Reviews by JxSxPx

It’s easy to go over the top when it comes to portraying a mental breakdown. Overly emotional histrionics and wild gesticulating are an actor’s lazy short hand, like a recipe for how to do it without bothering to come up with something more original or authentic. So thank god that William Friedkin took control of Bug and got some frighteningly brave, authentic and career-high performances from his two main cast members (the rest of the supporting players are equally effective). The Exorcist is a great horror film in which a lot of the violence begins as psychological terrors and ends up being of the corporeal variety, but me many of the greatest, most intruiging and scariest horror films present terror of the purely psychological variety. From Val Lewton’s dream-like run of films to something more graphic like this, these are the type of horror films that really engage me.

The real tragedy of the film is that Ashley Judd’s character seems pre-destined from the very beginning to suffer through some variation of this emotional and mental collapse regardless of who she was with. The real question was when it was going to happen and how bad it was going to be. And Bug presents us with a nightmarish vision of her descent into madness, aided by an equally disturbed drifter who becomes her lover (Michael Shannon). Without these two performances, working in perfect union with Friedkin’s subtle tonal shifts and the materials tricky monologs, Bug would have been a massive failure. Shannon seems to excel in playing mad characters, and something about him never quite seems totally trustworthy or all together stable. Without having to say a word he can make you uneasy, but once he bites into his ravings and spittle is flying out of his mouth, it’s a magnetic, hypnotic piece of acting that would have brought forth heaps of awards and accolades if it wasn’t in a horror film. But Judd is the true revelation here. Going seamlessly from beaten down blue collar woman to babbling psychotic, it’s the kind of work that would have won an actress an Oscar if it removed the horror film elements and stayed as a depressing character piece. Bug begins as a realistic character study before transitioning into something much deeper and untethers so quietly that it’s hard to spot the exact moment of transition. The claustrophobia and stark emotional context of the work gives two actors a great showcase, and they deliver some great work.

There’s a lot of scratch your head and shrug your shoulders about in confusion and disbelief over the poor decision making in No Such Thing. There’s the kernel of a great idea, but it doesn’t grow or prosper beyond that rudimentary idea. A modern day retread of the “Beauty & the Beast” fairy tale, but delivered in a very twee, anemic indie package, No Such Thing ends up frustrating as much as it delights.

One of the main problems is a sense of half-formed thoughts and monologues in which broad concepts like “the media” or “fame” without providing any unique, smart or concise thoughts about any of these subjects. The absence of salient arguments is harmful to a minimalistic film with large spaces of little to no dialog, so tiny amount remains has an extra weight added onto it. Even worse is how great actresses like Julie Christie and Helen Mirren, trying valiantly to overcome the limitations of thinly plotted characters, are trotted out like show ponies with nothing to do. Mirren wears a severe bob haircut and is constantly with a cigarette while doing her best approximation of Anna Wintour performing as Edith Head, but it never evolves beyond this thin sketch. And Christie mostly just smiles serenely and functions as a kind of fairy godmother in a way.

The only true saving graces are the two central performances from Sarah Polley and Robert John Burke. They bring a soulfulness and gravitas that the rest of the movie cannot earn or support. Scenes with just the two of them together have an energy and life that the rest of the movie is too bored to even try to recapture or enliven itself towards. It’s a somnambulistic affair, and might just be the first, last and only Hal Hartley film I partake in if the rest of his work is anything even remotely like this.

It strips away the macho-centric simplicity of language and depth of uncertainty in war and its ramifications, but Frank Borzage’s adaptation is still a winner. One of cinema’s great romantics, Borzage seems an odd choice to adapt a writer of such brusque anti-poetic wording, yet somehow Borzage finds a way into making a “Hollywood” version of the story. Perhaps it’s by downplaying the military battles and strategizing and zeroing in on the central doomed romance at the beating heart of the story.

And he is more than well equipped to tackle this challenge with the help of Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper, not bad company if you can get it. Not only are they formidable actors, but they have an innate gift for being interesting on camera. Hayes, a grand dame of American acting, is right at home in the more melodramatic stretches that the plot takes, yet still manages to invest her character with a grounded sense of noble suffering and heartbreak. Cooper, almost impossibly handsome here, uses the awkwardness of his body to grand effect here. While his exterior may be pure confidence, his twisted body angles or nervous twitches reveal the undercurrents barely contained. By the time the movie has arrived at the rousing climax, in which Cooper holds Hayes in an almost religious manner, this achingly romantic weepie will have earned the tears and emotions it has rung out of you.

Sure, there’s more than a few moments when the age of the thing is glaring obvious, and it can at times feel like a relic of a past era that no longer exists (which, quite frankly, it is). These will be major stumbling blocks for most first-time viewers who are unacquainted with the style of pre-code studio era films. And while I rarely comment upon how good or bad a print is, A Farewell to Arms is in hideously bad shape which becomes harder to ignore the longer it goes on. For a film that relies so heavily upon its dreamy cinematography to help sell the emotion, flecks and scratches often look like a blizzard is occurring in front of the screen. Not to mention that the audio sounds like it was recorded from three rooms down the hall. If you can make it through, and I highly suggest that one does, Arms has many rewards to offer, but time has not been kind to it in many ways.

For sheer innovation, Scarface: Shame of a Nation might just be the best of the three most infamous and enduring pre-noir/pre-code gangster classics that essentially dictated the language and look of the genre. (The other two would be Little Caesar and The Public Enemy.) That’s not to say that Scarface is a perfect film however, it’s brisk pace leaves behind many supporting characters and sometimes misplaces the emphasis on which ones it should be developing more for one. But still, the fact that it practically defined the conventions and filmic language of an entire genre cannot be denied or diminished.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. As I said earlier, Scarface has a tendency to misplace emphasis from time to time, either on an oddly placed comical figure or moment or an entire character. I could have done with far less Vince Barnett’s dumb slapstick side-kick and given more prominence to Karen Morley’s Poppy, George Raft’s romance with Ann Dvorak, and Dvorak in general deserved more screen time as our hero’s sister/inappropriate lust object. Dvorak’s potent sexuality threatens to ignite the film stock and the rest of the actors and scenery along with it, which doesn’t even begin to mention her dramatic heft as an actress, but she’s regulated to very little screen time and gives us a prime example of making the most of what little you’re given as a supporting player.

The quick pace leaves little room for strong character development, so many of the supporting figures remain stock players or, in Raft’s case, men of limited words who are only distinguishable by various tricks and busy-work with their hands. Female characters are also a major problem, there’s only two and Dvorak only makes an impression because of her skills as an actress. Poor Morley’s Poppy is merely a pretty prop and status symbol passed on from one gangster to another with no interior life or personality to her. Yet we get scene after scene of Vince Barnett confusing words, shooting a telephone receiver or trying to take a message down during a shootout.

But let’s go back to the good. This quick pace means that a lot of ground needs to be covered in a relatively short amount of time. Howard Hawks is fairly brilliant at maintaining energy in any of his films, and one scene which overlays a tommy gun unloading into an off-screen victim with days whizzing by on a calendar. It’s quick, smart and to the point, the kind of economic filmmaking that Hawks mastered in.

And Hawks could always be counted on to assemble a diverse and unique group of actors for any of his projects, which is no different here. Paul Muni became a star thanks to his ruthless, cold and unlikable killer in this film, and it isn’t hard to see why. Muni is continuously erupting volcano, and watching him leave a trail of destruction behind him with no remorse or feeling is riveting stuff. Osgood Perkins and Boris Karloff, nice to see him in something besides a horror film, are terrific as a pair of older bootleggers who run the rackets that Muni is eyeing to take over.

Scarface may not be as graphic in its depictions of sex and violence as the infamous 80s remake starring Al Pacino, but my god if it isn’t a potent enough blend on its own. Based on Al Capone, who is the gangster picture what Ted Bundy and Ed Gein are to the serial killer, Scarface seeks to remove much of the glamor and mystique about these individuals that was built up by the press and showcase them as a depraved, uneducated and bloodthirsty sub-species. The moral sermonizing of the thing is totally undermined because of the sick jolly thrill we get by vicariously watching bad people do bad things and then pay for it. It may not be perfect, but it’s damn close and an incredibly fun ride along the way.

You know, screwball comedy can be hard to make work. It requires a delicate touch in pacing and finding a balance between the grounded hero and the insane characters orbiting around them. An incomprehensible plot, or one that is filled with improbabilities isn’t really an issue since that seems pretty average for the territory. That a film could star so many stars and still not wind up a classic is a shame, but don’t blame Libeled Lady’s lackluster performance on any of them.

Instead, think of Lady as a definition of direction being key to making screwball comedy work. Gregory La Cava, Preston Sturges, George Cukor, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra all made perfect screwball comedies and are the kind of directors who could find the balance between keeping the comedy grounded and allowing the zany and strange parts to shine, but Jack Conway plays the entire film at the same pitch. Libeled Lady needed to slow down occasionally and not just speed through every scene, it doesn’t leave much room for the laughs to come out.

But this is a film which highlights star power making anything watchable. William Powell and Myrna Loy are a great team no matter what vehicle, combining a unique chemistry with sophisticated wits and sassy one-liners with delicate ease. Spencer Tracy on paper looks like an odd choice, but delivers a good enough performance, yet everyone is out-shined by Jean Harlow. Harlow played brassy, fast-talking dames with relish and here she works that tough-girl magic to great charm and manages to hit all of her laughs, even making some of the more outlandish plot twists believable thanks to her commitment and chemistry with Powell. One almost wishes that Powell and Harlow had ended up together, or maybe that Loy and Harlow had given the boys a verbal beat down and walked off arm-in-arm in a display of strength and sisterhood. But that may have been too much of a pipe dream for MGM’s patented glamorous posturing.

Lee Daniels, even in his awards-baiting prestige mode, is never one for subtly of emotion or the difference between gratuitous and melodramatic and finely assembled montage. The Butler will make you cry and feel an emotion, but only because it has worked so damn hard to beat it out of you when if it had taken a “Just the fact ma’am” approach we would have ended up with something all the better.

The fact is, there are several different films straining to burst forth from this one. And maybe Daniels and his creative staff would have been better served ushering in the project as a mini-series on HBO or a likeminded network that would have remained fairly hands-off. We begin our story in 1920s Georgia, which sees our main character as a young child witnessing his mother’s (off-screen) rape and the murder of his father. In typical style of the rest of the film motivations and shifting political ideology are spoken aloud instead of shown to us, even the things that seem incredibly obvious like a discussion with a teenaged Cecil Gaines, our future butler, and the master servant of a pastry shop who tells him that black people must wear two faces at all times, one for the white world at large and one for their private world.

None of this would have been a major problem if there weren’t a few other things that went wrong with the production. Chiefly, many of the major supporting roles are written as ciphers or walking symbols and not characters in their own right, and the more often than not distracting parade of star stunt-casting. Names like Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, John Cusack, Minka Kelly, Mariah Carey, Live Schreiber, Robin Williams, Alan Rickman and James Marsden certainly look like a tony cast, but they’re frequently stranded with bad makeup jobs and nothing to do. Mariah Carey’s entirely mute performance is particularly distracting at the beginning; her role could have just gone to an extra and nothing would have changed about the sequence except for the distracting nature of Mariah Carey dressed as a field worker. Marsden is a great choice for JFK, and in his limited time makes you think what wonders he could do with the role in a larger capacity, the same thing can’t be said for the rest of the presidents. Williams is decent but doesn’t register much, Cusack spends a lot of time staring off into the distance and doesn’t come close to emulating Nixon, and Schreiber dips into gonzo humor in his sequences which are uncomfortable in the sense that we can’t tell if this is supposed to be played straight or taken as some kind of satire.

But let’s get back to the characters as symbols, a few supporting characters walk away as fully realized characters. Cuba Gooding Jr. makes a welcome return to serious acting and does a commendable job as the fast-talking wiseass of the White House staff, that his character manages to add some depth and personality outside of this one-note role is a good thing. The same thing can’t be said about David Oyelowo as Louis Gaines, Cecil’s oldest son. Oyelowo is a gifted actor and I look forward to seeing more of his work, so it’s not a problem of performance here, purely one of writing a character who just so happens to be involved with every major twist and turn in political ideals and social revolutions of the pre, mid and post-Civil Rights era. First he’s a student protestor, and this segment gives the film its single best moment, a purely transcendent piece of filmmaking that makes the rest of the film feel weaker in comparison. While he is sitting in on a lunch counter, his father is prepping a luxurious dinner at the White House. It’s a quiet summation of the two parallel journeys in the story, Cecil’s quiet revolution by showing that black people are just as hard-working and committed to doing their jobs well as the rest of the society, and Louis’ longing to change the system so that he may dream bigger and achieve higher in society. But then Oyelowo must also take part in the fire-bombing of a bus, MLK’s assassination, the Black Panther party and seemingly every other major moment of the era. Its lazy writing that mistakes plugging a character into a historical situation for another to react towards for development. It would have been much better if The Butler had focused in on one particular presidency instead of delivery a broad history lesson or force-feeding these events to us.

But Daniels is still smart enough to know that the main success of his story was the central picture of a loving couple, and if he didn’t cast those two parts correctly nothing in The Butler would have worked. Forest Whitaker is dynamic and touching in a very quiet, understated, reflective and moving as Cecil Gaines. If there’s any justice, he’ll get a second Oscar nomination out of this. The same is true for Oprah Winfrey as his wife Gloria, who gets the flashier role. It’s hard to imagine Oprah (read: OPRAH!!) as a chain-smoking, alcoholic, adulterous housewife who is just taking out her loneliness and aggression in her life out in these ways, but she nails it. Of course, everyone talks about her glorious back-hand to her son during a highly combative dinner scene, but she’s most alive for me as an actress when she’s venomously questioning Cecil about Jackie Kennedy’s wardrobe and his career late at night. It’s easy to forget what a gifted character actress she is beneath the outsized media persona.

So as we walk away from The Butler I can’t help but bring up The Help, a film which takes place over the same amount of time and tackles much of the same subject matter. But unlike that film, this one doesn’t offer up balm for our wounds. It prefers to have a good hard look at the emotional and psychic scars which this country is still trying to let heal and move past picking at. It’s a mixed bag, but I’ll take the film about black history created by largely black talent over the white people solve racism myth, thank you very much.

Eve’s Bayou is a delicious little treat of Southern Gothic madness involving a family’s journey through one twisted summer. Actress turned writer/director Kasi Lemmons gives the entire film the aura of a folktale, and with the help of cinematography Amy Vincent renders the entire story and setting as an ambiguous and mysterious. That Eve’s Bayou is narrated from the titular character’s older self gives a stronger impact to the film-as-folktale since a child’s eyes cannot and do not completely understand the adult world.

We’re told through this narration that Eve gets her name from a freed slave descendant who was given the lands, and sixteen children, that her family currently lives in. They are a wealthy upper-middle class black family in a small town in Louisiana. They are the premiere family in the area, thanks to the name being passed down through the generations and her father’s work as a physician. It is during one of their parties that the film begins its layers of foresight, confusion, misdirection and half-truths. Eve clearly sees her philandering father engaging in a secretive tryst with a family friend’s wife, but is given different variations of what she clearly saw by both her sister and aunt. This clouds her memory and sight, which is a neat of way of foreshadowing how the film will end in pure confusion and events that seemed preordained from the beginning.

Into this pressure cooker of a story, Lemmons drops in an amazing group of actors, some of whom don’t get enough work or don’t actively seek out enough challenging work. Lynn Whitfield and Debbi Morgan fall into the former category while Samuel L. Jackson practically defines the latter. Jackson can be a very talented actor, but he’s often slumming and appearing in numerous projects far beneath him, and here he is clearly inspired and challenged by the material and complicated turns his character undergoes. He must play a man that we like, even when his actions and cockiness get in the way of that likability. Whitfield is all neurotic edge and beautiful artifice masking elemental rage and maternal worry as his long-suffering wife. Morgan, for me though, is the true standout and treasure of the film as Eve’s aunt with the gift of foresight and other strange quirks, which could be explain as mental illness but they’re so specifically detailed and tend to become true that there’s no other explanation for them but to be reality. Morgan has numerous delicious monolog’s, one in which she details the death of one of her husbands is a standout, which she devours with relish. Never overacting, Morgan is always subtle and graceful in displaying the various undercurrents of her stories and creates a haunting, powerhouse of a performance that was perhaps too subtle for the Academy to even throw her a Supporting Actress nomination which is an egregious error and pity.

Of course, without two strong performances from the main child actors the entire film would collapse. Luckily, Meagan Good as the older sister, Cisely, and Jurnee Smollett as Eve are up to the challenge. Smollett is particularly effective, registering the other-worldliness of Eve, she too seems to have been blessed with a supernatural gift, and has a tough, fierce core that works well with the character. Precociousness isn’t even a word that these two actresses come near in their performances, preferring to display maturity, grit and fire in their roles.

I have mentioned visions, foresight, magic (Diahann Caroll appears as a voodoo priestess, and it’s a deliriously strange and wonderful as it sounds) and so Eve’s Bayou constantly circles back in a manner similar to a fairy tale. We always return to whether these images can be trusted, or are they being pieced back together slowly from the memories of an adult looking back thirty years into the past? It’s hard to say. But this vagueness only added to my appreciation of the film. Is Eve’s Bayou a great film because of this dream-like, almost poetic memory rumination? Or is it great because this atmosphere only heightens the realistic performances? In the end, I think the curious strength and power of Eve’s Bayou comes across because it plays out like Ingmar Bergman directing a Tennessee Williams adaptation.

You know, if they would have chosen a path – dark comedy or serious vampire story – and stuck with it instead of merging the two into this hodge-podge unsettled mess we could have had something here. But the behind the scenes politics of filmmaking lead to a less than stellar product. Ain’t that always the way it goes down?

Eddie Murphy, the poster boy for lazy choices and easy money, was once viewed as a daringly original and edgy comedian. One didn’t know where his comedy would lead us, and frequently it led to projects like Raw or his time on SNL. Classic stuff, but then the 80s started to come to a close and Murphy decided that he was only interested in being a likable and bankable movie star and didn’t feel like putting in much time or effort to make a worthy project. Any goodwill attached to his name is all but gone, and Vampire in Brooklyn can be looked back on as the beginning of the end.

Vampire in Brooklyn was the last film required for Eddie Murphy to fulfill his contract with Paramount. And this clearly shows, instead of rising to the challenge and playing the character correctly, you can see the concessions that Wes Craven made to his star. Once more we have Murphy in layers upon layers of prosthetics in order to briefly appear as an ethnic comedic stereotype, this time an Italian gangster. This character offers nothing to the film at large but the distracting appearance of Murphy in wax-like non-emotive makeup. Even better are all of the scenes that should be played as vulnerable, scary, romantic or any other number of emotions that Murphy derails by insisting on trying to make them funny.

Look, a satirical take on Blacula doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Hell, a vague remake in which it’s brought up to modern times (or then modern times as this film is from 1995), not the worst thing I’ve ever heard if you do it properly and make it funny enough. The problem is, Brooklyn was clearly meant to be a scarier film. A spinoff of the tropes and themes in Dracula, but set in the inner city urban community with vague allusions to voodoo and a person being two halves of the same being. This two halves line is brought up in the beginning but quickly goes nowhere despite some interesting nightmare sequences and a heavy importance placed upon in the earliest parts of the film. It’s a shame that it becomes dropped – whatever happened with the body of the “other”? Why bring up all of these hints and teases about her mother’s work in Jamaica and having a previous familiarity with other characters and voodoo magic if it’s not going to build to anything?

Well, at least Angela Bassett looks gorgeous and has an appealing chemistry with both of her leading men. She’s trying really hard to create a believable character and ground her work in this film, but the numerous screenwriters clearly didn’t have a clear sense of purpose of what they were trying to achieve. If it was too be funny, then the movie is too dark and horrific, if it was to be scary then the movie is filled with too many scenes of abrasive characters mugging for camera time. It’s not a bad concept, either version of the film, but it lacks a distinct purpose so it’s left to drift into the ether forever.

Well lookie what we have here, a Marvel film property that dares to be something darker and more interesting than the largely paint-by-numbers affairs that so many of them have settled into lately. For much of the time, The Wolverine is actually much happier to NOT be a wall-to-wall action extravaganza that forsakes character development or interesting, smaller moments which build our rooting interests in their stakes. The Wolverine bothers to question what it’s like to be a near immortal being who cannot be hurt, but don’t worry there’s still plenty of explosions.

Taking place after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Wolverine has gone into hiding in the wilderness (and wouldn’t you after being a part of that movie?). After being located and tantalized with a chance to lose his mutant powers by an elderly Japanese businessman that he has past dealings with, we’re off and running into the actual story. Wolverine as surrogate parental figure to a younger girl (this is a reoccurring theme in the comic books), as wandering lone samurai, as brooding lover and existential human. And Hugh Jackman continues to play the part for all it is worth, but as roles in films like The Prestige and Les Miserables have proven that he is an actor of broader range and more depth than this role has allowed him to demonstrate previously, I really do hope he eventually hangs up the claws.

I suppose that’s the general problem with the X-Men film franchise: general fatigue about it all. Too many films overloaded with too many mutants for no real reason other than to throw in another nod to the comic books. Case in point here, Viper, leader of the group HYDRA in the comics, here a mutant who has taken the hydra/viper/snake motif to its literal extreme complete with a scene in which she sheds her skin. She offers up a few cool visuals and is very pretty, but could have been cut out and her role given to a non-mutant member of the yakuza or ninja rebels that the film is actually concerned with. And the less said about the gigantic letdown of a third action battle finale the better – it mistakes bigger for better, and the “twist” was obvious from the moment the film began to unravel it’s story.

Yet I still really enjoyed The Wolverine, and quite a bit I might add. Rila Fukushima and Tao Okamato are pleasingly tough, strong, complicated characters and both actresses give solid performances. I think Fukushima might just have made a stronger impression to me by the end of it, even if making that character a mutant with a relatively weak power was a questionable choice, she still managed to sell me on it. It also helps that both of them create a nice chemistry with Jackman and make the teacher/student relationship and the romantic one believable and worth our time and emotional investment. The film populates itself with a variety of characters that we care about and this doesn’t insult our intelligence when things must go predictably chaotic. The Wolverine is sometimes most arresting when it’s explosions are between the characters and not atop a speeding bullet train (although that scene does manage to take a familiar action trope and make it fresh and exciting).

Mostly a very strong end to an epic swim through dirty waters, 1983 doesn’t quite pack the emotional punch it needed to be ultimately satisfying. This time the narrative is fractured between two, sometimes even three, different perspectives and this indecisive quality about which character is our narrator stands in stark contrast to the first two which focused in with laser precision on one character’s point-of-view of the madness going on around them. But at least this one offers up a payoff to questions that we’ve had since the first installment.

Primarily, 1983 focuses in on David Morrissey’s bad cop having a moral crisis and beginning to break down. He has the dirt on who has been doing what and knows how to go about unearthing the truth and bringing the cycle of madness to an end. The other story, which isn’t given much time to really develop or become a very strong one, features a lawyer (Mark Addy) with ties to the police force uncovering the child abduction ring from the first film and frantically trying to rescue the latest victim. The third story, which dovetails into the two, highlights the reoccurring characters of a corrupt pastor (Peter Mullan) and a gay prostitute (Robert Sheehan). Does it sound convulted enough for you? Well, what emerges isn’t necessarily important to understand all of the crossed T’s and dotted I’s. It’s the portrait of a particular place undergoing a great deal of growth and change within a decade.

Also a major problem – the ending is a bit too upbeat to be entirely believable for this world. Redemption and a moment of grace for these three characters has been absolutely earned, especially poor Sheehan’s BJ. But it feels false, and while this particular crime ring has been shuttered, Morrissey’s cop will still have to face blowback from his job and former co-conspirators. The extensive use of voiceover and the employment of a medium are other egregious errors which make this installment a comedown from the previous two. Doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s still a solidly made and incredibly entertaining movie and generally works as a nice capper to the trilogy.

Red Riding ends up being as effective and epic an exploration of a specific time and place and the overwhelming crime and corruption that are building (or destroying) it into something totally different as, say, Chinatown or L.A. Confidential (but not quite reaching such lofty artistic heights as either). But when the dust settles and we stand back and look at it all, when we’ve finished processing the banality of cruelty and debauchery in this place, the thing that lingers the most in the mind is a phrase: “This is the north, where we do what we want.”