Reviews by JxSxPx

There’s more than a little bit of Louisa May Alcott in Jo March, and there’s also a bit of Jo March in Greta Gerwig. Not only does Gerwig prove that there’s still life in Little Women, Alcott’s oft filmed novel of four daughters coming of age in the Civil War, but that there’s still nuances and reflexive layers to mine in the material. Gerwig restores various bits of autobiographical detail to the material providing an already proto-feminist work with a stronger voice.

We begin in the middle of the narrative with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) living in New York and trying to sell her stories to a disinterested editor (Tracy Letts), and move backwards in time to see how her youth framed her present. Scenes of Jo scribbling ambidextrously, one of several points of Alcott’s own life that get woven in, will suddenly move backwards to show her love of writing plays as the seeds of her eventual present. It’s a smart way to differentiate this adaptation from the straight-through versions starring Katharine Hepburn, June Alyson, or Winona Ryder.

This structure provides not just bits of detail and meaning to things like Jo’s sibling rivalry with Amy (Florence Pugh, simply marvelous), but in shaping our vision of Jo’s bucking of societal conventions while simultaneously thinking she should subsume to them. She scoffs at prospects like marriage while chasing after a fulfilling artistic life, and the film’s third-act treatment of Jo being partnered off is treated as a joke. Gerwig, Alcott, and Jo all combine artistic voices to break the fourth wall and underscore that this endgame decision was one fostered upon them by outside forces.

I suppose some of your adoration of this material will rely upon your ability and tolerance for scenes of women chattering away. Frankly, I wish more films would be like this. It’s a joy to simply sit back and watch actresses as varied and talented as Ronan, Pugh, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, and Eliza Scanlon argue, laugh, support each other and offer bits of advice. These various personalities provide a wide range of color and ideologies from Streep’s elderly Aunt March being a bit of a battle-axe to Dern’s Marmee transforming volcanic emotional responses to muted self-sacrifice and neighborly support.

Of course, being Little Women, the four sisters get the largest amount of screen time. Ronan remains one of the best actresses of her generation with her ability to seemingly project multiple thoughts and unspoken feelings with just her body language and mercurial transition of facial muscles. Emma Watson gets a turn as Meg, the oldest of the sisters and the one most clearly repeating the life choices of her parents by marrying for love instead of money. Eliza Scanlon manages to make Beth a realistic character instead of the near saintly presence other versions have presented her as, and her resignation in the face of illness is heartbreaking.

While Pugh makes Amy March a more sympathetic and complicated figure than the spoiled brat of prior adaptations. Yes, Amy is a bit of a brat, but she’s also clear-eyed enough to realize the transactional and economic realities of a good marriage for someone in her station and era. It is this scene that best encapsulates what Gerwig is trying to reframe and discuss in this version of the story, the societal and financial pressures that linger upon the family. Each version of Little Women reflects something about the wider culture at the time with the 1949 exploring post-war euphoria and the 1994 underlining the value and defining nature of work, for instance. The 2019 version explores the then-versus-now dynamics at play within the material and transforms Jo from just a self-interest of its original author and into something more complex.

Julie Dash’s directorial debut, Daughters of the Dust, explores a legacy of slavery never given resonance or thought in American history, fiction, or cinema. Here is the Gullah island culture writ large and given a chance to reveal itself to a wider audience. Dash’s camera is less of a coherent narrative then it is a poetic, near novelistic exploration of family legacy that rolls backwards and forwards through time revealing or filling in details as it goes.

What emerges is a rapturously beautiful film that is involving in how mysterious it is. The Gullah dialect and language are difficult to traverse at first but soon becomes immersive and easier to grasp as the film goes along. It is largely told through the faces and voices of black women and girls as their family prepares to leave Ibo Landing and move to the mainland to start a new life. That’s the entirety of the narrative, but it’s also so much more than that in a way that can’t quite be described properly. It can only be experienced.

The film is narrated by an unborn child, the latest generation of the Peazant family, who explains the family history and is described by the current matriarch of the family as her spiritual twin, “the last of the old and the first of the new.” Ancestry, legacy, and the old ways conflict with the modernity of the early 1900s throughout, as do various interpersonal conflicts between family members. Dash’s camera is an ever expanding and unspooling series of exquisite character sketches done in miniature.

The vibrancy of the imagery of her camera underscores just how dream-like and aggressively against straight interpretation the film can be. Dash isn’t interested in detailing straight historical artifacts but in immersion in a culture as it could be, such as giving all her elderly characters permanently blue-tinted hands to reflect their work on an indigo plantation. It’s a detail that feels real but may not necessarily be true.

There’s also the way her use of color tilts towards the sensual and rhapsodic rather than the mundane or the real. The sands of the beaches are glorious, the variation of black skin a marvel, and the white dresses, their faded Sunday best, a gorgeous parade of variations. Dash’s camera recalls Technicolor’s cinema-from-the-firehose unreality, and Daughters of the Dust is all the better for her refusal to play anything straight.  

Movies about racism with a white protagonist often exhibit a milquetoast exploration of the subject matter as they inevitability treat systemic modes of oppression as the actions of a bad few. There are the good white people, the bad ones, and the patient, dignified oppressed class on the sidelines seeing their reality reflected through the prism of the privileged class. They are often groan-worthy in the ways they offer soothing balm for deep, ugly scars and obscure present-day realities and the violent histories that have transmogrified into a complicated present.

I’m talking about things like Green Book, Driving Miss Daisy, and The Help, to name just a few. The white characters must learn to see and treat the black characters as equal humans and flirt with their lived experiences before returning to their bubbles having effectively “solved” the issue. Roll credits and watch as the middle class white liberal set leave the theater smiling and chatting about what a great, socially important movie it is.

Thank god A Dry White Season is not one of those movies. Yes, it is about a white protagonist discovering that his safe stasis is built upon the exploitation and brutality of the oppressed class. While other films frame this discovery as a temporary slumming, A Dry White Season finds his character losing everything for daring to examine the effects and reality of colonialism.

It also helps that this film is directed by a black woman which reframes and gives a different authorial intent to the subject matter. Euzhan Palcy doesn’t just trace what her white protagonist loses, but how deeply rooted and reactionary apartheid will go to protect its status quo. She is unafraid to confront her character’s privilege and demonstrates what true allyship can look like when confronting a gigantic beast like racism.

But compromises to her outstanding vision had to be made in order to get the film produced by a major Hollywood studio. Namely, distracting movie stars. Marlon Brando brings all the gravity and weariness of his iconic cinematic legacy to a small part as a human rights lawyer, one of his least showy late-career performances. In contrast, Susan Sarandon’s oft-kilter accent work and minor role are more distracting than immersive as she quickly enters and exits the narrative as a photojournalist. Sacrifices must be made to the money men and this is not the first nor the last movie about a thorny subject that padded its cast out with big names in order to get made.

None of this entirely negates A Dry White Season’s outrage and conviction in detailing the personal sacrifices and moral outrage involved in dismantling unjust systems. In fact, more stories about tricky, complex subject matters could learn a thing or two from this one’s ability to put human faces on its subjects and demarcate the difference between by standing to tragedy and moral agency.   

Is this supposed to be a comedy or a melodrama about the behind-the-scenes machinations of filmmaking? Is there a political satire going on here or dishy tell all about Spain’s movie industry with proxies for its major stars? It’s difficult to say as The Queen of Spain wants to be all these things, and in being all these things winds up nullifying the entire enterprise.

The dramatics of a concentration camp survivor reconnecting with his former industry friends and peers is treated with the same level as the more satirical bits about making a Franco-approved version of Queen Isabella’s life. A group of filmmakers, mainly actors, break into a prison labor camp to escort their target to the safety of France. It’s clear the filmmakers are trying to echo Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic black satire To Be or Not to Be, but they don’t have his unique touch or ability to develop distinct dramaturgy and comedic tones in harmony.

There’s a lot going on in The Queen of Spain and much of it goes nowhere. There’s Cary Elwes as a closeted movie star, a lavender marriage, a cameo from Francisco Franco, Chino Darin’s random romance with Penélope Cruz, and Mandy Patinkin’s blacklisted screenwriter are all threads that are introduced only to be left dangling or unable to fold into the wider plot, or plots. If there’s one thing that does manage to tie all of this together it’s that the entire movie is too talky and meandering. You can guarantee that this film will go nowhere slowly and display a talented cast like a merry-go-round of incident looking for meaning.

Essentially a puzzle box film that’s too in love with its own conceit to bother with things like character, Zoom is all structure and no payoff. Three stories, three disparate visuals, and a thread connecting all three of them, which I will be openly discussing so turn away if you don’t want to be spoiled. You’ve been warned.

One story finds a frustrated cartoonist (Alison Pill) who works at a sex doll factory creates a movie director (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is directing the story of a model-cum-writer (Mariana Ximenes). Turns out that the novel Ximenes was writing was the life of Pill’s character, so each story involves someone creating the world of the other one. Each of them a frustrated creative looking for something to satisfy their artistic and sexual lives. That’s the entirety of Zoom in a nutshell, a bit of juvenile sexual psychosis and stylish too-clever-by-half structure that goes nowhere.

Once you’ve broken up the circular structure, and I did it damn fast as narrative coincidences piled up too quickly to not be a contrivance, Zoom doesn’t have much more to offer. There’s the sight of plenty of wonderful actors wasting their gifts on something that probably sounded swell on paper, but it doesn’t pan out to anything worthy of their time/gifts. Who knew the sight of Bernal breaking an electric strap-on penis by going in the ocean to be so banal?  

The melodrama of 50s and 60s cinema gets shoved through Anna Biller’s unhinged prism in the delightful The Love Witch. There’s a little bit of Jacques Demy’s candy-colored musicals here, the repressed sexuality of Vincente Minnelli there, and all of it is run through her distinctly feminist and hyperfeminine perspective. She finds a way to combine the sexual neurosis of the Technicolor era with a modern-day sensibility, essentially finding ways to merge the profanity of today with the restrictions of yesterday.

The Love Witch still finds Biller in dire need of an editor to keep her pacing from wandering around too much, but her focus is more narrowed here. We largely follow the exploits of our title character, Elaine (Samantha Robinson, finding the perfect balance between stiff object and active participant), as she searches for love, deals with her coven, and evades the law. There are still a few detours that could largely be removed or go on too long, plenty of scenes involving the coven spring to mind but not the wedding ceremony that directly references Donkey Skin. The world needs more movies that directly reference Demy.

Yet we largely keep our focus on Elaine as she tries to find a lover who will marry himself to her strict gender guidelines. She’ll happily play both loving wife and wanton harlot if her male counterpart to act accordingly to the strictly enforced but unwritten code of gender dynamics. In her own way, she’s as regressive and oppressive as the patriarchal society that witches so often stand in stark contrast towards and act as disruptive forces against. She’s a willing Stepford Wife or Barbie looking for someone to complete her, which is the best and quickest way to ensure that all relationships will prove toxic and doomed.

It is endlessly fascinating to watch a character destroy herself through a cage of her own making despite having all the tools and means of escape. I’m not sure if she’s happy in the cage or if she’s too blind to realize how imprisoned and slavishly devoted she is to remain there, but Elaine is a fully realized and complex character. If Elaine is buying into the tools and markings that hold women down, then she a creation of a society that made her. Consider her journey something of a feminist Trojan Horse as her eroticism is the first thing you notice before the pain behind her blank, smirking face is revealed.

Consider me a fan of Biller’s cinematic worlds and as someone who looks forward to whatever she does next. We need her explicitly feminine viewpoint, her unabashed use of color, and fascinating set of influences that create a “specialty act” of cinema. Her cinema is an artisanal one, and it recalls the otherworldly nature of not only Technicolor but German Expressionism and other cinematic conventions that terraformed the world into something more mythic, grand, and fairytale-like than the real one.

All hail Anna Biller, a one-woman film studio who wears her influences with all the mash-note love of a dyed in the wool fangirl, and her riotous debut, Viva. A film destined for cult-like devotion, Viva finds Biller writing, directing, producing, starring, designing, and editing her story of a bored housewife stumbling into sexual revolution before returning home to her impossibly handsome husband.

It's nearly too much of a movie as it stands, Biller could seriously use an outsider editor to help narrow her focus, as if you’re drinking cinema straight from the hose on full blast. Everything is purposefully stilted, and arch played with a wink and a nod as if it were all a grandiose burlesque, which it is in a way. Biller’s self-conciously campy tribute and critique of the films of Russ Meyer finds out what would happen if Tura Satana was a bored housewife with a distinctly lacking sex life that drove her towards an existential crisis.

Biller’s Barbi gets dumped by her Ken (actually, his name is Rick, but it might as well be Ken), and acts as unwitting magnet to the entirety of 1970s sex politics, both as something to experiment with and victim of its double-standards. It is here that Viva becomes something of an episodic sexual odyssey that frequently meanders too much for its own good from a nudist retreatment to a climatic hedonistic orgy, no erogenous zone goes unexplored.

And it is frequently too much for one movie to handle, even one as pleasingly colorful and textured as this one. The energy dips and sags at various points and the musical interludes could easily have been jettisoned to tighten things up. But there’s still so much to enjoy from the purposefully bad acting, which causes lines like “There’s nothing I like more than being wet” and “I always wanted to be a prostitute” into beautiful bon mots.

Sure, taking potshots at the Playboy lifestyle might seem easy, but Biller’s Cheshire grin knows when to revel in the kitsch and when to stop long enough to make an emphatic point. Barbi might be taking on sexploitation, but she frequently announces that she’ll be doing it on her own terms. In Scotchgarded fabrics, shag rugs, and heavy blue eyeshadow.    

I suppose the interiority of Shirley Jackson’s prose proves a problem to visualize as several adaptations of her work jettison the slow creeping dread for other bells and whistles. Sure, Robert Wise got the balance right with The Haunting, but Jan De Bont absolutely did not. Do you remember the 1996 TV adaptation of The Lottery with Keri Russell? Did you even know The Bird’s Nest got adapted as a movie called Lizzie with Eleanor Parker?

What I’m trying to get at is that competent adaptations of Jackson’s work are few and far better between. Here’s Stacie Passon’s take on Jackson’s final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and it’s a bit too polite and quiet with a change to the ending that’s too obvious for Jackson’s more curlicue prose. All the incident and character motivations have been translated, and populated by a game and talented cast, but the spirit of the thing doesn’t feel right.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is narrated by someone that we would generously label as “unreliable” and throbs with a fragile intensity and vulnerability that threatens to explode at any moment. It’s a slow burn of tension where detail is slowly fed out piece by piece until the horrifying truth lands with an aggressive blow. That sense of perpetual unease and paranoia deflates here as the entire thing plays out like a melodrama about an odd family instead of gothic feminist yarn it really is.

Everything feels too composed and clean to really visualize the emotional abuse and displacement these characters go through. Taissa Farmiga and Alexandra Daddario are perfectly cast as the Blackwood sisters, and Sebastian Stan is appropriately seductive as the scheming cousin, but they appear to be enacting this in an immaculate dollhouse. Where’s the grime and rot that the house as slowly succumbed to? Much like the candy-coated kitchen and crinoline dresses of Daddario’s Catherine, this version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle has been remodeled to a too neat and too obvious melodrama that needed more slow-burning dread.

A complete tonal mess that finds the Coen Brothers swinging wildly from wry farce to blood-soaked slapstick to harebrained lampoonery, Burn After Reading is muddled but entertaining enough. It seems that every time the Coens obtain some level of respectability they immediately follow it up with a confused big swing as if to reorientate their misanthropic worldview away from prestige. No Country for Old Men won them a bushel of Oscars, so they called up a bunch of their movie star friends (George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand) for a farce of conspiracy theories and an examination of one man’s grandiose sense of importance.

I suppose some of it works, but it also feels like the Coens are aware that Burn After Reading is all over the place as there’s a moment when J.K. Simmons appears to declare “Report back to me when it makes sense.” They’ve effectively hit pause on their own narrative to meta-comment on its ever expanding and convoluted plot that built out from adultery, cosmetic surgery, failed life transformations, bad marriages and mistaken identities before spiraling even further into espionage and a MacGuffin that leads to plenty of blood splatter.

If the movie is a bit of a mess, and it very much is, at least the cast appears to be having fun with it all. Clooney and Pitt are absolutely fabulous as a pair of idiots, Swinton is reliably icy and domineering, Malkovich gets to take his tortured cuckold self-proclaimed genius shtick for a ride, and McDormand and Jenkins bring a touch of sadness to their characters that’s a welcome undercurrent to the hijinks. Burn After Reading functions best when it isn’t trying to give these actors a coherent narrative but skits to play. When we eventually return to Simmons, he’s as flummoxed about what’s been told to him as we are about what we’ve just watched. “I’m fucked if I know what we did,” once again, Simmons functions as a mouth piece for the Coens, and as ending codas go, it’s as succinct yet unable to wrap things up as “Shut up and deal” or “Nobody’s perfect.”

You can almost see the film that Jonathan Hensleigh was trying to make if you squint and turn your face at just the right angle during any scene of The Punisher. It’s one built upon the rough, gritty cinema of Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, and Sam Peckinpah, but without their eye for composition or making the most of a thin budget. Hensleigh just populates his film with rote characterizations, laughable sequences, and a particularly awful performance from John Travolta during a decade where his performances were near uniformly atrocious.

The basics of the Punisher’s modus operandi are known, mainly thanks to an appearance in the Netflix suite of shows before getting his own spinoff, but for the uninitiated I shall recap: Frank Castle (Thomas Jane, glowering and mistaking dark hair dye for a personality) is an FBI agent that’s run afoul of a mafia boss (Travolta) leading to the massacre of his entire life and rebirth a soulless killing machine out for revenge known only as the Punisher. Here’s a Marvel character that I’ve never been able to care about, so his first major outing as a movie star (Dolph Lundgren’s 1989 B-movie notwithstanding) is met with more of a shrug than anything else from me.

Maybe better performances or livelier action sequences would’ve roused my interest, but Jane just looks dyspeptic throughout and Travolta never conjures any menace. Ben Foster, Rebecca Romijn, Laura Harring, Samantha Mathis, and Roy Scheider all get roped into this mess and are left stranded without much to do. Mathis and Scheider are egregiously underutilized as the doomed wife and father of Castle, while Foster and Romijn exist merely as characters for Castle to brood against. Harring’s trophy wife role is nearly incomprehensible given the depth of performance she managed in Mulholland Drive just a few years prior. You assemble a cast this talented and give them nothing to work or do that makes use of their skills immediately qualifies The Punisher as a stinker.

But there’s more cinematic sins that stack up beside a squandered cast, like a poor script, obviously cheap budget, and action scenes that are big on violence as spectacle AND so dour and laughably silly that you wonder just who you’re supposed to be rooting for and why. Perhaps that’s the biggest problem with The Punisher – there’s no reason to care or person to root for as Castle goes about enacting his revenge. By trying to play everything so grim Hensleigh inadvertently stepped into hokey and hammy territory when he clearly wanted to make the equivalent of Dirty Harry or The French Connection but wound up making his Reindeer Games.