Reviews by JxSxPx

Sure, it's not the masterpiece that "The Tortoise and the Hare" was, but "Toby Tortoise Returns" is a perfectly fine sequel. It leans very heavily on slapstick, but any cartoon that features caricatures of Mae West and Harpo Marx as anthropomorphic birds is worth a viewing and a recommendation in my book.

The basic premise is the same -- Toby and Max are competing against each other again, with no one predicting that Toby will come out on top. This time instead of a race it's a boxing match. Of course, Max's pride and ego get in his way once more and he loses a challenge he could have easily had won in the process. But it's so hard not to root for and be happy that that dim-witted turtle won out in the end.

The jokes and sight-gags fire off at a rapid pace, and if I didn't know any better I'd have assumed this was a long-forgotten Looney Tunes short. A few that I liked were the cameos from the Three Little Pigs, Max jumping out of his gloves and rob while they continue to independently do the movements he was just making, and the aviary versions of the Hollywood icons I mentioned earlier. All told, it's a very solid, enjoyable and entertaining little seven minutes.

Let's start off with the most obvious thing about Disney's spin on the tale of Persephone and the origins of the seasons, the animation is positively delicious. The colors are warm and vibrant, the movements are fluid and dynamic, there's a variation in design yet they each seem to occupy the same world. It's a beautiful thing to behold.

And, shockingly, it's reasonably faithful to the original Greek myth. The basic skeleton frame of the myth is there, but somewhere along the way in the production process they decided that Hades and the Judeo-Christian devil were one and the same. They're not, and it seems like a large misrepresentation of his place in the cosmos to turn his kingdom into Hell fire and demons.

The problems are pretty simple, it's a wall-to-wall musical, but none of the music is any good, and there's too much fat that could be cut to the story. Let's start off with the music, which insists that each and every single line be sung as if this were opera, it's not and that frequently leads to numerous lines sounding like they're mumbled or garbled. It doesn't help that so much of the writing is nothing but purple prose and overacted by a gloriously large ham. The story itself is pretty basic, but constantly showing us singing and dancing in the environments is only interesting if the choreography is interesting or there's something unique going on. Continuously zooming in on a large billow of fire that changes color doesn't really qualify.

"The Goddess of Spring" is one of Disney's better looking short films, but it's bogged down by a lot of problems that keep it from being great. But it's by no means a bad short, just a merely adequate one.

Disney had a habit in the late 50s/early 60s to make elaborate and longer-than-usual short films about characters from American folklore. "The Saga of Windwagon Smith" is one of these films, and is pretty terrible.

To begin with, the story just isn't very interesting or memorable. A former sailor outfits a covered wagon like it's a ship and uses the wind to steer it in the direction he would like to go. A town, out of greed and hoping to speed up the process of getting from Kansas to California, decides to build him a large vessel so that he can navigate it clear across country to make trading easier. That's the entirety of the story, and it somehow takes thirteen minutes to get around to this.

The animation is routinely rough and sub-par for the studio. Molly, the lone female character, is practically immobile but for her gigantic doll-eyes and comically large bottom half of her dress. Several character designs are clashing against each other, like they had each wandered in from different films or like the animators never decided on a singular overall look for the film and just decided to try and play to their strengths in-between animating the more consuming features. So the story is boring and the animation isn't great, which means as an animated short film it's a misfire.

Quick - think of a largely known fairy tale from Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm. Got it? OK. Chances are very high that there's at least one Disney variation of it. And for the story of "Hansel and Gretel" we have this Silly Symphony short, "Babes in the Woods."

It's not very good and feels more like a test drive for some of Walt Disney's obsessions and scenarios that he wanted to explore further in his feature films. So much of what is presented in this short would crop up in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, that it's very hard to not think of this as a prototype for how well the audience would react to these scenarios. The horrific journey in the woods which turns out to be mere hallucination and visual trickery? Discovering a merry group of diminutive workers who live deep in the woods, take them in, perform an extended musical sequence with brown jugs and come to the aid of the heroes? A twisted old crone with spells that cause terrible transformations? It's all in here, but nowhere near as endearing or imaginative as Snow White. Also, it's pretty well-known that Disney wanted to develop and create a movie version of The Wizard of Oz, and does anyone else get the impression that the wicked witch here was his prototype for the Wicked Witch of the West? It could just be me.

But anyway, back to this short. The animation isn't particularly appealing to look at, and all of the characters seem to be carbon-copies of each other. The final battle is more disturbing for how cutesy it tries to play it off as. The little elves come to the rescue, fire arrows at the witch and they somehow don't pierce her skin or cause her any harm at all. Meanwhile, Hansel and Gretel transform the other victims back into normal children, they wheel out her giant cauldron, which she promptly falls into, gets covered in her magical boiling hot brew, turns to stone and then all of the children join hands and dance and sing around the new statute version of their tormentor/captor. I don't even know how to evaluate and process that final series of images, so I'm just going to let you linger on them in your imagination.

The characters in "The Tortoise and the Hare" may not have become as ubiquitous as the Three Little Pigs, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Goofy and company, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't retain a luster and permanent place as one of Disney's best and most enjoyable animated shorts.

The animation is clean, simple and leans heavily on the rubbery-yet-fluid dynamics of so many 1930s cartoons. The story packs in the moralistic lesson of doing something correctly at your own pace, hard work, working on building your skill sets, not giving up along with numerous humorous bits. The extended sequence of Max Hare showing off for a quartet of female bunnies clearly points in the direction and style of humor that rivals WB would fashion to form not just Bugs Bunny, but the entirety of the Looney Tunes canon.

Pretty routine, but the production values and Kathryn Bigelow’s smarts as a director go a long way towards making this thing watchable and maintaining our interest. The only thing of any particular note which is different and unique about K-19: The Widowmaker is that it places its focus on Russian characters in a story set during the Cold War.

That paranoia and fear of that era causes many decisions to be made which lead us to question the sanity of their thinking. If your submarine is leaking out radiation and potentially a threat to everyone aboard the vessel and the choice is between help from the Americans and death? I don’t know, perhaps growing up in a post-Cold War mentality has made be naïve about these kinds of decisions. Notice how I have yet to actually name A character, any one of them because there’s a lot to choose from. This is one of the many problems plaguing K-19, there’s a distinct lack of differentiation between the secondary characters – it’s very hard to keep track of which one is named which without some kind of cheat sheet. The film doesn’t know if it wants us to root for this large body of men who heroically go about doing a Herculean task of fixing the leaking radioactive core in only chemical suits, or the two sparring leads played by Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford. The two of them buttheads and eventually come to an agreement and appreciation of each other which is very obviously their trajectory as characters, yet the film still takes its sweet time getting to that point.

This lack of focus means that the film is episodic and bloated in structure. Too many diversions and ancillary characters, not enough of a strong grip has been used to tighten the plot points. Ford and Neeson are dramatically fine actors, but neither one of them can get a decent handle on their Russian accents. Roughly half the time Neeson’s natural Irish tones come rolling out, and Ford just can’t seem to keep it consistent or make it sound believable.

So it’s up to Bigelow to deliver her solidly cerebral approach to macho chest-pounding, and she does manage to create tension in numerous sequences and smartly finds ways to make such a confined space work in a filmic language. By the end, the submarine becomes less a ship and more of a metallic tomb which moves through the water. A little generic, sure, and definitely overly-long, but K-19 is a sufficient and solidly crafted genre film.

There’s a good idea for a more adult riff on Roger Rabbit’s gimmick buried somewhere beneath the failings, trappings and rumble of Cool World’s final product. Cool World currently exists as a prime example of studio interference resulting in an auterist’s film being deferred and denied at every turn.

One cannot simply talk about Cool World without discussing the problematic production that led to its birth, and the more unique concept that launched it. The film began life as Ralph Bakshi’s attempt to take the main conceit of Roger Rabbit and flip it inside out and twist it all around. That is to say, he wanted to make a more mature and adult film in which real actors and cartoons interacted. His concept was pretty perverse, but highly intriguing: a half-human/half-cartoon creature would escape from the animated world into the real one and seek vengeance on the father who gave it mutated life.

The studio got scared about a hard-R animated film and started to revise the script into more PG-13 territory, and then Kim Basinger signed on. Basinger wanted a movie that could be shown to sick kids in the hospital, so she essentially wanted another Roger Rabbit. So what we ended up with was a film with no real plot to speak of, a main character who wants to become a real person by seducing her creator, an artist erotically fixated on his creation, and a very young Brad Pitt added into the mix for no reason that I can logically understand. It’s a clashing, thunderous storm of kiddie and adult tones, highly sexual images and zany Looney Tunes style sight gags, cutesy animals and film noir atmospherics. None of it gels or makes any kind of coherent sense at any given moment, it’s bad, but strangely, hypnotically watchable. A siren’s call of a film which only leads to confusion as to why you even bothered to watch it in the first place, yet there’s still that glimmer of promise that was the original film lurking somewhere around the edges of the frame.

It’s a pretty fun and rare treat to watch a hugely influential band use their clout to make a film so obviously designed for cult status and fringe worship. But what else would one expect from the Ramones?

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School does little to update the kids-against-the-adults formula of the rock-orientated high school musical. The stern principal who constantly tries to outlaw their fun and musical choices, the rebellious lead and nerdy sidekick, the hot boyfriend for the nerdy sidekick – all of them are present and accounted for. As are other various personality types and plot shenanigans from dozens of other films which have been distilled down to their purest form here.

It brings nothing new to the table, but it’s pretty solidly made and features two central performances which go a long way to selling the whole thing outright. P.J. Soles is pretty adorable and energetic as obsessive Ramones fan and PG-rated rebellious hellion Riff Randell, which is a great name. Much of the movie’s success or failure rests on her ability to make this loopy, bratty, goofy character seem believable and likeable and she nails each and every turn. She also seems to find the kitsch value and frequently appears to be sticking her tongue in her cheek. On the flip side is Mary Woronov as Miss Evelyn Togar, the school’s newest principal and main antagonist. Woronov plays the part up with a campy relish that is normally only seen in Disney villains, drag queens or John Waters films.

The Ramones themselves are mostly glimpsed as fantasy figures or onstage for most of their running time, kept mainly as a plot device and driving engine for the soundtrack, which is an all killer batch of songs from the Ramones, Devo and other legendary new wave and punk acts of the era. Yet when they’re called in to play up their brain-dead New Yawk personas, they do so with manic glee. And the climatic school takeover is utterly ridiculous and plays into their strengths and lyrical obsessions with outsiders, fun, macabre imagery and a simplistic form of youthful anarchy.

And as wonderfully silly and enjoyable as Rock ‘n’ Roll High School is/was, I can’t help but think of much better and more subversive a film starring the Ramones could’ve and should’ve been. If the directorial duties had been handed over to say, John Waters, I don’t know if the film would have turned out better, but it would have been more daring and original. But what is there is a prime example of zany cult comedy at its finest. Check the giant rodent amongst the revelers at the concert – only in a willfully strange ode to 1950s rock & roll teenage musicals.

I think something got lost in the translation of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. Other films based on his work used the text as scripture and featured running times that hovered somewhere between two-and-a-half and three hours. Desire runs, roughly, an hour-forty. So pacing is obviously a problem.

The first act plods along slowly, detailing the barely contained rage and boiling resentments of Eben (Anthony Perkins) towards his dad, Ephraim (Burl Ives). They quarrel over who owns the rights towards the farm lands they live on, and there’s conflict between him and his two brothers who run out into the wider world the moment they see the opportunity. It all seems like the beginnings of a sobering, powerful drama in which familial strife comes to a head and tragedy occurs.

This doesn’t happen. Once Anna (Sophia Loren) is added to the mix as Ephraim’s younger immigrant bride, the story warps into tawdry romance novel pulp and ends in something close to bad soap opera writing run amok. The mid-section frenziedly builds tension, that I assume is supposed to be erotic, between Anna and Eben, yet Perkins and Loren generate no chemistry between the two of them. So the romance between them is rushed and limp, and we stumble head-first into a finale that dizzily tries to tie up all the loose ends and come up with some kind of satisfactory conclusion to this mess. It almost succeeds, but Hollywood moralizing ruins the day.

So let’s examine these major problems for a minute aside from pacing. Here is a case of star power actually hurting and sinking a film instead of helping it. Sophia Loren’s character is supposed to be beautiful, but uneducated and greedy. But Loren comes across as too well-spoken, possessing a high-class accent that she picked up somehow and too sophisticated for this role. This was a common problem in her Hollywood films, they rarely seemed to know how to use her like Vittorio de Sica masterfully did.

Perkins is neurotic, and his performance is much better when it focuses in on the relationship between his character and Ives’. The romance is a wash from the start and the film’s insistence on transferring attention away from this central conflict hurts it profoundly. And Burl Ives manages to turn the two of them into nothing but white noise with his commanding presence. He takes the cliché role of “monstrous father figure” and transforms it into a more humane and complicated character reading through his great talents as an actor.

And that ending…. From what I’ve gathered in a brief bit of research, the original play ends with Anna killing her love child, Eben abandoning her after learning that she’s killed their son in some warped effort to win his love, and she gets carried off to jail. The film has all of that, except Eben returns to her, professing his undying love and getting carted away to jail with her. This goes against his character, the interior logic of the film and feels like tacked on moralizing from the period.

Of course that disaster is just one of many which harm the film. But it does have its bright spots, like gorgeous cinematography that crafts a mythological feeling in the images and overall tone. There’s also a nice score to compliment the look of the film and Ives’ committed work. While it is pretty terrible in the long run, it’s still watchable in a way that shows like Melrose Place were, you shake your head and feel guilty and stupid for watching something so clearly terrible as it twists and turns in increasingly ridiculous and strange ways before coming to a conclusion so outlandish it almost seems like the only logical one that could be found.

Having just watched Desire Under the Elms before watching this, I couldn’t help but notice a parallel between the two films. Both star Italian actresses of great magnetism, earthiness and sensuality as housewives with unfulfilling marriages who have affairs with the attractive younger stud in closest proximity. But whereas Sophia Loren eventually found some success in Hollywood, her epics El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire are the very best of that genre and her performance in Arabesque is appropriately charming, humorous and seductive, Anna Magnani never found as much success as an actress in Hollywood outside of Tennessee Williams adaptations.

Wild is the Wind is pretty tone-deaf, predictable and hyperbolic in its florid melodrama and unsettled moral convictions. But at least it has Anna Magnani as the central driving force behind it. Movie star vehicles are a strange breed, sometimes a great star can upend a movie because we can only think of them as one thing and it becomes difficult to change that course in our minds. Sometimes, through their sheer charisma and talents as an actor, they can make any ol’ piece of dreck immensely watchable and enjoyable. That is almost the case here with Magnani.

As an actress she seems unbound by the conventions of what we can consider quality acting. You never know where she is going to go or how she is going to do it. At times when we think “This will be the big crying scene,” and instead she plays it in a totally different way. Her manic outbursts and expressive hand gestures punctuate moments or help to fill in the gaps in this thinly written film. She isn’t beautiful in the conventional sense, but she is undeniably commanding and lovely in front of the camera. Her long nose and strong jaw give her face character and she is unlike so many of the disposable starlets that parade across the screen. Just getting a chance to sit back and view her is an absolute joy. So while Wild Is the Wind may veer off into areas approaching close to unintentional humor or convulsive eye-rolling, at least we can watch an original and unique artist at work.