Arizona Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Arizona Blu-ray Movie Review

Stuck in the Middle of Nowhere with You

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 18, 2018

We still live in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis and the housing market collapse that preceded it. Arizona takes the widespread devastation of that global disaster and turns it into an intimate horror comedy. The film is the feature debut of screenwriter Luke Del Tredici, a veteran of TV, and director Jonathan Watson, an experienced A.D. and second unit director. It's a skillfully crafted exercise with a superior cast, and it's good enough to keep you watching, while delivering plenty of gallows humor and a few shockers you didn't see coming. It's a small film that gets bigger the more closely you look at it.

The heroine—really, the Jamie Lee Curtis—of Arizona is Cassie Fowler (Rosemarie DeWitt, excellent as always). She's a divorced mom whose husband (Luke Wilson) left her for a petulant younger woman (Elizabeth Gillies), whom he obviously has no intention of marrying. Their teenage daughter, Morgan (Lolli Sorenson), hates the whole world, but especially her mom. Like many divorcées, Cassie obtained her broker's license and tried her hand at real estate. She works for Gary (Seth Rogen, uncredited), one of the many high-pressure hawkers who sold luxury homes in sprawling developments that sprang up overnight during the era of adjustable rates and no money down. Cassie herself bought one of these spiffy new residences, where she and Morgan now live surrounded by a ghost town. With the crash of the real estate market, her income has dried up, and the days she used to spend showing property and closing deals are now consumed with dodging calls from her bank on the overdue mortgage. She's desperate and at the end of her rope.

But Cassie isn't the only one. During the film's opening, she's attempting to put on a brave face for a couple who are among the rare prospects still interested in looking at these residential white elephants, only to be interrupted by the screams of a nearby owner trying to prevent the suicide of her despairing husband. (His desperation doesn't require explanation. Cassie knows instinctively that he's financially underwater.) Later one of Gary's customers, a motor-mouthed dufus named Sonny (Danny McBride, who specializes in motor mouths), shows up in the office complaining that his house hasn't doubled in value as Gary promised. Does Sonny want vengeance, an apology, a refund—or does he even know what he wants? What's clear is that Sonny is hopeless, broke and angry, and his confrontation with Gary quickly turns violent.

Because Cassie is an inadvertent witness to the deadly event, Sonny takes her hostage without quite knowing what he's going to do with her. Nothing better illustrates Arizona's nutty sense of humor than the sequence where Sonny insists on giving Casey a tour of his house and bragging about its improvements (undoubtedly made with borrowed money), all while she remains a prisoner with her hands duct-taped together and he wears a makeshift mask, even though she's already seen his face. McBride and DeWitt play their parts perfectly, each thoroughly committed to the reality of a situation that, from the viewer's point of view, is utterly ridiculous. (And it gets worse.)

So it goes for the rest of the film, as Cassie keeps trying to free herself from a captor who gradually morphs into a bumbling Michael Myers (with a bad back). A few additional figures criss-cross the story, including Sonny's harpy of an ex-wife (Kaitlin Olson), but Arizona remains focused on its two central antagonists, as their deadly game of escape-and-evade expands beyond Sonny's home. But even if Cassie breaks away, where can she go? Both she and her reluctant kidnapper are trapped in a remote wasteland of empty homes, with foreclosure and for sale signs out front and no more than an occasional occupant in a random cul-de-sac. (One house turns out to be an illegal drug operation, hiding in plain sight.) Call the cops, and there's only one for the entire area (David Alan Grier), because state appropriations for law enforcement haven't kept pace with the explosive rate of development. Ask for directions to Cassie's luxury development at one of the few gas stations still in business, and the clerk will smugly tell you that there are over a dozen such developments, all of them with "Mexican" names and no Mexican residents.

Arizona distills the vast personal devastation wrought by the housing crisis into one woman's absurdist nightmare, where the monster is a clueless schnook who just wanted his piece of the American dream. John Carpenter sent his relentless killer through sedate suburban streets where everything seemed to be in its proper place and the last thing you expected was a body count. Watson and Del Tredici situate Sonny's rampage in a place where suburbanites were promised a luxury upgrade, only to see their hopes collapse in a perfect storm of plunging property values and expiring teaser loan rates. Sonny's reaction may be extreme and his actions insane, but you understand where he's coming from—and so does Cassie (when she's not running for her life).

Arizona Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Arizona was shot by cinematographer Drew Daniels (It Comes at Night). Specific information about the shooting format was not available, but the image on RLJ/Image Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is obviously the product of digital acquisition. It features the sharp clarity and consistently excellent detail of a major studio production that's been expertly mounted by an experienced DP and a director with twenty-five years of mainstream experience. The Blu-ray's superior video allows you to appreciate the meticulous production design that has converted a New Mexico suburb into a barren Arizona housing development filled with visual reminders of the characters' predicament. (Even the strip mall office where Cassie works for Gary is dominated by "Space Available" signs.) The recurrent aerial shots with which director Watson emphasizes the development's isolation are impressive in capturing the emptiness of streets and the houses' sense of abandonment. The apparently endless desert through which Cassie attempts to flee has depth and texture. Black are solid and deep, especially at night, and they provide a sharp contrast to some of the pyrotechnics that erupt during the course of the film. The film's palette varies between realistic and just slightly oversaturated to intensify the increasingly surreal events. There's a brief tropically tinted opening that serves as a reminder of the happy dreams that were promised, then dashed by a rude awakening.

RLJ/Image continues to favor BD-25s for its feature films, but since Arizona runs a taut 84 minutes, the studio has managed to achieve a modestly respectable average bitrate of 23.98 Mbps, with a capable encode.

Arizona Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Arizona's 5.1 sound mix, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, is surprisingly sophisticated and subtly layered for an independent production. Listen to the gentle winds that surround the viewer and the tweeting birds in both rear speakers that are heard before anything appears beyond opening title cards. It sounds like you're about to enter a beautiful space, but then reality hits. When Cassie is showing a house, a subtle echo is added to the voices as she cheerfully reveals the dwelling's undeveloped basement that the purchasers can build out as they see fit (it's a legal loophole that becomes a plot point later on). Cassie's home, her office and Sonny's lair all have distinct sonic environments, and the outdoor sounds change with the specifics of the locale and the action of the film. The same is true of the long drive from Phoenix by Cassie's husband and his girlfriend, after a frantic call summons him for aid. There are a number of loud effects that can't be described without spoilers, but they're all distinctive and powerful. The dialogue is consistently clear and well-prioritized.

By far the most notable feature of the soundtrack is the score by Joseph Stevens (Observe and Report), which so often evokes John Carpenter that at times it comes close to a copyright violation. (There were moments when I could swear I was hearing Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.) Stevens uses deep (deep) bass notes to alarm and unsettle, and just when you think you've gotten used to it, the bass line suddenly goes silent—and then something terrible happens.

The film's opening is set to Kenny Young's "Arizona" in its signature performance by Mark Lindsay, where the singer exhorts his girlfriend to grow up and "take off your rainbow shades". The soundtrack neatly fades the song from all five speakers to a tiny unit floating in Cassie's pool. It's the same technique used by Sidney Lumet with "Amoreena" to open Dog Day Afternoon, which also involved an inadvertent hostage-taker who was anything but a criminal mastermind.

Arizona Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Arizona (1080p; 1.78:1; 8:39): This brief EPK focuses on the actors and their approach to the script and characters. All of them enthusiastically praise Watson's direction.



• Photo Gallery (1080p): A small collection of production stills.



• Introductory Trailers: The film's trailer is not included. At startup, the disc plays trailers for Terminal, Once Upon a Time in Venice and Dog Eat Dog.

Arizona Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's a revealing exchange between Cassie's ex-husband and his girlfriend, when he admits that he had a perfectly happy marriage but wanted "something better". The same could be said of people like Sonny, who were ripe targets for the blandishments of a real estate industry that, in the early years of the 21st Century, made a fortune promising a lifestyle of the rich and famous on layaway. Arizona acknowledges those victims' anger and frustration, as well as the prospect that some of them may just decide to burn it all down because they have nothing left to lose. RLJ/Image has given the film a fine Blu-ray presentation, which is highly recommended.