Review of The Human Stain (2003) by Jerome W — 12 Feb 2005

It's been a long time since a movie made me cry. I saw "Million Dollar Baby" today. Tears were flowing out of me by the end.

I have no interest in "The Aviator" and "Sideways" cannot possibly be better than this picture, so "Million Dollay Baby" is hands down the best film of last year foir me. Just thinking about it makes me emotional. Really it's not so much a film about boxing as a film about love, the love you search for when the people who are supposed to love you don't and the love for another person that overcomes all sense of right and wrong. Screw the "Scorsese is overdue" crap. Clint Eastwood richly deserves the Best Director Oscar and though Best Actor is going to Jamie Foxx by acclamation, Eastwood's performance here shouldn't be overlooked. It's the best acting I've ever seen from him. And Hilary Swank...my God. Everytime I think of her trussed up in that hospital bed I want to cry again. That young lady is about to win her second Best Actress Oscar. How bloody good do you have to be to turn out movies like this and "Mystic River" back to back in your 70's?

Last night I looked at most of "The Human Stain". I couldn't take any more after an hour. The movie tried to cover too much ground too quickly and never felt real for a minute. The casting didn't help either. A dead sexy Nicole Kidman as an abused wife and Anthony Hopkins as a light-skinned black man? Right, and I'm Mister Ed.

I also looked at the Popeye cartoon collection I rented. It wasn't quite as bad as I expected. Some of the cartoons were brain dead and unfunny but some had a few laughs. One thing for sure, I didn't realize before how cheap and empty looking 60's television cartoons were. People owe Hanna-Barbera something of an apology. They were not the only ones doing repetitive limited animation back then.

Actually five different groups produced the Popeye cartoons. One group, led by director Seymour Kneitel, was the one closest to the style of the 50's Popeye theatrical work, just cheaper and more far fetched. (In one of these, Popeye and Olive are menaced by an evil wheel of cheese. I am not making this up.) Another group was done by Larry Harmon who was far more famous for his Bozo the Clown cartoons and his stuff had Popeye acting like Bozo. Gene Deitch's work, at least the two shown here, were more adventure cartoons and nothing really special. The one sample from Bob Bemiller was negligible.

The good stuff came from Jack Kinney's unit. These cartoons were occasionally pretty funny, if sometimes odd. They had situations like Wimpy blown up to giant size to sell to a circus, and a jungle cartoon with Olive shooing awway a friendly tiger and Brutus trapped by an amorous flower. They also used all the pop culture signifiers of the time like television commercials, the suburbs, beatniks, abstract art and a few were fairy tale parodies in the vein of Jay Ward's sainted "Fractured Fairy Tales". The main problem with this group was that the plots could be really random and the cartoons often faded out with no real ending. Sometimes they didn't even let Popeye take his spinach.