Reviews by JxSxPx

How can a movie about a blackmailed German officer playing a cat-and-mouse game of brains and sabotage with a German merchant ship be so unbelievably dull? Yul Brynner does a fine job with his portrayal of the ship captain, who doesn’t appear to care much either way with the war but loves the sea and wants to fulfill his duty. But Marlon Brando frequently seems alternately tortured and a little bit bored by the entire thing. In interviews at the time Brando mentioned doing the film purely for money, and it shows. Much like Bette Davis, Brando would invent business or display an inability to hide his disdain for material he didn’t love with theatrical tics. Here, Brando stares out into the world with blank eyes, pausing and stuttering over dialog, crafting a performance that is like a caricature of Brando pointing the ways towards his more indulgent choices in later films.

One sordid episode after another plays out, I suppose to try and sustain mystery and suspense over whether or not Brando will remove the charges from the ship in the event that this ship’s cargo, rubber a commodity in short supply, gets discovered by the Allies. The general overview of the plot sounds interesting enough, but an unnecessary bit with a stowaway girl from a concentration camp who might blow the entire operation bogs the thing down. In fact, numerous diversions from the main story don’t heighten the tension but merely distract from it and made me believe that the writer(s) didn’t have enough ideas or confidence in the main action to fully expand it. But Morituri does have one large positive in its corner: the cinematography is top-notch. Moody and evocative, creating a tense, atmospheric tone that deserved a better film, the one lurking undercover in moments of Brando’s performance, in all of Brynner’s and in the basic premise. The parts were there, but the bloated running time and too many needless distractions hinder the enterprise.

It has its moments but Heaven Can Wait feels too much like Warren Beatty’s vanity project without some of the parts being more refined and better developed. But I must confess something here and now, outside of Bonnie and Clyde and some moments in Splendor in the Grass I have never thought much of Beatty as an actor. I find him limited here, mostly staring sweetly at Julie Christie or looking befuddled by the whimsy going on all around him. Of course the surrounding film isn’t that much better, Heaven is a mostly vapid, light entertainment endeavor. How it swayed the Academy to nominate it for so many big awards is a lingering confusion to me.

I think one of the major problems with the film is that the leads are so bland that they’re easily upstaged by Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin as a scheming wife and her lover. I’d rather spend a few hours with this comic duo than Beatty’s football stud trapped in an elderly billionaire’s body wooing Christie’s British ecologist. Cannon’s a spit-fire in the role, combing her innate sex appeal with a haphazard femme fatale. In a more straight-forward film she’d be a rival of Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai or something similar, but here it’s like Carole Lombard took over that role and brought along a screwball director with her. It’s no surprise that she got an Oscar nomination out of this film.

But I just didn’t find this film to be that funny aside from Cannon and Grodin, although James Mason and Buck Henry do get their moments to shine. When we see Beatty what everyone else really sees is an elderly man who is supposed to be dead. There’s a tremendous amount of visual trickery and gags that could accompany this basic set-up, and I felt that the film missed exploring that in favor of focusing in on the romance between the leads. Christie, who was coerced into the film by ex-lover Beatty, wasn’t thrilled to be a part of it and her indifference radiates off her lovely face. In the end, the hero gets a third go-round and a new body/appearance to go along with it and Christie to accompany him, but I would rather have walked off with the bad guys and had a lot more fun.

It never rises above the sitcom-level conceit of the original story, but with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, both impossibly attractive and achingly young, in the leads, does that really matter? The answer is, not entirely. They’re both cast to types which they would continue to play, both on and off the screen. Redford as the conservative WASP, the ideally gorgeous, wealthy man of a Park Avenue type’s dream, and Fonda as the more liberated, artistic and emotional free spirit, the manic-pixie dream girl to loosen his tie and add color to his beige lifestyle. They work opposite each other wonderfully, generating a chemistry which served them well in later projects.

There isn’t much meat to this thing; it’s a simple farce from Neil Simon, a puffy dessert – light and weightless. (Question for another time: why has so much of his work aged badly?) It’s not a very filling meal, but it’s a kind of guilty pleasure of mine. Charles Boyer gets a very fun role late in his career, and it’s moments like that which remind me of why I’ll stop and watch the film if it’s ever on TV and I need something fun in the background on while I fold laundry or do some dusting. The ‘jokes,’ of which there’s not that many funny ones, are thin and predictable, playing out exactly as one would imagine. It doesn’t help that Gene Saks never expands the story’s vocabulary beyond stagey, and we can clearly see the origins of this as a play. But no matter really, Barefoot in the Park is a featherweight sexy comedy about two incredibly attractive people with opposite personalities learning to navigate a relationship beyond the honeymoon phase. It doesn’t ask much, but it’s a load of fun and very likeable.

Third in the series (if we’re talking about this franchise in actual chronological order and not production), Walking with Beasts is a good, but never truly great affair. Its problems are pretty easy to spot, Walking with Dinosaurs had created the basic pattern of how these episodes would play out and Beasts practically shoots out carbon copies of these forms with different beasts being the only major point. There’s an episode dedicated to large plains animals, aquatic life, aviary creatures and so on.

And it isn’t just that these broad themes reoccur in a similar pattern from the previous series, it’s that the narratives attached to them also repeat with very little to make them truly original. But even when the narratives aren’t as enthralling as they were the first time around, the special effects typically save any episode from falling into less-than-good viewing. The lone notable exception might just be “Next of Kin,” an episode detailing the dawn of humankind and the animation on these early humanoid creatures is too rubbery or cartoonish to be successful or believable enough, and that’s factoring in the curve for a television budget. Another problem is that Beasts succumbs to the post-Matrix age of deciding that strange bullet-time or random slow-motion effects was necessary to tell this story. These moments are highly distracting and feel like a group of adults trying to cobble together an educational series with a desire to factor in “what the kids like these days.” It’s a glaring jump from realistic animal documentary style footage to this highly theatrical effects work that calls needless attention to itself.

No matter, the ambition and scope of this series might surpass that of Dinosaurs for the sheer fact that these creatures boast a striking resemblance to ones that walk around in present day. Making credible mammoths, sabre-tooth cats, giant birds or enormous sharks move with authenticity and appear close-but-not-quite like the modern day equivalents is a hard prospect. Episodes like “Sabre-tooth,” “Mammoth Journey” or “Whale Killer” are the best of this particular group without a doubt for this reason alone. Like the rest of the series it takes a “best guess” approach, utilizing all of the (then) current information to come up plausible scenarios and crafting educational AND entertaining content in the process. It’s inferior to Dinosaurs, mostly for cosmetic reasons, but still a great piece of television.

It’s hard to overstate just how fantastic Walking with Dinosaurs truly is, or the lasting impact that it has had upon the educational documentary genre. Before this, by and large, the educational specials about dinosaurs recycled footage from cheesy b-movies, offered cheap animation, highlighted complete skeletons, sketches of what they looked like and featured numerous talking heads detailing their possible behaviors, life spans, diets. Dinosaurs decided to take the current information and theories (as of 1999 when it premiered originally), and bring them to a more authentic life. Taking the conceit that you could go out into the wilderness and shoot, say, a lion in its natural environment and applying it to these prehistoric behemoths, Dinosaurs makes for some wildly fantastic viewing.

A problem that would plague the series in this and each of the sequels was the feeling that one is watching mostly speculation and plausibility and not entirely scientifically accurate information. But that curiosity is probably entirely the point. So little can be completely known and signed off on their behavior or appearance that a certain amount of guess-work is always called for and taken into account. But at times the creatures seem to be moving around so that the camera has something dynamic to look at while it observes these animals going about their daily life. Did some of these dinosaurs really eliminate waste this way, or did it just make an animator laugh and remained in? Who knows, but it doesn’t detract much from the series as a whole.

The greatest strength is normalizing dinosaur behavior, taking them away from the smashing and roaring giant monsters of old and having them instead displaying normal animal patterns of groupings, child-rearing and day-to-day activities. The brutality of life is shown in full bloom. These animals kill for survival, fight with others over territories or alpha-male standing in a herd, but generally they’re seen wandering from place to place or spending a significant amount of time playing in the wild, eating, drinking and taking care of their young. These aren’t the fantastic monstrous animals of my youthful imaginings but flesh-and-blood creatures trying to survive in the wild.

It’s a neat hat trick, at once making us believe that these dinosaurs are really there being filmed and yet looking unlike anything we’ve ever actually seen in our daily life. For some reason the aquatic episode is the one that stuck in my mind the longest. It’s the most successful in terms of creating realistic effects work. It uses more puppets than computer generated images and the results are highly impressive. It’s also because the aquatic animals during the time of the dinosaurs typically play second-fiddle to the well-known ones like T-Rex, triceratops, or any of the flying predatory flying birds.

Documentaries, especially ones specifically made for educational purposes, are hard to pull off. If the balance isn’t right they feel too dry or too dipped in tabloid-like vagaries passing themselves off as truths. But Dinosaurs manages to not only entertain and inform adult audiences, but children also seem to be big fans of this material. It works on numerous levels, and the best works accomplish this feat with a sense of ease and skill. Dinosaurs is one of those rare television accomplishments.

Very easily the weakest of the series, dating back to the time before the dinosaurs, due to one simple fact: it feels the most speculative in both the narratives about the creatures presented and the general looks of many of these beasts. But the production values can’t be argued with. The leap in animation presented here gives us a full range of creatures that move more fluidly; possess more weight and dynamic range of emotions and actions. These animations are beautiful to behold, but also leave the sneaking suspicion that many of their behavioral patterns and actions are simply the animators trying to fill the screen with some kind of business to prevent static images and show how far they’ve come since the early days of Dinosaurs.

Another problem is that so much ground is covered in only three episodes. Millions of years roll by in the blink of an eye. A creature will be placed into a still frame and slowly we trace its animated mutations and evolutions through millions of years before the creators arbitrarily decide where to stop for the next segment or episode. So narratively this series feels only half-formed. There’s more than enough material here to fill out a further three episodes (or even more).

Laurence Olivier directed three Shakespearean adaptations, and having seen two-thirds of them I think I can safely assume that this one is the weakest of the bunch. This version of Richard III is well acted from top to bottom and has nice production values, but there’s no point-of-view. It’s almost as if Olivier grabbed a camera crew, the Royal Shakespearean Company, threw some sets together and yelled “action” on a soundstage.

And the best Shakespearean films do something different or unique with the material. Olivier’s own Hamlet removed the comedic elements, played up the Freudian melodrama and entrapped us in a nightmarish castle of psychosexual drama. That kind of artistic vision is evident in his performance as Richard III, but not in his work as a director. I spent much of the film wishing and wondering what David Lean, Michael Powell or Orson Welles would have done with the material. Olivier does a few long tracking shots as Richard dictates his monologues directly to the audience, but film is a visual medium above all else and sometimes what can better be said with a unique composition is left in as wordiness. Say what you want about Welles’ three adaptations of the Bard’s work, but they don’t lack for daring, vision or offering new perspectives of the material.

But through his tremendous gifts as an actor, Olivier was able to capture your attention in crafting an unforgettable Richard. His shadow looms long over many of the great characters in Shakespeare’s work – we have his iconic Hamlet, after all – and his decision here are quite nice. While in the 1995 version, Ian McKellen plays the part as a scheming spider from the beginning (and if you haven’t seen that version, do so right now), Olivier prefers to play the part as a python slowly tightening his grip over the royal court, strangling his enemies and those who have angered him before they can even realize that they’re in danger.

Part of what makes this villainy and deliciously evil scheming so effective is that Olivier has chosen to outfit his Richard in a ridiculous wig, cartoonish nose and walks with a strange, limping gait. He’s also supposed to be a hunchback, but his tailor must do impressive work because a hump cannot be found. No matter, Olivier’s physicality in the role does half of the work for him. But his nasal tones and clipped speaking voice, a stylistic choice to be certain, roll out of the complicated monologues and make it sound like the most romantic of poetry. When a villain is this charming, it’s hard to entirely hate them no matter how dark or twisted their schemes.

But once we must exit the castle walls and go out into the battlefield a strong problem occurs that no amount of acting can overcome. In the great, vast plains of the battlefield, Olivier’s conservative directing style becomes undone completely. The battle sequences are awkwardly staged and filmed, and Richard feels defeated before he’s even approached the field or uttered out “My horse! My horse! My kingdom for a horse!” His tediously clean direction is clearly trying to rouse itself up for maximum dramatic effect, but it doesn’t come off. When one thinks about the battle scenes that Welles was able to conjure up with limited funds and extras in Chimes at Midnight there is no excuse in the world for why Olivier’s big-budgeted film couldn’t capture the same kind of frenzied magic.

And that’s the problem. Everything was at his disposal to make the definitive Richard III film, but Olivier’s interests were in making a film out of this play in the 40s, roughly right after he had made Henry V and Hamlet. Between then and 1955 Olivier had moved on to Macbeth, the producers agreed to finance that film if he first made Richard III. That’s a much abbreviated version of events, but it’s clear that he had other roles and films in mind and Richard III wasn’t he driving obsession. I think that some of that shows in his work as a director. Hamlet had certain choices made to offer a new perspective on the material, Richard III is just a well-acted, stagey condensed version of the material.

Irving G. Thalberg produced numerous lavish features to showcase his wife’s talents, everyone knows this. One cannot read a biography or trivia notes about Norma Shearer without coming across this factoid. These films were of varying degrees of success, and smack dab in the middle is this version of Romeo & Juliet.

Far too old for both of their roles, Shearer and Leslie Howard look a bit goofy playing these parts and trying to recite these lines. Hollywood actors frequently don’t have any training with Shakespearean language and it can sound awkward coming out of their mouths. Such is the case here. So our leads both look too old and sound awkward, so the central conceit of the work is already jeopardized. They also can’t seem to generate any chemistry between them, with Howard falling back on his old tricks of staring off with a furrowed brow and Shearer trying valiantly to appear as girlish as possible.

But Thalberg was a bit of a showman, and he wrapped these two into glossy and polished production values and surrounded them with supporting actors with varying degrees of success. John Barrymore is way too old for Mercutio, but he plays the part as a bit of a party-boy gigolo and steals scenes from the bland leads. Basil Rathbone, once more too old for the part, as Tybalt and Edna May Oliver as the nurse deliver hammy and fun supporting turns.

But the real highlight of the film is the production design and costuming. But what else would one expect from a George Cukor film? The costumes are gorgeous and ornate things, filling the screen with ruffles, frills and sparkles. And the sets are like fairy tale castle and towns plucked from illustrations and given life by the MGM crew. But you can only put so much gloss on an imperfect film to try and mask these flaws. This Romeo & Juliet cannot possibly hold a candle to the dewy, romanticism of Franco Zeffirelli’s masterful 1968 version. It’s a hit-and-miss affair for sure, but I suppose it’s worth a look if you’re a big fan of Shearer or Barrymore, he gives the best performance in the entire film. Or you’re just a fan of filmed version of Shakespeare’s work. Or you’re just a big fan of George Cukor’s work. I fell into all three categories, but I won’t be watching this film again anytime soon.

The 1960s were an interesting time for the western. The Searchers in 1956 pointed the way towards the revisionism and hard look at the genres racial attitudes, and by the time that films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Hombre came around, the western was an all-new, slightly foreign genre. The clothing and vast desert wastelands remained the same, but suddenly there wasn’t the black and white moralizing. Shades of grey had taken over, and the western became a safe place to explore racial attitudes of the day by wrapping them up in garments from the Wild West.

Hombre borrows the central conceit from another Ford classic, Stagecoach, in that it views the stagecoach as a small fragment in which to explore the greater outlook of life. It also borrows the central character being something of an anti-hero, a tortured man who doesn’t fit entirely in any one place but makes his home wherever he wanders but would like to make a connection with someone. Of course, John Wayne wasn’t playing an American Indian like Paul Newman is here, but that is eventually explained. Hombre is a white man who was raised as an Apache and exists in an existential area where he doesn’t feel comfortable in either world.

Newman’s performance relies a lot upon his good-looks staring soulfully outwards and laying bare raw emotions of crisis and longing for a whole identity. Sure Hombre lacks originality in many of its narrative structures and character developments, but a well-worn genre done very well is always a great thing to view. And Hombre is very much a very well made piece of genre movie-making. Of course there’s a big shootout at the very end, the characters all come to respect the main character, and he does find his place in society, but that isn’t what stuck with me. Reread what I’ve written and you’ll see an emphasis placed on the film’s identity politics. That is what stuck with me, and when Hombre focuses in on the character’s journey of coming to terms with himself it moves with a grace and intelligence that is quite pleasing to behold.

The building blocks and necessary materials are all right there for easy and accessible use to make a far better movie than this over the subject matter. How can a movie about the Manhattan Project turn out this boring? Quite simply, by shifting the focus from actually creating the project into a variety of stories about people involved in the project, none of which are of much interest or depth.

The creation of the atomic bomb is a moral quandary for the ages, much like dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Fat Man & Little Boy is a shallow exercise in tedium and pedantic pageantry. Not a single person in this script can be considered remotely plausible as a human being, despite being based on real life figures. They’re cardboard cutouts who function as easily digestible types and never move beyond that. There’s no questioning over what they’re doing is right or wrong, no guilt or remorse, no elation, nothing.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s the feeling that this was scrapped together from poorly written and researched public school history books that present bite-sized chunks of information for a large group of people. We see the social life, and we get a glimpse of life in the 1940s, but that’s about all we see. A story involving John Cusack and Laura Dern falling in love as he slowly dies of radiation poisoning is of questionable taste. Even more questionable of a choice is showing Cusack’s death bed scene occurring on the same night on the first atomic bomb test. Both events are underscored and neither is given the emotional payoff that they deserved.

Fat Man & Little Boy is that phrase in microcosm: there’s no emotional payoff to any of the events. Paul Newman is straddled with playing a scold; characters aren’t given dialog so much as they’re given long speechifying moments about nothing in particular since there’s no weight or payoff to the events. So I raise the question once more: How could a movie about the Manhattan Project contain such a wealth of material to work with and come up with nothing of consequence?