*. I think Oliver Stone was one of the more dynamic talents of his generation, but his career travelled a definite arc of rise and fall. He hit the ground running, and writing, with edgy political thrillers like Midnight Express and Salvador, and topical dramas that still pack a punch like Platoon and Wall Street. My own feeling is that he reached his apex with JFK in 1991. After that there was still work of interest, but things were clearly going downhill. Alexander was more than a bit ridiculous. By the time of W. (2008) I was calling him a spent force. Savages (2012) was wretched all the way through.
*. Nixon is a movie very much in the hit-and-miss part of his post-JFK oeuvre, coming between the oddities Natural Born Killers and U-Turn. In retrospect JFK, Nixon, and W. form a sort of presidential trilogy, and I think Nixon again falls in the middle. Parts of it are great. It has the grandiosity and paranoia that typify so much of Stone’s work, and is told in his signature style of a jumpy visual rhythm, but it also falls into some of the hubris, incoherence, and slackness that were symptoms of his decline.
*. As far as the script goes, I think it does a reasonable job of squeezing a biopic out of Nixon’s final days. Though I have to admit that even with a pretty solid grounding in the history of the Watergate affair I still had some trouble following what Stone was implying, or just muttering about. What was “that whole Bay of Pigs” thing they kept mentioning? And then there are all the oblique references to the way the mob/CIA/Cubans really killed Kennedy. I wonder if Stone believes this.
*. The real delight, and disaster, in this movie though is the cast. So let’s go through that.
*. Top billing goes to Anthony Hopkins, who was as surprised as anyone that Stone wanted him to play Nixon. Give the man credit, he does everything he can by way of performance to give us a believable Nixon. Sure he doesn’t look like the very distinctive, and easily caricatured, president, but for Stone this was irrelevant as acting is more an art of expressions and gestures, “as long as the spirit of the man comes across.” Yes, and no. Hopkins doesn’t sound like Nixon either, though again I really appreciate the effort made. He does do a thing with his tongue that I guess was a Nixon mannerism, but aside from that I just didn’t feel like I was watching anything more than a Nixon impersonator struggling madly to keep his head above water. So I have to rate it a fail, even though I think Hopkins does give it his considerable all. It’s just that at some point no actor can overcome miscasting.
*. A couple of other players find themselves stuck in the same hopeless situation. Bob Hoskins as J. Edgar Hoover? Really? No. Just no. Powers Booth as Alexander Haig? He doesn’t register as dirty enough. I like both Hoskins and Booth but they’re way out of place here.
*. As an aside on Hoover, I think Stone would get in trouble today with his presentation of the stereotype of what Gore Vidal called “the villainous fag.” What he does to Hoover here, and Clay Shaw in JFK, is cringeworthy.

*. But there’s a plus side of the ledger. Joan Allen is Pat Nixon. A dead ringer and a solid performance too. James Woods as Bob Haldeman is a home run, just toning down the usual Woods nervousness enough to project an air of absolutely cynical authority. Paul Sorvino must have had fun doing Henry Kissinger’s croaking delivery, and I think he nicely captures the sense of an arrogant individual playing with fire. Finally, even though she’s only on screen for a minute or two, Madeline Kahn is great as the larger-than-life Martha Mitchell.
*. And then there are a few faces I’m still undecided on, even after seeing the movie several times. J. T. Walsh doesn’t look a bit like John Ehrlichman, and I think disappears into the wallpaper a bit too much. David Hyde Pierce must have seemed like a good choice for John Dean, but I feel like something is missing. He has the look, but never gets the chance to show us the scheming intelligence (or blind ambition) that possessed Dean.

*. Stone thought it his “most encapsulated . . . most structured picture.” I think it’s not nearly as tight as JFK. The DVD version, which is 213 minutes, has a bunch of stuff with Sam Waterston playing CIA director Richard Helms that was cut from the theatrical release, perhaps because Helms threatened to sue. Stone claimed artistic reasons. I think it might have been both, as none of those scenes add anything except a bit more of the conspiracy innuendo.
*. So it’s lively, even at the length of the director’s cut, and there’s lots to be enjoyed, especially if you have an interest in the period. I guess not as many people did as the studio might have hoped though, as it bombed. Perhaps if it had been a little more conspiratorial it would have done better. That’s certainly the direction things were trending.
*. I don’t think it adds up to much though. We kick off with an epigraph asking us what good it will do someone to gain the whole world and lose their soul. Not much. Of course, if you don’t believe that you have a soul (immortal or close to it) then gaining the world would be a bargain. Stone remarks on the DVD commentary that this is “one of my favourite quotes in the Bible” (it’s Matthew 16:26) and he wanted to kick things off with it because it introduced the notion of Nixon losing his spiritual side in his rise to power. Actually, Nixon had pretty much lost his faith in college. In the lead-up to Watergate he talked to Kissinger about how his dirty tricks campaign might be going too far, and added “I don’t think we’re losing our soul. If we do, it’ll come back.”
*. The same epigraph, by the way, is used to kick off Caligula. Coincidence?

*. One of the few visual resources for the production of Shakespeare’s plays in his own time is the so-called Peacham drawing, which is a sketch apparently made by one Henry Peacham of a performance he saw of Titus Andronicus maybe sometime around 1595 (there is no scholarly agreement on any of this, but I’m giving you the usual line). The drawing (probably) depicts Tamora pleading for the lives of her sons before Titus, a scene from early in the play. What’s interesting about it is the medley of wardrobe on display, with some attempt at classical garb and then a mix of renaissance finery and military get-ups from different ages.
*. I mention this just as a way of introducing the blend of costumes and historical fluidity throughout Julie Taymor’s Titus. Not only is this nothing new, it may in fact be as old as performances at the Globe itself. I mean, it’s hard to tell when Shakespeare’s play is even meant to be set in terms of Roman history. There was no real Titus Andronicus and the story might have taken place in the early Republic or late Empire.

*. There haven’t been many modern adaptations of Shakespeare as brassy, bold, and variegated as Titus. The remarkable thing about it though is that for all its seeming chaos of time and imagery, its blend of history, media and myth, it holds together so well.
*. It was Julie Taymor’s first feature film and she was coming off the stage production of The Lion King on Broadway that had blown everyone away. What she does here is very theatrical but in a good way, not stagey or feeling constrained to a set. Much of the action is outdoors, but shot in Rome (and the Arena in Pula, Croatia) which is basically a giant stage set anyway.
*. Reviews were mixed and there was almost zero box office, but the latter at least might have been expected. Shakespeare’s audience had an appetite for the messiness of Senecan tragedy, but today I think our taste for gore is more closely confined to genre ghettos and the intensity of the violence here, the real theatre of cruelty, is alienating. In other words, it’s hard to watch.
*. It’s not a play I care for, and I think the scholarly consensus now is that Shakespeare only wrote a few bits in it. So I give Taymor a lot of credit for making something not just so stylish but well done in most essential departments.

*. For all the crowd scenes and background characters it’s envisioned very much as a two-hander, foregrounding the conflict between Titus (Anthony Hopkins) and Tamora (Jessica Lange). Harry Lennix is fine as the villainous Aaron and Alan Cumming as Saturninus is a caricature baby-man/drag queen, but they’re both playing very much in the wings. I didn’t like Demetrius and Chiron as clubby punks, but then what’s to like about them? They’re barbarians in the play.
*. Hopkins was appearing in everything around this time and frankly was spreading himself too thin. He’s on stabler ground here and does a great job as a proto-Lear, suffering the fate of the old fool who gets into trouble by putting his faith in others and neglecting his duty to the state. It’s not a great role, but he does everything he can with it and that’s a lot.

*. The revelation though is Lange, in what I was surprised to find was her first time doing Shakespeare. At age 50 she’s still glamorous (and even topless in one scene), channeling the femme fatale of her earliest screen appearances in films like The Postman Always Rings Twice and King Kong (beauty killing the beast). As a villain she’s well on her way to her later career turn to cable hagsploitation in American Horror Story.
*. If the costumes are all over the map, from classical to 1930s fascism, the tone is even more so. Taymor mixes in some comic notes that are deliberately jarring, like the reveal of the heads of Titus’s sons by a pair of what look like carnival barkers, but I thought that sort of approach worked. Indeed, it’s mainly the ending, with the boy walking off with Aaron’s spared son into the dawn that seemed false to me in its hopefulness.
*. In sum, it’s a movie I’d fully recommend but only for a select audience. It’s 162 minutes of often unpleasant action and if you’re mainly interested in just hearing Shakespeare done in a beautiful voice that’s not what’s on tap. What you do get are great design elements and two solid lead performances in a play that you’re not likely to see much of on stage or screen. And while it may not be a definitive Titus Andronicus, I can’t say I want to see another anytime soon.

*. Ah, the unbearable weight of Kevin Costner. Looking back, I think maybe all the acclaim showered on Dances with Wolves (for which he won two Oscars — Best Picture and Best Director — at the age of 35) was the worst thing that could have happened to him. An example of what Tennessee Williams called “the catastrophe of success.” Oliver Stone knew how to use him in JFK but after that he was clearly getting too big for his britches, resulting in pretentious slop like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, A Perfect World (which was almost unwatchable), and Wyatt Earp.
*. But I guess he never really changed. He first made a name for himself playing Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, and as Jim Garrison he was yet another uncompromising lawman. A He-ro. So you’d think he’d be perfect to play Wyatt Earp. But in fact, he’s playing against type and sinks any chance the movie has of being interesting.
*. What I mean by this is that the real Wyatt Earp was a complicated fellow. There was as much bad in him as good. But while this movie hints at his darkness, Costner is so obviously uncomfortable at doing a heel turn that we just can’t buy his descent into drunkenness and violence for a second. He’s better at projecting contempt for women, but this too is undone by the need to portray him as a Romantic Hero even when it’s made explicit that he’s a complete jerk. Costner being a Star, which is perhaps an unconscious bias or just the very real limits to his acting ability, is at war with the script, which could so easily have been made deeper and more interesting.
*. We could shrug this off as what might have been. And in fact we know what might have been because Costner was originally going to be in Tombstone before deciding to go his own way. This turned out to be a lucky break for Tombstone, which came out half a year earlier and was a much better movie. Wyatt Earp could only suffer in comparison, and it did.
*. The critics did not rave. Roger Ebert: “Wyatt Earp plays as if they took Tombstone and pumped it full of hot air.” David Thomson: “probably the longest, slowest, dullest film about Earp ever.” Or just listen to Michael Madsen (who plays Virgil Earp), looking back over twenty years later: “It’s long, it’s stupid and boring. It’s a giant close-up of Kevin for three fucking hours. The only reason I did it is ’cause I wanted to walk down that goddamn street to the OK Corral. If I knew that the movie was gonna be that fucking boring and stupid, I would have taken a fucking taxi cab.”
*. Madsen had good reason to feel bitter. He’d originally been offered the role of Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction but was under contract to do this movie. Ouch.
*. Yes, as Ebert, Thomson, and Madsen make clear, it’s long. 190 minutes. It was originally going to be a six-hour miniseries until Costner came on board. As it is, I’ll confess I watched it like a miniseries over a period of three days. I don’t know if that helped. It still seemed dull.
*. As I do with most movies this long, I started making a list of things I would have cut. Did we really need all the stuff about Wyatt’s first marriage? Maybe it’s meant to make us feel some sympathy for him, or help us understand his attitude toward women (“Wives come and go, that’s the plain truth of it. They run off. They die.”). I found it pointless. I also didn’t need to see young Wyatt running through a very modern cornfield at the beginning, wanting to join his brothers fighting in the Civil War. What did that add to anything? None of the brothers register as individual characters anyway.
*. I also didn’t need Gene Hackman as the Earp family patriarch serving up pearls of wisdom like “Nothing counts so much as blood” and “You take on a job, you finish it. Any man who can’t be depended on steady, ain’t worth the trouble of having around.” Thanks, pops. And it gets worse. “Do you think you’re the first person to lose someone? That’s what life is all about, loss! But we don’t use it as an excuse to destroy ourselves. We go on, all of us.” Or: “hit first if you can. And when you do hit, hit to kill. You’ll know. Don’t worry. You’ll know when it comes to that. The Earps always know.”
*. That’s leaden stuff, but it fits with the rest of the film. The epic score, which has a nice main theme, is overused as director and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan brings it in to highlight every big moment, I think mainly because for a movie this long there are so few big moments. So not-so-big moments get inflated too, like Josie stepping off the stagecoach. Or we get a heroic crane shot pulling up, up and away from Wyatt when he’s made sheriff of Dodge City, as the music swells.
*. This style of filmmaking is the visual complement to Pa Earp’s hokey lines. Look at Wyatt and Josie’s first kiss, which they have to arrange to occur right at the prettiest spot in the West, revealed in a cut from a close-up of them smooching to a long shot taking in that picturesque mesa in the background. As Spanky used to say, “Ah, mush!”

*. What all this is in aid of is what Kasdan thought the movie essentially was: an essay on American manhood. Which he sees as being made up of sterling virtues like duty, family, friendship, honour, and self-reliance. In other words: Wyatt Earp/Kevin Costner as all-American hero.
*. Are we supposed to be impressed at a threat to cut somebody open “from his belly to his dick”? Because that’s not so great a distance. No distance at all for some guys.
*. I can’t get over that steaming cup of coffee in the opening scene in the bar. How cold is it in Tombstone? Because that cup is blasting out steam like it’s full of dry ice.
*. In general I agree with Ebert’s observation that the womenfolk come off better than the men. At least they’re allowed flashes of character. Though Joanna Going as Josie is saddled with dialogue as bad as Hackman’s. On the plus side, for the film’s Alaskan coda “17 years later” she hasn’t visibly aged a day, while Wyatt’s moustache has silvered.
*. It’s not all bad. To be honest, I think it’s probably better than its reputation. I wouldn’t rate it worse than most biopics. It looks great when it’s in postcard mode. And Dennis Quaid is very good as Doc Holliday (he shed nearly 50 pounds for the role), though again he suffers in comparison when set next to Val Kilmer’s turn in the role. But at the end of the day it’s just a slow-paced, conventional oater with only a few big action scenes, none of which is presented in a way that’s new or exciting. Even the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral is pedestrian. I’d like to think there was the potential here for a much better movie, but being such a star project I think this is the best they could do. And it’s nothing special.

*. The screenplay for Tombstone was written by Kevin Jarre and he was also supposed to direct, but it was his first (and to my knowledge only) directing gig and it didn’t go well. He ended up being fired a month into filming and was replaced with George P. Cosmatos. But the role of Cosmatos has also been called into question, with star Kurt Russell claiming the he in fact directed the movie and that Cosmatos was just a front or “ghost director” since for some reason Russell did not want directing credit.
*. To this day, the breakdown of duties remains a bit of a mystery. My point in bringing this up is only to note that a movie with this troubled a production — with script rewrites during shooting and conflict between Cosmatos and cinematographer William A. Fraker thrown into the mix — rarely work out. Even Val Kilmer had a reputation by this point as being a difficult star to work with. I’m not sure the studio even believed in Tombstone, as it was kept away from critics before release. That’s usually a bad sign.
*. But somehow things had come together and Tombstone is a delightful Western, with Kilmer giving a career-defining performance. Sometimes, as Roger Ebert remarked about it on Sneak Previews, a strong and effective movie can emerge out of creative chaos.
*. Tombstone may not be a great movie, but it’s great entertainment. It’s an old-school Western, one where the heroes are heroes (manly, meaning they are adored by women and can slap men they don’t like around) and the bad guys are bad (cowards and bullies). It also understands, consciously or not, that the way the best genre material works is by giving the audience exactly what it expects/wants with the slightest of twists.
*. The main twist here is Kilmer’s Doc Holliday, a character who seems to have beamed in from another movie or even comedy sketch. Or look at how the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral plays out, with everyone braced to draw and then frozen until Kilmer gives one of the bad guys a sly wink (an improvised moment). There’s nothing as old as a stand-off and a gunfight in a Western, but there’s never been a gunfight introduced like that before or since, at least to my knowledge. It’s both something old and something new.

*. What a cast. Chock-full of early ’90s sweetness. Kurt Russell (Wyatt Earp, “a tall drink of water” in the desert) is always a good time. One of the more underrated actors of his generation. Kilmer steals the show as Doc Holliday: both a great character, given heroic beats and memorably obscure lines, and a great performance. Sam Elliott (unimaginable without a cowboy hat on) and Bill Paxton play the other Earp brothers. Powers Boothe is “Curly Bill” Brocius, about to be immortalized as a meme (“Well . . . bye”). Michael Biehn is Johnny Ringo. And, in the background, Billy Zane as a doomed thespian, Jason Priestley as a possibly gay and certainly compromised lawman, Michael Rooker, Frank Stallone . . . bonus points if you recognize Billy Bob Thornton because I sure didn’t. Throw in a cameo by Charlton Heston, narration by Robert Mitchum, and a delightfully modern turn by Dana Delany in the only meaningful female role. This is what movies, at least popular movies, were like thirty years ago.
*. As history it’s not perfect, but it’s miles ahead of My Darling Clementine in that regard. Both movies, coincidentally, have traveling actors performing famous speeches from Shakespeare in Tombstone. I wondered how likely this would be. The real history nerds will tell you that the Bird Cage Theatre didn’t open until several months after the gunfight, if that matters.
*. There are missteps along the way. I agree with Ebert that the montages of Wyatt and his gang taking out the Outlaws are just dull filler. And the best that can be said of the ending is that it’s relatively quick. That the last line should be Mitchum’s narration telling us that “Tom Mix wept” at Wyatt Earp’s funeral was a real headscratcher. Who cares? Who, among the audience then or now, would even know who Tom Mix was? I mean, I recognize the name but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of his movies.
*. I’m not a big fan of Westerns in general, but I really liked Tombstone when it came out, and so did everyone I saw it with. Thirty years later, it’s just as much fun as it was then. What’s more, I think it’s fun for all ages. The kind of film then that does make you wonder if they make them like this anymore.

*. There was a time back in the 1980s when I was a little more into the local cultural scene that I attended several “performance pieces” on campus. It was hard to pin down exactly what these were, as they just involved people moving about on a stage, not saying much. They wore costumes and sometimes danced or arranged themselves in tableaux. And there was music. And there was a lot of stagecraft, with odd set design and the imaginative use of strange props.
*. You came out of these things invigorated, sometimes laughing at what it all might have meant but usually wanting to talk about what you’d just seen. They were creative and fun even if they didn’t usually make a lot of sense.
*. I saw Prospero’s Books at the cinema when it came out and it fit in with this kind of aesthetic at the time. Today it takes me back in a way that’s nostalgic. It’s stagey, but not in a traditional way. Instead it’s like the fluid stage of the performance pieces, constantly being transformed and unscrolled by director Peter Greenaway’s beloved tracking shots.

*. It’s a Renaissance film, not in the sense so much of Greenaway’s inspiration in period art and the acres of naked flesh on display, but for being a melding of a variety of forms. Literary, being an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with John Gielgud (aged 86!) as Prospero delivering almost all the lines until the final act. But it’s also a movie filled with striking visuals, music (the operatic score is by Michael Nyman), special film effects, and modern dance (Caliban is played by Michael Clark, who strikes a lot of strained contortions). More than a masque, it’s a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk that combines as many arts as possible. Most of them quite successfully.
*. It’s also a film of paradoxes. Text is central, with the title taken from the small library of arcane books that Prospero took with him into exile. But as it’s a paean to books, of reading and writing, at the same time it blows pages of text to the wind and refashions the play as a sort of interior monologue: Prospero’s dream, or perhaps just his reading of the play he is ultimately revealed as writing.
*. Other paradoxes abound. Caliban is a monster in the play, but here he takes an ideal athletic form. The “painterly” compositions are often quite ugly, at least to my eyes, and always in motion, either scrolling or being deconstructed into screens-within-screens. Nudity is both a classical or Renaissance ideal and also something human and sloppy. Dangling man parts go marching alongside imperfect buttocks and breasts, and because it’s 1991 people still have body hair. Instead of evoking high art one thinks of The First Nudie Musical.

*. In other words, it’s high art that walks a line, consciously I think, with camp. Just get a load of the width of those lace ruffs, and the sky-high platform heels the courtiers wear. The perfect camp touch of taking everything just that little bit too far.
*. But I don’t think it’s camp. The Tempest is a play about magic, and that’s what I think Prospero’s Books is all about. Not just the magic of Shakespeare’s language, but the magic of theatre and film and their conjuring of a world of make believe that we buy into even as we’re drawn to notice how unreal it is. Like any good magician, Prospero/Greenaway knows that we want to be fooled. Suspension of disbelief isn’t a trick, but the price of admission. Once the show starts belief has already been dismissed.
*. That doesn’t mean we can’t be critical though. One thing about novelty movies like this is that the novelty wears off and when there’s no story being told (as here), or when the way it’s presented is more intellectually than emotionally involving (as here), you get tired of it pretty quickly. Even knowing the play well I found Prospero’s Books got a bit trying and I don’t think anyone not knowing the play would be that interested in it at all. It would only work as spectacle or circus.
*. But it’s a critical maxim of some validity that you have to judge the success of any work of art based on its own terms, on what it sets out to do. Seen this way, Prospero’s Books should be considered a triumph. I think it’s exactly the movie Greenaway wanted to make, an expression of a very personal vision. It is, however, resolutely “not for everyone.” Or, as Greenaway put it, “I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.”
*. Indeed, I imagine it’s for very few people. “Shakespeare” is by no means synonymous with “art house,” or at least it shouldn’t be, but there’s no denying this is “art-house Shakespeare,” or Greenaway’s Shakespeare, all the way. It comes to the same thing: a treat for those with a taste for either bard, and a trial for everyone else.

*. Hamlet on the savannah? Yes, and explicitly so. According to co-director Rob Minkoff in an interview in Oprah magazine they wanted to tap into a familiar story as an anchor seeing as this was Disney’s first animated feature that told an original story. At least that’s what I read in Oprah. But wasn’t The Aristocats an original story? I don’t know.
*. In any event, the Hamlet part — a prince’s father is killed by a usurping uncle, setting in motion a revenge plot — is an archetype going back quite a ways. Set’s murder of his brother Osiris, whose son Horus then gets revenge on Set, may be the oldest version. Step-fathers are as wicked as step-mothers in myth and fairy tales.
*. To all of which we might say that there have been Shakespeare adaptations less faithful to their source or inspiration. And the script here was apparently reworked so many times by so many different hands (there are 29 writing credits!) that I’d be surprised if they’d managed much more than what they eventually got in.
*. There are other, looser, connections to Hamlet. Scar spreading a forged process of Mufasa’s death and then sending Simba into exile. Simba being visited by his father’s “ghost.” There was even an alternate ending that had Scar killing Simba and then saying “Goodnight, sweet prince” before dying himself. But that would have been too tragic for kids in the ’90s.

*. In the few animated children’s films I’ve reviewed here I’ve made it clear that I’m not the target demographic for such entertainment so I’m probably not the best judge of it. So I’ll just make some comments on the highs and the lows and leave it at that.
*. It’s short. 88 minutes. For some reason I thought it was going to be longer. But there’s no padding or subplots. Just everything moving along quickly to get where you know it’s going.
*. Some of the music is pretty good. Three of the five nominations for Best Song at the 67th  Academy Awards were from this movie (all of them with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice). This may be a record. “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” won, and it’s great. The sly courtship going on between Simba and Nala when it plays is also pretty daring for Disney. “I Can’t Wait to Be King” is another good number, which plays through a Fantasia-style jungle romp. The rest of the tunes were just so-so though, with “Hakuna Matata” being particularly uninspired. It should have been a real show-stopper of a hummable number and it’s anything but.

*. Jeremy Irons naturally steals all his scenes as Scar. Because Hollywood villains often have British accents. Why the brother of James Earl Jones would have a British accent is all part of the Disney magic I guess.
*. Is a political critique necessary? I have to admit being a bit taken aback at monarchy and the divine right of kings being so wholeheartedly endorsed. Not only all of nature submits to the authority of Mufasa and Simba, but God himself shines down in a beam of light like God the Father blessing Simba as the Son in which he is well pleased. Meanwhile, the food chain is presented as a medieval great chain of being.
*. Of course we don’t see the lions actually preying on anything but grubs while the hyenas only eat carrion dressed up like deli cuts. Instead, all the animals that lions eat bow down and dance for the kings of the jungle, who they can only pray will be enlightened monarchs. It doesn’t seem very modern. Meaning post-1688 or thereabouts.

*. The animation is very traditional, and I thought a bit dull. The adult lions in particular didn’t strike me as very effectively drawn. Even Scar with his black mane, green eyes, and eponymous marking looks dull compared to Shere Khan from The Jungle Book. And the climactic fight on top of Mount Doom was surprisingly uninspired. They even slowed the action down at one point, which I thought a very poor decision.
*. Apparently it was considered to be less of a prestige project than Pocahontas and some in the animation team didn’t have high hopes for it because, as one declared, “the story wasn’t very good.” But it turned into a gargantuan hit, becoming what was then the second-highest grossing movie of all time. It took a while for Disney to follow up though, waiting until 2019 to release a CGI version that didn’t impress critics as much but still did over a billion in box office.
*. I look at it as being decent kids’ entertainment, marking the peak of what’s been called the Disney Renaissance. Personally, I prefer it to the more “kidult” fare of Pixar, and I think I would have enjoyed it more as a kid too. Its massive success and subsequent cultural prominence is a bit mysterious to me though, unless it can just be ascribed to how hungry the public is for such traditional, inoffensive family fare.

*. Félicie has a summer fling on the coast with a handsome fellow named Charles. They go their separate ways but she gives him her address so they can stay in touch. It’s the wrong address. Fives years later it’s winter in Paris and Félicie has a daughter, and a relationship with two different men: her boss the businessman Maxence and an intellectual librarian named Loïc. Neither man can satisfy her because she’s still carrying a torch for Charles. Maxence and Loïc know about each other, and Charles, but hope to land Félicie for themselves. But then she meets Charles on a bus and it looks like they’ll finally be happy together picking right up where they left off five years earlier.
*. If that sounds like a rom-com you wouldn’t be far from the mark. It’s a fantasy, or romance in the Shakespearian sense, meaning a late work from Éric Rohmer that mixes mythic elements into an improbable plot with a happy ending. Of course there’s a nod to Shakespeare in the title and the long passage near the end of the movie where Félicie and Loïc go to see a production of The Winter’s Tale. The full scene is played out where the “statue” of Hermione comes to life, and it moves Félicie to tears. You can then draw further connections for yourself.
*. Félicie has two such quiet moments of epiphany in the film, here and earlier when she stops into the cathedral in Nevers and realizes rather abruptly that she doesn’t love Maxence and has to leave him and return to Paris. What happens to her in these moments? Rohmer isn’t coy, and she does try to explain both experiences, but I don’t know how much we can trust her. Or maybe trust isn’t the right word. The thing is, Félicie is a rom-com heroine and they don’t run deep. She’s the princess in this fairy tale (a.k.a. a winter’s tale) just waiting for her prince to reappear.

*. The plain documentary style and the cast of unfamiliar faces (Charlotte Véry, Frédéric van den Driessche, Michel Voletti, Hervé Furic) fits this brand of magical realism. Though Charles does look like a movie star, or as Félicie’s sister points out, a male model. But then Félicie herself is a hairdresser, and if that sounds like I’m stereotyping I’d respond that Rohmer is doing a good enough job of that himself. Loïc is right that she’s bored with intellectual talk, or talk of faith, as she can only respond with her own New Age musings. What were these guys even thinking in going after her in the first place?
*. In one of the philosophical discussions Loïc tries to engage her in he mentions Pascal’s famous wager. At first I couldn’t understand why Rohmer was bothering bringing this up, but by the end of the movie I thought I’d figured it out. Both Maxence and Loïc have made their own version of the wager. Félicie hasn’t really led them on. She’s told them she can only really love Charles. That’s her version of keeping faith. But they’re betting on him being dead, or at least no longer interested in her. And in a non-romance world that would be a safe bet indeed. But this kind of story works by different rules. Alas, they aren’t the heroes of this rom-com. They’re not villains but just placeholders, or representatives of the “normal” world that have to be rejected.

*. Full credit to Véry, an actor I was unfamiliar with (though when I checked her filmography I guess I saw her not so long ago in Madame Hyde). Or maybe most of the credit goes to Rohmer for not letting us give up on her completely in the early going. Rohmer has always gotten a lot of leeway from critics because he genuinely likes women, which is something that isn’t all that common, at least among male directors.
*. I think we like Félicie mainly because she’s honest, and the men in her life so obviously calculating of their odds. Rejected, or dismissed from the stage, they leave with a shrug. Because, as I’ve said, Félicie plays fair with them, at least most of the time.
*. I’m still not sure how or why she gives Charles the wrong address though. An imp of the perverse? A bit of subconscious sabotage? Meanwhile, a line like “There’s love and love” expresses something that is absolutely true, for men and women, but it’s not very flattering to the guy who’s not being loved the way he’d like. And her complaint that she can “only live with a man I’m madly in love with” really should have had Maxence running for the door. She’s a single mom, not a moody teen. Or a heroine in a rom-com. Except, in this case she is.
*. Roger Ebert: “What pervades Rohmer’s work is a faith in love — or, if not love, then in the right people finding each other for the right reasons. There is sadness in his work but not gloom. His characters are too smart to be surprised by disappointments, and too interested in life to indulge in depression.” It’s not tragedy or comedy then, but romance, which is its own genre. This is a fantasy of wish-fulfillment, but a nice one with a happy ending for the only two people (or maybe three) that matter in the world. And you don’t have to give a thought as to the odds that they’re going to stick together. I’d only give them about a month.

*. The oddest factoid I turned up when doing a bit of research into this title, which I first saw during its original release run, is that it received a “zero stars” review from Roger Ebert.
*. Huh? I could understand not liking Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, but it’s still a long, long way from Freddy Got Fingered and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. I mean, Roger even gave Battlefield Earth half a star. Sure, he gave Walker the no-star treatment too, but what I mean is that he wasn’t in the habit of nuking decent flicks.
*. I’m beginning with Ebert’s surprising rating because of the way his review worries over the question of “What went wrong?” The answer isn’t simple. He likes the play and has nothing against its adaptation here and the direction by Tom Stoppard. He likes the cast. Finally he settles on the idea that it was a bad idea from the start: “I think the problem is that this material was never meant to be a film, and can hardly work as a film.”
*. I can see where he’s coming from, but I don’t think this cuts it. I don’t think this is an entirely successful adaptation of the play, and it may be that it was an impossible job putting it on film, but I think it’s easier than this to identify where it goes wrong. It’s too slow on its feet, especially given the nature of the dialogue, and the visual gags that Stoppard introduces, if they even rise to the level of gags, are pretty dull. Rosencrantz watching the paper boat rise and fall with the water level in his bath? What was the point of that?

*. I should jump in here and say I don’t hate this movie. In fact, I think it’s pretty good. It has a lovely, frosted look that perfectly walks the line between naturalism and the theatrical. The three leads are all excellent, Richard Dreyfuss surprisingly so. He strikes just the right impish note. The editing is a bit rough in places but the photography is first rate. And the play is still the play.
*. It’s a play that was almost twenty-five years old at the time. I wonder how Stoppard felt about going back to the work that was his breakout hit. I suspect he wasn’t very sentimental about it. On taking on the role of director (to date it’s the only movie he’s helmed), he remarked that “It just seemed that I’d be the only person who could treat the play with the necessary disrespect.”
*. Usually I’d consider that a good thing, but as I hinted at in what I said about the pacing I think this is a production that is, in the end, too solemn. It needed a lighter touch. Stoppard’s dialogue, for example, has the effect of making you feel like you’re always a step behind. I think this is intentional. But here it’s too easy to keep up.

*. A large part of the way the play works is by exploiting the friction between the almost slapstick nature of the comedy and the musings on death and the meaning and purpose of life. I’m not sure it’s all that profound in the end, basically just using the metaphor of the stage to show how we find ourselves thrust into various roles in life that we’re forced to go along with, losing ourselves in the process, and that some people just aren’t very important in the grand scheme of things, supporting actors in a greater drama. Still, it makes you think about where the boundaries of the world’s stage lie.
*. I can’t think of a better example of this than the game of Questions that plays out like a tennis match. Some reviewers objected to this being too obvious, but the thing is I always remembered this scene as having them actually playing tennis while they volley questions back and forth. I was, I think, confusing the scene with one from another movie, but still for nearly thirty years I had a memory of an imaginary game of tennis that I never actually saw. There is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.

*. Some interesting credits, even before you get to the cast. A Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheiser film. I guess they were having a Christmas break or something from shoot-’em-ups. Though Simpson said he could relate to this project as its “biting and sarcastic” tone was up his alley.
*. And then we have the cast. This was very much a vehicle, close to a launch, for Denis Leary. He was the main attraction and was set up to do his thing, playing a break-and-enter man who takes a bickering couple hostage on Christmas. They proceed to drive him crazy.
*. Unfortunately, as many critics were quick to point out, Leary’s stand-up persona didn’t translate that well to such a property. To my eye, he always seems waiting for a punchline that he isn’t being allowed to deliver. I blame the script, which isn’t funny at all and even finds itself recycling a number of old jokes. Before too long I was wishing Leary had just been left to improv the entire thing. He looks like he knows he’s dying (in the stand-up sense) and it’s killing him.
*. The couple are played by Kevin Spacey and and Judy Davis, talented actors not known for their work in comedy. Sometimes casting this way works and you get revelations like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, but here it’s a flop. Again I think the script is mostly at fault, but Spacey and Davis can’t even sell the mediocre parts.
*. OK, I didn’t like it. The premise is really simple and gets increasingly strained as things go along. Then it’s wound up in the most predictable and feel-good way you could imagine (and likely were). It did poorly at the box office and some people thought that was because it was too dark. I think it needed to be a lot darker. I don’t know what Simpson saw in it, because for me it wasn’t nearly biting and sarcastic enough. Everybody knows married couples bitch at each other, that holidays with family can be hell, and that letting it all hang out can be a kind of therapy. So what?
*. Apparently the original ending, with Leary getting arrested, didn’t work with audiences so they reshot it and didn’t end up releasing the movie until March. Which I’m sure didn’t help the box office for what was clearly meant to be a Christmas movie. Honestly, they didn’t get anything right here. There are Simpsons Christmas specials with more laughs and social insight. It might have had a shot at attracting a following if it had been a little more perverse, but as it is I think it’s justifiably forgotten.

*. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is usually considered the most faithful film adaptation of the famous novel. I have to use the awkward double possessive though because this production is Branagh’s baby all the way. As screenwriter Frank Darabont put it: “That movie was his vision entirely. If you love that movie you can throw all your roses at Ken Branagh’s feet. If you hated it, throw your spears there too, because that was his movie.”
*. A popular paradox has it that it takes real talent to make a very bad movie. This is true if we’re talking about a special kind of very bad movie. The vast majority of forgettable (and now forgotten) Grade-Z productions of yesteryear were the product of a general lack of vision, effort, technical competence, and/or funds. But a movie like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had all of these in abundance. It’s one of those special bad movies.

*. It was primarily criticized for its manic grandiloquence and operatic qualities. Roger Ebert: “Branagh has always been a director cheerfully willing to shoot for the moon, to pump up his scenes with melodrama and hyperbole, and usually I enjoy that. . . . Here, however, faced with material that begins as lurid melodrama, he goes over the top.” Or Darabont again: “It has no patience for subtlety. It has no patience for the quiet moments. It has no patience period. It’s big and loud and blunt and rephrased by the director at every possible turn. Cumulatively, the effect was a totally different movie. I don’t know why Branagh needed to make this big, loud film . . . the material was subtle. Shelley’s book was way out there in a lot of ways, but it’s also very subtle. I don’t know why it had to be this operatic attempt at filmmaking.”
*.  An irony: the classic 1931 Frankenstein was based less on Shelley’s novel than on a stage treatment that had been popular. In going back to the source, Branagh, with far greater resources than Universal, chose to make a film that was even more theatrical. It may be closer to the novel, but it’s actually less novelistic.
*. The critical assessments made by Ebert and Darabont are fair, but it’s worth remembering that Bram Stoker’s Dracula had come out just a couple of years earlier and Coppola had been praised precisely for the operatic, over-the-top theatricality of his production. So I don’t think it’s fair to say Branagh was necessarily heading in the wrong direction.
*. And to be fair I’d even say that some of his efforts pay off. Frankenstein’s attic lab looks like it was a lot of fun to design, as much in debt to Dr. Seuss as Kenneth Strickfaden. And Elizabeth’s long human torch scene is one of the best there’s been, right up there with such classic burns as the ones seen in The Thing from Another World, Westworld, and Bubba Ho-Tep (to name just a few of my favourites).

*. But then there’s all the silliness, that need to pump up every scene, if not through set design (dig that staircase!) then through a constantly twirling camera or with overhead shots that beg for a character to tilt his head back and scream at the heavens (an appeal that does not go denied).

*. I remember seeing this when it first came out and how it finally lost me with the Monster standing before the burning cottage vowing “Revenge!” (though I should add that this scene does stay pretty close to the book). This is immediately followed by an aerial shot of his trudging through an alpine landscape. It all just seemed too, too much. Not too bold, but too clichéd, both visually and dramatically.
*. Robert De Niro as the Monster (or The Creature) was a bold bit of casting. He’s given plenty to work with too, as what makes this a more faithful adaptation of Shelley than most Frankenstein movies is the fact that the Monster is so articulate and sympathetic a figure. In at least one scene the clear referent is the Elephant Man. Of course the fact that he’s taught himself to read is the silliest part of the novel as well, but I think it’s to Branagh’s and De Niro’s credit that they get us to go along with it.

*. I wasn’t sure though why the Monster had so much visible stitching. Sure he’s had a brain transplant, but why would that entail carving up his face? His head was otherwise a single unit. As is Elizabeth’s head when it is stuck on Justine’s body, and her face is all stitched up as well. Chalk it up to a design element that doesn’t stand close examination.
*. Tom Hulce seems to have arrived here just off the bus from Amadeus. Helena Bonham Carter has the period look, but doesn’t project the sexuality the role needs. John Cleese is surprisingly effective as Waldman. I think maybe because he realized he didn’t have to overplay the part in such a production.

*. Branagh himself is hard to take seriously. He embodies the shift the film makes from Romance (the cultural movement) to romance (of the men with no shirts and bodice-ripping kind). It’s the sort of hammy, artificial performance that goes with the giant, all-too-obvious studio sets. So in that sense it comes with the territory.
*. I started off calling this a very bad movie, but of a special type. In fact, it strikes me more as a very silly movie. As such, I think I actually enjoyed it a little more this time than I did twenty-five years ago. But it’s still a joke. Maybe in another twenty-five years I’ll be able to take it seriously and change my mind completely. A revolution like that takes a while.