Reviews by JxSxPx

It takes a while to warm itself up, but it easily rises above the half-formed formulas of most modern day romantic comedies (which use both words incredibly loosely). It’s funny and charming in spots, yet it never fully engaged or warmed me up to it. The insistence that the entire storylines and assortment of characters tie together somehow makes it all get a bit too conventional. Tying the film down to a structure that hinders its emotional impact when so many scenes ring with devastating emotional truth and insight makes it so that the film never has a chance to recover or overcome this rhetorical bondage.

But let’s give praise where it is due, much of the cast brings their best to the material and can work wonders out of some scenes which weren’t set-up to be the big emotional set pieces. The romantic geometry at play is never really interesting since we know from the beginning that everything will end up how it should with everyone getting, more or less, what they wanted. But back to the performances: Steve Carell, like many comedians before him, is an underrated dramatic performer (see Little Miss Sunshine) who brings a tremendous amount of believability and heft to his role. Julianne Moore is always reliable, but her cheating spouse in [Link removed - login to see] was a more interesting and fully formed character. Ryan Gosling is incredibly sexy, charming, sexy, able to be both dramatic and funny when needed, and did I mention sexy? He tries to make the best of the schizophrenic nature of his character, but even his tremendous gifts can’t overcome that obstacle. I have yet to be fully amazed by Emma Stone, she’s never bad and in one sequence she nails her part beautifully, but I have yet to see her do anything really special with a role/performance. The less said about Marisa Tomei, normally a reliably strong supporting and comedic performer, the better. She swings for the rafters in a film that has everyone else looking for the hurt and bruised heart beneath the comedy. She sticks out, but for all the wrong reasons.

Crazy, Stupid, Love occupies that space of good-but-not-great, which is probably one of the more frustrating places for a movie to inhabit since so much of the groundwork for a great movie was there. Maybe if I had ever for a moment felt shocked by a plot twist or thought that the central couple wouldn’t work it out by the end, I would have been more impressed and been more enthusiastic about it. But that’s the movie that could have been made, and this is the movie that was made.

Warm-hearted, emotionally involving, and delightfully lacking in the rampant post-modern snark that DreamWorks has infected family-aimed entertainment with, The Muppets is a glorious piece of nostalgia and a welcome return to a piece of pop-culture that has been missing for far too long.

As someone who grew up with The Muppet Show rerunning, new Muppet films invading the theaters, and more than a few products and VHS tapes related to the Muppets, I’m not entirely sure how impartial I can be. Or how emotionally stable I’ll be after admitting that I may have become teary-eyed multiple times during the course of this film from sheer happiness at some points and sadness at another. But, hell, I’m not being professional paid for writing this stuff (and it does take me forever to write and post these damn things). So journalistic integrity be damned! I’m a fan of the Muppets irreverent and self-reflexive brand of humor since my time as a toddler. I missed them greatly.

The plot, like it’s totally necessary to explain it…, harkens back to the Rooney-Garland “Let’s put on a show!” cheeriness of yore. You see, the Muppets studios and soundstages are coming up for auction, and unless they can raise the money to buy them back, an evil corporate businessman will tear them down to drill for oil. So, our intrepid heroes must plea with the Muppets to get back together and put all of the bad blood and history behind them for just one night.

Yes, we get reacquainted with old friends along the way, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to getting a little teary eyed at points, and it’s such a joyous and wonderful experience. We’re also subjected to the irreverent, meta-humor that only the Muppets can do so well. And there’s musical numbers. Lots of them actually, and the new songs, old songs, and covers all blend together beautifully. But, for me, as charming as “Life’s a Happy Song,” moving “Pictures in My Head,” hysterical “Me Party,” and the all-of-the-above-choice “Man or Muppet” are, nothing beats the whole gang getting together for a group version of “The Rainbow Connection.” What starts out as a duet between Kermit and Miss Piggy soon becomes a group sing-a-long, and possibly their mantra, chant, or religious hymnal.

I must admit, I was expecting The Muppets to not do much business at the box office. Time, as shown in the movie, had passed them by and they remained mostly fond memories of numerous “older” people. (At 25, I had co-workers a few years younger who were confused as to the appeal of them and didn’t grow up with them.) And when the film took off so spectacularly, I was ecstatic. There aren’t too many things from my childhood which I look back on with such love and fondness, and the Muppets gang is one of them. Welcome back guys, now don’t make me wait too long for the inevitable sequel.

You know, much has been made about one scene in a film that’s mostly about friendship, trying to regain your emotional and financial footing, and that awkward phase of your life called adulthood. Do I really need to mention the scene I’m talking about? It seems to be all anyone ever focuses on. But the gross-out gag in the middle of the film feels like it was shoved in to appeal to the boyfriends in the audience. What I took away was that a sharply written, well-acted ensemble comedy aimed at adults is far more enjoyable than the juvenilia ‘comedic’ stuff ground-out on a mass scale.

And let’s not forget the other half of that ‘comedic’ coin – movies which star people like Katharine Heigl as shrill, joyless harpies who need to find the perfectly uncouth but model-pretty male in their lives so they can lighten up and stop being so tortured in their ridiculously nice apartments and cushiony jobs in which they perform no actual work. These movies are acid on my soul. So it was with a great sigh of relief that I can admit that Bridesmaids greatly avoids all of these annoying clichés and tropes.

Sure, the film’s not perfect – tone and keeping a sense of pace and energy get lost towards the middle and end – but it does so much right that it’s easy to forgive its failures. While it doesn’t stray too much from the Apatow-formula, he is onboard as a producer here, it does dive into waters such as how we live, and how there’s an element of jealousy, envy, and thinly veiled contempt in how we interact with each other, even with the people that we love.

Bridesmaids focuses mostly on Annie (Kristen Wiig), Lillian (Maya Rudolph) and Helen (Rose Byrne). Sure, there’s a group of supporting players who are without a doubt a group of bridesmaids, but the complicated relationships between these three women is the true heart of the film. Annie and Lillian have been friends most of their lives, and success, happiness, stable relationships, and a smooth transition into adulthood have seemingly been blessed upon Lillian. Annie isn’t a bad person, but she’s going through several personal issues and this may have just become the very thing that tips her into self-absorbed hatred and vitriol.

That the film doesn’t ask us to love her constantly is refreshing. She has more than her fair share of panic stricken breakdowns and the garden variety neurosis of most people in the middle class. That Wiig nails the comedic moments should come as no surprise, but it’s the vulnerability and sensitivity in her performance that proves she may be that rare comic personality who can really act.

She’s offered wonderful support from Byrne’s rich-bitch who over the course of the movie goes from the object of Annie’s scorn to a flesh-and-blood character, Ellie Kemper doing a variation of her character from The Office, Wendi McLendon-Covey as an exasperated mother of three, and Maya Rudolph as the bride-to-be who appears to both truly love Annie and continue to be her friend only because of obligation. The best performance, in the entire film, belongs to Melissa McCarthy as Megan. Her performance both lacks vanity and has no judgment or hesitation in any of the insane, vulgar, hilarious, or awkward things she has to say and do. She’s an oddball character, but she’s also the most content, confident, and empathetic character in the whole lot. Her scene with Wiig late in the film is great because here is a character that should be angry and bitter with the world, but she’s there to offer words of advice and endearing tells Wiig to get her act together. It’s this note of humanity that truly sticks long after Bridesmaids has ended.

Here’s a novelty for you: an Olsen sibling who can act. I mean, really and truly act her ass of. Elizabeth Olsen deserves a major and long-lasting career based purely on the strength of this lone performance. The movie surrounding it should have risen to her level, but what’s there is effective if never transcendent. While the sense of paranoia and time-jumps do realistically place us in the mind of Martha, there are moments and thin characterizations which dwindle and handicap the overall effect of the story.

Hugh Dancy and Sarah Paulson perform their roles well, but are given limited and thinly plotted roles to work with. We share their sense of frustration and annoyance with Martha and her random outbursts, but aside from being both supportive and vexed about her they aren’t given much to work with. The same goes for most of the members of the cult who merge into a legion without making much of an impression. This could have been a stylistic choice of the director’s to continually ground us in Martha’s perspective, but supporting characters eventually become interchangeable. Naturally, only John Hawkes as the cult leader really makes any kind of lasting impression. He looks like a scarecrow that’s been covered in flesh, and is modulated enough to seem otherworldly. A scene in which he performs his “love” song for Martha is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in some time.

And there’s two moments which the film stumbles over and probably seemed like better ideas on paper than they did when put into motion on screen. One involves a home invasion which quickly turns into something out of a horror film and stands in startling contrast to the film built around it. Don’t misunderstand me, there are true moments of dread throughout the film but this particular one just smells of a desperate, cheap scare. The other is the ending. Martha’s time-jumps are almost too clever, and the constant need to try and put us in her frame of mind lead to an ambiguous ending that the film doesn’t truly feel like it’s earned. My gut reaction was more of an eye roll and shrug of “Of course that’s how it ended….” But one scene in which Martha prepares a new-comer for the ritualistic rape – preparing her drink, soothingly talking to her about it, encouraging her to have fun – is most disturbing for how banally it’s treated. That she wakes up and pees herself lets the mind wonder – dreaming of a memory, or was that not real at all?

Still, Martha Marcy May Marlene is ambitious and well-acted enough for me to have enjoyed it far more than any of its myriad of problems. But, as far as first feature’s go, this is mightily impressive and I look forward to seeing more of what Olsen and the director have to offer.

I think that I’ve discovered a running theme this awards season: actresses delivering award caliber work in films that are far beneath their talent levels. Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain in The Help spring to mind. From what I’ve gathered of Meryl Streep’s filmography of the past few years, The Iron Lady seems to be heading in this direction. But I think that My Week With Marilyn might take the cake for a film in which a lead performance carries the entire weight of its worth.

Filmed and written with the passion and emotional integrity of a really expensive Lifetime movie, My Week With Marilyn tells the fairy tale story of a third-assistant director’s alleged affair with the world’s most famous movie star and sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe. The biggest fault is that at no moment does this story ever feel the slightest bit believable, especially once you read up on the well-documented dust-ups that happened and discover that Colin Clark originally wrote rather disparaging things about Monroe in his first book, [Link removed - login to see]. Magically, a few years after that book was published came a book called My Week With Marilyn which detailed the alleged affair that Monroe had with Clark for roughly nine days.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that while dealing with Olivier’s aggressive outbursts and rejected romantic advances Monroe would look for anyone in the product to be friendly to her and be nice with. I just don’t for a minute believe his story of a romantic interlude. It doesn’t help that, as written and performed, he distinctly lacks any kind of engaging personality, wit, charm, anything that makes for a compelling lead character. Scenes with just Clark are lifeless and remove energy at an alarming rate.

It’s up to Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh to save this. A veritable host of British acting legends – Derek Jacobi, Dame Judi Dench among them – cameo, but Branagh and Williams steer the ship. Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier is type-casting at its finest, and he bellows and gives a big performance that feels just right. But Williams had the harder task – how do you play one of the greatest screen legends, sex symbols, and pagan goddesses of all-time without dipping into caricature and feeling like you’re just giving a lazy piece of mimicry? Williams knows that Monroe’s beauty was something that can’t be acted or even recreated, but she creates a gripping and phenomenal portrait through body movement and vocal inflections. She captures the mercurial quality that keeps me coming back to Monroe as both a star and an actress.

I just wish she had been granted a better film to showcase her formidable talents as an actress. As it stands, this is a very shiny display case with a note reading: “Michelle Williams’ Oscar goes here.” See it for the performances, and try to bear with the lazy and shoddy camera work and writing.

Never truly anything great, and Depp is clearly too old for the role, but there’s something so oddly charming and entertaining about The Rum Diary. Maybe it’s that there’s clearly a lot of love for Hunter S. Thompson on display here, and the film works best when you think of it as a love-letter to the days when the artist was trying to find his footing and artistic voice. By the time the film ends the true story and legacy has begun, and everything that happens here is just an unfocused, loosely connected string of vignettes that are amiable but offer no true insight into his character, writing, or importance.

The booze-filled meandering zig-zags between amusing adventures of Depp and his cohorts at an English-language newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the far more interesting, but very predictable, origins of Thompson’s alter-ego raging against moneyed interests and predatory upper-classes. A romantic subplot is severely undercooked and incredibly obvious, but Amber Heard’s mermaid-like rise from the water is positively romantic and erotic at the same moment, a rare moment in which we can witness a goddess emerging from nature.

A fun entertainment that wanders around with it’s heart-on-its-sleeve paying tribute to Thompson’s legacy, but revealing nothing new about the man behind it. That may sound like faint praise, and maybe it is. But this is just a cocktease of what kind of outlandish, feverish, delirious gonzo-literature that Thompson would go on to create and perfect over his lifetime.

The Whistleblower springs to mind a plethora of Seventies-era ripped-from-the-headlines dramas. Unfortunately it never rises to the level of All the President’s Men, but it offers up a performance from Rachel Weisz that is bruised, subtle, and full of naked rage.

Weisz’s performance is allowed one tragic scene in which to express white-hot rage, in a screaming cry against the corruptive powers that have enclosed around her and the lambs-to-the-slaughter girls trapped in the human trafficking living nightmare. Her tears of rage and pain are indelibly effective, but the movie that surrounds them is hopelessly bleak and unfocused. She starts the film as a stubborn single-minded officer trying to enact change and turns into something of an obsessive trying to perform a divine mission. There seems to be little thought about the possibility that she could lose her life, her job, or inadvertently get these girls killed.

The effort to humanize these poor girls, dismissed as “whores of war” by the group-think riddled male UN officers, is commendable, but it never fully materializes. What does is an obvious deficiency by first-time director who tries to juggle more characters and storylines then they are capable of effectively doing so. Vanessa Redgrave and Monica Bellucci are essentially glorified cameos, standing in as a wise, sage-like advisor and a by-the-books bureaucratic road-block respectively. And the men in the movie all blur into one large leering, threatening hive.

The Whistleblower works best if you think about it as a taunt, tense-thriller. It never quite shakes the feeling that it is editorializing, sermonizing, possibly even dipping into sensationalizing the truth by blunting some edges and removing some of the sting of the truth. (All of these girls appear to be near or over 18, which isn’t the truth. Depressing, gut-churning, repellent – but true.) In the end the only two things that truly stand out are Weisz’s masterful performance, and the conclusion that the ethical and moral wasteland leftover from war creates and sustains an atmosphere in which sex slavery and corruption are built in and self-sustaining.

The Help offers only a soothed-over, glossy portraiture of racial relations during the Civil Rights era. It plays it safe, only hinting a true darkness or briefly showing a scene of great violence or fear before rebounding back to featherweight fluff. It’s not that the history is revisionist; it’s that the story seems to have instead put a filter on itself. Any true depth the characters are given can be placed squarely on the fine performances from three standouts, and otherwise every plays things incredibly broadly. Bryce Dallas Howard’s racist alpha-bitch group-leader does everything but twirl a moustache in her heinous plotting. It’s this kind of simple reading of good/bad that hinders The Help at every turn.

You see, The Help makes the egregious error of mistaking Skeeter, a character who is clearly just a siphon for the voiceless black maids to tell their stories, as a person of interest and a heroine we can rally around. Either as written or performed by Emma Stone, who has yet to leave a lasting impression upon me, Skeeter is a dull character. She’s tenacious, career-minded, socially-progressive – in short, everything that is needed to be a catalyst for the story. There’s no hint of the racial bile that has been surrounding her all of her life as having even impacted her in the slightest. It’s like she came fully-formed out of the foam of liberal white-guilt in the post-Civil Rights era.

The true leads, when we’re given enough opportunity to spend time with them and their complicated interior lives, are Aibileen (Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer). They both always thought that this would be their burden, their lot in life. They never thought that they had any other options, or that any other options were even the slightest bit possible. Their mothers were maids, and their grandmothers were slaves. They endure because they have to.

Now, whether their characters are allowed to be so complex and fully-realized is a matter of debate between the written word and what they’ve brought to the roles. I lean towards the latter since so many of the others are underdeveloped or, oddly, played up for comedy. Spencer does portray the more quick-witted and stubborn of the two, but when it comes to nailing quiet dramatic moments she more than holds her own. One wishes though that her character’s dénouement played out a little bit better. And her scenes with Jessica Chastain, as her employer, are wonderful for their chemistry together. Chastain’s character starts off as some kind of poor white-trash bleached-blonde bimbo before texture and shading is added in. Chastain’s is the third performance that I mentioned earlier as a standout.

If The Help had focused exclusively on the characters portrayed by Spencer, Davis, and Chastain, and had focused upon issues of race, class, interior racism/classism/sexism, we might have had a far superior film. Scenes with Skeeter’s cancer striken mother are oddly played for laughs, and a relationship with Chris Lowell, who as attractive as he is does nothing in the movie, goes nowhere slowly. Again, the filmmaker’s mistook Skeeter for an interesting character, but perhaps this is a problem with the source material?

Anyway, and now we finally get to Viola Davis. When Meryl Streep won the Best Actress SAG Award in 2009 for Doubt, she rapturously proclaimed that co-star Viola Davis was a brilliant actress and demanded that someone needed to give her a movie to showcase her talents. (Watch it here: [Link removed - login to see] Now that someone has, I have one modest request: Someone gives her a better one.

Davis’ performance is a rare thing of beauty. In her posture and mannerisms we can see the aching of her joints, the rust that is starting to form around them from such taxing labor. In her face we can see so much. When she peers into the camera to talk about the death of her son the guttural impact of her facial muscle’s minute changes cannot properly be described. Or the sheer panic that sets in when a bus ride home one evening is stopped and she is forced to flee – for her life, for her safety, for everything.

It is in these moments with Viola Davis that The Help transcends its meager Lifetime/Hallmark movie-of-the-week vibe. The unearned faux-happy ending only compounds the problem. So why then did I give it a 3.5 out of 5? Well, across the board it is well-acted; even what the actresses are asked to do is broad comedy for some odd reason. It’s very well made, one cannot argue that a lot of time and money went into the costumes, hair, makeup, sets. But the biggest reason is that so few movies like The Help are made nowadays. I wanted to throw as much support behind a movie that: 1) stars minorities in the lead roles, 2) came out in the summer and didn’t shy away from telling an actual story, and 3) it’s disgusting how underrepresented/underutilized black actresses are in roles of some kind of depth and characterization. For those reasons, one should see The Help, no matter how problematic and rose-colored it is.

This is probably the best film that could have been made out of the jingoistic comics, and thankfully it doesn’t take itself seriously. The title alone, an epic clunker of Marvel Films groupthink synergy, clues you in to the vibe of the whole film. It’s a very long prequel to The Avengers, which I am both terrifically excited about and thankful that the build-up is finally over so these heroes can finally get movies that aren’t overlong commercials for that gang’s-all-here-explodathon, but it also has the balls to try and be a real movie. It puts Thor and Iron Man 2 to shame simply for that fact. It also doesn’t hurt that the film sees itself as the modern day product of a comic book-meets-1940’s serial.

Thankfully, everyone involved knew that the only way to truly make a Captain America movie work is by setting the story in WWII. And perhaps that has something to do with what makes Captain America: The First Avenger work so well: we’re used to seeing our heroes take place in a very current timeline, this offers up nostalgia, innocence, and fun, something which has slowly been sapped out of comic book-based entertainments since Christopher Nolan revolutionized the genre with his astounding Batman films. The lessons to learn? What worked for Nolan’s Batman films – grit, noir-esque visuals and dialog, a more realistic take on the material – can work for several heroes, but, much like what Nolan did with Batman, you have to approach the material on the hero’s terms and create the best world and storyline around him. Imagining a dark, broody Steve Rogers in WWII is a terrible thought. Captain America is there to show that even in the darkest of hours, goodness, strength, courage, and heart can triumph over the greatest of obstacles.

And, poor Steve Rogers, aside from Clark Kent has any other hero of Americana been subjected to more proclamations of how dull, square, and boring he is? Sure, Rogers (and Kent) lack the fallible, everyman charm of Spider-Man, and the brooding, tortured loner status of Wolverine or Batman, but underneath the giant Boy Scout exterior is an interior of sadness and isolation. Through scenes of both humor and stubbornness we come to care about Steve Rogers. He remains the good-hearted, courageous kid from Brooklyn who just wanted a chance to prove himself even after he’s been blessed with genetics that turn him into an impossibly good-looking, muscular Adonis who’s near indestructible. He wants to be all that he can be. Chris Evans’ earnest performance put any doubt (and I had a lot of them since he’s mostly made his career playing wiseasses) I had about his being cast in the role to rest. Evans is as great in the role as RDJ is as Iron Man.

The CGI used to shrink and thin out Chris Evans is a marvel (no pun intended). It reminds me of seeing Benjamin Button, and that is no small praise. And the supporting cast – particularly a droll Tommy Lee Jones, a scene-stealing Stanley Tucci, and Hugo Weaving as Red Skull – is nicely rounded out by a great group of character actors. Before we get to the final act, which has to see our hero stop the villain and the save the world, the film has a lot of fun harking back to Flash Gordon-style serial in tone, spirit and aesthetics. And, before the obligatory “Just kidding!” real ending kicks in, the bleak flirtation with an actual tragedy and emotional gravity of a situation is a welcome addition to the genre.

Sometimes you watch a movie and you can’t but think “That must have been very cathartic to write.” Beginners is a deeply personal journey through two strands of time, which never really intersect in the narrative-proper but thematically and emotionally in ways both obvious and subtle. Never self-pitying, nor is it an embellishment of self-hagiography, Beginners strives sincerity, and never even bothers to soft the sharp edges, or to unload the emotional/mental baggage that it’s characters carry around.

Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, a conceptual artist, he has never had a truly deep emotional relationship with a woman, and his relationship with his father was frayed at best. Through voiceover we learn all about his bruised heart, his self-destructive techniques, and how he is trying to pick up the pieces of his fragile, broken emotions and restart. We see Oliver at three points in his life: in flashbacks as a child, in span of time that his elderly father (Christopher Plummer) comes out and then slowly dies of cancer, and the relationship he tries to make work with the equally damaged Anna (Melanie Laurent).

Events in his childhood become clearer with the information that his father was a repressed homosexual in a sham marriage. Suddenly, the distance and emotional disengagement from his father make perfect sense. This knowledge does not heal these wounds overnight or at all really. But it helps to make sense of everything, it gives him an answer.

And now, at age 75, his father, Hal, is ready to start anew. His wife has died not long before he finally makes this announcement, and he takes this as a moment to lunge at life with a vigor that would make many twenty-something’s exhausted. To see their relationship finally start to heal itself is a wonder. Not all is forgiven or forgotten, and neither of them ever expect for it to be. But they look at each other and think: I need you now more than ever. Oliver is also amazed at how his father is able to grab hold of a romantic relationship that is deeper and more meaningful than he has ever had.

And then comes to announcement that Hal has cancer. And Oliver is, once more, an emotional outcast sent adrift. All of the mechanisms and emotional ugliness that he was working on have come back to him. And this is when he meets Anna.

So far, I have talked about the film as if it were structured linearly. It is not. It is an emotional collage in which events in the present or the past recall other things. It moves like stream-of-consciousness literature. We follow Oliver’s inner-monologue from one connect to the next before moving on.

The lessons of love, life, and living that Hal taught Oliver in his final years help him try to make sense and make a real life with Anna. But romantics are the worst when it comes to truly dealing with their emotional turmoil. Just when you think that he’s finally over it all, much like in real life, he knows that he’s damned to mess it all up somehow.

I have talked almost exclusively, and at great length, about the main character. And Beginners is really about all three characters. I could have talked about Hal or Anna just as much. That is because they are both written so fully, and essayed so greatly by three fantastic, and underrated, actors.

McGregor is subtle, wondrous, and utterly seamless. He never appears to be acting or affecting an emotion: he just is. And Laurent is mesmerizing, luminous, and quietly heartbreaking, often in the same scene. But neither of them can match the power that Plummer brings to the role. He’s charming, funny, vibrant, filled with a naturalistic presence and grace, but never showy or purposefully trying to steal the scene. It’s a quiet piece of work, but I hope that come Oscar night Plummer finally wins that golden guy.

Beginners is an unexpected mixture filled with tears, joy, and laughter. It has stayed in my memory for a very long time.