Reviews by JxSxPx

Blender dubbed them the “masters of soft rock,” and that sums it up about as neatly as possible. Karen Carpenter’s voice had a resignation, a fatigue towards romantic labors lost and a haunting quality that gave an edge to even the sappiest of songs. That haunted vocal texture made “Sing” quietly authoritative, after all.

This brother/sister duo came armed with a bevy of songwriters that would make numerous acts green with envy – Burt Bacharach, Paul Williams, Leon Russell, just to name a few – and Richard Carpenter gave them productions and arrangements that turned them slightly askew. They were toothsome, plainly attractive, very talented, and melancholic in the best of ways beneath that shiny surface.

The innate sadness of “Rainy Days and Mondays” doesn’t spring from nowhere. There was a real depth of feeling to this duo, mainly found in Karen’s velvety lower range. Her melodic sense was so unique and acute that she can find surprising details in her line readings. Try singing along with her and realize just how hard it is to copy her technique and style.

Am I arguing that the Carpenters are better than your dusty memories, or pop cultural shorthand for them as square pegs? You’re damn right I am. “Close to You” and “Hurting Each Other” would feel right at home on a Fleetwood Mac album, and everybody loves them. They endure because there’s something real going on beneath that “nice kids playing nice music” veneer, and it was tragic.

It’s too easy to tie the band’s tragic demise to this burbling darkness, but it is all of one piece of their history. Singles 1969 – 1981 places the emphasis on the earlier, better years before Karen’s health struggles and Richard’s addiction problems caused the group to lose focus (“Please Mr. Postman” and “Touch Me When We’re Dancing” are… not great), but those earlier songs are classics. “For All We Know” opens and closes the album essentially wrapping up the argument that they’ve got a better backlog of material than originally thought.

It’s a persuasive and compelling argument, especially when evidenced with “Superstar,” “Hurting Each Other,” and “We’ve Only Just Begun.” I’m particularly fond of the defeatist attitude scarred by battered hope she brings to “I Won’t Last a Day Without You.” Twenty-one songs feel just right as the smooth grooves blend into one another nicely, and there doesn’t appear to be any glaring omission.

The tragedy of their end is impossible to separate from the music nowadays but try. Karen Carpenter remains one of rock’s best singers, and she was one hell of an underrated drummer. Color me surprised that I love this collection as much as I do, but its softness appeals to me. You can try to fight it but, eventually, you just have to succumb to the inevitable fact that the Carpenters were a great band.   

DOWNLOAD: “Goodbye to Love,” “Superstar,” “I Won’t Last a Day Without You”

The Coens truly crafted a film that reflected the spartan, near-Biblical prose of Cormac McCarthy with this adaptation. Just as McCarthy’s novels are sparsely punctuated, filled with austere violence, and alternately terse and brusque, so too is No Country for Old Men. The whole thing plays out like a noir without the fatalistic romanticism with its lead in a situation that finds him punching above his weight and a specter of grim death that feels like the eye of the chaos swirling around him.

Roger Deakins remains the secret ingredient and MVP of the Coen brothers’ films, and his provides this bullet-soaked story with a severe look. The Texas deserts have rarely looked as harsh, unforgiving, and duplicitous as they do under his lens. What McCarthy writes, Deakins visualizes with a simpatico emotional texture that’s unnerving and bracing in its impact.

I say that McCarthy’s prose is near-Biblical because he renders a vision of the earth that demands blood sacrifice at routine intervals. His is not a benign natural state, but one of vengeance and fury balancing the karmic scales. The violence is as inevitable as it is horrifying. It’s the stillness and vastness of the landscapes that unnerves as one knows something is merely bidding its time before it strikes.

It is into this bleak atmosphere that we find Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) as he discovers a grisly murder scene, essentially a drug deal gone horribly wrong. A trail of blood leads to a suitcase filled with two million in cash and off he goes. Following close behind are a psycho killer (Javier Bardem, a revelation as the impassive grim reaper), a hired hand (Woody Harrelson), and a ready-for-retirement cop (Tommy Lee Jones) each with their own aims for finding Moss.

In the end, the violence shed throughout is of little consequence as the present-day tilts into madness and the past, despite a repository of folktales and explanatory remembrances, never offers any balm. If, as Anton Chigurgh argues throughout, everything has already led to this moment, then what difference does a coin toss make in the grand scheme of things? Life and death will go on as these are ongoing events on a scale we cannot comprehend.

In fact, that sense of things expanding beyond our comprehension is a reoccurring motif throughout No Country. Harrelson drawls out, “you’re not cut out for this” to Moss, but that analysis carries over into Jones’ lawman who sees the brutality before with uncomprehending eyes. A redneck mumbles out, “you can’t stop what’s coming,” and this becomes something a mantra, especially in the embodiment of Anton. While Anton may not view his actions as decisive, the story lends him an aura of spectral justice meriting out (often unholy) blessings and eliciting confessions. Chaos is the organizing principle of this universe, but it’s a near perfectly balanced chaos.

Swirling around all of this is the Coens penchant for dry humor. These asides don’t provide punctuation so much gasps in-between mounting tensions. No one’s ever going to mistake No Country for Old Men as a black comedy, but Beth Grant, character actress extraordinaire, as a cancer-stricken matron is a damn hoot in her limited screen time. They look straight into the ever-escalating tension and odious visage of Anton and laugh on occasion to make it all more manageable. It also makes some of McCarthy’s more relentlessly dark visions more palatable. They’re the best at managing these tonal shifts and keeping the wider work feeling of one coherent, complete piece. Behold, one of their masterpieces.      

Quite possibly the most well-adjusted film about racism, homophobia, cultural identity, and conservative economic policies punching down ever made. My Beautiful Launderette is simultaneously about all these things and none of them as it doesn’t place any moral judgment or imperative upon any of them. It seems content to open-heartedly watch its various characters scheme, fall in love, and try to find their place within the macro and micro scales of the British communities they populate.

There’s the vaguest sense of a “coming of age” story structure here, but the stasis of the various communities doesn’t sea change like you’d find in normal American films. Think of how the plucky heroes of Risky Business grapple with capitalism in uneasy ways but learn valuable lessons along the journey. I’m sure the characters in Launderette learned lessons, but the film doesn’t stop with them or neatly wrap things up in a bow. Instead, we plow ahead as each character gets their say about why and how they’re acting in the various ways they’re acting. It’s refreshing, to be honest.

One character’s affair would lead to bigger fireworks in another film, as would the eventual showdown between mistress and wronged progeny, but we feel a conflicted sense that they’re both right. It is this elasticity of narrative that makes My Beautiful Launderette such a fascinating, sweet examination of Thatcherite England on a ground floor. These characters dream of looking up, of escaping their limited options, and several of them are severely limited, and finding something. What that something is is ephemeral and dependent upon any given moment in the narrative.  

Of course, everyone remembers Launderette primarily as a gay love story that doesn’t make a big point of this, and for proving Daniel Day-Lewis was a star in the making. These two points intersect as Day-Lewis plays street punk Johnny, the bruised, conflicted heart of the film and one of his sexiest characters to boot, who functions as both counterpoint and love interest to Omar (Gordon Warnecke, toothy and handsome while straddling cultures and dreaming of upward mobility). Omar may run the launderette and provide many of the inciting incidents of the plot, but it’s Johnny that gives them a deeper emotional resonance.

Stephen Frears work is a mixed bag, to be polite, but he was really firing when he made this. Its touching humanism exemplifies a story that finds the deepest connections in the toughest of environments. These characters scheme and cause damage, but we understand exactly where and why these decisions are enfolding. My Beautiful Launderette is a landmark piece of queer cinema, and one of the sweetest damn tales of the lower class scrambling to make it during repressive times you’ll ever see.  

When Ms. Jackson barked out “Gimme a beat!” at the start of “Nasty,” she clearly meant it if this remix album is any indication. Not only has her long career as pop provocateur been filled with thick, sleek beats, but a sense that more is better. Let’s face the facts, Janet’s always been a size queen (check “All for You” and her horned up resignation about riding a large package), and that manifests itself in these remixes. I’m not so sure that “Nasty” needed a full ten-minute strut, “When I Think of You” loses itself in a dance remix that features one too many breakdowns, and so it goes until you get to an a cappella version of “Control” to close things out. Necessary? Absolutely not, but occasionally a fun diversion for the committed fan.

DOWNLOAD: “Let’s Wait Awhile (Remix)”

To quote Blender on You Can Dance’s questionable usefulness: “since when was it difficult to dance to Madonna records?” Yet here is 1987’s remix album/compilation, a stopgap and money-machine if ever there was one. Ever the control freak, Madonna hated it when others remixed her material, so she decided to do it herself. The results are inessential to her legend, but the songs are still uniformly strong even if their remixing makes them dated and flabby where some of the originals have barely gained a pound. It’s all a bit superfluous, but you won’t find underrated gem “Spotlight” anywhere else.

DOWNLOAD: “Spotlight”

There sure is a lot swirling around in Performance, but I’m not convinced it all adds to much of anything. Performance seems more content in throwing its ideas around and not to engage with them in any meaningful way, and it all becomes a sensory overload before the end. Although, calling it the ending makes it sound like there’s a sense of finality to the story, and there’s not so much as an ellipsis upon an ellipsis like so much of the film.

Filmed in 1968, Warner Brothers shelved the film for two years before finally releasing it. They claimed the film was incoherent, which it is, before they finally released it and it seemed destined a cult film from the beginning. I suppose they thought the presence of Mick Jagger, in his screen debut, was going to be akin to Jailhouse Rock or A Hard Day’s Night but with a patina of Easy Rider on top, and boy were they wrong.

Performance begins by comparing English gangster life to the hedonism of the rock star lifestyle, then it transforms into a heady examination of the performative nature of gender, identity, and sexuality. There’s a hazy narcotic glamour, but one that’s been left to rot, and a weariness has set in. the comedown of the counter-cultural movement is written all over the sleepy eyes of Jagger’s hermitic rocker. Yet it’s his inebriated, pseudo-shamanistic charisma that proves the inferno to James Fox’s gangster-cum-moth to the flame.

One intriguing setup that gets a minor payoff is the idea that Jagger’s character has retired since he’s lost his “demon.” Enter James Fox’s gangster in hiding to his polyamorous lifestyle and regular supply of drugs. Fox disguises himself as someone else and slowly loses sight of his original identity throughout as he gets lost in the performance. He eventually subsumes Jagger and gets lost in the newly performed and drafted persona. There are layers there, but it’s the only idea that the film manages to payoff along the way.

It’s as if all of the viscera of the film, all of the frantic editing, the exploitative sex and violence, the magnetism of Jagger, wind up canceling each other out and Performance is ephemeral. It can feel more like work to get through it all, but there’s still the occasional flashes of brilliance. There’s just so much goofy, druggy 60s shit to get through to find it.

John Waters described Kitten with a Whip as “a failed art film,” and I think that description can carry over to Something Wild, the obscure tale of a cinematic sexpot emoting after sexual trauma and trading one abusive relationship for another. There’s something wonderful underneath the hysteria here, and the better film emerges routinely from the questionable diversions and near madness of its choices. I mean, Something Wild opens with the proverbial “stranger in the bushes” rape scenario and continues on to the sight of Jean Stapleton getting drunk with a questionably legal boy toy before shoving Carroll Baker into an imprisonment with Ralph Meeker that softens into…love, I guess. There’s also her controlling mother (Mildred Dunnock, dialing it up way too much) that constantly cries about the dirt and ugliness of the city, symbolism about water that goes nowhere slowly, a suicide attempt that’s one of the best scenes in the film that quickly turns in on itself when you realize it’s a prelude to Meeker’s kidnapping and holding Baker captive until she agrees to marry him. Something Wild takes a serious, gripping set-up then gives one camp outburst after another before the whole thing just winds up being misshapen and weird. If anything qualifies as a failed art film, and if anything underlines how uneven an actress Baker was, it’s Something Wild, a rape melodrama-noir film that turns into a Stockholm Syndrome “love” story in the end.

Thank god Dorothy Arzner made Craig’s Wife instead of a male director. It would be so easy to tip Harriet Craig into a monstrous harpy and to side with the “put upon” husband. It would only embolden the patriarchy’s vision of marriage as an imprisonment for men with women as a controlling ball and chain to endure. Arzner undercuts this routinely, and Craig’s Wife is a richer experience for it.

When we’re introduced to Harriet Craig it’s as an unknown quantity, a despotic ruler of her household with an iron fist and level of perfectionism that’s squeamish. Then we actually see her, and she gives a matter-of-fact monologue about marrying her husband as a business contract as a lack of opportunities left her with nothing else. Harriet Craig had to marry and marry well in order to make something of her life, so she deferred an interior life, friendships, or anything outside of the home and transformed herself into a beautiful possession. It’s heartbreaking to realize she’s done this, and her eventual awakening to the monster she’s made of herself through pressures from the patriarchy is the basic thrust of the film.

It helps that Rosalind Russell is Harriet Craig as her ability to play tough, nearly unsympathetic characters was one of her trademarks. Think of how she makes us love her gossipy backstabber in The Women or breaks your heart as Mama Rose in Gypsy, and now look back at Craig’s Wife for one of the earliest examples of that talent. Harriet is a woman misshapen and festering resentment imposed upon her by wider society and completely devoid of a social safety net, and it’s a tall order to ask that we slowly feel something like empathy towards her plight by the end. But we do thanks to Russell’s ability to strip away the layers of armor before our eyes as her household empties out and she’s left alone.

Arzner managed to turn a misogynistic play into, as how BFI described it, “a plea for women to become their own people rather than beautiful possessions.” She succeeds by crafting a dueling glimpse of society: one of female solidarity and friendship that is unavailable to Harriet through her own actions, and the other about how repressive and suffocating heteronormative relationships can become when men view women as mere objects to control and own. Not entirely transgressive about the subject matter, Craig’s Wife still offers a thawing ice queen a potential happy ending but crafting a friendship and sisterhood with the widow-next-door.   

I’m tempted to give a long, rambling preamble about the history and importance of Dorothy Arzner, pioneering queer director during the Hollywood’s studio era, and how her later reexamination by feminist and queer theorist salvaged her work from the dustbin of history. I’m refrain, but just know that Arzner’s proto-feminist leanings and lesbianism are two important foundational blocks to understanding and vibrating with her art. I find it easy to immediately tune into her films, but others may find them slightly mystifying as they engage with the female psyche and gaze and often position men as secondary objects.

It is here that we enter into Christopher Strong, a film named for Colin Clive’s English lord but is really told through the gaze of Katharine Hepburn’s aviatrix. There’s a dual story going on here: Clive’ Sir Christopher Strong is engaging in an affair with Hepburn’s daredevil, and his daughter is learning all about love’s battlefield while carrying on her own affair with a married man. If you think there’s no way this can end in anything but tragedy, then you’re absolutely correct.

Society will happily allow men a wider berth than it will ever give to women, and Hepburn’s character learns that lesson repeatedly. While Helen Chandler’s affair is allowed, not without some tut-tutting by smoothed over once a divorce happens, Clive and Hepburn’s treated as a personal afront and betrayal by everyone involved. But wasn’t Chandler hurting an innocent woman at the same time so isn’t her protestations against Hepburn somewhat hollow? I suppose it all feels different when it comes close to home.

Christopher Strong is a strange film as the “meet cute” between Clive and Hepburn is at the expanse of their presence. A party for the idle rich requires a scavenger hunt to find a woman over 21 that’s never had a love affair and a man married for five-years who has never cheated. They laugh over their mutual exploitation and humiliation and entangle their lives from there. Billie Burke’s Lady Strong can see where this is going from the start, but Hepburn’s androgynous character is a fascinating persona to Chandler, and Clive seems so innocent with her at first.

This was only Hepburn’s second film and she’s already in full bloom of her peculiarities – her tomboyish physicality, her angular masculinity, her general sense of queerness, both in her behavior and in her sexuality. It’s a stunning early performance from the neophyte film actress as she must first emerge as a daring adventuress before slowly peeling back to reveal the wounded heart underneath it all. She’s fetching in her aviator outfits and looks lovely in a moth costume for a ball scene, even if that outfit too heavily underscores her eventual fate.

Christopher Strong is a fascinating steppingstone in Hepburn’s career where she plays the “other woman” for the only time and begins her independent modern woman persona at the same time. Arzner gives her plenty of leeway to demonstrate her innate qualities and talents while populating the film with several capable supporting players. Their work together is a lovely melodrama that feels more modern than several of its contemporaries, and distinctly feminine in its outlook.

Poignant and absurd in equal measure, Albert Brooks taps into the conflicted push-and-pull at the heart of parent/child relationships. Vulnerable, pleading, and anxious in an equilibrium that’s daring to watch, Mother finds Brooks going full Oedipal complex as a man reexamining his life choices, mainly his unlucky love life, through the prism of his mother. He moves back in with her and launches “The Experiment,” essentially trying to find the source of her passive-aggressive treatment of him and how it’s wormed its way into his life by moving back in with her.

Before you assume “that sounds infantilism and a bit like a hoary sitcom,” just remember that this is Albert Brooks, so the jokes come about in circular ways and the destinations of scenes aren’t immediately obvious. Brooks often keeps his camera setups simplistic and watches as two characters in medium shots talk at each other yet never seem to grow closer together. That medium shot begins to feel like CinemaScope after a while.

It also helps that the titular mother is played by Debbie Reynolds, one of cinema’s original virginal nice girls that contained more spunk and vinegar than the sugary exterior let on. Her performance is a transcendent thing, a creation of sweet, polite aggression that almost makes you wonder if she knows what she’s doing at the time. She appears so daffy at first that you don’t realize just how keen a mind is hidden underneath it all. It’s a mesmerizing piece of work from an undervalued actress.

Think of the scene where she tries to feed him food that’s been kept in her freezer since, I don’t know, 1987? She seems so nurturing and lovable at first, a little quirky but don’t we all view our parents as being slightly quirky after a certain age, that we barely notice the deeper truth going on here. She’s trying to nurture him with frozen objects, and this is a scene that examines the larger truth about improper parenting reflecting into our adult lives in various ways. Reynolds is also sly and gifted a comedienne that we barely notice she’s tasked with helping set-up a huge symbolic microcosm of the film’s wider thesis.

That’s the great thing about Mother – there’s a certain wry knowingness to the complexity of family dynamics that springs forth from the humor. It’s not always laugh-out-loud funny, but it is funny for its precision and relatability. Sure, the ending is a little bit too neat and tidy, but that’s no reason to write it off. There are many uncomfortable truths in Mother, and just as many humorous bits.