For the week of June 18th, Paramount Pictures is bringing Jack the Giant Slayer to Blu-ray. Director Bryan Singer's first feature-film since his underrated WWII thriller Valkyrie, Jack the Giant Slayer finds the Usual Suspects auteur working in a slightly different mode than he is used to. While Singer is no stranger to big-budget action (case in point: X2 and Superman Returns), this high-energy retelling of the classic fairy tale has a light touch that hasn't really been present in Singer's earlier blockbusters. It's winning and fun, with goofy special effects and a sense of derring-do seemingly inspired by Michael Curtiz's great The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Singer gets performances just this side of self-aware from a great cast that includes Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane, Ewen Bremner, Eddie Marsan, Stanley Tucci, and Bill Nighy. Audiences largely overlooked Jack the Giant Slayer this past March; it is ripe for rediscovery on Blu-ray, and a potential family favorite.
Kenneth Brown writes that "Jack the Giant Slayer [isn't] a bad film, though. Just one that doesn't live up to its potential. Singer's anointed cast is perfectly suited to the heroes and villains as written and envisioned, and the production is brimming with creative touches and smart design choices that go beyond the standard modernized fairy tale fare. What the giants lack in character they make up for in grassy, tree-knot skin, tangled hair, diseased eyes, flayed metal armor, craggy feet and intimidating size. Scale is clearly a fundamental factor, and Singer sidesteps slow and lumbering in favor of making his giants a feasible world-ending force to be reckoned with and his humans, every one without exception, fragile and inadequate...The story itself has enough twists, turns and reinventive flair to avoid predictable pitfalls. Even when the script travels familiar roads, it does so with enough heart, humor and good will to redeem its occasional humdrummery. Ah well. You could certainly do worse than Jack the Giant Slayer."
June 18th also sees the Blu-ray debut of Safety Last, the most iconic work from silent-film star Harold Lloyd. Compared to Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, Lloyd cuts an unimposing figure; on-screen, he's an affable, blandly handsome everyman who carries little of the pathos or wry mystery that his two more famous peers had. Yet in his time, Lloyd was even more popular than Chaplin or Keaton, and Safety Last offers a stunning example of why Lloyd was so successful. The plot is simplicity itself: through his attempts to impress a girl, Lloyd's hero ends up scaling the side of a very tall building. Narratively, that's about it, but we never notice the threadbare structure because the climb is so suspenseful. Using a seamless mixture of trick photography, stuntmen, and his own physical prowess, Lloyd conjures up one vertiginous thrill after another - he is really at risk a lot of the time, and that danger yields visceral moviegoing thrills. If Safety Last isn't as funny as, say, Modern Times or Sherlock Jr. - to paraphrase the late, great Roger Ebert, the physical risks that Lloyd undertakes are so palpable that his picture takes on the texture of a nail-biting thriller rather than an out-and-out comedy - it is still, in its own way, just as masterful as those other two films. Silent cinema rarely gets as engaging and exciting as this one.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov notes, "many theaters that showed Safety Last in the early 1920s apparently had nurses waiting in their lobbies because some people were getting seriously sick while watching Lloyd's character climbing the twelve-story store. It is not difficult to figure out why - the special effects in the film have everything to do with special skills and stunts, real people, and real locations...What separates Lloyd from Chaplin and Keaton is the elegant casualness of everything he does – he looks fragile, genuinely naive and unprepared for the tricky tests he typically faces. Safety Last is also a fascinating time capsule. Many of the film's best sequences were shot in downtown Los Angeles, with real people and real traffic, and offer a glimpse at a forgotten metropolis that is rarely seen in other films from the same era."
Scream Factory is streeting a cult-horror double-feature on Tuesday: The Howling and Lifeforce. Before films Gremlins and Matinee established director Joe Dante as a pop anarchist ŕ la Mad Magazine or Looney Tunes, he made this sly werewolf chiller, which - alongside John Landis' An American Werewolf in London - helped inject new energy into screen lycanthropes. Ostensibly the story of a self-help commune populated entirely by flesh-eating werewolves, The Howling acts as a platform for Dante to let loose with a plethora of cinematic gags. Besides the then-timely jabs at the psychiatric community (The Howling debuted in 1981), Dante overstuffs the film with movie references both subtle and obvious; he names characters after Island of Lost Souls director Erle Kenton and The Wolf Man director George Waggner, and he has veteran character actor Dick Miller reprise his A Bucket of Blood role as Walter Paisley). Best of all are Rob Bottin's still-revolutionary practical effects, which show-off the human-to-werewolf transformation in grisly, bone-crunching details.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review calls the film, "[Not] your father's werewolf movie, unless your father is an erstwhile hippie who liked to swallow lots of drugs and commune with nature and his inner animal. The film is perhaps a bit too wry for its own good, since many people didn't seem to get that it was making fun of the werewolf trope while at the same time exploiting it (how anyone could have failed to see the humor in the portenous news anchor rehearsing his report in sonorous tones and then lapsing into his 'real' Gomer Pyle-esque voice during a conversation is beyond me, but I digress). Perhaps now in this more cynical era people will feel more of a connection to The Howling's post-modern take on the genre. The then state of the art special effects hold up reasonably well, and the film's piquant sense of humor is still entirely intact."
While The Howling is a confident, perfectly pitched entertainment, Lifeforce is far more unwieldy, though it's still a great deal of fun. The movie represents the nexus between three very different filmmakers: director Tobe Hooper (the horror auteur who'd just scored big with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist), screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (the hard sci-fi buff partially responsible for creating the Alien franchise), and John Dykstra (the Academy Award-winning special-effects guru who supervised the FX work done on Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Essentially, the stage was set for a) a terrifying thriller b) rooted in big ideas and technical jargon c) with crowd-pleasing, entertaining visual delights, and if that combination sounds too improbable to work, then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Lifeforce. You can feel the different creative energies colliding against one another (as well as the behind-the-scenes travails that nearly crippled the picture), and none of it comes together in a conventionally satisfying way. However, what Lifeforce has in spades is manic invention; it might be the only vampire/zombie/end-of-the-world/philosophical-space-opera/softcore-porn/astral-romance hybrid ever made, and that unlikely jumble keeps Lifeforce from becoming boring or predictable.
Jeffrey Kauffman correctly posited that Lifeforce "tends to become a bit too ludicrous for its own good...with too many strands being dealt with too quickly to provide much of a satisfactory ending. The film works best in its early going, though the stupidity of the humans (who often just kind of stand there, looking at various other humans getting the life sucked out of them) becomes comical after a while. Lifeforce is not an entirely successful film, but it boasts an interesting premise and an often quite winning production design and special effects. Like several of the victims in the film itself, Lifeforce seems poised to rise from the dead in this new high definition presentation."
Finally, we end the week with the latest from Park Chan-wook, Stoker. Stoker marks the master filmmaker's English-language debut, and the results might surprise viewers only familiar with his Vengeance Trilogy; minus a few skin-crawling examples, there's very little of the graphic bloodletting that helped distinguish pictures like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. It's a tribute, then, to Park's gifts that Stoker is so unnerving despite its low viscera content. Taking a cue from the great Alfred Hitchcock (much of Stoker functions as a playful riff on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt), Park uses ambiguity and subtle intimations to suggest some remarkably deviant behavior in the lives of India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), her mother (Nicole Kidman), and his mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) - it's a master class in conveying perversity without really showing it explicitly. This is bravura moviemaking at its finest, and for those willing to access its diseased wavelength, it's also one of the best films of 2013.
When Casey Broadwater reviewed the film, he commented that it "has stoked its share of controversy, with critics and audiences divided on whether it's a garish, style-over-substance misfire or a gorgeous and deeply unsettling example of modern Gothic Romanticism. As with all art, it comes down to perspective. This is a film that requires you to be in a certain head-space as a viewer. Part of that is knowing up front that Stoker doesn't fit tidily into any one genre. It has horror elements, familial melodrama, and off-kilter romance, but the best way I can think to describe it is that this is a foremost a Park Chan-wook film in tone—violent and elegant in equal measure—albeit one filtered through the respective aesthetics of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, part putting-the-pieces-together mystery/suspense movie, and part fractured surrealist nightmare about family, obsession, and female sexuality."