Reviews by JxSxPx

If there’s subgenre of prestige filmmaking I’d happily never have to see again, it’s the feel-good movie about racism. It’s your movies like The Help, Driving Miss Daisy, the types that orientate the narrative about America’s racial strife around good hearted white liberals that solve the issue for the thankful black characters. Or, even more common and insidious, is the narrative of the redemptive white racist learning the error of their ways through the patience and friendship of a saintly black figure.

Behold Green Book, the latest entry in the middle-class white liberal’s favorite movie of the year. I mean, here’s a film where the white main character argues that he’s blacker than the actual black character, and we’re supposed to see this as a growing moment for him, a slow dawning realization that his casual racism needs to be reexamined and evaluated. It’s not shocking to learn that this comes sprung from the mind of Peter Farrelly, trying to go straight after decades of gross out frat bro humor, or that much of Green Book plays like a near parody of an Oscar bait film then pulls away and plays it all stony faced.

The ego stroking of its white tears is at least made endurable by the presence of Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali in the main roles. Mortensen’s character is a dim-bulb prone to explosive outbursts of violence and gluttony, yet he manages to make the character tolerable, bordering on likable for long stretches of time despite the film’s framing of his machismo bullshit as heroic or noble. Ali has the harder task of making his character’s cloistered body language and stiffness as a recognizable body armor to shield against the never-ending assault of micro and macro aggressions. They form a bond that makes much of the reductive and sugar-coated film manageable even as Green Book would want you to believe that such kumbaya moments were common in America’s recent past.

Well, I’m surprised by just how much I enjoyed this tale of art forgery and “companionable alienation,” as Chuck Bowen of Slant put it so masterfully. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a whooper of a true story that narrows its scope down to the twin points of the criminal activity and the deliciously odd friendship that blossoms to further it. Unconventional casting can lead to grand rewards, and the sight of a comedic movie star and arthouse darling playing a mean drunk and shabby dilettante mark Can You Ever Forgive Me? as something of a minor gem from 2018.

Meet Leonore Carol “Lee” Israel, a biographical writer who achieved some notoriety for sparring with Estée Lauder to a publishing date and losing. Lee is carving out a life on the fringes of the literary world, quickly dwindling away her limited funds, drowning herself in alcohol and kitty litter, and avoiding any/all forms of intimacy. Her dream project, a massive biography of Fanny Brice, is considered a non-starter by her increasingly disinterested and avoidant agent (Jane Curtain, still wonderfully thorny).

To say we’re meeting Lee at her rock bottom would be dishonest. This is her at equilibrium. Her desperation is palpable and then the discovery of (real) letters from Brice to a friend inside of a book quickly turns into a light bulb moment. If the generic nature of the letter will only score a small price on the market for such artifacts, will the one she added (an amusing) postscript to net a larger profit? What was that adage from PT Barnum again?

It’s during this long con of literary forgeries, complete with watching her buy various types of old typewriters and aged paper stock to make them more ‘authentic,’ that Lee meets Jack Hock, an itinerant gay self-styled socialite who is clearly imaging himself as Oscar Wilde’s heir apparent. Their odd friendship is a meeting of two lost souls seeing kindred spirits and the brief chance of making a few dollars along the way. If there’s a sucker born every minute, then Jack is someone capable of seeing the potential mark with clear eyes and enough charm to pilfer their pockets while making them look the other way. Their pairing and daring is proof that truth is indeed stranger than fiction when you consider just how long Lee was able to keep the forgeries going and how quickly they’ll turn on each other in self-preservation.  

These are two juicy roles any actor would be glad to have. Praise be to director Marielle Heller for looking at Melissa McCarthy and thinking she could do the job. McCarthy doesn’t submerge her natural charisma and willingness to do anything in the name comedy, she redirects them into the interior life of a very angry person that is seemingly incapable of connecting with most of humanity. Her work as a dramatic actress is a reminder of the truism that comics make for great “serious” actors, as if comedy were somehow easier to play than drama or drama were somehow better.

If McCarthy’s burying her natural ebullience into a woman gone to living decay is a revelation, then Richard E. Grant’s buoyant comic work is a reaffirmation of his position as one of our darlings of cinema. Grant never appears to be acting. He always manages the neat trick of appearing to merely exist in front of the camera as whatever part he’s playing. He gets to play the merry prankster to McCarthy’s straight woman, and much of the pleasures of watching the film is to simply engage in their rapport. Their performances are twined together and Can You Ever Forgive Me? is entirely dependent on their believability in the roles. Together they provided two of 2018’s great performances.

If Can You Ever Forgive Me? stumbles, it’s in trying to expand beyond the art forgery and companionship between Lee and Jack. An interlude between Lee and a mousy bookseller (Dolly Wells) is a bit of a nonstarter. As is a fraught reunion between Lee and her ex (Anna Deavere Smith), which merely exists to expound on a point we’ve already witnessed and underscored: Lee’s discomfort in her own skin and ability to slip into the voices of other people with greater ease and comfort.

Call me crazy, but I much prefer the spiked, devilish moments to the ones that dip Can You Ever Forgive Me? towards sentimentality. Luckily, those barbed moments outweigh the others, which seems fitting for Lee and Jack.

Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t a movie. It’s a regurgitation of Freddie Mercury’s Wikipedia page for a little over two hours. Oh, were you hoping to learn anything else about the other members of Queen? Too bad, so sad, as they’re regulated to Mercury’s merry band of sidekicks (despite whatever limp proclamations of “we are family” that come out of their mouths).

It’s tempting to question whether or not Bohemian Rhapsody is a parody of the popular musician biopic. So much of the film is presented in as sanded off, dulled, and literal a manner that you wonder just how this thing has transformed into a blockbuster. It’s certainly not the pedestrian director or eye-roll inducing script, but if it’s some of the editing choices, Rami Malek’s central performance, and the soundtrack then things start making sense.

This is a film that documents the rigors of touring by having Freddie Mercury say his goodbyes from the stage as neon letters of various international cities zoom past him. I cringed as that scene played out, and I cannot imagine how anyone looked at it and thought it passed muster. It isn’t just that, but a vague sense that his father’s replayed mantra is going nowhere by about it’s third utterance and a self-negation in Mercury’s own queerness. There’s joke a plenty about Mercury being a hysterical queen, but the main gay relationship that gets screen time is one that’s incredibly toxic and juxtaposed with the warmth and support of his heterosexual one. Gross.

So, leave it to Malek’s performance to provide any kind of effusive praise I can manage for this thing. It’d be too easy to write it off as simple mimicry aided by solid work from the makeup and costume departments, yet there’s several scenes where Malek is called to really act and invest a multitude of layers to what’s happening. Malek’s working in an artful manner in a film that’s merely happy to shallowly entertain and provide a reductive approximation of rock and roll’s greatest frontman. Just listen to Greatest Hits, Vols 1 and 2 while skimming the Wikipedia page for approximately the same level of enjoyment.

The Last Five Years requires a more visionary mind to make the central conceit work on film, and Richard LaGravenese is not that director. He’s a wonderful writer (The Fisher King, Behind the Candelabra), but he’s something of a point-and-shoot style director. Sometimes this works to the narrative’s strength, such as the opening salvo of Anna Kendrick performing “Still Hurting,” but it’s more often a detriment as the competing narratives eventually blur and things become vaguely incomprehensible.

It doesn’t help that the musical’s narrative is a twisted knot meant to symbolize the widening gulf between the couple. There’s the female perspective that starts at the ending of the relationship and runs backwards, and the male perspective that starts at the beginning and runs in chronological order. On stage this is accomplished by having the performer’s alternate monologues except for one moment in the middle where they’re together, but the film sticks them together to function as an audience for each other’s deepest thoughts and to provide commentary. This works at the beginning, but the timelines begin to blur and merge as it goes on.

The other major problem is that half of the equation isn’t pulling their weight. Anna Kendrick is a marvel throughout as she demonstrates a capacity for acting while singing that makes her perfect for a movie musical. Her character’s full trajectory of heartbreak to a bittersweet rush of blossoming love is dynamite. Kendrick hits all her notes, both emotive and vocal, and demonstrates a range as a performer that marks her as one of under cherished cinematic talents. When The Last Five Years narrows its focus to her perspective, everything works.

The other half, Jeremy Jordan, doesn’t manage the same trick. Jordan is incredibly attractive, so the camera loves him, but he can’t hit the emotional depths that Kendrick is capable of. He’s clearly talented, but the intimacy of the camera seems to elude his performing abilities. Jordan performs well in lighter numbers, but the ones that require us to feel for him or understand his selfish or destructive choices, there’s an imbalance. We find ourselves siding with Kendrick during his monologues as she’s managed to render a complete person through her a performance, but he’s striking poses and hitting notes like a robotic theater kid.

The Last Five Years is lacking in interpretive innovation, only half forms, and is strangely emotionally withholding, but there’s still some good work found here. Much of it rests in Anna Kendrick’s performance, a few moments of breeziness, and a finale that manages to convey some emotional texture that breaks your heart. It’s just frustrating to think about what might have been here.

The horror genre is already overpopulated with an emotional hysteria regarding sex and emotional vulnerability, a strange moralism that must destroy all but the virginal would-be bride to the monster, and It Follows is merely obsessed with this strand running through the genre. The film is entirely subtext with no true depth beyond the dangling carrot of symbolism that borders on the incoherent. Is the “it” a fear of STDs, the spectre of rape culture, societal moralism for sexual activity in young adults, or a grand fear of intimacy? The answer is yes, It Follows is all of them and none of them. It’s whatever you want/need it to be to get you through to the end of the film.

It doesn’t help that It Follows grows increasingly dull as the sequences involving the “it” recycles the same setup and payoff throughout. There’s a lack of inspiration in the execution and possibilities of a shape-shifting creature that can remain unseen by all but the infected that’s ultimately a gut punch to the wider work. It Follows is less of a horror film than a puzzle that’s begging for you to solve it. A cinematic Rubik’s Cube where none of the sides will ever successfully lineup.  

It Follows is so overly aestheticized and fussily obsessed with brainy classicism that it undermines its good points. It’s clear that writer/director David Robert Mitchell is aiming for a neo-masterpiece of grand ambition and a full plate of symbolic heft, but there’s too many half-formed ideas, the central conceit is too catch all, it’s too overpowered by its synth-heavy score and lacking in real tension or characters worth investing your time/energy. It Follows sure is pretty to look at and listen to, but the film’s thrust game is weak. It’s ultimately as unfulfilling as the first awkward stumbles into sexual activity.

Yorgos Lanthimos is one hell of an idiosyncratic auteur. Not just in his use of fishbowl lenses, or the darkly humorous conceits, or the generally corrosive aura that permeates every scene, but in his overall choices of unconventional, occasionally incoherent material. The Favourite keeps up his streak of oddball cinema by turning his weird eye towards the usually staid costume drama.

The Favourite has far more in common with the mildly anachronistic entries like Amadeus or Marie Antoinette then it does something like Victoria & Abdul or The Danish Girl. Think of this as a distaff Barry Lyndon after having ingested a copious amount of illicit substances. It is delightfully batshit.

The primary focuses is on highlighting the pettiness involved in obtaining and maintaining power in the court, and a subplot involving war with France and political party power plays is rendered as mere window dressing to parrying between the queen’s rival sycophants. Was that too long a sentence that made the plotline sound somewhat like word salad? Let me pull it back and explain in more detail.

The Favourite provides not one but three of the best female performances of the year. Scratch that, it’s three of the best performances of the year in the wider field. Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman) is entirely dependent upon Sarah (Rachel Weisz), her confidant, longtime friend and lover, who is often treated as the real power broker behind the crown. Into their clandestine affair crashes Abigail (Emma Stone), Sarah’s cousin and a woman who hides towering ambition behind a mask of sweet servitude. Having grown up in a hard knock life and sensing a chance for financial comfort and persona stability, Abigail displaces Sarah as the queen’s favorite (hey, get the title) but Sarah’s not going down without a fight.

Much of the film is concerned with watching Abigail and Sarah circling each other for weaknesses and they emerge as feral cats looking for dominance. Queen Anne operates as woman entombed in entitlement and pampered infantilism, look at how she’s easily distracted by the latest shiny object or the person who most readily strokes her ego to make a final decision. Think of how Abigail outpaces Anne and secures herself a marriage above her station, a secure financial position, and poisons the well against Sarah all in one sweeping gesture. Sarah is far more direct and withholds the dripping honey of Abigail. Sarah functions less as a shiny new object and far more as a long-term partner in a relationship that’s obtaining rust in the joints.

There’s a lot of material for this incredibly talented trio of actresses to play. Weisz possesses a polite sternness and stiff-lipped formality that registers as both incredibly intelligent/competent and unnerving/frightening. Don’t let that lovely face fool you, there’s a dragoness lurking beneath the surface and she knows she doesn’t need to grandly demonstrate her powers loudly. While Stone puts her canned performance in La La Land to shame here, and nearly steals the entire show. Her faux subordinate charms are slowly peeled away in scenes where she (literally) beats an officer for expressing romantic/sexual interest in her or she threatens one of the queen’s rabbits.

Yet it’s Coleman who gives the most aggressively daring and complicated performance of the three. Weisz and Stone have clearly delineated characters and trajectories to play while Coleman is a grotesquerie that reveals real human feeling and pain in unexpected moments. As Queen Anne’s body succumbs to gout, poor eyesight, and a childish temperament, Coleman plays it all at a draggy pitch, think Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Then she’ll turn around and reveal that she owns these seventeen rabbits as a method of dealing with the various stillbirths and lost pregnancies she’d endured over her lifetime. It’s a performance that hits a few notes then surprises you with a completely new set of them at unexpected moments.

The Favourite is most enjoyable when it narrows its focus to central triangle, and a whole series of subplots involving taxation, the war with France, and Nicholas Hoult’s sublime supporting work as an inept Machiavellian prime minister all get tossed around and don’t build to anything satisfactory. Although, a ball scene that descends into the vision of Hoult nearly voguing in full-on period garb is one opening fan (thworp!) away from Madonna’s infamous MTV performance, and it’s completely strange and wonderful. These strands don’t sustain their heft throughout the third act and the end of the film feels like a series of mildly unsatisfactory climaxes until we get to the real ending, which manages to stick the landing with a haunting grace note.

Untethered from the basic physics of live-action cinema, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse becomes the clearest, purest example of a comic book brought to fully realized cinematic life. A bit of Jack Kirby’s crackle here, a little bit of old school techniques there, and the whole thing is populated with the hallmarks of comic’s more fringe elements that much of the MCU has elided so far. There’s multiple universes, different versions of the same character meeting, and the death of a popular character that sticks and matters to the wider story/universe.

The elastic reality of a comic book’s universe is the foundational idea of Into the Spider-Verse. I mean, the Green Goblin here resembles the Ultimate Spider-Man’s literal goblin-like creature but amped to eleven, maybe even twelve. This version of Dr. Octopus has tentacles that appear to be both firm and spongy at the same time, so the elasticity of the film’s world and comic book ethos pours down into every expressionistic character design or hyperactive imagery.

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It’s absolutely wonderful to just stare at every frame for the amount of detail and unique artistic choices. This is one of the most original animated films I saw in 2018, so don’t let the fact that it’s another spin around the Spider-Man neighborhood deter you from watching it.

Much of this blast of kinetic energy and fresh air comes from sticking Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as the film’s central Spider-Man and placing Peter Parker as his older mentor figure. The film manages to add several more Spiders from various universes all while managing to poke fun at the redundancy of origin stories and power sets. It helps that the film manages to also add some differentiation to a few supporting players, like Aunt May (Lily Tomlin, sweet but sour) as one universe’s femme version of Alfred and Q.

Half of the fun is waiting for which versions of beloved fringe Marvel Spider characters are going to show up. There’s Noir (Nicolas Cage, alternately brooding and kitsch in perfect harmony), Spider-Ham (John Mulaney, a great fit of actor/character), Peni (Kimiko Glenn), and Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld, please give her a spinoff) as imports with individual animation designs and styles. We also get two versions of Peter Parker: this movie universe’s beloved/dead (Chris Pine) and the main Marvel universe’s middle-aged and bitter one (Jake Johnson, a goddamn delight). And Oscar Isaac in a surprise end credits addition that I won’t spoil. Into the Spider-Verse manages to balance all of these characters in a satisfactory way, mainly by knowing which ones to develop (Steinfeld, Johnson) and which to keep in smaller parts (Cage, Mulaney, Glenn).

By the time we get to the dimensional shattering and completely dazzling finale I was ready to proclaim Into the Spider-Verse as the best Spider-Man movie, ever. Then we get to the finale and end credits, and I had changed my mind. This isn’t just the best Spider-Man movie, this has to rank very high in Marvel’s cinematic output across the board.

Regardless if it’s Morales or Parker under the suit, Into the Spider-Verse shows us that the symbolism of Spider-Man is a bottomless well of relatable insecurity, self-assurance, and memorable emotional truth and humor. The balance between humor, action, and heart is maintained throughout by presenting a fully-fledged character before he even gets around to obtaining powers and maturing into the mask. This is a 117 minute love letter to Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, Jason Latour, Robbi Rodriguez, and everyone else who’s ever taken the job of scripting/drawing the adventures of Marvel’s friendly neighborhood hero.          

The clear progeny of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, itself a noir story filmed with detached air quotes, The Big Lebowski is both a love letter and complete deconstruction of the Raymond Chandler style of dense, incomprehensible crime story. Oh, it’s also a merrily sardonic film filled to the brim with quotable dialog and one of the greatest performances of Jeff Bridges’ career, maybe the definitive performance. It’s also one of the densest films the Coen Brothers have made thus far, which is really saying something as many of their films are tricky, thick narratives.

As the cavalcade of colorful characters introduce themselves to the ever-shifting story and the story becomes increasingly circular, it becomes crystal clear that The Big Lebowski about mood and dialog above all else. The central mystery doesn’t matter, nor does the fact that the Dude is in over his head, but the attitude of the film is what ensnares you and keeps you going.

I mean, this is a film where the central character is a stoner who wears jellies, drinks White Russians, and uses bowling as his life’s great constant. It’s the Dude, or “Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing,” that abides and drives the ship here. As such, you needed an actor as comfortable with various styles of acting as Bridges. He of the seemingly endless range, he who appears as at ease in a Terry Gilliam ubran fantasia as he does in strict dramas and broad comedies, combines all of his different skills into one major role that is impossible to imagine under anyone else’s guiding hands.

Bridges appears to be effortlessly embodying the part with no visible acting involved. It’s a strange performance as he must inhabit a character that seemingly never registers much emotionally while also delivering various comedic bits with a straight face. He must play a character that is eternally in a fog but smart enough to game an ever-shifting number of players vying for his attention. It’s a tricky part but one that Bridges eases into from his first moment on screen until his last variation of “fuck it, let’s bowl.”

If the labyrinthine structure of The Big Lebowski reflects the basic architecture of a Raymond Chandler novel, then the Dude is Philip Marlowe as hippie burnout. Much like that private eye, the Dude operates by his own moral code and singular motivation, in this case revenge for his ruined rug that “really tied the room together.” His simplistic motivation spirals out into cadre of oddball characters that feel lifted from Chandler’s writings – rich businessman, free-spirit daughter, gold digger wife, cops on a familiar basis with the hero, the muscle putting the squeeze on the hero and his cohorts. They’re all present and accounted for and revealed to be ultimately unimportant.

The Dude always returns to a Zen-like state, typically by drinking a White Russian, sparking up, and doing a few roads of bowling with his friends. Those friends are Coen mainstays Steve Buscemi and John Goodman in what have to be the most memorable and vibrant supporting performances in a film littered with idiosyncratic characters. Goodman’s violatile Vietnam vet frequently calms himself down by declaring that they go back to bowling. This mantra is less an admission of defeat at any given point in the film and more a sort of spiritual regrouping, a centering process of sorts, a reminder that life can and will go on.

After all, the Dude abides.

Ok, let’s give DreamWorks some credit here, they managed to release a film with a female lead before Pixar. Monsters vs. Aliens came out in 2009, and it wouldn’t be until 2012’s Brave that Pixar would catch-up with their rival on that feat. I’m not saying this is the only bit of positive criticism I can hurl Monsters vs. Aliens way, but it is the most enthusiasm I can muster towards it.

The rest is a grab-bag of celebrity voices, thinly written characters, 50s sci-fi movie parodies and clichés, and a bare minimum of pop culture references disguised as jokes. At least there’s that from DreamWorks, the worst offender of that particular brand of “humor.” Well, there is the whole bit about Stephen Colbert voicing the president and looking/acting like his Colbert Report character was transformed into something resembling Ronald Reagan. But other than that and a character basically performing Dance, Dance Revolution to hijack a space ship while Aqua plays in the background, no you read that right, there’s relatively little references as jokes here.

It’s just a shame that the majority of Monsters vs. Aliens goes through the motions as quickly as possible and still feels overly long. There’s no wit, no inventiveness, no sense of joy or adventure here. Compare it to the comic book love letter The Incredibles, the bruised heart of How to Train Your Dragon, or the emotional heft of ParaNorman and watch contemporaneous films put this one to disgrace.

The innocence of the Winnie the Pooh movies is what engages me the most about them. Here’s an hour, sometimes more but frequently not by much, of gentle, quiet humor, loveable characters, and a complete lack of irony, snark, and pop culture references. The creatures of Hundred Acre Woods learn life lessons, charm with their simple and silly personalities, and live in a world that’s rich and warm with its soft watercolors and solid ink details. It’s easy to enjoy spending time with them.

So here’s Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, one of the weaker entries but still a reliably sweet and innocent hour-plus of entertainment. Here the Hundred Acre Woods learn to examine their prejudices, rethink preconceived notions of “the other,” and learn to show compassion and empathy for the plight of those they once feared/misunderstood. It doesn’t hurt that the symbol of that plea for compassion and empathy is an adorable purple stuffed elephant named Lumpy with a British accent and infectious laugh. He befriends Roo and much of the film is about their budding friendship and unlearning the prejudices the adults taught them about the other.

Then we get to the end and I haven’t felt quite as much empathy for an animated elephant crying for his mother since my last viewing of Dumbo. While Pooh’s Heffalump Movie is not the equal of that masterpiece, it is an enjoyable little featherweight companion story with a tidy little moral for the tots. It’s clearly a direct-to-video effort that got changed at the last minute, so the animation displays those weaknesses and the Carly Simon songs are generally weak, but there’s still plenty to recommend here, like the sight of Roo and Lumpy frolicking through the forest like the innocent children they are. It’s slight but it does its job well.