Reviews by JxSxPx

A toothless comedy about culture clashes in 1980s America with a script by John Hughes. Not the worst way to spend 90 minutes, but not one of the better uses of its talented cast or beloved writer’s skills. The Great Outdoors plays more like the set-up of a sitcom stretched out to feature length, lots of bits works, and just as many land with a thud.

But, hey, we get to watch John Candy and Dan Aykroyd plays off of each other, and that’s worth something. Candy plays the poorer patriarch taking his family out into the woods for a nice quiet vacation, while Aykroyd is the yuppie brother-in-law bringing his family along to crash that vacation. The set-up is about all there is to the movie, with culture clashing over and over again and a few expected moments in which these city dwellers freak out about nature. It’s mildly amusing, but that’s about it.

Pity its third act twist into melodrama, because before that Bachelorette wasn’t a half-bad female-centric twist on a group of friends reuniting and behaving awfully for one wild night. Actually, Bachelorette never truly finds that sweet spot between moments of raunchy humor and emotional depth. It works better when it puts aside the quiet character moments and focuses instead on being a debauched riot.

Beginning with the revelation that their “fat friend” is getting married before any of them, the main trio reunite as said friend’s maid-of-honor and bridesmaids. Each of them seem to have calcified into their high school era personas – a type-A ice queen, a cynical and introspective drug addict, and a party-girl eternally looking for the next good time. And each of these characters are played beautifully, possibly because they’ve been cast to type by a group of strong actresses.

Kirsten Dunst finds a welcome balance between internally seething with rage at not reaching this milestone before the rest of her friends, and finding the laughs in the situation. Lizzy Caplan possibly plays her character with too much vulnerability and honesty, we root for her to get her head straightened out, yet find her equally frustrating over still being this wildly incompetent in maneuvering through life. Best in show is easily Isla Fisher as the manic, slapstick prone walking disaster zone.

Bachelorette utilizes them very well, but leaves talented comic actors like Rebel Wilson, Adam Scott, Hayes MacArthur, and James Marsden with very little to do. Andrew Rannells makes the most out of his minimal screen time, but wouldn’t this film have only improved with it had used this talented cast more effectively? I think so.

Mathieu Demy’s presence is a heavy-burden to carry for any film, never mind one written, directed, and starring him. As the son of canonized icons of cinema Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda, Demy’s Americano feels like it needs to be something better than it is based purely on their long shadows, and it is merely adequate.

The bare bones of a strong story is there, but Demy isn’t much of an actor. His dispassionate performance starts life as a unique reading, we are about to see this man reawaken to himself and his life. This never materializes in Demy’s work, even when the script is clearly heading that way. He always looks slightly bored and disinterested in the material, strange to consider since it came from his mind.

Americano may mangle the central mystery’s payoff, which is very one-dimensional, yet it handles the confusion over whether something is remembered or colored by outside voices. Demy’s fractured memories of his youth in Los Angeles are seen through footage taken by his real-life mother Varda, and contrasted with his character’s frequent lapses in memory, or maybe they’ve been edited by his bitter father. This smoky recollection is the highlight of the film, and proves that Demy has a gift with screenwriting, but maybe he should reconsider acting and directing.

A bit of a bait-and-switch from the beginning, which sees Natalie Portman crying in extreme close-up for 10 minutes straight. But Free Zone is unconcerned with Natalie Portman’s character, preferring instead to use her as an audience surrogate between two characters who function as symbols writ large for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Free Zone lacks for subtlety and hammers home its various talking points repeatedly, stranding three talented actresses with little worthy material to work with.

The story is armed with loaded material – a Palestinian and an Israeli both look to an American to work as intermediary to square a debt – and the film overloads it with needlessly arty digressions. Loads of shots are superimposed over the car windows, colliding past and present, which would be more interesting and significant a choice if the film bothered with giving these women dialog worth listening to, or characters beyond their symbolic meaning. What we’re introduced to at the beginning of their journey is the same state they’re in when we reach the end. There’s some good film-making here, it’s just buried beneath strange choices and the questionable choice to present the eternal conflict in the Middle East as a quirky road trip.

An improvement over its predecessor, A Fistful of Dollars, and a visible trajectory towards the greatness of The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West is highly visible. For a Few Dollars More is all sweaty pieces that don’t exactly make for a coherent plot, but they make a damn fine excuse for Sergio Leone to exercise his obsessions with making violence both look awful and strangely poetic.

I can’t really recall what anyone would call a “narrative” in this, but I do remember a lot of the varied set-pieces. The skeletal plot concerns Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" teaming up with his enemy, a bounty hunter played by Lee Van Cleef, to capture a bandit (Gian Maria Volontè). That's about it, but it doesn't matter as it's just a ploy to create moments of pure cinematic vision in all its poetic glory.

Leone was a master of pointing his camera towards epic vistas and juxtaposing it with extreme close-ups of his actors looking dirty, chomping on cigars, and sweating buckets. And this is just the preliminary moments leading up to the shoot-outs, which seem to last for long stretches of time. This is western stretched to the breaking point with melodramatic flourishes. This is grand entertainment.

An amiable little bauble of a film with nothing much in mind besides simple entertainments, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw is one of the better offerings from star Jayne Mansfield’s film output. Borrowing more than a little liberally from Destry Rides Again, this too sees a fish-out-of-water sheriff with a penchant for not using firearms taking control of an anarchic town. Fractured Jaw even comes complete with a tough-talking saloon girl, this time she’s the proprietress/songstress instead of the just being the songstress (and vaguely hinted at prostitute) Dietrich played.

It offers up a consistently bemused atmosphere, never truly reaching for anything beyond mild diversions. This is fine, as it does this job with great efficiency. Director Raoul Walsh had made better films before this, and would go on to make a few more greats ones, but he brings a professionalism and craft that makes the entire thing run like clockwork.

Walsh also manages to get a performance out of Mansfield that isn’t mannered, she doesn’t find that extra little spark to truly make the character sing, but it’s a very good effort on her part. (Her singing is dubbed by Connie Francis, who gets credit for singing the title song and nothing else.) Kenneth Moore as the titular sheriff is a consistent delight, bumbling his way through situations through a combination of blind luck and help from friends, frequently oblivious to the dangers around him. One does wish that Frank Tashlin had gotten a hold of this material and really played it up for all the comedic potential it had, not to mention that he was the only director who really knew how to use Mansfield to great effect. Tashlin would have managed to trim some of the fat from it, too.

I’m fairly confident that I’ve mentioned this before in other reviews for Marvel’s direct-to-video animated films, but they’re nothing in comparison to the work that DC has been doing. Granted, even DC’s films have varied wild in quality of story, animation, and vocal acting, but they’ve also given us ones as great as Batman: Under the Red Hood, Batman: Year One or Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths. DC has explored their characters in a deeper way, bringing to life stories that are too adult/violent for their animated series or too fringe to use to introduce a major audience to in a live action film.

Marvel has yet to do anything quite so adventurous or daring with their films. A typical one is poorly written, lazily delivered by the actors, and cheaply animated. Iron Man & Hulk: Heroes United is no different. The sense that every sentence is written in bold and delivered with an exclamation point isn’t the worst choice, but the voice actors don’t deliver it with a wink and a nod, or any real life. Compared to something like Batman: The Brave and the Bold which embraces the goofier aspects of comic books and delivers with panache, this feels like a lead balloon.

Shame, really, cause I adore Marvel, always have. The Avengers are a group of characters that they haven’t cracked the code on in animated form just yet (moment of confession, I have not yet watched Earth’s Mightiest Heroes which I hear nothing but praise for). The 90s animated series was a blast to my twelve-year-old self, but finding old clips of it now is a painful reminder of what used to pass for quality entertainment in that decade. And the two Ultimate Avengers films are a mixed bag. Taken as solo entities, Iron Man: Armored Adventures wasn’t anything special, and the less said about his solo animated film the better. I don’t know why Marvel can’t seem to produce a quality animated project in regards to many of these characters, they’ve got Disney money backing them now, but they seem to do better with Spider-Man or the X-Men. This is just the latest in a series of duds featuring Marvel’s finest.

Not really a movie in the conventional sense, this is more like a very well done version of the recent live musicals from NBC. Having said that, there’s still some minor charms to be found in this filmed version of Gilbert & Sullivan’s beloved property, mostly in the form of Kevin Kline’s Errol Flynn-esque swashbuckling performance.

The story concerns Frederic (here played by pop singer Rex Smith, very handsome), a young pirate who wants to leave the life behind as his 21st birthday nears. These feelings kick into higher gear once he meets Mabel (Linda Ronstadt, vocally beautiful but sacked with a wet blanket part), but the Pirate King (Kevin Kline, deliciously hammy) has other plans for dear Frederic. That’s about it for plot, and the film is an operetta so instead of a normal musical in which the dialog pauses to break into song-and-dance, the song-and-dance pauses to include some dialog.

The Pirates of Penzance is a faithful recreation of the Broadway revival, with the only major change in creative talent being Estelle Parsons dropped in favor of Angela Lansbury. This is both a blessing and a curse, while Ronstadt and Smith deliver brilliant vocals, I can only imagine how powerful this must have sounded in-person, they’re very green as actors and the camera is unforgiving at times about this. It doesn’t help that they’re the dullest characters, not the fault of the actors as they do their best, and Kline and Lansbury run circles indulging their theatrical backgrounds to grand, high-camp effect. Kline’s performance is the real standout here, proving that in another era he could lead a production like The Adventures of Robin Hood with élan.

I suppose this is supposed to be a thriller, but something about the presence of Walter Matthau in the central role makes it feel more like a shaggy, formless but pleasant farcical take on a thriller. Which is strange, because Matthau was a legitimate threat in Charade and capable of more dramatic depths in films like Bigger Than Life or The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Doesn’t matter in the end, Hopscotch is a strange but charming little movie.

From the mind of author Brian Garfield, who also wrote Death Wish, Hopscotch also finds one singular man rebelling against the established order, but unlike Death Wish this lone man isn’t interested in mercenary violence. No, he’d rather annoy his enemies by out-smarting them at every single turn. This guy isn’t just a few steps ahead, he’s several floors up with enough time to occasionally look down at the people chasing after him and laugh at how slowly they’re gaining traction.

And that is the entire movie in a nutshell, in which Matthau leads his pursuers on a wild chase across continents, setting up scenarios for one outcome while delivering an entirely different one. There’s other actors on-screen, but none of them do much. Pity, as the supporting players are made up of Glenda Jackson, Ned Beatty, Sam Waterson, and other fantastic character actors. But the film belongs to Matthau and his particular hang-dog charisma and charms. It’s a strange picaresque, but ultimately enjoyable in how wafer-thin it is.

Oh man, if I’m a sucker for any type of film, it’s a British costume drama about repressed emotions, all-consuming love affairs, and the disruption of the respectable order. A Room with a View feels tailored made for someone like me, and it’s a great film from start to finish.

The film, and the novel upon which it is based by E.M. Forster, tells of the love affair between Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, who meet on a vacation in the Italian countryside. Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) is being chaperoned by her spinster cousin (Maggie Smith) on this vacation, mostly to keep an eye on the young woman as she is engaged to Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis). But the attraction between Lucy and George (Julian Sands) is titanic. Lucy and George are both outsiders of the normal customs of English culture and find in each other a kindred spirit.

George sees Lucy for the woman she truly is, or could be nurtured into being if the class system and society in which she lives didn’t demand her to be a beautiful ornamentation and nothing more. Cecil is the type of man who views her as a logical prize to be obtained in order to retain the established order of things and work through the checklist of milestones and objects to be attained in an effort to be deemed a respectable member of the upper class. George wants Lucy as a partner, as an equal in life.

A Room with a View is about Lucy’s choice between what type of life she wants – a life with no view, or a life with one. Lucy’s journey is primarily one of deep intellectual thought about what she truly wants out of life. Helena Bonham Carter, known primarily to me for playing eccentrics, is wonderfully restrained here. Julian Sands is the intense free-thinker George, and he’s impossibly attractive in this mode. It’s easy to see why Lucy would throw everything away to be with him. Daniel Day-Lewis is a laugh riot in this, playing a character so pretentious and filled with airs that he frequently looks like the caricature on The New Yorker come to life. While Maggie Smith makes a meal of playing her dotty spinster character, given the trajectory of her career it almost feels like Smith was just waiting to age into these roles where she could deliver sassy quips, blunt one-liners, and tut-tut about diminishing propriety and standards of class with exuberance.

The film does move at a more modest and measured pace, preferring to take idle strolls through various dialog passages making the more blunt mannerisms of George stand out even more as a shock of violent color in a beige world. This deliberate pace and tone makes for a story in which you must get swept up in the intricacies of a sideways glance or an arched brow to speak volumes about the emotions bubbling under the placid surface. Heart and mind join together in this film in which we must ask these characters why they’re doing what they are, and whether or not this is what they truly want.