Reviews by JxSxPx

Danny Kaye’s film debut, Up in Arms, is a case study in his (now stale) musical-comedies of the mid-40s. There’s a very basic premise and structure, hypochondriac gets drafted into the army, that merely exists as an excuse to get Kaye to perform various bits of song-and-dance, pull faces, and contort his lithe body into exaggerated shapes. While it's merely serviceable as a film, Kaye is a personality that shines from the screen.

There’s an alternate timeline where his handsome face and athleticism would have brought him great luck as a leading man in screwball comedies romancing the likes of Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, or Carole Lombard. He doesn’t bring a natural comedian sensibility to his parts but that of a musical star who stumbled into being funny. To be more succinct, he’s not a Jerry Lewis or a Groucho Marx by nature, but more like a Gene Kelly type that got typecast as an idiot savant.

Up in Arms’ threadbare is merely there to give some structure to various sequences involving Dinah Shore and Kaye engaging in a fantasy jump-jive or Kaye doing a riff on a singing cowboy. While there’s not much to exactly hail as high-level artistry, there is a certain comfort food like warmth to the entire thing. It may not add up to much but it’s a satisfying glimpse into unreality where people sing, dance, and everything works out fine in the end.

Lina Wertmüller returns to her oldest obsessions – sexuality and politics and where/how they converge – in Ferdinando and Carolina. Yet Wertmüller’s film is malformed and various maneuvers are poorly explained to the audience so the narrative remains indecipherable. It’s quite simple, Ferdinando and Carolina are poorly thought out as characters leaving a hole in the center that the film cannot overcome.

Playing fast and loose with history, this film tells the story of the King of Naples’ wandering and insatiable cock and the virginal queen who conquers him with the power of his pussy. Her transition from blushing bride to controlling shrew is near instantaneous as her hymen breaks and the switch happens. We’re led to believe that he’s obsessed with her to the point where she haunts him on his deathbed. We never feel this eroticism or manipulation.

What we do feel is Wertmüller’s obsession with supple flesh and carnality as the naughty scenes abound. Hell, this movie proves that she’s not above a fart joke this late in her career. Where this movie should be intoxicating us with nubile bodies cavorting about and political machinations underscoring all that communing, Ferdinando and Carolina loses us with these underwritten leads that feel like brief character sketches instead of fully developed ideas.

At least Wertmüller’s camera is populated with lush and gorgeous set designs and locations. If the script loses our interests at least there’s plenty of beauty to keep your interest and catch your eye. Although, this is proof positive that their can come a point where sex and nudity become nearly antithetical to your overall point.

Summer Night plays like a spiritual sequel to Swept Away in which the couple get something akin to a happy ending, or as happy an ending as Lina Wertmüller is capable of crafting, which is more elliptical than emphatic. A wealthy industrialist (Mariangela Melato) kidnaps a Sicilian renegade (Michele Placido) and engages in verbal warfare and sexual dynamism. This is Wertmüller operating under her typical wheelhouse and doing a damn fine job of presenting a solid entry into her oeuvre.

Taking a brief glimpse of her career, this was something of a return to her eternal wellsprings after branching into other genres and narratives. Nothing wrong with that, how often has Martin Scorsese return to the gangster epic, so long as it offers something new. Mainly, it comes in the form of that ending which is more a whimper than a pronounced cry.

It all adds up to a film that is more enjoyable than the daredevil and brazen earlier works. Swept Away’s blurring of sex and politics to the point where they become inextricable from each other recurs here. It largely simmers as Melato’s high-powered super-bitch ties up and tortures Placido before, even captive in chains, he turns the power dynamics against her. Their cat and mouse game are a lot of fun to watch as are the various supporting players like a quirky spy and his inept sidekick.

If Summer Night feels formulaic it’s at least a solidly built formula that proves enjoyable. Sometimes all you need is a solid entry that provides enough differentiation from a master to make for a pleasant evening. Summer Night may not rank among her best but it’s certainly a solidly constructed one.

A make-or-break film or the make-or-break film for whether the cinema of Lina Wertmüller is for you? Swept Away is a combination of her rebellious treatment of sexual politics, class politics, and regional differences populated with her two favorite actors, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. I found this tale of feminist manifesto bait-and-switch provocative, entertaining, and a wild ride throughout.

Swept Away finds Melato playing a high society bitch that is prone to political screeds, mainly delivered in the form of gesticulated shouting, who gets stranded with one of her laborers, Giannini going broke in a performance that borders on the unlikable. Each of them represents something, North vs South, capitalism vs communism, and, of course at its most basic, male vs female. It is in how Wertmüller sets them up in the beginning as archetypes then begins to flip the script and blur the polarities between them.

Yes, there is a strong element of S&M fantasy at the center as Giannini threatens Melato with sexual and physical violence (that she seems not only open but receptive towards), but there’s a purpose. Melato’s performance is so carefully layered and moderated that we notice when she finally submits to Giannini there’s an undercurrent of understanding in her eyes. She has learned how to control and manipulate through submission.

The characters eventual declarations of love are proven entirely conditional to their proximity to society. Island life allows them to craft a cracked romance while a return to the mainland reminds them of the deep divides which cannot be overcome. Or Melato’s society dame simply refuses to overcome them and returns to her life of luxury and privilege. It’s a spiky ending that had me howling for its refusal of a happy ending and its underlining of its female character’s agency as its core.

Swept Away is not so much a love story as it is an exploration of learning to manipulate and a subversion of machismo. Not only is a bravura piece of filmmaking, but it’s a potent and potentially dangerous minefield to explore. Wertmüller manages to make something not only daring but beautiful and strange. A masterpiece, in short.   

Coming off her first masterpiece, Love & Anarchy, Lina Wertmüller dropped the stars and more playful tone for this scattershot glimpse on modern living in Milan viewed through the prism of recently arrived citizens of southern Italy. The film is essentially an assembly of various pieces struggling for a wider shape. This isn’t to say that several comedic and musical suites don’t work or aren’t entertaining, but that the whole is not the sum of its parts.

Our main country rubes are fools that get conned or used as punchlines to underscore the basic uncaring nature of the big city. Some dream of upward mobility while others dream of personal happiness and fulfillment. There can occasionally be overlap between these two yet Wertmüller’s eye is eternally on the satirical. Catch the scene where a character must choose between her virginity or an expensive television that combines a certain squeamishness and slapstick comedy.

Perhaps the greatest scenario in the film happens early when Wertmüller correlates two characters working in a slaughterhouse with their lot in capitalistic society. As animal carcasses are bled out, gutted, and strung up, Wertmüller underscores these scenes with classical music so it plays out like a deranged waltz.

All Screwed Up is only as good as any of its provocations, and some of them are a bit limp. A protracted subplot involving one character’s incredibly fertile womb and her anemic, neurotic nature is a bit of a slog to get through, and it occupies too much time for my liking. But Wertmüller express a reoccurring motif of the corrosive and narcotic pull of modernity to the fresh-faced innocent, along with plenty of her typical sexual and political hot buttons. It’s a patchwork that flails about in the wind, but it has moments of absolute brilliance.

A perfect sampler for the cinema of Lina Wertmüller, one of Italian cinema’s biggest provocateurs. The Seduction of Mimi not only unites the director with her two best stars, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, but offers an accessible primer on her artistic outlook and prevailing themes. Wertmüller’s camera is obsessed with corpulent flesh and the strife of the working class, often conflating or merging sex and politics into one thing.

All of that is present in the journey of Carmelo, aka Mimi, as he runs afoul of a corrupt government and his machismo gets grounded down. The “seduction” is a multifold experience as he gets seduced by a beautiful anarchist, by revenge, by defending his battered masculine pride. There isn’t just one seduction afforded to Mimi in this regional farce, but a perpetual pull into various scenarios that transform him into a carnally frustrated silent film clown.

Mimi is haunted by, if not outright cursed, by a mobster bloodline throughout his sojourn. He first runs into them in his Sicilian village as he refuses to vote a certain way to spite the mafioso family. They run him out of town and away from his frigid wife. He promptly makes his way to the big city and falls in love with a beautiful Trotskyite (Melato).

All of this is a bit of a picaresque and a chronicle of his various domestic mishaps that flirts with farcical bits and the erupting sexuality really come out. Mimi manages to return home to Sicily to find his chilly wife knocked up and enacts a plan of revenge by impregnating the wife of the man that cuckolded him. The wife, Elena Fiore, is rotund, middle-aged woman whose naked body becomes a nearly surreal object of desire as it fills Wertmüller’s frame. But Fiore plans her part with a kooky, earthy sensuality that upends any fears of body shaming or making her the punchline of a joke.

It all winds up in tragedy with Mimi crushed under the heels of his lower class and doomed to subjugation. Mimi is eternally trying to keep his pride in check while flailing about to tear off the old ways and embrace modernity, but this push and pull is a great source of tension as he cannot quite overcome. We leave him alone and completely flabbergasted that he is doomed to not have his cake and eat it too.

Corrosive power is eternally alluring to those that have it, those that want it, and those that somehow briefly touch it. Mimi begins as an apolitical figure, gains communist ideals, then sacrifices them all for a shot at respectability. But as quickly as it is given so can it be taken away.

Much of this makes The Seduction of Mimi sound like a chore to get through when it is a symphony of moods and tones. There are the romantic comedy interludes of Giannini and Melato, the physical bits of comedy, the hints of danger, and the verbal pyrotechnics. It thrilled me and I wanted to discover more from Wertmüller. I’m thankful that I have.   

From the opening minutes of A Separation we are thrown into the deep end of the film’s emotionally bruising and complicated morass. The simplest of domestic squabbles can so easily spin out into messy situations that grow exponentially and drag in surrounding players. What starts as a simple impasse between a married couple soon involves a lower-class family and a thorny legal battle.

But how do we get there? That’s the pleasure and engaging emotional tournament that A Separation pulls us through. It is a masterpiece of taking the old adage of the “frog in the slowly boiling pot” and applies it to the narrative and character journeys.

Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) are a married couple at a roadblock in their relationship. She wants to move out of Iran and raise their daughter elsewhere, it is never specified where, and Nader wants to stay to take care of Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. You understand exactly where both of these people are coming from and feel your sympathies being pulled in both directions.

There is, of course, a separation as Simin moves out of the family apartment and Nader does not interfere or stop her. There’s a glimpse here that he respects her autonomy as a person, but refuses to allow her to take their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). We sense the immense love and history between these people as this fracturing of the household occurs, but this is all nearly a prelude for what is to come.

One of the joys of watching A Separation is discovering where this basic premise takes us and revealing it in gory details would be a disservice. Just know that Nader hires a devoutly religious woman (Sareh Bayat) to care for his father in Simin’s absence, and this proves a complicating factor for a variety of reasons. The personal becomes uncomfortably political as class, sex, and religion comingle and ignite.   

Asghar Farhadi writes and directs a tense, absorbing drama that leaves us with ethical and moral questions that don’t have easy answers, if they can have any answer at all. Our empathies are evenly spread across the disparate POVs and characters demanding attention/their voice, and Farhadi glimpses them in often extreme closeup to register the immediacy of their situations. Farhadi’s milieu is a tender humanism that makes his fundamental structure so complicated and conflicted. Truly, A Separation is one of the richest films of the 2010s.

Am I missing something with Get Carter? Widely acclaimed as one of the preeminent British gangster films, if not films in general, but I just couldn’t embrace it. For all its grit, grime, and fetishistic sexuality, there’s a sleaziness and pronounced periods of lag.

Granted, having Michael Caine in the lead role goes a long way towards papering over these issues as he remains dynamic when playing brutes and unlikable men. It makes his modern-day transition to kindly grandfatherly/wise mentor roles something of a surprise when taken in the context of his larger body of work. His vicious gangster indulges in a perverted sense of honor while going on a bloody revenge quest over the murder of his brother.

That’s the basic outline of the story. Wayward son returns home to uncover the mystery of his sibling’s death with underworld mysteries blown open along the way. The shock ending twist still stings and make a perfect mordant cap to Get Carter.

If the pacing often slags, and it does, at least there’s a commendable sense of style to the proceedings, even when that style tips into salaciousness. You can’t fault Get Carter from shying away from its commitment to blood, sex, and dirty streets. Awash in grays and smoke, inky blacks and shocking splashes of red, Get Carter at least follows its hard-boiled vision to a logical conclusion.  

A corrosive portrait of a misogynist getting his comeuppance, Alfie is a minor late-60s work anchored by a wonderful Michael Caine performance. Caine gives a layered, complex performance that finds Alfie’s toxic masculinity, unwarranted arrogance, and gross sexism smothering a deep insecurity and contradictory fourth-wall breaking justifications. He is infinitely better than the rest of this hedonistic glimpse of Swinging London.

Perhaps it’s because our main character is so nearly off-putting that I couldn’t embrace Alfie. It’s hard to care about a narrative when the main character is so nearly without redeeming qualities to counterbalance. It becomes an exercise in endurance of one man’s bad behavior and his seemingly unwillingness or purposeful blindness to the damage he’s left behind. You may find it an emotionally engaging experience, but I found it occasionally tiresome.

What’s it all about, Alfie? A broken man burning through women and a health scare to learn to not be a selfish dick. I’ve had about enough of these stories and there’s just not enough charm to Alfie, aside from strong acting, to make me engage with it. I get why Caine’s cockney Don Juan launched him into super-stardom, though. His work really is that good.

Hanna-Barbera aren’t a studio that’s necessarily known for its high production values. Many of its beloved franchises, and I do love several of them, aren’t exactly memorable (in a positive way) for their beautiful animation. Plenty of chatter has occurred referencing the repeating backgrounds of Scooby-Doo or the limited movements of The Jetsons. What they excelled at was selling personality and sturdy formulaic situations in bite-sized chunks.

Much of that is evident in this adaptation of E.B. White’s perennial childhood classic, Charlotte’s Web. Yeah, the animation is pretty good for the studio’s typical quality but imagine this in the hands of Disney in its prime. The farms and fairs would’ve looked like watercolor pastoral wonderlands filled with whimsy and Americana beauty. Granted, the studio in the 70s wasn’t exactly in better shape so this is really imagining if they’d made it in the 50s.

And there is something of a displaced quality to this film. The animation reveals all the markings of the not just the studio, but the time period, while the songs by the Sherman Brothers feel retro, simplistic, and more attuned to the era of the film’s setting. Think of the happy-go-lucky corn pone songs of Summer Stock shoved into a hazy 70s hangout vibe. It’s fascinating in its mild weirdness.

Of course, nothing could diminish the power and heart of White’s original story, which this film is nearly slavishly faithful towards. I do not mean that as a criticism as White’s story is an acknowledged and beloved classic and straying too far from it would potentially collapse its fragile magic. Yes, I felt a similar emotional devastation as this cartoon spider’s death as I did in the fourth grade read-aloud during class. Ok, maybe not quite as powerful as that initial blow, but the warmth and weight of the story remain intact.

I often used to watch this as a child. Not because I thought it was some kind of masterpiece, even as a kid I recognized the shortcomings, but because it has a winsome charm that felt like comfort food. After all, where else could you find Debbie Reynolds as a sweet, motherly spider, Agnes Moorehead as a stern goose, Henry Gibson as an anxious pig, and Paul Lynde as gluttonous, sour rat? It may not be perfect, but it is a humble little thing that sparkles.