Reviews by JxSxPx

While other compilations have eclipsed this one, The Best of Blondie remains one hell of an album. The de facto and defining summary of the band’s power pop and disco-punk for years, The Best of Blondie is winnowed down to the absolute essentials. No wrong note and nary an ounce of fat to be found here. Instead, there’s just one great song after another that combined smart song craft with arty, underground roots to produce some of the shiniest, sleekest, sexiest New Wave around. The random sequencing of songs gives the impression that experimenting with disco caused sexpot/singer Debbie Harry and her mop-topped bandmates no bigger sweat than reggae, hip-hop, girl group pop, and punk. It’s a dizzying rush of urbane, sophisticated pop artistes ironically sending up the rock and roll radio of their youths and winding up joining the pantheon almost in spite of themselves. Essential listening.

DOWNLOAD: “Sunday Girl (Special Mix)”

Just in time for Blondie’s 2006 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came this combo release: one disc of greatest hits, one disc of music videos. Yet there’s a pervading sense of wheel spinning here. Other compilation albums have managed the neat trick of feeling complete, but this one suffers from glaring omissions and unnecessary changes.

The 2002 Greatest Hits collection remains the single best one-disc collection of Blondie’s crown jewels, even if the random order of the songs proves mildly vexing. At nineteen songs there’s nary a missing major single, fan favorite, and it came wrapped up in remastered sound and official approval from the band. This version’s physical disc drops both “X Offender” and “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” and later digital versions drop “Maria” and “Rapture Riders.” That last omission isn’t so bad, to be fair, but it’s an interesting sonic curio.

Greatest Hits: Sound & Vision becomes a curious little thing. Splitting the difference between random order and chronological, the track listing drops the biggest hits (“Heart of Glass,” “Call Me,” “Rapture”) at the front before switching to chronological order near the midpoint, a remix of “In the Flesh.” I’m not sure why “In the Flesh” was remixed by Super Buddha, a producing team that Debbie Harry was quite fond of at the time as they were also behind her album Necessary Evil.

There’s also the very real danger of Parallel Lines imploding as nearly every song from that essential album is reflected here. While this is supposed to reflect the best of Blondie, leaning so heavily on one album, even if it is their best one, doesn’t leave enough room for the other albums to shine. I’d trade a few of those album-only songs for the likes of “Detroit 442” and “The Hardest Part,” lesser-known singles that deserve prominence when collecting a comprehensive career overview.

No new material was recorded for this, but newer songs like “Good Boys” and “End to End” get written into Blondie’s history in a more prevalent way than The Curse of Blondie afforded. The “Good Boys” remix diminishes that song’s original burbling disco-rock rhythms for something stranger, but still keeps the personality of it intact. While “End to End,” much like the here then gone “Maria,” sounds like a modern-day Blondie song should: Harry’s rock goddess persona riding over crunchy guitars and layers of keyboards.

And Greatest Hits: Sound & Vision nearly manages the hat trick of being a comprehensive overview of the band’s career to this point. If you’re looking for a single-disc collection of Blondie’s pop smarts and chilly New Wave glamour, you could do worse. There’s no shortage of Blondie compilations on the market, but that also means there’s better, bigger ones out there just primed for discovery.

At least there’s the Vision half of the title to valiantly try and tip the scales. Seventeen primitive music videos that find Harry looking too bored to live and generating an impressive erotic charge. Their power pop was mighty, and they had some absurd and brilliant visuals to go right along with it, like the trash bag chic of “Atomic” and sci-fi dopiness of “The Tide is High.”

DOWNLOAD: “Good Boys (Blow-Up Remix),” “In the Flesh (Remix),” “Rapture Riders”

Even by the already slim standards of direct-to-video and/or made-for-TV Disney movies, The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story is particularly grim. It occupies a no man’s land between the animated film and the original text by dropping many of the inventions of the studio, no King Louie or “Bare Necessities,” and restoring some of the characters and darkness, including Tabaqui and a bloodthirsty Shere Khan. Except, none of it is done well or even with much care or thought. The whole thing looks like it was filmed on maybe two sets, the voice cast is wasted (including Clancy Brown, Eartha Kitt, Sherman Howard, and Brian Doyle-Murray), Brandon Baker is awkward in the lead, and the humor is beyond condescending. Kids are smarter than this version of The Jungle Book thinks they are, and I have a hard time thinking they’d much entertaining or diverting about this version. After all, this is an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s beloved text where Fred Savage narrates as an adult Mowgli. It is an interminable hour and sixteen minutes.

This feels like a coherent animated horror anthology than a collage of Raúl García’s various influences and cinematic obsessions writ large. The inherent “cool factor” involved in watching short films of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous stories narrated by the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi goes a long way towards justifying the very existence of Extraordinary Tales, but I just wish there was more there.

Parts of García’s various short films are spectacular, beautiful, and baroque works of animation. The film is never less than visually pleasing even if the narrative stumbles or the presentation needed more finessing. The biggest ding against the film is a wraparound segment involving Poe reincarnated as a raven (oy) having a discussion with the specter of death, ingeniously voiced by author Cornelia Funke. These segments merely exist to allow the audience to breathe in-between gothic set pieces acting out the likes of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Pit and the Pendulum, yet they fail to establish the next segment in any meaningful way. These sequences left me perplexed and they felt too on the nose throughout.

Extraordinary Tales is much better when acting out its various shorts, each animated in a unique and individual manner. The Fall of the House of Usher’s characters resemble marionettes and the whole thing is wrapped up in angular designs and moody shadows. The Tell-Tale Heart is all negative space as blindingly bright whites and contrasted by inky blacks swallowing up the frame and forming shapes along the way. The Masque of Red Death is all watercolors and exaggerated designs where everyone looks roughly nine feet tall, all long limbs, disproportionate bodies, and jagged edges.  

Everything looks gorgeous, especially a The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar that functions like a motion comic for the EC Comics days with a Vincent Price proxy in the lead, but the truncated versions of these stories grow increasingly frustrating. You just start to get into the groove of the films and they’re wrapping up and spitting us back to the raven and death engaging in word play and seduction. It doesn’t help that some of the narration sounds buried under the mix and is hard to hear, Lugosi’s vintage text is pummeled with artifacts that make some of his overacting nearly incomprehensible.

But if Extraordinary Tales manages to make someone pickup the works of Poe, the Hammer Horror films of Lee, the Universal Monsters days of Lugosi, or the nasal purring theatrics of Price, then it all evens up to a net positive. As it stands, Extraordinary Tales feels like a film tailor made for future use in high school English class as a supplementary material for lessons on gothic literature. To quote Brian Tallerico: “It just never quite rises above that faint praise.”

The straight-to-video sequel franchise, a cannibalistic enterprise that the Disney studio has mercifully reframed from, is often a glimpse into piggybacking off borrowed shine. These films aren’t good or strong enough to stand on their own, so they shove already known entities into strange shapes to use brand name recognition to spruce up sales. If The Fox and the Hound 2 isn’t the worst offender, then it must be somewhere near the top of that list. Or is it the bottom? It’s hard to tell.

The Fox and the Hound is a minimalist morality play of outside prejudices and influences destroying the purity of a childhood friendship. It’s a heartfelt film that lingers in the emotional memory for the authenticity of its relationships and the powerful feelings it conjures up. The Fox and the Hound 2 is ersatz art in comparison to the film it is borrowing shine and prestige from, and on its own limited merits.

This midquel (is that even a word?) doesn’t entirely mesh with either the timeline or tone of the original. It ultimately feels like something that was conceived as a separate idea then jammed together with preexisting characters to ensure profitability. It’s no great secret that I enjoy Disney, but I’m not blind to the problems of the studio and their gross penchant for eating itself in order to generate more product. Sometimes, I wish the studio would know when to leave well enough alone. Their gault of live action remakes points toward a redirection of their worst impulses. Oh well, at least we aren’t getting more thing like The Fox and the Hound 2 to make us question our admiration for the original films in the process.   

Cab Calloway’s Jitterbug Party’s is a perfectly serviceable musical short that needed some visual imagination to match the high-octane energy of the music and performers. Cursed with a point-and-shoot style that several early sound musicals are doomed with, Jitterbug Party nearly undermines the swinging good time promised by Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra. Leave it to Calloway’s rapid-fire vocal technique and manic movements to keep you engaged. It’s also notable for historical import: a very young Lena Horne appears as a chorus girl during the final scene.

At times over fond but rightly critical of the stunted adolescence of these man-babies, Beautiful Girls still gives them too wide a berth for their ruminations on nothing in particular while ignoring the more intriguing female characters that reside on the periphery. Strange that the two most fascinating ones are a wisecracking Rosie O’Donnell and Natalie Portman doing one of her neighborhood Lolitas. (She had a few of these roles in the beginning of her career, most evidently in Leon: The Professional.) Makes you wonder about what exactly these men expect and where they’ve placed their sexual hang-ups.

Then again, one of the schlubbiest is obsessed with lingerie models, Penthouse playmates, and Playboy bunnies, so you know, I think we can guess what type of males we’re dealing with here. It’s great to watch O’Donnell hold up one of those magazines and give them a verbal lashing about the unrealistic expectations of womanhood and its performative aspects to these men. Of course, they’re too myopic to understand what she’s saying. Not to mention the entire scene feels like a screenwriter’s conceit and less like a realistic moment no matter how much gusto O’Donnell provides in dishing out this rapid-fire monologue.

Much of Beautiful Girls is like that – men stuck in their high school glory days unable to see past their navel, unsure about this whole commitment thing, and strangely overconfident about what they’re bringing to the table. Matt Dillon’s character peaked in high school and he strings along his girlfriend (Mira Sorvino, underused and deserving better much like her character) while carrying on an affair with his high school girlfriend (Lauren Holly, her part mainly consists of walking into a scene and projecting an icy bitchiness to everyone in the room). Michael Rappaport’s creepily obsessed with his ex-girlfriend (Martha Plimpton), and unable to separate his unbelievable expectations of womanhood from his addiction to pornography and scantily clad models.

The movie is really about O’Donnell’s monologue, how these men need to let go of their strange ideals and hang-ups and look at the actual people around them for love, commitment, and growth. Elle MacPherson will always be a fantasy object to them, but Mira Sorvino’s harried girlfriend has tremendous reservoirs of love to give and no one willing to take it. Frankly, these women deserve much better.

Yet when Beautiful Girls zeros in on Timothy Hutton’s character, I enjoyed it much more. He’s returned home to try and sort things out while attending his high school reunion. He made it out of the small town and engages in an odd relationship with Portman’s character. They seem to attract each other as blank slates they can project their dreams and realities upon, canvases they can project innocence or maturity that may or may not be there.

Hutton’s performance is one of the best in the film as he realizes these guys are stuck in a rut, and he doesn’t want to replicate this within his own life. He’s going to give that whole commitment thing a shot with the beautiful girl he left behind in New York. Bravo, you’ve managed to enter your thirties with the same uncertainty as the rest of us.

Leave it up to this film’s stellar ensemble to paper over the thinness of the premise and the occasionally bits of dialog that feel more “written” than “spoken.” Hey, they also managed to squeeze in a semi-drunken singalong to “Sweet Caroline,” and that’s a charming bit that feels truthful. Friend groups do get weirdly obsessed with bits of pop culture that become some kind of shared experience or shorthand with each other. Beautiful Girls is mildly enjoyable, but I’ll be happy if we can keep the films about wheel spinning white dudes to a minimum from here on out.  

Does it often feel like every other gay movie is about two men falling in love and one of them having a fraught relationship to his sexuality and object of desire? I get it, self-repression is part of the queer experience, but it can get mildly depressing to watch movie after movie detailing this panic-stricken moment when one character has to choose between his authentic self or societal expectations. Enter Esteros, a movie all about that exact moment yet told with uncommon sensitivity and tactile sensuality.

We alternate back-and-forth in time, between the idyllic adolescence friendship between Matias and Jeronimo and their tension-filled reunion ten years later. We witness their youthful selves at the exact moment that sexuality begins to intrude upon their lives, and there’s something more happening between them than mere friendship. Flashforward ten years later and it’s clear neither one has entirely gotten over the absence of the other. While Matias has seemingly accepted a buttoned-up heterosexual life, Jeronimo has embraced a more bohemian and queerer lifestyle. Their attraction and chemistry are evident even in their awkward first moments.

We spend much time exploring why they parted, what incidents happened to drive them apart, and an airing of long simmering emotions popping off at random spurts. There’s a shorthand there that no one else can ever hope to replicate and understand, and I found myself rooting for them to make it work. Call me a romantic, but I hoped these two crazy kids would work it all out by the end.

It’s too Papu Curotto’s directorial achievement that one can see this going any number of ways, and Esteros manages to never fall into melodramatics or hysterics. Events unfold at a realistic and logical pace based upon the character’s personalities and histories. It works well as a quiet storm romance, a sensual drama, and offers a chance to bask in the beauty of the Argentinian wetlands of the title.

Here’s a tiny little movie with a big emotional punch and an uncommon sensitivity offered to its various characters and their plights. One of the great joys of the streaming age is the chance to discover these quiet movies that never got a chance beyond the festival circuit or a one-week run in an arthouse theater. Esteros may not reinvent its various cinematic tropes in a large way, but it deploys them consummate skill, intelligence, and emotional truth.

Stephen Cone’s queer films are well meaning if misguided. Here he looks to examine the hypocrisies of the evangelical sect, a fertile and ripe place, and do so in an empathetic and humane way, noble choice, but Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is trying to tackle way more than Cone’s abilities as a writer or a director are capable of handling. There are bits about racism, mental illness, adultery, eating disorders, homosexuality, and the policing of women’s bodies and sexuality. All of that in 87 minutes, and you best believe that none of it is given much depth or consideration.

It’s a very open-hearted film and characters that would be easy target practice under another filmmaker are given moments to feel like real people. There’s a humorous bit where one character is explaining that wider societal problems play a role in young women going into pornography and maybe we should be working to dissolve those barriers and problems. This is met with a rebuttal questioning whether that character has gone democrat on everyone. It lands better in action than it may in summary.

At least Cone offers several of his characters to step into their truth and obtain agency by the end, even if the journey somehow feels compromised or only half-formed. There’s the main character and his mother who both step into the murkier waters that they’ve only flirted with by the end, and his sister who seems to find the balance between her faith and prior choices. Cone sure is big-hearted and capable of working with his actors to develop real people on the screen, so let’s focus on the positive before I wrap this up. I think Ben Kenigsberg of the New York Times summarized it best when he said, “Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party feels sincere but not accomplished, empathetic but not deep.”

For a while Tale of Tales plays out with the free-associative logic of a fairy tale and provides sequences that in an American film would lead to bombast with quiet emotional urgency. This is when the film is operating at its best, but then a certain thinness begins to undermine the film’s triptych of stories and their corresponding images. That is, the film runs out of gas long before the final credits are rolling.

The three tales told here are eventually revealed as being interwoven in intimate and unique ways, but the crosscutting between them feels arbitrary at best. At its worst, the stories intrude all over each other’s emotional rhythms and textures, and I wonder if this could be reedited to have the films work more in concert with each other. There are clear parallels in story beats or characters dropping in to work as a smoother connective tissue.

Eventually the blood splattering and bare breasts, the aggressive carnality and contrasting imagery begins to feel repetitive instead of how invigorating and unique it was in the opening scenes. After all, casting Vincent Cassel as a randy king that blasts through all of the maidens in his kingdom is a bit of type-casting begging for a reframing, but that never happens here. While Salma Hayek’s queen with baby-fever is one of the better, more realized creations in the film. Hayek’s fantastic in the role even if the eventual story beats squander her investment and misguided maternal instincts.

There’s still plenty to celebrate about Tale of Tales, especially its masterful first half, and it’s great to see a fairy-tale film that doesn’t want to wrap its fantastical elements around big CGI battles and frantic editing in the final act. There are several unique ideas about patriarchy, femininity and neurotic relationships between royals and their subjects to chew on, mainly the tale of two sisters obsessed with regaining their youth. The horror and sexuality of fairy tales is alive and well in Tale of Tales even if it can’t stick the landing.