Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

JFK

I haven’t seen nearly as many Oliver Stone films as I probably should have, but of the four I’ve seen (Platoon, Nixon, Natural Born Killers and now JFK), I would place JFK in an unequivocal second place behind Platoon. His exploration of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was an instantly famous film, quoted endlessly and exposing what had mostly been seen as a fringe theory into the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And the film does an excellent job assembling facts and creating a tableau that sets his theory up nicely. That he gets a bit wingnut in the middle with a purported encounter with a high ranking military official exposing the details he’s been trying to uncover, the film begins to feel a bit more off kilter and perhaps unwieldy.

Up to that point, the film had been engrossing and fascinating from a perspective interested in investigation and research. Yet, the last half of the film, focusing now on Jim Garrison’s (Kevin Costner) paranoia seems to lose some of that earlier tension and when Garrison goes off on an in-court tirade about the affair, Stone exposes his true colors. And I agree with them, but it’s a bit more heavy handed than I would want. Of course, with a director like Stone, you can’t go in and not expect some measure of forcefulness. The film runs 3 hours, making it a tough film to sit through and were it not for the stylish and exemplary editing, I might have suggested Stone needed a better one to rein in the length.

Apart from the length, the performances are all quite amazing led by a stellar supporting cast including Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Gary Oldman, Laurie Metcalf, Walter Matthau, John Candy and Kevin Bacon. There are a number of other notable performances, including Costner, but the aforementioned troop are all far superior, creating an intense framework of personalities that keep the film churning its length. While it isn’t the intense political examination that was All the President’s Men, JFK is still an endlessly intriguing film featuring Stone working at the height of his career, a place he really needs to get back to.

John Carter

Can a film as richly detailed, gorgeously appointed and visually thrilling feel less inspiring? Andrew Stanton’s first foray into live action (he directed Finding Nemo, Wall-E and co-directed A Bug’s Life), lacks the sense of excitement and urgency that could have made the film so much more entertaining. Part of this failure stands in the studio for which he was working. Walt Disney, as forward-thinking as they are in their employment, is hopelessly old fashioned in its entertainment product. Too frequently, they sap all the energy out of their products in an effort to mass produce goods to sell along with their movies. John Carter suffers from this strained control, never rising above passable entertainment to become something more engrossing.

Take for example fellow Pixar alum Brad Bird whose Paramount effort Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Both films have first-rate directors at their helms, both have strict requirements on delivering a PG-13 product. Yet, with Bird’s film, you have energy, excitement and contained ferocity. With Stanton’s, you have length, excess and emotional distance. Ghost Protocol despite being an established brand and with a history that tends to favor dumbing down for the audience. In essence, Mission: Impossible is a revitalized franchise because Bird’s final product looks like something he was given quite a bit of control over whereas John Carter feels heavily micromanaged and stuck in a mold crafted decades earlier when family films had to be sanitized for the public good. At least that’s what Disney seemed and still seems to think.

The performances in John Carter are far from superlative. Taylor Kitsch is sometimes charismatic, but frequently feels like he’s from another time period and not late 18th Century England as the film suggests. But it’s in the voice acting where the true talent lies Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton do more as Tars Tarkas and Sola than any of their live action counterparts do. Even the normally dependable Ciaran Hinds overacts tremendously. I’ll credit that to Stanton’s lengthy experience in animation. Handling an actor in front of a microphone is more in line with his training than trying to coax emotion out of a stiff actor whose voice wouldn’t do so well without a corporeal form to go with it.

The film is sometimes fun and always a pleasure to look at, but it never achieves the level of creative flexibility and presence of mind to be more than generic popcorn entertainment.