Reviews by JxSxPx

This is the Jean Harlow that I know and love! The Pre-Code siren with the self-aware sexuality, smart mouth, and likeability that allowed you to forgive or root for some of her more questionable choices, except The Girl from Missouri was released after the Production Code took effect. In a way, The Girl from Missouri is our last look with this particular Harlow, shortly afterwards her hair would be toned down, her parts leaning more towards dramatics, and her sexuality tempered. Yet this one still feels as sassy, breezy and fun as one of her Pre-Code features.

The story sees Harlow’s showgirl trying to land a rich husband and secure a position for herself. She and her best gal-pal (Pasty Kelly, a charmer with great rapport with Harlow) travel to New York City, get involved in a man’s suicide, go on the run to Florida, meet a rich playboy, and more zany hijinks ensue. It is a quintessential Harlow vehicle, maybe not as famous as Dinner at Eight or Bombshell, but I found it to be utterly charming.

Harlow’s showgirl is basically decent despite her compromising past, so a lot of the jokes and sexy costumes seem to get a pass. The film calls for her to be both comedic and dramatic, and she nails both. A sequence where she says goodbye to her mother proves that she had more talent for dramatic parts than we give her credit for. Granted, early appearances like The Public Enemy were filled with bizarre line readings, but all Harlow needed was a steady hand to guide her and she shone brightly.

Once more Franchot Tone is playing her wealthy suitor, and he’s very handsome and sells his being struck-dumb romance with Harlow. Tone never seems to have much more to do than chase after Harlow, promising love and wealth, but he does well and sells the glibness of his playboy. Lionel Barrymore as Tone’s father is dead-set against his son marrying a girl like Harlow, and he blusters and overacts like only a Barrymore could. That’s not a ding against him, Barrymore’s histrionics are wildly entertaining in this film, no more so than when he finally meets his match in Harlow’s scheming and she humbles him. Yet it’s Patsy Kelly who makes the most out of what little she’s given, her caustic best friend hammers home some delicious quips and her back-and-forth with Harlow is pretty fantastic. One wishes for an entire film of just the two of them pulling a Lucy-and-Ethel in various situations.

While made after the Production Code was enforced, Missouri still feels like a Pre-Code film. It’s not just that Harlow’s sexuality hasn’t been brought down from boiling hot to simmering under dowdy clothes like in Riffraff, but the film throws out explicit references to cocaine, strongly hints that Harlow and Kelly may make a living as whores on the side in the beginning, and has the kind of anything-goes charms that defined the films of the previous three years. It’s not perfect, but it’s solidly made and highly enjoyable vehicle in which Jean Harlow’s special brand of sex symbol gets free reign to be as loopy and brassy as she wanted to be.

Where cinema is concerned, the thought process of “print the legend” is the de facto modus operandi. Young Mr. Lincoln is a piece of democratic mythology, more in tuned to iconography and hagiography than detailing what little is truly known about Abraham Lincoln’s early years. It is with this in mind that John Ford has sought not to explore the reality of Lincoln’s formative years, but to hammer home the tall tales that have built up around him, changing him into a walking/talking symbol for homespun politics and common sense intelligence.

Casting the right star in a role can add a definitive layer of symbolic weight to the part, and Ford was smart enough to cast Henry Fonda as Lincoln. Fonda is practically a walking monument to Americana itself, think of his iconic roles in films like The Grapes of Wrath or 12 Angry Men. He seemed to excel in roles that put him in the shoes of men who spoke little but it meant something when they did, men who had a strong conscience and moral convictions. Young Mr. Lincoln seems custom-made for these intrinsic qualities that Fonda brought to any role. He and Ford work in harmony to make this Lincoln feel real enough in the context of the film, and Fonda holds his own against Ford’s poetic vistas.

While Young Mr. Lincoln may not hold as much weight for me as other films like The Searchers or Red River, it does possess a certain charm. A little bit old-fashioned with gorgeous scenery and Ford’s particular way of shooting a scene that immediately turns it into a symbolic moment of humanity being tamed. It’s a gorgeous looking movie, and one that manages to juggle courtroom drama, sentimentality, and folksy charm and humor to spin out a myth of Lincoln in wait. But much of it is almost too cutesy, too folksy for me to fully embrace. One cannot fault it’s form, nor the potent beauty of many of its images, but Young Mr. Lincoln never feels as immediate or great as other films in Ford’s career. Yet Young Mr. Lincoln does alternately feel like one of Ford’s more personal films, one filled with his patriotism and various obsessions that routinely popped up in his work.

Remember that brief period of time when Jim Carrey was moving beyond the juvenile brand of comedy that had made his name and expanding into fairly adventurous dramatic territory? When films like The Truman Show or Man on the Moon felt like the next stage of his career, before realizing that these were just strange detours before going back to overacting and mugging for laughs? Yeah, I know it’s tough to remember this brief period of time, but it happened. And it proved that if he wanted to, Carrey could have gone the path of Robin Williams or Whoopi Goldberg and left a lasting impression on dramatic character parts.

Granted, The Truman Show is practically all surface polish, high-concept, and a great central performance from Carrey with an eccentric group of supporting players, and not too much else. But I think that it’s more than enough to recommend a cursory viewing of the film. Truman’s world is like the neighborhoods of Leave it to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet sprawled across an entire metropolis. His world is stuck in an everything’s clean, perfect, shiny and happy 1950’s comedy. Truman’s assigned wife, Laura Linney in an early film role, describes household products as a commercial voiceover would, and seems like a walking parody of the dutiful homemaker, complete with pearls.

If I had awoken in this ideal suburbia, I’d think something suspicious was going on, but not Truman. From the time he was born, he has been the subject matter of this experiment, designed by producer Christof, Ed Harris dripping with god-like egomania and twisted paternal affection. Truman knows of no other reality, until a woman (Natascha McElhone) goes off-script, the only woman he’s ever truly been attracted to, and he begins to question his existence. The rest of the film details his experiments with trying to discover what is going on underneath the placid surfaces. This is a film which sees a man for whom every whim and development of his life has been forethought and made-to-order rebelling against those shackles, seeking a more fully human and realized life.

The Truman Show may be more in love with its concept than creating a fully realized character in Truman, but it’s still an enjoyable ride. One that feels still timely as the Real Housewives franchise makes dubious “stars” out of manufactured drama and limitedly talented people. Just because we can put anyone and anything on TV, just because we can telecast real lives, does that mean we should? I don’t know what the answers are, but I know a movie like Network raises many of the same questions and provides a more engaging experience.

If there’s any writer that practically defines the term “near impossible to film” it would be James Joyce. His works are densely layered cerebral works, and “The Dead” taken from his short story collection Dubliners is just two scenes. But John Huston always had a way with difficult writers, and here, in his last film, managed to find a way into Joyce’s prose and emerge with an elegiac portrait of two people who have spent years together without really knowing each other.

The Dead was a labor of love for Huston, and a family affair, with his son Tony writing the script and daughter Anjelica being one of the few famous faces in the ensemble. And Huston’s passion for the material is palpable onscreen. The smart choices he makes in editing allows for us to be visually clued in to the various resentments and allegiances involved in this family as they gather together for a holiday party. Through subtle cues and shifts in his camera’s placement we are slowly being built up to the great reveal, the outpouring of emotion that has been withheld until this point.

The film is quiet and intimate, and I was drawn in as each relative and friend is introduced and examined for their faults. An alcoholic trying to keep it together and not embarrass his mother in front of the family is a particular highlight, as is an elderly aunt who used to be a singer and is now only equipped with a tremulous and weak voice. The Dead circles around these various characters until it eventually closes in on Gabriel (Donal McGann) and Gretta (Anjelica Huston), and we learn that the preceding hour as only been a prologue to Gretta’s long-held secret.

McGann is wonderful as Gabriel, beginning the story as a generic upper-middle-class man and eventually peeling back the layer to reveal the true person at the core. The film’s slip from observation into Gabriel’s mind at the very end is a daring leap, but Huston’s direction has led us there so passively that we didn’t even notice it. And McGann deserves equal credit for making it work, as his impassioned reading of Joyce’s prose brings the story to its close, and he emerges as a man who has learned that he has never truly known his wife, but is besieged by grace in this moment.

Anjelica Huston is easily one of my favorite working actresses, I watched the entirety of the incredibly flawed-but-bonkers Smash just because she was in it. To watch her in The Dead is to be reminded of how wonderful a character actress she is, and how there was a time when she was the most daring American actress. Prizzi’s Honor, The Grifters, Enemies; A Love Story, The Witches, and her work here demonstrate that in a five-year span of time she was unafraid to show her darker impulses or play characters that didn’t demand to be loved. And The Dead taps into these assets, as her character emerges onto the screen as the image of a strong, proud wife and slowly breaks apart until she shares the story of the dead boy who stole her heart when they were both teenagers. It’s hard to believe she went from such a sustained portrait of quiet sorrow to just a few years later vamping it up as a deliciously droll and sexy Morticia Addams, but that's just how tremendous her range is.

The Dead taps into one knowing of their own mortality, and it is the defining moment of the film. And there’s something sad yet joyful about knowing Huston loving crafted this last film during his waning days. He was bound to a wheelchair and an oxygen mask, yet he crafted something of sublime poetry and tender beauty, a film that works as a great companion piece to its source material. Huston’s magnificent career is filled with gems, and this last film is one of them. He seemed to exemplify this quote from Joyce: “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” With The Dead this is exactly what he accomplished.

As a series of beautifully ornate costumes, moody cinematography, exotic locations, and observation of shifting tastes – politically, culturally – in various eras, The Last Emperor is a grand statement. A movie in big emblazoned letters, a movie that rests in the truest sense of the term cinematic, but it’s a pity that there’s no good script to go along with all of the detailed craft and pretty images on display. As an epic, it has more in common with the bloated likes of Gandhi than it does Lawrence of Arabia.

The story follows around a footnote of an emperor; he was crowned when he was two and abdicated the throne at seven, through the transition from dynasties to Communism, from feudalism to a revolution. But it never engages our emotions or provides a rooting interest in the main character. It offers up a powerless character, one with no true identity, and watches as he stumbles through various ideologies, frequently as a mere pawn in a grander scheme.

Bernardo Bertolucci is a great director, and he bathes The Last Emperor in rich colors. The fact that he was allowed to film inside of the Forbidden City makes the film have a very authentic flavor, and provides a unique setting for various events to take place in. But Bertolucci isn’t much of a writer, and The Last Emperor has a problem maintaining interest and momentum as it goes on, and on, and on. Bertolucci co-wrote the script, and the pacing problems cause the film to at times feel incredibly sluggish or too remote to draw us in. And this, I believe, is the reason why a film can win 9 Oscars and have an indifferent reputation. A film from the man who gave us Last Tango in Paris should be a cause for debate, but Emperor is stately, lacking in the unflinching emotions and deep connections of his other works. Sure, it deserved the Oscars it won for Cinematography, Art Direction-Set Decoration, Costume Design, Original Score, and Director, but Picture, Editing, and Adapted Screenplay are three awards too much.

Adapting a play into a film isn’t easy, look at the bloated corpses of many Shakespearean films, which is both understandable and odd. The only reason that I think it’s odd is because you’re already dealing with something in a scripted format, but a play and a film are two very different beasts in execution. A play happens in real time before you, you’re in an intimate space watching the events unfold before you. There’s a specific energy to live theater that can’t be replicated when that material is taken from its intimate setting and blown to gigantic proportions on the big screen. The best filmed adaptations try to find a way to gain access to the spirit of the piece while making it work as a film. Boesman and Lena is mildly successful, but I can think of a few small choices that would have possibly made it work better.

The ingredients are all there for an emotionally visceral and engaging experiencing. The story fragments are heartbreaking and shed a personal light upon the black faces of apartheid that could possibly go ignored, those who once had and know lost it all. But throbbing beneath that is deep-dive into the psychic wounds of institutionalized racism and its lasting effects. Add in strong lead performances from Angela Bassett and Danny Glover, and you’ve got everything needed to make a gut-punch of a film.

Yet it never quit reaches those heights. The play is very wordy and more concerned with allegory than narrative propulsion or developing completely human characters. These aren’t bad things for a film to have, but too much and the film becomes a filmed play without the correct language of cinema. Passages of the characters saying their private monologues aloud instead of through voiceover proves distracting, making the film feel like the director took the cast and crew out into the wild and decided to do a play in an outdoor venue. Bassett and Glover are two actors who can exude the theatrical, sometimes going too big on screen, but here they have found perfect vehicles their intense acting styles. Bassett has long been one of my favorites to watch, and here she takes her character’s desperation, neediness, and white hot rage and slowly builds a bonfire that threatens to burn the reels of film it’s so intense. And Glover manages to tap into the latent tenderness buried beneath the battered pride and over-grown frustrations. Boesman and Lena may fall into a more generic “good” area of play-to-film adaptations, but as a vehicle for Glover and Bassett it cannot be beat.

Jim Sheridan makes films about the complicated political and emotional stakes of Ireland and refuses to simplify them for easy consumption. The Boxer takes a hard look at the IRA during a time of momentary peace, and explores the delicate balancing act it takes to keep it going. It also combines the general overview of a sports movie, but eschews the simple storytelling devices in favor of crafting something more cerebral in the process.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays a former IRA man/boxer who is being released after fourteen years in prison. Returning to his Belfast home, he finds the head of the IRA (Brian Cox) trying to orchestrate a lasting peace, his former love (Emily Watson), and a wild card (Gerard McSorley) who wants to watch it all burn down. If The Boxer sounds overstuffed, well, it is, because we haven’t even mentioned the subplot involving Day-Lewis getting together with his former manager (Ken Stott) to build a gymnasium for students of all faiths.

When a movie is this smart, and works so well, it pains me to say that The Boxer might have too much of a good thing going with all of these plot strands. The film doesn’t truly need the one about the gymnasium, and it often times feels like it only exists to act as a visualization of a ticking time bomb, without actually seeing a bomb count down. It also doesn’t help that this particular strand is the least interesting of the four going on. Watson and Day-Lewis bring a tremendous amount of soul, depth and heart to their tenuous romance, both knowing that is forbidden and punishable by death according to the rules of the IRA, yet seemingly drawn to each other. And Cox plays his figurehead with a mixture of brevity, strength, sadness and tiredness, this is a man who has killed, ordered killings, seen far too much death, and wants the cycle to stop. While McSorley just wants to watch everything burn in order to ease the pain of losing a child during The Troubles.

It’s a strong ensemble working with great material. Sheridan’s direction is appropriately solid, and his script, co-written with Terry George, is novel-like, exploring the internal lives of these characters and their world. It develops them with a steady hand and gives them smart choices to make, finding a way to handle delicate subject matter with intelligence, poise and a strong sense of craft. Granted, the boxing stuff is exciting to watch, but it feels like needless distractions from the interior politics of the IRA, the deadly romance, and the quiet strength and passion of a man trying in his own to make things right and atone for the misdeeds of his youth.

When originally announced, I was more than a little skeptical about the entire concept of “Marvel Anime,” a series of four twelve episode shows focusing on Iron Man, Blade, Wolverine, and the X-Men. I don’t know how well the others turned out, but X-Men turned out much better than I originally thought. I can’t even remember why I was skeptical of the whole thing at first, but it probably had to do with how lackluster Batman: Gotham Knight turned out.

But I should have known better and put my faith in the story that Warren Ellis would provide. If you haven’t read his run on Astonishing X-Men, do so now. X-Men follows many of the similar themes and obsessions that concerned Ellis’s run on the book, even features the same team line-up. Call me crazy, but this is a team that I would like to see stripped down to in the movies one day – Cyclops, Storm, Beast, Emma Frost, Wolverine, Armor – it’s a good group, a nice mixture of powers/personalities, and Ellis knows how to write them really well.

The problem is, I’m not sure that the animators knew how to handle them. Emma Frost and Storm suffer the worst, as always. Frost is written as the snarky bitch, but the voice actress and animators have chosen to portray her as a softer schoolmarm type. It’s an odd choice and doesn’t fit in with any version of the character. Storm gets side-lined fairly often, underdeveloped, and doesn’t possess the regality that is needed. But Wolverine, Beast, Cyclops, Xaiver, and Armor all seem to come out the other side relatively intact and baring a close enough resemblance to their comic counterparts.

The choice of the U-Men as the leadoff villain is an odd one, but it eventually emerges to something far more interesting and personal. Also along for the ride are the Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle, a variation on Legion, and a quick cameo from Dark Phoenix. These different enemies actually come together in a very fluid and logical way once the full extent of the story comes to fruition. The only odd choice is the insistence on placing all of the action in Japan and replacing known characters with thinly veiled “new” versions that are just Japanese counterparts. A human genetic research scientist bears a striking similarity to Moira MacTaggert, but isn’t actually called Moira, despite having all of telltale signs of that character.

Your enjoyment will depend entirely on how you feel about anime. Me? I don’t mind it, not a huge fan, but I’ve found a few things here and there that I’ve enjoyed. The show does rely heavily upon light effects and a few of the character designs are a little strange, mostly Cyclops’ shoulder pads and the overly large breasts on the female characters, but it works more often than not. And the action sequences are top notch, it’s obvious where a lot of time, effort and money went, this isn’t a bad thing, as every episode zips back and forth between philosophical questions and grand fights. After a sluggish start, I think the series only improves as it goes on, comes complete with a satisfying story, dynamic and fluid animation, clever new character designs, and lots to enjoy. It may be a strange experiment, but I think if you come to it with an open mind it works pretty damn well.

My god, talk about a goddamn snooze fest.

Julian Fellowes, he of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey fame, takes his obsession with upstairs/downstairs struggles and shoves it onto the Titanic. Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, but it suffers from the same things that Downton Abbey’s later seasons have: too many characters, none of which are developed, redundancy in storytelling devices/choices, and strained soap opera-level melodramatics.

The first three episodes replay the same events over and over and over again, but follow around a different group of characters to see them played out from different perspectives. It’s not a bad choice, but it becomes dully repetitive by episode two, and we never truly get to know any of them, so we don’t care much what happens to them. We know going into this series that most of them probably won’t make it to the very end, but trying to develop about twenty characters in four short (are they even an hour?) episodes isn’t a smart choice.

Since we can only get to know and care about so many characters in just four episodes, and the fourth one is the payoff, some of these disparate characters must merge their journeys and fights for survival with others, and it can feel incredibly forced. Titanic feels like the penultimate example of elephantine entertainment. Handsome to look at, well acted for the (too) large ensemble, but incredibly safe, stale even, in its storytelling, Titanic is like all of the problems of the burn-victim-amnesic episode, and the following seasons, of Downton thrown onto a sinking boat.

Contrived as this series may be, you’d have to be made of stone not to feel even the tiniest of emotions when the fourth episode plays out before you. Some of the circumstances cause an eye-roll as the lazy writing essentially comes down to the lower your economic/social standing = the more noble you are, it still doesn’t dilute the impact of a father telling his daughter that they’ll just hold on to each other tightly as water fills the sinking ship. It’s a pity then that the series didn’t scale back and instead focus only on a smaller number of characters, dropped the lazy classist shorthand, and focused instead on developing strong characters with logical actions. You’d have to be pretty inept at your job to screw up a story as tragic as the Titanic, but Fellowes and company only come just shy of delivering a total disaster.

Syfy’s miniseries takeoff on Peter Pan is a little all over the place, but mostly an enjoyable variation on the well-known story. Sometimes the deviations pose more questions and add too much bloat than being a clever new take, yet I still walked away from it thinking that this version did minor justice to one of my favorite childhood stories.

Set in 1906 London, Neverland sees Captain Hook and Peter Pan beginning the story out as a Fagin and Oliver Twist type of wandering thieves. Add in dimension hoping, the Philosopher’s Stone, a lost Native American tribe, warrior fairies, ten-legged crocodiles, man-eating spider/scorpion creatures, and the ending of this story being the beginning of the Peter Pan from J.M. Barrie’s novel. If that sounds like a lot of stuff going on in a small number of episodes, it is, and the series cannot sustain so many disparate strands, nor can it tie them together in a coherent manner.

Adding in Anna Friel’s manic pirate captain is all about scenery chewing and feels like her entire plot is a needless excursion from the main narrative. We didn’t truly need more diversions, let alone one which sees a band of pirates destroy the magic fairy tree looking for some rare mineral. But Neverland’s greatest strength and weakness is its ambition. For every charming piece of mythology that has added or spun out existing parts in a new way, there are hooky choices or undeveloped relationships that become shoved together in order to end where the tale everyone knows by heart begins.

The same goes for the special effects work, much like Alice, a large number of the sets are green screen. Sometimes this looks magical and like a storybook come to life, and at others like a group of actors clearly not interacting with the environment around them. At there’s more than a few times when it switches from one to the other within one scene and back again. A few of the fantasy creatures look quite lovely, Tinkerbell is pretty effectively done, but that crocodile is very much a TV budget creation.

At least Neverland isn’t afraid to explore the darker tones hidden in plain sight with the Peter Pan story. Barrie’s creation has an underlying melancholy and darkness that goes ignored in favor of the whimsy and fantasy action-adventure sequences. The actors go a long way to selling this darker tone and making the whole thing work. Charlie Rowe is great as Peter Pan, Rhys Ifans is even better as Hook, Bob Hoskins is a welcome sight while reprising his role of Smee, Q’orianka Kilcher makes for a solid Tiger Lily (even if she is given nothing much to do), and Keira Knightley gives a good vocal performance as Tinkerbell. It’s a mixed bag, but mostly charming and nicely dark. I say give it a look; it’s certainly miles better than Alice.