Reviews by JxSxPx

While watching American Psycho I had a bit of a thought, “literal” truth does not matter in stories where the perspective is skewered in several different directions. That is to say, it does not matter if Patrick Bateman is actually murdering any of these people or behaving this badly, he believes that he is, and that is all that matters. A literal truth would probably be hard to distinguish from his perspective and the world that he inhabits.

If one must think of it in a way that gives a concrete answer, I would say that at least one of the murders in this story is true, and the rest is the product of his feverish imagination and quickly disintegrating psyche. There’s plenty of ammunition for both camps to explore whether or not what the film shows us is really happening or not, but that’s not an interesting point of debate. A film like American Psycho gives us a rich and disturbing text, then asks us why we think what we do as we walk away from it. An argument over “yes” or “no” should be the beginning of the discussion, not the end point.

The first time I viewed the film, at the far too young age of thirteen, I didn’t know what the hell I had just watched. I only knew that what I watched had taken place in the very dark, scary mind of an incredibly attractive man. Returning to it, I expected for that original thought to be reinforced. I guess in a way, it was, but in a deeper way, I discovered that I didn’t care much whether or not he really did it. Bateman believes that he has entirely committed these acts, spoken about them, cried for help, and been met with gross indifference. American Psycho was oddly prescient in detailing an American landscape in which the very wealthy get off freely by arguing that they’re too affluent for jail time. Hell, half the time they don’t even have to be rich, they just have to be white.

White privilege, particularly the virulently hyper-masculine, extremely wealthy, heterosexual kind, is taken to task in a world where no one can distinguish each other from the next person, and business cards are treated like a dick measuring contest. This doesn’t even begin to cover the hilarity that ensues from trying to get restaurants to reserve you a table, something which is treated with a seriousness and severity that it approaches religious fundamentalism in its single-minded oppressiveness.

And walking us through this satirical world is Christian Bale’s unbelievably good work as Bateman. When playing serial killers or highly unlikeable people, most actors will try to find a way to give them at least one sympathetic moment. Bette Davis’ final scene in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane springs to mind. So does how endearingly nervous and sweet Norman Bates is upon first blush in Psycho. None of that is existent here in Bale’s work. Any moments of kindness or self-reflection feel like errors in his coding. Bale and the film-makers see Bateman clearly, and the type of men he symbolizes, and they hate him, skewer and satirize him endlessly. And perhaps it required a female director, Mary Harron here, to see clearly such a terrible man and the fragility of the entitled male ego and take it to task, over and over again.

I wonder how much of an influence this film was on From Dusk till Dawn? This film also features a pair of idiots stumbling into a strip club which is actually a haven for vampires. Instead of a pair of gangster brothers, we’re stuck with a pair of frat boys looking for a good time.

Where Vamp really stumbles is in having Grace Jones play the leader of the vampires, and squandering her interesting film presence in a thankless supporting role that gives her no dialog, nor even much of a character besides some fierce high-fashion outfits to wear. Her Keith Haring look for a striptease is a bizarre moment, one of grander ambitions and more interesting artistry than the rest of the film can bother to aspire to.

Vamp is hogged up for far too long but handsome but bland college kids. It’s a troop of B-movie actors, and Jones outshines them all despite being dumped about halfway through. I have yet to find a decent movie in which Grace Jones has a part. Too often she’s set-up to be a threatening, dynamic presence in the film, before being thrown aside so the plot machinations can go on as normally intended. I guess she’s too androgynous, ferocious, sexual, and unique a persona for Hollywood to figure out what to do with her. What a pity.

Is it good? Is it bad? I guess the answer to that lies squarely with whether or not you grew up with Heavy Metal, or if you’re a thirteen-year-old straight boy. It seemed aimed squarely at the mentality of that particular group – most of the stories devolve into scenes of random violence and sex. Even the female characters with any kind of agency are scantily clad and frequently used as little more than sex objects. The entire thing is seen from the prism of a pubescent mind, which doesn’t mean that Heavy Metal has no charms.

On a mindless level, there’s plenty of dumb fun to be had. Only two sequences really stand out for me, in a positive way. “B-17” and “Taarna” are the unquestionable highlights, bothering to push the boundaries of their stories into scary or epic constructs. “Taarna” is one of the best shorts based purely on the iconography of its main character, it is she that we glimpse on the film’s poster. These two are also the most effective uses of the soundtrack, which in others can appear oppressive or strangely out of synch with the material. Dated, more than a little sexist, and fairly mindless, Heavy Metal isn’t good in any real sense of the word, but it is fun in a midnight-movie kind of way.

You’d think the cinematic marriage of two rascally talents like playwright Sam Shepard and director Robert Altman would be a happy occasion, but Fool for Love is only halfway there. Altman gets great work from his leading lady, and surrounds the two leads with an impressively eccentric supporting cast, but the material never coheres.

A drifting cowboy (Sam Shepard) pulls into a sleepy hamlet, encounters a long-lost love (Kim Basinger), and proceeds to try and force her back home with him. It’s an interesting set-up and Altman tries to inject much needed energy as the story slowly reveals an incestuous plot twist, but it’s to no true avail. Basinger appears to be the only actor acutely aware of the Southern Gothic soap opera that she’s performing, while Shepard, despite being the author of the piece, never gets a firm grasp on his character. My best guess is that he and Altman had disagreements about how to tackle the material, and the result is the muddled Fool for Love with Shepard trying to bring gravity to the proceedings while Altman and Basinger are playing it as deep-fried sex farce, like a screwball goof on Faulkner. It’s entertaining for being so unsettled and deeply strange in tonality.

Based on a play by David Rabe, Streamers examines the American male on the eve of Vietnam. We have those who enjoy playing the violent war games, trying desperately to live up to some idealized version of masculinity (Matthew Modine, David Alan Grier), and then there are the others, a pair of dangerous individuals because their points-of-view and sexual identities cause a disruption of the simplicity of the visions of the former group (Mitchell Lichtenstein, Michael Wright).

To par that complicated thought down to its absolute essentials, Modine and Grier are treating boot camp like a game in which they will emerge out the other side as the typical American male. This ideology is complicated by the presence of the gay Lichtenstein, a character that they don’t want to believe is gay, in Modine’s case a good argument could be made about him suppressing his own homosexual urges. Into this already tense environment enters Wright, a wildly unpredictable and unstable chaos bringer, someone who is at odds with everything society tells him he is and should be. Streamers is already off to richly fertile ground.

But Streamers also came out during a time in which Altman did nothing but make films from stage plays. And these films were frequently awkward things, at times trying valiantly to break free from their stage origins (Fool for Love), or, like here, merely pointing and shooting a camera at the one room setting of the story. And this staginess prevents Streamers from achieving true greatness. No matter how many mirrors or through-window shots Altman tries to throw at it, Streamers always feels like a filmed stage play, not a true cinematic adaptation.

Luckily, Altman has stuffed his four main roles with talented performers. I never really knew Grier could dig so deep or do much beyond broad comedy, so it was nice to see him play a more complicated character here. Wright suffers from some unfortunate stereotyping, far too much of his character is tone deaf jive-talking, but he also gets a few chances as the film progresses to dismantle some of those earlier wince-inducing moments. His big break down at the end is impressive. Modine is oddly playful here, boyishly handsome, more than a little fey, and very solid throughout. But Streamers belongs to Lichtenstein. He is the one character who sees himself clearly, and the absurdity of the situation around them. Sexual, charismatic, and yet vulnerable, Lichtenstein seemed primed to be a big discovery, but maybe the openly gay actor proved too hard to cast after this? I don’t know, but his performance was my great discovery of Streamers.

In the barest of ways, Thieves Like Us resembles the iconoclastic Bonnie and Clyde, but unlike that film, Thieves doesn’t present us with anti-heroes seeking to dismantle the existing structures and paying for it. No, Thieves presents us with a group of idiots who just so happen to rob banks and be in the criminal business, because what else are they going to do in-between bouts of hanging out and drinking Coke and listening to music?

Thieves Like Us reminded me of a shambling, narrative-less hang-out film like Mean Streets. There’s a central romance between Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall that gives the film a semblance of a cohesive narrative structure, but it never really centers on anything much. It’s not an all encompassing work of intricate observation and genius like Altman’s The Long Goodbye or Nashville, but it’s a good time. Altman still prefers to sit back and observe his characters and their situations, but the violent dénouement doesn’t give Thieves a deeper meaning. It just feels like a last-ditch effort to give these characters some pathos. This wasn’t necessary, they were much more fun being a pack of idiots, falling in love, robbing some banks, and generally hanging around.

Leave it to Robert Altman to take his sarcasm to film noir and emerge with a brilliant take that marries a 40s hardboiled detective to the paranoia and malaise of the 70s. Part of the reason that the film works so well is that it doesn’t treat the source material as a hallowed text, instead chopping and skewering it, rearranging and reassigning various plot strands, emerging with something that looks and talks like noir on the outside, but is subtly taking pot shots at it.

Here Philip Marlowe isn’t the suave, witty private detective of The Big Sleep, but rather an oddly innocent Marlowe. He’s like a man out of time, mumbling to himself and chain-smoking like the 40s aesthetic never ended while all around him in sunny Los Angeles everyone else is wearing boho chic and eating green. It creates a distance between us and the rest of the characters, as Marlowe is the prism through which we view all of these events. And he is pitched at a comedic tone in comparison to all of the serious events around him, it’s a strange combination, but it works beautifully.

Nothing can be trusted as he doesn’t seem part of this world. He is a distinct foreigner despite living in the same neighborhood. And the most slippery and elusive of figures of the rich, beach goddess Eileen (Nina Van Pallandt), who hires Marlowe originally to find her alcoholic writer husband (Sterling Hayden). Prior to these events, Marlowe’s friend Terry (Jim Bouton) apparently killed his wife before committing suicide. These events will eventually dovetail in a way which is not clear at first, but eventually begins to make more sense. The Long Goodbye, like many film noirs, is a labyrinthine, needlessly complicated plot more concerned with mood and crafting a unique voice.

To give away how and why these events collide would diminish much of the fun and joy of experiencing The Long Goodbye unfold before your eyes. And Elliot Gould gives an endearing and complicated performance in a tricky role. The film asks that he eventually gets to a dark enough place to shoot someone at point-blank range, but to begin the film as a mumbling softie feeding his cat and dimly drawn into a vast conspiracy. Gould must play a character from noir’s heyday in an era that had washed away such antiquated tropes, and he does it beautifully. His quick wit as Marlowe is mostly used to hurl zingers at the proceedings, as if Marlowe was a one-man Greek chorus commenting upon the strange twists and turns, the never-ending double crosses and violent encounters.

Gould and Altman working together created a perfect film noir by lovingly poking holes at it. One must come to The Long Goodbye having watched and studied many of the classics in the genre to understand how it pushes against these story outlines and repeated conventions.

I’m not entirely sure what I am to have taken away from Foxcatcher. Here is a movie with a fascinating true crime story that treats that piece of it as an after-thought, an apostrophe to a slow burning meditation on….homoerotic bonds? Capitalism? Delusion? Obsession? That’s all floating around in there, but the film somehow feels unsettled and the climax just arrives without much thought put into it.

Well, as abrupt as a climax can arrive for a film that’s 130 minutes and frequently feels like every single one of those minutes. Numerous early scenes see the characters staring off at nothing in particular, or just staring at each other while a pervading sense of gloom thanks to stellar cinematography hovers above it all. Foxcatcher also seemed to be missing a few key scenes that would more successfully transition us between various story elements or developments. It feels like a few things were lost in the editing room, like they needed to just expand the running time more or edit down even further.

But Foxcatcher does have a trio of leading performances that make it a must watch. Channing Tatum’s leading role feels like it’s going to wind up like Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter, swallowed up and ignored come awards season by the flashier co-star and too large to commit category fraud against a solid contender from the same film. Tatum’s magnificent physique in a wrestling singlet is the stuff of my erotic daydreams, but there’s a tremendous sense of vulnerability and desperate need for validation and brotherly/fatherly love that’s constantly cracking open his Adonis exterior.

Steve Carell’s Oscar nomination feels like a foregone conclusion from the moment that he enters the frame. I’ve already seen a lot of online debate about whether or not he’s getting attention based on the virtues of his performance, or if it’s just a great makeup job doing the work for him. I think it’s a bit of both. Yes, that makeup job goes a long way to establishing and masking Carell’s familiar visage, but Carell’s work is disorientating and disquieting from his first appearance onwards. That strange voice and general sense of bratty entitlement are very different from the beloved idiot Michael Scott. And Mark Ruffalo adds another humane and loveable family man to his repertoire. He’s equally as good as Carell and Tatum, playing the sweet, level-headed family man to their more outlandish and conflicted characters. Ruffalo is the quiet heart of Foxcatcher, and his death is shocking for the lack of build-up or resolution.

We’re given a few tiny glimpses into Carell’s slow-building madness and paranoia, but the real story involved a two-day standoff to get him out of the house, and a general sense of bubbling mania prior to the murder. None of this is witnessed or given much attention, they’re as hugely underdeveloped as the wasted actresses playing a rich matriarch (Vanessa Regrave) and Ruffalo’s loving wife (Sienna Miller). I’m generally glad that I saw Foxcatcher, and I fear that I may be reviewing it as the movie I wanted it to be rather than what it is. But compared to the main creative team’s previous joint effort, Capote, Foxcatcher can’t help but feel meandering and shapeless.

Ever since it premiered on Broadway in 1987, Hollywood has been trying to adapt Into the Woods into a feature film. It’s no surprise that it took nearly 30 years to get it from the stage to the screen, the show plays with the conventions of a stage show freely. The process of adaptation requires the loss of a major character, The Narrator, and the severe editing down process of the entire second act, which engages in breaking the fourth wall.

I say all of this because Sondheim’s work is something that I hold close to my heart, and when it was announced that Disney was going to be handling the film version of Into the Woods feared the worst. Would they totally reject the second act and just film the first, in which the various fairy tales play out straight and everyone gets their happy ending? How would they handle moments like “Hello, Little Girl” or the deaths of various major players? And then it was announced that Rob Marshall was going to direct, and I was ready to scream out to the heavens. After doing great work with Chicago, Marshall went on to direct the uneven Memoirs of a Geisha and the terrible Nine, I never saw his entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. What was Disney doing to Sondheim’s beautiful, subversive stage show?

Well, it’s with a happy heart that I can announce that I found myself greatly enjoying the film version of Into the Woods. I made peace that the film would dismantle the second act, and that Disney would insist on taking some of the piss out of it. But what remains is as good an adaptation of the stage show as one could hope for. You’ve heard of novels that seem unfilmable on the surface? Into the Woods was a Broadway musical version of that.

Granted, Into the Woods does gloss over some of the more violent and sexual moments in the story, but it doesn’t outright abandon them. The Baker’s Wife still has a dalliance with The Prince, Red Riding Hood’s molestation and sexual awakening are mentioned even if whizzed past, and Cinderella’s still a bundle of neurosis.

I can forgive a lot of the changes with a cast this good delivering the material. James Corden and Emily Blunt are absolutely charming and winning as the Baker and his Wife. Anna Kendrick nails Cinderella’s big song, “On the Steps of the Palace,” and sells us on a twitchier version of a beloved character. Johnny Depp’s Wolf was something that worried me as the preliminary footage came out, but his “Hello, Little Girl” is gloriously cartoonish and strange. Christine Baranski, Lucy Punch, and Tammy Blanchard are hypnotically evil and glamorous as Cinderella’s Wicked Step-Mother and Step-Sisters, even if this does mean that they’re parts are cut down severely due to the second half being edited so much. Tracey Ullman as Jack’s Mother is an obvious and smart bit of casting as she plays frazzled so well and is effortless is earning her laughs. Daniel Huttlestone and Lilla Crawford as Jack and Red Riding Hood are aces. Only Mackenzie Mauzy as Rapunzel doesn’t get to make much of an impression, which probably has something to do with her character’s eventually descent into madness and trauma being removed from the film.

But Into the Woods really belongs to two actors: Meryl Streep as the Witch and Chris Pine as the Prince. Pine’s duet with Billy Magnussen, “Agony,” is a goofy highlight of the film’s first half. The two princes square off, posturing and preening like two peacocks trying to demonstrate who has the more colorful assortment of feathers, consistently trying to one-up each other’s emotional turmoil over not being able to be with their respective princesses. But throughout the film Pine gets the chance to deflate the image of the stereotypical Disney prince, which he looks like a live-action version of. While everyone else is playing real characters (or as real as they can make them with names like “Red Riding Hood” or “The Baker”), Pine’s prince is a two-dimensional construct, all perfectly styled hair and designer clothing labels. He can pout, pose, and give good face like a prince, but he’s a charming himbo with few redeeming actual qualities.

As for Streep, I haven’t been this enamored with a performance of hers since Doubt. She manages to make both halves of the Witch feel like the same person while highlighting different aspects of that persona depending on whether or not she’s glamorous or a crone. As the hideous crone, she’s all blustering fury and quick wit, manic and twitchy before gaining back her beauty. And as the glamorous version, who looks like a dreamy Blue Fairy, she highlights the long-suppressed vanity, the wit remains, but her posture and cool elegance return. “Stay With Me” is an emotional journey, but nothing compares to her furious and carefully modulated “Last Midnight,” a real show-stopper.

It’s not perfect, and perhaps I was a smidge too generous, but Into the Woods is an enjoyable adaptation of a beloved stage show. Marshall appears to have slowly reacquired his Chicago mojo. More than enough of the original Into the Woods survives that makes the trip worthwhile.

Poor Miles Teller, he’s so damn good in Whiplash that it almost feels cruel how completely stolen the movie is from him. Telling the story of a quiet student who dreams of becoming one of the world’s premiere drummers, Whiplash offers up a juicy supporting role to a great character actor. And you can figure out why I say that the movie is completely stolen out from underneath him.

Yet Whiplash is so great not just for the chance to watch J.K.Simmons tear the screen up, always a good excuse for anything in my book, but to watch the unconventional mentor/teacher harnessing a promising young pupil into greatness tropes get harshly twisted around. Simmons’ musical instructor will use any means necessary to get what he wants from his students, and most of his means are various levels of psychological, verbal, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse. Mr. Holland’s Opus this is not.

It’s not that Simmons’ instructor is abusive that upends and destroys the clichés in this sub-genre, it’s also that our lead is obsessive and armed with tunnel-vision to the point of self-destruction and madness. He pushes away all distractions, including the possibility of a young-love romance with a pretty college girl, because they might distract him from achieving greatness. We have met a student who will happily take the abuse, even dish some out of his own, if he thinks it will get him to greatness. Teller never flinches away from making his character a bit unlikeable, frequently an asshole.

And the greatness of Whiplash dovetails into the climactic scene in which the mentor/student square off. It’s a power-play, at first intended to completely embarrass and derail the student, before he recovers his courage and head-first charges back into the fray. Simmons finds a way to make every movement and choice brimming with the threat of violence and musical. His staccato speech patterns feel like the jazzy instrumentation that he loves and teaches. The volcanic violence he displays his frightening, but even more unnerving are the quiet moments in which he threatens to blow at any given moment. This “by any means necessary” thought is a brief glimpse into the monomania required to achieve greatness, to nurture it, and this final square off is an intense and prolonged debate about whether or not his actions have lead to a prized pupil transcending. The film never answers the question, but I couldn’t help thinking about it afterwards. I’m not entirely sure what my conclusion is. I just know I want Simmons to win the Oscar.