Reviews by JxSxPx

After a five year dry spell, the Pirates of the Caribbean returned with a new director (Rob Marshall), two returning players (Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush), and minus two others (Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom). On Stranger Tides, based on a novel by Tim Powers, is what a franchise looks like when it has stayed too long at the party.

Ironically, this is the shortest of the film’s in running time, but there’s not enough propulsive energy or fun to be found here. This makes On Stranger Tides feel like the longest of the four films. This one somehow finds the magical spot between being both over-spiced and under-cooked. Once again, there’s too much going on here, and yet not enough of it is given much thought or significant detail to work.

I never thought I’d miss Orlando Bloom, who for all of his fey mannerisms and swoon-worthy good-looks distinctly lacks charisma as an actor, as the lead of this franchise, but this one just proves that a little bit of Jack Sparrow goes a long way. With Jack Sparrow now officially leading the proceedings, there’s no one for him to bounce his inebriated logic off of, no one to act as sober counterbalance to his inanity. I knew I was going to miss Keira Knightley’s fierce and fiery Elizabeth, one of the few characters that could outmaneuver Jack and get respect from him. The film needed a straight man for him to play off, and without one this just proves that too much of one note is devastating.

Here we follow Jack in his quest to find the Fountain of Youth. Barbossa, now working with the British crown (Richard Griffiths, corpulent and boorish as King George II in a glorified cameo) joins in on the journey. Blackbeard (Ian McShane, perfection in casting, underused in execution) and his daughter Angelica (Penélope Cruz, a welcome feisty presence with a thinly written role) kidnap Jack for his knowledge. And then there’s Spanish, who are only vaguely important to the plot despite being the third corner of this triangle Jack finds himself in. Then you have to throw in a missionary (Sam Claflin, so pretty), mermaids (including Astrid Berges-Frisbey as one of our new lovebirds), and cameos from Keith Richards and Judi Dench.

Since this is the first entry to be based off a book’s plot and not borrowed imagery from the rides, there’s a distinctly off-key feeling throughout. Much like the Marx Brothers in Room Service was deeply unexciting for the way it forced screen personalities into a story that wasn’t built around them, On Stranger Tides feels like a patchwork event. The romances, both of them, are ineffective for the ways they’re underwritten, and despite McShane gloriously chewing scenery and capable of projecting menace with but a glance, Blackbeard doesn’t linger in the imagination like Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones. There’s just not enough for him to spin into gold despite how game he seems.

Wasting McShane is a cinematic sin, but so is the way that Gore Verbinski’s unique visuals disappear under Rob Marshall’s workman-like visuals. There’s no joy or splendor here, and many of the sequences land with a thud that no amount of gorgeous natural scenery or detailed costuming can mask. The only sequence worth its might is the mermaid attack. No kindly Ariel’s here, these mermaids are the darker brand and their scene feels like a thrilling horror movie plopped into the middle of a sleepy pirate yarn. Even worse, while At World’s End closed with a sense of a completed story, On Stranger Tides  ends openly with the possibility of another sequel. It’s called Dead Men Tell No Tales, and it comes out in 2017. Yo ho, please end this franchise already. 

If the prior year’s Dead Man’s Chest was a rollercoaster that consistently threatened to careen wildly off the tracks at any moment, then At World’s End is a whirligig on a crumbling foundation. The sense of bloat that’s always threatened to devour these films reaches its apex here, with nearly three hours of convoluted plotting, unnecessary side-plots, and lore that spirals out quick enough to meet the demands of the plot.

Once more, I don’t hate this entry in the Pirates franchise, but with (broken) promise that this would end the series, it seemed a fitting enough ending. Will and Elizabeth grew over the course of the series, their plots get a pleasing conclusion, Jack’s sense of self-preservation warred with his better impulses, and Barbossa chewed scenery throughout. Keith Richards cameos as Jack’s father, an assembly of pirate leaders provides many uniquely colorful and distinct characters, and there’s enough spectacle for several films to be found here.

It’s just incoherent and needlessly complicated. It’s easy to forget that this was once based on a theme park attraction! Granted, The Curse of the Black Pearl used up a majority of the most famous sights and sounds of the ride so they had to branch out. I said most, At World’s End includes audio lifted directly from the original ride. Just in time for these back-to-back sequels, Disney completely renovated the ride to include Jack, Davy Jones, Barbossa, and the cursed Aztec gold in a bit of corporate synergy. If that isn’t a perfect metaphor for the presence of these sequels, I don’t know what else is.

Does the plot really matter? No, it hasn’t in any of these up to this point, and this one is overstuffed to the max. There’s Chow Yun-Fat as a pirate lord of Singapore, and completely underutilized, and Davy Jones and Tia Dalma’s past is revealed while simultaneously shuffling them off to the side to focus on…. well, it’s hard to say. There’s the East Indian Trading Company, led by Tom Hollander’s sneer and glower, there’s the gathering of pirate lords, there’s Davy Jones and Tia Dalma, there’s our two love birds, there’s Barbossa, and they each double-cross each other then go back again. Then they switch sides once more, before switching back, and are you confused yet? Good. You should be.

None of it makes any sense, and good luck trying to keep all of the players and their motivations square. I gave up a long time ago and just sat back to watch the visual splendor of it all. And there is a ton of it to be found. While the franchise may have squandered much of the good will from the first film by this point, director Gore Verbinski still gave you plenty of reason to keep your eyes on the screen with his imaginative and distinct images. A pirate ship sailing across a still sea with the stars reflected upon the surface, given the distinct impression of them sailing through space, has enough poetry in it to keep your interest.

The thing that’s so damned frustrating about these sequels is how they drop in a series of smart ideas and characters with potential, then squander it all with stupid choices. Elizabeth Swann’s transformations from society ingénue to pirate king (yes, king) is far more interesting than Will Turner and his daddy issues, but guess who gets the lion’s share of the screen time? Then there’s Davy Jones, so major a role in Dead Man’s Chest, stuck playing supporting player to far less interesting characters, while Tia Dalma and Commodore Norrington barely register in this bloated epic at all. Meanwhile, Jonathan Pryce’s Governor Swann has spent the entirety of this trilogy as background decoration and little else.

The darkness that threatened to overtake Dead Man’s Chest swallows up At World’s End, quite literally in the climactic battle between all three major parties across two boats locked together over a whirlpool. Or the opening, which finds pirates (or those accused of piracy, or those found guilty of aiding piracy, including a young child) being led to their death, by hanging no less, and defiantly singing a sea shanty while waiting for the bottom to drop. It is in these moments that the film’s muchness becomes a serious case of too much of a good thing. I respect the titanic ambitions and originality of visual splendor in these films, even their sense of fun, but my god, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Then they made a fourth film.

True emotional uplift is hard to accomplish in the movies, especially in “based on a true story” variations that trend towards easy emotional manipulation and sugary sentimentality. Leave it to a more idiosyncratic director like Mira Nair to take the “child prodigy-made-good-through-sports” story under Disney’s guiding hand and make it feel vibrant, alive, and fresh.

Queen of Katwe tells the true of Phiona Mutesi, a young girl growing up in the slums with her widowed mother (Lupita Nyong’o), getting discovered by a coach (David Oyelowo) during his missionary work, and her quest to become a master player. There’s a vibrancy of life, complete with its hardships and specificity and essence of life in this place.

It would be easy to revel in a misery porn tone throughout these early scenes of intransigent poverty and selling corn on the streets. Another film would play up the misery and struggle, but there’s a core of strength to these characters in the ways they get up every day and just keep fighting. This is exemplified in a scene between Oyelowo and Nyong’o at the marketplace. Oyelowo praises Nyong’o’s persistence in trying to provide and care for her children despite overwhelming odds, and her face positively glows, radiating a hard-won sense of victory and verging on joyous tears for someone recognizing her strength.

The film’s drunk on color and textures adding a more unique spin on the typical plot moves. A reoccurring theme of chess as metaphor for life is creaky, and the longer the film goes on the more structurally predictable it becomes. But there’s a lot of meat in the concurrent metaphor in chess as symbolic of a class divide. The resilience of these kids to prove their worth against the more privileged plays out with the games, and with the brightness of their clothes in contrast to the coolness of their uniforms.

Even better is the way that Nair populates this film with strong players. Of course, David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong’o are perfection, but newcomer Madina Nalwanga is its luminous heart. Oyelowo is sacked with some of the worst cliché inspiring lines, but he delivers them with grit and determination. Oyelowo is fast becoming one of the strongest actors of his generation, each performance a study in earnestly felt emotion and strong vocal delivery. Nyong’o finally graces us with her presence again since her Oscar-winning work in 12 Years a Slave, after two films in which she did motion-capture and vocal work. Her work here is transformative, burying her natural grace and poise into a woman beaten around by life but not ready to lie down for the count.

While the pros give typically strong work, it’s Nalwanga who lingers longest in the mind for the first role. Just like Mutesi is preternaturally gifted at chess, Nalwanga is preternaturally gifted with holding the camera. She’s bright, open, and delicately finding the balance of coming into her own while harnessing the strength inherited from her mother. I hope this is merely the first role in a long career should Nalwanga want it, as she’s got a certain something special about her. I think of her leading a young adult franchise!

Queen of Katwe is sentimental, yes, but it’s the right kind of sentimentality at play here. In another director’s hands, who knows what this material would have looked like. Luckily, it’s in Mira Nair’s strong hands, and she never condescends to the material, nor loses sight of the harshness and fears lurking around every corner in the slums. Even when the script gets ham-fisted in its emotional uplifting speechifying and awkwardly hoary in its “underdog-makes-good” sports clichés, there’s a throbbing, pulsating energy to the material that is completely unique to any of the other films in this genre. What a lovely, compassionate, and warm movie this is. We need more stories like this.

Everything wrong with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest can be perfectly summarized in the frenzied battle that encapsulates much of the climax. There’s Will, Jack, and a dispossessed Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) fighting in a gigantic spinning wheel across an island terrain. Meanwhile, the two comic relief pirates (Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg) are chased by Elizabeth after they steal the title’s chest. Soon both of these groups must stop their in-fighting to take on Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his crew. If you’re exhausted reading that much plot dump, well, we haven’t even mentioned Beckett (Tom Hollander), a heavy from the East Indian trading company who sneers and pulls puppet strings throughout the plot, and Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), a swamp dwelling witch who exists as both exposition dump and the keeper of vital character backstory for several players.

Plot bloat was already a problem in the first entry, and this sequel only exacerbates this problem. Less is not more, more is more, and too much of a good thing is simply Disney trying to demonstrate blockbuster dominance. This bloated feeling isn’t simply from too many characters demanding time and attention, but too much time spent on frantic action sequences that drag on past the point of being enjoyable. We get two daring escapes across islands in circular contraptions, two Kraken attacks, two love triangles, and numerous other instances of the film doubling back on itself. Editing would only have improved matters.

If it sounds like I disliked Dead Man’s Chest, well, you’d be wrong. The problems are obvious and there’s no going around them. Yes, this one also outstays its welcome, but it’s still highly enjoyable for the sheer lunacy on display. This is a movie with Davy Jones envisioned as made up from various barnacles, crustaceans, and an octopus face. There’s an immortal monkey, an island of cannibals, plenty of gags involving a pirate’s fake eye and his newfound religious views, and the female character getting the more interesting character development.

There’s a lot to like about the Pirates franchise in general, including the ever-expanding mythology that feels breezily constructed for a vague framework, and Dead Man’s Chest is no different. It’s a definite step-down from the first, but it’s solidly entertaining and well-made. I mean, zombie-pirates revealed only in moonlight is cool, but an entire ship and crew made up coral and sea flora and fauna? That’s awesome, and provides some moments to stare in awe at expertly done special-effects work and wholly original creature designs.

Ok, so maybe the Kraken attacks have not aged well. And by not aged well, I mean what once looked terrifying and majestic on the big screen now looks rubbery and painfully artificial. Thankfully these moments are kept to a minimum and the stellar work done on Jones and crew (mostly) remains convincing and engaging. It helps that many of their scenes take place in darkened rooms, atmospheric lighting, or in the rain, all tricks and forgiving circumstances for special effects to retain their power.

In fact, Dead Man’s Chest is a darker, more atmospheric experience all around. There’s still an element of swashbuckling daring, an alchemy of too many disparate elements coming together to form a mixed brew, but the gallows humor and more supernatural aspects of the first take a strong grasp here. It’s not a bad thing necessarily, but eventually the foundations start to crack and there’s still another hour or so of movie to get through. Then there’s the ending which is clearly open-ended for the sequel, not so coincidentally filmed back-to-back with this one. Just as idiosyncratic and rambunctious as The Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest still threatens to sink underneath the weight of its own ambitions.

Forgive the groan-worthy pun, but the pirate film genre was dead in the water by this point. Cutthroat Island was the most recent big-budget pirate film, and it was a notorious bomb in 1995. More ominous signs loomed over Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl prior to its release. How exactly does one go about using a theme-park attraction as the basis for the huge summer blockbuster? Is Disney seriously banking this on Johnny Depp and two relatively unknown British actors to lead this?

We were naïve in 2003, in a sense, not that Pirates eventually behemoth box office take and franchise spawns were obvious at the time. But when the final product is so crowd-pleasing and fun, so drunk upon the images and clichés of the pirate genre, its success isn’t quite so astounding in hindsight. Still, none of us saw this franchise coming, nor the eventual decade-plus of continuing sequels (a fifth is planned for 2017). Even better is how well the first one holds up.

Yes, Pirates does overstay its welcome by about thirty minutes of extended double/triple-crosses and fighting, but there’s enough freewheeling, exciting film-making here to power you through. I assume it was Disney’s controlling hand here, but Pirates is a prime example of a formula working very well. The two romantic leads are straight men, Depp gets to play the rogue scene-stealer, while Geoffrey Rush’s villain is gloriously theatrical, and the technical aspects power you to the home stretch.

There’s no narrative surprises or character development that decades of popcorn entertainment haven’t prepared you for, but how well they’re employed it what makes it all work. Orlando Bloom’s Will and Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth are our young lovers with a backstory that ties into the central curse/mystery, while also both effectively working as protégé’s to Depp’s unique creation. This is the hero’s journey distilled down as basically as it was in Star Wars, effectively making Depp the Han Solo, Knightley the Leia, and Bloom the Luke.

Bloom’s handsome but bland screen presence allows the other two to shine brighter. He looks like a Douglas Fairbanks, but displays none of the personality or charisma. Knightley exhibits tons of spunk and personality in her role, transitioning from damsel-in-distress to pirate-princess over the course of just this film. (Her character’s transition over the first three is a rare example of female character becoming an action heroine.)

But Pirates is best known for Depp’s career-changing role for a good reason, he gives us a spin on a pirate and charming rogue ally that we’ve never seen before. His character generally wobbles around in a permanent state of inebriation, experiencing rare moments of lucidity and keen-eyed intelligence. This character would eventually devolve into pure caricature in the later films, but the darkness lurking beneath the androgynous pirate make the character. His moments of steely sobriety are bracing for how smartly deployed they are in rare moments.

Pirates may belong to Depp, but he’s not the lone essential performance here. There’s Geoffrey Rush’s hammy, rafter-shaking Barbossa, the rival pirate captain struck with a curse. Rush plays the role with all the verbose artifice of a Charles Laughton. When these two aren’t warring with each other, either verbally or in sword fights, the film finds a way to marry swashbuckling adventure, romance, mild horror (the curse renders a gang of pirates as disturbing zombies), and a quickly unraveling (made-up on the fly) mythology that they try to make feel lived in and authentic to the universe.

There’s a lot going on in this daffy tapestry, and the film cannot hold all of the weight it loads upon its own back. But my god is it fun. Unburdened from history, this would be the point at which Depp’s career began its slow decline and his top-lining a blockbuster would lead to a groan, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is what we go to summer movies for. It’s escapism, heavy on the signs and symbols of pirate lore, and clearly enamored with its sword fights, goofy accents, parrots, secret treasure, and rococo humor.

Mystique and contradictory impulses abound in Eyes Wide Shut, the final film from cinematic master Stanley Kubrick. Is everything we are witnessing but a strange dream, a stroll through the subterranean sexual lives of Manhattanites both rich and poor, or is this happening in real time? Does it really matter what the literal truth of the story is?

I would argue that it does not, as the film’s style is like a self-reflexive poem in which the first half plays out as titillation and flirtation then once more as the horrific morning after. A wealthy couple live in a staid domestic life, with the husband (Tom Cruise) convinced they’re happy and stable while the wife (Nicole Kidman) withholds vital information. One night while high on pot, they begin to talk about gender politics, fidelity, and marriage, and reveals that she once considered throwing it all away for a handsome stranger. This piece of information unlocks something within the husband, who begins trolling the underground for adventures and sex.

Then the story repeats, but this time with horrific twists and new revelations about many of the players he meets along the way. A surprisingly sweet hooker (Vinessa Shaw) spends some night nearly working her charms on him, only for him to return to her apartment the next day and learn that she’s just tested positive for HIV. Another character he meets along his sojourn of fevered jealous and torpid imagination mentions that he’s willing to whore his teenage daughter out for wealthy men in a cursory manner when the night before he was ready to punish her when catching her engaged in sexual activities.

Then there’s the central set piece of the film, the infamous orgy sequence which does not play out as a prolonged erotic cinema but a hammering home of the dream-like intensity of his central obsessions. Everyone wears ornate Venetian masks, and the orgy plays out as both bacchanal and religious observance as the grand master of ceremonies treats the entire thing with the solemnity of an orthodox sermon. There’s also a masked woman who hints that our hero is in danger, and continually tries to usher him away from this glimpse into the Marquis de Sade’s idle musings.

This masked woman is the symbolic turning point. Everything before this contained a more flirty, if emotionally cool, air, with every character we meet along this odyssey happy and eager to jump into bed with Cruise’s doctor. This masked woman introduces the element of personal danger in chasing these acts and scenarios, and the film detours into darker territory soon after. What’s shocking about this is just how smooth a transition Kubrick manages it.

When this debuted, the studio marketed it as a sexual thriller, and the basic framework of that genre is in place but not the execution. Eyes Wide Shut is not a carnal, erotic thriller, but a musing of marriage, fidelity and infidelity (both real and imagined), and emotional intimacy between partners. The ideas haunt you in their hallucinatory scrawling.

Their marriage was presented as placid, a comfortable sense of familiarity that many long-term couples can experience and witness, then slowly reveals the inner lives and yearnings of its two main characters. The wife’s shocking information dump gets the plot going, and she gets the last word on it all too. In an odd scene, one that doesn’t entirely work, she states that they should be glad to survive his adventures after he’s confessed it all. She looks him over and says that they should go back home and have sex as soon as possible. Is this Kubrick making a subtle jab about the way lovers will lie to each other in order to survive? Maybe, but it can also feel like a tidy cleaning up of a messy plot.

Thankfully, Cruise and Kidman are up the herculean task of acting this stuff out. Cruise never gets the big moments that Kidman does, having to spend much of the time merely reacting to the visions and exposition dumps around him. But he’s a major movie star, not entirely convincing as a regular human but that seems the point, and he knows how to carefully modulate himself in front of the camera for impact without dialog.

Kidman though, that’s the real meaty performance in this piece. Her prolonged diatribe about gender roles and outdated thinking, effectively saying her husband doesn’t know shit about women if he thinks they’ve never toyed with affairs and casual sex as much as men, gives the actress one of her strongest scenes in her entire career. She’s nearly feral here in her rage and emotional whippings, then strangely muted when she decides to hit him with the truth of her fantasy. Kidman remains still, her voice going scratchy and soft, as she peels back layers of emotional withholding and carefully withheld intimacy from her husband.

In the end, domestic order may be restored, but at what price? Eyes Wide Shut provides no answers with its erratic, fervid musings and wanderings. But there’s a richness of text here to unpack, like many of Kubrick’s best films. Many great directors go out in a whimper, but not Kubrick. He went out on a mysterious, controversial, artistically daring final note, a film that landed with a question mark in 1999 but now grows in esteem, securing a comfortable place in his legacy. 

Operating under the logic of dreams, with everyone delivering their dialog at a sleepy pace, Liebestraum is a series of beautiful images signifying nothing of interest. All it offers is moody and stylish surfaces, interminable verbal exchanges about architectural designs, and a central mystery that announces its obvious conclusion from the moment its dangled in front of you.

A forbidden romance in the present has echoes in the past, and these symmetrical story beats repeat throughout the film. Often times they’re ham-fisted and obvious, like Kim Novak’s death-bed scene contrasted with a couple’s mutual orgasms. It plays out as unintentional silliness, but it’s pitched for serious conviction and delivered with verve.

Shame that none of these emotionally synchronous moments are in service of a better script. Writer/director Mike Figgis seems drunk upon his images and stark light compositions, his disturbed angles and sense of impending doom. A series of coincidences pile up, revelations pour out in elliptical manners, and our hero stares blankly and introspectively for far too much of the film.

Then there’s the curious problem of Kim Novak, or rather, the curious problem of how little screen time she gets. Her character holds the answers to the various mysteries pulling these characters together, but her scenes amount to a small handful and her lines of dialog about a dozen or so. Apparently, she feuded with the director over their overall vision for the piece and her performance, and he threatened to cut her role out of the picture. So it appears he followed through on that threat, essentially killing his calf on the altar of ego. The resulting film ends up treating this mystery and character revelations as mere afterthoughts to the dual affairs, seduction through photography, and villainous building developments.

As the film goes on, Novak’s spectral appearance begins to feel like borrowed cinematic weight. As though Figgis was trying to create his own variation of an Alfred Hitchcock film, and he needed borrowed prestige from Novak’s legacy as one of his greatest cool blondes. This element of borrowed prestige haunts the film; it creates an evocative atmosphere and thinks it’s telling a masterful study of suspense and personal tragedy, but it’s laborious and lacking in substance. 

Agatha Christie’s star-studded film adaptations are perfect excuses for slumming movie stars to have a bit of fun with a polite murder-mystery story. They line up in a series of eccentric roles, providing a colorful, and loud, cast of characters to bicker, plot, and deliver red herrings galore, before Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot wrap up the who done it through a series of flashbacks and exposition dumps.

These films are the perfect type of rainy Sunday afternoon fare, which is how I watched The Mirror Crack’d. By no stretch is this a great movie, but it’s supremely adequate and mildly entertaining way to waste away two hours while stuck inside buried under blankets. It’s also an excuse to watch Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Kim Novak, and Angela Lansbury act opposite each other, and that accounts for a lot of enjoyment and mileage out of this thin material.

Lansbury takes over the role of Miss Jane Marple, investigating a murder plot on a movie set with a has-been actress (Taylor) making a comeback after suffering an emotional breakdown, sparring with her long-time rival (Novak), the producer (Curtis), and a shockingly tender and poignant romance with her director husband (Hudson). During a major reception in the small English town they’ll be filming the movie in, the studio invites a select group of villagers up to the manor house to meet-and-greet with the major production players. When a villager turns up dead, all signs point to foul play with the intended victim getting out of it through a mishap, or did they?

The Mirror Crack’d is predictable, especially if you know anything about Hollywood history and trivia. Quicker than you can say Gene Tierney, the central mystery is obvious once you see where that particular bit of backstory is going. The real tragedy of The Mirror Crack’d is how it sidelines Marple, and Lansbury by extension, with a sprained ankle for so much of the mid-section of the film, sending in her nephew, Inspector Craddock (Edward Fox), in her place to investigate the major players and scenes of the crime. In fact, the actual business of the murder-mystery is the least interesting aspect of the entire film, so it’s natural most of the business.

No, The Mirror Crack’d is much more fun when it lets its movie stars off their leashes and chew the scenery. Taylor and Novak trade bitch verbal barbs and icy glances like a pair of feuding drag queens, and it’s a riot to watch these all too brief scenes. The script lets these two actresses down, they’ve come ready to spar but the script only gives them a few brief moments to let it out then shoves them back into their respective corners. Taylor’s in particularly high-camp mode here, and it works well for an aging diva of the screen prepping herself for a glorious return to form. The same could be said for Novak, normally an actress of interior dialog and neurosis, none of that present here. Novak instead goes for ostentatious exterior, a movie star with no inner life and grand delusions. It feels like she’s getting to tear apart the visage of screen goddess past and present, perhaps even a bit of her own persona.

Tony Curtis oozes oily menace, but doesn’t get enough screen time. He spars wonderfully with Novak, Taylor, and most especially Hudson in his few scenes. I wanted more, but the script isn’t up to the task of giving all of the players enough time to shine or invest their characters with major personality, so it rests upon the stars to either bring their own personas and baggage to the parts or to play each of them as brusque archetypes of film productions. Truly, only Rock Hudson gives a fully dimensional performance. He spits acid with Curtis, fends off Novak, and is shockingly tender with Taylor, their off-screen friendship and history together bringing much of the dynamics and weight to their pairing. Even Geraldine Chaplin carries with her the vestiges of Old Hollywood, being the daughter of Charles Chaplin, one of its primary architects.

All this talk of the various supporting players and so little of Dame Angela? Well, maybe if The Mirror Crack’d had provided her with more material to work with I’d get to go full on rapturous mode on her performance. Alas, it’s not to be. She’s very good, as she always is, buried under makeup to transform her 55 years into the ancient Miss Marple, but her disappearance from the narrative is a serious blow. In the end, this feels like something of a dry-run for Murder, She Wrote, where Lansbury would once more play a delightfully eccentric and very English detective of grisly crimes.

Even worse is how the film comes roaring out the gate with a film-within-a-film, clearly a meta-moment where Marple is watching a Poirot-inspired story. This opening five minutes is more fun than the next hundred, and that is a major problem. But is a problem of the script or the directing? A little bit of both, really. Guy Hamilton lacks energy here, which is odd considering he cemented and perfected the Bond template with Goldfinger. While the script feels dashed off, a half-hearted affair that makes the killer obvious with the first murder, but painfully so by the second. There’s no mystery or suspense here, and that’s a severe impairment for a murder-mystery. Still, it’s a fine bit of entertainment for what it is, mostly as a chance to watch a series of cinematic legends transforming average material into something better by chewing enough scenery to make a season of RuPaul’s Drag Race feel tame by comparison.

As a massive devotee and fan of David Bowie, I’ve been known to refer to him as God on more than one occasion, I’ve been strangely looking forward to viewing this. I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect, but I knew it was going to be a mess. Perhaps these low expectations lead to my odd enjoyment of the film, but I’m not blind to its numerous faults and weaknesses.

Just a Gigolo’s biggest problem is a clumsiness of tonal coherence and narrative purpose. “The Graduate-lite in the Weimar Republic” is as close to a description as I can get to it. Is this trying to be arch and ironic? If so, only a few of the players get that tone and attune their performances accordingly. Is this trying to be a poignant and tragic look at the rise of Nazism? If so, someone please tell the people trying to play things for laughs that they’re undermining it. But watching the two styles clash and consume each other almost becomes an entertainment in its own right.

There’s several films fighting for prominence in Just a Gigolo, beginning with the Paths of Glory aping opening, filmed in sepia and taking place entirely in the trenches. Once we return to Berlin, the film pulls a Wizard of Oz and transforms into full color. Each passing year is presented by following a pair of elder gossiping ladies in completely ludicrous hats, seemingly oblivious to the social strife and ills surrounding them. There’s the rise of Nazism, of course, explorations into the subterranean sexual and romantic lives of Berliners that Nazism would seek to destroy.

A queer aesthetic runs throughout much of Bowie’s work, so no shock that Just a Gigolo both openly expresses it and flirts with it obliquely. After all, this is a film that managed to get Marlene Dietrich to play the madam of the dancehall’s gigolos and perform the title song late in the film, a moment so poignant and weighted because it is Dietrich delivering such loaded lines with exquisite melancholy. Then there’s Sydne Rome’s divinely decadent Cilly, a clear variation of Cabaret’s Sally Bowles. She performs in a music hall that’s emceed by a drag queen and frequented by Berlin’s queer community. The more oblique queer element resides not only in Bowie’s eventual transition into a gigolo, where the film flirts with his male clients, but the Nazis obsession with him as a good looking symbol for the cause, eager to transform his lithe, willowy looks into a leather-clad submissive.

Sydne Rome’s performance is the obvious winner, as she most accurately vibes with the alternating currents of the film’s tones. Her musical number flirts with Cabaret’s editing techniques, and Just a Gigolo fires away on all cylinders for a few brief moments. I wonder what Bob Fosse could have finessed from this material, or, if not him, if Nicolas Roeg’s deconstructed, dream-like collage style, or any number of better directors.

There’s several kernels of strong ideas and storytelling choices, but David Hemmings, director and actor of this, doesn’t know what to do with them. He manages to not only get Dietrich for a glorified cameo, but Maria Schell, Curd Jürgens, and Kim Novak are in this in roles that are given weight and dimension by their screen personas. Each of them brings their A-game to their limited scenes, but it’s frustrating to watch, say, Schell play the mother but never get a memorable moment to really dig in to joy of being reunited with her son or despair at his death. Or for Novak to bring her sad, intelligent sex appeal to an older woman looking for comfort, and only manage to really express this in one brief close-up of her still face, eyes filled with sadness, and mouth slightly twisted in frustration.

I’m not going to proclaim that Just a Gigolo is somehow underappreciated and deserves another look, because it is entertaining in its awfulness while still being awful. It is a case in which a movie is unique in its badness, not merely one that can be written off as unmemorable and terrible, think of any given year’s major summer blockbusters, which are so ephemeral they may require a new word to describe them. Bowie once described this as all of his Elvis Presley films rolled into one, and that wackiness pervades the entirety of the film. It’s not good in any traditional way, but it’s fascinating to watch. I’m also deeply curious about that alleged three-hour German version, I wonder if a more coherent movie can be found in that edit.

Given the creative team behind this, many of the major players of the kitsch-minor classic 70s King Kong, I was ready to view The White Buffalo as a kissing cousin to that oddity. Imagine my surprise when I finished watching it only to discover a film of great promise and premise, undercut only by its technical limitations and anemic supporting roles.

I’m not comfortable proclaiming The White Buffalo as a sleeper classic, but it’s close to earning that reputation. If nothing else, it deserves better than the cinematic wasteland it’s been subjugated to. Taking parts of historical truth, forming them around Moby Dick-as-American folk tragedy, and giving two minor actors a chance to shine, The White Buffalo definitely deserves a cursory look.

If only then that the film were longer, which is a criticism I don’t frequently make, to really give its loaded themes, symbols, and parade of colorful supporting players more chance to shine. Any film should be lucky and happy to include Slim Pickens, Clint Walker, John Carradine, and Kim Novak among its supporting players, but none of them are given enough material to work with to really land a lasting impression. Carradine’s cameo and Novak’s nothing role (she tries to add some poignancy and sadness to it) are particularly egregious uses of actors with history and loaded cinematic lineage left with nothing to do. Wasting Pickens seems like a sin for a western to commit, that man is the face and voice of the genre in a way that could be argued as equal to that of John Wayne.

Yet the film provides some stellar moments for Jack Warden, Charles Bronson, and Will Sampson, the film’s strongest asset and performance. Warden and Bronson find a solid groove, creating history between their characters, and a shared weariness at the narrative they find themselves in. Bronson, in particular, is an actor I’ve never “gotten” aside from Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, which played well with his natural quiet strength and cragginess. But those traits and so much more are evident here, and it may be one of Bronson’s more essential performances for the way it takes his star persona and exposes the neurosis and fears lurking underneath.

Will Sampson is known primarily for playing Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he’s a standout here. Transforming his take on Crazy Horse into Ahab-on-a-horse, culminating in the climatic confrontation with the titular beast where he rides it and stabs it with a fervor and spiritual possession that borders on the maniacal. Going back to the earlier criticism of not enough time being spent to really develop certain characters, Sampson’s Crazy Horse gets his tragic origin for his quest, then disappears for far too long. The White Buffalo is better when treating Crazy Horse and Bronson’s Wild Bill Hickok as tragic equals, as two kindred spirits intertwined in this quest through forces and obsessions larger than they are.

Perhaps the biggest black mark against The White Buffalo is the terrible effects work used to animate the titular beast. In an era with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman: The Movie, and Alien released within close range of this film, there’s just no excuse for how bad they are. The buffalo never looks real, never moves in a believable way, and threatens to turn the movie from somber, clear-eyed examination of the fear of death, or the obsession of revenge as code of honor, and into a kitsch B-western. Thankfully, director J. Lee Thompson knows how to make scenes moody and evocative, and this skill goes a long way towards masking the weakness of the central special effect. Thompson’s dream-like compositions nearly transform the beast into a hallucinatory hell-beast, and then we see the visible tracks and wires used to animate it and the illusion is punctured.

There’s still more strengths to The White Buffalo that manage to overpower the blows of its weaknesses enough to give it a recommendation. I’m happy to glance through the reviews of the recent video release and see its reputation and critical notices improving. It’s just frustrating that so many aspects were left underdeveloped or taken for granted.