Reviews by JxSxPx

This is…fine, I guess, as these things go. It’s hard to muster up much enthusiasm or spite for Dick Tracy’s G-Men. It’s improbable like any of these movie serials, has a pleasing lead actor, there’s contortions into ridiculous shapes to keep the drama/action going, but it all just feels so meh. A persistent sense of autopilot lingers in every frame, same goes for the sense that this is Dick Tracy slapped into a generic adventure without any of his colorful or outlandish supporting players and rogues.

The major saving grace of G-Men is Ralph Byrd as Dick Tracy. He plays the part with quotes around the action at all times, and frequently smirks to himself during the more credibility straining moments as if to single to the audience that he’s in on the joke. He’s a serious joy in his square-jawed charisma that it’s a shame the serial couldn’t muster up a better villain for him to tangle with. Where Byrd seems continually engaged and even ironically modern in his square peg gumshoe, Irving Pichel just seems bored and asleep at the wheel as Zarnoff.

Any comic book adaptation, especially one from pulp origins, lives or dies based on its antagonist and supporting players, and it’s here that G-Men persistently trips. There’s no Tess Trueheart, but Jennifer Jones as Gwen Andrews, a thankless secretarial role that caused Jones to run to New York for some challenging acting gigs. Junior has been scrubbed, and good luck finding any of the colorful gangsters from the comics. Zarnoff had potential, but Pichel can’t commit to his mad scientist with shadowy ties to the Three Powers (we’re in full-on WWII paranoia here). It emerges as a fine if overly padded and eye-rolling inducing bit of thrill-seeking, but it’s easy to see why the Dick Tracy serials faded so quickly after this entry. Republic released four serials, with G-Men as the third, and this one is too aloof, too sleepy, too lacking in personality to make for a viable, long-lasting franchise.

Everyone’s least favorite Marvel franchise finally gets a thoroughly enjoyable entry after a mediocre first one and a sloppy second. Third time really is the charm for the Asgardian gang, even if Ragnarok repeats many of the same problems as Thor and The Dark World. Why do films ostensibly about Thor, Loki, Odin, and all of the rest spend an inordinate amount of time away from Asgard and on a completely different earth? Even The Dark World frequently forgot to include its namesake villains and their realm for much of the running time in favor of more Jane Foster and spending time on Earth.

Thor: Ragnarok is most successful when it sticks to Asgard, and lets everything rip with a freewheeling charm that indulges the gonzo-like nature of Jack Kirby’s imagination. It becomes the cinematic equivalent to joy riding in a van with a wicked airbrushed Thor raining down lighting on the side and cheesy, incredibly loud hair metal blasting out of the speakers. The full-fledged embrace of the ludicrous nature of the Thor films makes for the mountains of exposition to go down easier. Hell, it makes it down-right enjoyable as director Taika Waititi has clearly encouraged a certain tongue-in-cheek approach to the material that makes a lot of it feel like free associative riffing.

This is after all a film that combines Thor and Hulk on Sakaar, Asgard in strife as Hela returns to wreak havoc, Surtur waiting for his chance to make things go boom, Valkyrie, Skurge, and Heimdal all vying for supporting spots, Korg deadpanning, and a cameo from Dr. Strange. It’s bloated and many of these various characters and tones clash in discord or get completely forgotten as it goes on, but it still manages to make a lot of it a great deal of fun. Watching Strange, Thor, and Loki interact with each other for a few brief minutes is a pure distillation of the joy of reading comics as a kid come to three-dimensional life.

Still doesn’t mean that all of this humor, energy, and joy can entirely paper over the problems with the Marvel films. It becomes increasingly obvious that Skurge (Karl Urban, giving his all for not) was only included for two reasons. One of them was to recreate an infamous series of panels from Walt Simonson’s run, and the other was to act as someone for Hela (Cate Blanchett, clearly having a grand time playing a grand villain) to deliver reams of exposition to and provide someone for her to talk to that isn’t a gigantic CGI wolf or undead soldier. Skurge isn’t the only character given the shaft in this franchise as Lady Sif is nowhere to be found, the Warriors Three never got the spotlight they deserved, and Anthony Hopkins is clearly marking time until his contract is up.

Then there’s the curious problem of Thor: Ragnarok feeling like two different films smashed together just because. Maybe Marvel doesn’t believe that Hulk could handle a film entry on his own merits even with the talents of Mark Ruffalo in the role, but Planet Hulk  segment feels like an overly-long distraction from the more interesting elements. The title plays into the mythological and prophesized destruction and rebirth of the Nordic god’s home world, and with Hela leading the charge but the middle of the film pulling focus away to become a buddy film with Thor and Hulk, she’s frequently left adrift. Marvel has a bad habit of smartly choosing villains for their films and then giving them nothing to do, or leaving them stranded as but one mere cog in a massive machine. Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster springs to mind, and he’s saved entirely on the strength of Goldblum’s oddity and asymmetric performing style. Goldblum manages to take a nothing role and turn it into something spectacular through sheer force of will and idiosyncratic performing style.

Cate Blanchett is a strong enough actress to nearly single-handedly succeed in masking this problem, but then your realize that the goddess of death would have laid waste to Asgard in half the time it appears to be taking here. Still, it does give her the chance to underline the lies and historical half-truths that have been fed down from generations about just how Odin claimed the Nine Realms and brokered peace. She’s a genocidal figure craving power and capable of sprouting a crown of thorns – I love her, both in the comics and in the movie. The single best sequence has to be Hela laying waste to all of the Valkyrie. Never before has any Marvel movie dared to even try a sequence as beautifully shot and composed as this. It looks like Jack Kirby panels as painted by Alex Ross come to life.

Holding it all together as best it can be held together is Chris Hemsworth. Who knew a life-size action figure would grow to become such a great comedic actor? There’s an arch way he has to playing Thor’s dumb-jock moments with wry, ironic quotes around the action that calls to mind the way Kurt Russell stumbled through Big Trouble in Little China. His chemistry with all of the major players (Tom Hiddleston, Tessa Thompson, Ruffalo, and Blanchett) gives a goofy, solid center to a movie that frequently plays out like a pinball machine having an acid trip.

It’s only when Thor: Ragnarok has to reign itself in and kowtow to the Marvel formula, which is too often for my liking, that things go horribly wrong. There’s a lot to like and enjoy about this movie, but the stumbles and diversions stand out. It’s best to just sit back and embrace the “why the hell not” nature of the whole thing. It’s not every day you get the chance to watch Goldblum liquefy a dude, Blanchett sprout horns, or Thompson play a drunken, bisexual mythological figure. All of that alone is charming enough to spend a few hours invested in.

Maybe any one of the other 50 entries in the Three Mesquiteers franchise are actually good, enjoyable B-movie westerns that manage to thrill within their limited scope, but New Frontier is not one of them. Even at barely under an hour it feels padded and stretched thin. There’s no nuance or texture to the story, characters, and complicating factors so everything goes in a perfectly straight line from beat to beat.

The most enjoyable thing about New Frontier, or Frontier Horizon as it’s also known but where that name came from is anyone’s guess, is the flagrant disregard for history on display. The Three Mesquiteers work as Pony Express riders in 1914 despite the Pony Express having stopped around 1860 or so. Then there are the modern dress and makeup styles on display, the fact that the characters drive covered wagons still for some reason despite the presence of the automobile en masse around this time, and the inability to hide phone and power lines in numerous shots.

This came out the same year as Stagecoach, and one can clearly see John Wayne counting time before his big star-making turn would land him in better material. He appeared in eight of these films, and New Frontier would prove his final appearance in the franchise. Keep a lookout for Jennifer Jones in her debut and billed under her real name, Phylis Isley, in a thankless role as the granddaughter to a curmudgeon. Jones recites her lines, manages not to embarrass herself, and hits her marks all the while displaying none of the flexible acting range or innate complex vulnerability her later work would highlight so effectively or utilize to subvert her movie star image.

New Frontier is only of interest to fans of Wayne or Jones right before their careers would skyrocket. We already knew what better work Wayne was capable of thanks to his first pairing with John Ford, so it’s interesting to watch him in “dues paying” mode. Once David O. Selznick got his hands on Jones and finessed her career a bit, he would remove this and Dick Tracy’s G-Men from her resume. Who could blame him as New Frontier is so immediately forgettable.

Can we all just admit that television-to-film adaptations typically don’t work, and that they emerge as bloated episodes on the big screen? Or that they emerge with a distinct feeling of three or more episodes strung together? Well, prepare to be amazed as In the Loop functions on its own merits as a brilliant piece of wicked political satire with no prior knowledge of the show necessary to enjoy it all.

In the wake of our current never-ending political quagmire it’s almost difficult to even mildly chuckle at the lunatics running the asylum. Yet the sight of Peter Capaldi wrapping his Scottish brogue around a series of expletive-laden verbal tirades is impressive in the musicality and muscularity with which he attacks them. A personal favorite is a threat of sticking his cock so far down someone’s throat that it’ll come out their anus. That’s nearly avant-garde poetry in its maximalist prose and graphic absurdity.

Even better is how even the adults in the room are rendered into mere cartoons and we’re displaced into a phantasmagoria of chest-thumping egos clashing in one verbal sparring match and slapstick spectacle after another. Among all of the raucous personalities there’s the major plot of a hapharzd minister (Tom Hollander), who can’t seem to keep his foot out of his mouth, inadvertently supporting a US war based on questionable intelligence from a source dubbed “Iceman” and fending off a constituent who claims his office wall is destroying his mother’s garden (a hilariously deranged Steve Coogan).

In-between all of this is a State Department warhawk (David Rasche) fighting with a more stable-minded colleague (Mimi Kennedy) and a lieutenant that’s a bit of a dove (James Gandolfini). In the Loop isn’t afraid to make any of these people appear incompetent for their jobs or as fragile children warring on the playground, and this is funny in the spikiest way imaginable. After all, it’s a satire of the Iraq war and Dubya years, but there’s a relevance here as our current commander is saber-rattling with North Korea and in a persistent state of petulance over special investigations.  

In the Loop will make you laugh out loud, and then squirm in a way that only truly good satire can. There’s too much of a kernel of truth here for comfort. Even when we want to pertend that adults are running things, there’s frequently plenty of evidence to the contrary. This one is just soundtrack to Capaldi calling everyone a cocksucker or telling them to go fuck themselves like a piece of classical symphony.

Well, this one is at least better than the prior entry in this never-ending franchise that has grown stale and cemented into a series of character tropes and ideas recycled from one chapter to the next. There’s nothing new added to the expanded mythology here besides the presence of young, dewy lovers who are obviously intended to take over the franchise once Johnny Depp is ready to let Jack Sparrow rest, and even then, they play out as lukewarm versions of the characters played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. Any franchise has a natural lifespan, and Disney’s refusal to let this one go makes the freewheeling, anarchic, bloated fun of Gore Verbinski’s three films look worse as more chapters dilute their luster.

Dead Men Tell No Tales borrows its title from one of the few pieces of ephemera in the ride that the prior films hadn’t already consumed and regurgitated back up on the screen. Part of me waited for the talking skull to drop the line before a shocking action or explosive action scene kicked in, but there was no such luck. Instead, we’re treated to another entry where a villain is stuck to live a supernatural life stuck out at sea. The franchise seems to view the seas as both the nurturing mother, the charismatic devil, and a perpetual state of limbo depending on where they fall on the protagonist, antagonist spectrum.

Here we follow Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites, just as bland and dreamy as Bloom) as he tries to break the curse left upon his father at the end of At World’s End. Concurrently we also follow Carina Smith (Kaya Scodelario), a young woman doomed to be killed for the crimes for witchcraft because she can perform complex mathematics as she tries to unravel the mystery of the map that no man can read. Naturally, their ambitions dovetail as they seek the same object: the trident of Poseidon, an object with the ability to break any of the sea’s many curses. Jack Sparrow gets drawn in, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush is still in glorious ham mode) replays his fremeny antics, and our villain is a ghoul stuck at sea with a past that ties directly with Sparrow’s.

If any of this sounds routine and familiar in this franchise, then good, that means you’re paying attention. Dead Men Tell No Tales is simply a Frankenstein-like super-entry in the franchise that takes pieces from the prior four films and shoves them all together. Occasionally it manages to liven things up, a zombie shark attack is bit of spark and fun that much of the surrounding film is missing and Javier Bardem playing to rafters of the neighboring theater, but it mainly feels like you’ve seen all of this before and done better. It’s the sight of a franchise doing a soft reboot on itself after fourteen years.

And it still repeats the major problem of On Stranger Tides by mistaking Sparrow as a leading character when he works best as a loopy, chaotic supporting player. It was shocking to revisit The Curse of the Black Pearl and be reminded of how shocking and daring his original performance was in lieu of what has happened since. It’s now a predictable series of tics strung together in a perfunctory manner that suggests the sight of Marlon Brando slumming it in dreck like The Island of Dr. Moreau. It doesn’t help that Thwaites can’t manage the straight-man demeanor to Depp that Bloom actually did well with, and that whole scenario merely becomes something of another cog in a noisy machine.

Somehow, Dead Men Tell No Tales is the shortest of the four films at just a little over two hours, yet it still manages to feel as stretched out as At World’s End, the longest entry in the series. A good chance that the film’s inability to surprise us like the first three could with their completely bonkers set pieces and mythology could. Now this franchise feels like one of the rides at the Disney theme parks – rigidly locked into place and stiffly moving through the same motions over and over again. Except it’s not as fun as any of those rides.

They’ve already announced plans for a sixth film. Please, for the love of god, send this franchise to the locker already. Send it out to sea, return it to the murky bilge, insert whatever sea-related pun you’d like Disney, just give this franchise a rest already.

Ah, The Invasion a movie compromised by committee interference and the last minute decision to bring in not only the Wachowskis to rewrite the script but James McTeigue to handle the reshoots. This leaves The Invasion as a film in search of an identity. Well, that and a core idea, any idea will do after a while. These additions stick out for how improbable and tonally different they are from everything else going on around them, and the long-standing tradition of adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel reflecting the main paranoia hovering in the zeitgeist of their time crumbles with a gentle breeze.  

You see, The Invasion is the fourth in a series of these things, and the clear winner for Worst in Show. They come out roughly every fifteen to twenty years (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007, so we’re due for another in a few years), and tend to keep the basic pieces in place but shift around what exactly they’re an extended allusion for by swallowing whole major political and cultural concerns of their eras. The Invasion makes vague posturing towards the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror as a concept, and other such things that kept us all paranoid and awake in fright during the Dubya-era, but it does nothing with them. They merely exist as window dressing for a psychological thriller that dissipates quicker than cotton candy in water.

While it’s impossible to know what exactly the original vision was from Oliver Hirschbiegel, it was clearly not this. A climatic car chase is everything that’s wrong with modern blockbuster film-making in its visual incoherence and flagrant disregard for the laws of physics, and a tacked on happy ending is just a slap in the face to the audience. No, it might be worse than that, it might even cross the line into straight-up contempt for the intelligence of the audience at large. All of this leads to a pile-up of problems where the film feels simultaneously unfinished, overly indulgent, and completely underwhelming in its chaos.

Even worse is how it wastes such a killer group of talent in front of the camera with thankless tasks and incoherent performances. Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig seem completely lost here, with Kidman on paper a brilliant choice for a human trying to masquerade as a frigid alien in order to survive. She’s best when dealing with darker material and impulses so she’s fine in the first half, but The Invasion asks her to suddenly become an action-heroine in its final moments and she’s ill-equipped for this. And poor character actors like Josef Sommer, Celia Weston, Veronica Cartwright, and Jeffrey Wright are left with half-sketched out characters that they try valiantly to make work. It’s a sight to behold, especially Cartwright as a woman who knows something is wrong because her husband no longer abuses her, and one only feels for their herculean task.

If only The Invasion had risen to the level of a good bad movie instead of just being an impotent bore. It just lays there spinning along making 99 minutes feel like interminable hours upon hours of flaccid paranoia and empty spectacle. This can’t even arise to the level of cult or camp enjoyment, and that’s the real sin. If you can’t be good, at least be enjoyably terrible.

Sometimes Clint Eastwood’s penchant for fast, loose, and cheap directing projects ends up working in the film’s favor, and other times it sinks the production because the sutures bleed throughout. American Sniper’s quickie nature was evident, look no further than that laughable fake baby, and The Bridges of Madison County excelled because an overly popular dime store romance became something greater in his no-fuss hands. Then there’s the films like Million Dollar Baby which not only benefit from the fast and loose approach, but the material demands it and is enriched by it.

I don’t go to Eastwood looking for radical alterations to the formulas that he so often works best within, but that doesn’t mean he can’t surprise you. Million Dollar Baby follows many of the conventions and beats of a typical boxing film, and then it shocks us with a twist that remains true to who these characters are, what they want out of their lives, and where they’re trying to reach.

Sometimes Eastwood’s work can hit squarely in sentimentality that feels unearned or garish, but not here. There’s still a sentimental streak, but it’s rough-hewn and calloused, much like the main characters. There’s a confidence on display here that’s quite rich and rewarding in how deep emotional resonances are never spelled out but lived-in and honed with a fine eye of character detail and imagery. Look at the relationship between Eastwood’s ornery bastard and Morgan Freeman’s former boxer Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris. Eddie functions as the film’s observer and chorus, narrating this story of strived for redemption, failure, and penance. He exists as Eastwood’s lone employee and, seemingly, only friend as a form of apology and emotional flagellation for allowing him to partake in a fight that he never should have in the first place.

None of this is spelled out, but it’s right there on the surface if you’re ready to engage with the material and look for it. It is a type of unadorned art that doesn’t announce itself as such. Much in the same way that Eastwood’s failures and regrets as a father and brought to the fore by the presence of Maggie, the boxer of the title, and the ways in which his character taunts and teases a Catholic priest with a series of escalating questions about the absurdity of the religion. This is the closest to acts of faith he can go until the very end where the last shot is something of a quizzical blur. Has he achieved a level of penance for his sins, or is he still beating himself up for yet another one?

The film never answers these questions, but instead presents us three individual characters and looks at them with an even-keeled and clear-eyed perspective. We see them as they are, faults and failures, dreams and ambitions, all of it. It’s also an excuse to sit back and watch three superb performances. Eastwood and Freeman are veterans who can imbue pathos into this material in their sleep, but both of them are clearly engaged and enlivened by what the script tasks them with. Eastwood in particular is shockingly good, full of depth and a kind of poetry of streamlined acting. There’s not an ounce of fat in his directing or acting choices here, just a presentation of everything we need to know about the characters and their world.

But Million Dollar Baby would live or die upon the central role of Maggie, and Hilary Swank proves that the Oscar she won for Boys Don’t Cry was no fluke one-off. Swank’s become something of an uneven actress, prone to overacting like in Amelia, or poor material choices like The Reaping, but when she finds the right role she’s positively engrossing and electrifying. (Glimpse The Homesman for a more recent great turn from her.) She’s stubborn and intense here, a woman striving to better herself and find a way out of the extreme poverty and low station that she comes from, and thinks that boxing might be the best and only option. This back-story is not entirely dissimilar to Swank’s own life as a trailer-park girl who became a movie star, and that core of truth is something that other actors couldn’t bring to the role. Two Oscars may seem a bit much for her career, but she deserved them both and this performance may even be the better one between the two.

If there’s any fat to be found in Million Dollar Baby it’s in the scenes with Maggie’s white trash family. These scenes play out as grotesque comedy, almost a vaudevillian series of interludes to the dour, somber film that orbits these scenes. Margo Martindale plays her role as the mother to the tilt by emphasizing the vainglorious, ignorant nature of the character that immediately receives an act of kindness and questions the motivations and ramifications of it. These scenes are brief and over nearly as soon as they begin, and it’s quiet easy to write them off as everything else around them is so strong.

Simplicity is the key to the effectiveness of the story here. It’s not entirely a boxing film as it’s a film about a boxer. There’s training montages, series set in the boxing ring, but it’s what happens in a fateful fight that reveals its deeper ambitions and hidden moral quandaries. What happens feels authentic and believable to these characters, and that’s all that we can ask of a great story well told, really.

Not a direct remake of the sweaty, paranoid original by John Frankenheimer, but another adaptation of the source material, this version of The Manchurian Candidate still can’t seem to emerge from the omnipresent shadow of the 1962 film. Not entirely fair as this version makes numerous changes (some that pay off, many that don’t) to the narrative and truly tries valiantly to be its own. The problem is, the changes more often than not render the story as a mere political thriller that becomes ephemeral while the other lasts for its political ramifications, trenchant satire and dark humor, or its hothouse of escalating paranoia.

Jonathan Demme’s reworking of the material is far too self-serious for much of the time and it throws the material off balance. It plays all of its science-fiction brainwashing with a straight face and this causes some of the audacity to wash away. This one reveals itself less and less about vast potential conspiracy theories or foreign entities disrupting our political system and more about the vast media landscape and the power of corporations over our lives. It’s necessary to differentiate itself, but something is deeply lost in the mix.

A major change is how Denzel Washington’s Marco is now more of a piece of the central plot whereas Frank Sinatra’s was merely trying to help Shaw regain his life and mind by  exposing the puppet strings. Here, Marco is not only intertwined with the conspiracy, but he’s a pawn that they can use to justify and examine their ends. This all holds together until the very end where things don’t just go sideways, but buckle under the strains and fall apart. It ends with Marco setting a photo of his platoon adrift at sea while walking around the brainwashing facility, and the whole thing smacks of contrived and reaching uplift. It doesn’t jive with the rest of the world and ideas expressed within this film.

This would all be forgivable if Mrs. Iselin, here reworked as a long-term Senator, was as engrossing and disturbing as she was in the original. Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Iselin was a terrifying ice queen who pulled the strings out of lustful ambitions for power. She was a woman who would happily give everything to achieve her goals in an Old Testament-style form of sacrifice. Here Senator Shaw is a woman operating out of mere hubris and is far less shocking and villainous. Try as valiantly as Meryl Streep might to reconstitute the role into her own imagining, there’s no removing Lansbury’s career achievement work in the original and Streep’s essay on the role comes across poorly.

Then there’s the choice to downgrade the tragedy of Raymond Shaw. Laurence Harvey, not a great actor by any stretch, expressed a haunted, wounded soul that was marching towards a tragic ending no matter what. Liev Schreiber’s Shaw is missing that sense of impending doom, of a noose lingering over his head just waiting to coil around his neck and tighten. It is a unique spin on the material to watch Raymond and his mother locked in a death embrace on the world’s stage as their preordained doom awaits, but it hit you harder in the gut when it was Raymond himself taking out his enemies and then himself.

It remains nearly impossible to gauge this film on its own merits because it plays everything so damn earnestly. It’s the sight of a bunch of very talented people taking on juicy material and then delivering something pedestrian with it. It’s competent and nothing more, and that’s the grand tragedy of this version of The Manchurian Candidate. Of the spate of unnecessary remakes released in the mid-00’s (The Omen, The Amityville Horror among them), this is probably be the best of that lot. But that’s damning it with the faintest of praise.

What exactly is Barton Fink about, really? What do all of these vague symbols and political allusions add up to, and does the deeper “truth” to them really matter? Barton Fink seems in deeply enamored with its own ambiguities, both in narrative architecture and thematically.

It’s about the mental and emotional unraveling of a blowhard writer lacking in any discernible talent but not lacking in any smug self-satisfaction an ego with some references to fascism thrown in. I remain unsold on there being more to “get” here than merely a cavalcade of disparate but fascinating ideas crammed together with panache. The Coen Brothers manage to sustain the weirdness and free associative nature of the plot and characters, seemingly held together by black humor and a pervading sense of dourness, with artistic bravado and technical mastery.

Look no further than the persistent symbolism of Barton’s unraveling blind and artistic blockage. It’s first glimpsed by the wallpaper of his hotel room coming undone, and Barton trying to push it all back in place as if restoring creative order to the world. It’s followed by a series of character interactions that reveal layers of deceptions and artifice in order to keep the wheels of Hollywood spinning. The creative muse is a fickle mistress throughout Barton Fink, not only to the lead character, but to one resembling a funhouse mirror of William Faulkner, descended into alcoholism and his writing performed by his mistress/secretary.

Deals with the devil do not provide Faustian bargains, there’s no sweet moment of euphoria before the bottom drops out. There is only the bottom dropping out and the creeping rush of encroaching darkness. Not only in the surprise twist with Charlie, Barton’s neighbor in the hotel and a pleasant everyman insurance salesman type that’s also the most likable character in the movie, but in a high-ranking producer and the studio executive that spit rapid-fire insults laced with profanity as they do empty ego-boosting platitudes. Tony Shalhoub is great in a bit part as the producer, but Michael Lerner as the studio head is really playing for the rafters. I mean that as a compliment as he’s a riot of vulgarly wielded power, clearly playing his studio head as a riff on Louis B. Meyer and probably some more modern references behind the scenes.

Of course there’s the bewildering shrug that I meet with the reoccurring image of the woman on the beach only for Barton to meet her in the end. What does it mean? No idea. Frankly, I don’t really care. It made me laugh, and I think the entire point of it was some kind of cosmic joke. It’s almost as if you must take on Barton Fink on an image-by-image basis. Individual scenes clearly throb with deeper meanings while others are merely there to land a joke or provide a character actor a moment to shine.

The thing that ties it all together is an extremely game cast. John Turturro as Barton is overly earnest, completely lacking in self-awareness, and prone to rhapsodizing about his lofty goals with no output or talent to match. Turturro’s a perfect match for the dark comedic tone that the Coen Brothers are striving for throughout. While John Mahoney gets to turn a caricature of William Faulkner into an excuse for mugging, a ridiculous accent, and slapstick. Judy Davis as his secretary/mistress plays everything with an arched eyebrow and wry tone of voice. While John Goodman clearly walks away with best in show for his overly polite, jovial manners masking over monstrous secrets that lead towards the film’s apocalyptic finale.

It is a strange journey, but a highly enjoyable one for me. Some may find the dourness and frankly overall sour pointing towards misanthropic if not nihilistic tone a bit much. Maybe my sense of humor is just that skewed, but I rode out Barton Fink’s wavelength towards the closing credits and had a good time. What does it all? Anything you want it to mean.

If Kagemusha isn’t as daring as Akira Kurosawa’s other samurai epics, like Seven Samurai or Throne of Blood, then it is still a pleasurable jewel of a late master throwing around his considerable artistry and craft. The troubled birth and production doesn’t show (much), and it is an immensely pleasurable experience throughout. It simmers in its weightiness and epic scope, and Kurosawa still manages to pull it off with grace, beauty, and a deft touch that numerous imitators have tried and failed to achieve.

The title refers to a common thief who bears a striking resemblance to a warlord, and he effectively becomes his “shadow warrior,” what kagemusha translates to. This shadow warrior is something a spectral entity, more of an emotional cipher than a fully-realized character for the narrative to pivot around. We do not understand his motivations, nor are we lead to believe that he does either, but we follow him through his descent into a kind of madness and power-grab. Is he possessed by the warlord’s spirit or merely haunted by the warlord’s legacy?

This ambiguity becomes a driving force the latter portions of the film. In fact, a dream sequence can function under either reading of the material. These dream sequences in the third act of the film are the most audacious throughout the entire film as so much of it is a medium shot that takes in the vastness of the surroundings and the numerous players in the frame. They play with perspective and demonstrate our shadow warrior being terrorized and haunted by the warlord’s armor, or maybe he’s slowly being possessed. (Personally, I think he’s cracking up because his identity is being subsumed by the legacy and demands of his role, but plenty of professional critics have argued the other meaning.)

Yet there’s a pervasive irony to much of the middle portion of the film as the warlord’s death means that the thief must become the man, and only a handful of people know the truth. The “shadow warrior” begins to believe his own lie and slowly finds himself wanting to obtain power. The final masterstroke of this thread comes in the climactic battle, one of Kurosawa’s greatest sustained sequences of cinematic pageantry, where the thief dies chasing after the banner and unable to catch it. Not only was this thief never truly a warlord, but he was unable to maintain the illusion and cast out into the wilderness.

It’s a fairly simple plot and it’s only as good as any particular scene, some of which are transcendent and others reveal the break Kurosawa was forced to take between projects. At this point, despite being heralded by the New Hollywood class as a role model and iconoclast artist found funding hard to come by. Four years separated this film from his prior work, and the scenes where Kurosawa’s paintings are clearly adapted are the best. Others show a bit of aching joints, or like watching someone trying to get feeling back into a hand or foot that fell asleep.

None of this means that Kagemusha is a bad film, it is very much not but it is more of a second-shelf Kurosawa work and bettered by its predecessor, Ran. It perhaps colder than some of his greater works, but it’s still a great film. Kurosawa bookends the film with two sequences, one completely quiet that effectively explains the power dynamics at play and the other a bitterly ironic ending note. These two sequences alone are worth the viewing experience, but there’s so many other riches to discover along the way.