Reviews by JxSxPx

David Lynch’s second film, The Elephant Man, appears on the surface as one of his more outré works. Nary a twisty narrative that takes multiple viewings to possibly discern, The Elephant Man was nearly like Lynch going all prestige on everybody… on the surface. Peak deep enough beneath the surface and you’ll find scenes of hallucinatory beauty and a more emotive structure.

There’s plenty of facts in The Elephant Man, but there’s just as much fiction to elicit a response in the viewer as we traverse from unease at John Merrick’s disfigurement towards seeing into his soul and finding the beauty there. That combination, or combative tension to be more precise, between horror and beauty is a Lynchian trademark. Think of Blue Velvet’s pastoral suburbia giving way to the rot and festering maggots beneath the surface, quite literally.

Lynch also transitions the film from firm timelines and slow burning developments into a heady rush of incident as it goes along. Clocks and punctuality are underscored throughout the earliest scenes only to disappear as days/months dissolve into a handful of scenes that explain vast expanses of time. Once again, beneath the beautiful images and respectable costuming there’s a Lynchian sense of narrative malleability at play here. We go from dire reality to wish fulfilling social life then fold back into a terrible reality as man’s monstrous nature disrupts Merrick’s modest idyll.      

It’s not as if this more impressionistic second half comes out of nowhere. Lynch opens the film with a dream-like vision of a pregnant woman attacked by elephants and throws in plenty of slow-motion circus imagery at the same time. This sequence is repeated as Merrick prepares to die at the very end of the film. His mother speaks in this bookending surrealistic sequence, quoting from Lord Tennyson’s “Nothing Will Die.” These pieces bookend the film and poetical tie it all together making a visual rhyme as mother and son suffer and die to the strands of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

There’s another Lynchian trademark: the easy delineation between good and evil with the setting functioning as a character onto itself. The characters of The Elephant Man are types deployed with effectiveness by a game cast. There’s the kindly doctor (Anthony Hopkins, showing flashes of his later ham years), the tough but tender matron (Wendy Hiller, bringing layers to a thinly written part), the cruel surrogate father (Freddie Jones, absolutely stellar), and the noble victim (John Hurt, completely unrecognizable but towering). We know these types well, and Lynch gets new wrinkles out of a cast that manages to find sneaky bits of business that subvert our expectations.

Hurt is the wounded heart of the film. He’s buried under layers of prosthetic makeup leaving him with little of his original self, yet he manages to project a wounded pride and soulfulness through it all. If it hadn’t been for Robert De Niro’s career-defining work in Raging Bull, I wonder if that year’s Best Actor Oscar would’ve found a different outcome in Hurt’s favor. I’m normally suspect of actors transforming underneath layers of makeup but Hurt manages to shine something through it that others do not. He makes us feel every hurt, every victory, even the inevitable peace of his death feels like the rational thought of a mind tired of being gawked at and exploited.

These make The Elephant Man clearly a piece of Lynch’s wider work, even if history and general audience reaction to it categorize as his most standard, normal film and everything else as “weird.” Reductive, to be sure, but The Elephant Man is nearly abstract in its ending run of scenes and emotional crescendos, but the presence of period trappings and actors of note like Hopkins and Hurt somehow smooth out these oddball choices. Here is the sum of Lynch’s work up to this point and various breadcrumbs of where he was about to go.

It’s easy to write The Elephant Man off as Lynch playing it straight on a surface level, but is he really doing that? Yes, it’s simple, but it’s also overwhelming in its visual beauty, surrealistic flourishes, and obscure sound choices, such as Merrick’s mother narrating over his death from the afterlife, seemingly. The Elephant Man is Lynch’s most straightforward, linear film, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in line with the rest of his work. It is very much as strong an auteur statement as Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway.

One of the worst aspects of the first Mulan was the presence of Mushu, Eddie Murphy’s wisecracking dragon that was an obvious attempt at recapturing the magic of Robin Williams’ genie from Aladdin, so here comes Mulan II doubling down on his presence. While he was a supporting player in the original, a major one but still technically one of her sidekicks, here he is elevated to a major player. This isn’t even the worst aspect of Mulan II, but it is endemic to its worst impulses.

Mulan II doubles down on the modern philosophies and viewpoints invading an ancient story. In this film, it manifests in the way that Mulan seeks to dismantle the arranged marriages of the three princesses and help them find true love. Arranged marriages for political purposes is a tale as old as time and trying to dismantle it because of a concept as relatively new as “true love” is a bit of historical revisionism that stands out in stark contrast to the politics and time period of the setting.

So here we have Mulan and Shang, newly engaged, escorting the three princesses (Lucy Liu, Sandra Oh, Lauren Tom) with the help of her three best buds from the military (Harvey Fierstein, Gedde Watanabe, Jerry Tondo). If that three-to-three ratio seems suspiciously symmetrical, then congratulations you know exactly where the story is going. Everything fun and interesting about the original film is slowly sapped out here as the characters are twisted into unrecognizable shapes. Mulan is all about duty and honor, but here she’s freewheeling and prone to breaking promises and sidestepping the law for her own personal amusement. Who is this person?

These direct-to-video cash-ins are the worst impulses of the Disney money-making machinery in action. Why create art when you could just create something lacking in integrity or artistry and print money? Thank god these films came to a crashing halt as they diminished not only their source films, but the entirety of the Disney brand along the way.

So, this was clearly intended as a trial-run for an Atlantis: The Lost Empire spinoff TV show, right? I mean, it just seems so obvious given the way that the three different adventures involved have clean three-act structures and obvious breaks for commercials and separation into individual episodes. I’m surprised Disney didn’t go through with the project as the pulpy adventure story of Atlantis felt so primed and ready for further exploration but seeing how limp the final pilot turned out… maybe it wasn’t such a shock.

Long gone is the visually appealing takeoff of Mike Mignola’s style in favor of a blockier, chunkier style the reads as passable for a mass-produced series but woefully for a movie. Just a reminder that this was not intended as a standalone movie, I guess. Here the main group of explorers from the first film launch into a steampunk X-Files agency that encounter Lovecraftian horrors, a rogue Asgardian god, and a trickster coyote spirit in the American southwest.

Each of these stories contains a connection to the hitherto unexplored history of Atlantis and its wider connections to the outside world, a fact that the original film flirted with and used as a reason for their eventual hiding. There’s vast potential here but the insistence on making them digestible 22-minute adventures leaves much of the potential undiscovered. Frankly, I’d have much preferred a 90-minute story involving the gang encountering that Lovecraftian horror and realizing how its existence is the basis for a variety of mythological creatures throughout the world and history.

Atlantis: Milo’s Return, which is misnamed as Milo never left Atlantis in the first place, needed to go full pulp fiction when it merely cockteases. These damn direct-to-video sequels, prequels, and in-betweens really do cheapen the value of the original film, even ones as cult-ish and fringe as Atlantis: The Lost Empire. But I still fully expect Disney to announce a live-action remake of it any day now, cause the House of Mouse just can’t stop itself.

The foundation for the story is the childhood belief that your toys could become real, or even were real when you weren’t looking. This idea appeared in two divergent films in 1995: The Indian in the Cupboard and Toy Story. One of them had a ton of heart and spawned a long-lasting franchise, while the other was an average film with a bitter aftertaste that it seemed completely unaware of as it played out.

This adaptation of Lynne Reid Banks’ children’s novel rises more complicated issues than it is capable or interested in answering. The toys placed in the magical cupboard don’t just become real, they’re brought to life by displacing people out of time and merging them with the plastic figurines. This element of intended horror is slowly dripped out, and The Indian in the Cupboard begins to flirt with the idea of the child as a god. It never does anything of interest with this idea.

Here is a film where Little Bear, the titular Indian, proclaims that there is no god, and there’s no dramatic resolution or import afford that line. It’s just casually tossed off – in a family film from 1995! Surely, there was more territory to explore with a line and development like that. Much of the problem is in the unease that director Frank Oz clearly exhibits with the material. He’s not a director made for family entertainment, and it shows in his awkward attempts at Spielbergian wonder.

Directing child actors to authentic performances is a hard job. Some kids are naturally gifted at appearing at ease in front of the camera while others are clearly in high-performance mode. Hal Scardino is permanently breathless, and Rishi Bhat comes across way too bratty, despite ostensibly playing the best friend role. Much of the film follows their melodrama and classroom scenes, and The Indian in the Cupboard is disappointing when we spend too much time away from the magical realism portions.

Litefoot is much better and more involving as Little Bear. He feels more engrossing, complicated, and aggressive than the rest of the balmy film knows what to do with. His rage threatens to disrupt the film, and his passages of wisdom can feel like Oz shouting, “pay attention – this message is important, kids!” I’ll assume the adventure was more involving on the page than it is on the screen.

I remember this being a film they’d wheel out on rainy days and end-of-the-year movie days in elementary school. But I also remember never finding the movie particularly engaging even at eight-years-old. It’s passable enough, I suppose, but it sure is disappointing.

What do you get when you combine the talents of Chuck Jones, operating as a writer and producer, and a vocal cast that includes Judy Garland, Robert Goulet (in his film debut), Red Buttons, and Hermione Gingold? Well, you get Gay Purr-ee, a film that’s more visually arresting than it is capable of holding your attention. The disparate parts of Gay Purr-ee are wonderful, so it’s a damn shame that don’t quite fit together.

The limited animation doesn’t help, not when so much of the background and montage work is so adventurous. I guess UPA didn’t have the budget of a Disney or Warner Brothers, but the so-so quality of the animation starts to pop out in scenes that are supposed to suggest tension or action. Physical comedy bits feel like they’re missing in-between sections to smooth over their actions.

At least the character designs are pleasing, especially Gingold’s villainous Mme Rubens-Chatte, a corpulent purple cat with piercing eye lashes and bright eye shadow. Meowrice’s four hench-cats are an interesting visual invention, too. Four inky, jagged black cats with yellow slits for eyes, they move as if a refraction of each other in ridged geometry.

Even when the story or song falters, the act of looking at Gay Purr-ee remains an enjoyable experience. One of the best montages involves Garland’s Mewsette reimagined in a series of paintings by various French impressionists, including Gaugan, Van Gogh, and Seurat. The provincial village where Mewsette and Goulet’s Jaune-Tom reside in the earliest scenes resembles one of Van Gogh’s sweeping vistas with unexpected color combinations and broad strokes. If Gay Purr-ee manages to pull off such a neat trick on a limited budget, then just imagine what director Abe Levitow could’ve accomplished with more time, money and resources. It’s a cute little tchotchke, but there’s obviously something better waiting to spring out.

Seventeen musical numbers in 103 minutes. No one can unfairly claim that Easter Parade doesn’t offer a lot of bang for its buck, but that doesn’t mean it was necessarily money well spent. There’s no real story or concept here, just a loose connection of scenes that ostensibly tell a story but really function to get Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, in the only film they made together, from one song/dance to the next.

Easter Parade is a bit of a non-event considering it’s the meeting of Astaire and Garland, two of the movie musicals towering artistes. What Garland could do with phrasing, delivering, and vocal power, both its withholding and unleashing, Astaire could do with his elegant, languid bodily movements and control. They get plenty of chances to shine, but the surrounding film never adds up to much in the end. Astaire’s a vaudeville performer whose former partner goes solo (Ann Miller, largely wasted apart from her kinetic “Shakin’ the Blues Away”), so he finds Garland’s chorus girl and trains her to be his new partner. Naturally, they eventually fall in love, and Peter Lawford’s around the edges as a best friend and would-be suitor.

That’s not enough material to justify its running time, so Easter Parade functions like the Macy’s Day Parade – all artifice and happy to be seen with nothing much going on. Sequences that don’t involve singing, dancing, or Jules Munshin hamming it up in an extended bit about… tossing a salad (?!) are basically color commentary from toothy hosts before they cut back to something more visually interesting. It’s a soundtrack with some visuals to go along with it.

A three-hour black and white courtroom drama about the Nazi trials populated by movie stars in the waning days of their careers – sounds like the recipe for a snooze fest, an overly pious piece of do-gooder cinema that’s overly saccharine. Judgment at Nuremberg is not that movie. I mean, in a way it is since Judgment at Nuremberg is a star-studded piece of social critique that’s black and white and runs for three hours, but it’s more complicated than that.

Perhaps Judgment at Nuremberg’s quick glance as a piece of white elephant cinema is quite simply unfair. Much of this might have to do with director Stanley Kramer’s complicated legacy as one of Hollywood’s original open hearted (white) liberals. His films were heavy on the message and the sentiment, often at times overly simplistic about complex social issues, but clearly intended to mean well.

But this digestible view of his career seems to forget that he was a producer of works such as Champion, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, and High Noon. When he got all the right ingredients together, Kramer could make some classic cinema. It is here that Judgment at Nuremberg resides – it is a masterpiece of the courtroom drama and the social issue film.

The best thing about Judgment at Nuremberg is how it presents a Germany identity at war with itself. There are no simplistic heroes and villains here, and the rise of Nazism is removed from the cartoonish, pulpy villainy of so many Hollywood films and distinctly given recognizably human faces. These thorny and complex ideologies give the film a distinct bite. It’s easier to hate someone and their actions from afar, but how easy is to hate someone and their deeds up close? How culpable was the average German citizen? How effective is a “good German” defense by someone with some social power?

These are the open psychological scars that Germany is grappling with when Spencer Tracy’s judge enters the bombed out remains of Nuremberg. Tracy is here to oversee a tribunal hearing the case against four German judges, including Burt Lancaster’s conflicted Ernst Janning. Into this already simmering cauldron of trauma and guilt wander a variety of stars in supporting roles, such as Richard Widmark as the prosecuting attorney, that blur the lines between victim and victimizer. Nationalism proved Germany’s downfall, but the ‘how’ and ‘why’ it got there is where Judgment at Nuremberg offers some insight.

While the staging and camera work is a bit static, as is typically the case with courtroom dramas, the acting never falters. This is a group operating with decades of experience and know when to push and when to hold back. Tracy anchors everything with gravitas, Lancaster complicates our sympathies, and Maximilian Schell is a mercurial defense attorney. Tracy and Schell both deservedly got Oscar nominations, and Schell walked away with win for a flashy but layered performance that’s never anything less than riveting.

Even better are a trio of supporting players: Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, and Marlene Dietrich. Clift plays a victim of forced sterilization, and his performance feels so authentic and real that it becomes squeamish to watch him rage and reveal the deep scars within. Garland is a gentile woman accused of having an affair with a Jewish man, and she’s broken and vulnerable in a way that lays bare an interior neurosis that often threatened to combust her flimsiest musical parts. In the twilight of their careers, both Clift and Garland would die before the decade was done, these two reminded the world what their vast talents were capable of in riveting, raw performances.

While Dietrich gets a role that finds her swimming in and out of the film as the conflicted, wounded soul of Germany itself, a woman trying to reconcile with the atrocities as much as she’s struggling with the new world of a liberated Germany. Clift and Garland deservedly got Oscar nominations, but there was no love for Dietrich. What a shame as her performance here is a minimalist wonder, and a definition of the word “luminous.”  

As the film winds towards its harrowing end, one that does not absolve anyone from guilt and eschews easy political favoritism, such as a subplot about the encroaching Cold War and pressures to emphasize reunification over justice, Judgment at Nuremberg remains as haunting as Dietrich wandering down the streets with Tracy by her side. Jingoistic fervor and political apathy are the real enemies here, and they remain something worth fighting against. There’s no easy answers to prickly questions, and this film is an engrossing, harrowing fictionalization that thrills as much as it disturbs.   

The Clock is a lovely little movie that offers Judy Garland one of her rare straight dramatic parts. It doesn’t hurt that she’s matched by a fabulously sincere and present performance by Robert Walker, and an overall tender tone that underscores the bittersweet nature of the romance. The Clock is a “small” wartime romance that packs a bigger punch than some of its more prestigious siblings.

It’s in the ways that The Clock goes against the MGM modus operandi of high-gloss and heavy glamour that prove so successful for this little movie. The story is simple: a soldier on leave (Walker) finds himself in New York City, meets cute with a girl (Garland), and they spend the rest of his leave falling in love and exploring the city. Along the way there’s appearances by several well-known characters including, including a drunk Keenan Wynn, James Gleason and his wife, Lucile Gleason, in small supporting parts that add color and texture to the central romance.

That’s it. That’s the entirety of The Clock in summary, yet it fails to do justice to its emotional majesty and fragility. There’s a deep well of insecurity and battered hope, both in the main characters, and in the country at large. The specter of World War II hovers around the edges of their thoughts and actions, including the complicated emotional goodbye as Garland sends Walker off. Tears have been shed along the way, but Garland’s young bride is smiling a peculiar way as she strides back in the bustle of the city with a sense of…something. Maybe of purpose? Maybe the bloom of new love hasn’t wilted with the cold light of day?

There’s a mystery at the heart of the romance, and the petty indifference and cynicism that they encounter that lingers both in the spirit and the imagination. Quickie romances are a common practice in the face of war and potential death, but it feels like these two likeable, sincere people found something special with each other. There’s a level of comfort in their interactions, an uneasy chemistry that seems to shift with the same fast pace as the story’s contours that’s quite refreshing.

It doesn’t hurt that director Vincente Minnelli has two lead actors as talented and enthralling to watch as Garland and Walker. Walker was a known quality as a “serious” actor, and he does incredibly well with his green corporal that’s adrift in the big city aside from this girl he found. But it’s Garland’s straight dramatic work that’s the real discovery, as if her numerous scenes of quivering need or rejection weren’t powerful enough. Her crying at the wedding reception she’s just gone through is a marvel, but it’s nowhere near as commanding as the quiet power she brings to their scene in a church or the morning after their wedding night.

The city itself functions as a third character, and one that is ever shifting to its mercurial moods and whims. A frantic search after they’ve been broken up underscores a big city’s ability to be both massive and small, caring and unfeeling at the same time. In scaling back the ambitions of the narrative, Minnelli once again provides a symphony of emotions, faces, and textures that give a little sting with the sweet. The Clock may be the greatest little movie in all of their careers.

Booth Tarkington’s novel gets the glossy MGM treatment here, so that means the downbeat ending and realistic traumas the characters face are softened and/or jettisoned in favor of a triumphant final bow before the curtain closes/screen fades to black. Presenting Lily Mars is a great showcase for the full breadth of star Judy Garland’s talents even when the rest of the film is flabby, creaky, or generally hokey. But we get to watch Garland belt out “Broadway Rhythm” while dancing with Charles Walters, and it’s hard not to be enamored of a film that provides that chance.

Frankly, the first chunk is stronger and more focused than the rest. The first chunk finds Garland’s Lily Mars, a teenager with dreams of stage stardom, trying to charm a big Broadway producer, Van Heflin in purely reactive mode. The producer just so happens to be the son of her neighbor and family friend, Fay Bainter lovable as ever, and Lily manages to convince her to setup a meeting so Lily can demonstrate her talents. It’s a joy to watch Garland play as a novice actress that adopts that strange mid-Atlantic accent and overly done mannerisms around every vowel. Her Lily is a neophyte actress lacking skill but making up for it with gumption and a tremendous capacity to listen, learn, and grow.

Presenting Lily Mars automatically goes into more predictable and paint-by-numbers territory once she runs off to New York for a chance at the big time. She can’t make it past being an understudy with a tiny speaking part, but the girl gives it the old college try. Of course, when you’re blessed with a singing voice and style like Garland’s, you won’t be doing bit parts for very long. The eventual love story between Garland and Heflin feels tacked on and entirely out of the blue.

Those New York scenes are also undone by the presence of Martha Eggerth, a great singer but a lousy actress, as a grand diva of the stage annoyed and threatened by the upstart. Eggerth lacks a definable presence or quality in front of the camera, and much like she threw portions of For Me and My Gal got out of shape, she distorts plenty of space in Presenting Lily Mars. Perhaps putting her against acting greats like Garland, Heflin, and a fun Richard Carlson as a theatrical sidekick. Her best scene is a reaction towards Garland’s imitation of her. Make of that what you will.

It all winds up being a bit of a meh. Presenting Lily Mars is not one of Judy’s standout films, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable little minor work. It’s easy, breezy, and contains a great role for the actress transitioning to adult roles and away from being the perpetual adolescent. Better things were on the horizon, including The Clock and Summer Stock.

Ignore that James Stewart, fresh off an Oscar win for The Philadelphia Story, gets top billing here. Here’s a supporting player to the trio of stage-struck hopefuls played by Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, and Lana Turner. The whole thing is overly long, the melodrama gets laid on a bit too thick, I did roll my eyes on several occasions, but this is the type of grand scale entertainment you’ll only find in the studio system.

Ziegfeld Girl, a loose sequel to The Great Ziegfeld, which it borrows plenty of footage from during the climatic show, is all about showing what it takes to make it in the big time, or how to burn out glamorously. Garland’s a vaudeville singer/actor that does a lot of work with her father but is getting eyed for a solo spot in the Follies. Lamarr is a devoted wife who takes the job after getting scouted during her husband’s violin audition out of pure desperation for money. Turner is discovered working an elevator and quickly goes from starry-eyed dreamer to alcoholic tramp precariously at the top of the social ladder.

If that’s not enough plot for you, there’s also James Stewart miscast as the bootlegger boyfriend of Turner, Tony Martin as a married crooner trying to have an affair with Lamarr, and Jackie Cooper as Turner’s younger brother who has a chaste romance with Garland. The whole thing is overstuffed and moves at a lugubrious pace towards a near uproarious finale for its sheer overwrought glamor trappings. Turner’s character can’t just die, she has to reenact her triumphant walk down the Follies stairs then collapse in an impassioned heap on the floor. It’s more camp white elephant cinema than honest-to-god entertainment.

It doesn’t help that two-thirds of the girls get the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Lamarr is gorgeous and swims through the frame in flowing gowns, but that’s the entirety of her role. There are a few bits where her character expresses a mild disdain for show biz and her life as a clotheshorse, which is a reflection of Lamarr’s own sensibilities. While Garland gives a rare misfire of a performance. She’s uneven as though she’s unsteadied about performing around her glamour girl co-stars. She’s a bit too self-conscious in spots, or too manic in others, but reliable in her comedic bits and that voice can sell you ice in the tundra.

It’s Lana Turner’s tragic bad girl that gets the fullest scope, and Turner rises to the occasion. She wasn’t much of an actress, but she was a presence that was fascinating to the camera. Her best roles matched her beauty with a destructive force that threatened to topple her away from sex goddess and into broken human. Ziegfeld Girl launches her into the stratosphere and waits a short bit before yanking her down into addiction, destitution, and eventual tragic (but highly photogenic) deathbed scene.    

Ziegfeld Girl is an ornate bauble that sparkles brightly but is an overly designed paper weight. Watch it for Turner’s star-making role, Lamarr’s narcotized glam, and Garland’s impassioned belting. Just don’t expect it to be one of the better films of anyone’s career.