Reviews by JxSxPx

Here is a film that is trying to be two different ones at once, and ends up being merely adequate versions of both. If it wasn’t for Matthew McConaughey’s impressive and strong central performance, Dallas Buyers Club would fold under its own weight and confusion over just which type of movie this is. What wins out more, unfortunately, is Hollywood feel-good hogwash about a scrappy little guy fighting against a large goliath entity. The better film is the character study of a leathery rascal who looks imminent death in the face and says, in a Texan drawl, “Not today.”

Long ago I had written off McConaughey as a tanned himbo – a nice body, charming accent and not much else to offer up. While I thought he was the weakest of the three leads in Bernie that doesn’t mean I thought he was bad by any stretch, he was just stuck with the straight-man role. But I bring up Bernie because it was the first time I had ever noticed the actor hiding inside of the man who had made such terrible choices as How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Ghosts of Girlfriend’s Past. And he has continued on with that hot streak – a small role in The Wolf of Wall Street is perfectly oily as he’s the man who brings DiCaprio’s character into the drugs-and-sex hedonism and underworld of Wall Street trading, and he’s gotten great reviews for his work in Magic Mike, Mud, The Paperboy and Killer Joe, films which I unwisely avoided due to his name being attached and having unfair expectations over what exactly they are and his having rarely, if ever, displayed any versatility or depth as an actor.

But here we are, with McConaughey as the front-runner to win Best Actor at the Oscars, and me not only impressed with his work, but rather hoping he’ll actually win the damn thing and continue on with these challenging roles and for-the-art subject matter. It’s damn fine performance, and not just for the drastic weight loss. His skeletal frame is unnerving to stare at, but it’s the way he refuses to make his character easy to love, preferring to keep him a bit of a rascal and fighter even as the film is charging towards a Hollywood-style redemption arc. He does great work here, and anything that works effectively in the film is because of the graceful balancing act he does with the role.

But Dallas Buyers Club is loaded with problems. Denis O’Hare and Jennifer Garner turn in fine work, but their characters feel entirely superfluous. An abortive sub-plot sees a semi-romance between Garner and McConaughey that goes nowhere slowly, while she’s also involved with a tenuous friendship with Jared Leto’s doomed trans-woman Rayon.

Being entirely inconsequential to the plot is one thing, but creating a trans character to serve only as the spring board for a homophobe’s transition into being less of an asshole is just condescending. Leto is fine in the role, but he doesn’t do anything truly extraordinary with it besides lose a lot of weight, cry on command and toss off sassy quips. Rayon is given no interior life, no backstory, no reasoning for existing aside from providing hollow and false moments, the kind that present the lead character as more likeable, like when McConaughey forces a former friend into giving Leto a handshake. It rings entirely false as a scene. Rayon feels like a character from another era, the hetero’s goofy sidekick who is an outlandish other, but basically a harmless eunuch who exits the story once the hero has become softer and more tolerant.

This doesn’t even begin to describe the problem of hetero-washing McConaughey’s character, turning him from a bisexual cowboy into a homophobic heterosexual asshole that can be redeemed. This brand of story-telling is basically an off-shoot of “White Savior” hokum. Out of all the stories to tell about AIDS, its enduring ugly legacy, the gay community and redemption why change so much from the real one? Why tell it this way? An even worse offense is to pretend that there were only small pockets at this time, when ACT-UP was organizing mass protests. So much of the truth is left out of Dallas Buyers Club that it’s both shocking and not. Well, I guess there’s a pretty solid reason that this film was somehow, inexplicably nominated for Best Original Screenplay. I have got to say that while I rarely expect Hollywood to craft a complicated and unflinching look at any historical subject without changing whole cloth much of the truth, I rarely expect this much revisionist history and pigeon-holing into tidy story conventions.

Editing, especially when it is your Tony and Pulitzer prize winner baby, is a tricky beast to tame in adapting a work from one medium to the next. What do you edit, where and why? These are the questions that all writers must answer when performing the adaptation process. I can only imagine the difficulty that Tracy Letts encountered when he had to perform this alchemic work on his beloved stage play.

Sadly, those questions don’t seem to have been answered in August: Osage County. Some of the magic appears to have gotten lost in the transition from the Broadway stage to the big screen. Maybe it had something to do with sanding down the three-and-half hour running time from the stage into a more manageable two hours. There’s abrupt character transition, new information is just thrown into your lap, and despite primarily taking place in the same house numerous characters have a strange habit of disappearing for long stretches of time.

What I walked away from August: Osage County with was this thought: “Man, I really wish I had seen the play instead.” It’s not that the movie is bad, it’s just that’s inelegantly constructed. You walk away with the feeling that this must really work wonders onstage, where the actors are in front of you and you’re trapped inside the tense and hostile atmosphere. A good film adaptation can do this, Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made George and Martha’s house feel like a gateway to Hell, the exorcism was a cathartic moment in which the sunlight look brand new.

But Virginia Woolf had Nichols, and August has John Wells, primarily a television director of much repute and recognition. But directly television and directing a film are two entirely different beasts. Wells seems to favor a point-and-shoot aesthetic, afraid to meet the darkness of the material, the vitriol of the dialog head-on and wrestle with it in an engaging way. He softens major scenes, doesn’t find the appropriate amount of dark comedy in others, but his actors are game.

With the exception of Ewan McGregor, his accent wanders all over the place and he’s stuck with a half-formed character and the lion’s share of awkwardly handled material, the acting ensemble of August: Osage County is a high-water mark for great acting. This is very much an actor’s piece, complete with loud pronouncements and chances to chew the scenery (which is frequently indulged, but it works for these characters). Sam Shepard is world-weary and soulful as the family patriarch, while Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis are aces as the level-headed middle daughter and aggressively-perky and happy-go-lucky youngest daughter. Dermont Mulroney is creepy and slick as Lewis’ oily fiancé, while Abigail Breslin is the disillusioned and snarky daughter of Julia Roberts and McGregor. Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale and Benedict Cumberbatch feel like a real Oklahoma family being plucked off the street and thrown in front of a movie camera. Cooper and Martindale threaten to frequently steal the film from the leads as they bicker, make-up and argue over their no-good son (Cumberbatch). While Misty Upham’s role seems to have become a victim of editing, she gives her housekeeper a sweetness and quiet-center that counter-balances some of the insanity surrounding her.

But, much like the stage play, August: Osage County belongs to two women – Julie Roberts as the eldest daughter and Meryl Streep as their acid-tongued, drug addicted mother. While I found Streep to sometimes be too obviously acting in a few scenes, effectively nudging us and going “Watch me act the hell out of this,” I found myself believing in her character more often than consciously noticing her acting. But Roberts was the real surprise here. I am prone to finding her a great movie star, but one who recycles the same moves in every dramatic performance. She surprised me here. Not only did she rise to the challenge of the material, I found her overall impression to better than that of Streep’s. She find the dark comic tone in lines like “Eat the fish, bitch” and finds the horror in her character’s realization that she is her mother’s daughter in far too many ways.

I think if you approach August as a showcase for a group of talented actors to chew on some great material, then there’s a lot to enjoy in here. But I was expecting something much tougher, something that hit much harder. This is a film that needed the freewheeling madness, the hothouse paranoia of a Virginia Woolf or A Streetcar Named Desire to soar. As it lands, it’s good, but never truly great as a complete film. But there’s magic to be found in the individual components.

I’m trying really hard to think of the last time I had so much fun while watching a movie in 2013. It was probably Pacific Rim, but that was a different kind of joy and fun. That film had clearly demarcated characters – these were good guys, there were bad guys, and there were characters that were mostly good but needed to lose their bad attitudes. Nothing so easily digestible is to be found here. American Hustle gives us nothing but variations on characters who are bad, sneaky, liars and cheats.

So it’s a pity that I must admit that it doesn’t evolve much from there. It’s a sloppy narrative with an ending that just feels wrong and illogical, but as an excuse to watch a group of supremely talented actors have a grand time chewing scenery and playing bad? Well, it can’t really be beat.

Degradedly referred to as “Explosion at the Wig Factory,” American Hustle is a fairly easy target to lock-on as being “overrated.” It does venture mightily close to being Scorsese-Lite – like GoodFellas or Casino without the magic touch that Scorsese brings to them, oh, and pump up the shrieking hysteria to eleven. But Hustle is more concerned with being a dark comedy than anything else. And don’t expect much fidelity to the true ABSCAM story, but at least the film is upfront about that from the very beginning. Hollywood has a long history of playing fast and loose with true stories, but this one throws its hands up in the air from the get-go and tells us “Some of this actually happened.”

But no matter, let’s talk about how great David O. Russell is with actors before he break down what went wrong with Hustle. The film has five major roles and each is filled by an actor I greatly admire. Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner and Jennifer Lawrence – how is that for an ensemble? While Bale and Renner look fairly unattractive (a feat in itself), they’re not tasked with playing loud or obnoxious characters. In fact, despite being the main con artist and a crooked politician, they’re the most decent, self-aware characters with a strong moral compass. Sure what they do is wrong, but Renner’s shady political dealings are from a strong desire to make things better, and Bale’s character undergoes a quagmire once he gets too close and involved with his mark. Don’t let the distracting beer gut and spectacular comb-over fool you, these are just ornamentations on another solid performance from Bale. While Renner has the quietest part, but delivers a surprisingly heartfelt and emotionally sincere performance, despite the sometimes distracting bouffant.

It’s nice to see Cooper taking that Oscar nomination for Silver Lining’s Playbook and trying to make good on the promise his work in that film gave us. Here he plays an FBI agent trying to make his name and reputation by bringing down corrupt politicians. There’s just one tiny little catch, he falls hard for Amy Adams’ seductive grifter and lets his unbridled ego get the better of him once he lets it out to play. It’s a large and loud performance from him, but it’s also very engaging at the same time. Which is pretty much the same thing you could say about Jennifer Lawrence’s part as Bale’s loud, needy, desperate and manipulative wife, except her character is engineered to steal the show. She comes in like a bang of foul-mouthed Long Island accented neurosis, her hair like a crumpled bedsheet thrown atop her head and chain-smoking like a chimney. Lawrence is aces in the role and plays it to the comical heights, cultivating in a scene in which she sings along to “Live and Let Die” while doing household chores and scrubs in time to the music. It’s the kind of gonzo comic work that’s scene-stealing and seems primed for baiting awards, but Lawrence actually brings a real depth and emotional honesty to it, locating the real woman beneath the theatrics.

The true MVP of Hustle is Amy Adams, though. Her characters (and yes, there are two) are duplicitous and balance on a fine line between seducing us and making us question if she’s ever been totally honest with anyone. There’s the real character that she plays, the one that she invents which she must continue to play and the possibility that she may lose herself within this long con. She doesn’t get to ignite as many fireworks as Cooper or Lawrence, but Adams reveals her depths of her already impressive talents.

But the problem with Hustle is quite simple, really. It’s mostly an actor’s vanity project, and it frequently gives them too much room to be loud and give grandiose displays of “ACTING!” I’ll gladly take this over the mental-illness-as-romantic-comedy-device bad taste that Silver Lining’s Playbook left me with. Yes, I enjoyed SLP, but I also had massive problems with it at the same time. Hustle gives over to its actors too much and apes Scorsese’s style pretty blatantly, but at least it’s also really fun and funny.

Except for that damn ending, and, look, I know endings are hard. Russell has said that after The Fighter and SLP, Hustle completes his thematic trilogy about redemption. And this wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t insist on giving the characters a “Happily Ever After”-style ending. That worked in Fighter because there was one of those in the real story, it was irksome and one of my points of contention over SLP and just feels plain wrong-headed here. These characters just committed a long-con on several people, helped indict numerous politicians and cost an FBI agent his job. Tell me how and why these people deserve a happy ending? It just feels so wrong based on everything that has gone before, not that the “bad guys win.” That doesn’t bother me, but tonally it stands in stark contrast to everything else that preceded it. It’s an imperfect film, but I would say that I enjoyed the hell out of it far more than anything else. Sure it’s showboating the actors, and the story is a beat all over the place, but sometimes a piece of pop entertainment is just what is needed on a Saturday night.

I remember after Shame had come out, and emotionally gut-punched me, reading about Steve McQueen’s new film being an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s memoir, Twelve Years a Slave. Shame had impressed me greatly, and I figured if anyone could make an emotional honesty and devastating portrait of the American slavery system, it would be McQueen. He seems to traffic in complicated and harrowing dramas about men stuck in tumultuous situations and fighting for their way out.

12 Years a Slave did not disappoint me. I think that when all of the dust settles and long after the awards season has ended, 12 Years a Slave (and Gravity) will stand as a towering achievement in movie-making for the year 2013.

Granted, this isn’t exactly a comfortable viewing experience, but 12 Years feels incredibly authentic, radiates brilliance in every facet and is feels like an essential film blooming before our eyes. You can pick just about any segment of the film and talk about how perfect it works in unison with everything else. But since I’ve already mentioned McQueen, we might as well start with the director.

Only his third feature film, 12 Years continues on with his distinctive style of film-making – an artfully composed, starkly emotional and viscerally engaging. His clear-eyed vision leads the charge that the rest of the cast and crew follow along with. Never one to hand-hold or play things for Oscar prestige, McQueen instead delivers a complicated and daring portrait of an evil that crept into every corner of American society, leaving long-lasting ramifications that haven’t healed entirely over time.

Then of course there’s the script by John Ridley. Yes, the film mostly focuses in on the narrative of Northup’s enslavement and eventually freedom, but it also loads itself up with beautiful amounts of symbols and rich character details. Where to begin to discuss the scenes that disturbed or enlightened me and have stuck with me all of this time? The slave auction that sees a woman’s children torn from her side and sold off is a marvel of great acting, writing and directing. Another is a scene in which a field slave begs Northup to kill her and remove her from her miserable existence. Or the one where Northup is left strung up from a tree until his master arrives to cut him down while the other slaves go about their business and pretend to not witness or get involved with the atrocity happening before their eyes.

But we never lose sight of the hope and promise that gets Northup through every trial and harsh encounter. Northup’s memories and feelings about home, his longing to return to the safety and embrace of his family is the constant humming noise in the distance. And Chiwetel Ejiofor, a gifted and underrated British actor who has been turning good work for so long that it seems criminal that he’s just now getting a huge part like this, nails every nuance and conflicted emotion that the role requires. His pained face and tenacious inner strength are the visuals which Ridley’s script and McQueen’s direction lovingly drape themselves around. McQueen compared Ejiofor to Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte in terms of his class and dignity as an actor, strong comparisons but Ejiofor meets them with wild success.

The other two main roles go to Michael Fassbender as a sadistic slave owner and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o as a field slave. Fassbender, another great actor who seems to have only recently poked through the mainstream, transforms into a scary monster, a man who has turned scripture into an ordained right to punish his slaves and mistreat his wife as he sees fit. His character feels like a Molotov cocktail ready to light and ignite at a moment’s notice. While Nyong’o plays Patsey, one of Fassbender’s slaves and the object of his cruel affections. The rape she endures is painful, you can practically see her spirit hover above her body while it happens, and even worse is the whipping which sees small pieces of her back fly off as it builds in intensity and cruelty. But two scenes stuck with me longer, the above mentioned scene in which she smiling and calmly requests that Northup kill her and free her from her misery. The second features Alfre Woodard as a kept woman whom Patsey eagerly tries to learn from and mimic her decorum, class and nobility. It’s a strange scene in which Woodard reminds us her particular magic and gifts – someone give this woman a juicy movie role or great television series already! But Nyong’o is no slouch, and if there’s any justice on March 2nd she’ll walk to the podium to collect her Best Supporting Actress award for her committed turn. The emotional truth she brings to numerous scenes is the true staying power of her part, and not the physical tortures that she endures.

But there’s a tremendous amount of unique and underrated character actors surrounding those three, I’ve already mentioned Woodard, but there’s also Benedict Cumberbatch, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Taran Killam and Adepero Oduye. Each and every single one of them is always a welcome presence to me as they bring with them a tremendous body of excellent work. Paulson is especially memorable as Fassbender’s jealous and cruel wife taking her frustrations out on Patsey every chance she gets. Giamatti as the slave auctioneer sticks with her for the amount of uncaring and unflinching efficiency with which he completes his work. The sight of Oduye crying and in hysterics over her children being ripped from her offers him only a minor annoyance and nothing more. Oduye’s grieving mother is a small wonder, but another reminder that there’s a lot of talented black actresses out there with little to no substantive work outside of opportunities like this. While McNairy and Killam are the foppish yet sinister men who trick Northup into getting drunk and sell him off. Cumberbatch is Northup’s first owner, a decent man and a preacher, which almost makes him crueler in the long run. While Dano, who seems to excel at playing sociopaths and troubled young men, is the carpenter in charge of work going on at Cumberbatch’s property and constantly butts heads with Northup before eventually trying to lynch him. And lastly Pitt, who comes in at the end, a benevolent Canadian who agrees to try to help free Northup from his enslavement, and I know it seems strange to call a major star like Pitt an underrated actor but think of much solid work he has done in the past and yet we continue to think of him as an attractive movie star only. It’s a symphony of great actors relishing the juicy parts they’ve been given.

I could clearly keep rhapsodizing about the merits and beauty to be found in 12 Years a Slave, but I fear that I would bore you if I kept prattling on and on and on. So I will wrap up with this, here is a film that has the courage to stare the subject of slavery in the face and never waiver in its gaze for a single moment.

Nothing says Disney like taking a dark fairy tale and only adapting the thinnest and most generic parts of it into family friendly entertainment. This process has proven to be hit and miss over the years, but, for some reason, they always turn out good work with Hans Christian Andersen. Frozen is no exception to this observation.

The original fairy tale concerns a young girl trying to save her best friend before his heart freezes due to a piece of a broken mirror created by the devil poisoning him. The Snow Queen abducts her best friend, and a robber girl, some crows, a princess and a reindeer help her along the way. Also, there's a witch that has her cottage cast into eternal summer and a few other diversions factor into the overall plot. Much has been stripped down to its essential elements, which is a bit of a shame since The Snow Queen is one of Andersen’s finest, grandest stories.

Disney keeps the concept of a young girl seeking out to rescue someone before her heart freezes, a plucky reindeer, a snow queen and that’s about it. It takes these generic pieces and creates something special and very charming out of them. Finally a princess movie from Disney that acknowledges the long-standing tradition of the two main characters marrying after knowing each other for roughly twenty-four hours, or less. Granted, this is a carry-over from a fairy tale, but those are from a time when that didn’t seem totally out of the ordinary. And it takes a nice feminist stance in having the two main female characters save the day by working out their relationship problems with each other instead of relying upon a male character to swoop in and save the day.

One of Frozen’s biggest problems is that for a musical film, with about a dozen songs, only four of them are remotely memorable. “In Summer” is the goofy sidekick song, and in this case it’s a snowman named Olaf voiced by Josh Gad. Gad’s vocal performance throughout is endearingly ditzy and deadpan, and I’m convinced they allowed him to ad-lib quite a bit. “Summer” sees Olaf dreaming about what it would be like to experience warmer weather and do whatever it is that snow tends to do in these circumstances. “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” starts off as a bit of cute pleas from a younger sister to an older one, but ends up quietly breaking your heart as time passes and we see the fractured relationship between the two of them, and the abusive decision by their parents, has left both of these women in emotional tailspins. Did I mention that this happens at the very beginning of the movie? Well, there you go. “Love is an Open Door” is a meet-cute between a prince and princess that features an Arrested Development joke and some joyous harmonies. 

I think that it’s officially time to declare that Peter Jackson has gone full-on George Lucas mode. The Lord of the Rings was a trilogy of films that edited down the expansive material into something more manageable and workable to a general audience while maintaining the tone and flavor of the novels. They stand as a glorious testament to what a great literary adaptation could be; each frame filled with love and a tremendous amount of detail. However, that was also back when Jackson knew when to edit and where to do it.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is largely a very fun film, but bogged down with an obscene amount of filler and material created specifically for this trilogy of films. The Hobbit is a slim novel, episodic in structure, that could easily, and preferably, be adapted into one three hour long film and lose nothing. This is why I believe that the Lucas comparison is apt. Jackson has taken a beloved franchise and added onto it a bloated series of prequels that strive too hard to hammer home how this action here leads to the events of Rings.

Let’s get back to discussing Smaug and stop focusing in on the creator for a moment. For the most part, I rather enjoyed Smaug. The special effects work is top-notch, many of the supporting roles wisely cast, the costumes and sets are fully realized and spectacular to behold, and when the film moves through its numerous action sequences it can still inspire a sense of wonderment and awe. The only true drawback is the problematic script.

I do not believe for one minute that adding back in Legolas was a choice of any value or necessity. Legolas was an anemic character in the books, and Orlando Bloom is a charismatic black hole for me. I never got his appeal much beyond his blandly handsome looks. Piggybacking on this thought, the inclusion of a love interest for him, which soon becomes a love triangle when she express a romantic inclination to one of the numerous dwarves, was totally unnecessary. Evangeline Lilly plays the part well, but no one could make an awkward romantic gesture late in the film remotely plausible or emotionally valid given the purple prose nature of the whole thing. (Is it just me, or does she bear a striking resemblance to Link from Zelda?) Her inclusion feels like pandering to try and include another female role in the otherwise male-dominated cast. This wouldn’t be such a problem if she was allowed to only function as the Mirkwood guard’s captain. That love story really weighs things down and turns a kickass female character into another defined by her relationships to the males in the plot.

Coming out much better is the inclusion and additions of Gandalf’s journey that happens concurrently in The Hobbit but isn’t mentioned anywhere in the text. Prone to disappearing for long stretches of time while having his own adventures, Smaug visualizes them, and any excuse to spend more time with Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf is always a great idea in my mind. His story is taken from the appendix, so unlike the stuff involving Legolas, this hasn’t been invented wholesale. I didn’t mind these additions since they explained a few of the questions one has about the events leading up to Rings involving this particular character.

Yet these aren’t the only moments that the film excels at doing. The spiders and hallucations as Bilbo and the dwarves succumb to the strangeness of Mirkwood is a executed flawless. I really liked the idea of Bilbo being able to understand the spiders while wearing the ring. And while the action sequence may have gone on a bit long (more on that in a minute), it still brought a bright smile to my face.

Even better is Lee Pace’s scenery-chewing, drag queen over-the-top reading of Thranduil, one of my favorite secondary characters in The Hobbit. If we must spend more time with the elves, I’d have dropped Legolas entirely, the love triangle, and given Pace more to do. His essaying of this character is deliciously grandiose, a case in which overacting is perfect for the character in question.

Clearly though, if Smaug had not worked then this entire chapter in trilogy would have proven fruitless. Benedict Cumberbatch gave a motion-capture performance as the giant dragon and gives him a voice. He finds a mixture of menace, droll intelligence and vicious wit that matches the character as well as Smaug, another of my favorite secondary characters. The entire last third of the film takes place in the Lonely Mountain, and Smaug’s slow reveal beneath hundreds of pounds of gold coins is a perfect synthesis of material and creative team. And while roughly three-fourths of Smaug’s material is perfectly executed, an extended sequence in which he lays waste to a rekindled forge goes on for far too long and begins to move away from fairly realistic sequence of carnage and destruction and into video game boss battle. As the arena moves locations and our heroes must vanquish the boss in ever escalating and crazy means. This isn’t even the worst of these never-ending sequences.

I can’t think of a better encapsulation of Smaug’s problems with imaginative movie-making quickly turning into over-done strum und drag than the barrel escape from Mirkwood. It moves away from dwarves, elves, a hobbit and a never-ending army of orcs doing battle into Donkey Kong-level territory. That this sequence is not found in the book should be a tip off. Does this spectacle start off making you want to laugh and cheer? Oh yes, but it ends with you rolling your eyes and wondering how many barrels there were to begin with and which one is which and who is where. So while Smaug does much right, it still hasn’t presented a credible reason for existing as a trilogy.

You can call me crazy all you want, but if there’s one franchise that’s more overrated and currently incredibly popular than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I can’t think of it. And this is coming from someone who learned how to read and draw from his issues of X-Men. The beef I have with them, for those of you that don’t already know, is quite simple: by manufacturing all of these movies to tie together, eventually collide into one super-film, and function as spin-offs for new solo films makes for viewing that is frequently paint-by-numbers. It’s like watching everyone involved in the production try to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their back and trying to successfully complete a set of jumping jacks.

This not to say that any of the films have not been without merits, charms, or that a few of them haven’t been solidly constructed. Captain America: The First Avenger worked so well because it existed independently of all the others. All it had to do to tie into the rest of the franchise was make sure that Cap got frozen in ice at the very end. They didn’t even have to unthaw him, that was a bonus. Thor worked best when it ignored the mortal realm and had fun treating Asgard like a Shakespearean tragedy waiting to happen. Luckily Thor: The Dark World doesn’t descend into a cacophony of overly done sound effects, too many characters, unsatisfactory story strands and general poor filmmaking like Iron Man 2, but it doesn’t really do anything better than the first solo Thor film.

It was a smart move to put most of the action in Asgard and the other realms while generally staying away from Earth for as long as possible, but that doesn’t shake the “made by committee” feeling that permeates the entire thing. I think in the end though, that Thor: The Dark World emerges as better than average for this type of film, but it still doesn’t reach the artistic highs of X2: X-Men United, Superman: The Movie or The Dark Knight Trilogy.

Look, these films always have a certain amount of bloat that is to be expected and frequently the talented older cast members are given little to do and sent off on notes that are supposed to be highly emotional, but ring as hollow due to little time being used to develop their characters. The most obvious examples are Anthony Hopkins and Renee Russo as Odin and Frigga, the king and queen of Asgard and parents of Thor and Loki. You’d think with a character pedigree like that they’d play a larger role in the overall film, but not so. They’re firmly side-lined, given one glorious moment to showcase how badass they are before being either killed off or shoved to the sides to make more room for Kat Dennings and Jonathan Howard as Natalie Portman’s interns.

Call me crazy, but I’d sacrifice Portman, Dennings, Howard and Stellan Skarsgard to spend more time with the Asgardian characters. Or, you know, our new big bad Malekith (Christopher Eccleston). While Eccleston is perfectly cast in the role of the rulers of the dark elves, he’s also given little to do as the film tries to keep far too many plots successfully spinning in the air and praying none of them fall. At this point I’ve come to expect Sif and the Warriors Three to be given the short-end of the stick, but cutting down the main villain’s role seems inherently grievous a decision.

Nothing against Portman, I love her as an actor and I’m happy to see her character take a more proactive role, but I think the romance aspect of the Thor films is always the weakest link. We mostly see Sif mooing over him from afar, while Thor and Jane Foster interact more intimately. So this particular plot is fairly limp and generates no heat. Maybe they’ll finally do something interesting with it in the inevitable sequel – I’m hoping for an appearance by the Enchantress and Executioner myself to really give the romance some juice.

But thank god that Marvel, more specifically Kenneth Branagh, was smart enough to cast Tom Hiddleston as Loki. For my money, he’s the great MVP of this whole thing. He plays bad wonderfully, relishing every moment afforded him to chew the scenery or deliver a hilariously withering quip with great bite. He plays Loki like the long lost relative of Richard III, a character so charismatic and single-minded in his quest to become king that we can’t help but be entranced by his scheming and plotting. Hiddleston also manages to bring a fragile depth to this scheming trickster. But the sub-plot involving his relationship to Frigga is half-baked and never generates the amount of empathy or sympathy called for. This is not the fault of Russo or Hiddleston, as they try valiantly to create a bond that looks believable and almost succeed. I do take issue with a moment that does generate a tone of emotion, but then it’s nullified by the end. You’ll know it when you see it.

He also plays off Chris Hemsworth’s Thor beautifully. Hemsworth, I haven’t seen Rush but I’m convinced there’s a great actor underneath the hulking physique, plays the heroic straight man wonderfully. He doesn’t get a flashy role, but he does anchor the entire franchise with an appealing mixture of arrogant bravado, humor and strength. Plus a body that it truly Adonis-like in every conceivable form of that word.

So there you have it. Thor: The Dark World is a case of too much going on at once for any of it to truly matter in the end. It’s a low stakes affair, but it is a lot of fun. So that does account for a whole lot of something. It may not rank amongst the best and brightest of the superhero films, but it’s definitely a better-than-average piece of action-adventure popcorn entertainment. Now if only Marvel would get really daring and drop the symbiotic franchise building and character spin-offs and focus on just making a daring, original and adventurous adaptation of their work that allows a writer and director to spin the material in darker or more independent avenues.

Maybe not a cinematic masterpiece, but, by god, is it a rollicking good time! So who really cares if the meeting of Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Isabella Rossellini didn’t lead to a classic in the five-star sense of the term? It created a wonderfully strange and campy diva standoff in which Streep and Hawn got to add new depths and layers to their public images and poke some jabs at a youth obsessed society.

The basics of the plot concern two old friends who eventually become enemies over Bruce Willis’ romantic affections, reunite years later and continue their feud to hilariously dark and disturbing places. Oh, and the secret to eternal beauty and youth is involved as well. Ok, so there’s not too much meat on them bones, but it honestly doesn’t matter. Death Becomes Her gave Streep and Hawn two deliciously vampy and campy roles, and they relish the opportunities like the consummate actresses that they are. (Quick aside: where has Goldie Hawn disappeared to? I miss her.) Watching the two of them deliver grotesque and incredibly graphic cartoonish violence upon each other is a joy that possibly only a gay man could truly enjoy.

After building up her career as an actress of tremendous range and versatility in (mostly) prestige films and literary adaptations, Streep finally broke free of that Greer Garson school of acting and found a manic Carole Lombard type buried underneath that impressive technique. She looks like she’s having a ball playing an aging actress who will do anything to stay young and beautiful. And Hawn is her former best friend-turned-enemy. Years prior Streep stole away Willis, a plastic surgeon, from Hawn, which lead to Hawn’s character having a complete breakdown and vowing revenge. What is better revenge than looking good and feeling fabulous? But Hawn’s character is still mentally in a very dark place, and Hawn, normally so bubbly and sunny, nails that unhinged maniac lurking beneath the surface. They play off of each other wonderfully, and Willis for his part isn’t too shabby. Known primarily for the Die Hard franchise, Willis here plays a sweaty, nervous type who appears as if he’d be all thumbs in all matters of romance. It is a departure, but it somehow works in the film’s favor to cast an actor known for he-man machismo as a neurotic schlub.

But where the film mainly falters is that it never develops beyond these sequences and story ideas. It seems more obsessed with the idea of Rossellini as an exotic purveyor of eternal youth and beauty that they never bothered to develop her character beyond this quick sketch. Rossellini, thanks to good genetics, is an intoxicating presence no matter what she is doing, and it doesn’t hurt that she has a strange, foreign mystique about her that makes any action she does infinitely interesting. But around this time David Lynch was routinely proving what a capable actress she was so it’s a pity they couldn’t craft more for her to do, although she does get a great joke about why Greta Garbo went into self-imposed seclusion. However, that’s all the film really is – a few great jokes about our obsession with aging, diva theatrics and loads of special effects. There’s not a lot of story or character development here. Still, it’s a ton of fun and I’ll admit to watching it whenever it comes on TV or, in this case, before it went off Netflix.

If you haven’t figured this out by now, let me just throw it all out there: I rather enjoy meta-textual works. I recently completed At Swim-Two-Birds, and found that novels strange layers of self-reference and literalizing the concept of characters hijacking the plot to meet their own desires to be a witty and strange read. So a film like Soapdish is right up my alley.

It’s a delicate balancing act in lampooning the conventions of a daytime soap opera and giddily embracing them at the same time. Except while the film does take place on an actual daytime soap opera set, it applies the clichéd story lines to the production of the series. A long buried secret involving paternity results and family connections that were thought to be long buried? Oh yeah. A devious, highly sexual femme fatale brainwashing a poor sap into doing her dirty work while clawing her way to the top? Check. A long lost lover returning and bringing with him years of emotional baggage and acid? Yep, that’s in here too. Even the names of the various characters practically scream soap opera pulp – Celeste Talbert, Montana Moorehead, Lori Craven, Ariel Maloney, David Seaton Barnes. Characters on All My Children or the characters in this film? Those aren’t even the names they have on the soap they’re making within the film.

While most of the jokes are uproarious and aimed more at the general strangeness and semi-tacky nature of soap opera writing, one harkens back to the worst of the genre. A late reveal that a character is a trans woman and publicly shamed, humiliated and dismissed with it is an ugly reminder that this type of humor was once considered perfectly fine. Which is a shame since it does darken a film that for so long was a zesty, tart and smart piece of satire about the behind-the-scenes scandal of a popular soap opera hijacking the actual material they’re trying to film.

An incredible ensemble cast that includes Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Shue, Robert Downey Jr., Cathy Moriarty, Carrie Fisher, Garry Marshall and Terri Hatcher, and if you count the amount of Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy nominations and wins amongst that bunch it becomes even more impressive. I said that the film was a delicate balance, and this group of actors manages to make the entire enterprise both believable and occasionally winks at us to let us know that they’re in on the joke. Field gets to indulge in her histrionics, but it works for a grand dame of daytime. Same goes for Kline as a down-and-out thespian hungry for a routine to the spotlight that this provides him. Shue, as in real life, plays the up-and-coming ingénue – what happened to her? She’s a solid actress. And Moriarty seems to relish playing a devious character, it isn’t terribly surprising that post-Raging Bull she turned that sharp, deep voice into a career as a character actress specializing in wicked women.

Soapdish is an incredibly fun bit of satire, at once playing these conventions perfectly straight and taking the piss out of them. A bit loud and messy in spots? Oh sure, but who cares really when the results are this much fun.

You can smell excessive studio interference on a film from several miles away, and Mimic has that smell about it. It bares many of the hallmarks of Guillermo del Toro’s work, I’ll let him explain what those are: “I have a sort of a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things.” Mimic hits all of those boxes, but you can still tell that something got a little lost in the production line. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where del Toro’s vision got compromised, but it’s obvious in numerous moments that it was.

The plot concerns a movie disease which effects children, causing hundreds of children to become fatally ill. A scientist engineers a super-bug to take New York City’s roach population, the carriers of the disease, and the unexpected consequences of this action. This being a del Toro film, the engineered roaches take on a disturbing life of their own, which comes to a head in a taunt and gross series of encounters in the sewers.

I think one of the main problems with the film is the cast that has been assembled who hit more than they miss, but when they miss they sink their scenes in awkwardly acted and stilted movements. Mira Sorvino, Josh Brolin, Charles Dutton, Giancarlo Giannini all do great work. Sorvino in particular brings a wounded strength, fragility and intelligence to her scientist who unwittingly opened a Pandora’s Box of creepy, crawly evolution. Without her work the film would have sunk under its own weight, or if her performance had been bad the entire film wouldn’t have worked at all.

Another performance that required a solid actor is Chuy, the autistic grandson of Giannini’s shoe-shiner. While Giannini delivers a soulful charachter, Alexander Goodwin’s Chuy is awfully played, which is strange since del Toro got astounding work out of his child actors in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. But Goodwin’s constantly smiling character never seems to realize when he’s in danger, highlighting the worst of actorly traits in portraying characters with mental or emotional disabilities. Goodwin doesn’t make his character real, but it isn’t entirely his fault. Del Toro has never shied away from placing children in grave danger, but for some reason he pulls back here. I think this was probably studio interference – was New Line convinced that opening the film with the mass deaths of hundreds of children already sad enough without putting another kid in danger? It’s highly possible to me. But the scenes involving Chuy don’t work as written and performed. (Spoiler territory: the refusal to put Chuy in any true danger is even stranger given that we witness the big-bad bug kill two other kids in the abandoned subway while they’re investigating the catacombs.)

But I still believe that Mimic like all of del Toro’s work is worth a viewing for the wit he frequently displays. Not just in crafting situations, but in creating original and grotesque monsters to take root in our nightmares. It’s imperfect, and there’s an overall sense of something being “off” with the whole thing, but I still maintain that there’s enough positives to Mimic’s claustrophobic catacombs and interesting premise to make it at least a one-time viewing experience.