For the week of November 12th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Man of Steel to Blu-ray. This gritty, epic reboot of the Superman narrative proved unexpectedly controversial when it premiered last June; using Mark Waid's Birthright and Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale's Superman for All Seasons as their inspiration, producer Christopher Nolan, screenwriter David Goyer (who helped Nolan craft his Dark Knight Trilogy), and director Zack Snyder have adopted a more vulnerable and uncertain tone for the Man of Steel (Henry Cavill), who is a stranger in a strange land - Earth - even before learning about his alien origins and having to face the world-destroying machinations of insane Kryptonian General Zod (Michael Shannon, playing - to perfection, I might add - yet another of his nuanced, bug-eyed psychopaths). It is Superman's response to Zod that provides Man of Steel's most indelible and upsetting thrills. Snyder's gift for staging and shooting action gives the rival Kryptonians' battle for the planet more scope and visceral impact than just about any other superhero blockbuster in town: compared to the relatively low-scale chaos in Iron Man 3 or The Avengers, the film's sixty-minute action climax redefines just how big these kinds of movies can get, as Superman battles Zod and his minions all over the globe and beyond. However, that same wide-scale destruction suggests a collateral damage that also outstrips anything seen in previous PG-13-rated superhero movies - with the unintentional leveling of Metropolis a particularly brutal session - and it involves Superman in a moral decision that many viewers found unpleasant, if not completely inappropriate. Since the excitement goes hand-in-hand with the carnage, Man of Steel's fans and detractors are both correct in their respective assessments, and it's that ambiguity - unintentional or otherwise - that makes the picture so fascinating, alongside the great performances from its all-star cast (Amy Adams as Lois Lane! Lawrence Fishburne as Perry White! Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Ma and Pa Kent! Russell Crowe as Jor-El!).
Chalk Jeffrey Kauffman up as one of the film's detractors, as he wrote thst "Bryan Singer attempted to reboot this character along more traditional lines in Superman Returns, but one of Singer's addition[s] to the mythos was a patently Christian subtext where Superman's sacrifice was likened to Jesus on the cross (visually as well as textually). Of all the ideas Goyer and crew could have cribbed from Singer's version, it seems patently odd that it should be this one, but here is that same conceit, handled perhaps even more overtly than in the Singer film. When Clark seeks out a priest to discuss whether he should sacrifice himself to save Mankind, he does so with a stained glass window of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane hovering over his shoulder. Later, Clark mentions to a military expert that he's been on Earth for 33 years. In one of the moments of calm before the (repeated) storm that is a Groundhog Day-esque feature of the film's final act, Superman haltingly grasps toward a glowing light in what is perhaps an unintentional reference to Michelangelo's immortal Sistine Chapel painting of God reaching out and touching Adam. It's not hard to see what Snyder, Nolan, and Goyer wanted to do with Man of Steel, and in a way it's perfectly understandable, especially given the previous success of the Dark Knight films, as well as the lackluster response to the last Superman outing by Bryan Singer. But some may, as I do, question the appropriateness of investing this frankly two[-]dimensional hero with so much emotional baggage. Sometimes it's best to just be able to root for the good guy without worrying about what he's going through as he leaps over tall buildings in a single bound."
At the opposite end of the size spectrum is Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, which makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of the Criterion Collection. This intimate dramedy is primarily a character study of Frances Halladay (Greta Gerwig), a twenty-something dancer forced to readjust to the realities of contemporary New York City when her best friend (Mickey Sumner) moves out of their shared apartment. As Baumbach demonstrated in his The Squid and the Whale and Greenberg, he has infinite love and impatience for his tortured protagonists, and in that regard, Frances is no different from Ben Stiller's Greenberg or Jeff Daniels' Bernard Berkman - Frances could stand for the entire millennial generation, with its need for independence and its aversion to growing up (the film would make a great double-feature with HBO's Girls, and not just because they both co-star actor Adam Driver). That said, Frances Ha is far less emotionally lacerating than any of Baumbach's previous ventures as a writer/director. Part of that ease comes from Sam Levy's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, which merits comparison with the work Gordon Willis did on Woody Allen's Manhattan. More importantly, though, Gerwig deserves much of the credit for keeping the film (relatively) light on its feet. For all her mistakes, Frances isn't a misanthrope, and Gerwig makes her effortlessly appealing and likable, and deserving of what little light shines at the end of the tunnel.
Whereas Frances Ha sees Noah Baumbach moving away (slightly) from his traditional realm of misanthropes and ennui, Prince Avalanche finds filmmaker David Gordon Green returning to the kinds of films with which he established his career. Since 2008's Pineapple Express, Green has specialized in raunchy, foul-mouthed comedies (the good: HBO's brilliant Eastbound & Down). The bad: his Adventures in Babysitting-ripoff The Sitter), but he started out making intimate, character-based dramas (George Washington, All the Real Girls, and the underrated Snow Angels, with its phenomenal Sam Rockwell performance), and Prince Avalanche belongs squarely in that latter camp. A rambling, gentle remake of the Icelandic film Either Way, the movie contents itself with the misadventures of two outsiders (Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch) painting traffic lines on a lonely Texas highway. Rudd is a repressed loner and Hirsch is a genial doofus, and other filmmakers - or even Green, in another life - might have used their dynamic as a springboard for Odd Couple-like hijinks, but Green is more interested in watching them try to make a human connection with one another. That's not to say Prince Avalanche isn't funny (Rudd's a terrific straight man, and Hirsch is a revelation as the dopier of the two men), but the fire-ravaged surroundings (in Bastrop State Park) and Explosions in the Sky soundtrack give the film a unique air of melancholy. It's a slight, small picture, but it's just as absorbing as anything else in Green's body of work.
Michael Reuben's Blu-ray review noted that the film "freed Green from studio oversight and allowed him to make the kind of film he obviously prefers, which concerns itself more with exploring oddball characters than with working through plot mechanics. A friend introduced Green to...Either Way (Á annan veg) by writer/director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurđsson, which was little seen even in its homeland. Green immediately recognized a kindred spirit. Working only from subtitles, he transposed the story to his native Texas. He already had a specific location in mind: Bastrop State Park in central Texas, where raging fires in 2011 had destroyed 98% of the forest and over 1600 homes. There Green could recreate the surreal sense of dislocation and isolation that he'd observed in Either Way's use of the bleak Icelandic countryside. Of course, the time period had to remain in the Eighties. The kind of isolation on which both films depend wouldn't be possible in the present era of permanent connectivity."
With Kino's new Nosferatu Blu-ray, viewers can see one of the screen's most iconic horror films in as close to a pristine condition as possible. For years, this silent classic suffered the imperfections of faded, scratchy prints, but Kino uses the sterling Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung restoration, which employs the original color-tinting scheme and recreates previously missing title cards. It's a striking look at a film that, while no longer viscerally frightening, still carries a dreamlike, unnerving charge. In adapting Bram Stoker's Dracula to the screen, director F.W. Murnau set the template for the modern vampire thriller, with his eerie, atmospheric images of Count Orlok (Max Schreck) terrorizing the crew on his ship ride to Europe, or the psychic, sexualized connection he establishes between Orlok and beautiful innocent Ellen (Greta Schröder). Most memorable is Orlok himself - Murnau and Schreck turn their vampire lead into a creature more beast than man, his feral, rat-like teeth and claws a far cry from the romantic bloodsuckers of Interview with the Vampire, Twilight, or even the Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi Dracula. Some vampire movies sugarcoat the curse of everlasting life through blood sacrifice, but Orlok's very appearance signifies the psychic and physical rot better than any dialogue could. For film lovers, this is a canonical entry in movie history.
Casey Broadwater has the highest praise for the film, writing that "Much can certainly be read into it, but on the surface, Nosferatu is deceptively simple in plot and drama. [Screenwriter Henrik] Galeen's adaptation takes Stoker's novel and boils it down, straining out ancillary characters and reducing the action to its most basic form. In a failed attempt to side-skirt those pesky copyright issues, Galeen also changed all of the names, restaged the story from England to Germany, and provided a new ending that's responsible for permanently altering the vampire mythos by being the first to suggest that the undead can be killed by direct sunlight...Modern horror filmmakers could learn a thing or two from how bold-but-somehow-understated Murnau's imagery is; he does more with a shadow moving across a wall than other directors have with a thousand quick cuts and jump scares. His horror is primal and dream-like; it rises up out of the subconsciousness and—like Orlok wielding his telepathic sway over Ellen—grabs your heart with its invisible hand. The film is so heebie-jeebies-inducing that you can easily overlook how masterful it is in its construction. The editing is brilliant—see the crosscutting between Hutter pursued by Orlok and shots of far-off Ellen caught in a fit of sleepwalking terror—and the on-location cinematography, while more realistic than most German Expressionist films, is every bit as striking. Murnau got the genre off to a great start; Nosferatu's crumbling Gothic influence—drafty castles and creaky ships, dark shadows and silhouettes—can be felt in everything from the Universal monster movies to Hammer Horror and beyond."
Finally, Warner is issuing a 40th Anniversary Edition of All the President's Men. A classic docudrama, All the President's Men endures not because of its historical relevance but because it remains one of the most improbably suspenseful films ever made. It shouldn't work; we know the ending (Spoilers: Nixon resigns), and one might assume that knowledge would dilute the potential for thrills and intrigue. Yet like Apollo 13 or Captain Phillips or Zodiac (a film that owes a huge debt to All the President's Men in both look and tone), we're held in thrall just the same. Here, what we know takes a back-seat to how it happened - screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man) lays the story out as a detective procedural, of sorts, generating interest from how Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) negotiate a never-ending stream of minute details, sudden scoops, and dead-ends in their investigation of the 1972 Watergate break-in. Furthermore, All the President's Men doesn't look like a vérité documentary. Goldman's dialogue is as punchy and entertaining as it is in his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride scripts, and the late, great director Alan J. Pakula concocts an air of shadowy, inescapable paranoia: he and his The Parallax View DP Gordon Willis paint Washington, D.C., as a landscape that is visually murky as it is ethically suspect.
In his review of the 2011 Blu-ray, Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "Even though many viewers will either personally remember the Watergate affair or at least have a passing acquaintance with the general outlines of the case, the film wraps up the proceedings in a really artful, quasi-thriller package, complete with undercover informants ('Deep Throat,' played by Hal Holbrook). Part of the film's impact comes from its low key but very effective recreation of a working newsroom, back in the days when the clatter of typewriters filled the echoing cavernous reporters' dens. [Jason] Robards is perfectly cast as the crusty but ultimately no-nonsense [Ben] Bradlee, a man who can't quite believe what his junior reporters have uncovered and what that could mean for his paper (It of course meant a Pulitzer Prize, but that came later). The entire supporting cast is marvelous, though, including everyone from stalwarts like Ned Beatty to recognizable, though lesser known, actors like Broadway regular and occasional film supporting player John McMartin (Watch closely for a nice cameo by Meredith Baxter, toward the end of the film). Redford and Hoffman work surprisingly well together, eschewing the usual "buddy" routines and never letting the underlying tension between the two reporters devolve into low comedy. What is probably most amazing about the film, taken with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, is just how sanguine so many people were about what was going on. Goldman adapts the bare bones news elements of the original book with gusto and flair, showing the many dead ends the reporters encountered, and not all of them due to a 'vast right wing conspiracy.' People just didn't seem to care very much, or if they did, they didn't think the break-in and resultant cover-up was any big deal. In fact, Woodward and Bernstein strike most of these people as pesky annoyances, rather than dogged pursuers of The Truth."