Reviews by JxSxPx

It’s not hard for me to hold a book near and dear to my heart, and White Teeth was one of those crazy, strange trips across generations and locations that wrapped me up in its warmth, humor and sense of generational/cultural tension. I was curious but cautious if this four episode mini-series could do any kind of justice to the book.

Luckily, White Teeth has survived the transition from page to (small) screen. A film of the novel would’ve required too much material being removed for the sake of fitting the sprawling tale into a two hour running time. This mini-series, while not perfect but my god is it fantastic, does justice to the novels epic look at two central families and changing times in which they interact.

Each of the four episodes, much like the book, focuses in on one of the four major male characters. The first section, “The Peculiar Second Marriage of Archie Jones,” details the events leading up to Archie and Clara meeting, getting married, having their daughter Irie and reconnecting with Archie’s old friend, Samad, and his arranged marriage and eventually his wife’s pregnancy with their twin sons. We cover as much ground in the proceeding episodes as they detail the immigrant experience, the gap between immigrants and their children as they assimilate into a new culture, racial and religious identity.

It’s grand in its ambitions and handles many of these subjects with a great deal of humor. Simultaneously it’s unafraid to treat certain aspects with stone-faced seriousness as Millat struggles with finding an identity outside of a troublemaker and suddenly becomes wrapped up in a fringe extremist group. Or the blackly humorous pseudo-adoption of Millat and his twin brother Magid by the upper class Jewish intellectual family, the Malfens, can take some surprisingly dark turns. The mother in particular ignores her own son in favor of the exotic and dangerous Millat, who becomes less of an actual person and more of passion project to show that Western mothering and pandering can turn any problem child around.

While the series is incredibly well-acted and expertly cast from top to bottom, although I’m not so sure that someone as cute as James McAvoy is who I had in mind for the nerdy Josh, White Teeth does tend to unfairly marginalize the female characters who were so well-rounded in the novel. Naomie Harris as Clara and Archie Panjabi as Alsana turn in fiercely committed performances that announce their talents as actresses with a loud bang, but they’re given relatively little to do outside of the first two episodes, Harris more so as her daughter Irie seems to occupy most of the time allotted for a female character. Irie’s prominence makes sense since she’s the same age of the two boys, but Clara’s relationship with both her religious zealot mother and Irie took some unexpected and surprisingly emotional turns in the novel that are sorely missed here. While Panjabi still gets a few great scenes in the later episodes, one that springs to mind is when she confronts Joyce Malfen about Millat’s disappearance and eventual membership in the extremist group. I just wanted so much more from the two of them because they turn in such finely modulated and emotional convincing work here.

This means the burden of carrying the series falls on the three central male actors, one of whom must put double duty through special effects work. Thankfully, each of them attack their roles head-on and create distinct and believable characters. Phil Davis as Archie is like someone took the mental picture from my mind as I was reading the novel and gave it three dimensional life. Om Puri as Samad has the grander and bigger role, and he performs it as if he knows his life depends on it. It’s a marriage of role and actor that can create a masterful and wondrous dynamic and brings a real energy to the screen each time he’s allowed to show us the various twists and turns his character’s journey takes him on. And Christopher Simpson truly captures the conflicted Millat and more English-than-English Magid, carving out a separate yet whole persona for each of the boys.

While White Teeth may have a problem distributing equal amounts of time between its principal characters, it makes up for this with a propulsive energy that just never stops. Somehow the entire thing remains fairly intimate when we pause for a quiet moment to allow for the characters to express their innermost thoughts and desires, but the energy never waivers.

As a beacon for the “post-racial society” that the western world is allegedly moves towards at a slow scale, White Teeth couldn’t be a better document of that process. As the offspring of several different cultures and racial identities coming together myself, I understand and empathized with the plights of characters like Irie and Magid, and found myself totally immersed in their drama. I just wish that they had found more time to pay off some of the subplots involving WWII, Mangal Pande and Irie’s relationship with her grandmother. Those subplots revealed much about the assumptions, secrets and personalities of the characters and emerged into some surprising twists. Ah well, we can’t have it all. I’m just so happy it turned out to be as close to perfect an adaptation as it did.

Ostensibly, a show is never truly about what the quick script makes it out to be. For example, The Simpsons is about a satirical look at a lower middle class family of five in brief summation, when in reality it’s a Dadaist examination of modern American life encompassing everything from family dynamics, politics, religion and pop culture. I bring this up because I’m not quite sure what Terra Nova was aiming for at a deeper level. It brings up subplots and possibly takes shape in various directions, but they all lead to nothing and go nowhere.

Terra Nova was a show in search of a deeper identity, and that’s just one of a menagerie of problems it comes loaded up with.

It already takes a large leap of faith and suppression of logic to try and buy into the premise – in the future the earth has been left so polluted and desolate that our only course of action is go back into the past and try again. But here’s the overarching problem with that concept: by going back in time to the prehistoric age, the colony has to manage to live through the comet that destroyed the dinosaurs and that ecosystem, the ice age and somehow find a way not to get involved with the natural course of evolution and human history. This is to say nothing of the fact that the prehistoric age had an atmosphere that wasn’t breathable or livable for humans.

All of that could have been forgiven if I had been given some characters to root for and care about, but Terra Nova is also fairly brainless in that regard. The first episode spends more time trying to put the emphasis on the budget and doesn’t bother to populate the various locations with characters of interest. Any changes in their behavior are abrupt and quickly reverted back to how they were at the beginning. The conflict between father and son, over an issue that is worth exploring and honest, is smoothed over very quickly and we’re soon back to the happy nuclear family we met in the beginning of episode one. There’s a distinct lack of dramatic tension or believable character archs at play here, nothing is at stake at any given moment.

The only characters of any worth or interest are side-lined for much of the series, only coming to the center towards the last few entries in the series. Commander Nathaniel Taylor, Lt. “Wash” Washington and Taylor’s estranged son are far more engaging as characters than the ones we spend a significant amount of time with. It’s almost unfair that the characters with dark secrets, hidden motivations and tension between each other are left in small supporting roles.

But not knowing what to focus in on is a reoccurring problem with Terra Nova. Much is made of how unsafe it is to leave the colony, yet every chance the characters get they go on random excursions into the wilderness. A fishing trip here, a group of youths deciding to make moonshine there, and so it continually goes as the show writes rules that it never bothers to follow through on cutting itself off at the knee for any sense of conflict or emotional stakes at play. We know for certain that anyone going out into the wilderness will only encounter PG-rated violence and danger, despite it being up against various carnivorous dinosaurs.

The worst offense here is the rebel group now as Sixers, who despite being of limited ammunition and medical supplies and numbers continually find ways to break into the colony and fire off obscene amounts of rounds in any given fight. If they truly had limited numbers and weapons/supplies – how could they be so wasteful or have such a large base in the middle of the jungle if things were as dire as they say?

No, maybe it was the fact that the dinosaurs were magically bulletproof. That may have been the worst and stupidest decision in the show. I’ll grant that it would take A LOT of bullets to take down a Carnotaurus, but they’re not bullet-proof. Nor would they probably be impervious to the sonic blasters and other weapons the characters possess.

I know, I know, it’s just a TV show – why can’t I just turn my brain off and enjoy? Well, I’d happily have gone along with it if it had given me some reason to care about anything. One episode is a who-done-it while another is a medical mystery and a third episode is something entirely different. Not to mention that the characters make some horrendously poor decisions – the central family has a third child which is against the law in a dystopian future in which most vegetation and water is in limited supply or died off, decide to hide her existence instead of paying a fee, get caught by the authorities and the father lands in jail, this makes them stupid in my eyes and they never failed to live up to this first series of poor decision-making.

I couldn’t find myself able to turn off the “logic” part of my brain and just watch the mindless, hollow spectacle on display. The offenses kept piling up higher and higher, and if there wasn’t a parade of attractive men (who were pretty liberal with the shirtless scenes in the first half of the series) and the occasionally cool and thrilling dinosaur-centric action center piece I would’ve stopped after the first two episodes.

Well, does Terra Nova do anything right? Sure. The production values are top-notch, the special effects are pretty fantastic for television, the sets are nice and the locations are gorgeous. It’s wonderful to look at, but it’s the things that make or break a TV series like well-developed characters, satisfying dramatic storytelling, conflict and good dialog that sank the thing so quickly. I somehow made it through the entire run, but it took me a very long time and I frequently had to busy myself with other tasks to get through it. Somewhere, buried within the rubble of poor execution, there was a kernel of a great idea.

Now, it has been several years since I read Brideshead Revisited but I am fairly certain that this eleven-part mini-series simply took the novel and filmed it scene for scene. If anything’s been changed it was probably fairly subtle, same could be said if anything was left out. It feels as if Evelyn Waugh’s great novel has made the jump from page to screen fully formed and intact.

Which is astonishing considered the troubled history the production had to endure. Originally it began filming towards the late 70s, but various strikes, production delays, casting problems (Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews switched roles), and a change of directors mid-way through meant that the series wasn’t released until 1981. But the whole thing is so stylish, smooth and practically perfect in every way that you wouldn’t even be aware of the troubled birth.

It seems almost silly to try and summarize Brideshead as it encompasses so much, but in general is about one man who meets a family, becomes infatuated and then disenfranchised with them and slowly moves towards Catholicism. In-between are two love affairs, various allegiances and fights, descents into alcoholism and estrangement, and always the slow pounding in the background is the progress of time and the destruction of the vast family manors and titles of Old Britain making way for the New Britain. Oh, and WWI and WWII factor into the story as well. It is epic in scope and emotionally devastating in how it levels these actions within the narrative.

The mini-series does a great job of translating the conflicted and complicated verbal exchanges to the screen. Fights rarely go above a polite, clipped tone, yet so much is hidden within the gentries way to speaking to each other. This coded language carries over into the two central romantic entanglements of the story – Charles and Sebastian in the beginning, and Charles and Julia towards the end. Sebastian and Julia are also brother and sister, in the novel they look quite a bit like each other and one of the few flaws in the series is the casting choice for Julia, but on to that in a moment.

You see, there remains a great debate about the exact nature of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian – were they something beyond close friends? Are we all too filthy-minded to think that maybe you can be that close to someone and not have it dip into sex? Personally, I think that they had a romantic relationship, but I don’t think it went as far as sex. It’s clear that Sebastian is a homosexual and much of his decline into self-hatred and alcoholism is caused by his religion, family and society destroying his ideal and making him feel dirty and guilty. Charles seems enamored with him at first because he represents a carefree lifestyle of bourgeoisie decadence and getting hammered at noon. He is old money yet not snobbish, very charismatic and charming, yet stunted and doomed from the start. Charles as a single child from a lower class is obviously looking for “love,” but there are many forms and variations of love to find.

Although his later relationship with Julia is all sorts of strange once you factor in that she looks like the female version of his long-lost best friend, and he only seems to take a romantic interest in her years after his relationship with Sebastian has fallen apart. I don’t really think that these two characters loved each other, it always felt like they were empty and searching for something to fill the void in their lives that Sebastian had left and chose each other to accomplish that goal.

I’ve had a similar problem with the late-in-life conversion of Charles to Catholicism. He has spent a vast majority of the book denouncing religion and being skeptical of whole enterprise. Yet, nearly 20 years after first meeting the Flyte’s and encountering Brideshead, he returns as a soldier in WWII and prays in their broken cathedral. I understand that Waugh wanted to explain Roman Catholic ideology in a secular novel, but he crafted a family that exhibited the worst of the privileged class and systematically broke them apart. In the end they each find solace in faith, but their solace is shrouded in motivations and actions that are highly questionable.

Lady Marchmain, superbly played with the right combination of domineering venomousness and posh sophistication by Claire Bloom, is basically the villainess of the piece in many ways. Manipulating and dominating her children with her religious beliefs and making complacent in her spying on Sebastian deeds. Lady Marchmain truly believes that her actions are justifiable and right for her children, even as they tiptoe towards zealotry and madness in making sure they have a fear and sense of forbidden fruit about things like sex and a drink. It’s not hard to see why Sebastian falls into addiction and self-destruction, Julia into a loveless marriage and eventually tries to find some identity with the church, that Lord Brideshead (her eldest son) who lives by the rules his mother has enforced and ends up being cold and distant. The only one who turns out relatively well is Coredellia, the youngest, who never felt conflict over her beliefs and in the end goes out and does charitable work for the world.

This jaundiced view of Catholicism is suddenly made into an apologia by having the main character have a last minute conversion. It didn’t work in the novel and it doesn’t work in the series, but redemption does play a large role in the narrative and that does work. It’s clear that Waugh was still working out his religious ideals when writing Brideshead and that fractured thought-process has its figure prints all over any adaptation.

But lets go back to what works beautifully – pretty much everything else. With the exception of Diana Quick as Julia, every part is perfectly cast. Jeremy Irons does a great job in giving some life to Charles, who is essentially a blank cipher for us to maneuver through the narrative with. But the real standouts are Anthony Andrews as the doomed Sebastian, Sir Laurence Olivier as Lord Marchmain, John Geiguld as Charles’ father, and Nikolas Grace as the fey bitchily hilarious Anthony Blanche. The only reason Quick fails to live up to the rest of the cast is because she comes across as too mannered in any of her emotional scenes and looks nothing like Andrews.

It could be argued that Brideshead moves as a deliberately slow pace, but the lyricism is important as we watch the decay of this world give birth to the modern world. And with scenery as lovely as this who can complain about a few scenes where the characters stare longingly out into the distance or at each other? It’s beautiful to behold and get yourself lost in. And Geoffrey Burgon’s score only heightens the beauty and emotions on display, adding to the luster of an already lustrous production.

I suppose this is what happens when you pay lip-service and nothing much else to the more adult themes of a comic book in an animated feature. Gen 13 is obviously a makeshift pilot on one hand and on the other a slap-dash effort to tie it all up and rush out a movie. Enemy characters that were clearly being primed for season long mysteries and a gradual buildup are crammed into the story’s second half and given abrupt and quick development before being either killed off or just vanishing from the story.

Then there are the random bits and pieces that try to play darker and more mature. A few scenes flirt with sexuality and implied nudity, but apparently nipples don’t exist in this world. I guess that’s what happens when Disney is given the reins on a property that isn’t entirely kid-friendly. The animation isn’t terribly distinguished, looking a lot like much of the 90s super-heroic shows like Batman: The Animated Series or even Disney’s own Gargoyles, except it lacks much of the fluidity and atmosphere of those shows. There are a few things going for it, namely Alicia Witt’s performance in the main role and a couple of interesting ideas, but nothing much is done with them. In the end, Disney’s sinking Gen 13 into obscurity was probably for the best and one of their wisest decisions.

Luis Bunuel, even in his narrative features like Belle de Jour, preferred to view things through a dream-like prism. Think of how much of Belle de Jour’s narrative is occupied within the interior fantasy life and memories of its main character. Numerous things happen with no true “logic” to dictate them, and this is a thread that can be followed back to his first work Un Chien Andalou.

Beginning with the title, An Andalusian Dog in English, nothing much makes literal sense or has a grand meaning. There’s a thin plot which sees two people fight, reconnect, engage in various violent or sexual encounters and then it ends close to where it began. But this synopsis doesn’t capture the strange, nightmarish, beautiful and hallucinatory nature of viewing and experiencing these fifteen minutes.

Concerned more with free association than anything else, the dream logic of Un Chien conjures up some indelible images. Of course everyone knows that opening scene where a cloud cutting across the moon is paralleled by a man using a razor to slice open a woman’s eye, but what about the reoccurring image of a man’s hand with a hole in it and ants emerging from it? It’s a neat trick that left me wondering how they did that exactly. The same could be said for the part where a man removes his own mouth with a quick gesture.

It’s not hard to see why this was considered transgressive and shocking in 1929, but time has dulled some of the squirm-worthy luster of it. What time has not dulled is the never-ending sense of originality and creativity, no matter how outré the images get, no matter how loaded they become with religious, sexual or violent imagery, they are marvelous to behold. They may no longer shock as much as they used to, but these images can still produce awe in the viewer.

Un Chien Andalou may be easy for no-movie-fanatics to dismiss as artsy/surrealist nothing since it doesn’t conform to our notions and learned behavior to examine a story, a painting, a film for lessons and story to be excavated. It laughs at those notions. It may not have a “purpose” or a “point” to make, but that is what makes it so great. It is pure invention made by two radical youths – Bunuel and Salvador Dali – in the prime of youth and artistic ego. It’s maddening and mocks our tendencies in how we evaluate art, but greatness comes in many forms and sometimes what’s great about a work is that is pure anarchy, it means nothing and yet still feels alive after 84 years.

Using the titular poem as a Launchpad, Howl is an ode to one of the most groundbreaking works of literature, a poem who took preconceived notions of style, voice and form in poetry and blasted them into the stratosphere. Narrowing in on a life as varied and richly lived as Allen Ginsberg’s was probably one of the smartest ideas the filmmakers had, as was casting James Franco, yet I couldn’t help but feel as if parts of Howl were undercooked or too literal.

Howl traces through the early artistic life of Ginsberg in brief patches, covering in quick succession his first meeting with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and his beginnings in poetic verse. We see in black-and-white footage throughout the film the first public reading of an early version of “Howl” and the obscenity trial that followed it’s publication. A longer, well-developed film could have been made out of these materials and kept this entire cast, for it is an embarrassment of riches.

As Ginsberg, Franco is tasked with carrying the entirety of the film on his shoulders. While he frequently seems adrift or lost in big-budget movies like Oz the Great and Powerful, smaller films like this showcase his intelligence as an actor. He works best in more adventurous and dark material, and his performance is mostly a series of monologues to an unseen interviewer and pantomiming with various would be and actual lovers. By turns intellectual, charming, boyish, insecure, Franco develops a portrait of Ginsberg that is fully realized and one wishes that the film had matched his well thought and developed reading of the character.

Lots of actors turn up in what is essentially one-and-done walk-ons – Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, Alessandro Nivola, Aaron Tveit, Treat Williams – the only main supporting players are John Hamm, Bob Balaban and David Strathairn as the lawyers and judge in the obscenity trial. But each actor brings a unique voice and presence to the film and I wish they had found more for each of them to do.

The film’s structure, while very loving and admiring to the original poem, while unique and interesting, is also problematic since it never focuses in long enough on any particular part of the poem’s life to continuously hold our interest. But I know for certain that the animated sequences, which literalize the words in the actions of two figures, could be completely removed and the film would be all the better for them. That time and space could have gone to more sequences building up the intensity of the trial or investing us in the relationship between Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit).

Well, there you have it in a nutshell: Howl has its heart in the right place, but it boils down to an 85 minute trailer for a longer and better movie. I do hope that Franco gets another chance to portray Ginsberg in a more developed film, because he is honestly just that good in the role.

Honestly, all of the warning signs were right there for those of us ready to pay attention to them. Getting pushed back six months (roughly), the pointless decision to film the thing in 3D, the fact that Baz Luhrmann was directing and the odd decision to use hip-hop and hipster bands in a film detailing Jazz Age hedonism right before the crash. Which is to speak nothing of the very plain fact that The Great Gatsby is probably one of the hardest novels to adapt to the screen not because of its story, which is loaded with allegory and symbolism but slim on actual plot, but so much of the joy in reading and reputation of the novel resides in the clean, detailed sentences of Fitzgerald’s prose.

No amount of head-rush sugar-high visuals can properly reconnect the emotional devastation of the head of the novel or the bourgeois inertia and boredom that so many of the characters are trying to emptily fill with parties, drinks and vacuous adventures. These are creatures of money who mistake materialism for morality, they are empty-headed ciphers looking for something to give them purpose, or, at the very least, a strong drink and a good time. And Luhrmann’s film only half-way gets it right.

The frantic drop into this world is appropriately dizzying and eye-melting garish and loud. Each party scene is a decadent orgy of booze, flappers, hangers-on, glitter, streamers and fireworks. But this manic tone never lets up, and by the time the story is supposed to have rendered the emotional punches and pulled back the layers on Gatsby’s mystique and self-cultivated new identity, we feel nothing. There is no beating heart beneath the surface-level of sparkle and music video style quick cuts.

And much of the film is an out-right lie about race relationship in the 1920s. There’s a scene where a group of partiers, all of whom are black, are being driven by a white driver. It’s a moment of pure artifice made only worse by the Jay-Z song playing over it. The whole thing is almost like an apologia for Tom’s racist, xenophobic, misogynistic worldview, but an authentic view of the racial and economic realities is not exactly something Luhrmann is striving for.

Consider Nick Carraway’s cottage, a small and warm house sitting in the woods next to Gatsby’s grandiose mansion. It looks as clean and unlived in, as picturesque and large as any of the mansions. Gatsby’s brilliance is in the way that our narrator explores the wide gulf between his poor hanger-on and the nouveau riche Gatsby against the old-money Daisy and Tom. Everything is pitched at far too grand a scale for the destitution to really sink in, or for Gatsby’s remodeling of himself to carry more weight, or Nick’s first-hand experience in the oncoming stock market crash.

There’s also the problem of the white-washing, literally in this case, of the Jewish subtext of Gatsby. Born a poor Jewish boy named Jay Gatz before transforming himself through lies, revisionism and illegal activities into a wealthy WASP, Gatsby’s journey is one that recurs throughout American history. This also doesn’t bring in the problematic choice of a Bollywood actor for a Jewish gangster. What is that point of that choice? One could argue that since the entire story is told from Nick’s outsider-looking-in perspective this is his variation on that image, but that’s pretty thin an argument.

But enough about the differences between the movie and the novel, they are two very different forms, I know and understand that. As long as a movie grasps the soul and tone of the source material, everything can be forgiven. Gatsby clearly does not entirely understand it, playing like a version in which the director and writers read the back of the book and saw only buzz words and worked out from there.

At this point Luhrmann’s style has dipped into self-parody. Films like Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet could handle this full-scale assault because they’re based on an opera and Shakespeare, respectively. They’re already built in with grand emotions and theatricality whereas the Gatsby is a tender, quiet, interior novel. It buckles and strains as under the pressure that Luhrmann has placed under it. And many scenes, which are supposed to be highly involved and emotional play out as store-front windows, pretty but hollow. And the choice to have narration frequently appear on the screen is questionable at best. It ended and I let out a sigh, seeing those perfect final words emblazed on the screen were confusing for numerous reasons.

There are a few great things working for it though. The costumes and the production design are beautiful works of art. And except for Tobey Maguire, the cast is uniformly excellent. It’s not that Maguire is bad; he’s just miscast – too old for the role and alternately playing it too boyishly. But Mulligan and DiCaprio are excellent as our lovers and central players. Joel Edgerton as Tom is a bellowing rich devil, capable of charming you in disarmed awe one moment and raging and violent the very next. Isla Fisher and Elizabeth Debicki as Myrtle and Jordan are standouts. Fisher looks like Clara Bow and sounds like Betty Boop after spending a lot of time drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes, it’s a shame that Myrtle’s screen time is so minimal. And Debicki delivers what should be a star-making performance, coming on like Katharine Hepburn in Pat and Mike and finding the right bored/frivolous/party-going tone for the whole thing.

The Great Gatsby never lives up to its title, but it’s also never truly unforgivably bad. It’s more a case of overkill and frustrating for what it omits, changes or doesn’t seem to understand. There’s a bruised but still hopeful and beating heart at the center of Fitzgerald’s prose, pity none of that could be found here.

It’s sometimes a little too clean in how it deals with emotionally harrowing material, and frequently looks like it was shot inside of a sterile Ikea design book, but Rabbit Hole is a quiet gut-punch of a film that never plays any of its turns too broadly. It prefers to create a communal sense of sadness between the characters and the audience without resorting to maudlin hysterics or wallowing around in hyperbole and self-flagellations.

Picking up eight months after the accidental death of their four-year-old son, Becca and Howie are trying their best to regain an emotional foothold in life. Neither is entirely successful, nor do they appear to even be remotely trying to regain some remnant of normalcy. Each prefers to hide away in their self-contained shell of mourning. Their anger and depression is palpable from the very beginning.

Becca is all crazed emotional outbursts over the tiniest infractions against anyone who gets in her path. She has numbed herself to the point where her daily routine is robotic and efficient with no human touch. A scene where she emotionlessly removes her son’s drawings from the fridge, packs up his clothing and nearly scrubs every trace of him from the house is unbelievably cold, yet there’s a core of truth to her actions. The same could be said of Howie who finds a support group very sympathetic. His repeatedly watching a saved video of his son, the last one that he took before the accident, speaks to his preference for remembering and embracing his son’s existence. Becca wants everything to be new and fresh, Howie wants familiarity and routine. They have effectively built themselves closets in which to hide away from the glare of the rest of the world.

If all of this sounds practically oppressive in its empathetic feelings and melancholic nature, well, it can be. Luckily David Lindsay-Abaire who wrote the screenplay, adapted from his own play, knows that life is filled with just as much unintentional hilarity as it is in heartbreak. And some of the emotional outbursts and fleeting moments of trying to reconnect to each other or their family and friends are darkly comic. It is these acute and accurate observations of life that make Rabbit Hole overcome the few problems that happen along the way. A scene with Howie crying into the dog is slightly understandable even if it is played perhaps a touch too big, or that the films sometimes too obviously sign posts us to its inevitable destination of healing and gradual return to normal everyday life.

But the strongest asset Rabbit Hole has going for it are the two central performances by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. When it came out, Kidman justifiably got the lion’s share of praise and awards, but Eckhart delivers a performance that is just as strong, equally hitting all of the complicated twists and turns that his character must make within a single scene. Rabbit Hole is a great ensemble and it’s a pity more of the actors weren’t singled out for high-praise, but Kidman spent years as a movie star before returning to her roots as a dark, fearless and complicated actress of great strength. Rabbit Hole proves that her best work isn’t in big studio fluff like Nine, but daring films like To Die For.

What a strange, wonderful little movie this is that has such big movie stars in it. Leave it to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman to create a seemingly fully-formed and original genre: the fictional autobiography that also deals with themes of evolution and literary merits. I think that’s as good a description that I can come up with for it.

The title Adaptation is a play on words, both a self-referential nod and wink to the fact that Kaufman is detailing his struggles in finding a way to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a film and the basic themes of the novel which dictate how evolutionary theory can be grafted onto botany and show the strength of actual science at work to explain our world. It’s a smart, engaging film filled to bursting with grand and eloquent ideas that never feels bogged down or trite in trying to express them.

It helps tremendously that Kaufman fractured his own psyche into two different but completely realized presences in the film to give voice his internal struggles, not just in writing the damn thing but in life. One brother, Charlie, demands originality and great art to pour through him in everything he writes, while the other, Donald, prefers to crank out pulp-y entertainments which sound enormously entertaining for their sheer insanity and like empty calorie movies that Charlie abhors. Within the same household is a dialog, a very sweaty, neurotic, stuttering, socially awkward, passive-aggressive dialog, about the differences in art and commerce and what a writer should be striving for in Hollywood, and at large.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the whole storyline with Susan Orlean and John Larouche, which begins as a fairly routine relationship between a journalist and a charming and intelligent, if crass and uncouth, subject. By the end of the film they’re chasing the brothers into the swamps of Florida and ready to murder them for discovering their affair. How we got from watching Charlie torture himself to adapt The Orchid Thief into a useable screenplay to this noir ending is baffling even after you’ve seen the film. But most of the joy is in watching the screenplay smartly and methodically lay down each of its cards one at a time.

Of course when a film is blessed with a cast as diverse and talented as this, that most certainly goes a long way in allowing for an audience to be a little lost and confused and not minds too much. Lead by Nicolas Cage, in one of his last great performances before selling his soul out to questionable choices like National Treasure and Ghost Rider, and brilliantly supported by Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper, Adaptation has got one of the all-time great ensembles. Cage’s double performance is a masterpiece, embedding each distinct brother with a fully realized personality and letting them battle each other is a great deal of fun. Streep and Cooper are, of course, great, but Cooper’s magnetism and unexpected sensitivity and poetry in his role is truly something great to watch. He deserved that Oscar. And it’s nice to see Streep letting her hair down, freak flag fly and generating laughs, most notably in the scene where she’s high and trying to get Cooper to help her recreate a particular dial tone.

Tilda Swinton, Maggie Gyllenhaal (who for me has always been a more interesting and better actor than her brother), Brian Cox and Cara Seymour help add even more color and originality to a film ready to pop with those very things. Swinton, so subtle and smart, plays a movie executive and with one blink of an eye or half-smile can totally destroy Charlie. And Cox as Robert McKee is obviously having a grand time playing someone who stopped giving a fuck a long time ago.

Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze make for a great pairing. Kaufman’s scripts are smart and delicate, they require someone who can juggle their variations in tone and styles, and Jonze seems to deeply understand his work and have mastered that particular art of juggling. Wouldn’t it be great to see them collaborate for a third time?

Basically two movies stitched together and both of them made as pure morale boosters for the troops during WWII, Thousands Cheer isn’t half-bad all things considered. In the end it shares a lot in common with Ziegfeld Follies, Cheer is at its best when it moves out of the way of its best and brightest musical stars and just lets them do their thing.

The plot is incredibly thin; the faintest of breezes could totally dismantle it. Frankly, the whole first hour is a little unnecessarily padded. Gene Kelly is a military man who falls in love with Kathryn Grayson, a colonel’s daughter. That’s pretty much the gist of it. And the movie could’ve done without so many musical interludes from Grayson. Sure, her voice is lovely, but she doesn’t seem to understand that an operatic aria is not the same thing as a pop song. The romance takes too long to get going, and once it does, we’ve hit the revue section of the film, which is infinitely better. By cutting down the first hour, we could get the plot out of the way and get to the all-star montage quicker.

The all-star musical parade is also a more dynamic section of the film and plays into the whole “teamwork” ethos that the film expounds upon, however limitedly. Mickey Rooney is our emcee, and he does a fine job. Red Skelton and Frank Morgan’s comedic bits are a bit of dead weight, but Judy Garland belting out “Joint Is Really Jumpin’ Down at Carnegie Hall” ia great, Lena Horne is marvelous in “Honeysuckle Rose,” June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven and deadpan queen Virginia O’Brien do a nice “In a Little Spanish Town,” and Eleanor Powell provides her lone Technicolor dance sequence. Grayson still doesn’t possess much of a presence as an actress, but she’s lovely to look at. And Kelly is great throughout, not quite mastering his later comedic facial reactions, but even this early on he’s athletic and exciting to watch dance. Later day tropes that he would master and make indelible images on the big screen are seen here as well – dancing with props as human stand-ins, early opportunities to showcase his distinctive choreography which combines masculinity with elegance and grace. Thousands Cheer is best when pure spectacle and at its worst when trying to adhere a serious drama to the nonexistent storyline. While it’s uneven, when it’s cooking, it’s a tasty little treat.