Reviews

Jerry Lewis has always been one of the most awesomely gifted comedians in the business. He can make you laugh so hard, your ribs hurt. He can also bore (and embarrass) the snot out of you. This movie is, truthfully, uneven. The first ten minutes, as the poor schnook tries merely to sit down in a doctor's office, are brilliant, screamingly funny. Other bits (there really isn't much of a plot) traverse a range from lying there like iron ingots to surreally jaw-dropping. The French aren't necessarily crazy. The highs in this movie soar, the lows strain to reach the curb. Welcome to a Jerry Lewis movie. If you can't handle that, this isn't for you.

I don't know. It seems to me that Americans have lost their taste for "small" films - films that emphasize character, rather than explosions and movement. You get the same sort of comments with movies like Tim Burton's wonderful Big Fish or Spielberg's Terminal. I will admit that the Dunst character is a cliché, but this movie is really about the extras, the characters that step out of the background, have their moment, and step back again. Paula Dean stands out as a woman to whom family -- *all* her family -- is all-important and who keeps it together with food and photographs. I'm not from Kentucky or the South, although I've lived South for a number of years. I'm not that interested in *my* extended family -- and in that respect I'm far closer to the Bloom character than to the Dean character. But I recognize that this film is a great portrait of a certain kind of family life. Also, the dead father becomes a very well-rounded character indeed, as you think about the contradictions of his life. This is a film that expects the audience to do a little work, and it pays very well for that work.

I think this one of Lumet's best. He always gave something extra when the milieu was New York. Unusually for Lumet, this is a comedy, and one with an adult sensibility at that. This movie brilliantly explores a certain subset of New York: the liberal, mostly Jewish intellectuals, the Lionel Trilling wannabes. Every scene, even every set, rings true. This movie means "New York" to me more than any Woody Allen film I've seen. New York is usually a mere backdrop in Allen's movies. He's more interested in moral than social types. Indeed, Allen, were he not so good, could have easily become one of the characters in Braverman. Furthermore, Braverman moves better than most of Allen's films. Every performance is a winner: Jack Warden, Alan King, Joseph Wiseman, Jessica Walter, Sorrell Brooke, and especially George Segal, who holds the picture together as a kind of moral quester, a man who really does want to know the truth of things but has no idea how to find it. The screenplay by Herb Sargent is so good, you gnash your teeth wondering why so few movie people gave him work.

Like his Baron Munchhausen, Gilliam's Brothers Grimm has been horridly misunderstood by critics and public alike. What I get from the comments and reviews is the sense of thwarted expectations, although I have little idea what the anti-Grimms expected in the first place. People dislike the kitten scene because it's a cute kitten. This I find entirely in the grotesque spirit of the original folk tales. We've learned to take our fairy tales Disneyfied, apparently. I've also heard complaints about the quality of the special effects as sub-ILM quality. Frankly, that's what I liked about them. They *didn't* look like ILM; they looked personal. I admit I found the basic premise a cliché (two con men who make their living on the superstitious gullible find out that, in this case, the magic is real), but its working-out overcomes this basic flaw. This is a movie that shuns cliché. The brightest scenes, for example, almost always contain the greatest menace. Relative safety is drab, dirty, brutish, nasty, and short. Ledger gives an amazing performance -- I had previously regarded him as a Troy Donahue update. Matt Damon shows he has the chops to cross over from small "indies" to big performances in the old leading-man vein. Peter Stromare and Jonathan Pryce do a highbrow Martin & Lewis -- Stromare all over the place and Pryce coolly self-contained -- to hilarious effect. The faces alone in this movie are wonderful, hearkening back to the glory days of Leone. There are so many telling details in the background ("Bienvenue a Karlstadt") -- let alone the foreground -- that show Gilliam's mastery. Harry Potter (which I enjoyed), Lord of the Rings, and Chronicles of Narnia are for the kiddies and show us worlds we can, with effort, control. Gilliam doesn't offer any such comfort, not even at the end. The sense of menace is overwhelming, and Gilliam achieves it without super-special effects, usually camera movement (the shots following Little Red Riding Hood through the forest made my jaw drop). A brilliant film, operating at a high level we don't see much of these days. Someone compared the movie to Burton's Big Fish, another film dismissed or ignored by critics and public. Although Burton's and Gilliam's sensibilities differ, I take the writer's point. The confident, poetic handling of myth and archetype in both astonishes.

Very stark, very drab, no real drama. Why not just make a documentary? This isn't exactly The Passion of Joan of Arc. The only reason for seeing Chronicles is to hear the performances. I love Bach's music and even I found it hard to sit through this misery of a film. The great Gustav Leonhardt plays (in two senses of the word) Bach. We don't get much of a sense of him as an actor, since he's given so little to do dramatically. Mostly, he gets to walk purposefully or angrily out of various rooms. Bach's life, of course, was not an Errol Flynn movie. It was indeed fairly drab and more than a little hard. This probably means that the life isn't a terrific candidate for a film. The music, of course, is another story. I recommend The Stations of Bach. Far more information, for one thing, and some insight into the music, which is, after all, why Bach interests us in the first place.

I'm ashamed to admit it. Critics steered me away from this movie, despite the fact that every Branagh film of Shakespeare I've seen had been wonderful. I waited for the video, but my local chain store never got it in. I finally found it in a little hole-in-the-wall store. What a charmer! It's true that there's only one real dancer in the film and only one real singer, but all of these folks know how to put over a number. Nathan Lane shines as the clown (he may be the funniest Shakespearean clown I've seen, mostly because he's more Borscht Belt than RADA), but the eight principals pull off the difficult feat of being fatuous and winning at the same time. Branagh did what he had to do: devise a new context for this decidedly second-run Shakespeare comedy and yet convince us of a kind of fairy tale. The context (that of Thirties movie musicals) suits the material down to the ground, and the music throughout is superb, drawing most effectively on the great songs, not all of them well known, of the Twenties and Thirties. Love's Labours Lost can go on and on, but Branagh gives it to us in easy bits, breaking things up with an hilarious parody of Thirties newsreels and imaginatively staged numbers. There is the sombre thread of imminent war in Europe throughout, and it provides the necessary casus for the final transformation of character in the play, which normally seems a little abrupt. All in all, terrific.