Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 5 of 48

1984 (1984) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 20, 2020****/****, 1980s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Satire, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, UK

Nineteen Eighty-Four
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Gregor Fisher
written and directed by Michael Radford

by Walter Chaw George Orwell’s 1984 is a fabulously paranoid fantasy in which everything predicted has not only come to pass but proven mild in comparison. Orwell himself failed to foresee how Big Brother’s intrusion into all aspects of our lives would be a privilege we happily facilitated and paid for at a premium through the acquisition of our manifold devices and subscriptions. Cameras and microphones are recording every aspect of our existence…and that’s just the way we wanted it. Capitalism is the most pernicious form of authoritarianism. We are slaves to ease. 1984 is, for all intents and purposes, a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a novel written in 1923 and instantly suppressed in Zamyatin’s native Russia for being ideologically undesirable. It wasn’t published there until 1988 in the temporary spirit of glasnost, though copies of it had been in circulation abroad for decades. Orwell, reviewing We for TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in January of 1947, identified it as one of “the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” “This is a book to look out for when an English version appears,” he wrote, and suggested that Aldous Huxley had borrowed from it extensively for A Brave New World. (For what it’s worth, Huxley denied the charge vociferously and, having read We, I’d have to agree with him.) Orwell went on to criticize We for lacking political focus in favour of a more general fear of “the machine.” So I like to think of 1984, written three years after this review of We, to be Orwell’s attempt to correct what he identified as that work’s essential flaw rather than a more cynical wholesale lift. I like to think he was driven more by the urgency of the message than by the venality of stolen valour.

Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 15, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Stallone, Thriller

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

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 12, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Stallone, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada
screenplay by Matt Cirulnick & Sylvester Stallone
directed by Adrian Grünberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rambo: Last Blood, hereafter Last Blood, became irresistible to me the moment John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) decided to score his own climactic bloodbath with The Doors‘ “Five to One,” flooding his homemade tunnels with it to taunt and ridicule the small army hunting him. A Kevin McAllister move, one might say. Lyrics-wise, “Five to One” is a little on the nose (“Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now”), but it’s still a deep cut from a band in many ways synonymous with the Vietnam War’s acid-rock energy, making it a loaded choice indeed. This was probably the soundtrack to Rambo losing his innocence; what matters is that it could’ve been. There’s a certain frisson, too, that comes with hearing a pop song in a Rambo movie for the first time, at least diegetically. It makes for a set-piece that is, in the context of le cinéma de Rambo, unusually exuberant, and one begins to suspect that without music it would be merely nauseating, maybe unbearable. Indeed, the slickness of Last Blood is the only thing keeping it from being a snuff movie.

Dolittle (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 6, 20202020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Fantasy

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it’s worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, “it” being a scene from Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing “pieces” summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan’s Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It’s played for laughs, but I wasn’t laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy’s accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who’s been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn’t for you, it’s for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 20201920s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG
***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, June (née June Tripp), Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault
scenario by Eliot Stannard, from the novel by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

DOWNHILL (1927)
When Boys Leave Home
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, Robin Irvine, Isabel Jeans, Ben Webster
scenario by Eliot Stannard, based on the play by Constance Collier & David L’Estrange (née Ivor Novello)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Alfred Hitchcock’s fifth time at the plate produced his third completed picture, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (hereafter The Lodger), based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes that was itself based on the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, which still would have been in the immediate cultural memory of 1927. When first screened, distributor C.M. Woolf proclaimed it incomprehensible, jeopardizing its release until London Film Society founding member Ivor Montagu was enlisted to clear up the mess. In truth, Montagu liked what he saw, advised the reshooting of the darkest scenes, and, with Hitchcock’s approval and assistance, discarded a good number of title cards to, in effect, leave the storytelling to the visuals. Producer Michael Balcon, already a supporter, called it good, and the picture allowed the British film industry to finally boast a product that could compete with not merely the artistically-dominant European cinema (France, Germany, and Russia), but also the commercially-dominant American dream factory. Just in time, as it happened. The passage of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act stipulated that distributors would guarantee at least 7.5% of their total output be British: a number that would increase in increments until it hit 20% in 1936. The skeletal British industry boasted few stars. On the strength of The Lodger and his earlier The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock was something of a known quantity before much of the British public had even seen any of his films.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 17, 2020****/****, 1970s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Western

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller is, even more than his Nashville, the quintessential American film. The whole of it is in a constant state of construction and reconstruction, a continuous and ever-doomed battle against entropy and that human desire to matter a little before it’s all over too soon. The modern analogue for it is Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, as both films detail the sad lives of entrepreneurs staking a claim for themselves on the frontier at the beginning of America’s potential. The only reward for ambition, unfortunately, is death. Death is the only reward for anything. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) is a swaggering loudmouth in a big fur coat who one day struts into the tiny town of Presbyterian Church, pop. 120 (the majority of those prospectors and illiterate scumbags), lays a cloth across a table in the disgusting saloon of Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois), and proceeds to take the rubes for everything they’re worth. With that cash, he buys three broken-down whores, then lights out for the edge of town, where he starts a company.

Business is good.

Richard Jewell (2019) – Blu-ray + Digital

March 16, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Paul Walter Hauser
written by Billy Ray, based on the article “American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell” by Marie Brenner
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda You’d be hard-pressed to think of a more fateful intersection between director and biographical subject than Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, which crystallizes the venerable American filmmaker’s aesthetic and thematic interests of late. The infamous minimalist and chair-scolder–hyped to godly proportions in some corners of Film Twitter for his cool efficiency, scorned as a conservative propagandist by others–has been charged since the film’s AFI Fest debut last month with cranking out ill-timed “Trumpian talking points” about the FBI and smearing a journalist’s good name after her death. While some of the callouts are fairer than others, the uproar has distracted from the quiet dignity and formal strangeness of the work, which deepens Eastwood’s recent interest in unlikely American newsmakers with asterisks beside their names and their acts of heroism by grounding itself in the awkward humanity of an even less immediately palatable figure than the inarticulate, gelato-eating Euro travellers who saved lives in The 15:17 to Paris.

The Circus (1928) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 14, 2020****/****, 1920s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Charlie Chaplin, Allan Garvia, Merna Kennedy, Harry Crocker
written and directed by Charlie Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer It started with the tightrope. That was Charlie Chaplin’s original idea as he developed his feature-length comedy The Circus–his iconic character, the Tramp, forced into a high-wire act, defying death and injury on a rope stretched taut far above the ground. It was later, shortly before production started, that the monkeys came into the picture. Those mischievous animals, those gremlins, would crawl over his arms and body, wrap themselves around his face, and pull down his pants as the Tramp struggled to maintain his balance on the wire. From what we know of his off-screen life at the time, it’s easy to imagine why Chaplin felt bedevilled. His second marriage, to Lita Grey, still a teenager, was fundamentally unhappy. He spent his time away from home with divorce on his mind, and it was around this point he learned that Lita was pregnant with his second child. He also kept an eye out for the detectives he was sure had been hired to investigate his affair with Hearst’s wife, Marion Davies.

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)|The Grudge (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

March 11, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Christmas, Horror, Malaysia, Mystery, New Zealand, Nicolas Cage, Portugal, Sci-Fi, Thriller

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that’s particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They’re fairy tales, fables. They’re warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they’re how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species’ survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don’t come home if they’re caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades–each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

Le Samouraï (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 4, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Le samouraï
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Michel Boisrond
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

by Walter Chaw Jef (Alain Delon) is an assassin, and while he’s objectively terrible at it, he seems to be sought-after for his services. Maybe there’s a shortage of killers; maybe he lives in that bubble where handsome people exist without knowledge of the advantages they’re given for the fact of their attractiveness. Hired to assassinate some guy who owns a nightclub in Paris, Jef steals a car by trying out a lot of keys on this giant key ring he has and goes to the club to do just that. Everyone sees him: the guests, the bartender, and most notably the club’s unnamed, featured chanteuse (Caty Rosier), who catches him walking out of her boss’s office after hearing gunshots. Jef pauses when he sees her, and for a second you wonder if he’s going to kill her to eliminate any witnesses. I mean, that’s what a hardened criminal would do–but he doesn’t. It’s not that Jef isn’t smart, exactly, it’s that Jef is a cipher, and Le samouraï is less noir than it is a commentary on American genre films and, along the way, a satire of them, too. Jef’s affect is blank and pretty, perfectly turned-out in his neat suit and overcoat, a fedora perched on his head just so. Melville spends a lot of time watching Jef look at himself in the mirror, fiddling with his collar and smoothing down the crease in his pants. Not unlike a Robert Bresson film, Le samouraï is obsessed with gestures. It’s a story told by hands at rest and in motion.

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.