Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 5 of 47

Knives Out (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

February 25, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Christopher Plummer
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Bryant Frazer Knives Out, a cleverly plotted and star-studded whodunit, is both comfortingly familiar and surprisingly novel–a loving homage to classic English drawing-room mysteries that celebrates its sources while updating their assumptions about class and politics. It might seem strange that, having scaled the filmmaking Everest that is a Star Wars movie with The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson would immediately retreat into the comfort of an Agatha Christie pastiche. But Knives Out plays directly to Johnson’s strengths: his knack for putting a new spin on old tropes and clichés, his facility with actors, and his apparent capacity for empathy. It’s a comedy of manners with a marvellously dry wit, exceptionally broad appeal, and a satisfyingly complex (though not convoluted) narrative. No wonder this thing made bank at the box office.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2020****/****, 1990s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Taiwan, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Lisa Yang, Chang Chen, Chang Kuo-Chu, Elaine Jin
script and dialogue by Edward Yang, Yan Hong-Ya, Alex Yang, Lai Ming-Tang
directed by Edward Yang

by Walter Chaw My family fled mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, just ahead of the communist takeover. My grandfather on my mother’s side, a member of the Chinese military, asked his aide to fill out the paperwork necessary for their emigration. In his haste, the kids were given sequential birth dates (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…) to expedite completion of the forms so they could get on with their flight. My uncle, Fu Kun-Ning, was born on January 7, 1941, though his official identification documents say something different. I think he probably liked the chaos, the mystery represented by that discrepancy–he was nobody’s man but his own. He died on March 1, 2007, when I was 33. I hadn’t spent much time with him over the course of my life. I was quickly and irrevocably estranged from my family and my heritage, as are many Chinese-Americans born here to immigrant parents. I barely said anything to my own parents for thirty years. There was one visit, though, where I had a formative conversation with said uncle. He asked me what I was interested in and, ashamed to tell him the truth, I told him I wanted to be a biochemical engineer, the major I went into my first semester of college having declared.

Blow-Up (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 17, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Blowup
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A
starring Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, John Castle
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra (English dialogue in collaboration with Edward Bond), inspired by a short story by Julio Cortazar
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw Michelango Antonioni’s Blowup, when it appeared at the end of 1966, marked the confluence of a great many cultural throughlines. Sanctified by the grace of a long theatrical run on the rep circuit in the United States, it all but ensured (with an assist from Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that film’s gleeful use of the term “hump the hostess”) the final death of the antiquated Production Code when audiences disregarded the promise of eternal hellfire and went to see the damn thing anyway. There were other foreign arthouse sensations before it, of course (notably Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, with which Blowup shares some surface similarity), but it was Blowup that felt like the revolutionary bellwether for the rise of the foreign arthouse as something of a genre unto itself. The picture’s success was of a moment with the peak of the British Mod period and right there with the birth of America’s version of it: namely, the Summer of Love and the concurrent season of assassination. We never quite recovered from that whiplash between love and death. Similarly, film language has never recovered from the teleological disruption of Blowup.

Shutter Island (2010) [10th Anniversary Limited Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 14, 20202000s, 2010, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/****
BD – Image A Sound B Extras B-
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island left me breathless with delight. The rack-focus through mess-hall implements; swaying along a ceiling as we peer beyond the door to the head, where our hero, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is losing his lunch; the way a ferry blows through a fog bank like Travis Bickle’s cab through the steam escaping a New York sewer cap. When it snows, it snows up like in the dream sequences from Bringing Out the Dead (there’s even a moment when the smoke from Teddy’s cigarette retreats into the butt)–and when a shadowy figure named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) finally materializes in the midst of Teddy’s fugue, he bears a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle. (It’s not until later that we understand the full extent of this self-reference.) Shutter Island is among the director’s handsomest films, and moments of it suggest there’s a masterpiece here–as a WWII Holocaust drama, or a ghost story, or a period Red Menace piece, or a 1960s Manchurian Candidate manqué, or a 1940s Freud clinic, or a G-Man noir, or a straight procedural, or a modernist existential piece–if he wants it. But it’s less than the sum of its tantalizing parts, providing instead a hackneyed climax that proves just another votive lit in Dennis Lehane’s church of dead children.

The Story of Temple Drake (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 20201930s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Miriam Hopkins, Jack La Rue, William Gargan, William Collier, Jr.
screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett, from the novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner
directed by Stephen Roberts

by Bryant Frazer In 1933, Paramount Pictures released The Story of Temple Drake, an unusually frank melodrama that depicted a brutal sexual assault and its aftermath, with special attention paid to the reputation of the well-liked party girl named in the title. Released during that brief, free-wheeling period before the industry began enforcing its production code to clamp down on screen sex and violence, The Story of Temple Drake took pains to show how a woman could fall prey to sexual predators through no real fault of her own. It also illustrated in detail her downward psychological spiral, fuelled, in large part, by a well-founded fear of the opprobrium of others. Just last week, in an interview recorded for THE NEW YORK TIMES during Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial, reporter Megan Twohey asked the defense lawyer, Donna Rotunno, whether she had ever been sexually assaulted. “I have not,” Rotunno answered, “because I would never put myself in that position.” Twohey was stunned; the conversation suddenly took on a different tone. Rotunno’s response is a textbook example of the ways that privilege blinds people to reality. It must be comforting to believe that you haven’t been raped because you’re just too darned smart to be raped, but it’s also delusional, not to mention hugely condescending to legions of sexual-assault victims who never requested their trauma.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 9, 2020****/****, 1940s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Stairway to Heaven
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw Watching 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death while the end of the American experiment is upon us is an amazingly painful thing. The film was conceived in part by hyphenates Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as a way of cementing the postwar British-American alliance. Accordingly, it ends with a trial in which the United States is celebrated as an inspirational model: a paragon of idealism, humanism, truth. If it ever was those things, it isn’t any of them today. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the movie now plays as an elegy for everything we’ve lost since 1946–for everything I’ve lost as I bid goodbye to what remains of my innocence and my optimism that there’s anything left in this country that resembles what I had been raised to believe about it. We are divided, hateful, unhealthy, selfish, stupid, and brutal. There’s a line from Graham Baker’s underestimated Alien Nation I think of often nowadays. Alien immigrant Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), drunk one night, tells his human friend:

Doctor Sleep (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

February 3, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Stephen King, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it’s based, Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It’s not unlike Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn’t just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it’s impossible to read Lee’s sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it’s impossible to read Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick’s The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film’s Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny’s mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he’s played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who’s held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you’re pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 27, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Spain

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate–the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity–where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she’s gone. It’s a small moment, and one that works to move the film’s exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. “He’s not here for you, he’s here for your womb,” says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)–but “he,” a killer robot from the future called a “Rev-9” (Gabriel Luna), isn’t. He’s there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah’s videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon–a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man’s attire even though a woman’s is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) + Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection – Blu-ray Discs

January 21, 20201980s, 1990s, 2011, 2020, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Eddie Murphy, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the “Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection”

BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984)
**/****
2011 BD – Image B+ Sound C+ Extras A
2020 BD – Image A Sound C+ Extras A
starring Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Lisa Eilbacher
screenplay by Daniel Petrie Jr.
directed by Martin Brest

by Walter Chaw I used to watch Beverly Hills Cop about once a week in regular rotation with other movies I bootlegged during those first delirious go-rounds with the VCR-connected-to-rented-VCR carousel. It was on an extended-play tape with two other movies (Desert Hearts was one of the others, Re-Animator the third; quite the triple-feature!); back then, quantity beat the ever-loving shit out of quality. (Bless Paramount, by the way, for always being too cheap to encode their VHS tapes with Macrovision.) For me, Beverly Hills Cop was, like its contemporary Ghost Busters, the ne plus ultra of comedy–my eleven-year-old self still a couple of years away from Monty Python–and the requisite throwaway scene in a strip club was enough to be the centrefold in this analog PLAYBOY that, huzzah, I didn’t have to hide between the mattress and bedspring. The picture had, truth be told, everything a pre-pubescent boy could want in terms of violence (but not freaky violence), sex (but not freaky sex), nobility (the easy-to-understand kind), and plotting (ditto). The hero was an African-American man I’d never seen on SNL (which was on too late for me to catch) and had likewise never seen in 48Hrs.. He was small and not particularly powerful, but he was lithe and had a quick wit and compelling improvisational skills, and he ably parlayed his minority status in a few scenes that aren’t the slightest bit threatening. Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley is, in fact, not entirely unlike cultural brother E.T.–the outsider hero with special abilities who, mission accomplished, can slink off to wherever it is he came from.

Gemini Man (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 14, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Will Smith

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we’re attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film’s prologue, it’s stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee’s Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It’s kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories–like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It’s considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that’s stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it’s poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the “you just need an egg!” explanation. Better if said explanation were that they’d figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray (2019)

December 17, 20192019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best-of Lists, Blog, Blu-ray Disc, The Criterion Collection

by Bill Chambers I learned to appreciate the benefits of streaming this past October when I became so fatigued from illness that getting up to load a disc may as well have been trekking across the Sahara. (It really put the “physical” in physical media.) Then Disney+ launched, and “Maclunkey” happened–a startling reminder that streaming content can change at the drop of a hat depending on corporate or creator whim. It remains a struggle to fight complacency, though, given that a) the screener pool is drying up and b) even the cheapest disc will probably set you back as much as a month’s subscription to a streaming service. In short, I wouldn’t call this a definitive or comprehensive list of the year’s best discs by any stretch, merely the best among those I had an opportunity to audit. But FILM FREAK CENTRAL will never stop championing physical media, for a variety of “because”s:

Polyester (1981) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 12, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Divine, Tab Hunter, Edith Massey, Stiv Bators
written and directed by John Waters

by Bryant Frazer For anyone who kept up with John Waters’s gleeful forays into poor taste during the 1970s, Polyester, released at the dawn of the Reagan era, must have seemed like a change-up. It was hardly a big-budget affair, but it felt posher than the earlier, low-budget features that earned him his (dis)reputation. Those movies were filmed on grungier 16mm in the belly of Waters’s Baltimore hometown, but Polyester was shot on 35mm and set in the suburbs. Famed actor-in-drag Divine was once again in front of the camera, but instead of the usual outsider role, he was playing squarely against type as neglected housewife Francine Fishpaw–and sharing star billing with 1950s/’60s heartthrob Tab Hunter. Waters introduces Francine by having his camera glide into the Fishpaws’ home and up the stairs (the director’s first-ever Steadicam shot) to find her dressed only in bra and girdle, bathed in a golden-hour glow, as Hunter croons lines from the title tune (lyrics by Debbie Harry): “You know about abundant women/Well, this girl only aims to please/Outside there’s a load of noisy neighbours/Upstairs there’s a Polyester squeeze.”

Universal Soldier (1992) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 25, 20191990s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Ally Walker, Jerry Orbach
screenplay by Richard Rothstein & Christopher Leitch and Dean Devlin
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bryant Frazer You might expect an early-1990s T2 knock-off starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren to be a bit of a romp, but Universal Soldier is pretty dark from the get-go. It opens with a cut-rate Vietnam War-movie pastiche that has Sergeant Andrew Scott (Lundgren) going on a My Lai-style rampage, stitching human ears into a necklace, executing innocent civilians, and decrying the horrified American soldiers around him as traitors before shooting them, too. Private Luc Devreux (Van Damme) manages to jam his bayonet into Scott’s gut, ending his murderous spree but earning a lethal volley of return fire in the bargain. Both men end up bleeding out in the mud before the U.S. military spirits their bodies away and declares them AWOL. Fast-forward 20 years or so, and the government has figured out a way to revive and power up dead soldiers and repurpose them as an unbeatable tactical force. We see these so-called “universal soldiers,” including Scott and Deveraux, working as a unit to take out a group of terrorists in an action set-piece that was, impressively, shot at the Hoover Dam. All goes well for a while, until both Scott and Deveraux start recalling their former lives–and remembering they don’t like each other very much.

Red Heat (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 6, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O'Ross
screenplay by Harry Kleiner & Walter Hill and Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Walter Hill

by Bryant Frazer The first, pre-credits scene of Red Heat takes place in a Russian banya, a steam bath where hulking, Vulcanian workers in grimy T-shirts labour to shovel wood and coal into massive stoves that keep the water hot and the room steamy. The camera follows a blue-eyed man as he steps into the room, assuming his POV as he surveys the tableau. A whole section of the space is dedicated to barely-clad muscled men pumping iron, and the camera lingers on them. It pans slowly across the room before finding a group of nymphs bathing au naturel, zooming in and reframing, finally deciding it's not interested in them. The blue-eyed man turns his head, catching sight of a figure across the room. It's Schwarzenegger, about one square foot of fabric shy of nudity, striding confidently past the bathing beauties before stepping up into a side chamber and disappearing again into the haze. The next shot catches Arnold in medium close-up, tilting lazily from his calves all the way up his chiselled torso, until it frames him in flattering low-angle portraiture. He is squinting, and he is scowling, and he has an Ivan Drago flat-top. This is peak Arnold. The reverse shot lands, almost hilariously, on a group of a half-dozen nude and nearly-nude bathers, all pink and vulnerable in their skin, gazing back at him, excited or terrified or maybe both. It's as if a god stands before them.

House of Games (1987) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, J.T. Walsh
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by David Mamet

by Bryant Frazer House of Games pivots on a hand of poker that spirals out of control and reveals itself as more than a mere card game. It’s a moral hazard. On one side of the table, holding three of a kind, is Mike (Joe Mantegna), a small-time hood with a big mouth who runs a card room out of the back of House of Games, a pool hall that sits upstairs from a paperback bookstore in downtown Seattle. Across from him, George (the late, great sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, in his first film role), who may or may not have drawn to a trips-beating straight or a flush. Spectating from Mike’s side is Margaret (Lindsay Crouse), a psychiatrist (and best-selling author) who stumbled upon the tableau in an effort to negotiate down the debt of a troubled patient (Steve Goldstein), a gambling addict. Impressed by Margaret’s apparent fearlessness–when he makes an oblique threat to kill her, she calls him a bully–Mike enlists her help in a scheme that isn’t cheating, per se, but does rely on duplicity. Simply put, Mike contrives to leave the room for a few minutes; in his absence, Margaret watches for an indication that George is bluffing and signals Mike, quietly, to call.

The Doors (1991) [The Final Cut] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 24, 20191990s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kevin Dillon, Kathleen Quinlan
written by J. Randal Johnson and Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

by Bryant Frazer Oliver Stone’s lofty take on California psychedelic rock band The Doors begins near the end, with a thickly bearded Jim Morrison–Val Kilmer, delivering a well-practiced but largely soulless imitation of the ’60s cultural icon–slouched in a dark Los Angeles studio recording lines of spoken-word poetry. “Did you have a good world when you died?” he demands. “Enough to base a movie on?” The setting is December, 1970, a few months before Morrison voluntarily exiled himself in France–perhaps to dodge a potential prison sentence after his arrest for lewdness on stage–and a little more than six months before his death in Paris. Stone fills all of that in later, but he starts here, not just because the poem Morrison is reading, “The Movie,” is too apropos for a filmmaker as literal-minded as Stone to resist, but also because Morrison’s demonstrated preoccupation with death and storytelling dovetails so nicely with the film’s manifestation of same. Stone includes a formative event from Morrison’s early life: His family is driving through the desert when they pass the aftermath of a car accident where an elderly Navajo man is bleeding to death at the side of the road. Young Jim, rubbernecking, locks eyes for an instant with the Native American and, just like that, picks up a fellow traveller. Stone digs the idea. Throughout the film, he has Morrison seeing Native spirits at key moments, dancing at Doors performances, or lurking in the corners of parties. He also gives Morrison a stalker: a mysterious man (an uncredited Richard Rutowski, who later collaborated on the screenplay for Stone’s Natural Born Killers), well-built and sometimes nude, who represents death and occasionally materializes at the periphery of the action, not unlike the reaper from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

Bumblebee (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

July 9, 20192018, 2019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Teen

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Travis Knight

by Walter Chaw Travis Knight’s Bumblebee is a tone-perfect amalgamation of The Love Bug and The Iron Giant. It is, in other words, both a throwback summer programmer (perhaps mistakenly released during the Christmas season) and a sophisticated parable about coming of age in a divided America. It casts Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a gearhead who loves her car more than she’s interested in fielding the advances of the awkward neighbour kid pining after her. And then it has her dealing with the loss of a parent as she finds her way through an already-difficult period in a young person’s development. It wisely hires Knight, who at Laika Studios produced the unexpectedly sensitive and introspective ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings (the latter of which he directed), and screenwriter Christina Hodson (the woman entrusted with upcoming films about Harley Quinn and Batgirl), with uncredited contributions from Kelly Fremon Craig, writer-director of the sensitive The Edge of Seventeen, which also starred Steinfeld. In placing gifted, effortlessly diverse people before and behind the camera and then watching as the lingering hostility around the misogynistic, racist, xenophobic Michael Bay cock operas that have made the Transformers franchise to this point disgusting and toxic just melt away, Bumblebee becomes a prototype for the modern reboot. It’s amazing how the right choices among topline talent make all the work of not only avoiding offense, but also providing uplift, seem a magical side-effect rather than some laborious and arcane undertaking. (It’s the difference, for instance, between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.) Knight’s Bumblebee is the Transformers franchise as it should have been from the start: on the one hand a nostalgic, sometimes exciting, often hilarious story about the coming to earth of sentient machines engaged in perpetual war who can camouflage themselves as terrestrial vehicles and appliances–and on the other, a clever parable about how the toys (and cars) we grow up with sometimes provide the guardrails for how we view accountability as we get older. By the end of Bumblebee, the girl and her ‘bot arrive at the mature–and, more importantly, healthy–decision to move on from each other. Another franchise after The Last Jedi making the daring suggestion that living in the past is death.

Us (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

June 26, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Get Out was an instant classic that appeared at the spearhead of a new blaxploitation movement. It introduced terms and concepts into the lexicon (“Now you’re in the sunken place”). It attacked race relations with intelligence and, save one tonal slip at the end, maintained an almost unbearable tension throughout. Its signature image of a black face, frozen in terror, the path of a single tear tracing its way down one cheek–you see it three times, on three different characters in the film–encapsulates the black experience: outrage held forever in abeyance, voices stolen by the ruling culture, along with lives and potential lives. Get Out won its writer-director Jordan Peele accolades and the type of laurels (the next Spielberg!, the next Hitchcock!) that, the last time they were handed out (to one M. Night Shyamalan), did the recipient no real favours. And where Get Out asked the question of what Peele’s limits were, Us answers it immediately–and decisively enough that it feels almost cruel. Us has a couple of vaguely interesting ideas it fails to develop, a few set-pieces it fails to pay off, and a central metaphor–literal upper and lower classes being tethered together along some socially-engineered psychic conduit–that it has no real idea what to do with. The two choices for any conversation about Us, then, are to continue treating Peele like a holy, anointed savant/prophet until he makes The Happening (to the extent that Us is not already The Happening, let’s face it), or to say that Us is at best disappointing and at worst just plain bad.

Detour (1945) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 24, 2019****/****, 1940s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on his novel
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

by Bryant Frazer Among legitimate Hollywood classics, Detour is about as threadbare as they come: a small film, shot on a shoestring over a handful of days (between six and 14, depending on whose accounting you believe) at a Poverty Row film studio. And yet, the finished product is uniquely compelling. As a crime thriller, it’s notable for the absence of gunfights, chase scenes, double-crosses, and back-stabbings. What it’s lacking in film noir‘s usual narrative detail or expressionistic flourishes is compensated for by its overarching preoccupation with determinism and a healthy contempt for fate. Amplifying and accompanying the slow-building sense of despair and helplessness is an internal-monologue-in-voiceover that’s unrelentingly dreary and self-pitying, even for noir. Detour isn’t remotely sexy or exciting, though it is amply dour and uncomfortably personal–disturbing, even, in its spare vision.

Howard the Duck (1986) [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 21, 20191980s, 2019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you’ll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12″ EP of the movie’s title track, performed by Dolby’s Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-‘n’-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly’s mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.