Reviews by JxSxPx

Sometimes a certain piece should just be left as whatever medium it was originally intended to be. Rosencratz & Guildenstern Are Dead is witty and takes a familiar subject matter from an acute angle, but it doesn’t make for a great feature film. It’s so obviously indentured to the stage, so dependent upon audience interaction and knowledge of Hamlet to thrive, that something is missing from the film version. It needs the visual tension of these two minimally important characters standing around while the important parts of Hamlet occur around them with little of Shakespeare’s dialog or situations being immediately obvious to them.

Or maybe it’s just that Tom Stoppard, great writer, is not that great of a director. The palette is bland, the pacing is off, but his actors are uniformly excellent. Tim Roth and Gary Oldman really can’t do any wrong, and they both equip themselves quite well to the comedic notes of the script. I’m used to the idea of Roth and Oldman as obsessives or villains that to see them play dim witted and gentile characters is almost transgressive. But they are an absolute joy to watch. Stoppard’s extended dialog or verbal back-and-forth volleying isn’t easy to master, but they both display a great affinity for the rhythm and cadence with it. Iain Glen makes for an incredibly handsome and melancholic Hamlet, while Richard Dreyfuss as the Player, the leader of a troupe of actors. He seems to be some kind of fourth-wall breaking character as he tips off the two main characters to their eventual fate while also making sure it happens, he’s a character made up of pure energy and Dreyfuss tries valiantly to steal the movie away. As an acting showcase, it’s dynamite. But like a lot of other film adaptations of great stage plays, something just didn’t quite transfer from stage to screen.

Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy is a film love drunk for musical theater, more specifically, the musical theater of Gilbert & Sullivan. Perhaps a bit too in love with them, since it details in the creation of The Mikado from the beginning to the very end, never once glossing over even the tiniest bits of the creative process. This wouldn’t be so bad if we had walked away with a clearer portrait of the numerous characters or locations. It’s a three hour journey from the first flush of an idea to the eventual opening night, but it’s all details and no real narrative.

While it’s interesting as an conceit to jump around between Gilbert & Sullivan banging around the piano coming up with melodies and lyrics then jumping to rehearsals before finally transforming into the opening night version, it doesn’t really give much weight to any place or occurrence. I loved Topsy-Turvy for its grand ambition, but I’m just not sure how successful it was in the long run. Having said that, I would rather watch a film overstuffed with ideas, beautiful costumes, gorgeous art direction and production design, lovely cinematography, and grand scale artistic ambition than one that does even half of those things exceptionally well for a more bland end product.

That’s not to say Topsy-Turvy is a noble failure, far from it, it does too many things too well to be considered a failure in any sense of the word. I just think that it lacks shape and clarity. Films about the artistic process are hard to pull off, especially when it comes to writers. It’s terribly hard to make people hunched over scribbling away at something terribly cinematic. But Leigh is blessed with a very talented ensemble of actors. Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner play William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, respectively. They make quick work of forming a believable bond in the early scenes so that we can imagine that they’ve been working together as artistic partners for a long time before this hiccup. Kevin McKidd, Martin Savage, Dorothy Atkinson, Shirley Henderson, and, especially, Timothy Spall make for a great acting company. Spall in particular has a scene towards the end in which he gets to register disappointment and heartbreaking on the inside while keeping a cool exterior that is pretty magnificent. But I walked away feeling the most for Lesley Manville’s long-suffering wife, the woman who must live with genius and put up with its inconsistencies of mood and affection. She gives a quiet, carefully modulated performance that slowly lets out all of the hurt that’s been boiling over the years.

I wanted to love Topsy-Turvy more than I did, but I still greatly enjoyed it. Maybe it’s because it so joyfully expresses its love for its subject matter in every frame, in every scene. So what if its heedless in structure and lacks strong characters, by and large, there’s a tremendous amount of love and respect in this film. And that counts for a lot.

Wildly entertaining wouldn’t be the first words that pop into my mind concerning a film about the Marquis de Sade. Disturbed, borderline pornographic, nihilistic, hedonism, and anarchy – these words seem to fit de Sade much better. Yet, here we are with Quills featuring a never better Geoffrey Rush as de Sade spending his last days locked up in a mental institution.

Maybe it has something to do with the decision to reframe the image of de Sade as a symbol, a martyr for artistic freedom and freedom of expression. Moving him away from the sexually dangerous aristocrat who believed he had a god given right to kill as a mode of seeking pleasure does tend to make a more palatable character. Any way you want to examine it, Quills manages to find a way to examine him and not leave us completely shattered from the debauchery we have just witnessed.

Quills also goes about giving him a hypocritical authority figure to fight against (Michael Caine), a religious man to be his biggest supporter (Joaquin Phoenix), and a star struck laundry girl as an accomplice (Kate Winslet). Rush’s de Sade may be softer than the real one, but the film is still filled with masochism, sadism, blood, and excrement. As Caine’s authority figure presses down harder on de Sade, fighting to suppress de Sade’s works as they incite repressed feelings and desires, he strips him of his basic tools – removing ink and quills. With those gone, de Sade uses wine and his own blood, his clothing, the walls of his cell, even his own feces. Nothing will stop his indomitable will to purge the ideas and images from his head.

Caine’s puritan has more than met his match; he has met the instrument of his very undoing. And it is pretty thrilling to watch as we’re presented with two villains in our lead roles and forced to pick a side. That we begin to sympathize with de Sade is a pretty neat trick on the part of writer Doug Wright, and that we recognize the hypocrisy of Caine’s figurehead proves that this story could be taken from any time in history.

Philip Kaufman handles the material with tremendous ease. Exploring the dichotomies and similarities of the two main characters with a subtle hand and great skill, it’s not long before we realize how much joy and pleasure the puritanical figure is getting from punishing and torturing de Sade. The Marquis de Sade at least had the good taste to admit his warped ideals outright instead of masking them behind something else. Kaufman also manages to sprinkle in plenty of humorous bits, most of them concerning Winslet’s laundry girl, who is buxom and peppy in equal measures.

The biggest accomplishment is how Kaufman manages to keep the tone more absorbing and entertaining than drifting us into depression. As the film draws to a close it mounts up a large amount of tension, killing off a few major characters, and giving us a disturbing yet somehow moving scene between Phoenix and Winslet. I won’t spoil it, but it’s a trip and pretty messed up. But I think that is the great joy of the film, we’re more entranced by what’s getting away with and how it’s doing it than what it’s actually doing. It plays fast and loose with the truth, but spending two hours with Rush’s version of de Sade, all charming malice, scabrous carnality, and unbridled insanity is an oddly great way to spend some time.

It’s not the punches and kicks that weigh so hard upon us in Warrior, it’s being stuck in a lose-lose situation in which you’re rooting for both of the characters to succeed and to win the fight, and praying that some outcome will allow for that to happen. Sure, Warrior leans heavily upon cliché characters tropes and story beats, but it also manages to expand beyond those basic sketches and create a real investment in what happens to these people. Sports films are hard, either you’re indentured to make a victory feel loaded with symbolic weight, or give us a rooting everyman who is really but a blank cipher that allows us to live out our wildest fantasies of rising to a challenge and succeeding beyond belief, but very rarely do they extend beyond these faint ideals to impart real tension and a sense of something at stake here.

Which is Warrior is so damn satisfying. It cloaks the sports drama behind an emotionally gripping story of two estranged brothers trying to make peace with each other and their recovering alcoholic father. The story leans harder on its themes of redemption, making peace with the past, reconciliation and forgiveness than it does on montages of training or spending long periods of time in the ring. We want both of these brothers, who rise up from dark horse candidates to eventually having to fight each other for the title, to win, to find some kind of inner peace and access to a better tomorrow. It doesn’t really matter which one wins out in the end, what matters more is that they manage to work out their issues and come together. That’s what makes the closing shot so satisfying.

But a script can only go so far into making us care about these characters, they still need to be brought to life and made real. And Warrior’s three leading roles are expertly played by Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte. Nolte seems to excel in these kind of roles: damaged men trying valiantly to regain their footing, or crushed with guilt and tortured by their past. Nolte’s alcoholic father begging for a second chance sounds like a villainous role, but the film extends a sympathetic viewpoint towards him as it shows his guilt weighing heavily upon his soul and desperate to try and make things right. Hardy and Edgerton are equally compelling and evenly matched as the brothers. Edgerton is a particularly underrated actor. He’s one of the few bright spots in The Great Gatsby, solid in Animal Kingdom, and brings tremendous amount of emotional weight to his small role in Zero Dark Thirty. It’s nice to see him get a main role here and demonstrate his full talents. Hardy is an actor I’ve long been a fan of, he’s a standout in the solid ensemble of Inception, menacing in The Dark Knight Rises, and a confused agent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, all performances that I’ve enjoyed. Here he does his best variation on Brando in On the Waterfront and finds the vulnerability in this man. His relationship between him and his father is one of more fascinating and slowly evolving aspects of the film.

Here is a film that started off as something deeply disturbing, a comment on mob-mentality and how when allowed the opportunity to let our darkest impulses run wild we shall we do so with alarming glee, and ends up leaving a distasteful feeling within us for a different reason entirely. Inspired by the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl who was brutally tortured and starved to death by her caretaker, Gertrude Baniszewski, An American Crime is well acted by its two leads, but there’s not much else to discuss.

Ellen Page stars as Likens, and from the moment we see her, she has already given way to a doomed martyr. The film never gives Page much of a character to play before the abuse starts and she’s only allowed to convulse in agony and cry. But Page tries mightily to carve out a real teenage girl before everything falls apart. Catherine Keener plays Baniszewski, a fraught, sickly mother with a tenuous grip on reality from the beginning. Small details like her children cowering in fear over certain words, or allowing them to decide on punishments for others, tips off that all is not right within this woman’s mind. Keener does great work here, alternately engaging our sympathy for how destitute her life and making us recall in horror as she forces Page to stick a Coke bottle in private places.

But An American Crime flies off the rails in the third act. It presents us with a false happy ending, an ugly decision. It gives a false note of uplift, as is the deceptive choice to have her provide a voice over narration. It’s a grab at blatant manipulation, a trick to distract us from the inevitability that she will die. That imagined rescue scene though sticks out the hardest and is a pain the side. It sinks a movie that was floating on the surface of good, but not great, and tanks it right into the territory of bad. To climax a film based on a true story with such a dishonest choice waivers in-between bad taste and purely obscene exploitation.

I still don’t think that Ordinary People deserved a few of its Oscar wins over Raging Bull, but it’s easy to see why this film was so beloved by voters. It’s not as boundary pushing as Scorsese’s character portrait, but it tells a simple, yet devastating, story of a well-to-do family disintegrating after the death of their oldest son. As an upper-class couple more concerned with appearances than properly displaying emotions, Ordinary People sees this family flailing about trying to kept it together, deal with the past, and move on from it.

The film mostly follows the exploits of the teenaged son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton, in his debut film role), as he returns home from an extended stay in a mental institution. Conrad is living under a dark cloud of guilt and is begging his parents to empathize and understand him. His father, Donald Sutherland, the only main member of the cast to not get Oscar nominated, which is a damn shame, meets him halfway and encourages his trips to see a therapist (Judd Hirsch) and deal with the past. It’s his mother (Mary Tyler Moore), a frigid woman more concerned with keeping up appearances than dealing with her anger or grief, who cannot deal with these ugly, vulnerable, naked emotions.

The film details these emotional standoffs and how these characters either sink or soar when they come into contact with them. Conrad goes into therapy to combat his paranoia and belief that his mother never loved him; she only ever loved his dead older brother. This fear of his is proven time and time again, not through words, but through her actions. She smiles politely, maintains an immaculate home, yet she cannot give any part of herself away to anyone. She is a sterile person incapable of emotions or vulnerability, and the way she shrinks away from these insights in a late-night passive aggressive fight with her husband is a marvel. Moore came up against the juggernaut of Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner’s Daughter come Oscar time, but she would have been a worthy winner.

Poor Sutherland, here he is giving a great performance as a man trying to support his son, searching within himself for the comforting words to say, for the right actions to take, and awkwardly fumbling around. One of the saddest things about Ordinary People is the slow burn in which he discovers that his marriage is a sham, a falsely built idol that he has never questioned until this very moment. His heart to heart with his son at the end of the film just reminded me of how undervalued Sutherland is an actor. How has he gone so consistently ignored by the Academy when he’s capable of tender, moving work like this?

But the film truly belongs to Hutton, who is painfully naturalistic to the point where some of his brooding scenes or an awkward attempt to reach outside of himself for help feel like a real person has been placed in front of a camera. That he was placed in the Supporting Actor category is a head spinning bit of category fraud. The scenes between him and the three veteran actors are all solid, and he develops a believable rapport with Hirsch’s therapist, but he’s even better with the two teenage girls in his life. Dinah Manoff is a girl he met while in the hospital, she seems aggressively cheerful in her one scene, like she’s trying to giddily run away from her depression instead of dealing with it head-on. While Elizabeth McGovern is his love interest, an open, honest girl from his choir class who is always straightforward with him. She also provides the sympathetic ear he so frequently needs. These two provide deeper insight into Hutton’s emotional state.

While Ordinary People may feel like prestige-picture, and maybe it is, but it’s also deeply moving, intelligent, and unafraid to engage in his characters who are all too human, in all of the highs and lows of what that means. It feels like a real, honest portrayal of a family moving on from a tragedy.

Sometimes being a big fan of a star means having to suffer through their lesser vehicles. It’s not that Gregory Peck can’t play a bad boy, he did well and had a lot of fun in Duel in the Sun, or that Henry Hathaway can’t make an entertaining movie, 14 Hours and Niagara prove that he can. No, the problem is quite simply this: Shoot Out reunites the main players of True Grit, director Hathaway, writer Marguerite Roberts, producer Hal B. Wallis, but no star John Wayne, and they expected the same results to pop out by placing someone else in the Wayne role. Moreover, as great an actor Peck was, he was no John Wayne. Peck was too tenderhearted and morally sound as time went on, whereas Wayne could be morally compromised and tough as leather.

The other major obstacle is that Shoot Out isn’t given a terribly engaging script. It plays out like a lesser quasi-remake of True Grit throughout. A curmudgeon gunslinger gets stuck with a younger female sidekick in a quest for revenge. One gets the sense that they have seen this movie before, and much better elsewhere. So, the story is boring, failing to hold our interest as it checks off each box on its way towards the inevitable conclusion. It’s a journeyman effort through and through, just barely watchable due to a high level of production and technique on display, but not for much else.

While very much based on historical events, and a deeply fascinating story about political/sexual intrigue and power plays, Mary, Queen of Scots frequently dips into a tone of melodramatic soap opera. Historical dramas need a bit more to go along with besides opulent sets, lovely costumes, and veteran character actors playing bit parts who only function to speak excessively long monologues which describe the events instead of actually showing them to us. Mary, Queen of Scots never reaches above this limited achievements, yet it does have two huge strengths in its corner: the lead roles played by Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson.

Jackson demonstrated her considerable skills as an actress with the role of the Virgin Queen twice in 1971. There was Mary, obviously, but the far more successful mini-series Elizabeth R allowed Jackson the opportunity to role every aspect of the role and develop a full personality. Her character here seems more obsessed with what Mary is doing with her genitals at any given moment, developing a strange pseudo-romance with her Master of Horses, and defending her throne from accusations of being a bastard progeny. The jousting matches between Redgrave and Jackson, too rare, play like watching two thoroughbred horses race against each other. The material here is rich and ripe for the making of a great drama, but it never congeals.

But as a spotlight for Vanessa Redgrave’s talents, Mary, Queen of Scots does give her a lot of room to show her stuff. There are multiple marriages, including one fraught with alcoholism and wandering lust. Of course, there’s political uprisings and accusations of rightful ownership of the throne of England, but it somehow never logically flows from one story section to another, no matter how valiantly Redgrave tries to keep it all working. She captures a series of contradictory impulses that feel right for a woman in her position. She’s stands straight as a steel rod, projecting a domineering spirit and regality, before turning around and acting like a naïve, bubble-headed royal prone to leisurely reposing about the court. Watch it see two actresses challenge and inspire each other, but forgive it for being somewhat dull in narrative structure.

The Naked City is frequently heralded as a great film noir, but I frankly just don’t see it. It lacks much of moral quagmire that noir traffics in. Here the good guys (the cops) are straight-laced and completely heroic, while are bad guys have no ambiguity or nuance present in them. Film noir was a black and white populated by tortured souls who were effectively various shades of grey. Naked City cleans everything up, playing more like pro-police propaganda than anything else.

Or maybe it plays out more like a police procedural show? The road map is clearly there: begin with the murder, follow through with various suspects, and conclude with the apprehension of the murder. It’s formulaic, even for the time, with the only truly daring choice was to film in a primitive variation of cinema verite. The film is shot on the streets of New York, effectively become a character, and I presume the spirit of the city was the narrator since that plot device felt like lazy writing. Instead of developing a strong primary character through which to view the proceeding events, we’re given lazy narration from an unseen eye and hand held by the director throughout the entire duration. But where is the dark cynicism at the heart of so much of the crime genre? Where is the expressive, emotive lighting?

It’s not without its charms or reasons to watch it. Stories like these always work in some base level, even if they never transcend beyond being merely serviceable. And it’s not that The Naked City didn’t leave a legacy behind it. Dragnet, Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue these are the children of The Naked City. It’s just that it hasn’t aged well, other films from the same era did this material with more artistic daring, or tighter scripts, or more inventive cinematography. And its descendents have leapt over its small achievements. Not every classic is going to register with you, and this one certainly didn’t make much of an impression with me.

I’m not really sure what to call Her: is it science-fiction? A drama? A romantic comedy? Some strange combination of the three? Her is a film which stares at genre titles and conventions and has a good laugh in their face. Of course, this movie sprung from the mind of Spike Jonze, that strangely soulful cinematic poet who explored the fractured humanity of a little boy in Where the Wild Things Are, gave us the strange fever-dream Being John Malkovich, and blessed the world with the darkly comic and deeply odd Adaptation. There isn’t a contemporary that it could have possibly sprung forth from, only from the deliciously inventive imagination of Jonze.

Here is a film that takes the strangeness of online dating, social media, and friendships which exist purely through the computer screen and examines them from several different angles. It doesn’t take much to see the heart and soul beneath the polished surfaces, and the world of the film feels both strangely familiar and like worn in fantasy. We believable that this world is entirely plausible, and that in a few more years, the world of Her could easily be the real world outside of the cinema.

I didn’t think that a movie about a man falling in love with a piece of software would be so touching to me going in, but I left having felt something deeply about the human condition. Once more, Joaquin Phoenix gives a complex performance in what has slowly emerged as my favorite movie of the year. Last year, it was his animalistic portrayal of a broken man in Paul Thomas Anderson’s hypnotic character study The Master. Here is another broken man, but this one is on the cusp of healing and changing for the better.

Phoenix plays Theodore, a man who makes his living penning vividly detailed, poignant, touching, and emotional honesty letters for people based on the most basic of details his clients have given him. The irony in all of this is that his character finds it easier to express emotions for other people, or behind the veil of technology and screen names, than he does for himself. He’s in the final stages of a divorce (Rooney Mara in a small role, but one that proves she’s an actress for picking daring subject matter and nailing the nuance of a scene), but cannot bring himself to sign off on the divorce papers. Into his life comes the software that will learn-and-grow along with him, a computer operating system that will help him get his life in order and reestablish his emotional footing.

We’re already dealing with some delicate and emotional material based purely on the set-up, and Jonze keeps that momentum up as the story unfolds. Trying to get back into the dating world is a disaster, his best friends end their marriage, and he slowly begins to fall in love with his operating system, Samantha (voiced to perfection by Scarlett Johnansson). Again, I know all of this sounds incredibly strange, and maybe it is and I’m just very weird, but I found it easy to empathize with Theodore’s confusion and emotional loneliness. Her takes a solid look at the evolving nature of relationships – the growth, decay, and the struggles to pick up the pieces and move on – not just romantic, but the relationships we have with ourselves and our friends.

I don’t know what kind of alchemy Jonze performs to get such tender yet quirky performances out of his actors, but god I do love him for it. Phoenix’s range is a marvel. Just comparing his performance in The Master to this is enough to let you know he’s one of our great working actors. From the adventure-seeking, death-defying, pure id of Freddie in one film, to suddenly turn around and be introspective, quiet, then bloom into a happier, more extroverted person is the wonder of a great artist doing their magic. Amy Adams plays his supportive best friend, herself a recent victim of a broken relationship and its devastating aftermath. My god, look at Adams’s work within the past year: tough and spunky as Lois Lane in Man of Steel, sexy and scheming in American Hustle (a career-high in a career full of great performances), and here as a supportive, nonjudgmental, open-hearted woman. That is a great amount of range.

No less terrific in smaller roles are Rooney Mara as Theodore’s ex-wife, who appears winsome and waif-like in the flashbacks to happier times in their relationship, before appearing freaked out and passive-aggressive about learning of Theodore’s relationship to Samantha, and Olivia Wilde as a blind date gone horribly wrong. She appears as a blond goddess, but quickly descends into a strange mixture of ugly neediness and desperation for emotional stability. Bill Hader, Brian Cox and Kristen Wiig make vocal cameos are various callers in on-line sex chats and operating systems. Wiig’s bit is especially twisted and hilarious, and I won’t dare spoil the good fun of it.

And now we must talk about Johansson’s vocal performance of Samantha. A lot was written about how she’s deserving of recognition in the supporting actress field during awards season. I agree. Voice acting, when truly done right and not the lazy celebrity vocal work of say DreamWorks films, can hit you just as well as seeing a real person emote. And the development of Samantha, from standoffish automaton to inquisitively soaking up knowledge to developing at a rate beyond comprehension, offers Johansson a chance to stretch her vocal muscles. Without a Samantha we could believe in, Her would fail, thrown onto the pyre of well-intentioned but disastrous exercises.

At the end of Her I walked away feeling like this film was truly pushing onto the idea that our love affair with the newest and latest technology was about more than just finding new, expensive ways to partake in conspicuous consumption and waste time. These machines are simultaneously bringing us together and apart, and just reinforces the notion that while we may enjoy being alone, none of us want to be lonely.