Reviews by JxSxPx

Downfall positions Hitler’s final days inside the bunker as alternately a labyrinth and a series of death traps slowly going off. Surrounding by his madness and the closest members of his Nazi party, the film focuses in on the grim specter of death that haunted Germany at the time coming back to its root. Numerous young characters can easily be seen as a generation preparing to comprehend tremendous guilt, and as innocents swept up in hysteria beyond their understanding.

By looking at only the last ten days of his reign of power, Downfall manages to remind us that evil does not exist or grow in a vacuum. Presenting Adolf Hitler as a man may sound like a squeamish prospect, how could one of the greatest monsters in all of history be presented as human? Because he was a human, in all of the mass contradictions present in that. He cracks a joke to calm his newly appointed secretary, he’s playful with a youth, and yet he rages hysterically about his impending defeat and where his rule went wrong. Yet his defeat wasn’t his fault, it was the people of Germany’s, they had turned traitor against their beloved Fuhrer in his eyes.

Is presenting Hitler as a mad man, but still as a man, an appropriate thing to do? I believe so, if only to remind us that this kind of thinking is not some mythological creation, it is born from a reality. And what Downfall excels at is exploring the various characters differing levels of mind-control. To view the film is to watch people swept up in the hysterics and mania of dangerous political ideology, and to witness how far down that hole some of them had fallen.

Perhaps none of them had fallen as hard as Joseph Goebbels and his wife, who with robotic indifference and steely reserve force their six children to swallow suicide pills before killing themselves. It’s a disturbing scene for several reasons, one of which is fever of which they believed in their cause, and fear of reprisal from the enemy that they would slaughter their own children with such quick and calculating efficiency. Goebbels, like Hitler, is seen as a twisted man, one still believing that their cause is not entirely lost until after Hitler’s committed suicide and the Allies are tramping down the dirt over their heads.

Downfall follows the ins and outs of life in the bunker, and it is scattershot as such. Some characters get sufficient development, while others are briefly glimpsed throughout, and they can be hard to keep track off. A roll-call of what happened to the various survivors of life in the bunker closes out their stories, but it’s hard to remember how big or important a role they had played previously. This does hamper the film a bit, but does not weaken it.

These people were under the spell of a mad man, who seethed with rage-filled fits, laid blame upon everyone else, and continued to fight the war despite no longer having an army or the resources to do so. Hitler was smart enough to align himself with great propagandists and military minds, but his racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and grand-standing are not original within him. Downfall presents a glimpse into the final days of Hitler’s life and the Third Reich, but it could just as easily be a mirror holding up and reflecting back the worst impulses within our society. After all, it’s not like any of those traits have vanished in the years since.

Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I’m not quite sure how Agora adds up together. Mostly an examination of religious demagoguery gone insane, but contains a female character who was a mathematician, scientist, astronomer, philosopher, and teacher trying to figure out the earth’s rotation. And much of Agora is just watching as the crazy, murderous Christians begin killing the intellectuals and pagans for daring to not convert.

It all adds up to a lot of pretty images and not much else. On a technical level, the film is utter perfection, but it gives its three main actors nothing to do besides act out as caricatures or, mostly in Rachel Weisz’s case, stare soulfully into the distance. Her character spends much of the film wrapped up in her various academic studies and theories, mumbling that they are “definitive proof” of something (she’s not quite sure of what herself), and being indifferent to the obvious love triangle she’s trapped in.

The costumes, cinematography, production design, makeup/hair are all top notch, but that does not a movie make. It’s hard to know exactly what they were trying to sell us on in this film. Were they trying to tell us how the rise of Christianity and religious zealotry killed away a more philosophical, reasoned way of thinking? Or is that just the background noise for the story of Hypatia, a historical figure who deserves a better treatment than this? Basically, it boils down to this fairly simple-minded philosophy: “There are more things that unite us than divide us.” It’s a pity that this film couldn’t find a united, coherent whole to present to us then.

The Holocaust is an exhaustively done subject matter in popular culture, one that by this point feels like there’s nothing left to discover or witness about the atrocities. The Pianist is interesting because it doesn’t present itself as a grand sweeping statement on the time period, but rather presents us with one man’s personal journey through the hell and quest for survival. It is admirably restrained, and deeply felt. It quietly hums with a personal pain and knowledge of first-hand experience.

Roman Polanski lived through the Holocaust, admitting that only his own death will purge the memories and pain of his mother going to the gas chamber. What he brings to The Pianist is a tremendous sense of detail and guttural emotion. The story is about Wladyslaw Szpillman, but parts of it could easily be Polanski’s own autobiography. That amount of empathy makes The Pianist truly special.

Through good luck and survivalist instincts, we watch Szpillman survive the Warsaw ghetto, escapes going to a concentration camp, smuggles in weapons for the failed uprising, and hiding out as Warsaw falls. Not only that, but Szpillman watches his entire family gets torn apart, only dodging the camps because of a friend on the Jewish Ghetto Police, and managing to survive the Uprising through the discovery of a kindly German officer. Szpillman’s story is the kind that not even a great novelist could invent.

The only problem I had with the film, and even then it wasn’t a huge one, was Adrian Brody’s lead performance. Gravitas and seriousness aren’t his strongest assets as an actor, he’s more alive when tasked with playing mischief like his cameo as Salvador Dali in Midnight in Paris. While he is disturbingly gaunt, depressive, and stoic, most of his big acting moments are undercut. The scene where he is discovered by Thomas Kretschmann’s good German and plays the piano for him puts the focus on Krestchmann instead of Brody. Here was a chance to see the various emotional undercurrents going on in Szpillman’s mind as he plays his beloved instrument for the first time in ages, but instead the focus is put on someone else. This does not mean that Brody’s work isn’t moving, on the contrary, it is frequently deeply felt and moving, rather that The Pianist makes his character a walking/talking symbol more often than not.

The Pianist does a great job showing us the changing morality, in which the narrative of Szpillman transformed from praying that the interference of outside forces will save the day to his personal choices to save himself at all costs. This impassive quality displays the randomness and chance involved in so many of the stories of survivors. Perhaps Polanski is even holding up his cinematic gifts as a mirror, refracting his lingering guilt over living while his mother died. Either way, The Pianist is a deeply felt and moving work.

The story isn’t the point, nor is the dialog. The Mill & the Cross is a visual poem, a deep dive into one particular painting and making it come to fully realized life. Words don’t entirely matter in the face of such stunning imagery, and the film works best when you consider it as a fever-dream of swirling lights and colors.

The film stars Rutger Hauer as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the painter behind The Procession to Calvary, Michael York as his patron, and Charlotte Rampling as Mary, Bruegel’s mother and model for the Virgin Mary in the painting. To say that they “star” is something of a misnomer, as the film really stars the painting, going into detail on some of the people caught in their daily lives who found themselves immortalized in the work, or imagining some of those who may have posed for it. Hauer, York, and Rampling contain the most dialog in their scenes, this mostly consists of them providing expository background details on the era or the goals of the work.

Numerous times throughout the film, the actors and extras seem to be walking straight out of the painting. And while many of the visuals are hypnotic and perfectly realized, a few, it must be said, are the obvious work of green screen and have the actors sitting on top of the backgrounds in an inorganic way. This is a minor complaint, as they only announce themselves when compared to the fluidity and beauty of the rest. The Mill & the Cross is a quiet, meditative examination of a work of art and its creation, and it is a glorious film to be enraptured within.

I admit that I have been sometimes hard on Marvel for creating films by committee and being aggressive about a house style that inhibits the amount of creativity that it allows creators. I still maintain this can, and is, a problem, how hard is it to create something that stands on its own when it must also tie in with eight other films and a television show? Practically impossible is what I would say. This is why so many of their films have a fast food level of flavorlessness – immediately satisfying but lacking in any nutritional value.

Guardians of the Galaxy comes damn close to escaping the formula and doing something unique with the material. Preferring to jettison comic book movie tropes, mostly, in favor of comedic space opera is a smart idea. Guardians has a real sense of fun, like Rio Bravo-meets-Star Wars, but it still comes into direct contact with the mandates of Marvel’s cinematic universe. These additions announce themselves easily, distinctly feeling like the additions of Marvel/Disney upon the material instead of an organic outgrowth of it.

For example, the film’s depressing opening note is in stark contrast to more anarchic sense of fun that permeates the rest. Peter Quill, our future Star-Lord, is but a preteen watching his mother die of cancer before being abducted by aliens. This tragic hero opening feels like a mandate from Disney, a company known for its dead parent trope, to make the hero more sympathetic, not allowing Quill to fully emerge as the charming, sarcastic, tough rogue hero that he is in the rest of the film. He must be sympathetic from the opening scene until the last.

And the plot, convoluted as any of the other Marvel films but always quirky and whimsical, once again falls squarely on the impossibly handsome shoulders of another white male savior. Marvel is at the forefront of comic book cinema, they have the creative and financial freedom to make films expanding away from the obvious properties like Iron Man and Captain America. To their credit they got more adventurous with Guardians of the Galaxy, but we’re roughly 15 movies into their cinematic universe (either already released, upcoming, or announced as in active development) and not one film has starred a person of color or female character in the main role, nor has one been announced as in active development. Guardians populates it’s world with plenty of unique and colorful characters, it’s to its credit that you walk away feeling the most amount of sympathy for a talking raccoon and a sentient tree that can only say three words, but this is a valid criticism against them and the current landscape of blockbuster entertainment.

But enough about my criticisms of the film, Guardians is a merciful reminder that comic book cinema, and science-fiction/fantasy stories, can be bright, colorful, and fun. Christopher Nolan’s grim, realistic and gritty The Dark Knight Trilogy is a great template for Batman, but that dynamic doesn’t work for every character. So thankfully, Marvel went with a goofier, more freewheeling spirit for this property. It’s a refreshing reminder that these films can be high-spirited and tongue-in-cheek.

Much of the success of Guardians goes to a terrific ensemble led by Chris Pratt. His oddball charisma is on full display, as is a previously unknown capability to essential play a variation of Han Solo like gangbusters. His introduction scene has him listening to a mix-tape while lip-synching and cheekily dancing while trying to steal a mysterious object. The four most successful performances belong to first time actor David Bautista as Drax, Lee Pace chewing the scenery with menacing relish as Ronan, and the vocal work of Bradley Cooper as Rocket Raccoon, and Vin Diesel as Groot. Diesel’s ability to infuse “I am Groot” with various emotional resonances is commendable, that is not an easy task to ask of an actor to perform. And Cooper’s manic Rocket is a deeply sarcastic and strangely wounded singular creation. Pace, not given much to do besides bellow and rock ridiculous makeup, plays it up for all its worth as the primary villain. And who knew a wrestler like Bautista could be such a great comedic actor? Maybe it’s just a great marriage of actor and role, but it’s a charmingly literal character who gets a good share of the laughs.

Like many of Marvel’s films, the villains get lost in the shuffle and the female characters may not be fully realized as they change allegiances as needed by the plot. Karen Gillan’s Nebula and Zoe Saldana’s Gamora are nicely made-up, but they’re not terribly compelling as characters. Introduced as a secondary villain, by her second scene Gamora is already willing to switch sides and take down Thanos. There appears to be a few scenes missing in her back-story or a smoother transition from ally to enemy against Thanos. She’s also the least interesting of the five main characters. We are told repeatedly that she is a deadly assassin and bounty hunter, yet she is easily taken out of commission or throw into a damsel-in-distress situation repeatedly. Nebula and Nova Prime (Glenn Close, getting to essentially be the Nick Fury of outer space as leader of the Nova Corps) are given little to do besides wear freakish outfits and rock fantastical makeup. All three actresses commit fully and try valiantly to overcome their underwritten roles, but hopefully in the sequel this problem will be addressed and their characters given more to do.

As for Thanos, Josh Brolin’s voice works well with the visual of the character, but he’s still not a very interesting or credible film threat. All he has done is chose various lower-level mercenaries to do his business and sit back on his floating throne as each of them betrays or fails him. For being a supreme entity of enormous cosmic power and a character that should inspire awe and fear in equal measure in us, he’s thus far been a non-starter. Marvel’s taking too long to get to the point with him. Not to mention that we’ve only come across three of the six Infinity Stones.

I know it seems like I’ve criticized a lot of this film, and maybe I have over-thought it, but Guardians does so much that’s right and fun, that the problems become more glaringly obvious upon second-thought. At its best, Guardians blows off the shackles of Marvel film clichés and comic book movie beats to act out it’s freak flag inclinations as a space opera. What the film needed was even more of those moments, and maybe more fleshed out and credible threats to our heroes. It’s a good time, but too much of it does evaporate shortly after viewing.

The Marx Brothers had a five or six film run of greatness. A zany run through holy cows like college, the opera, and high society in which the brothers unleashed all various forms of hell on the unsuspecting straight men. But after A Day at the Races the Brothers never truly recaptured the same amount of magic and manic comedy that they trademarked in. This can be directly pointed towards the influence of Irving Thalberg, who insisted that they needed a stronger story structure and to be more sympathetic characters.

This formula would be the template for the rest of the films that the brothers made together, mostly to help Chico out with his gambling debts. A Night in Casablanca is proof that you can’t really mess the formula up too terribly, but that doesn’t mean the results are all that memorable. If I even mentioned film titles like Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, Animal Crackers, and A Night at the Opera the amount of sight gags and classic moments will flood the imagination, and Casablanca could have used a greater sense of inspiration for some of its comedic bits. There’s some good ones, a climatic plane battle comes to mind, or the extended sequence where the brothers keep stealing clothes from the bad guy and throwing them out of his room.

And perhaps that’s the major problem with the film, there are good moments, but they’re never quite polished off enough to really become that next level of great. There’s way too much plot going on with this movie, and it’s rather unfortunate that the Marx Brothers play a supporting role despite being above the title. Call me crazy, but a Marx Brothers movie needs to star them and have as many scenes of the group of them together raising hell. It’s pretty entertaining, but the romantic lovers occupy too much of the running time and they’re wooden. Most egregious of all is the lack of Margaret Dumont, who was the perfect springboard for their particular brand of insanity. A Night in Casablanca has plenty of entertainment value to make it worthwhile, but it feels like it’s trying hard to keep its central absurdist heroes in check too often. And I’m against that.

Basically a remake of Rio Bravo with only two of the same players involved – director Howard Hawks and star John Wayne – and immensely inferior in just about every aspect, I think only the biggest and strictest of fans of Wayne will find much to enjoy about this. Maybe it’s that this exact same story isn’t as fresh or invigorating the second time around, or maybe it’s the characters don’t have the same chemistry or development as they did the first time out. I couldn’t tell you exactly what is missing, but El Dorado is very much the weaker film.

I think some of the problem is that El Dorado trades out Ricky Nelson, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan, and Angie Dickinson for James Caan, Robert Mitchum, Arthur Hunnicutt, Charlene Holt, and Michele Carey. Caan and Mitchum are actors of tremendous depth when given a meaty role, but they seem adrift here. Mitchum’s always at his greatest when he is allowed to show the sympathetic sides of dark characters, or allowed to go full-on charismatic in villainous modes. Holt doesn’t have the tenacity or sarcasm of Dickinson, while Carey is just bad and her makeup is distractingly modern for a western. For a film about hanging out this group of actors seem too disparate to even congeal together. Nelson and Martin understood that they were playing to their personas, and that their acting was to be pitched at movie star charisma, Caan does not, being too intense for everyone else.

But one cannot fault Hawks’ craftsmanship at this point in his life. Even if he seems to be running on autopilot Hawks still manages to get decent work from his major star, and does solid work with the various colors. The last shot, of Wayne and Mitchum walking off arm-in-arm, is a great one. On its own merits El Dorado is a halfway decent movie, operating as a nice time waster and nothing more. It’s when we compare it to Rio Bravo that the weaknesses of it are put into sharpest contrast, and while it’s bad to compare them to each other it can’t be helped. The strongest sense of déjà vu pervades the entire film after the first 15 minutes and only gets stronger from there.

In the presence of Mae West, the story is smart enough to take a backseat to her ribald sexuality and zest for quips. A ham of the highest order, West was goofy on the blonde sex goddess persona before it was even solidified as an iconic image of the cinema. After all, this was around the same time that Jean Harlow was only beginning her ascendency into the Valhalla of pop culture iconography and movie stars. Not even the supporting cast, with a young Cary Grant, can gain much footing while standing next to her. She Done Him Wrong is the very essence of West’s star persona, it’s her show and nothing else even matters or compares.

The plot, vaguely based on her play Diamond Lil but watered down due to the demands of Hollywood production, concerns a showgirl, her gangster ex-boyfriend, and an undercover police officer all keeping track on what’s possibly going down. Of course there’s subjects like prostitution, jewelry theft, and the bad girl goes semi-good ending, only the last one is outwardly spoken of while the rest are elliptically mentioned since the Production Code was in full force. But none of this matters, we know exactly where everything is going from the time each character is introduced, and the plot is smart enough to pause itself to allow time for West to do what she does best. And that’s really the only reason necessary to watch She Done Him Wrong, and it’s a damn fine reason.

Look, no movie that features Bob Hope doing what he does best and Rosemary Clooney is going to be entirely without any merits, but damn does Here Come the Girls come close. It’s a musical comedy without any memorable musical numbers or funny gags. Yet I still find myself welcoming any chance that I get to spend some time with Bob Hope, a man with a machine gun wit and delivery.

Here Come the Girls finds Hope, at fifty, playing a chorus-boy looking for his break, finding it in the seductive form of Arlene Dahl, finds himself continually blowing his big numbers, and there’s also Robert Strauss as a murderous gangster with an obsession with Dahl, Tony Martin shows up, and Clooney is mostly on the sidelines as the supportive friend clearly in love with Hope. The film noisily hums along on a formula we have seen done several time before, both for the better and worse. This wouldn’t be a problem with more of the jokes landed, or if the songs were better, but not even Clooney’s ace vocal work and skills as a comedienne can salvage them.

Hell, don’t even the fault the director, Claude Binyon. He tries to super-charge the energy and get the most bang out of the material. This goes a long way to patching over some of the script problems, but Here Come the Girls stars a comedy icon, one of the all-time greats, and it needed to be funnier. The parts are there, the pieces are decent enough individually, but they don’t add up to too much.

You know, On an Island with You had a bit of potential to be much better, possibly one of the best of Esther Williams’ aquatic musicals, if it hadn’t been for Peter Lawford. His dour, creepy performance takes a problematic aspect of the script and amplifies it tenfold. The script, always a weak link in star vehicle musicals of any kind, throws in various musical guests (including Xaiver Cugat, who seems to be in all of these), comedic sidekicks (this one trades out Red Skelton for Jimmy Durante), and impossibly attractive leads (Ricardo Montalban is a walking/talking definition of RAWR in this, and Cyd Charisse is always lovely). But the most unsettling part of this is a brief sequence in the film in which Lawford’s love-struck naval technical advisor abducts Williams’ movie star and tries to romance her.

This segment of the film could have been glossed over or paved over more easily if the actors involved had been committed and interested in their parts. Williams is actively engaged throughout, giving a warm, winning performance. She’s not much of an actress, but she seems to have loosened up before the camera and always manages to make her swimming set pieces into something transfixing. Lawford is completely uninterested, delivering the entire film in a blank monotone with no feeling or recognizable human speech pattern, as if he’s been replaced by an android. His lack of a performance makes the romantic entanglements of the film that much worse.

Montalban and Charisse are the lovers pining away in the strange game of romantic musical chairs that Island plays. Montalban and Williams have an appealing chemistry, and he holds his own with Charisse in their big dance number together. A lead with his same kind of interest in the part and positive demeanor would have only made things better. And Charisse, normally wooden as an actress, is given things to play well within her limited range, along with two dance numbers which remind us why she was a star in the first place. It’s the things that work well in Island that make me think it had more potential, that make it entertaining and enjoyable, but one can’t forgive those questionable gender politics and Lawford.