For the week of July 30th, Paramount Pictures is bringing G.I. Joe: Retaliation to Blu-ray. The film's path to theaters was not without issues, to say the least; a sequel to a film that few wanted a sequel to 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Retaliation underwent a costly delay for reshoots (rumored to boost the presence of Rise of Cobra star Channing Tatum, whose presence in the final cut still amounts to little more than a cameo appearance) and 3D-post-conversion that created near-fatal advance buzz. What a surprise, then, that not only is Retaliation far superior to Rise of Cobra, but it also stands as one of Summer 2013's blithest and most cheerfully ridiculous actioners. In terms of scope, there's little here to rival Rise of Cobra's attack on Paris sequence, though director John M. Chu more-than-compensates for a reduced budget with improved action choreography and a breakneck pace a swordfight on the side of the mountain between Ray Park's Snake Eyes and a handful of ninjas outstrips anything in its predecessor. Best of all are the self-aware turns from the likes of Jonathan Pryce, Walton Goggins, Ray Stevenson, RZA, Bruce Willis, and Dwayne Johnson, whose presence as protagonist Roadblock is a classic and very appealing take on the brawling badasses headlining the best 1980s action movies.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman notes that "those things harmed the previous film...only make Retaliation a better film, complimenting the story and action and pacing rather than hindering them or, worse, feeling like a detached element from them...Ultimately - no matter what the characters do, how they look, or who's gone and who's back and who's new - this is a film about expectations. Audiences going in hoping for deep character studies or profound drama will leave disappointed, but like the best of Emmerich the film will satisfy core action enthusiasts just looking for the next big spectacle. It'll also wash away much of the bad taste left behind from the last picture as a more faithful G.I. Joe adaptation without all the added bells and whistles that weighted down Stephen Sommers' fun, though very far from perfect, film."
The other big Paramount title on Tuesday is Season Four of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This Emmy-winning stretch of television represents Star Trek: The Next Generation at the height of its powers. The cast relationships were mixing together perfectly, the individual episodes deftly balanced standalone adventures with longer arcs, and the individual scripts had grown more nuanced and rich; the writers room had started to settle again after some turnovers made in the third season. On that front, this season would mark for increased involvement for writer Ronald D. Moore - Moore would become the showrunner and creator for the critically lauded Battlestar Galactica reboot, and much of his work here feels like prep time for that later program, particularly in episodes like "Family," "First Contact," and the season finale.
Martin Liebman singled this season out for praise, writing that "not only did the writers, cast, and crew of TNG win over fans and craft incredible television, they followed it up with a tremendous season built around a variety of fantastic episodes that saw the growth of the crew even as one of its own departed, that saw further adventures with old friends in new settings, that saw friendly faces turned into devilish enemies, that even introduced a species that would play a vital role in shaping the complex political landscape of TNG's successor, Deep Space Nine. Indeed, season four had quite the unenviable task of making a great thing even better and paving the way towards not only the last three seasons of TNG but establishing Star Trek as a brand beyond a niche audience. In short, this is the season - with a lot of help, admittedly, from the end of season three - that took the franchise to a place no television show had been before."
About that season finale: titled "Redemption," the episode finds the crew of the Enterprise right in the middle of what threatens to become a Klingon civil war, with Worf's allegiances torn between different factions. It's a sterling piece of television, full of complex political infighting and action, and like the "Best of Both Worlds" episode that concluded the third season, it's also part one of a much longer story that would get resolved at the beginning of the following season. However, just as Paramount reedited the two "Best of Both Worlds" parts into one standalone movie for Blu-ray, so has the studio given the same treatment to Redemption. It now flows as a single, continuous narrative, and eliding the gap separating Seasons Four and Five only strengthens the episode, which is another example of writer Ron Moore's sterling work. Furthermore, the Redemption Blu-ray has exclusive bonus materials not present on Seasons Four and Five in order to help mitigate double-dipping.
Again Martin Liebman lauded this Next Generation product, calling it "not be the finest two-part episode in Star Trek history - it's near impossible to top 'The Best of Both Worlds' and 'All Good Things...' - but it ranks right up there amongst the elites. In essence, it's Trek near its best. There's fantastic character moments and progression, thought-provoking drama, deep political plot structures, unlikely alliances, surprise revelations, and a good bit of action. Its easy to see in 'Redemption' the sort of things that would go on to make Deep Space Nine such a tremendous success from a dramatic and storytelling perspective, to see Star Trek on the greater front escape from the clutches of "mission of the week" and morph into something with a more continuous plot line, deeper character arcs, and longer-lasting consequences. Of course, the episode builds on previous Worf-centered story lines and also brilliantly ties back to the fan-favorite 'Yesterday's Enterprise' for inspiration and a fascinating means of facilitating the return of Denise Crosby to the show in her second major guest role appearance. It's a hugely satisfying venture on all fronts, and it's so well structured that even the glaring absence of deeper parts from about half of the main cast - Riker, Geordi, Troi, and Crusher - goes largely unnoticed."
This week also plays host to quite a few horror options, and The Criterion Collection's new Blu-ray of The Devil's Backbone stands at the head of the pack. After his protracted battle with the Weinstein brothers during the production and post-production periods for his 1997 thriller Mimic, filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro felt betrayed by the Hollywood studio system, and so he returned to Mexico in order to work unobstructed on this film, a sad, scary tale about the members of a boarding school living under the threat of the Spanish Civil War, and the paranormal spirit that insinuates itself into the lives of both students and faculty. The Devil's Backbone is as subtle as Mimic is over-the-top, and it contains a well of sympathy for its supernatural creatures; Del Toro is operating under the thesis that the most horrific monster has all-too human origins. The director would revisit this theme later in films like Hellboy II: The Golden Army and his Academy Award-winning Pan's Labyrinth, but The Devil's Backbone has both those pictures beat in terms of moral ambiguity and emotional impact. Del Toro has pulled off a near-impossible feat: he's blended the spiritual gravity of an Ingmar Bergman drama (it's impossible to watch The Devil's Backbone and not think of Bergman's masterwork Fanny and Alexander, with its multigenerational cast and undercurrents of magical realism) with the chills of the best horror movies (fans of The Haunting or last week's box-office hit The Conjuring will definitely find moments here to keep them up all night), and he's done so in a confident, entertaining fashion. The Devil's Backbone is, quite simply, a masterpiece in any genre, and a stark reminder of how good Del Toro is at finding the beating heart in the most outlandish of stories.
Svet Atanasov commented that the film "is often compared to [Del Toro's] Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth, but it actually has a lot more in common with Spanish director Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive. In Erice's film, a young girl attends a screening of Frankenstein and her life changes dramatically. Throughout the film Erice uses light and shadow to create an atmosphere that is very similar to the one present in The Devil's Backbone. Like The Devil's Backbone, Erice's film also delivers an important political commentary...The special effects in The Devil's Backbone are not as elaborate as those seen in Pan's Labyrinth, but this is something that actually benefits the film. Del Toro and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro use light, shadow, and color in a variety of different ways and create some truly spectacular visuals that are guaranteed to impress even viewers who do not typically enjoy films in which ghosts are frequently mentioned. The visuals are also enhanced by a top-notch soundtrack courtesy of Javier Navarrete (Agustํ Villaronga's In a Glass Cage, Marํa Lidon's Stranded)."
Of the films comprising the first wave of John Carpenter's legendary genre thrillers (from, let's say, Assault on Precinct 13 to The Thing), The Fog (here given the deluxe HD treatment from Scream Factory) rarely falls as anyone's favorite; admittedly, it's pretty slight, even by Carpenter's terse standards (in fact, his first cut was so short that the studio mandated he shoot some extra scenes to pad the runtime), with a less compelling villain than Halloween or The Thing had and a sprawling cast of characters including Tom Atkins, Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, her mom and Psycho moll Janet Leigh, Hal Holbrook, and John Houseman, of all people that never feels as developed as it could be. However, these flaws don't keep the film from being essential viewing for Carpenter buffs. If there's anything The Fog has in spades, it's atmosphere. Along with Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park 3D cinematographer Dean Cundey, Carpenter fashions a widescreen ghost story that generates tension from camera placement and movement rather than from overt horror and blood (though you'll find some gore here, in reshot footage that doesn't fit in with the piece's more elegant scares and that Carpenter mostly hated). The Fog works as Carpenter's feature-length homage to Mario Bava, warts and all, and by that measure, it's mostly successful.
The third notable horror option for the week is Lionsgate's Black Rock. Unlike The Fog, the pace of this one is more Deliverance than Black Sunday: the film follows the travails of three estranged friends (Katie Aselton, Lake Bell, and Kate Bosworth) whose camping trip turns into a life-or-death struggle when the most disturbed member of the group incurs the wrath of some very unpleasant local fellows. Aselton who is a regular on FX's The League is also a fixture in mumblecore cinema, and at times, one can't help but see Black Rock as her attempt to bridge that indie genre with more conventional survival horror. The mix of halting, improvisatory-seeming dramatics and white-knuckle terror isn't always successful (the first act, in particular, threatens to derail the piece before the mayhem commences), but the realistic dynamic between Aselton, Bell, and Bosworth ultimately grounds Black Rock in a positive fashion; we worry more during the suspense sequences because we've grown to care about these three women.
Jeffrey Kauffman took issue with the film, asking "why do the women in...Black Rock keep doing so many stupid things? That's one of the discordant issues that repeatedly keeps the film from being as scary, or perhaps even as meaningful, as it might have otherwise been. How refreshing it could have been to have seen women outsmart predatory males, especially since at its core this isn't so much about the war between the sexes as it is, like Deliverance itself, a story about pure survival. Black Rock is also oddly reminiscent of the 2010 Korean horror film Bedevilled, which, like Black Rock, posited a female protagonist on an isolated island which might have seemed like a paradise, but which in fact turned out to be at least purgatory, if not outright hell. Also like Bedevilled, Black Rock ultimately lapses into such hyperbolic intensity that, while it admittedly may leave some viewers reeling from the shock value, becomes almost cartoonish as a result."
Finally, just as Twixt brought one Francis Ford Coppola picture to Blu-ray last week, so does this week see the release of his 1986 feature Peggy Sue Got Married. The 1980s were a period of creative, financial, and personal troubles for the Godfather auteur, but he still managed to pull off some real gems, most notably 1988's Tucker: The Man and His Dream and this, a fantasy-drama about a frustrated housewife (Kathleen Turner) who gets a second chance to live out her teenage years. In its broad strokes, Peggy Sue Got Married isn't that far removed from the 1980s other great fantasy about time-travel to the 1950s, but while Back to the Future exploits that concept for blockbuster-styled thrills and comedy, Coppola is telling a much more intimate story about how regret and the passing of time cloud simple nostalgia. Peggy Sue might be in a position to give her life the temporal makeover it's always needed, but the more she relives her youth, the more she begins to question the notion that her existence operates on a simple "either/or" theorem. That ambivalence affords Peggy Sue Got Married a resonant viewpoint it might not otherwise have; couple that with sensitive direction and interesting performances (Turner is phenomenal, and Nicolas Cage matches her beat for beat despite his employment of some potentially off-putting artistic curlicues as her rocker boyfriend who would grow into a frustrated, middle-aged portrait of failure), and you have one of Coppola's most woefully underappreciated works.
Michael Reuben's Blu-ray review called the film "one bright spot in this troubled era [the 1980s]...which Coppola took over from fledgling director Penny Marshall during pre-production. Based on an original script by husband-and-wife writers Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner, Peggy Sue ingeniously combined a variation on time travel with a sort of romance-in-reverse that could easily have turned cloying and sentimental in different hands. Under Coppola's direction, and cast with numerous actors on the verge of major careers, the film became a box office success and was nominated for three Oscars. Still, despite its favorable reception, Peggy Sue has never been one of the films on which Coppola has lavished ongoing attention, as he has with projects dear to his artistic heart like the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now or The Conversation. One gets the sense that he made the film as a director-for-hire and not with the kind of singular passion that motivated the films with which he is most closely identified."