robsta23

All The King's Men (2006) - Steven Zaillian

I thought this movie would be interesting since I was led to believe it would be like a biopic. Looking at IMDb right now, I discovered that it is based on a real politician, but it is a fictional version of the subject at hand since that was how the book was written.

But man, was this movie a bore to watch.

Sean Penn and Jude Law lead the cast as Willie Stark and Jack Burden, respectively. Willie Stark is an everyday man who aspires to run for a local office (I cannot remember which), but then is talked into running for the even more important position of Governor of Louisiana. Jack Burden is a newspaper man who finds himself entangled in the life of Willie Stark, and eventually finds himself working for the politician. Both Penn and Law give perfectly apt performances in this movie. If I only cared for any of the characters or for the plot.

Anthony Hopkins is also a major part of this 2006 film, playing the closest thing to an antagonist to Stark. He plays an influential judge who is in opposition of Stark's political career, and is also a relative of Jude Law's character. He is a supporting character with some good charm, but it is a pretty average performance compared to works earlier in his career.

To me, this movie feels like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets a modern Shakespearean tragedy, but loses the intrigue of either side of that spectrum. It is an aptly made movie in terms of technicality, but I simply could never get into the story. I honestly do not have much more to say about All the King's Men. It simply could not hold my interest. At all.

3/10.

Kill the Jockey (2025 USA Release) - Luis Ortega

Kill the Jockey is not what I was expecting at all from a film with that title. I went in blind, only having looked at its decent critic score on the website MetaCritic. Since I knew it was an independent foreign film, I did assume that it had the potential to be a more artful film than most movies I go to see in the theaters.

It is definitely an artful film. But is that a good thing, or a bad thing? On my first viewing of Kill the Jockey, it is tough to answer that question.

The first half of the movie is relatively normal, and funny at times, and it explains the title of the film quite easily. Meet Remo, an alcoholic and drug-addicted jockey who can only race well when he is hammered (kind of like that Family Guy episode when Peter is a genius pianist while drunk). Because Remo gets hammered or stoned so much, one time it causes him to not even start a race properly, and "bosses" get mad and try to lock him and his sort-of-girlfriend up in a small shack to force him to sober up before his next race. They need him to win, and if he does not, they threaten to kill him.

With the themes that Kill the Jockey tries to address, I will say that it is an ambitious movie which challenges its audience to determine hidden meaning. About halfway through the film, it shifts focus from a mafia group trying to control Remo to a very in-your-face transgender allegory in which Remo is reborn after an accident on the track into a feminine version of himself (and I forget her new name).

The movie started to lose me about three quarters of the way through. Characters who knew the titular jockey as Remo in the beginning suddenly start calling the now-woman by her new name as if they always knew her that way. The movie loses its cohesiveness and its logic, although maybe the hidden meaning behind the overarching plot is really there, and it is just tough for me to connect the dots? Maybe that is just surrealist cinema for you, who knows?

I am not sure whether this is just the surrealism of the second half of the movie as well, but there are several times late in the movie where it attempts to be comedic, but falls very short in most of these attempts.

The concept is good in theory, I feel. With the ambition this movie has with its transgender allegory, it seems like it falls in the same light as some of Almodovar's movies, but just not fully fleshed out or made with the same careful direction as his movies. Maybe a second viewing would allow me to see what I was missing, but I think I will pass as this movie was mostly uninteresting.

5/10.

Short Cuts (1993) - Robert Altman

I saw this one at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica as part of American Cinematheque's 2025 Ultra 70mm Festival. The 70mm festival tends not to disappoint, with a bunch of great titles, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lawrence of Arabia, which continue to return to the fest and sell out every year (and I'm going to see Lawrence tomorrow).

Both my brother and a friend of mine told me that Short Cuts is a movie very similar to Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson, but if anything, since Short Cuts came first, Magnolia must be inspired by Altman's film. Short Cuts is a movie of many intersecting subplots, though most characters will never interact with each other, as the giant cast of characters is very loosely tied together. The ultimate point of the movie, though, is that this community of characters have commonalities and are affected by both each other and by the environment since they live in the same area: Los Angeles, California.

To critique Short Cuts is to critique the various mini-stories which populate the bigger picture which is the community of characters. A good chunk of the subplots in the film are very well-done, while others prove to be dull and forgettable. One of the more forgettable subplots is the story of Robert Downey Jr's character, who ends up house-sitting with his girlfriend for a neighbor, only to use it as an excuse to host friends for a little party.

At the very heart of Short Cuts, though, are various stories about intersecting sexual relationships. A good portion of the characters prove to be polygamous, either having affairs with others while married, or just "having fun" with multiple partners without titles. These characters who have multiple affairs are mostly shown through an unbiased lens. The audience may judge them, but Altman with his direction seems to remain as objective as possible, showing that people have natural urges, and act on them accordingly.

Life and death are also at the front and center of the overarching story. One darkly humorous subplot involves a group of fishermen who come across a stripped-nearly-naked dead woman in the body of water where they fish. With cell phones not being a regular thing when this movie takes place, they quarrel over how they should handle the situation since they are in a secluded area.

Bad parenting is also a common theme found in Short Cuts, which is an interesting topic of discussion when compared with the only two good parents in the film, played by Andie McDowell and Bruce Davison. But even then, Davison's character, being a great parent, comes from a despicable father, played by Jack Lemmon in a phenomenal performance.

If you have seen Magnolia, you know that there is an environmental event at the end of the movie that sort of ties everything together, and that is the other big similarity it has to Short Cuts, a big event that affects everyone in the community of characters.

I realize I just kind of rambled with this one, but it is hard to talk about this film without getting into the specifics, which would then spoil the movie. Just know, it is a great film about a bunch of intersecting characters that proves to be mostly dramatic, but refreshingly funny at times. And while it is a movie that is slightly over 3 hours, it was so well-paced in my opinion that it only felt just over 2 hours. Short Cuts definitely laid the groundwork for the success of Magnolia.

9/10.