Reviews by JxSxPx

There’s something delightfully innocent and feminine about The Trouble with Angels. A lot of this probably has to do with it being directed (Ida Lupino), written by (original novel by Jane Trahey; script by Blanche Hanalis), and starring lots of girls/women (Hayley Mills, June Harding, Rosalind Russell). They never condescend to the emotional journeys of these characters, even if the whole thing is a bit too conservative in the face of deep cultural change, but instead present them all as fully developed individuals. Yes, even the nuns get some texture and development.

There’s no real overarching plot, so The Trouble with Angels plays out in episodic structure giving the whole thing the vague feeling of a tv show being binged. A very cute, charming tv show with a surprise guest appearance by Gypsy Rose Lee as a dance instructor (modern, not her typical, uh, forte). Mills and Harding get into wholesome trouble, the kind that places them as the “bad girls” of the school when they’re just rebelling in the most suburban ways imaginable and squaring off against the stern-but-fair Mother Superior (Russell).

If there is any plot thread that ties it all together, it’s in the slow realization Mills experiences in witnessing all the good that the nuns do. Her eventual turn from adversary to novitiate is superficial, to be sure, but so is the surrounding film in many ways. While the nuns are introduced as whacky, Mills’ eventual realization of them as people and dedicated pillars of the community is presented at surface level. It’s all fine and good getting by mainly on the charm of Mills and Russell, which will get you a lot if you know how to work it. Lupino does, recognizing the material for the afternoon time-filler it is and smart enough to let the two rip through the silly scenarios with their patented charisma.

Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings has all the surface beauty of a glorious painting. As it should, given that masterful cinematographer Jack Cardiff was responsible for illuminating the fjords, the battle scenes, and burly he-man populating the frame. The Vikings is painted with light, to appropriate the title from a documentary about his work on Black Narcissus, and it’s a pity that the story isn’t up to the power and mystery of the images.

There’s a grandeur and heft to the film’s visual splendor that just isn’t met by a script that is purple prose through and through. There are two half-brothers, each unaware of their shared lineage, that war with each other over everything, including a virginal princess, and a barrel-chested king that spends much of his time soused on ale and devouring mounds of food. There’s the prerequisite storming of castles, warring between the old ways and emerging Christianity, and daring displays of macho hedonism. It’s simplistic and emphasizes brawn over brain routinely.

Into this world, actors like Kirk Douglas, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh are tasked with striking poses and playing archetypes. Curtis and Leigh seem a bit adrift at this and fall back on their pretty faces, which at times is more than enough given that they’re squarely the romantic leads. Douglas and Borgnine do much better by finding the right tone of machismo camp and chest-first delivery. Douglas, in particular, is quite dynamic while in a blurry of motion in the various action spectacles.

It all adds up to a grandiose and silly film that’s the stuff of Saturday matinees. By no means a long-lost classic in anyone’s body of work, The Vikings is at least a fun time. The atmosphere is so over heated with sexuality, the violence so persistent, the family melodrama buttressing against slapstick comedy so often that the entire thing becomes engulfing for its refusal to calm down. It’s pulp alright, but the good kind.  

Much like James Stewart got a glimpse of the spiritual world in It’s a Wonderful Life and chose to remain in the corporeal, so too does David Niven’s RAF pilot opt to stay with the living. Of course, A Matter of Life and Death argues for the healing and redemptive power of love and mankind’s brotherhood, but there’s something trickier, even thornier, about how it goes about arguing these facts. While the dividing line between the afterlife and the living was easier to navigate in It’s a Wonderful Life, A Matter of Life and Death gives ample room for interpreting the afterlife as Niven’s imagination run wild.

After completely a successful air raid, Niven’s plane is struck, and his parachute is no good. He manages to contact American radio operator June (Kim Hunter), and spends what are clearly framed as his final moments speaking with her. His stiff upper lip in the face of demise pulls at your emotions, and June becomes our proxy for this. Except, Niven’s pilot manages to escape certain doom and washes ashore the next day with zero clue as to how he was spared.

Cut to heaven, a black and white bureaucratic netherworld of clean Art Deco design, where one of his compatriots argues that there’s been a mistaken and someone is missing. Heaven sends an emissary, Marius Goring essentially playing Maurice Chevalier, to investigate what exactly happened. Only Niven can see Goring and his ability to stop time/space around him, which lands Niven a series of tests for psychological issues or potential brain lesions.

Does this sound like abstract and high-concept stuff? Welcome to the cinematic world of the Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Powell and Pressburger wrote, produced, and directed their films with an overpowering aestheticism that treated the cinema as a wonderland. They created a series of films that treated the cinema as an exercise in not just aesthetics, but esoteric moods and deep sensuality. Theirs was a cinema for people who wanted to overdose on the power of the movies.

This is all to say that they manage to make something so deeply strange and turn it into a deeply involving emotional journey. Niven’s trial, basically his ability to stay on earth or go back to heaven, is both an argument for the power of love and a cinematic extension of the special relationship between England and the United States in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Yes, this was intended as a morale booster for a country suffering from deep psychological scars in the aftermath of one of the bloodiest wars in history.

If the Archers wound up being enthusiastically optimistic, then who could blame them? England was still cleaning up the rubble of the blitz. They deserved a little poetry to help them heal, and A Matter of Life and Death is indeed cinematic poetry.

We should all hail the resurgence of Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott as her 2019 EP reminds us – nobody does it better. Her first collection of new material since 2005’s The Cookbook, Iconology is a welcome reminder to the weird, wild world of Elliott’s hip-hop/dance fusion. There’s been several aborted comeback attempts with singles like “Pep Rally,” “WTF” and “9^th Inning” appearing and quickly being left adrift. I guess we should thank Katy Perry (groan) for giving Elliott a greatest hits medley cameo during her Super Bowl halftime show and really greasing the wheels of this return.

It’s not that Elliott hasn’t been busy, but her medical issues have kept her from taking the stage in the same way that nearly every year between 2000 and 2005 saw a new album. She’s gone back to writing, producing and guest appearances, which is where she made her name and brand before unleashing her Afrofuturistic sound on Supa Dupa Fly in 1997. There’s never been a pioneering artist in the hip-hop universe like her before or since, and no one’s really tried. Only she can create her style and sound – a mixture of world beats, throwback jams, and a playful, confident sexuality that’s empowering and fun.

Iconology doesn’t break new ground with Elliott’s sound or style, but reminds us of just how much the wider pop cultural landscape is missing in its prolonged absence. Between the breakneck “Cool Off” and the done-wrong ballad “Why I Still Love You,” Elliott crafts entire sonic worlds where you as the listener are never quite certain where her next detour will go, but you’re thrilled to be along for her journey. And “Throw It Back” remains both a declaration of her reclaiming her throne and a wistful ode to the road she’s paved. It is both an anthem of Elliott as icon and a playful tease of her overall mantra to throw hip-hop back to the good ol’ days.

It has been a banner year for Elliott between finally receiving the Video Vanguard award and becoming the first female rapper inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. It made sense for her to dip her toe back into the water, so to speak. I just hope that this sampler is a taste of future things to come and not another discarded attempt at a comeback. I hope you know how much we’ve all missed you Missy.

DOWNLOAD: “Throw It Back”

Sheryl Crow’s greatest hits package is practically a soundtrack to the Clinton years as the roots rocker transformed into uncomfortable pop star before going country by the mid-2000s. Her pop/rock years, essentially the mid-90s, produced a string of surprisingly durable, hook-filled bangers like “A Change Would Do You Good” and “Every Day is a Winding Road.” She was never an artist who was about changing the sonic possibilities of the genre, and she was at times a bit too reverent and thirsty for authenticity (check how many tribute albums she appears on for Boomer rock acts), but she knew her way around a strong melody and a nice guitar lick.

The Very Best of Sheryl Crow really does exemplify the best of her glory days without a sizable missing or any addition that proves questionable. The material is uniformly good even if some of it does reveal the limitations of her singing voice (“The Difficult Kind” finds her a little strained), questionable choice of material (Kid Rock duet “Picture” is an army of love-done-me-wrong clichés), or silly lyrical detours (“Steve McQueen” is an eye-roller). And yes, she’s still chasing authenticity by dusting off a Cat Stevens hit for her own purposes, but it at least sounds right at home snuggly buffered by her own material.

DOWNLOAD: “I Shall Believe,” “The First Cut is the Deepest,” “Light in Your Eyes”

Best of Berlin focuses in on Berlin’s three biggest albums – Pleasure Victim, Love Life, Count Three & Pray – and still somehow comes up short in the song choices. No “Dancing in Berlin,” “Touch,” “Pleasure Victim,” or “Pink and Velvet,” but you can be damn sure there’s a new bombastic song (“Blowin’ Sky High”), a groan-worthy power ballad (“For All Tomorrow’s Lies”) and a generic 80s synth-rocker (“Will I Ever Understand You”). Although, nothing is truly as bad as “Like Flames,” which starts out like a cracked New Wave cover of “Whistle While You Work” before the overindulgent electro-pop kicks in. All the synthesizer glitz and growly vocals can do is cover such MOR material for so long, but there’s still some gems to mine from the group. “Masquerade” is full of spunk, “Take My Breath Away” is delightfully cheesy, “No More Words” is a tart bit of synth-pop. But nothing is quite as good as “The Metro,” a classic of the genre with its disaffected attitude and neo-noir music video. They had a handful of hits and were big for a time in the era, but Best of Berlin proves that they’re more curio object of the time than anything else.

DOWNLOAD: “Blowin’ Sky High”

When the legend ends, where does that leave the figures in the central plot? Robin and Marian answers that question by picking up decades after his populist campaign against the Sheriff of Nottingham. Here is one last ride into the sunset, the coda to the end of the legendary Merry Men, Sherwood Forest, and symbolism of Robin Hood.

We begin with the Crusades and the vision of Robin Hood (Sean Connery) and Little John (Nicol Williamson) finally disillusioned enough to leave behind King Richard (Richard Harris). He returns to his old haunts and reunites with key figures from his glory days such as Friar Tuck (Ronnie Barker), Will Scarlett (Denholm Elliott), and the Sheriff (Robert Shaw). Naturally, he goes looking for Marian (Audrey Hepburn), and finds her now living her life as a nun having happily left behind her more adventurous life. Robin’s reappearance disrupts the delicate stasis of this community as old wounds, love affairs, and resentments come rising back to the surface.

If the first romp through Sherwood was a merry series of adventures and prankish dares, think Errol Flynn’s proud strutting in The Adventures of Robin Hood, then Robin and Marian is the elegy to their twilight. The film is best when it lays off the slapstick and comedy and goes for a sustained tone of history repeating itself as tragedy and restraint.

Even as the film loses its way tonally, Connery, Hepburn, and Shaw know exactly how to play the material for maximum impact. Shaw is all grim and taunt as a version of the Sheriff that knows better than to underestimate Robin. There’s a certain note of finality to Shaw’s Sheriff as if he knows this meeting will be the final one for him, for Robin, or for the both of them. It’s an interesting note that Shaw deploys with extreme delicacy and care over the course of the film.

While Connery seems to the forest born for the part as he brings a certain swagger that age will not dim. There’s a depth of feeling to his Robin Hood that displaces him from Saturday matinee adventurer and into flesh-and-blood person. It’s in the ways he looks and interacts with Hepburn, the resignation and disgust with Richard the Lionheart’s actions in the opening scenes, and in his final moments as he shoots the arrow through the window to mark his grave.

But it’s Audrey Hepburn that leaves the biggest impact on you. She was away from the screen for nearly ten years before this role, and she seems perfectly attuned to the part and its layers. It seems a bit like reality and fiction are folding in on themselves as a screen legend of a Hollywood gone by returns to the screen during the “New Hollywood” period playing a fable finding her taste for love and adventure reawakening. Or as The Dissolve succinctly put it, “Hepburn’s subtly shifting moods give this movie its soul.”

My biggest problem with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is that half of the musical’s songs got jettisoned leaving the film adaptation as a movie musical that’s a little shy about it, so it masquerades as a bawdy burlesque instead. Essentially a chance for star Zero Mostel to mug the camera for two hours with help with from Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford, and Buster Keaton, in his final film, A Funny Thing is an enjoyable mess of a movie. If vaudeville had been a thing in ancient Greece, complete with Borscht belt humor, it would’ve looked something like this.

Little attention is paid to historical accuracy, and why would it, when the story boils down to an anachronistic farce about a slave trying to earn his freedom by helping his hapless master win the girl. Once again, Michael Crawford plays the neurotic virgin seemingly downplaying his handsome looks for sexual inadequacy, and he generates a hilarious straight man/clown chemistry with Mostel. Their lunacy of a pact and its varied schemes lay the foundation for a live-action cartoon in which physical feats turn everyone into rubber, identities become mistaken, and, of course, cross-dressing must occur.

If this sounds like its overburdened with plot and incident, well it very much is. A Funny Thing does tend to wander off and takes too long between musical sequences. You half forget you’re watching one when suddenly one blunders in and reminds you that this was originally conceived as a musical farce. The cast is game, especially Mostel, Silvers, Gilford, and Keaton bringing their A game, but the rest of the film can be a bit like spinning your wheels in the mud. It eventually gets out of the trap, but it can take a while to move.

I’m not sure if it’s the material or the hyperkinetic direction, but something about The Knack… and How to Get It just feels off from the first frame until the last. It’s a microcosm of the Swinging Sixties and the sexual anxieties on display throughout, best exemplified by Michael Crawford’s anxious schoolteacher and Rita Tushingham’s frigid virgin. There’s also an unnecessary device of an older British generation scolding the younger one through voiceover and documentary style footage of them looking disproving on the street.

The manic editing and freewheeling attitude Richard Lester brought to the Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night is here again, but that spirit is too overpowering. The Beatles taking the piss out of themselves and deploying proto-music videos is one thing, but a juvenile psychosexual comedy (I guess?) is an entirely different beast. The balancing act between comedy and neurosis is perpetually in flux as the scales keep tilting too far either way before we finally reach the final scene, which was patently obvious from Crawford and Tushingham’s first meet cute.

The whole thing adds up to a lot of style in search of a point. If there’s such a thing as “too much” or “fussily overdirected,” and there is if the tone and artistic choices feel routinely at combative odds with the material, then The Knack is a prime example of this phenomena. It’s more of a cinematic curio of a generation struggling to define itself and developing its own identity in real time.

I love musicals, ABBA, Meryl Streep, and a lot of the character actors appearing in supporting roles, but Mamma Mia! is, without a doubt, dreadful. Much of the blame goes not on the vague sketch of a plot, plenty of musicals have stories that merely exists as a threadbare setup between songs, but on Phyllida Lloyd’s amateur hour direction. The film is edited to shreds mistaking frantic cuts for energy, and an inability to understand that merely repeating the choreography from the Broadway stage for the camera is not successful staging. Some of the cast seems game if a bit lost, Streep in particular appears to be over-doing it and Colin Firth is clearly having the time of his life, but a lot of the film feels lost at sea, like Pierce Brosnan’s winced performance or the fact that several of these stars can’t sing. Mamma Mia! becomes almost enjoyable for laughably bad and poorly made it is. Like it nearly rounds the corner to so bad it’s good territory before veering wildly off the road and driving off on the Greek cliffs prominently featured in the film. It’s hard to begrudge a screen diva her good time, but Streep’s choice to make this really tries your patience.