jmjosmak Reviews

The Affair (2014–2019)

Passionate Nausea

[3/10 · 9 May 2024]

I have a confession to make: At a certain point late in the first season I started watching this show just to see how bad it would get. How over-wrought, meandering, how bloated with melodrama, how attenuated with weak tension, how dishwater dull. I don't know why it intrigued me to keep watching so morbidly, episode after episode. It's like negating in slow-motion. Maybe I was waiting for them all to drown at a clambake by some miracle. Maybe I have too much time on my hands. But if you want to feel time crawling across the floor, binge-watch this blob. You may feel elderly when it's over.

What first sparked it for me was Hagai Levi's writing. He was the best thing about the show and he left after a few episodes. The Rashomon device in the first episode was done elegantly, filled with ambivalent turns, inviting us into private corners of consciousness, hinting at as-yet unknowable outcomes of human desire. Ruth Wilson and Dominic West are in the hands of good writer here and they swim along well. They are ordinary people waking up to complex passions.

I started noticing that Ruth Wilson looks nauseated much of the time. Not surprising in light of the way she was treated by the people who ran this show after Levi left. Then I studied Dominic West's face and noticed that he ALSO looked like he was about to throw-up quite frequently. How about a beach scene where they both kneel and puke into the surf, holding hands...Another counterfeit catharsis in a show packed with them.

This show promises a lot but keeps on delivering these two dreary retreads. Didn't anyone stop to ask: Who cares if they're having an affair? Their love, or whatever it is, is tedious. Glad I wasn't in it.

Oppenheimer (I) (2023)

He Has Become as Nolan, Destroyer of Narrative Sense

[3/10 · 6 February 2024]

This is a bloated, grandiose, pretentious cluster of half-anecdotes and impressions. Nolan whips it and whips it bad. I have read a little about these events but pity the 99.99% of humanity that has not, if they come to Nolan's movie hoping to learn. How would the unschooled have a prayer of understanding these events if their only source is this overpriced Jackson Pollock? Nolan is an obscurantist.

He goes non-linear because it's cool. Deep down, Nolan wants to ride Michael Mann into Tarantinismo, prettified with a veneer of ideas that makes him seem Something Better--than he really is. Nolan already brought in the anti-communist grilling in his unnecessary time skips, so after the big fat dud of the Trinity scene it's anti-climax time. He trudges onward, swinging his whip of exposition over the assembled worthies for another 50 minutes of verbiage.

Cillian Murphy doesn't deserve the praise he's getting, though I salute him for keeping a straight face while reciting Nolan's Cliff Notes. Watching Murphy's stupefied, bedazzled gape you can almost see him calculating: 'I might win an Oscar.' So he'll get rich. Hooray for show-biz.

The music! Horribly overbearing and overbearingly horrible. It sounds like Arvo Part trying to play Motown on a Moog. If it were actually good music of course it would be too distracting and we wouldn't get to hear whatever fragment of an idea the actor bandies about. It drowns out the dialogue and it's electronic tone is anachronistic. No doubt Nolan was trying to make it the sound of prophecy. In the late 40s Hollywood had a period when overbearing symphonic soundtracks were the thing (Portrait of Jennie). It's beyond excessive--an impediment to understanding, more obscurantism. Quite early on I caught myself asking: When is this tedious irrelevant music going to stop? It never did.

So the feature film staggers onward, deeper into artistic irrelevance, consoled by financial accumulating. There is so much hero-worship in movie culture and appreciation. You become a celebrity director like this guy and it gets to be like "The Aristocrats" joke. And you make millions. People will pay good money to worship what ever god happens to be at the top of the charts.

Nolan wants so much to be profound, like a god. But a cluster of artistic flourishes does not profundity make. We have all seen false modesty gushers in red-carpetland. Nolan should try the real thing.

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Tragedy plus time

[10/10 · 11 December 2023]

My opinion: this is Woody Allen's best movie and his only great one. It's his best writing, including the pompous windbag he creates for Alan Alda, who says that comedy is tragedy plus time. This carries through as Allen brilliantly posits the humor as counterpoint to the moral seriousness of Dr. Rosenthal's torment.

Allen's comedic character is a masterpiece of frustrated desire, low self-esteem. And this comedy seems to "exonerate" Rosenthal at the finish, when Allen and Martin Landau have their meeting. Of course, the good Doctor has has already exonerated himself. What a relief that god turns out to be blind! In the moral seriousness of his agony, the solution to guilt is atheism. There is no god. All is permitted. As long as you can get away with it socially, with your country club and your rich friends.

After the tragedy of Dolores's murder time goes by and Rosenthal "awakens," fulfilled in the knowledge that he has solved his problem rationally. His problem was sin, guilt, fear--thinking he was morally wrong, damned, for having killed her. But he awakens to realize that he was right to have killed her. His self-exculpation works because he himself is the only real judge.

C & M was done just before Woody's nebbish act got so stale, before his writing began spitting out tediously familiar lines, making a cliche out of his persona and themes. From 1990 on, Allen puked out one terrible movie after another. I think he was working too hard. Definitely too much. Few artists have made prolificacy a vice to the extent Allen has. He even rehashed the themes of Crimes and Misdemeanors in his dreary, lifeless "Match Point," whose awfulness called to mind Coppola's self-inflicted travesty of "Apocalypse Now Redux."

Someone should have done an intervention with Woody as the 90s became the aughts. He should have retired from screenwriting totally--and probably acting. I'd say one exception in this time is "Bullets Over Broadway." This was a fun clever movie, sparkling with ideas. And it didn't hurt one bit that Woody had major help from another writer. He needed it, badly. Still, fun though it is, it can't approach the magnitude of Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Martin Landau got the role of a lifetime late in life. He redeemed what he may have felt was a disappointing career. Ever since Mission Impossible, I always thought that Landau, to quote Jerry Orbach in another movie about another character "should have been bigger." He had the depth to put across the moral seriousness of Dr. Rosenthal. Landau haunts us with his anguish of guilt, his ambivalence, then his "chilling" resolution. Hats of to Landau and a great cast for personifying Woody Allen's masterpiece.

Trust (1990)

A Comedy to Make You Cry

[10/10 · 12 November 2023]

I just rewatched this beautiful movie and it gets me every time. It is funny, then heartbreaking. I adore these two young people, forced by experience to discover, haltingly, who they are. Hal Hartley leads them into these discoveries with a loving elegance and wit, an articulate back-and-forth of faces answering one another so truthfully, risking hope, wincing in regret.

As a comedy of ideas the story has a symmetry: two tyrant parents, two lost babies, and two befuddled lovers. Power, Connectedness, Desire. The social order is harsh. Our connections are fragile. Our love is a search for meaning. The inchoate yearning of Mathew and Maria pushes them to a self-knowledge resembling heroic sacrifice, with a background music of very funny human details and denials, big and small.

There is a melancholy grandeur to this film that envelopes me in its sorrowful end. It is a comedy to make you cry. And what we really are about must be somewhere in between laughter and tears.

I am no longer young. But when I was, I was the type of guy who would have fallen in love with Adrienne Shelly. Like Mathew, like many young people, I was incomplete, fighting to define myself, seeking solace in books. We might expect now that our knowledge of the horrible tragedy that befell Adrienne would add to the pervasive melancholy of "Trust." But it is such a brilliant film that we forget real-world dismay amid Hartley's symphony of human longing. It never hits a wrong note. There is a perfection to this film because Hartley creates a small story of small people in a small place that nevertheless leads us to life's biggest choices.

What a heartbreaking dedication to the angelic Adrienne Shelly. Let me quickly add that Donovan and the rest of the actors are perfect. But Adrienne had an imperfection about her that was...Oh well...If time heals too much go back in time, before it passed. Feel young again.

Dispassionate Note: Hartley treats TV the way Neil Postman did is his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death." TV was said to be the bane of our existence. Mathew says in mock-self-therapy: TV deadens my inner soul and helps me bear the pain of submitting to the things in my life that are NOT me, when what I yearn for are the things that ARE me.

It's remarkable that Hartley's points about TV seem minor against his brilliant love story. Politics is the enemy of love. But for what it's worth, seeing these old arguments of Postman and Hartley and Jerry Mander remind us that TV won. The typographical age is shriveled up in the corner. Long live the Video Age! The picture over the word, feeling over thought-if necessary, a fake over the truth.

Now fakes are deep.

The Favourite (2018)

The Feature Film in its Senescence

[1/10 · 1 November 2023]

When an art form is dying it hangs on for for dear life, insisting on survival with despairing denial. The feature film dethroned the novel as the culturally dominant storytelling form in the middle of the last century. Now, of course, it has lost that exalted throne to peak TV. But there's always a lag time and money to made pretending that the Empress's clothes are exquisite.

This is the worst sort of movie--high pretentious. The script abounds with witling tit-for-tat wisecracks learned from sitcoms, not good ones. There are puerile anachronisms that should embarrass the filmmakers, though they may be immune. Perhaps they calculate: it doesn't really matter what we write. The costumes and history and all the snobbery about English accents will get us a win in Los Angeles. What an artistically bankrupt enterprise.

The Favourite pretends to be a deep, intelligent study of how character shapes history, a nations' destiny--of how desire injects power with purpose, discovering political meaning. The creators of this shallow crap no doubt read great novels, saw great movies when they were young. So they aspire to greatness, but lack the mind or honest inclination, really. They just want to be SEEN as great. That wins awards!

Awards tell you what you should revere. And there were feature films deserving of it, in the past. But now the prestige awards are lavished on outright junk like '3 Billboards," for example, and this stupefying sub-mediocrity. It's almost feels like a betrayal: didn't our reverence for Sunset Blvd, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, mean anything? How could this stand with them? Giving this an Oscar is like handing the Nobel Prize for literature to Dean Koontz.

Sorry Dean. I know your are a far superior writer than the hacks who penned this rubbish.

Breaking Bad (2008–2013)

Rewarding Rewatch

[10/10 · 7 October 2023]

I just rewatched this astoundingly brilliant show from beginning to end. It is rich, deep, full of echoes and shadows, love and fear. Vince Gilligan and his people have entered the history of this art form of theirs, of ours, this video age. From poetry to the novel, to radio then TV, cinema and the computer: We humans will always tell our story. And there are so many stories, so many shows. But sometimes when watching Walt and Jesse , I feel like I'm watching the greatest story ever told. So calling Breaking Bad a "TV show" is a little like calling the Sistine Chapel a drywall job.

Here's something I wanted to mention--funny that I never noticed it before. You can take Ozymandias as an ending. The end, there. Of course I also like very much the last 2 episodes.

But taking Ozymandias as an ending works. It makes for a pitch dark, no-redemption finale, with zero light, morally. If your soul can stand it, try watching BB and using Ozymandias as the hard end. Good luck!

The Estate (II) (2022)

So Horrible It Hurts

[1/10 · 24 May 2023]

Is Dean Craig in possession of compromising photos of some studio head? How does imbecilic trash like this get a green light? Who could read this script, with its mentality of a drugged 9 year-old, and look up brightly, chirping: "Yeah! Let's make this!" How could that happen in a sane world or even an insane one?

What an insult to a group of fine actors all of whom I'm pretty sure are intelligent, cultivated, discerning people. But they agreed to do it. That's dismaying, for movie comedy and for the future of the feature film. Anna Faris is a great comic actress; Toni Collette has shown many times that there is nothing she can't do, brilliantly. The others have also been superb in many roles.

But writing this bad makes actors look bad. How bad? Watch this dreck and see. No. Just take my word for it. This movie is so horrible it hurts and I wouldn't want your suffering on my conscience.

Maybe sometime Dean Craig can grow a conscience. That won't be funny either.

Better Call Saul (2015–2022)

Epic Fail

[4/10 · 22 January 2023]

When confronted with such delirious acclaim, I turn to Mugatu (of Zoolander) : "What?! Am I taking crazy pills?!" This show isn't any good and it never was.

There's a scene in Breaking Bad when Saul says about a mistake: "That's what the kids call an 'epic fail.'" Saul was a prophet about his own past. For Better Call Saul is just the money grab/status grab that I feared. Its badness is fully intact but has zero bearing on Breaking Bad, which I say is the greatest show in TV history-a towering work of genius. To be clear: Breaking Bad is not sullied by this travesty. Better Call Saul is irrelevant to Breaking Bad.

"Irrelevant" is a good word for BCS. And it's a painful epic fail for Peter Gould who did so much that was relevant before. I doubt if Vince Gilligan's heart was in this from the start. BCS never comes within a New Mexico mile of VG's brilliance in BB.

I think the big mistake was in not making this a real comedy. Odenkirk's' Saul was always darkly comic-he seamlessly shifted from breezy sarcasm to harsh assessments, as one will who sees life as both comedy and tragedy. There is darkness and light. Saul made the darkness of Breaking Bad more real by clowning. There was always a despair lurking in Saul's garrulous patter. A great performance in a great show.

Maybe they just didn't have enough comedy writers hanging around the BB set. Maybe they wanted a tragicomedy and simply lacked the writing chops to deliver. Odenkirk is a fair comedy writer. And though he's a one-note actor he had perfect pitch for Breaking Bad.

Better Call Saul is a dreary afterthought. A successful clown suddenly decides to take it all very seriously then discovers that he has nothing to say.

To quote Jesse: "Seriously?"

The Offer (2022)

Much ado about...

[3/10 · 20 January 2023]

A great movie. That I have treasured for years and always will. But really, isn't this a bit much, just as an idea? Michael Tolkin did 2 cool, stylish movies in the 90s: The Rapture and The New Age. I've enjoyed both more than once. I'll bet he had a lot more good ideas, but couldn't get them to the screen. So here he is with a bible of narcissistic nostalgia.

These pseudo-historical moments of the Godfather's birth are supposed to thrill us with spasms of awe. We are present at the creation! Big deal. Tolkin cultivates a detailed creation myth but I do not worship the Godfather. Those who do I suspect long for a day when white men could be tough, the hippest urban transgressors. That accounts for the Sopranos cult, I guess. (BTW Coppola hates the Sopranos.)

I guess these cultists explain the absurdly high rating The Offer enjoys. It's almost comical, after watching some episodes of this obviously mediocre show, to see an army of shills descend upon it with tens. But maybe they aren't shills, just fan-boys. That verges on pathetic.

Enjoy Coppola and Puzo's beautiful, brilliant work and dismiss this afterthought. I refuse your offer and you can't hurt me.

Live Nude Girls (1995)

Desire and thoughts about desire

[10/10 · 2 December 2022]

What an accomplishment for Julianna Lavin and a great cast. This is something very rare. Live Nude Girls is a work of art that balances intelligent, witty, honest story-telling with high intensity eroticism. It is very engaging in a humane, beautiful, funny way while at the same time remaining very very sexy. I have never seen anything that achieved this. Julianna Lavin somehow knew how to weave sexiness with ideas and the result is astonishing.

The script is funny; the direction is elegant, and the acting is perfect.

But Julianna Lavin achieves a miraculous balance of the sexy and the psyche in this unique picture. She stands almost alone in having succeeded at this and we must acknowledge her rare accomplishment. Hats off to Julianna Lavin.

This movie has been ignored, forgotten, treated as a non-movie. That's worse than wrong. It's cowardly. Are we brave enough to face the truths that Live Nude Girls insists upon, with its charming intimacy?

Anyway, enjoy this delightful, wise and loving movie by a woman who no doubt embodies these virtues herself.

I give Live Nude Girls a 10 out of 10. And I wish Julianna Lavin would come back. How about Live Nude Grannies? (Just kidding.)

Nightmare Alley (2021)

How to end misery

[8/10 · 2 December 2022]

After watching Pan's Labyrinth I knew that de Toro is a filmmaker of dazzling yet authentic imagination. This is on display in Nightmare Alley in many arresting scenes. I won't belabor a rundown: the movie is a visual feast-of rotten food. The acting of course, is brilliant.

I think the ending is a real problem. Somehow the dramatic doom-knell of Cooper's ending up back in the pit-where he belongs, where his destiny terminates-lacks a clear loud ring. The final scene when he is down there under the hooting, hideous crowd should have been much more explicit, more repulsive, to hammer home that ugly truth.

Still, it's quite a ride...

The White Lotus (2021–2025)

And Blah Blah Blah

[1/10 · 14 October 2022]

What has happened to Mike White? Where is the witty, honest, daring, funny creator we know from Orange County, Year of the Dog, Chuck&Buck? White was such a breath of fresh air in the stale vapors of Hollywood mediocrity. Is that over?

"The White Lotus" is putrid. White flails around for something interesting to say and comes up with lame whining. These people are too shallow and poorly written to be despicable: they are just tediously peevish. Unreal conversations of exalted small-talk numb the mind. Does White hate these people? Why bother? That would invalidate the praise Skinner gave Shawn in OC: "I can tell you love your characters."

Nobody could love these dreary over-stuffed wretches. The story is so weak that White makes a huge deal out of Jennifer Coolidge's character scattering her mother's ashes in Hawaiian waters. This is belabored, talked-to-death, built up, as if it were a plot point. The same thing was done with intelligence and beauty in the penultimate scene of "The Descendants." And without a word.

These people prattle on and on and on. It's one emotionally over-wrought conflict over trivia, over attitude, after another.

Well here's a fact: This show is terrible.

Mass (2021)

20 Minute Rule Broken

[18 August 2022]

Someone major once said: When watching a movie, if you reach the 20 minute mark and you have not liked it yet, you can turn it off. You are not going to like it it. I have seen this true a lot of times. Now with Mass we have a movie that doesn't just defy that rule--but reverses it!

The first 20 minutes of this movie is tedious prattling. The character played by Breeda Wool is quite obnoxious for no reason that serves the ideas of the movie. She overdoes the nervous, apologetic ineffectualness of a sincere do-gooder in the face of human tragedy, which will always be partly unknowable to those who weren't there. And this ineffectual, fussy prattling about the placement of chairs, ect...Goes on for 20 minutes! It's trying to intimate the horror that will be faced, but a cut-out paper heart on a window is to weak an image, too trite, too vague. Fran Kranz's writing fails here. He was clearly trying to be ominous in a gentle way, but that's subtle, hard to do. The scene is crowded with 3 characters when one would have done--for 1 minute, not 20. It is a mundane setting of the scene, nothing more, though it wants to be.

And THEN...at exactly the 20 minute point, the four leads arrive. Although the only significant sympathetic interesting people in this human story don't even show up on camera for 20 minutes, we soon are transported. The next 90 minutes is a brilliant, heartbreaking, heart-expanding quadrologue of horrifying murder, devastating loss. To say Fran Kranz's writing here succeeds astoundingly is an understatement. This is a writer of real human knowing; this approaches greatness. By the end I was in a trance of tragedy, surrendering to the truth of our fallenness. Wow! And the four leads are superb.

So the 20 Minute Rule be darned! The only other movie I remember for this is Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones. The first 20 minutes of that is very weak. Then Cobb takes over, through Jones, and it is just fascinating, poetic, tragic, loaded with fate.

As is Mass. My advice: Skip the first 20 minutes and go right to it. I'm not kidding--the opening is terrible but the meat of the movie will nurture your soul. At a price, Ugarte, at a price.

The Beach Bum (2019)

Beached Bummer

[1/10 · 20 August 2019]

After sitting through this vile, despicable, idiotic garbage I felt angry. Why angry? Perhaps because this movie addresses the concept of the free spirit while lacking the intelligence, let alone humanity, to do anything but rub excrement on it.

Perhaps I'm angry because this movie takes an honorable stock character of our culture, the brilliant, tormented writer with a select following-the "voice of his generation" type-and turns it into a moronic burlesque of impulses too vulgar to merit examination. But examine we must, as pathologists studying how bad a bad movie can be.

Mathew McConaughey is about as convincing portraying a brilliant tormented literary light as Carrot Top would be playing Abe Lincoln. After great work in True Detective and Tiptoes it's dismaying to watch Mathew sink so low. He takes a "voice of his generation" genius figure and turns it into a mindlessly swaggering frat boy, smirking his way through one stupid depraved act after another. But in all fairness, all he has to work with is the putrid script consisting of Harmony Korine's puerile ravings.

Wanton acts of cruelty to strangers are presented as bold realizations of sincerity, the free man's self-actualization. That's license, not freedom. It creates its own sort of jail. With rights come responsibilities.

The script doesn't come close to being funny because the writer is too dumb to think of anything remotely clever.

Snoop Dog is even tainted by Beach Bum's rancid swill. It brought out a thought that I thought I'd never think: Snoop Dog, you're slumming.

But the biggest reason I felt angry after watching this insultingly stupid obscenity? It gives Hawaiian shirts a bad name. Yes! Hawaiian shirts! I love Hawaiian shirts. I own nine of them myself. In my Hawaiian shirt I celebrate summer and the prospect that life can be beautiful. And I live it with the merciful notion that while enjoying life's beauty I don't have to take things so seriously. Hawaiian shirts stand for generosity with the joy of living. That's a deeply humane sentiment, isn't it?

McConaughey wears Hawaiian shirts throughout Beach Bum. The day after I watched it I went out in town wearing one of my Hawaiian shirts. I felt self-conscious all of a sudden. Am I like this rotten character? No! But could my shirt be seen by others as my support for the insupportably disgusting idiot at the center of this terrible movie? I felt sick.

The cure was to watch a beautiful movie, The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne. Clooney wears Hawaiian shirts very well. And if I may indulge the reader, in the scene where Clooney refuses to sign he wears a shirt that I once had, 20 years ago. The exact same shirt, exact same print! Though now long lost in some laundry room, my memory of that shirt helped me identify even closer to the character.

And watching a great movie is a cure for the suffering inflicted by a terrible movie. After that I once again proudly sported my Hawaiian shirt, putting Beach Bum behind me. Forever.