Reviews by JxSxPx

A remake of a 1932 film of the same name, The Last Mile tells the story of a group of nine inmates on death row. More violent than the original (a little shocking since sex and violence were the primary selling points of the Pre-Code era), but clearly originating from a play, The Last Mile proves more frustrating than anything.

The camera frequently just sits in one locked location and watches as the various inmates in the cell block twist, contort, and deliver long dialog passages at a time. They’re lined up against one side of the building, with a police desk sitting towards the middle. In adapting a stage show, one must take into consideration that what works on a stage may not work on film. That simple rule was either forgotten or totally ignored here.

Try as the actors might, and they’re assembled from a gallery of supporting players with recognizable faces if their names are escaping, they just can’t rise above this sluggish directing choices. Mickey Rooney, the headliner, plays it all subtle and quiet during the first half, before getting a chance to exploit his volcanic screen presence and charisma in the second. I know it’s easy to write off Rooney as a ham, and in various musical comedies he could be a huge one, but if given a strong guiding hand, he could be surprisingly malleable to a variety of genres and styles. I wouldn’t say this is one of his greatest performances, but it’s a solid and dark turn from the former Andy Hardy star.

It may not be a great film, but with Rooney and a cast of relative unknowns doing some commendable work, The Last Mile is at least worth a cursory look. It’s a decent enough B-movie, but you’ll be spending a decent amount of time watching it and wondering how much better it could have been if the budget was larger, a few more retakes could be done, and if the direction had been livelier.

The end of Prime Suspect 2 saw the boys club of the police squadron reject Tennison’s application for promotion, despite being more than qualified for the position. Prime Suspect 3 picks up a year later, with Tennison now working at a new police precinct, and taking over a half-assed case with Vice Squad. This time around, we’re exploring child prostitution and homosexuality.

The plot has become infinitely more complicated, and the balance between character development and sociological issues is finely starting to even out. The story begins with a house fire where the remains of an underage rent boy are found, and by the end we’ve descended into a hellish world where the police are complicit in covering up these heinous acts. Tennison’s righteous fury is deeply felt as she claws through a mercurial landscape looking for clues to piece it all together.

Prime Suspect 3 is the series gearing up to fire off on all cylinders, and achieves many moments of absolute greatness. The only problem here is that so many of the supporting players are given ample moments of character development, but we’ve just met them so the intended payoff is possibly less than expected. If we were with the same unit as the first two entries, this point would be invalid, but we’re with a (mostly) fresh batch of characters.

No matter, Mirren is typically excellent, continuing to dive deeper into Tennison’s many personality quirks to find new textures and colors to explore. Peter Capaldi as the emotionally brittle Vera, a female impersonator, is equally excellent. First introduced as the victim of the house fire, Vera knows more than she tells, and Capaldi’s fluttering speech and anxious body language really sell the character. Equally as important, Tom Bell returns from the first installment to reprise his character. In the first series, he was Tennison’s main bully on the force, and here he softens to her just enough to work with her, becoming her main support system within Vice Squad. His character never fully blossoms into someone likable, but Bell does a damn fine job making his character understandable.

It’s understandable if any of this material sounds well-worn, but Prime Suspect always finds a more unique, quieter spin on the material than one would guess. The plot intricacies can get convoluted, but the series finds time to counterbalance that with the weight and pressure placed on Tennison to either abandon the case, or her own internalized emotions to solve and prove them all wrong. The balance between the two, and how it is sometimes hard to shut off “work mode” and “home mode” when one is involved in this work gets more richly explored than before. Prime Suspect 3 continues the improvements made in the first two, and finds new ways to make the subject matter fresh, engaging, and Tennison an enigmatic if charismatic protagonist.

Prime Suspect 2 picks up just a year after the events from the first series. Tennison has established her name and reputation, but still crashes into the glass ceiling at full force. Prime Suspect 2 also adds in a newer layers, bringing in racial tensions, police brutality, and pornography to its central mystery. It’s an improvement over the first series, but still only flirting with the brilliance that the remainder of the series would be operating at.

When the remains of a tied-up girl are found in a neighborhood backyard, Tennison is joined in her investigation by Robert Oswalde, the newly hired black detective. While the first series saw Tennison’s rough initiation because of her gender, Oswalde’s is tied into his race. Since the murder took place in an era primarily composed to Caribbean natives, Oswalde is brought in to take the lead on the case, hoping to diffuse or ease any potential troubles between the citizens and the police department.

At times the series leans a little hard on the social issues, drifting a little too far away from Tennison’s personal growth and journey. Her love affair with Oswalde is kept quiet out of her desire for professional respect and career-driven single-mindedness. Later on we will see the various sacrifices and toils this has caused her, but it gets a little too muted here. When she is pulled off of the case, briefly, we see how rudderless and hopeless she is as a person without her job to define her. It’s these moments into Tennison’s mental and emotional space that make Prime Suspect so beloved. Prime Suspect 2 could have used a few more of them.

But it’s still a solidly made piece of television. I appreciate that this series finds its resolutions as anti-climaxes. These detectives stare into the abyss of human behavior, powerless to stop it from happening, but hoping to stop it from happening again. There’s a general sense of feeling adrift among these detectives that’s strangely compelling. They’re not the super-humans of American TV, but people trying desperately to do a tiny bit of good.

Who would have imagined that the Brits would produce a show that changed the entire format of a police procedural? One thinks of British TV as a continuous source of Masterpiece Theater’s handsome literary adaptations. Tasteful, might even be a better word for it. Of course, as an American my perception is more than likely warped given that much of British TV wasn’t shown over here, or it was hard to find, buried away in some distant cable channel.

But I’m digressing away from the main point. Prime Suspect is a hell of a show. Police dramas like Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, and the various outsets of Law & Order owe a tremendous debt to this series. These prodigal children wouldn’t have a roadmap to follow if it wasn’t for this first entry in the six volume series, which began in 1991 and ended in 2006.

This first volume, simply titled Prime Suspect, follows the newly appointed Jane Tennison as she takes over the homicide division and tries to solve a murder. As the first woman to run the department and head up an investigation of this magnitude, she encounters sexism at every turn. Tennison’s steely resolve and hard-outer shell eventually began to consume her, both at the job and in her private life, as she submerges her femininity to try and demand the respect she should be entitled to from her male peers and subordinates.

It’s gritty, well-written, and supremely well-acted show. Helen Mirren’s Tennison is a compulsively watchable character. We root for her to succeed in front of these hostile odds. She’s not always likable, and as the series progresses some of her more questionable traits and decisions become major problems, but she feels like a complete person. As flawed, damaged, and interesting as that sounds, Mirren makes it even more intriguing. When one looks at Mirren’s career achievements, her work on this series must be placed near the very top of the list, alongside her performances in Gosford Park, The Queen, Elizabeth, I, and The Madness of King George.

The only true flaw I can find with this first season of Prime Suspect is how consistently it replays some of the same story beats. There’s only one true suspect, we don’t spend much time with the others, and the series frequently has him in-and-out of jail, going out on bail/freed for lack of evidence, new evidence comes out to implicate him, repeat. It gets a little monotonous by the third go-around, but it’s highly forgivable a flaw. The rest of the series is so solidly constructed and executed, the supporting players is perfectly in-tuned with the material, and Mirren’s guiding performance so masterful, that it still feels imminently satisfying once the climatic events reveal themselves and the story reaches its inevitable conclusion.

Grandiose and perhaps too slavishly faithful to Pearl S. Buck’s novel, The Good Earth is a bit of an overstuffed drag. Wunderkind Irving Thalberg’s last film before his premature death, it’s yet another super-production more concerned with spectacle and initial impact than anything concerning art.

The plot follows the novel’s various detours and big set-pieces very faithfully, which is a problem. Buck’s novel presents a simplistic group of characters who don’t evolve or grow much, or are frequently lost track of for long periods of time before being reintroduced at random points. Her viewpoint was also clearly that of a white Christian bringing about salvation and modernity to the “backwards” Chinese, and they’re too often presented with child-like simplicity.

The worst offender of this is Paul Muni’s Wang Lung. Muni never disappears as effortlessly as he did in Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. He overacts too often, and adopts an accent that I suppose is his best effort at Chinese, but it just sounds distractingly "off." Good thing he’s the main character with the most speaking lines. And Luise Rainer’s mostly silent O-Lan is certainly a better performance than the previous year’s hammy Best Actress turn, but her win here is odd. She’s solid, if nothing more. She’s mostly called on to suffer nobly, and the harder edges of her character have been sanded off. Her work is commendable, maybe even worthy of the nomination, but it’s not as good as Greta Garbo’s immaculate work in Camille.

The rest of the cast is filled out with white actors in yellowface, just like the leads. While Muni and Rainer aren’t familiar faces or voices as hard-set star personas, the supporting players were recognizable character actors at the time. Many of them sound like grizzled prospectors and not the poor Chinese peasants they’re supposed to be playing. This was to be expected of the era, sadly, but it becomes more egregious and ugly once you notice that all of the extras and bit players are played by Asians.

There are two solid reasons to watch The Good Earth, and they’re the big production scenes and the cinematography. Karl Freund’s cinematography is a highlight of any film bearing his name, and his work is similarly solid and commendable. I would have thrown him a statute for his work in Metropolis, Dracula, Camille, or Key Largo before this one, but his win here is still well deserved.

The Good Earth brings to life many of the memorable scenes from the book – the plague of locusts, the revolution and rioting, the vast scenes of drought and starvation. These segments are thrilling moments in which the film springs alive, shaking off the tendency towards tasteful suffering and turgid movie-making. O-Lan’s near-miss with a firing squad is one of the few scenes of high-tension.

Far too much of The Good Earth is wasted on making a large-scale epic, without bothering to populate it with memorable characters. There’s too many long-stretches of tedium setting in, or Muni mugging for the back row, or Rainer's open-mouthed bowing and looking vaguely distressed. The big scenes show where all of the time and money went on the screen, shame they couldn’t put that kind of care into the rest of the production.

I’m sure that the real story of Florenz Ziegfeld is worthy of a three hour spectacle, but this movie plays so fast and loose with the story, unconcerned with dramatics in fact, that it clearly only wants to move as quickly as possible from one big production number or melodramatic scene to the next. The Great Ziegfeld is probably a more tightly constructed variation of the blossoming genre of thinly veiled biopics that MGM traded in over the following decade: a loosely constructed plot to disguise the fact that we’re watching a filmed revue. Later films like Words and Music feature better production numbers, but The Great Ziegfeld never drags for a moment despite the sense of bloat that occurs frequently.

Perhaps Ziegfeld is most illuminating about MGM’s figurehead, Louis B. Mayer. Here was a super-production without the fingerprints of Irving Thalberg, this one was all Mayer, and his ludicrous artistic vision. The story superficially concerns Ziegfeld’s rise, increasing lavish productions, and grand showmanship, but it’s really a bit of back-patting from MGM’s head-honcho. This is the type of elephantine cinema that makes clean sweeps at the Oscars, despite never truly deserving such accolades.

It’s easy to confuse biggest with being the best. The Great Ziegfeld certainly is BIG. Bordering on garish the production numbers are things that hit you over the head with the swirling gigs, rising curtains, and showgirls buried under sparkles and fringe. This sense of overly fussy production carries over into the three lead acting performances that are at times too large. William Powell, normally an urbane sophisticate that I adore spending time with, is lost here. There’s no tether for him to hold on to or arc for him to play. His Ziegfeld is unchanging from the first frame until the very last, with only age makeup to signify a major growth has happened. This is the master showman as saintly figure, yet another moment in which Mayer’s self-congratulations feels unearned. The amount of crocodile tears the production probably had to shed while he gave orders about this could have turned the Sahara into the wetlands.

Myrna Loy, normally a perfect foil to Powell, also feels lost amongst the glitter and pomp. Her third-place top billing is nothing but a bit of name recognition to pull in audiences. The movie is three hours long, and she shows up for the last forty-five minutes, roughly. She doesn’t capture anything of Billie Burke, and her performance mostly consists of a new hair color and nothing dramatic for her to play. Luise Rainer fares better in the sense that she has more scenes to play, but her performance is too mannered. Rainer projects a delicate nature, but her performance is brittle and fluttery, and she plays everything too large. The infamous phone scene is a study in the theatrical technique the Method generation sought to remove. It’s a decent enough performance, but to win the Oscar over Carole Lombard’s iconic work in My Man Godfrey? Strange.

As heavy-handed, teetering towards a grotesque celebration of quantity over quality, as The Great Ziegfeld is, it’s no worse than many modern Oscar winners. In 1936 this won Best Picture, and, frankly, it probably would stand a good chance of winning that title in any decade given the sheer number of bloated, banal films with epic running times that have claimed that honor. There’s some fine moments hidden within the colossal running time, but the film mostly plays as a enormous masturbatory bit of ego stroking from Mayer.

I understand that looking for coherent storytelling in a big summer blockbuster is like looking for water in Death Valley. Trust me, I really do understand this, but even accounting for that, I found Jurassic World to be insanely stupid. Sure it’s fun while watching it in the moment, but I could never stop myself from internal eye-rolling or unintentional giggle fits.

Here is a movie that introduces a series of concepts and tones and never pays them off. It appears to frequently be calling attention to itself through meta-commentary, but it merely pays as lip service. A sound bite about audiences desire for “more teeth” in comparison to the thrills of the original Jurassic Park is akin to this. It says it knows that it’s going to be ridiculous, but it plays everything with a deadly serious tone.

Jurassic Park was not exactly a fountain of correct science, dinosaur DNA preserved in amber for millions upon millions of years? Yeah, right. Dinosaurs recreated with amphibian DNA as opposed to birds, which we were told were their theoretical ancestors? Weird choice, one must admit. But Jurassic Park had solid film-making choices, and if a film is well made and engaging, we will forgive a great many logical blunders.

Jurassic World is not a film made with great care and skill. It constantly wants us to look up in awe, without having earned that awe. The special effects work is rough looking, and at no point did I believe that Chris Pratt was in the same frame as the velociraptors. Jurassic Park gave us accurate enough dinosaurs based upon the cumulative knowledge of the era, while this film is only happy to regurgitate those images instead of expanding the notion of what a cinematic dinosaur could be. Call me old fashioned, but I wanted more animatronic work! The reason the first film is still so beloved and cherished is the top-notch effects work that created believable looking dinosaurs, most of which were made by Stan Winston Studios. And the main plot point of a hybrid dinosaur as something new and shocking is laughable enough, the dinosaurs in the original film were hybrids!

Another problem is that of character. A blockbuster by design plays within well-known character tropes. Bryce Dallas Howard’s frigid all-business career woman will inevitably thaw in the presence of chaos in her perfectly organized world. Jurassic World is also positioning her as the ostensible hero of the film, yet undercuts every single one of her numerous heroic moments in favor of a laugh. It’s an unseemly bit of condescension to the main character in favor of making Pratt’s animal trainer look like the sweaty, masculine alpha star of these things. Pratt’s character doesn’t deserve this heroic view either, as he does nothing much memorable or life-saving for a majority of the film. Jurassic World is also not a great highlight for Pratt’s brand of goofy, insouciant charm as it asks him to play it straight. He gets lost in the shuffle.

What Jurassic World does well is unleash dinosaur related chaos for two hours. I knew going into this movie that it was probably going to be a mess as none of the previews had endeared me to it. But I was a kid who loved dinosaurs, and I still do. Jurassic World certainly gave me plenty of dino-related bang for my buck. The climatic finale had more to do with kaiju film-making than anything else, and while it was appropriately campy (a believed dead character returns cause magic!), it was also strangely satisfying to watch. Man, is it a stupid movie as plot holes and thinly written characters crash up higher and higher, but there’s a level of fun to be had in watching gigantic super beasts cause massive amounts of destruction. It’s still the best sequel in the franchise, but that is an admittedly low-bar to leap.

If there is such a thing as too much cinema, as overdosing on it even, I think a film like Mad Max: Fury Road might be what someone is talking about. From the first frame until the credits roll, every single second of it is blasted to 15, and pumped full of adrenaline. It’s a crazed, gorgeous piece of action film-making, with coherent sequences that clearly delineate who is where and what is going on, and surrounds them in piercing colors and textures.

This isn’t so much a reboot of a beloved but long dormant franchise as it is a complete makeover of it. If this movie was a high school student, it would be a carhead that huffs paint and pierces himself when bored. It’s an invigorating and hellish ride, a rollercoaster which threatens to throw itself off of the tracks at any given second, spitting off sparks every step of the way.

The Mad Max franchise has always placed him as an outsider, a supporting player in whichever episodic narrative he has become entangled in. Fury Road quickly captures Max (Tom Hardy), throws him in the den of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his War Boys, used for blood transfusions for the ailing War Boys. He escapes, and runs into Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and the runaway wives of Joe. Joining forces with them, the motley crew try to survive the vast desert, reach a promised land, and escape from Joe who is hot on their heels.

The entire Mad Max franchise has hidden away the threat of violence against females, and Fury Road places those fears at the center stage. Presenting a world in which a group of avenging females gain agency and dismantle the oppressive patriarchy of their world. They don’t replace it with a matriarchy, but with a hinted at third option. Immortan Joe’s world is explained through visual cues, with water as a precious commodity, given freely among the upper class but rationed to the lower classes. Borrowing from Metropolis, Joe’s haven is a paradise at the top of a large structure, and a dirty, grubby land at the bottom, burdened with overpopulation and little resources. The ending sees them restoring some kind of leveling playing field.

Fury Road is also a film which gives us a full spectrum of female characters, each developed enough to make clear their wants, desires, and needs. Furiosa gets the majority of the screen time, and she’s one hell of a character. I would happily watch another several dozen films with her in the lead character. She recalls Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, but is a decidedly original and unique creation. I want a movie detailing her culture, their backstory, everything.

This theme of female strength presents itself in the various action sequences. An early one sees a gigantic sandstorm conjuring itself when Furiosa and the wives need it. This sandstorm is like a physical manifestation of maternal rage and protection. It’s a thrilling piece of film-making. The colors in this sequence, like the rest of the film, are saturated to the point of eyeball searing. The swirling color palette is kind of pure cinematic distillation that we go to the movies for.

God, I loved this movie. I could go on praising the entire thing even more, but I think I have made the case.

Born on the Fourth of July just reminds me of why I’m so lukewarm to Oliver Stone on a good day, and loathe him on a bad day. While the center of the film is a solid story, an impassioned howl about Vietnam and its numerous wrongs, it is trapped within too many stylistic diversions and distractions.

The early sequences are meant to be slices of Americana, but they’re too hokey, and filled with too many on-the-noise dialog passages to be entirely forgivable. The worst of which has Ron Kovic’s mother turning to him and creating a prophecy for his future by sharing a dream she had. It’s ham-fisted, indulging in the worst tricks of Stone as a storyteller – slow-motion, obvious symbolism pointed out, a grandiose tone that pounds away.

Once you accept that the film will be overblown, it becomes more enjoyable as Kovic ages, goes to war, and descends into self-hatred and activism. Certain scenes still ring with a sense of hysteria and bloat that don’t aid the epic tone he’s striving for, but he more often just rests his camera upon Tom Cruise and lets him act.

To be fair, I’ve never thought of Cruise as much of an actor. His lone mode of intensity or creeping manic laughter left me cold in numerous beloved properties. I only really warm up to him when he’s forced to dig deep in roles we wouldn’t normally picture him in, think of Magnolia or Interview with the Vampire. Here, he does commendable and strong movie star acting. Never quite disappearing entirely into the role, and frequently doing the type of acting that looks great in small chunks come award season or in career retrospectives, but he still digs deeper into the role than in anything he had done before.

Cruise is the main reason to watch Fourth of July, as most of the other actors are wasted in small supporting parts. Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Willem Dafoe, Frank Whaley, these are just some of the actors given prominent billing in parts that are thinly written, drift in-and-out of the film randomly, or appear for a small handful of scenes then exit. None of them makes much of an impression since none of them are written as dynamic people. They’re supporting players to Kovic’s story, characters who exist to move the narrative forward, or to make sure emotional beats are hit properly.

Born on the Fourth of July was probably the first warning of the bloated, overindulgent tendencies that Oliver Stone would fall into as time went on, but it still has a visceral power in numerous ways. Cruise’s central performance is a solid anchor for the film, and it’s story is an important one, still timely and deeply felt. It’s good, but I don’t know if it’s just my distaste for Stone, or if between my first viewing of the film and my most recent one I noticed its flaws much more. Could be, the film hasn’t changed, but I certainly have.

For all of the praise that Up garnered around this same time for maturely handling grief, regret, and death, I never quite warmed up to it. I appreciated it at an arm’s length, but Mary and Max handles similar material with more aplomb. Mary and Max is quite possibly one of the bleakest and despairing animated films, a meditation of two sad, damaged individuals struggling deeply to form a connection. This connection, surprisingly intimate and warm despite being over letters, also gives the film a counterbalance of hope, joy, and humanity.

2009 was a banner year for animation, not only did we see the release of these two films, but even lesser efforts like 9, commendable ones like The Princess and the Frog, and neo-classics like Coraline, Ponyo, and Fantastic Mr. Fox all saw release. Each of those films obtained some measure of respect and an audience, yet Mary and Max was handled poorly. Pity, while the target audience may be hard to determine, this film deserved a better rollout than to just be dropped on Video-on-Demand with little fanfare.

The story concerns the decades-long friendship between Mary, a young Australian girl with a rough home life, and Max, a middle-aged mentally ill New Yorker. They communicate through letters, with Max frequently oversharing adult situations and themes that Mary would have no clue how to process or what they meant. Mary, meanwhile, shares stories of an alcoholic mother, absentee father, and isolated childhood. Individually, their lives are sad and damaged, but when brought together they find some measure of happiness and understanding between them.

The film is unconcerned with traditional narrative, preferring to craft a series of vignettes populated by eccentrics, and colored in muted tones with an occasional splash of crimson. Sight-gags and strange choices in character design make this world feel welcoming at first glance, until one realizes just how depraved and twisted everything is swirling around these two optimists. The emotional heft of the film ultimately prevails as hopeful, despite numerous accidental deaths and suicide attempts along the way. These two characters share a common thread of innocence, of hopefulness, that the world cannot extinguish no matter how hard it tries. The climatic revelation is a touching, even heartbreakingly tender portrait of what a connection between two people can inspire. The comfort we find in this final passage is a hard-won victory against the anguish of so much that transpired before it.

Mary and Max may not be a movie for everyone, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t absolutely adore it. Here was a movie that tackled difficult, often tricky subject matter head-on with humanity, wicked humor, and a frankness that is refreshing. Many animated films have touched me deeply, but I don’t know of another one that did the feat quite as sublimely as this one did.