jnathanj's Reviews

And Then I Go (2017)

9/10

The Lonlieness of Adolescence, Close and Honestly Seen

10 November 2017

This film, dark and spare in the script and the actual cinematographic light cast on its main characters, succeeds in getting the viewer inside every character.

It makes clear the gnarly inchoate incompetence and pain of being thirteen year-old boys, friends since kindergarten, unsuccessful in 'socializing' in middle school.

Clear also is the wide gap parents try to bridge, when they try to fix their kids, objectify their children as problems to be solved by programs and processes, instead of wordless aimless love.

"And Then I Go" has a plot, which dimly echoes the Columbine school tragedy, but that echo isn't the point of the film at all.

It's about the hundreds of blows that being "othered" inflict upon a young and fragile sense of human worth, and the dark pearl that can rise from being hated or dismissed or being made small, a nick at a time.

It's about the tragedy of blind loyalty also. It's about a lot of things, some of which you will see, though I have missed.

Good movies are like that.

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The Rifleman: Which Way'd They Go? (1963)

Season 5, Episode 25

8/10

And now, something completely different!

26 January 2017

The key to enjoying this episode of The Rifleman?

Note the original air date! April 1st, 1958.

Fans of this TV series know how rare the installment is, where no one suffers the righteous lead of Lucas McCain's rifle.

In this episode, if a gun had been fired, what would exit the barrel? A flag embroidered with the word "BANG!"

The humor is so broad, the sight gags so numerous, you'd call it, what, vaudeville mostly, though the gags pointer moves all the way to The Three Stooges for about 15 seconds.

But the arc of the story also has a moral optimism, in that the kind-hearted but feckless Jackman clan, in exodus from their farm for back taxes, finds a comically improbable fortune smile on them, in a town called Paradise. . .

It feels like a producer's gift to the writers, to have allowed them to create this "APRIL FOOLS!" installment. I want to watch it again, to listen for any slide-whistles or brass "Wah, wah, wah" in the soundtrack.

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Canvas (2006)

8/10

Tight Memoir of Tattered Shirts and Sails

29 November 2008

Canvas is a good story in itself, but also feels like a sketch of a larger movie that could be.

The acting and the cinematography are light and even, and a bit pulled-back, as if first-takes were all the budget allowed.

This film has a hook for anyone who's had a family member suffering from mental illness.

Point-of-view is omniscient, but is 2/3rds from the son, who loves his mother almost without reservation, yet wishes she could be perfect, or normal, though his definition of that desire changes in the story's course.

Canvas is a candid yet gentle memory. Yet it's told without the prop-device of voice-over narrative. One scene opens with the son asking his buddy, "Am I Weird?", and after his friend's assurance, he risks repeating, "No. Really, Am I weird?" I take that as reference to Rob Reiner's film treatment of S. King's novella, "Stand By Me".

Reiner's movie relied on the narrator. It was successful and profitable, and a fine movie. But, the narrator device was a cheat.

Canvas has no cheats, unless you count as cheat understanding and identifying with all the main characters.

The foil, the foible characters are chalky sketches, but the story has an arc.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

1/10

A Movie-thing and Nullity that Craves Redemption

29 September 2007

Warning: Spoilers

If you're like me, you just had to read the "Hated It!" reviews here as soon as possible after your viewing, as expiation for the passive sin of watching this thing.

I spent no money to watch this film in a roomful of people who spent the same (a local community college screens films for free, with free popcorn and soda, for students and instructors and alumni and their kids).

Still it was too high a price, for time's arrow only runs one way, and I can't get that time back.

Redemption comes partly from skimming the "Hated It!" comments here, for the witty one-liners we lay reviewers invent to compensate for having sat through such dreck.

Now, I'm nearly 50, and hardly have brain-room for pointless stories. My brain has experience though, and though it was hopeful at first that the opening scene portended some subtle indictment of the Bush Presidency in the guise of a Disney movie, it quickly set itself to "Eyes Wide Shut" mode.

But, what about my young godson's wasted time? Or the time we'll have to waste together while I try to help him purge this thing from his brain? He's nine, his experience is limited. This thing was shown on the same screen where he's watched real movies for kids, and now I have to figure out how to explain how "Thing: Three" was not a movie at all, just noise and sound.

For a filmed effort such as this, it's denigatory to useful words, to critique it using the words "characters", "acting", or "plot". Just to use those words, implies that somewhere in this thing some shred of those concepts had life.

I vaguely recall seeing Mr. Depp on Letterman's show earlier in 2007, to pimp this thing. He mentioned there that he'd recently been able to buy some small (Caribbean?) island with his wealth, for his amusement and family escape from the demands of fame as an actor.

So, he's clipped a fat coupon for appearing in this thing, and bravo! to him. It's one gross green way to redeem that the picture was made at all.

I fear there's a karmic curse, like the one for the Bloom character, on everyone who participated in this thing: every ten years, they'll have one day to genuinely shine and make love to the craft that brought each of them to the making of this thing.

It's useless to review this thing in a conventional sense. It begs for a meta-review, as a bellwether of the culture and community that let it be advertised and edited and screened at all.

As a technical exercise, some serious film student might try for a witty parody, but even that effort would pay it more attention than the thing deserves. It barely merits comparison with the tar in the LaBrea tar pits, let alone the bones of the poor creatures who lost life sinking into that oily morass.

Kudos to the monkey. Kudos to the stunt man who pitched himself out of the rowboat early on: that looked real, and if not CGI was a tricky stunt.

The rest? grey noise, shot in the color of money, signifying nothing, not even popcorn action entertainment.

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Stan Kann: The Happiest Man in the World (2005)

8/10

Sweet documentary, but not saccharine

14 November 2005

. . . and cannily underplayed by the director.

Stan Kann's a talented theater organist, but that's not the reason to see this documentary.

See it, to find out how to show strangers, intimately, the arc of a person's public life (his private life is left private).

Watch it, to understand how to combine interviews and live shots and period "stock-footage" to tell a story rooted in time and place, with quiet humor and understated grace.

What I mean to say is, given Mr. Kann's love of things that blow (pipe organs) and things that suck (vacuum cleaners), it would've been easy to go for fatuous and stupid jokes.

This documentary is remarkable for the way the director gets out of the way, and just lets Stan and friends and stock footage tell the story.

The only part of this documentary that begins to drag slow, is toward the end, when at his birthday party is read out most of the Mayor of Saint Louis's Proclamation of "Stan Kann" day. I've watched this kind of thing happen for other people, and I can't imagine why the director left it in, except that Stan Kann bears the tedium of it very well, and keeps his face happy and composed, like an eager Terrier.

A story worth the time, even if you don't care about theater organs or vacuum cleaners, so long as you care about how to tell a story.

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Johanna (2005)

Could not stay seated to watch the whole thing

14 November 2005

Sat through about what seemed like 20 minutes of this attempt at art, though it may have been in fact only 8-12 minutes.

I don't know what sort of cameras they shot this with, but as presented at the 2005 Saint Louis Internation Film Festival, the picture had such visible digital compression artifacts that I wished it had been shot with antique analog video camera instead of whatever they used. Then at least the blown-out whites would have had some interesting flange and flare.

Sound, similarly, was digitally compromised, or at least had unintended sounds bumping in. The singers were competent, but the music itself was over-composed.

I'm not writing a review. More of a warning: You're going to have to love the concept, I think, to sit through this production.

I suggest to the authors that they load up a web-server with it, treat it as a storyboard for a real production, and see if anyone bites on it.

It's just not ready for putting people in the seats to experience it, and this is from one who loved J. Caouette's "Tarnation".

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