Reviews by JxSxPx

The nation state as we know it has fallen and there is only the mega-corporation that controls everything from entertainment to the political sphere. No, I’m not providing a generalized summary of Ned Beatty’s blistering monologue in Network, although the 70s had an eerily prescient vision of where America was heading even if it was often through a parodic filter. I’m talking about Norman Jewison’s entry into the jaundiced, dystopic 70s sci-fi, Rollerball.

Less of a well plotted narrative than a film that is largely premise and tone, Rollerball envisions an America in the grips of corporate takeover and lulled by a bloodthirsty sport. Rollerball, the sport, is somewhere between American football, roller-derby, and hockey, and James Caan (it doesn’t matter what his character’s name is) is the mega-watt star of the sport. The powers-that-be demand his forced retirement as his rugged individualism offers bright spot of hope for the unseen masses that goes against the bottom-line of the cruel one-percenters.

Rollerball is fascinating as a prolonged mood piece with a significant central hole at its narrative logic. Celebrity adoration is one of the many opiates of the masses that keeps the bottom chunk from revolting against their oppressors. If the Energy Corporation that sponsors and functions as a not-so-invisible hand for the sport wants to diminish his star power because of what it might engendered in the populace, then Jewison and company never considered how narcotizing it is to dream that one day you’ll be “one of them” as opposed to a harsher reality. Caan’s star power is something they would have easily harnessed, finessed, and controlled in a smarter movie.

Which isn’t to say that Rollerball is dumb, just inconsistent. There’s a brutality here that’s counterbalanced by a coolly intellectually rendering of the future-punk dystopia. For all the anarchic, brutal, and shard-like intensity of the games themselves, there’s a future-is-now (or, 1975) reminder or a treatment of something bacchanal as nearly sterile. The apathy that’s fostered in the populace by devouring the sport is reflected in the structure of the film as everything is commodified and presented in a near detached manner. Has the apocalypse ever looked so institutional before?

Dan O’Bannon sure does love to reconfigure space travelers as truckers just doing their job. He gained cinematic immortality by taking that concept and grafting it to a haunted house in space structure in Alien, one of the 70s best science-fiction films from a decade filled with great science-fiction films. But Alien wasn’t the first time that he decided to populate space with stoned out drifters. Behold, Dark Star.

Dark Star is a shaggy hangout movie that plays as both a parody of 2001, replete with destructive piece of artificial intelligence, and like a student film filled with in-jokes amongst friends. The student film vibe is apropos as director John Carpenter and writer Dan O’Bannon met as USC film school and made this D-list midnight movie. Actually, D-list has a certain sense of judgment when Dark Star is fun for its goofiness and stoned-out loser vibes.

After all, where else will you find an inflatable beach ball subbing for an alien that nearly tickles someone to death, or watch a literal cosmic surfer meets his demise as a falling star? I laughed more than once at Bomb #20 determining that it was god and not beholden to its original programming. Sometimes eccentricity, even with obvious budgetary limitations, is the perfect antidote to an era that’s overwhelmingly paranoid and dour.

The enduring appeal of Westworld can be summarized as thus: murderous cowboy robots. Does this ignore the other virtues that power Westworld? Yes, and I fully admit that it’s a bit of an opening joke to get things going.

Truth be told, Westworld endures because it’s fascinating, engaging, and well-acted. There’s also a vague sense that the material has not entirely reached its maximum potential so its remodel into a hit television series is not surprising. Hell, even creator Michael Crichton took the basic premise, theme goes on the fritz with dangerous results, and reconstituted it into Jurassic Park.

Good ideas can become eternal well springs.

For those that don’t know, Delos is an attraction for the rich that allows them to indulge in their most depraved fantasies under the guise of the mythological time periods. You won’t die of dysentery while riding a stagecoach trying to move out west in this world, but you can become a black hat bandit and have fun in the brothel. There are complementary parks that provide similar fantasy structures in Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. Without consequences, just who will you become and what choices would you feel free to make?

Our guides are a reoccurring visitor and a neophyte to the parks, and they decide to go through Westworld. A frequent highlight of the park is the Gunslinger (Yul Brynner, remote and calculating through body movements and projection), a character that will pick a gun fight with a guest. Pay attention to him as he becomes a proto-Terminator that stalks the characters as the park’s androids malfunction thanks to a rapidly moving virus. This virus switches off the safety protocols in the attractions that keeps them from harming the guests and leads to a bloody insurrection as the machines revolt.

The fear and distrust of technology and scientific progress is a through line between Crichton’s work, and it appears here. In fact, the crux of the plot is about how misplaced trust in technology can lead to our ruin, which is both mildly hysterical and a good point. There’s also plenty of material here pointing towards a jaundiced view on advertising and bending towards sparse B-western. It is an odd film, but one fully worth exploring.

When discussing his reaction to the film version of his book Make Room! Make Room!, author Harry Harrison described it as such: “murder and chase sequences [and] the ‘furniture’ girls are not what the film is about – and are completely irrelevant” and mentioned being only fifty percent satisfied with the final product. Hollywood has a long history of treating authors shabbily and using the bare bones of their work to scavenge for parts. Enter Soylent Green in which the author’s thoughts about the work prove to be true – the least interesting parts are the Hollywood add-ons that bog the paranoia down into something more conventional.

Aggressive sexual politics (be prepared to see why the women’s liberation movement was and remains an absolute necessity), dumb-downed detective moves, and shrill mindlessness aside, Soylent Green vibrates with a paranoia endemic to the 70s. There’s a deep distrust of the government and wider society, made all the more ironic by casting Mr. NRA Charlton Heston as the lead, that’s quite enrapturing. Couple that with the smarter aspects of the film – messages about ecological disaster, overpopulation, depletion of resources, and Edward G. Robinson’s beautiful final performance – and you’ve got something that’s fascinating in fits and starts.

But we should all innately distrustful and suspicious of mega corporations, especially in times of disaster and strife. Soylent Green at least manages to make that abundantly clear in its scattershot presentation.   

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is a book that is nearly ready made for film adaptation. One that has been adapted three times, this is probably the most famous, and each somehow swinging and missing. The Omega Man makes the fatal mistake of requesting that the audience invest in Charlton Heston as a world weary, introspective leading man. He is not that guy.

Heston is gritted teeth machismo. He is an actor that requires an epic scope to anchor is limited abilities as an actor. When taken in context of something like Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments, he excels as the role requires not a depth of feeling but a force of personality to power through and hold the material together. If the material zeros in on quiet moments and exact character work, then he’s not your man.

The Omega Man tries to make someone who is a “type” into a subtle actor. The material distorts around him along with a general silliness that the novel avoided. The presence of the vampires was a reframing of the creatures as something else entirely. Long gone were the aristocratic “others” with their refined manners and eccentric habits instead they are the results of a pandemic that creates a new strain of humanity. Matheson’s prose reflects a growing sense of isolation, dread, and eventual acceptance of the narrator’s status as transitioning from standard to superstition. This is outside of Heston’s abilities as an actor.

A similar thing occurs in how ghouls are represented here. There’s no sense of fear or dread in them. They look silly in their medieval monk robes and cheap aging makeup. The twin poles of I Am Legend’s prose are warped and unsatisfactory here. Yet The Omega Man overpowers these limitations through sheer force of will. It swaps out emotional investment with thrilling chases, PG-rated sex and romance, and a healthy dose of 1970s jaundice. A classic? Eh, hardly, but a good enough clock eater.  

“It came from a brilliant book, but Cornel Wilde, God rest his soul, I don't think he did it justice when it came to the screenplay. He seemed to go over the top and get some bits of egg on his face.”

– Wendy Richard

Cornel Wilde’s view of a global pandemic, this one a virus that destroys crops, reveals the shallowness of his aggressive masculinity and nihilistic view of humanity as merely meat puppets with vague social contracts threatening to implode at any second. There’s a kernel of a great idea here, most of it borrowed from the source material, done in the most overblown grindhouse way imaginable. You almost respect its uneasy juxtaposition of cheesy theme song and shocking rape scene for sheer film-making chutzpah alone. There was clearly plenty of effort involved here. Except it is in service of a truly ugly worldview and plays as something near camp with its excesses. No Blade of Grass throws everything it can think of – environmental worry, marauding gangs, murder, societal collapse, pollution – in service of a tonally confused product.

A hagiographic portrait of the current pope that plays like something off PBS’ Great Performances, The Two Popes mistakes unnecessarily, often incongruous, camera flourishes with visual interest. The best argument for this movie is watching Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins deliver incredibly strong work like the veterans they are. Aside from that, The Two Popes is an exercise in party line Catholicism.

We bounce around in time from Jorge Bergoglio’s life in Argentina during the tumultuous 1970s to the present-day thorny relationship with Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, and all of it wrapped up in a glowing “man of the people” aura. The main dramatic points involve the political scheming required to find a new pope, including Ratzinger’s glad-handing and retail politicking. These two represent the ideological spectrum for the catholic church with Ratzinger exemplifying the old/displaced methods and Bergoglio as the newer/kinder approach.

The begrudging respect that develops between the two of them is only of interest because actors as gifted as Pryce and Hopkins are reciting it. The script itself does nothing to complicate a simplistic reading of Pope Benedict XVI’s reign as shrouded in controversy, secrecy, and displaced from the common man in contrast to Pope Francis’ liberalism and calls for transformative action. If you walk into this film thinking that Pope Francis was a bleeding heart and net positive for the church, then this will not complicate or call into question that symbolism.

There’s plenty of rot at the core of the church. Where are the prolonged discussions about the child sex abuse scandals, especially the various coverups? What about the financial corruption within the Vatican? These issues toppled Pope Benedict XVI’s tenure and revealed a man too attached to the institutions to look deeply at the problems and actions needed to correct them. The Two Popes would rather present cutesy moments of the two men ordering pizza and extoling the virtues of the Beatles.

Heavily sentimental in its portraiture of two papal figures, The Two Popes at least offers Pryce and Hopkins ample opportunity to shine. This is clearly the story about Pope Francis’ ascension to the role and Benedict merely exists as something for him to react against. Hopkins manages to wrap his keen intelligence into the controversial figure and make something recognizably human out of the icon. While Pryce speaks Spanish, Latin, and accented English while being by turns playful, saintly, and tortured.

Since this started life as a play, maybe it would’ve been better if it had merely been filmed as one. It needed less shaky camera work, less weird zooms and awkward tilts to try and make scene after scene of characters talking in cloistered rooms “energized.” Sometimes less is more and knowing when to pull back and merely observe can harness a story’s true power. Or that of two great actors.

There’s something of a tone problem with Marriage Story. Occupying a space that is nominally within raw melodrama, Marriage Story details a he said/she said back-and-forth that occasionally wanders into quirky comedy territory. It does eventually stick the landing but getting to that complicated ending point takes quite a bit of work.

Noah Baumbach is clearly pulling from his own life with the painful earnestness of the emotional revelations and excoriating fights. None of that is meant in a negative critical way, despite what the word choice may imply. Rather, I mean it as a hallelujah-like affirmation. There’s a keen emotional intelligence and revealing spiritual cost at the center of this relationship.

We begin with a montage and voiceover as Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) detail what initially attracted and brought them together as a couple. We are setting up the paradise while it is in the midst of being lost. We eventually learn that this idyllic portrait is being recalled during a therapy session as the couple bristles at each other, but in that polite way that longtime companions will do when they don’t want to scorch the earth.

Not yet anyway as much of Marriage Story details how the conscious uncoupling at the beginning is about to get blown to smithereens. The twin storylines involve Nicole reclaiming her voice and power after dimming them both in deference to Charlie, and Charlie realizing how controlling and domineering his ego is. There’s also plenty about the human cost of a long-term relationship dissolving, especially when that relationship extends beyond the romantic and into business.

That Zen-like separation only lasts so long before Nicole lawyers up. Notably with a barracuda named Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), a fictional proxy for Laura Wasser, Hollywood’s preeminent divorce lawyer. Soon Charlie is meeting with a smart if amiable lawyer (Alan Alda) and a far more aggressive type (Ray Liotta). The eventual verbal gunfight between Dern and Liotta in court is an expertly written and performed scene demonstrating where, how, and why good intentions in divorce can go so far astray and quickly turn nearly nuclear in their toxicity.

However, all this honesty and raw feeling is offset by divergences into strange comedic detours. A visit from a court-appointed social worker feels like it wandered in from an entirely different movie. One that is arch and performative in contrast to this one’s lived-in authenticity. Same goes for an extended musical sequence where Charlie sings “Being Alive” from Company. It feels like a glimpse of a movie Driver and Baumbach are dying to make and not something that feels necessary to this story.

It helps that guiding through all these narrative twists are an ensemble of incredibly talented actors giving lived in performances. Driver and Johansson must immediately create a believable history as a couple before promptly imploding it and asking for our sympathies and understanding. Alda is stellar as the genteel attorney while Liotta is masculine aggrandizement writ large. Dern recalls Rosalind Russell’s working women at their steeliest. What a series of great performances that breathe life into strong material. For all its narrative stumbles, Marriage Story’s human story is worth the journey.  

I Lost My Body is an animated European art film if I’ve ever seen one. Is it good or bad? I’m not entirely sure, but it is very French. Literalizing the main character’s emotional disconnection by crafting the story from his disembodied hand, I Lost My Body is all about its main character’s awakening to life. There’s something to sense and muscle memory, but this presents its biographical tidbits from the perspective of the (eventually) severed hand. It’s both a fascinating and a potentially unnecessarily fussy artistic choice. Same goes with a romantic subplot that eventually leads nowhere in particular. It feels like it’s there to payoff in a bigger way than it does. The woodworking of the main character is first taken up to impress the girl, causes the accident, and then becomes the thing he finds solace and fulfillment in. It’s a confluence of the ways that life can be uncertain by comingling joy with heartache.  

Toy Story 4’s announcement was met with trepidation on my part. The prior trilogy of films was as perfect as a franchise could get, including a closure that recalled the very beginning. How many other trilogies managed to be successful picking up after so prolonged a breather? Disney/Pixar risked depleting good will and making the prior films look slack in comparison if this fourth entry wasn’t, at minimum, entertaining.

Well, crisis averted, I guess, as Toy Story 4 is largely entertaining and capable of taking the franchise into new territory, be it with more films or shorts. But a larger part of me hopes that they leave well enough alone as the rust in the joints is very much evident. How many times can Woody and Buzz fight and/or try to remind each other of their true purpose?

Picking up back at Bonnie’s room, Woody is now the largely discarded and forgotten man. The cowboy that prided himself and knowing his place in a child’s ecosystem is about to careen into a mid-life crisis, or whatever the vintage toy version of that would be. Not only that, but we get a reunion with Bo-Peep, and an explanation of where she’s been this whole time, along with the franchise’s best new character in some time, Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves going for broke).

The problem is everything we’ve seen Woody go through on this personal odyssey has already happened before, and with more emotional investment in the previous entries. This is the Toy Story franchise spinning its plastic wheels in the mud desperately trying to escape. Brand fatigue hits different franchises in various ways, and there’s only so many stories of a toy’s obsolescence, and their fear of it, that can be told before it goes a bit thin.

Same goes for several of the new characters who feel like reskin of previous ones. Gabby (Christina Hendricks) is an abandoned toy gone to seed, Forky (Tony Hale) is a cobbled together misfit, quirky toys stumbled upon in an overwhelming setting (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele), each of them have the mark of familiarity and recall comparisons that don’t serve the fourth entry any favors. In the end it’s still hard to imagine a better sendoff for this franchise than the third film and its tear wringing pathos.