all that much, but for some reason I love it.”

Well, enjoy to your heart’s content. But after I sample such kid stuff, I then buy what I came in for—Wild Black Cherry. Make no mistake, even among Rita’s flavors it’s a stunner—deeply sweet but not cloying, and studded with fleshy bits of real cherry. Indeed, while in a pinch I’ll settle for Rita’s standard non-wild Cherry, or Mango, or Juicy Pear, or “Alex’s Lemonade,” I rarely go into the place unless I’ve been informed by email that the Wild Black Cherry is on the menu that day. When it is, I usually buy a couple of quarts to take home and freeze—it’s very revivable by means of a microwave zap and some patient stirring. There are four quarts of it my freezer at this writing.

One minor warning, however: Wild Black Cherry will turn your lips and tongue a gory, arterial scarlet. If I was directing a vampire movie, I would make the actors eat it between takes.