Reviews by JxSxPx

A collection of short films featuring characters that were deemed unable to carry their own feature, made up of three previously available and brand new short, that is by turns more adventurous than just about any of the direct-to-DVD full-length films, and proof that there is indeed room for expansion within the confines of “comic book film adaptation” for experimentation and growth. It’s a pity that not all of them amount to much of anything, but the ones that do are stellar.

Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam
This one kicks off the set, and it’s the sole shiny, new and exclusive addition, and ironically feels like the perfect beginning for a full-length feature on Captain Marvel, as he used to be called, and his corresponding mythology. Superman feels a tiny bit superfluous to the whole thing, and the insistence on blowing through at maximum velocity through his origin story to get to the prolonged fight is problematic.

Only the most committed and knowledgeable of readers will get all of the tiny references sprinkled through the film about Billy and his fictional world. I found myself left with more questions than anything and hoping for some kind of continuation to clarify, Captain Marvel has never been a character I followed much. But the voice actors assembled are quite nice with George Newbern and Jerry O’Connell returning from the Justice League cartoon. James Garner and Arnold Vosloo are unexpected additions, and they bring an appropriate amount of gravitas and menace to their respective characters.

The Spectre
Hands down this is both one of the most original shorts and probably the weakest of the lot. The Spectre is a hard character to write for, admittedly, but the plot here doesn’t amount to much and is really just a thinly connected series of cool moments. The best being his possession of various creature effects makeup and animatronics to torture and kill their creator.

While the plot doesn’t do the film many favors, the look and vibe of the whole thing is quite nice. The whole film has been given a grindhouse make-under – the film frequently looks scratched and dated, the colors are more muted than the other films, and the whole thing is made to look like it was done on cheap film stock. It’s appropriately noir-esque and very visually appealing proving that even superhero adaptations can be experimental in approach. Gary Cole also delivers a solid vocal performance as the titular character. It’s good, but could have been so much better.

Green Arrow
I am biased – I love Green Arrow. And this short film gave me everything about the character that I love. His rogue sense of humor, his cockiness and swagger, and a ridiculous arsenal of arrows that can do really cool tricks. Black Canary is unfortunately sidelined for too much of the action, but her eleventh hour battle cry appropriately showcases the dynamic between the two characters.

Like the previous two, Green Arrow is also heavy on the action and light on the plot, but this one is more engaging and exciting making full use of its airport setting. It’s also better than the Shazam! because it doesn’t try to shoehorn in his origin story anywhere in there, instead focusing in on showing us his character traits and the important things about him through visual clues and his actions/choices. Neal McDonough makes for a great Green Arrow and Malcolm McDowell is always great as the heavy.

Jonah Hex
Well, color me surprised, because I had no great interest or hope in a film about Jonah Hex being remotely engaging. But, shockingly, this is without a doubt the best of the lot. It’s very dark and aimed squarely at a more mature audience. It has a distinctly slower, more modulated pace, and it ends on a series of disturbing images and actions. Jonah Hex proves that comics aren’t just for kids, and neither are their animated adaptations.

Thomas Jane and Linda Hamilton give their characters very distinct flavors. Hamilton’s growly drawl as murdering saloon owner/prostitute Lorraine really sells her character’s rattlesnake-in-a-corset vibe. Jane, for his part, sounds like he sustains himself on whiskey and tobacco, and not much else. His Hex is a hardened man of the Wild West. The final sequence, in which Hex takes Lorraine out into the wilderness to find a cave where she dumps the bodies of the rich men she kills for money, and promptly leaves her stranded in there is horrifying. The final images we see are the decaying remains as her lantern slowly extinguishes. The film is also bathed in muted colors – mainly variations of browns, blacks and tans. It’s still appealing, but it looks so much darker than the brightly colored others and really stands out, in a good way.

This collection of DC Showcase shorts actually made the cases for expanded films on Green Arrow, Captain Marvel and Jonah Hex, oddly enough. With Jonah Hex being the best, Green Arrow and Shazam! tied for second, and in a very distant third place, The Spectre. Peaks and valleys like any collection of short films, but it offers up some pretty good thrills, nice animation and excellent vocal work throughout. At a little over an hour, five minutes maybe, it’s worth a look.

Other than My Fairy Lady, I don’t think that the 60s was the greatest period creatively or artistically for George Cukor. The 50s had plenty of successes – anything he made with Judy Holliday is worth a viewing – but something happened in the 1960s. Maybe it was fatigue, but Heller in Pink Tights is missing that creative spark, that combination of romantic poetry and glorious wit that makes films like The Philadelphia Story, Dinner at Eight, The Women or Adam’s Rib such enjoyable classics.

The story is a clouded and muddled affair, less a western than a rambling tale of a group of actors who happen to be in the Old West. A few jokes hit, namely any time Sophia Loren is tasked to play the part of card-shark and seductress to get out a tight spot and any sequence involving Eileen Heckart, an underrated supporting actress if there ever was one, but mainly it rambles incoherently from one plot strand to another with relatively little connective tissue between. It starts as a western, but ends up being a romantic comedy and love poem to the life of a theatrical actor.

What it lacks in strength of narrative, it makes up for in beautiful cinematography, costume and production design. The sets are lovely to look at, the natural beauty of the Arizona desert is used to good effect, and Sophia Loren alone is enough of a work of art to take in. I prefer her more voluptuous and full figured to the cinched waist figure she sports here, but she still looks amazing. And she manages to make her olive skin and blonde wig look very fetching.

That’s the problem with Heller in Pink Tights, it’s only worth a look because of the enchanting visuals on display. They’re not serving the story like Johnny Guitar or Written on the Wind, color coded films which use these tools as an expressive means to symbolic enrich the story. Heller is pure visual opulence and has nothing much to show for it. Its fleeting inspirations can’t overcompensate for the fact that it miscasts Anthony Quinn as an everyman fop, meanders hither and yon without reaching much of a destination, and offers supporting players more interesting things to do instead of charismatic leads who strike beautiful poses but not much else.

If someone had told me that a Stanley Donen movie starring Cary Grant was an absolute bore, an anemic, leering, unfunny stage-bound mess of a film that featured two vacuous leading ladies, I’d have given them a most quizzical look. But that film very much exists and it is called Kiss Them for Me.

The story, as much as there is one, concerns three sailors on leave, an icy socialite and pneumatic blonde having a party in a hotel room. Will they get in trouble for skipping out on the PR-approved appointments and photo-ops that the Navy had set up for them? Who really cares? At 105 minutes, the film feels interminably longer than that for a variety of reasons – watering down the material. The main reasons are the two lead actress that Grant is forced to try and act opposite of.

Jayne Mansfield, a poor man’s ditzy blonde, may have the body built for sin and the peroxided hair, but she’s missing the spark that made previous bombshells like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe so immortal. Harlow had the duality of either being a tough-talking pistol who knew just how to seduce men to make them do her bidding, or good-girl who was only having fun at playing bad. Monroe may have become infamous and iconic for playing bubble-headed sex bombs, but lurking beneath that breathy voiced surface was a true artist aching to prove her worth. The variations and textures she could bring to the model, and that she was smart enough to escape when it wore thin, were part of her charm.

Mansfield has none of that. Nor does she possess even the tiniest bit of Harlow or Monroe’s gift for physical or verbal comedy. She plays everything as a giggle and jiggle, and not much more. Her presence here is more a special effect than as an actual character or actress. Knowing that Judy Holliday originated this role on Broadway only makes one wish that she had been allowed to recreate it. Her kewpie doll voice, tomboy act and ability to infuse gravitas into even the most airheaded of characters seems like the perfect combination for this role (watch her sublime work in Born Yesterday to see what I mean).

Worse yet is Suzy Parker, who they’re clearly trying to refashion as the next Lauren Bacall. The problem here is that Bacall had a weight and allure as an actress without having to say or do anything to provoke our interest. Her mystique helped her keep up with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not even when her acting is a little green. Parker is lovely to look at, but Grant’s mega-watt star power and charisma swallows her whole and she’s a dead zone on celluloid.

I’ve long said that Cary Grant never slummed, even when the material was beneath him. Kiss Them for Me was the type of film, and performance, that I was talking about. At 52, and only a few years away from retirement, he could have done this part half-asleep and backwards. Instead, he invests more gravitas into sequences that don’t really deserve it, and try as he might to spin comedic gold out of this muck, he can only be so successful on his own. I’ll chalk the failure of this one up to Donen’s brief period of growing pains and readjustment after his fallout from Gene Kelly and remember that some of his best work was only a few years away.

Everyone has a beloved film, a film dubbed a classic by the masses regardless of whether or not it's actually any good (Steel Magnolias, anyone?), which they just can’t seem to make a connection with no matter how hard they try. White Christmas is that film for me. I do see plenty of charms in it, sure, but I find it less than satisfying as a whole.

I’m a big fan of musicals, the thin plotting here isn’t that much of a problem for me, so the characters randomly bursting into song-and-dance doesn’t affect me any. I think that it’s the syrupy sweet, antiseptic vibe of the whole show that irks me the wrong way. Many of the best musicals -- Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris -- featured darker undercurrents at play. There are moments when we question if everything will actually work out in the end, like the gloomy undercurrent in “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” or the way that Gene Kelly’s sugar mama emotional manipulations after noticing that he has feelings for the cute younger French girl.

There’s never a moment of doubt, dread or sadness in White Christmas, we know everything is going to work out fine in the end. What this film needed was a little angst around the edges to make it more interesting. That Bing Crosby will wind up with Rosemary Clooney is never in doubt, even when she runs off for a brief spell it comes across more like plot conventions than something her character would actually feel compelled to do. This film’s safe, balmy, soothing gel makes a brief film feel much longer.

At least White Christmas is not without its charms. I’ve never warmed up to Crosby much as an actor, I find him to be in a living coma when trying to emote, but this film luckily has him singing and dancing more than emoting. And his performance of “White Christmas” is THE version of the song, his sheepish voice merging with the lyrics and melody to create a sonic blanket to wrap you up in. Vera-Ellen is a terrific and energetic dancer, and a lovely presence throughout. Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen make “Sisters” a highlight of the film using nothing more than giant fans and some simple choreography. And Danny Kaye is a manic livewire, mugging and camping it up to the extreme. The four of them, especially Crosby and Kaye, make for a lively group and create a nice, believable sense of relationships and comradery amongst them.

It may be corny, and for me a little dull, but I can see why it’s such a perennial Christmas time favorite. The plot is a slapdash bit of clichéd story points, but the score is pleasant, there’s some nice comedic work from the stars, and quite a few of the musical sequences stick out after the film has ended. I guess that’s all one could hope for when the film was thrown together from random Irving Berlin songs and a storyline was crafted around them instead of in service of them. It could have been more satisfying, but it also could have been much worse – just look at any of the current jukebox musicals.

Highly fictionalized and threadbare on plot, Till the Clouds Roll By still features plenty of charms if you can make it through the framing device that houses them. While the narrative tissue connecting one musical sequence to another is hopelessly dull, the musical numbers by and large are enchanting. Plus, it offers up a chance to listen to some of Jerome Kern’s greatest hits sung by some of the greatest musical stars of all time.

While the film is questionably about Kern’s life, little is learned about the man, his process, the impact of his songs or his enduring legacy. As played by Robert Walker, he’s a dignified and saintly composer who churns out one brilliant piece of writing after another with little effort. So the film is useless as drama, but at least, intermittently, it works as a lovely musical tribute to one of the greatest composers of musical theater and popular songs, ever.

The first great sequence is the opening, heavily abridged version of Show Boat. It zips through several songs, and while I find Kathyrn Grayson’s trill to be a little annoying and shrill at times, the rest of the players give it a spark and energy missing from the following dramatic passages. Of particular note in this segment are Virginia O’Brien’s deadpan version of “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” and Lena Horne’s moving, yearning and seductive “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” In a more just and fair cinematic universe, Horne would have been given the chance to essay the role of Julie in the 1951 film version. It seems like the part and her talents would have been a perfect marriage of actor and material, and her delivery of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” could have been the showstopper. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

“How’d You Like to Spoon With Me?” is a cute little number involving swings and Angela Lansbury, whose voice is a bit of an acquired taste, in full on cockney showgirl swagger. There’s not much meat to it, but it’s charming in a quaint way. June Allyson’s “Cleopatterer” plays into her strengths as a sweet, wholesome, girl-next-door with more charm, pluck and energy than anyone else on the MGM lot. Dinah Shore’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris” is notable if only to hear her lovely voice wrap itself around the wistful lyrics.

And the ending medley, which sees six or seven songs performed first by an ensemble then by individual performers, is a smooth bit of filmmaking. No surprise that it was done by George Sidney, his work in Pal Joey and Anchors Aweigh prove that he can stage a memorable musical sequence. Highlights include Virginia O’Brien's (again) snarky “A Fine Romance,” Lena Horne (again) singing “Why Was I Born?” and Frank Sinatra standing still and belting out “Ol’ Man River.”

Arguably the best sequence is when Judy Garland shows up onscreen and the whole affair is taken over by Vincente Minnelli. Minnelli, along with Stanley Donen, is without a doubt one of the greatest musical directors of all time. He brings a real energy and eye for unique details and compositions to the film that the rest of it sorely lacks. Even the best sequences could have been improved tenfold if he had been allowed to take charge of them. The best part of this segment is definitely the plaintive “Look for the Silver Lining.” “Silver Lining” sees Garland playing one of the grand dames of musical theater at the time, it’s a perfect bit of casting, and focuses in on washing dishes. It doesn’t sound that enthralling on paper, but Garland was a rare talent who could make the most mundane of actions feel alive onscreen. The combination of the melancholic lyric and her standing still, focusing in on her repetitive task give the whole song a somber tone that is quite beautiful.

Till the Clouds Roll By is no great classic, but it is a charming production. At two hours and fifteen minutes it could feel like a chore to get through since the dramatic moments are so insipid, but they’re mercifully short, as if the filmmakers knew the greatest asset and strength of the film was in the musical performers and the songs themselves. It’s a smart move to usher from one to the next fairly quickly, even if the film does leave us wanting more after it’s all said and done. But when this many great songs are being performed for us, it seems forgivable that the presentation is less than stellar.

Great movies come in various levels. For every canonized masterpiece like, oh I don’t know, The Red Shoes, there’s another subset of so-bad-they’re-amazing like Showgirls. And then you’ve got the films which are perfectly fine entertainments but seemed destined to become cult-favorites, the kind of movies you sit around quoting with your best friends and watching at a get together. Pitch Perfect is that kind of great movie, not a masterpiece, and far beyond the garbage pile/oddly hypnotic films of midnight showtimes, but the happy medium where it will enjoy a long life.

It meets somewhere in-between the culture clashes of Mean Girls and Bring It On, removing much of the hard-edged spikes of female combativeness to embrace a sisterhood and joyousness in performing. The story beats are predictable, but the characters have enough unique twists to their archetypes to be fresh and lovable personas. And it’s just really, really funny.

Granted, most of the best bits are stolen outright by Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy. Her self-given nickname may seem like a lazy fat joke, but her reasoning behind it provides enough self-awareness and disarming self-confidence to make her character interesting. And then there are all of the scenes and moments which were clearly ad-libbed by Wilson. She projects goofy warmth while hurling out hilarious zingers and sarcastic observations about everyone and everything around her. With this and Bridesmaids, it’s very clear that Wilson is becoming an MVP supporting comedic actress, capable of enlivening the dullest of scenes with an acerbic wit.

This isn’t to say that the other girls aren’t any good, in fact, they’re all uniformly excellent. It’s just that there’s something unhinged about Wilson’s performance that gives it a little extra oomph. Anna Kendrick is carving out a nice post-Oscar nomination career for herself, as long as she steers away from any further What to Expect When You’re Expecting choices. Her lead performance as Beca, the tough, sarcastic but sweet newcomer to the world of a cappella singing, demonstrates her ability to create characters with distinct points-of-view and make them empathetic. Anna Camp and Brittany Snow are a nice comedic duo as the older members of the group, the new de facto leaders. Camp in particular is effective as a character who is essentially a drill sergeant in a mini-skit and stilettos. Ester Dean, Alexis Knapp and Hana Mae Lee are given the most one dimensional characters to deal with, but the give them each a deadpan, manic and fearless unhinged spark, respectively.

Pitch Perfect was one of my more highly enjoyable theatrical experiences of last year, probably because I went with a group of close girl-friends and we had a grand time. We all know Beca is going to end up with the cute Jewish boy at the end. And that the girls are going to get the group in shape and magically turn it out for the finals leading to an unprecedented victory. And all of that is ok. Because it’s the energy and humor on display that make this so entertaining, which is to say nothing of the wonderful musical sequences which pop off the screen with firework-like energy.

NOTE: Before we begin the review proper, I viewed this film two years ago when it was in theaters with my best friend. I believed that I had already posted my review for it sometime last year, but it appears to have disappeared off of listal. So, here we go again – I’ll do my best to try and remember all of the pros and cons I had with the film, but do cut me some slack. It has been awhile…

And now on to our regularly scheduled programming!

A Dangerous Method on the outside looks like David Cronenberg has gone not only mainstream, but into glossy Oscar-bait territory with this story of the birth of psychoanalysis, but beneath that surface lies the twisted, diabolical sexuality and violence at play in so many of his great films. Yes, it does away with body-horror, and the story seems to follow routine beats along the projected bell curve of plot diagrams, yet beating at the center is the story of one man’s slow moving mental and emotional destruction by his mentor-colleague and patient-romantic partner. It twists and refracts this story points into surprisingly naked and candid emotional fractures for Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender).

On the immaculately beautiful and, it must be said, wholly intoxicating exterior, this looks like pure prestige picture. The cinematography is luscious, the costumes expertly done, and the locations and interiors look remarkably period accurate to construct and make us believe in this world. And from the outset I was hooked in.

One of the first images we see is that of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) screaming, spitting and gyrating madly in a carriage. We aren’t inside of the carriage, but outside of it looking in through a glass. We removed, viewing in on her and her madness from a safe distance. It isn’t long before we’re subtly shifted from this safe voyeurism into intimate and uncomfortably close proximity with her sexuality and insanity, which sometimes dovetail.

Spielrein begins as Jung’s newest patient/test subject for some of his latest innovations and radical ideology. He consults with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), his colleague and teacher, about Speilrein’s case, who advises that the woman is potentially dangerous and to tread carefully. And he begins his analytical work with her with the appropriate amount of distance and composure. All it takes is one visit from hedonistic Otto Grossman (Vincent Cassel) to begin the fracturing between patient/doctor relationships, Jung’s relationship with Freud, and everything else he holds dear.

It is here, with the appearance of Grossman, that the restrained id of Jung becomes to come raging out full force and we delve from austere prestige film tones into something very much Cronenberg. These characters may play prim and proper on the outside, but all it takes is the gentlest of pushes before their self-destruction and sexual hunger squirm out of the cracks in their exterior selves.

And when you’re blessed with a cast this good, they make any and all of the transitions both immensely riveting and utterly smooth. Knightley in particular is so committed to contorting, twisting and stuttering out her character’s tics and neurosis during the earliest scenes that her transformation is the most startling. As her character’s desire to be disciplined and used for sadomasochistic sex games begins to reintegrate her sanity, it begins to tear apart Jung’s. When she reemerges at the end as an outwardly prim, smart and proper woman of society, and a mental health professional in her own right, it’s the kind of performance and character journey that the Oscars should be rewarding. Sadly, she wasn’t nominated for much of anything.

But at least she can take solace with her costars who both turn in outstanding work. Mortensen’s Freud, whom he plays as a domineering and menacing father-figure, is always quick to put Jung back in his presumed place as an apprentice every time Jung believes that they are to be seen as contemporaries. There are numerous scenes in which in a controlled, quiet way Mortensen reveals Freud to be a man who must be viewed as the king of the mountain and any challengers to his throne as mere pretenders. His emotional abuse to Jung is particularly wrenching towards the end of the film as Jung sits around nearly catatonic and broken.

And Fassbender, who had a banner year in 2011 and should’ve enjoyed a career-first Oscar nomination both for his work in Shame and for appearing in every other movie seemingly, anchors the film with his intensity and mercurial charm. His Jung is a man slowly devastated by competing interests and needs. Aching to get out from Freud’s shadow and his forced patriarchal domination, and questioning whether he should or shouldn’t engage his libidinous desire for Spielrein, and guilt-tripped by society for cheating on his wife and putting his career at stake, this is a portrait of a man slowly losing his grip on reality as he, ironically, helps Spielrein ascend upwards from her personal repression. Fassbender is absolutely riveting in each and every step along his character’s journey – from pensive scholar to frustrated intellectual to finally his profound depths as a broken, weary man.

A Dangerous Method mostly belongs to Spielrein/Knightley, who while draped in period garb and given an overall polish, is very much of the Cronenberg milieu. She’s creature rising up from sex and violence, alternately restrained and liberated by one society and another, and released upon the world to enact change. No matter how much varnish is used on the exterior, it doesn’t take much to peak beneath the surface and see that Cronenberg is and he always is. And god bless him for it.

Here is a movie from a director that I admire greatly, David Cronenberg, featuring zeitgeist themes and dialog, which I just could not get into the frequency of. Others love it, but I found it an annoying, shrill frequency to try to tune myself in on. The best word I could think of for it was didactic. And that’s most of my problem with it.

In-between scene after scene speechifying about cyber-capital and protests over the soulessness and greed of the 1%, we’re treated to a succession of random characters who show up for one scene, and don’t really matter much once they’ve disappeared. The performances vary, most are in a highly stylized deadpan, and a few are given the chance to emote and actually make an impact (Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti, and no one else), and at the center of it all is Robert Pattinson. I can’t decide if he’s just a terrible actor with no true discernible talent besides starring off broodingly, or if those same trademarks work well for this performance. The dialog never flows correctly out of his mouth, and any time he tries to conjure up a real emotion he just seems to flail about, but there’s a level of snark that’s quite nice in the role.

A vast majority of the film takes place in limo of Pattinson’s character, not all of it, we are treated to several brief scenes which play out like random stops on a road trip to visit tourist traps and freak shows. This limo is really more of a rolling war room, outfitted with every tool one could think of that someone in any variation of the financial industry would need to do business. And we’re told numerous times that this thing can do some impressive tricks, pity we don’t witness much. There are lots of fancy screens and a bar, but nothing too terribly impressive.

And that’s the movie. Characters come and go, only long enough to deliver a speech about this invisible currency that exists only as binary when you truly think about it, and we move from one point of the city to another. There’s provocative ideas brought up, but it’s so unbelievably uninteresting. Cosmopolis always feels like it’s trying far too hard to be edgy, profound, rebellious, avant-garde as it drones on and on and on. Whoever wants it, can have this mess of a film. I’ll cuddle up with Videodrome and The Fly any night of the week instead.

The only thing of any interest in Savages is that it shows a polyamorous relationship working out perfectly well for all three involved. Other than that it’s a story about Mexican drug cartels and the corruption of the DEA told through a trio of vapid beach bunnies with nice, hard bodies. It comes complete with a checklist of stereotypical characters, lazy visual short hands and a cloying narration to wrap it all up for your viewing pleasure.

It tells the story of Ben (Aaron Johnson, yes please) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch, ditto), two surfer buddies who grow and sell weed and live with their mutual girlfriend O (Blake Lively, way out of her acting depth). Ben and Chon begin to encroach upon and get the attention of the Baja cartel, whom they swiftly anger. Next thing you know O gets kidnapped and the boys go on a rescue mission. If the plot had focused instead on the leader of the Baja cartel (Salma Hayek, turning in a great performance even when the script lets her down, which is often) we may have had something more engaging, exciting and unique here.

Savages may have three pretty but vacuous leads, of which only Johnson makes any kind of impact as an actor, but it surrounds them with a gifted supporting cast, that it doesn’t always know what to do with. Emile Hirsch is always a pleasure to me (for several reasons), and he always turns in good work. He’s given very limited screen time and nothing much to do, but at least he seems to be having some fun with the material. John Travolta’s character suffers from clichéd and lazy character motivations (he’s a DEA agent on the take because he has a wife with cancer) and even lazier visual shortcuts (we know he’s corrupt because he’s always inhaling junk food), but he does his best. His character’s penchant for ranting, raving and proving to be an excellent emotional manipulator offers him several chances to show that when he wants to act, he can be damn fine at it.

But other than sexy ciphers with no discernible personality traits, the other major problem with the characters is on the cartel side. Benicio del Toro is in full-on Grand Guignol mode, but his character is an assembly of stereotypical Mexican gangsters stitched together and given bizarre life not but the script, but by del Toro’s strange acting choices. Sure, he goes too far into theatrical, hammy, overacting, but it makes his character more exciting and lively that way. And Hayek is given a meaty role after years of playing bland supporting characters, but that comes with a hitch. Yes, her character runs the cartel and is a dangerous femme fatale in a Cleopatra wig, but she’s also a woman easily swayed by her emotions, needy, hysterical and every joke about a woman in power going crazy because of PMS and general female-ness shows it ugly head from time to time. Like del Toro she tries to reshape it through sheer acting talent, but there’s only so far one can take it beyond what was written on the page.

And in the end we’re treated to two different endings. One which seems like the logical, even if extremely violent, conclusion to the story, and the other which seems like some bullshit, tacked-on Hollywood happy ending. This schizophrenic two-tone mindset is like the film in microcosm. At once, very realistic, even if given a hyperbolic visual flair, and cartoonish, engineered of equal parts reportage and pulpy violence, yet it never sticks to one or the other long enough to matter. It’s serious one minute and cartoonishly over-the-top the next effectively killing the suspense and lowering the stakes. Savages needed the whacked-out Oliver Stone of Natural Born Killers to be anything remotely worth watching.

Since Tim Burton’s uneven Alice in Wonderland made a billion dollars worldwide at the box office, fairy tales are just so hot right now. How else to explain two different versions of the Snow White story hitting the big screen within a few months of each other? Well, Hollywood saw a movie that made a ton of money and wanted a piece of the pie, and the stories are in the public domain, so there’s no pesky writer to pay royalties too.

And on the surface of things, Tarsem Singh’s version should have been the better of the two. Narrative coherence was never his strong selling point, but a feverish, hallucinogenic visual splendor and ripe, overly zealous pageantry are. And a fairy tale seems like the perfect vehicle for his brand of visual overload. But something went terribly wrong in the marriage between material and director.

Mirror Mirror does everything wrong that you could possibly think of with the source material, simultaneously gutting it of the darker, sexual undertones and lifelessly doing nothing interesting or clever to bring a fresh vision to it. It lobotomizes itself and places us in a world as fully realized and blatantly artificial as Fantasy Land in Disney Land.

Perhaps if it hadn’t committed the cardinal sin of being so unbelievably boring I could find myself being kinder to it. But with a glorious, quirky animated introduction that retells the origin of Snow White, her father and how the Wicked Queen came into power through puppets and a pop-up book wonderland my expectations were set too high. Once we realize that Julia Roberts is going to be employing a now-you-hear-it, now-you-don’t British accent and trying her best to toss off sarcastic bon mots (which is not where her gifts lie as an actor), we know we’re in trouble.

Here is a Snow White who is sweet, pure, kind-hearted and in-touch with nature. And here is an Evil Queen, who is not evil, so much as vainglorious, bratty and insecure. Disney’s animated variation could have, and would have, taken this version out with one withering glance and snide half-smile. The balance is off. Fairy tale villains are so engaging, more so than the heroes, because they relish in their evil. They take a great amount of pride in being disturbed, highly sexual and violent beings. They are pure id turned towards our darkest impulses. To remove the venom from the Queen is to neuter the story.

So why did I give this movie two stars instead of half of one? Well, that animated introduction is just beautiful to look at. And Lily Collins and Armie Hammer try their best to make something happen with their characters and the film at large. There’s (maybe) one fresh idea in having the magic mirror transport the Queen to an alternate realm where a version of herself, the nice(r) one, resides and tries to talk her out of her schemes and machinations. And the costumes from Eiko Ishioka are mind-blowingly beautiful and, alternately, completely and utterly ridiculous at the same time. I’ve long been a fan of her costume design work, and this movie is no different.

So those things kept me interested, while the poor CGI (the Beast at the end of the film is cartoonish, rubbery creature that is both hideously designed and horrifically animated), lackluster storytelling (it feels far longer than its 106 minutes), and unnecessary alterations to the storyline (no huntsman, no eating a poisoned apple, nothing that really makes Snow White, well… Snow White, aside from a basic framework and some names), cheap amusement park-like sets and general tedium bored me to tears.

There you have it. Watch Mirror Mirror for the introduction and the costumes. Or, just Google the intro and look at the production stills of the characters. Either way, as long as you avoid the confounding choice to end the movie with a Bollywood style musical number, which I still think doesn’t make any sense.