Reviews by JxSxPx

The 1950s began and ended with Vincente Minnelli films triumphant at the Academy Awards. An American in Paris won for Best Picture, even if Minnelli was overlooked that year, and launched the acting career of star Leslie Caron. Several year later they reunited for Gigi, the musical adaptation of the Colette novella, and went on to sweep the Oscars.

Gigi feels like a celebration of the individual film’s achievements and more like a career achievement award in disguise. This one is uneven, an overstuffed pastry that makes one wonder why it won it all. It wasn’t like it was a slow year as The Defiant Ones, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Some Came Running, Auntie Mame, and The Big Country were all in contention at the ceremony.

There’s plenty to work with in the material, to be sure. Here is the story of a young girl struggling to overcome the patriarchal structures in place of her social order. But it’s also a love story, one with a vaguely creepy veneer, and populated by a largely unmemorable film score. Minnelli’s elegant camerawork and borderline overbearing mise-en-scene and use of color prove exquisite distractions. Although, the film’s most memorable song, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” sounds borderline disturbing as sun by Maurice Chevalier’s aging lecher.

Gigi needed something darker, vulgar, something more beyond the frou-frou. The basic outline is that of My Fair Lady, but minus all the grittier aspects and social critique, and the plot essentially reveals itself within the first 15 minutes. We know Caron’s courtesan-in-training will steal the heart of Louis Jourdan’s playboy and domesticate him at the same time, so we’re only left with artifice.  

As is, the film is a pastry that leaves you gagging and never gives you a moment’s pause to deal with that. It just keeps shoving it down your throat. But it’s all so lovely to look at. Every frame is a stylish painting that is like mainlining cinematic unreality.  

Is it controversial to share that you were enchanted by Vincente Minnelli’s film version of Brigadoon? A quick look at the critical reception shows a mixed/positive reception, and I can understand that. Buying into Brigadoon requires you to accept the complete unreality of the world, and a camera that largely remains stationary in order to absorb the masterful dancing.

The story concerns a magical Scottish town that only manifests and reawakens once every 100 days and two vacationing Americans (Gene Kelly and Van Johnson) who accidentally discover it. Kelly falls in love with Cyd Charisse’s Fiona, and much of the plot involves Kelly and Johnson getting to know the denizens, customs, and whether Kelly will forsake his modern life to live forever with Charisse. Sure, that plot doesn’t sound like much, but between the dancing, the beauty of the scenery, and Minnelli’s restless camera breathing life into it all.

“Heather on the Hill” aches with swooning romance as Kelly and Charisse flirtatiously dance through the Scottish countryside. The sexual innuendo of the material is hinted at through the subdued fire of their choreographic chemistry. In much the same way that “The Chase” elevates the danger of the material by providing Minnelli a chance to go crazy with the shadows, color, and busyness of the frame. “Waiting for My Dearie” has Charisse and her sisters, friends dancing around in celebration of the upcoming wedding. It was this scene that had me buying exactly what Brigadoon was selling, and everything else was extra.

If there is any weak point in Brigadoon it is Van Johnson’s comedic sidekick. He grumbles around the periphery in a permanently drunken stupor and adds a bit too much sourness. A little bit is good, but he’s a mean drunk with no payoff.

This isn’t a Scottish highland that has much to do with reality and one that has everything to do with dreams and imagination. Leave it to Minnelli to explore the ways in which escapist fantasy lures and attracts us away from the real world. I would argue that Brigadoon is one of several misunderstood or undervalued minor works in Minnelli’s oeuvre, like The Pirate or Cabin in the Sky.  

This is a weird one. Not quite a musical but really a melodrama either, Lili exists somewhere in the netherworld between those twin points. Lili (Leslie Caron) is a young girl, roughly sixteen, recently orphaned who runs off to the carnival. Here she meets a magician (Jean-Pierre Aumont), his jealous wife (Zsa Zsa Gabor), and a brooding puppeteer (Mel Ferrer). It is through the relationship with the puppets in the show that Lili not only blossoms, but the puppeteer is able to communicate his love for her.

Yeah, that last bit is a bit skeevy not matter who you try to look at or frame it. Mel Ferrer smolders with an intense, dark sexuality that makes him appear like a hungry wolf leering over Caron’s innocent lamb, even when the script is not intending that. As it stands, the love story is dispassionate and pervading in melancholy, a tone that the rest of the film also strikes.

Lili is really a star vehicle for Caron, and she rises to the occasion beautifully. A trained dancer, Caron gives her Lili a body language and carriage that changes and grows as her character does. The ways that she holds her body in the earliest scenes are awkward and stiff and loosen up as she experiences her sexual awakening and the agony of her first unrequited love. She’s charming when interacting with the puppets and unbelievable in her two big dance numbers.

The climatic ballet is particularly memorable as Lili dances with life-size versions of the puppets that transform into Ferrer. This is not only her realization that she loves her Svengali, but a lovely reminder of Lili’s overall essence of fairy tale-like fantasy. Great musical stars know that they need to act while dancing/singing just as much as they need to act when they’re being tasked with jokes or dramatics. Caron intelligently develops Lili from naïve waif to more mature individual throughout, but never more beautifully than in her two dream ballets.

While Lili’s parts never quite come together there’s something undeniably enchanting here. Chalk it up to Caron’s gamine features and uncontrollable sensitivity as she is the film’s heart and soul. By the end, I just wanted to embrace her and say, “good job.”

This is clearly B-level, churn out product to keep the stars in the public consciousness movie from the MGM musical department. Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor are appropriately spunky and adorable in this inconsequential love story. I’ll be damned if I can remember anything from the score, but I do remember Reynolds dressed as a football and being tossed around and O’Connor tapping in roller skates. I know that I watched I Love Melvin but even ten minutes after it ended, I was already having a hard time remembering much of it. There are worse ways to spend 75 minutes, and I Love Melvin is eager to please enough during its running time.

A pleasing if forgettable minor musical that provides Bob Fosse with one of his few major roles, Give a Girl a Break is just one of many MGM musicals released during the 50s that is more of a trial run for up-and-coming talent than anything else. After all, there’s a precocious Debbie Reynolds fresh off Singin’ in the Rain and Gower and Marge Champion trying out for the Fred and Ginger formula. Although that last bit is also part of the problem.

Gower and Marge Champion are exquisite dancers, best used in specialty numbers or in supporting roles, but limited as actors. He’s very handsome but can’t seem to sparkle like Gene Kelly in front of the camera. Give a Girl a Break does provide Champion and Fosse with the opportunity to dance together, and that’s really something. Now if this had given the main roles to Fosse and Reynolds, we might be talking about this film in a different context. Their major dance scene, “Balloon Dance,” is one of the great sequences in an MGM film where the film runs backwards, forwards, and they twirl through a stylized New York City landscape.

Originally conceived as a reunion of Fred Astaire and Judy Garland after the success of Easter Parade, The Barkleys of Broadway instead ended up being the coda for the Astaire and Ginger Rogers duo. Garland was amid a breakdown due to her addictions and Rogers was a last-minute replacement. This also holds the distinction of being their lone film in color.  

It had been ten years since their last film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, and there were rumors that their working relationship was closely related to the one depicted here. The truth of the matter was probably too complicated for us to boil down to a few sentences. She wanted and tried to escape the song-and-dance routine with deeper dramatic parts, he didn’t want to be perpetually defined by being half of a duo, and I’m sure they had their share of fights. Would she have presented him with his honorary Oscar if they hated each other? Maybe, but I doubt she’d readily rejoin him during a decade that started with her winning an Oscar and doing some of her most diverse work up to that point.

Why am I spending so much time exploring the behind-the-scenes drama of this movie? Because it is possibly more interesting than the movie itself.

Their one pairing outside of the Depression and away from their home studio, RKO, The Barkleys of Broadway substitutes the breezy formulas for MGM’s mechanics. Frankly, I miss the dizzy lovesick heights of the RKO years and would gladly trade the glossy banalities found here for it. The Barkleys are a squabbling theatrical duo that breaks up before they inevitably reunite and twirl off to happily ever after.

The entire scenario feels ripe for playing for laughs but the script plays things straight. There’s a noticeable lack of laughs for Astaire and Rogers to play, but there’s plenty of room for Oscar Levant to mug for the camera and deliver sardonic barbs. The Barkleys of Broadway ends their union with a bit of an anticlimactic bang, but it’s still Astaire and Rogers doing their thing.

The fourth and final entry in the Broadway Melody franchise, The Broadway Melody of 1940 follows a familiar pattern of ‘star is born,’ mistaken identities, and romance. It’s our lone chance to watch Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell dance together, and that accounts for a lot of the pleasures of this film. These two are grace personified in their combination of athleticism and sophistication. The elegance just drips off the screen when they dance.

It’s a shame that neither of them is particularly adept at the whole acting thing quite yet. They’re fine as personalities and spring to god-like life in their musical scenes, but there’s no romantic heat generated between the two like Astaire’s pairings with Ginger Rogers. Much of the acting is left to the ever smiling and handsome George Murphy and a befuddled Frank Morgan. We must also pause at random intervals to allow for various specialty acts to do their thing, and they’re a mixed bag.

In the end, The Broadway Melody of 1940 is a finely made and amusing little trifle. It’s a glimpse of the MGM machine churning out product from its refinery at a clipped pace with not a stray hair or sweaty brow to be found. This is pure fantasy from the dream factory’s strongest purveyor of the artificial life.

I suppose even Sunday school needs chum to keep the tots occupied, so here’s The Star to take up that space. I’m not opposed to films with religious themes, The Last Temptation of Christ is one of my favorites, but this doesn’t explore anything interesting, wondrous, magical, or enchanting about the story of Christ’s birth. It just gives a cutesy animal point-of-view and provides a cavalcade of “wait, what?” star appearances to voice them.

Although, if you ever wondered who self-identified as a Christian in Hollywood, then The Star’s voice cast should answer that question. Yes, that includes Oprah Winfrey as a sage-like camel that drops the movie’s heaviest pieces of religiosity. If that casting choice both confuses and somehow makes sense, then Kelly Clarkson as a singing horse, Kristin Chenowith as a mouse, Tracy Morgan and Tyler Perry as the other two camels (guess who is riding them!), and Ving Rhames and Gabriel Iglesias as King Herrod’s (Christopher Plummer) hench-dogs.

Sure, there’s also Joseph (Zachary Levi) and Mary (Gina Rodriguez), but they’re merely supporting players in this spin on the greatest story ever told. Aside from that top layer of religion, there’s nothing here to differentiate the film from the tumult of other children’s animated features. Our main through line is a donkey named Bo (Steve Yeun) embarking on an action-comedy adventure, and yes, you know from the first minute that he’ll eventually wind up in Mary’s possession and function as the donkey she rides to the stable in Bethlehem.

And that’s why The Star is so damn dreary in the end. There’s no personality here, there’s no sense of art or deeper meaning. It’s a plug-and-play thing that is given a borrowed sense of elevation thanks to its biblical themes, settings, and characters. It’s as banal and meek as an overly saccharine rendition of “Silent Night” pumped into a mall during the holiday season.      

Cuter and more imaginative than I imagined, even if it does feel a little bit like microwaved wonder and imagination, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a minor delight. Geeky wunderkind grows up (Bill Hader) to invent a machine that transforms water into food so that it rains down hamburgers, for instance. Once shunned in his small town of Chewandswallow, one of many food puns, he finds himself embraced as a savior until it all goes sideways.

It must go sideways otherwise there would be no plot. There has to be a romance (Anna Faris, weathergirl trying to make good). There must be a long-standing rival turned friend (Andy Samberg, playing cocky turned humble). Cloudy hits all these beats and throws in a goofy animal sidekick (Neil Patrick Harris as the “voice” of a monkey), daddy issues (James Caan), and a devious politician (Bruce Campbell playing it up like the glorious ham he is) for good measure. Much like the junk food that rains down from the sky, Cloudy does have a sense of fast food discount menu to its assembly of parts.

Yet Cloudy does offer up numerous humorous sights, like parodies of disaster and horror movie clichés by giving us tornados of spaghetti and meatballs, or a “home planet” that must be blown up that is populated by sentient food like vicious gummi bears and rotisserie chickens. Even if the film does feel like it was made from various previously made parts, there’s still a fun sense of chaos and whimsy on display throughout and the stellar voice cast to liven things up. I’m not sure if consumerism and gluttony can more perfectly be satirized than they are in the sight of Campbell’s ever-widening mayor, but Caan and Hader’s father-son dynamic gives the anarchy a grounding and pleasing heart.  

Sometimes things that are clouded with the nostalgia of childhood are best left in that hazy rearview mirror. Case in point, my recent reacquaintance with We’re Back! A Dinosaur Story, a film I used to watch relentlessly as a sickly youth. Upon rewatch, thing I had never noticed before (inconsistent animation, tonal dissonance, made-by-committee feel) were glaringly obvious this time around.

I remembered something zippy, energetic that blasted along its 71-minute running time with aplomb. Imagine my surprise to realize how incongruent Professor Screweyes’ sequence is with the rest of the movie, and how unnecessary it is. No wonder John Malkovich maintains a grand displeasure in even speaking about this film. To give wider context to his gripes: “Good ideas go to die in Hollywood. I worked on an animated movie about dinosaurs in New York once. It was completely bureaucratized. They took something that had art in it and put it in the laps of people that only cared about the bottom line and look what happened.”

This isn’t just a case of sour grapes, but a valid criticism of the final product. How else to explain the cutesy presence of Jay Leno, Walter Cronkite, and Julia Childs in a chidlren’s film. Gotta have something to make the parents chuckle! And there’s also a general sense of the interior logic of the film not making any sense. There are science-fiction elements involving time travel, dark magic and fantastical elements in a twisted circus, and a lone musical number because apparently animated family films need musical numbers.

If there’s no interior logic to explain the functioning of the plot and the world, which is ostensibly a heightened version of our own, then nothing in it really matters. Things are just jammed in to get from one scene to the next, and this does mildly insult the intelligence of the viewer, no matter their age. Then you must consider the sight of human character being turned into primates, the dinosaurs being drugged/mind controlled, and the villain being devoured by crows, none of which is reflected in that G-rating. We’re Back! alternates between silly and starkly mature sometimes within the same scene. I mean, I haven’t even begun to discuss the fact that parental neglect and running away from home are major plot points.  

Yet a part of me still likes the damn thing, but maybe some things are best left in the warm embrace of nostalgia and not to be revisited.