Reviews by JxSxPx

You gotta love it when an adaptation of a period piece in a European country that is not England winds up getting a very English makeover. Or not. A Promise is very much a headscratcher in this regard. Here’s a story that explicitly takes place in Germany pre-WWI but is cast from top to bottom with British talent not even bothering with attempting an accent. It’s like when ancient Greece is uniformly white and populated by posh accents – something is curiously hilarious about it all.

Does this sound like nitpicking? Perhaps, but nothing much in A Promise works as it should, so my mind may have wondered a bit. You see, A Promise is basically a will they/won’t they romance wrapped up in fidgety, mannered indifference and dispassionate verbal exchanges that never sells its central conceit.

There’s the young buck (Richard Madden, handsome but bored) hired to tutor the young son of his older boss (Alan Rickman, doing his default seething) and gob smacked when he meets the boss’ younger wife (Rebecca Hall, the only lead finding the right balance in her performance). Attraction slow burns and is blown out by a variety of sources – the boss’ machinations, the outbreak of the Great War, a sense of propriety and honor. A Promise finds its title in the exchange of love and fidelity that the young buck and younger wife give each other as he’s shipped off away from Germany and eventually stranded with no lines of communication.

If you’re wondering if they’ll eventually wind up together, then you’ve clearly never seen a movie of this type before. There’s also some underdeveloped bits of social commentary and a general sense of turgid pacing that makes everything feel diluted and dull, frankly. The talent assembled for this is mighty, but it all is in service of a misguided vision that never quite squares where it wants to go or what it wants to be.

There’s something about Gustav Flaubert’s towering literary achievement that seems nearly impossible to translate to cinematic language. Perhaps it’s the insular nature of the prose? The way that its critique is both ambiguous and acidic, especially towards its titular heroine, maybe more like anti-heroine, is something that’s difficult to capture under even the greatest translations.

This version of Madame Bovary is not one of the greatest translations. It’s not the worst, but it’s merely there existing. There’s no grand shock of Flaubert’s ending here, as the film opens with Emma Bovary’s death-rattle as she stumbles around the woods and eventually collapses. This Emma Bovary is envisioned as a woman placed in a stranglehold by the patriarchy and blown about by the various men that seduce then toss her aside. Not a bad choice for a new stylistic interpretation, but it doesn’t feel fully formed.

There’s plenty of somber scenes of Mia Wasikowska’s Emma staring blankly around her house or engaging in dispassionate love affairs that threaten to destroy her reputation and homelife, but that only goes so far to explicate the deeper truths that Susan Barthes’ direction is trying to unearth. I wasn’t convinced of Emma’s plight and the film’s frigidity and withholding made her appear more as a petulant brat than something struggling for agency and choice in an oppressive atmosphere.

It doesn’t help that Wasikowska’s two lovers feel grossly unsuited to period films, and there’s little to no chemistry generated between them. Ezra Miller is a fine actor, but he doesn’t look or feel right in this specific period as there’s something too modern about his whole being. Logan Marshall-Green is given little to do besides look beautiful and act like a dick. These two are supposed to be the grand love affairs and rejections that push Emma over the edge? Madame Bovary doesn’t generate the sensuality necessary to make us invest in these relationships. It winds up being a perfunctory Sunday matinee of a costume drama and nothing more when the ideas behind the adaption go frustratingly teased but never blossom.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is a memory play and a quiet documentation of the sublime found in the banality of everyday life. I wouldn’t entirely call the ability of the film’s images to transform the mundane into the cinematic divine ‘magic realism,’ but I’m not sure what else to dub it. Cuarón’s camera is permanently seeking a way to alchemically transform something boring into something engrossing and beautiful.

Told entirely from the point-of-view of the domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Apericio), Roma glimpses a year-in-the-life of this woman and the family she serves. Alternating between Spanish and Mixtec, Roma manages to humanize all of its primary characters, namely Cleo and her employer’s wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), putting our empathies and rooting interest in their relationship’s nuances and complications. These women lean on each other and Roma never judges either of them for their lifestyles and choices, however limited or dependent upon the men or more monied persons orbiting their lives.

Roma details these nuances and minute details through closeups of faces and visual storytelling. Long passages of the film are spent merely observing the day-to-day realities and tasks of its various characters with little to no dialogue. Some of these moments turn the grueling physical labor of the domestic workers into magical tableaus where the water used to clean dog shit transitions into a mirror that captures the planes flying overhead or tracks across a countryside that becomes an Eden-like place as it taps into a character’s nostalgia for home and childhood.

This was Cuarón’s passion project, and his one-man-band approach to the material marks it as his most personal and potentially autobiographical work to date. He wrote, directed, shot, and edited the entire thing, and his artistic mastery is utterly compelling and wide-ranging. The visuals he manages to capture explain so much of the dynamics at play within the material better than any verbal pyrotechnics ever could. He never tells us but shows through his slow burning poetry and shots that capture the friction between the characters or the larger situation that Cleo finds herself caught within.

It doesn’t hurt that he manages to get stunning work from his two actresses. They are Roma and Roma is them just as much as it is Cuarón’s baby. Marina de Tavira is an established actress in Mexico, so her stunning work comes as no shock beyond being a primary introduction to American audiences. Her work is subtle even when the tribulations could tip into melodrama, and she’s never more engaging then when she stumbles home drunk and calmly asserts to Cleo that women are inevitably alone in this world. Her delivery is laced with impotence and pent-up rage, with misdirected aggression and heartache.

I’m most curious about what waits in store for Yalitza Apericio as an actress going forward. Will she be one of those morning glory darlings or manage to craft a respectable career for herself? God, I hope she gets further opportunities because there’s something enthralling about merely observing her in front of the camera. Her work is a perfect example of the quiet ones being the ones you have to watch out for. Her birthing scene is extraordinary as we learn of the complications and tragedies at the same time she does, and her transition from pain to panic to emotional exhaustion is profoundly real. Her character’s dignity is written all over her mysterious smile and refusal to lie down in spite of a series of turbulent emotional experiences.

Roma’s quiet dignity and emotional tactility sucker punched me from the first gorgeous frame to the last. It slowly builds from one emotional crescendo to the next (god, that beach scene!) and it’s all an incredibly intimate affair. It’s a glimpse of an artist’s autobiography also functioning as self-critique as he examines his privileged childhood and wonders what the interior life of his family’s domestic workers was like. There’s no grand three-act structure here, instead Roma lulls you into its textures and movements through a slow burn. Your mileage may vary, but I was enthralled from the opening credits to the end.

Where does one begin a discussion on a Spike Lee joint that draws immediate parallels between its recent history and our immediate present? I suppose you could start there, but BlacKkKlansman has so much going for it that it seems somehow the most obvious entry point. Here is a film that manages to balance its political messaging with comedy, its moments of high-tension with Lee’s imprimatur, and manages to make a commentary about our nation’s stagnant identity with grace and wit.

You really can’t make this shit up, as evidenced by the title card reading “some fo’ real fo’ real shit.” It makes perfect sense that Spike Lee would gravitate towards the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, a star is born here), a black cop that infiltrated the Klu Klux Klan. On paper that scans as insane enough to be true, no questions asked as no writer has so fervid an imagination as to dream up such a scenario.

This historical story, if 1979 can count as historical, not only entertains us with the sheer insanity of its truth, both as something that can be verified as happening but with its clear lack of artifice, but functions as a gauge for present-day racial tensions. As if we needed further reminding, America’s complicated relationships between racial and ethnic groups has largely stagnated more than we’re comfortable with. For all of the outward looking progress and symbols of hope and change, there was clearly an animosity and backlash festering away and waiting for something to come along and provide clearance for it to explode.

It is within this space that BlacKkKlansman operates best as a document of art responding to history as much as the present. Hell, this could easily be said of so much of Lee’s body of work. Think of how Bamboozled argued that maybe audiences still responded enthusiastically with uncomplicated and stereotypical portraits of black people’s interior lives, and then remember how Green Book just won Best Picture. Once more, Lee’s thorny portrait of an American landscape and identity at war with itself loses to the feel good movie that places its major black character as a supporting role and makes them function as a tool for the white character’s learning that racism is bad and maybe we’re more alike than we aren’t.

Then there’s the way in which Lee opens the film, with Alec Baldwin in a cameo delivering a monologue directly to the camera. Baldwin’s cameo, not dissimilar to his opening salvo in Glengarry Glen Ross, introduces us to the world of white angst that seers anyone unlike them as inherently inferior and deserving of violent retribution. It’s pure fear-mongering, and something of a stunt cast as Baldwin’s spent the better part of his time post-2016 election planning a rambling, divisive bigoted dotard every week on SNL. Lee’s choices are smart and piercing.

To go back to Bamboozled for a second – that was a film that received a tremendous amount of criticism for its use of historical cinematic tropes and images that left a lasting legacy of violence and oppression. Many thought his satirical intent was undermined by deploying these tropes and images, but Lee was making a great point. Images and symbols matter. It’s easy to see various groups as “the other” if all you know about them is happy slaves, mammies, and lazy simpletons.

Look at the KKK induction ceremony scene late in this film for proof of this point. After the proxy (Adam Driver, playing a Jewish man continually creating and destroying various identities) has completed his ceremonial joining by, in my opinion, desecrating the actual tenants of Christianity and their symbols in the Eucharist, they all convene to watch The Birth of a Nation. D. W. Griffith’s film is one that is a loaded subject – do you talk about it as a important historical document for all it accomplished on a technical level? Do you remove it from the canon for its aggressive racism and dangerous stereotypes, including blackface and images of sex crazed black men? Do you leave it and discuss as the controversial, thorny thing it is? There’s no right answer here, but it is important to remember that the Klan really does treat that cinematic text as a near-holy gospel as depicted here. (For the record, I refused to watch it after learning that last little tidbit.)

Lee knows that there’s no way to tell this story without drawing parallels with the present, so why even hide from the fact? We end the film with a montage of violence in Charlottesville and an upside down American flag that slowly drains out of color. His pessimistic view of race relations is earned as it does appear that we’re backsliding and everyone’s on the defensive instead of paying attention and listening. BlacKkKlansman doesn’t offer any balm for these scars the way that Green Book does, and it’s a superior work of art for it.

She’s a black intellectual! He’s a scummy car salesman! Together, they unwittingly had a daughter through IVF! Will these whacky two work it out and come together as a modern family? Find out on Made in America!

Coming this fall to CBS!

Ok, not really, but Made in America does play like a variation of My Two Dads or Perfect Strangers loaded up with more, because more is more and there’s never too much of a good thing. Or something along those lines. Any which way you glance at it, Made in America is cheese of the highest order that’s imminently forgettable and a waste of the talents of Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson.

Ostensibly a romantic comedy, and also one of misunderstanding and improbable medical situations, Made in America certainly plays with pathos far more than it earns or is potentially comfortable with. Nia Long’s screen time boils down to her prettily staring off with tears staining her face in soft closeup. Ted Danson’s character is clearly flirting with alcoholism, and there’s a scene of him moodily pouring booze down the sink. If you’re wondering if there’s a scene where characters forlornly stare off into the rain, you bet your ass there is.

I mean, this is a movie that introduces us to Goldberg and her haphazard bicycling through town as a means to eventually stick in her an accident that leads to grand revelations in a hospital. It’s all so damn convoluted that it feels less like an organic plot than the machinations involved in crafty whacky scenarios in a sitcom. Hey look, there’s Will Smith doing his Fresh Prince of Bel Air shtick.

This isn’t a particularly good movie, but it’s enjoyable for its warmth and slightness. It’s an amiable way to spend nearly two hours, even if the conceit feels strained by that length. This is the kind of movie that lazy Saturday afternoons scrolling through cable, or I guess Netflix or Amazon Prime nowadays, were engineered for. It asks little of you and gives just enough in return.

If you ever wanted a single-disc collection of Stevie Nicks’ work with both Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist, then maybe this is for you. There’s heartfelt intent behind the cherry picking of Mac songs mixed in with the obvious choices from here solo material, but the execution leaves something to be desired. It doesn’t help that the material removed between Timespace and this collection wasn’t in service of under heralded gems from albums like Street Angel (“Blue Denim”) or Trouble in Shangri-la (“Bombay Sapphires”), but inferior live versions (“Rhiannon” and “Landslide” reveal the cracks in her voice) or questionable remixes (“Dreams,” what happened to you?) of Fleetwood Mac songs.

The Very Best of Stevie Nicks? Hardly. The track listing skews heavily towards Bella Donna and The Wild Heart while giving short attention to the bulk of her solo material. Frankly, this thing needed to be two-discs if it really wanted to thread the line between her time in Mac and her solo work. Sure, it’s lovely to hear a studio version of “Silver Springs,” but it already appeared on 2003’s The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac. Nicks is justifiably proud of the song, but I’d be happier removing all the Mac material for more of her solo work.

A collection like this could have brought in various soundtrack-only appearances, or rarities regulated to her Enchanted box set into an economical set. Wherefore art thou “Beauty and the Beast,” “Sometimes It’s a Bitch,” “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?” or “Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind”? Crystal Visions… The Very Best of Stevie Nicks is a curious set that wants to have it several different ways but doesn’t do justice to the material in the end. I still think Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks is the greatest single-disc distillation of her solo work, as outdated as it is.    

DOWNLOAD: “Leather and Lace,” “Rock and Roll (Live),” “Edge of Seventeen (Live)”

Watching this is like reading a Junichiro Tanizaki short story: you’re enthralled by all the ways that love can blossom into something toxic and obsessive. After all, we are witnessing a couple break up then crash back into each other’s lives repeatedly over a fifteen year span. It’s a slim narrative but one propelled by a lean, mean artistic minimalism that crafts some sublime, transcendent moments of love and lust careening towards the edge of destruction.

Don’t get Cold War’s title twisted as a statement on the encroachment of sociopolitical forces on the couple’s lives. They’re present in the background but not meaningfully engaged or explored. There’s not much emotional depth here, so Cold War is powered through by the driving forces of its beautiful, haunting images and its lead actress’ dynamic work.

The images carry an emotive power that the story’s fatalism and flirtations with oblivion may otherwise lack. It isn’t just that Zula and Wiktor are thunderstruck from their first meeting, but in the ways that they animalistically caress and devour each other. It’s in the way that watching Zula listen to “Rock Around the Clock” and carnally dance towards the edge of madness and self-destruction in front of an entire club says more about her displaced point-of-view than anything else. While Wiktor welcomes the modernity of Paris and changing times as an excuse to shed the oppressiveness of Polish society, Zula is continually ahead of the curve in her libertine morality and ferocious physicality. If only we had spent more time with her and less with Wiktor’s dyspeptic looking composer.

It’s engrossing to watch two people barrel into each other and disrupt everything around them for the sake of love, or something like it. It’s downright shocking to learn that director Pawel Pawlikowski intended this as a tribute to his parents love affair. How he managed to make this perpetual implosion look and feel like beautifully reoccurring rendezvous is impressive. What exactly drives them to and from each other isn’t always clear, but there’s still a richness here that is overpowering.

God, Willem Dafoe really is one of our most undervalued actors. Ignore for a second that he’s about twenty-five years older than Vincent van Gogh when he died and look at his performance here. He’s been this good for so long that it’s easy to forget just how captivating he is in close-up, how great he is in portraying full-bodied agony. If only the rest of At Eternity’s Gate had functioned at his level.

It’s not that At Eternity’s Gate is bad, it’s just that Julian Schnabel’s tendencies as a filmmaking veer towards incoherent visual continuity and a disregard for narrative sense. As van Gogh descends into madness, so too does the camera-work, except Schnabel begins his portrait of the artist at madness and only goes weirder from there. There’s also a distinct lack of purpose in reconciling with the artist as a man or with his work at play here. It’s as if Schnabel merely wanted to film pictorial landscapes and have Dafoe read actual letters from van Gogh describing his wonder at nature’s beauty.

It’s all a bit lazy and ugly with no character’s lasting long enough to get any definition aside from what the talented ensemble brings to them. The entire film is an enigma and a scattershot of ideas, symbols, and faces that hardly register as much of anything after a while. What was the intent of Schnabel’s insouciant camera choices: Are we trying to digest the artist’s near-zealotry to create in the face of omnipresent opposition and criticism? Are we trying to reconcile with art, understanding how it’s critiqued and glimpsed through its time and social prism? Are we aiming for something deeper, richer to be said about van Gogh?

The answer to all of these is yes and no simultaneously as At Eternity’s Gate takes all of them, some more vigorously than others, until it’s carrying too much water for its anemic shoulders to bear. It also becomes something of a gauntlet as scene after scene descends into van Gogh encountering towering, occasionally violent opposition to his technique and belief in his talent. Given that he died in obscurity and was only elevated as a master of the medium through his own invigorating technique, this is not entirely without a core of truth to it. This doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable to watch after the third or fourth scene, especially one with school children pelting him with rocks.

 This leads us back to Dafoe’s performance, the film’s lifeblood and divinity. It would be too easy to play van Gogh in a showy manner, he was mentally ill after all, but Dafoe forsakes such choices. His eyes simmer with a fully realized inner world, one that the rest of the film elides in favor of painting him as a simple victim of a cruel world. Yet it’s exactly that penetrating gaze that enlivens several tedious scenes, including a few with a wasted Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin. Where Schnabel is blanching away from asking the “why,” Dafoe is valiantly trying to exhume some pathos and sensitivity, to grapple with the madness and creativity of the great artist he’s playing. He makes At Eternity’s Gate worth watching.

I was texting back and forth with a good friend about the film’s I had yet to watch in order to complete my yearly Oscar challenge. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was one of them. Not for any deep reason beyond it was on Netflix so what was the rush, really? I think he succinctly put it best in that chat by describing it as thus: “Buster Scruggs is a Coen movie. It’s good but eh.”

Short, sweet, and to the point, that agnostic declaration of the film held true for myself when I finally got around to watching it. Comprised of six vignettes, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology set in the American frontier. There’s a certain lack of essential Coen eccentricity here. These stories are misanthropic, blackly comic, violent, and frequently add up to something less than their parts. Four of them vary from good to great while the other two are merely there.

The first section provides the film its namesake, and it’s a happy-go-lucky cartoon filled with geysers of fake blood and quirky country tunes. It’s a lot of fun even as it ends up feeling rudderless and like confirmation of the worst criticisms of the Coens filmography to date. There’s at least some personality on display here, which is more than can be said for the next two entries. James Franco sure does look handsome in his cowboy gear, but that’s about the only thing going for that segment. It plays like a Sergio Leone epic as refracted through a screwball prism then zapped of personality. The next story with Liam Neeson feels like a remnant of a horror anthology or something far more macabre than the rest of the film. It’s visually elegant but it doesn’t mesh with everything surrounding it.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is only as good as any particular moment, but it has to work hard to gain back the steam it loses by the time Franco’s mumbling about or Neeson’s buying a chicken that can do simple addition. Things manage to pickup in the final three segments, two of which are adaptations of other material. They adapt Jack London in “All Gold Canyon” and get Tom Waits to star in it, and it’s worth watching just to see that rascal play a grizzled prospector. This strangely feels like a part Waits was born to play, and his sour voice and gruffly textured face feel weirdly at home. The story involves a lot of waiting around for incident to happen, so its charms are squarely upon Waits’ skills as a character actor.

The best of the lot is “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” adapted from a short story by Stewart Edward White. It follows a pair of siblings hitching a ride with a wagon train to Oregon and the tragedy and chaos that ensue. Zoe Kazan is the one true innocent in the film, and her performance emerges as the best of the film. Hers is the most fully developed story and character with clear wants, needs, and the persistent feeling of inevitable tragedy that’s smartly deployed and slowly builds towards an anxious-fueled shootout.

Things wrap up in a stagecoach, which sounds boring but “The Mortal Remains” is a nice bit of funereal dread. It helps keep your attention when actors such as Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, and Jonjo O’Neill are delivering the twisty words and tricky tone. This one feels a bit like a gothic tale from Edgar Alan Poe reskinned as a western, yet it ends the film on an ambiguous note of mordant humor and unease.

Does it mildly pain me to take a few knocks against Fire Song? Yes, it does. I mean, how often are you greeted with a film about queer native characters? I’m sure there’s more out there, but they don’t exactly leap out of the film festival circuit limbo into the wider world very often, now do they? It doesn’t hurt that Fire Song feels lived-in and authentic in its depiction of a group living somewhere beyond the societal fringes and trying to scrape by. Yet Fire Song is yet another film where the male character’s personal journey is built upon the dead bodies of feminine ones. First, there’s his sister, she committed suicide an indeterminate amount of time before the narrative begins, then his girlfriend after discovering his bisexuality and being raped by the reservation’s prominent ne’er-do-well. And for a film that’s ostensibly about its main character’s tortured sexuality and love affair, the chemistry between the male leads isn’t quite there. Fire Song overplays the strength of their bond and misdiagnosis what’s so intriguing about it. It’s rare to see the truth of the native experience on film without the filtering of colonialism or historical dressing to keep it all at a remove. Fire Song is squarely modern and it’s interesting to watch these characters struggle to navigate the conservative cultural landscape with the ever encroaching modern world, or find a way to make the two of them work in something resembling harmony.