Reviews by JxSxPx

Call me a big sentimentalist, but I largely enjoy Fiddler on the Roof. Granted, it does go on far too long and drags in numerous spots, but there’s Topol’s alchemical work where he disappears into the character he’s playing, the memorable songs, and a general elegiac sense of a past being erased, and an uncertain future being shaped. Sure, the clean arithmetic of the plot becomes a contrivance, there’s three daughters and each marries off at a clear narrative point with grander historical import, but I agree that the schmaltz overpowers it at times.

What am I trying to get at then?

Well, Norman Jewison’s film version of the beloved Broadway institution is about as great a film as the material could provide. It helps that Tevye, the narrator of this yarn about the erasure of Anatevka due to a pogrom and his spiritual unease with changing social tides, is so charismatic and engaging a presence. He can spin bullshit or wax poetic with the best of them, and he’s equally charming while doing both. You root for him and invest in his journey.

You couldn’t ask for a better guide, and it’s just a shame that other characters aren’t invested with as much development or understanding as he is. The various husbands for the daughters seem preordained as pairings from their introductions between closeups of dreamy eyes, and nothing much is made of developing the actual relationships. The only one that escapes this is the one between oldest daughter, Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris), and poor tailor Motel (Leonard Frey, Oscar nominated for playing nebbish while singing). Everyone else is bit of a thin sketch. His Wife, His Second Daughter, and so on. While they may have names, they function merely as symbolic pieces moving around to demonstrate the origins of the Jewish diaspora that exists in a post-WWII culture.

But we always circle back to Tevye. Chaim Topol, credited just as Topol here, gives one of the screen’s greatest, fully rounded, and robust performances. Topol must speak through the camera directly to the audience or commiserate with God about his people’s fortunes (or misfortunes, depending). With no one to act against, it’s entirely up to Topol to sell the material, the emotional stakes, and the tone of the thing. He does repeatedly with such consummate ease and skill that it’s hard to imagine that he’s not really Tevye. He doesn’t just sell the fraught emotional devastation of the film’s ending but reveals the conflicted paternal feelings at play through minute fluctuations of body language and carriage. He was rightly nominated for an Oscar that year but lost to Gene Hackman in The French Connection.

It's a bit refreshing to watch a movie musical that’s recognizably earthy and attached to reality. There’s only one fantastical sequence, an alleged supernatural visitation in Tevye’s dream to get his wife on board with Motel and Tzeitel getting married, and it’s clearly artificial in contrast to the lived-in realism of the rest of the movie. But it also best exemplifies the contradictions at play here. Fiddler is at once a polished and smooth production, and capable of eliciting authentic emotional responses while deploying some great songs in the American songbook. You won’t get a better movie out of this material.

Essentially a redress of Top Hat with ballet plugged into the plot contrivance and George and Ira Gershwin in place of Irving Berlin, Shall We Dance comes so close to recreating the delicate perfection of prior pairings that it’s frustrating when it falls just short. The major problem is that a bit of Shall We Dance feels stiff kneed when trying to go for a rat-a-tat-tat routine. It just seems like there’s almost too much here that the escapist dilettante nature of their best pairings feels a bit too overburdened.

Something like the Russian ballet feels too highbrow for the bubble delicate world of Fred and Ginger. They’re best in parts where they’re either recognizably in an approximation of the real world, or in complete glitterati mode where their concerns and bank accounts are fantasies for the rest of us. They’re caught somewhere in-between those two modes here, and Shall We Dance feels unsettled as the pair’s courtship is built around forced publicity. Fred and Ginger are flimsy baubles, and this feels too cynical for their world.

Where Shall We Dance excels at though is in its variety of song and dance sequences. From the “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” where they flirt and spare on roller skates to the “Shall We Dance/Finale Coda” where background dancers wear Ginger Rogers’ face as a mask in a kind of hallucinatory dream, this is one of the best choreographed films ever. “Rehearsal Fragments” displays Astaire performing ballet and tap in a hybrid style that reminds me of how his flailing is still more graceful and elegant than my ability to sit still. The only thing missing is the romantic duet between the stars, which I guess you could argue is what happens during the finale but by that point the central romance hasn’t developed with the naturalness of prior films.

If this was, as originally intended, to be the swan song of their pairing, then they could’ve done much worse. They had opulent sets, lovely costumes, key supporting players, and one of their strongest songbooks here. The overly convoluted script and stiff portions are a problem, but there’s still some magic to be found here. Who else could make falling in roller skates look so tony?

The best of the Fred and Ginger movies take place in an imaginary Art Deco world where the Great Depression takes place in an alternate reality, the champagne flows freely, and the ideal rich are charmingly bumbling their way through love and posh continental locations. The formula of their films hadn’t quite settled just yet as The Gay Divorcee was their second film together but the first as leads. The studio stuck them with proven commodities like Alice Brady, future sidekicks Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and plum songbook by Cole Porter.

If the studio didn’t have enough faith in them, and by all accounts they didn’t, then RKO was foolish in historical hindsight. While The Gay Divorcee isn’t one of my favorite outing from the pair, it’s still a uniformly strong one. It was proof-positive that the duo had something magical that could be exploited.

Fred Astaire’s sophistication needs Ginger Rogers’ bluntness, and Rogers’ sexuality needs Astaire’s elegance to balance everything out. He’s the weaker actor between the pair and she’s the weaker dancer, but it doesn’t matter when the music kicks in and they takeoff to the races with each other. Whatever individual strengths or weaknesses they had as performers was balanced out with the other and the whole thing becomes a glimpse at cinematic gods engaged in play.

To complain about the central thinness of the plot of a Fred and Ginger movie is a bit foolhardy, but I’m about to do it anyway. The romantic twists and turns are perfectly fine, as are the mistaken identities, but then there’s the variety of supporting players and one-offs eating up time with comedic bits or musical diversions. Sure, it’s cute to watch Betty Grable flirt out “Let’s K-nock K-nees” but what does it add to the primary plot of The Gay Divorcee? That’s where films like Top Hat and Swing Time shine. There’s not an ounce of fat on them as they move with precision through their setups and routines.

The Gay Divorcee is second shelf but still a very good time. After all, “The Continental” is an ever-expanding dance routine that eats up nearly 20 minutes of screen time by itself, and it’s one of the best sequences in any of their films. Same goes for the romantic interlude of “Night and Day.” The ingredients are all there, but the makers haven’t quite got the recipe right.

Jesus Christ, did the makers of this know at the time that they were inadvertently underscoring and signing off on a truly contemptible character study? Actually, a character study would imply that the main character experiences anything resembling coherent growth or reason for acting out in the ways that he does, but this very much does not. Instead, Standing Tall tries to glorify social workers as hagiographic individuals involved with the public.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to glorify social workers – they do hard jobs with a huge emotional toil with little respect and even less money – but Standing Tall gives them an ill-defined character to act opposite against. Maloney (Rod Paradot) isn’t a character so much as a composite of the various social ills prevalent in society. His heel-turn change in the final minutes feel less like a natural product of the script and a predetermined landing that had to be reached at all costs. Why exactly do they extend chance after chance to so vile a boy when he clearly can’t be bothered to self-reflect or do the hard work of maturing and growing up?

And that’s the major problem with Standing Tall, the center cannot hold as it is so poorly rendered. When his mother dubs him a “monster” early in the film, everything is so new that it’s hard to see why she thinks this. As the film goes on, we’re clearly intended to rethink that description and give him space to find his humanity, but there’s no reason to invest in his journey. Maloney is nothing but a series of psychotic behaviors, including a forced love story that finds him turning consensual sex into a violent assault.

Catherine Deneuve, Paradot, and Benoît Magimel act the hell out of every scenario, but it’s not enough to make the slog through the film worth it. This isn’t exactly the glorification of social workers or a glimpse of a person discovering their humanity that was intended, but a gross exploitative affair of pressing sociological matters. Standing Tall needs to sit its ass back down.

What a strange film this is for a provocateur like Pedro Almodóvar. The Flower of My Secret is so tranquil and subdued that it nearly tips into the middlebrow provincialism that he so proudly flaunted before. There’s still a series of great female roles, populated by some of his favorite actresses, and here is a transitional film that would make a way for his richer, more mature works like All About My Mother, Volver, and Bad Education.

What really manifests throughout is how the entire film feels like an artist doing warm-up exercises for those later films. While it’s always a joy to watch Marisa Paredes tear into Almodóvar’s words, there just isn’t enough energy elsewhere to match her Douglas Sirkian heroine cracking up under artistic unfulfillment and sexual repression. The ways those two ideas combine is disappointingly left underdeveloped.

Where is the enfant terrible of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown that would’ve mined the ways in which Paredes’ Leo needs to both orgasm and escape her fluffy romantic novels as not dissimilar goals? Hell, in the future, Almodóvar would find ways to combine his anarchic jokester with the melodramatic artiste and still manage to stick in subversive bits in the glossy crying scenes. The Flower of My Secret finds the auteur nearly embarrassed by his past irreverence and trying for something more “artistic” but forgetting his major gifts along the way.  

We love the films of Douglas Sirk for their ironies not in spite of them. We love Almodóvar’s cinema for similar reasons. It’s in the ways he finds the humor and black heart in the outlandish, in the ways he deflates the seriousness of society with joyful cynicism and psychosexual provocations. This muted character piece remains one of his lesser works.

In a career abundant in provocations and skewering of provincial middlebrow aesthetics, Matador still announces itself as something punk rock and aggressive in Pedro Almodóvar’s oeuvre. Here is a film that opens with one of its main characters jerking off to Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace as if it were the most mundane and routine of weeknight activities. The threat and comingling of violence and sexuality pervades throughout Matador by drawing a direct correlation between bullfighting with the battle of the sexes.

The story concerns a retired matador (Nacho Martínez), his pupil (Antonio Banderas), and a black widow attorney (Assumpta Serna) and a string of perverse scenarios that alternate between bodily fluids and twisted romance. Not a lot of the narrative makes sense, but Matador poses an energy and aura that is hypnotic in its perversions and daring. Review blurbs throw around the word “lurid” a lot, and that does seem to emerge as a great de facto descriptor of this strange little movie from a cinematic genius.

I’m somewhere in-between Almodóvar’s self-assessment and Vincent Canby’s New York Times review. Almodóvar declared in Almodóvar on Almodóvar that Matador and Kika were his weakest films in his mind, and Matador at times can feel less like a coherent work and like a series of provocations. While Canby’s review looked at the film as “a film maker who, possibly, is in the process of refining a singular talent.” They’re both right at the same time as Matador is both a talent in process of refining itself and a little underwhelming in its formlessness.   

The inevitable sequel to a successful direct-to-video product, but they can’t announce it as such, so it’s instead marketed as an excuse to watch the beloved Disney icons being animated in CG for the first time. It looks terrible. The characters look strangely lifeless or off model, occasionally both. Although, they tend to turn out far better than any of the human characters. Santa didn’t even look this frightening in The Nightmare Before Christmas where his rotund body and tiny hands and feet made him look like a seasonal sleep paralysis demon. (I say that with immense love for that macabre little movie.)

Even after watching it I can barely remember chunks of it. There’s something about Huey, Dewey, and Louie infiltrating the North Pole to put their names on the nice list, and Goofy and Max having another generational conflict. Uh, and a bunch of other incidents like the crocodiles and hippos from Fantasia ice skating with Minnie and Daisy. Something that ends with Donald destroying animatronic figures and lusting after a cup of hot chocolate?

The only thoroughly engaging story is the one where Pluto accidentally destroys Mickey’s decorations, winds up in the North Pole, and finds Mickey frantically searching for him across town. It’s the one story that actively engages the heart and the spirit of togetherness in a successful way. The rest are just garishly animated and unmemorable filler that will work well enough as a distraction for the tots in your life.

Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas is a trio of generic, if heartwarming, yuletide fables that should provide enough babysitting capabilities for the tots in your life. Strung together through the rhyming narration of Kelsey Grammar, whatever annoyance I may have with him his voice is perfectly suited to that of gentle bedtime narrator, Once Upon a Christmas shoves the famous Disney brand into stories both adapted and original that highlight the community and spirit of the holidays. But make sure you buy our merchandise while you teach your kids about the value of the inner spirit and familial togetherness.

There’s Mickey and Minnie taking “The Gift of the Magi” out for a spin, and watching the icons play destitute is a bit like watching MGM starlets playing struggling shopgirls in haute couture gowns and flawless makeup in the 40s.  Meanwhile, Huey, Dewey, and Louie get stuck in a Groundhog Day retread, and must learn the same lessons about selfish behavior and the true meaning of the holidays. They’re fine enough shorts, but only “A Very Goofy Christmas” touches for its vision of paternal love seeking to protect the innocence and magic of childhood from more cynical forces.

The animation quality is a visible step up from the typical direct-to-video fare. While nowhere near as good as their theatrical releases, this one doesn’t look like it was slapped together by the tv branch in a caffeine and Adderall fueled weekend. There are worse Christmas wares out there, and Goofy’s segment really does the heartstrings, so you could be stuck watching worse with the little ones during the season. I mean, you could get sacked watching the sequel, Twice Upon a Christmas.

Normally, I’m a big fan of Disney’s forays into the Hundred Acre Wood, but The Search for Christopher Robin feels like a great short film that’s been stretched too far. Grand Adventure? Hardly. It just keeps going and going, and while it is initially adorable that Pooh and the gang discover the concept of school, what’s not so cute is how a natural endpoint for the adventure just keeps rolling on. There’s too much padding and not enough actual story to justify the running time, but the direct-to-video franchise market was still a new concept and territory for Disney in 1997. Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin is the nadir in a franchise that tends to be above average, if not great in its simple sweetness. I suppose on tedious transgression is forgivable.  

Not a takeoff of the source material so much a vague sequel, The Three Musketeers is a little over an hour but generally free from joy, memorable music, or anything with “oomph” that makes visiting Mickey and the gang so much fun. Sure, the fourth-wall jokes are cute, but they begin to pileup as exercises in futility if they’re the only funny bits that are working. Pete has his peg-leg back and is in villainous mode, with a delightfully deranged Clarabelle as his gal Friday, while Goofy and Donald round out Mickey’s straight man with their lunacy, but it just isn’t enough.

Perhaps the biggest strike against it is how the first half is zippy and full of anarchic energy, and then it all clearly loses gas. The engine is running no fumes by minute 35, but we’re only a little over halfway there. What should have been, and felt like, a natural climax is merely a point in the narrative where things start to repeat. Just how many times can Minnie either narrowly escape capture or need rescuing in 68 minutes anyway?

There’s a very charming and delightful short film buried somewhere in the rewritten opera songs, visual gags, and borrowed literary pedigree. It’s not the worst of the direct-to-video bunch, but it’s grossly inadequate a use of the company’s a-list creations. The Mouse deserves better.