Reviews by JxSxPx

I don't really know what to make of this one.... It's not bad, just incredibly odd. And, honestly, Mickey takes on an angrier tone here that just doesn't sit well with his predominant characteristics of sweetness, an everyman type who was a little bit shy, but goodhearted.

Mickey tells his nephews a story about how he was shipwrecked once and the story is just a reworking of Gulliver's Travels but with Mickey put into it instead. Granted, in some of his earliest cartoons he was portrayed as mischievous and a little bit naughty, but he takes on a bullying persona here that doesn't mesh well when taken into context with the breadth of his short-films and branding.

Like pretty much anything Disney does it's gloriously animated, and the sea forming a fist to grab Mickey and toss him like a gambler throwing dice is a humorous and nice touch. There isn't much that's actually funny in this, but it's smoothly animated and not awful. Not very good, just very, very odd.

I’ve said it before in other reviews of film adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I hold those stories dear to my heart and read them numerous times as a child, and I still believe that no one completely faithful film version has been made yet. I’ve enjoyed a lot of them – the 1933 star-studded version was unnerving and maniacally oddball, Disney’s animated version has its charms in the off kilter background designs – but none of them has been as disturbingly psychotic or burrowed as far into Alice’s psyche as Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 take on the classic tale.

The movie begins with a close-up on Alice’s lips as she tells us what we’re about to watch is a creation of her imagination. Immediately we’re placed inside of her feverish hallucinations as she follows the white rabbit – here a taxidermy creature with disturbing bug-eyes glued on and a tendency to bleed out sawdust – down a rabbit hole that is located in a desk drawer. It only gets more bizarre from there as Wonderland is presented as a spacious house with rooms and entryways that make no logistical sense from space to another.

This combination of live-action and stop-motion has never before freaked me out like it has here. Normally, I love stop-motion animation. The films of Ray Harryhausen combine reality and animation in adorably artificial ways, but the merging of the two (obvious seams and all) only makes the films more dream-like and imaginative. Alice is dream-like in its combination of stop-motion and live-action, in the sense that a nightmare is a type of dream. As Alice grows and shrinks she changes back and forth from a human into a porcelain doll, which is one of the least creepy images in the film.

The caterpillar is a sock with dentures and googly eyes, now that is one of the most disturbing and freakish images in the entire film. The herky-jerky movements only add to the macabre overtones of the animation. Raw meats climb up walls and in and out of canisters, the combination of artificial puppets like the caterpillar and March Hare stand in glaring contrast to taxidermy animals of the White Rabbit or fish servant. Yes, this ever-unfolding series of deranged images freaked me out, but I loved every minute of it.

Alice is the kind of film that finds the ordinary object and transforms it into a magical and mysterious new entity. To put it even more bluntly – it’s a film that is a veritable feast for the eyes and imagination. As long as one doesn’t mind being a little creeped out along the journey it takes us. It manages to bring back the horror of the fairy tale, and while not a film for small children may be of interest to older ones.

But back to the psyche of Alice, it seems obvious that once we look upon her room and have made the full-circle journey through Wonderland back to it that the use of found objects as the denizens of the land and the more organic and earthy textures of the whole enterprise was a deliberate choice to place us in her mind. And after running into the queen and almost getting beheaded, she awakens (maybe?) from her time in Wonderland to find a pair of scissors and question where the White Rabbit is. And once she finds him, will she decapitate him?

Alice boldly reinvents the title character from the originals sweet little English girl who seeks to bring order to the chaos and grow into her adulthood to a more deranged and violent creature. At once it captures the fever-dream nature of the images in the text and yet managed to strike its own tone and twists the story into something new. As a strict adaptation it might leave a purist something to be desired, but as its own identity that loosely takes the story and re-imagines it in a new and different direction it’s a masterpiece of some kind.

The only thing that I didn’t care for was the constant use of close-ups on her lips to remind us that she is telling the story. That is glaringly obvious from the beginning and becomes tedious the more it is used as it breaks up some of the tension and pulls us away from the visual wonders on display. But this minor problem doesn’t really detract or hurt the film in any major, or minor, way. Call it a personal annoyance.

As a Cary Grant fan, it’s a little hard to deal with some of the later films in his career. As the 50s and 60s went on his particular brand of debonair irony, grace, wit, romanticism, sharp intelligence and movie star charisma seemed to become old fashioned and he did a lot of movies which are watchable but hardly indicative of his best work which twisted his mold into interesting shapes. The Grass Is Greener is a prime example of this.

With a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons acting alongside Grant, there’s no way the movie could ever dip into unwatchable territory, but it never really highlights the supremely talented actors’ best assets. Mitchum is great playing tortured, complicated characters, romantic comedy was never his greatest strength, so placing him inside of one was a terrible idea from the start. He doesn’t find the right vibe with the rest of the cast or the material and seems to have indifferently drifted in from an entirely different set. Kerr played a lot of prim, proper English ladies but she usually brought something different to them. In Black Narcissus she found the erotic longing within her nun and crafted a deceptively simple and elegant performance from that. Or in The King and I in which she played it as a sweetly rebellious and proto-feminist archetype, a woman who could charm the king and make him rethink his grandiose ideals about female subservience and intelligence. Here she seems frequently adrift and doesn’t generate much chemistry with Mitchum. And Grant for his part dips dangerously close to supreme indifference and pure slumming. Watching him play a cuckold husband in the 40s may have yielded some comedic results, but in the 50s he just seems mildly amused by it.

Does the plot even matter? Explorations of marriage, infidelity and societal differences between males and females engaging in said things are brought up with the minimalist of interest before being completely abandoned. It’s too “polite” a film about subject matter that requires a more brusque treatment. Or maybe just a funnier one? Most of the comedic moments are stolen by Jean Simmons as a party-ready minx. That she stands outside of the central romantic triangle is what probably aides in our enjoyment of her frivolity and one-liners. We’re not being asked to sympathize and like people who are willfully hurting each other and going through the motions before reuniting in the last reel with her. The Grass Is Greener never truly slides into cringe-worthy and awful territory, but it is too cloying and runs about twenty minutes too long, but it’s serviceably watchable.

I just plain don’t get the sleepy-eyed charm of Bing Crosby. As an actor I find him to be rather indifferent to any part he plays, always looking bored, never investing much in the way of emotional truth, but he did have a very lovely singing voice. Which he seemingly used in every single film he made, didn’t matter what kind it was. And in this sequel to Going My Way he reprises his role as a singing priest with a laid-back demeanor.

The Bells of St. Mary’s is a rambling effort which is by turns cavity-causing sweet, treacle, winsome and confoundingly “heart-warming,” as it tells the story of a priest and a nun who join forces to swindle an elder man out of his property so they can turn it into a new school. And also tells the tale of how the priest and nun manage to marry their two different teaching styles into one middle ground and come to respect one another. That part of the story I had relatively little problems with, although the choice of passing a girl who failed just because it’ll help her self-esteem and parental issues is utterly baffling.

That last bit of story development is essentially all of my problems with the film in microcosm. You see, this girl has come to the school and she has a lot of issues and baggage because her father ran out on them before she was born and left her and her mother completely destitute. So far, this seems pretty believable as a hard-luck case, and, of course, the church would want to help her. But once Crosby is engineering a reunion of her deadbeat father and mother, who it is strongly implied has been forced into prostitution to survive; they suddenly realize that they need to become a happy nuclear family unit. What the hell kind of dream-world is this? A mountainous problem like that would never be corrected so smoothly, and they are essentially shamed into reassembling the family unit. No one was bothered by this story development?

Granted, the whole thing is top-notch as far as filmmaking goes. The cinematography is pretty, clean and has real warmth to it. Of course, making Ingrid Bergman look lovely is probably one of the easiest jobs one could have, but that doesn’t take away from any of it. Bergman, for her part, plays the role with a nice mix of elegance, tenderness and tough-love. She brings a real empathy and humanity to the part. All of the kid actors do a solid job, and are appropriately precocious and adorable.

But these pleasures are hollow and in service of a script that rambles on for far too long. St. Mary’s needed a good trimming to tighten up the plot, or to make it appear as if there even was any singular plot. It’s an episodic thing that occasionally goes back to the fact that the church and school are rundown and need to be replaced. But instead of actually going about and doing anything about it, the nuns just pray for God to give them a new school and the resources to make it work. Isn’t this very thing what the church’s sense of community and collections are for? No matter, soon enough they’ve got their eyes on the new building across the street and they’re off to guilt-trip and out-right lie to an elderly rich man in order to be given the building.

But this movie is still viewed as heartwarming and family friendly because it stars a priest and a nun as the characters grifting an elderly man out of his property. I know that I’ve made it sound like I hated The Bells of St. Mary’s, well, I didn’t entirely. I gave the film a three-star rating because it is technically accomplished and Bergman delivers a fine performance and Crosby croons so very lovely. But like I said earlier, it’s all so hollow. Leo McCarey is probably best remembered for this saccharine mess instead of his 30s comedic classics like Duck Soup, The Awful Truth, Belle of the Nineties, which is an absolute shame. St. Mary’s isn’t a bad way to be remembered I suppose, but it is one of his weaker films.

“Don’t allow anyone to humiliate you. No one has the right to do that to anyone.”

Two simple sentences that encapsulate the entirety of the dramatic push and tension of Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film which sees an impassioned but wounded heart (Raul Julia) slowly learning to understand and empathize with a battered, dreamy soul (William Hurt). Julia’s revolutionary is initially disgusted by Hurt’s lack of political identity and ideology, homosexuality and tendency to express from harsh realities into dreamscapes populated by re-contextualized propaganda films and pop culture iconography. Yet they eventually reach across the divide and change each other in profound ways. Not only does Hurt’s character become more worldly and manage to look outside his own pleasures and seek to help his fellow man, but Julia’s sees that sometimes escaping from the torturous present is the best of ways to keep your sanity.

As the film progresses and they eventually have sex, in a very chaste scene, it seems almost unneeded as an earlier moment captured the switch and showed us the growing tenderness between the two of them. Julia’s revolutionary is poisoned during his stay in the camp and eventually gets so sick that he defecates all over himself. Hurt tenderly takes care of him and cleans him up, all the while Julia keep asking if this doesn’t disgust him in disbelief but growing appreciate at this token of kindness in a prison which continually beats them both down physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Their kiss may have a little to do with sexuality, but it has far more to do with kindness.

So is Kiss of the Spider Woman all about two different men connecting and learning something from each other? A tiny bit, and a great deal of the pleasures in watching the film is dynamic conversations and interactions between these two colliding worldviews and archetypes. Yet there is something deeper going on here.

The marriage and mixture of fantasy and reality isn’t just a way to demonstrate the elaborate stories that Hurt spins out from memories of romanticized films he watched before being incarcerated. The ending, and the reoccurring use of Sonia Braga in the various roles, must hint at something far deeper and more lyrical. Maybe they’re there to highlight that the entire film is being told from the point-of-view of Julia’s character? Braga turns out to be his girlfriend, so naturally he would imagine her as the romantic leading lady in the various yarns. They’re like puzzle pieces that I haven’t quite figured out what they mean on a deeper level, but I’d love to try and figure out.

Since so much of the film is just two people having long dialog passages with each other in a jail cell, it should go without saying that the film would soar or plummet with two poor casting choices. Clearly, Kiss soars high. William Hurt turns in an odd performance as a gay man who seems to be less a real person but rather a concoction of randomly stitched together quirks and eccentricities that he uses to shield himself from the harsh realities of life. Like he has created so elaborate a fantasy world to escape into that he has become one of those idealized female heroines he adorns on his wall. It’s a colorful, extraordinary performance, and Hurt deservedly won critical acclaim and an Oscar for it.

But Raul Julia is no slouch either. His character may be less colorful, and he was ignored for it comes awards season which is a damn shame, but no less committed or affecting work. His transition from sweaty machismo posing into a poetic and heartbreaking idealist is wonderfully modulated. He may not get to be as mannered or theatrical as Hurt, but his work is no less extraordinary and involving.

In the end, Spider Woman manages to tell a story about enduring kindness and human dignity finding a way to rise above the worst of circumstances without resorting to liberal heart-string manipulations or coming across like an extended ad for Amnesty International. It’s a dynamic and emotional dialog between two separate identities who seem to symbolize so very much.

There's a lot of laughs, joy and charm to behold in Mickey Mouse's adventures in "Brave Little Tailor," but it's missing a certain spark that makes a good piece of animation truly great. "Mickey and the Beanstalk" has it, "Clock Cleaners" has it, so why doesn't this one have it too?

The basic premise follows the fairy tale -- a tailor kills a group of flies, gets misunderstood by the townsfolk and finds himself in an escalating series of events culminating in a fight with a giant. Using his pluck and tools of the trade he manages to take the giant down and win the heart of Minnie Mouse. That's the entirety of the short. Sure there's a few clever gags and some solid animated work, but I think some of the missing spark is in the villain. The giant here just isn't much of a presence. Willie the Giant may have been more comedic than frightening, but he had a fully-built and fleshed out persona to engage us in. This giant is pretty generic and forgettable, even a few seconds after you've finished viewing it. He doesn't linger in the mind, but jokes involving him do. Namely, tearing apart a house to use a stove as a lighter for his makeshift cigarette -- but this is more memorable for the clever sight gags and slick animation than any kind of character traits or quirk. Cute, fun but not great, "Brave Little Tailor" is still worth a viewing (or several).

Walt Disney built his company's reputation on re-imagining classic fairy tales. Sometimes in his features that meant cutting much of the sexuality and toning down on the on-screen violence, or, often in the case of his shorts, substituting in his beloved staple of characters. "Mickey and the Beanstalk" is, possibly, the most famous example of this.

It's also one the best short films that the studio turned out.

Originally presented as part of Fun and Fancy Free, "Mickey and the Beanstalk" still works best in that context. If you keep the Edgar Bergen wrap-around segments and just separate it from "Bongo," then there shouldn't be a problem. But the film is often presented with animation done decades later and the heavily lined and cruder style stands in glaring contrast with the sophisticated, clean and smooth work done in 1947. Not only that, but most of the jokes work best and were timed and set-up for Bergen's narration.

But no matter how one gets to view the film, that may just be me being a stickler and elitist about it's presentation. The point is despite being 66 years old, "Mickey and the Beanstalk" holds up incredibly well. Still charming, funny, quick witted and gorgeously animated as ever. The warmth of the paints and fluidity of the drawings are still the mark of a group of artists working at the top of their game. The overnight growth of the beanstalk is one of the greatest marriages of sight-gags and sound effects the studio churned out. As the music swells and does odd little flourishes so does the beanstalk in perfect sync.

I remember watching this several times as a child, and it warms my heart to see that it still holds up after all this time. Willie the Giant's introduction alone is a practical guarantee for immortality as it demonstrates the animators tendency towards experimentation and surrealist imagery at the time, most notably in their feature-length films like Dumbo and Fantasia. "Mickey and the Beanstalk" is an exquisite miniature.

It’s rough and tough and whittles away everything so that the only remaining parts of the film are the connective tissues and bones of the tropes in film noir. This is great B-movie territory with a lot of caveats from me, yet none of them have to do with the stock footage or low budget novelty of the whole thing.

In fact, what I enjoyed most about Detour was the lo-fi rock and roll spirit of the film, the fact that they had a dream, a few dollars and a couple feet of film and made a movie. It packs a mighty punch in a little over an hour, and I can see why many claim this to be a masterpiece and genre-defining piece of work. Yet much of the first half just didn’t work for me.

I think Detour is a perfect example of a movie where narrator is largely unnecessary. Describing one character falling asleep only to awaken with a start and begin making accusations while the action plays out is hokey. It’s too literal minded for a film that prefers to submerge us into a world in which subjective values are crushed by those willing to exploit weaknesses and doll out punishment with masochistic glee.

Detour really perks up once Ann Savage enters the film, and if she doesn’t live up to that last name by the time all is said and done I don’t know who else possibly could. She’s all hard edge, steamroller tenacity, bulging eyes and lacerating verbal sparring. It’s a great undervalued performance in the genre. Her character is like every hardboiled femme fatale distilled down into one twisted, disturbed persona. She represents the outside world willing coming along to crush the man stuck in the car and hotel room with her.

I firmly believe I would’ve appreciated Detour more if it had been blessed with a leading man who gave me a reason to care about this man’s downfall and eventual preordained destruction. Tom Neal is not that leading man. He’s anemic and blank enough, but there’s nothing much else there. He doesn’t sell the haunted or weary nature of the character. He just blankly moves from one scenario to the next. His character should willingly, almost gleefully surrender to Savage’s, but he doesn’t sell that moment, the ending or anything in-between, really.

So while the self-pitying whine of the narration and the mannequin-like performance of the leading man harm the film, there’s still a lot of beautifully acidic poetry in the dialog. And better yet is the fact that this world is a nightmarish creation, almost as if Neal’s character is trying to reassemble the pieces in his drunken stupor in which he does come out the victim of circumstance to forces outside of his control. He’s displayed early on as a freakishly talented piano player, only to lose that job/girl and descend into Hell on his way to recapture the singer he fell in love with. If Hell is alternately being locked in the room with someone and a design of our own making, I present to you the film example of both arguments.

Let’s start out with the positive, because while The Outlaw is by and large absolutely terrible it does still manage to do a few things in fresh and unique ways. Namely, it gives us a group of four characters and watches as they consistently change allegiances and tries to delve into their psychology. It never reaches much depth, but it at least gives us a central conceit of perceived wrong-doings and friendship crumbling away. The history it presents is highly dubious, but it presents Pat Garrett and Doc Holliday as old friends who find themselves at odds over Billy the Kid. The trio’s relationship at times dips into a kind of campy homoeroticism in which it appears as if Garrett is jealous over Holliday’s replacing him with a new, younger lover.

Great actors like Walter Huston and Thomas Mitchell are left to their own devices with the poorly written dialog and plot mechanics. They try their damnedest to create in this vacuum, but even their immense gifts as versatile and diverse character actors can’t help the sinking feeling that The Outlaw has in spades. Jane Russell and Jack Buetel are very attractive to look at, but that’s pretty much all that they are. Wooden acting would be a compliment to the kind of shoddy work they turn out, as if they have no respect or knowledge of the craft involved in making a performance come to life and really work.

The stagey, artificial looking sets and ham-fisted direction continue with this line of thought. There is nothing much of value going on with The Outlaw. And the movie routinely appears to have been made by someone who doesn’t have the firmest grasp on moviemaking shorthand or basics. Every joke is pounded home and punctuated by a reoccurring thorn note horn beat in a manner that even a Looney Tunes short would find excessive. In fact, there are only two bits of music which alternate back-and-forth between the jokey horn beats and the more dramatic flourishes of pure bombast. The Outlaw seems best remembered for causing a raucous upon its first release than for any particular artistic merits. Nowadays this is mostly G-rated, except for the sequence where Billy clearly rapes Rio before she falls in love with him, but the controversy from the era gives the film a sexy, dangerous edge that it doesn’t really deserve. Sure Jane Russell shows off a lot of cleavage, but so did a lot of other starlets back in the day. The Outlaw is the purest example of the film industry hype-machine working over-time. It’s an even better documentation of the fractured and disturbed mind/obsessions of Howard Hughes; it’s sometimes director, financier and full-time eccentric.

You ever watch a TV show and think, my god that had no right to be even remotely that good? That’s how I felt while watching Beast Wars: Transformers. Of course, I had watched it as a child, but the only thing I really remembered was a few character names and it was robotic dinosaurs and insects versus robotic mammals. While no one can really pronounce this as the greatest show of all time, for being a show based on a line of action figures, it brings a surprising amount of depth to its characters and storytelling and connects itself back to the original Transformers series in a reverent and unique way.

That isn’t to say the series is flawless and doesn’t occasionally dip too far into the “extended toy commercial” zone, because a good chunk of the third season is hampered by that kind of shoddy storytelling. But Beast Wars does seem to go out of its way to actually bother with crafting individualized personalities and bringing some level of complexity to the material. Granted, the major appeal is essentially a T-Rex that can turn into a giant robot and fire lasers fighting with a silverback gorilla that can do the same but with rockets.

The general story arc is pretty basic to anyone even vaguely familiar with some facet of the franchise, Maximals (Autobots) and Predacons (Decepticons) have crash landed on ancient Earth after traveling through a wormhole in space. The three seasons progress in a fairly naturalistic way, expanding from just defeat of the enemies into stumbling upon the dormant Autobots and primitive mankind while fighting for control of history. The stakes increase with each season, but plenty of time is found to develop characters and make us care about the vast majority of them.

What’s also fairly refreshing about Beast Wars is the fact that it so ruthlessly killed off characters, the off-handed deaths of Terrorsaur and Scorponok at the start of season two clues us into the fact that any of these characters are fair game. Season one spent a great deal of time introducing Airazor and Tigatron only to remove them from the series before eventually explaining their disappearance. Although the removal of Airazor is problematic since the show is left with only one female character. And Dinobot’s last episode is probably the high point of the series, the logical culmination of events in which he switched sides numerous times, searched within himself and found that there was goodness and a respectable code of ethics located deep within himself.

It must be said that for a CGI cartoon from the mid-to-late 90s, Beast Wars still looks fairly impressive. Granted, there is crudeness to the animation of their beast modes, namely the musculature doesn’t look quite right or move as smoothly as it should. And characters tend to not interact with their environments as seamlessly as possible. Explosions in the first season seem to hit the ground and not cause any noticeable damage. Same thing happens with aquatic interactions and anything with flame is a consistent problem throughout the series. By the end of the series this problem isn’t fixed, but it has vastly improved. A crashing ship actually seems to be causing some kind of effect on the water and ground beneath it.

Sometimes a little bit of fun is in order, and this show accomplishes that kind of goal with aplomb. And Beast Wars: Transformers actually bothers to give us characters with distinct and defined personalities, clear motivations and actions, surprising amounts of depth and complexity. Granted, the show at times feels like writers struggling to create something with one hand tied behind their back, but, by and large, they manage to make something that is surprisingly sturdy and managed to hold up over time.