For the week of November 26th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment brings Breaking Bad to a close on Blu-ray, both in a three-disc set that compiles the show's final eight episodes as well as a plus-sized, sixteen-disc package that compiles all sixty-two episodes of the acclaimed AMC drama (fans of the show will appreciate that the complete series edition comes bundled in a very familiar drum barrel). For a show that began with such an attractive, pulpy hook - when high-school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston, in the performance of his career) learns he has contracted terminal cancer, he starts cooking and selling crystal meth in order to secure his family's financial future - Breaking Bad never contented itself with stasis. In its first year, showrunner and creator Vince Gilligan styled it as an exceedingly dark comedy, a bloody look at what people do to survive in post-Recession-era America. But by the second season, the overt satire had almost vanished, and what emerged was a gripping, Grand Guignol take on the perils of the drug war, with Walter and his partner Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, whose slacker drug addict emerges as the heart of the series) trying to increase their profits without losing their lives. Then, somewhere around its stellar fourth season, Breaking Bad mutated again, this time into a Shakespearean drama of corruption and betrayal, and the program sounded this note right through its controversial finale.
That Gilligan and his crew were able to navigate between these different realms so consistently is one of the show's chief pleasures. Looking back, there isn't a bum episode in the lot, and it's startling how well later-season plot developments that Gilligan and the writers improvised on the spot pay off themes established early on in the series (for example, the evolution of Giancarlo Esposito's chilling Gus Fring into Breaking Bad's second-most iconic villain - Walter White himself will always remain Number One - was a decision borne from desperation, as Gilligan brought the character into the fold only after losing actor Raymond Cruz to TNT's The Closer). Even more revelatory is Breaking Bad's near-perfect mix of narrative and psychology. Week for week, the show excelled at putting Walter into ever-more perilous situations and making him think (or worse) his way out, but it also made sure his shifting mental states were just as important as any explosive plot twist. Forget the "Mr. Chips Meets Scarface" tagline that Gilligan used to sell the show: Walter White was a maddeningly complex and contradictory person from the start, and his descent into criminality only illuminates what already existed. Years from now, when people talk about the Golden Age of television, they will bring up Breaking Bad early - and often. This is one of the great TV shows.
Less impressive is Summit and Lionsgate's goofy Red 2, though to the film's credit, at least it's better than its 2010 predecessor. That earlier film rode its one-note gimmick into the ground, placing a very sleepy-looking Bruce Willis in charge of a group of retired government agents (Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren) who band together after the CIA targets them for assassination. The first Red assumed that if you liked its absurdly talented cast (which also included Mary Louise Parker, Karl Urban, Richard Dreyfuss, Ernest Borgnine, and Brian Cox), you'd forgive the picture its clichés and logy action staging, the latter of which isn't an issue with Red 2. Things blow up and fire and crash at a regular pace here, and director Dean Parisot (replacing Robert Schwentke) does a good job of keeping the violence (mostly) coherent and watchable, especially when he unleashes the fearsome Byung-hun Lee as Willis' most deadly adversary. What he can't do is a) make Bruce Willis care or b) keep Willis' co-stars from chewing the scenery (Malkovich, as he was in Red, is the highlight in this regard. Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, and Catherine Zeta-Jones? Not so much), but at least those performance issues are no worse than before. Still, while Red 2 is a modest improvement, it doesn't really distinguish itself in the annals of contemporary AARP-age blockbusters; Sylvester Stallone's Expendables franchise gets to highlight the prowess of its similarly aging cast without the restrictions of a PG-13 rating.
Jeffrey Kauffman was less kind in his Blu-ray review, writing that "Howard Hawks became famous for crafting dialogue scenes where actors tended to talk over each other in a more naturally "conversational" style, and one of Red 2's most annoying traits is a kind of B-movie approach to this same technique. Most of these elements take place between a weirdly spacey Parker and Willis, with Parker's lines tending to ooze into Willis' and then suddenly trailing off into nothingness. One assumes this is supposed to be funny, or at least amusing, but it's just a distraction after a while. Malkovich is even more tic filled in this outing than he was in the first Red, but that actually works toward the film's benefit. The actor can actually express more with his bizarrely twirling eyes than most performers can with a battery of emotive techniques. Willis frankly doesn't have much to do other than beat guys into a bloody pulp and squint menacingly into the lens now and then, but he anchors the film with an enjoyably steely gravitas. Red 2 simply tries too hard most of the time, lurching into completely wacky sidebars (Brian Cox as Mirren's paramour Simanov actually sniffs her boots in romantic ecstasy at one point) and giving itself over to hyperbolism as the film trundles through several showdowns (one firefight on a Paris street takes out buildings and several cars without so much as a hint of police presence). Of course this burgeoning franchise is based on a comic book, so it's probably unwise to try to take anything in either film too seriously, but parts of Red 2 seem like an overly desperate standup comedian begging the audience to laugh - even if just a little - to soothe his self esteem issues."
From IFC Films comes The Canyons, the Kickstarter-financed project from filmmaker Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) and author Bret Easton Ellis (he of American Psycho fame/infamy). The Canyons drummed up its fair share of controversy before it even opened in (limited) theatrical and VOD markets last August; while Schrader envisioned the film, in part, as a comeback role for Lindsay Lohan, the starlet complicated the production schedule more than Schrader had intended, with various reports saying that Lohan often showed up late and unprepared and then refused, after post-production, to help promote The Canyons in any way. To give some idea of the stress Lohan was causing him, Schrader cited her Canyons co-star, adult film actor James Deen, as a veritable model of discipline and professionalism. The Blu-ray offers viewers a chance to assess the film separately from all the backstage drama...except in this case, real life proves more interesting than fiction. The Canyons is a tawdry, relentlessly unpleasant psychodrama that combines the least attractive artistic qualities of Schrader and Ellis: Ellis makes sure that the sexual and mental warfare waged between the picture's protagonists (Lohan and Deen) is as lurid and sensationalist-for-sensationist's-sake as anything in his Rules of Attraction or The Informers, and Schrader casts his most judgmental, self-important veneer (think The Walker or Hardcore) over the proceedings. Worst of all, The Canyons takes itself too seriously to even be so-bad-it's-good - the potential camp factor can't survive under all the portent and fatalism.
Casey Broadwater lit into the film, writing that "beyond the lack of substance, there's also the stone cold fact that The Canyons is all-around ineptly made, even for a microbudget feature. The cinematography, for example, is inconsistent in noticeable, off-putting ways; sometimes the camera is locked down on a tripod, sometimes handheld, sometimes swaying awkwardly, and elsewhere following the characters via Steadicam. There's no cohesion to the feeling of the camerawork or the editing, which features a strange surplus of unnecessarily jarring cuts and transitions. What kills the film outright, though, is the acting, not just from one or two, but from the collective cast. Every other line reading sounds like an excerpt from an audition tape for an actor who should never get the part. Deen is artificial and overplayed, bringing with him all the performance baggage from his porno career. Nolan Funk is a non-presence on screen. And Lohan is dead-eyed, tired, non-committal. If the writer of that scathing New York Times article is to be believed, Lohan used all her energy partying with Lady Gaga and racking up a $46,000 bill at the Marmont. And if The Canyons will be remembered for anything, it'll only be as another of the many twists in her downward spiral."
Shout Factory's superlative contributions to cult cinema continue with its HD upgrade of Knightriders. Knightriders might be the most unusual film in George Romero's career: the Dawn of the Dead and Martin auteur takes a break from the horror genre with this gritty, satirical take on the story of King Arthur. Just like the Arthurian legend, Romero follows the exploits of a noble, troubled hero (Ed Harris, who's just wonderful here: strong and believably flawed) and the knights that follow him, making time for a doomed love affair and a rivalry with a jealous fellow knight (Romero's go-to FX wizard Tom Savini); the only difference is (and it's a big one) these knights are performers who travel across the country on their motorcycles, enacting these mythical dramas from renaissance faire to renaissance faire. It's an offbeat way of approaching the material, and it lets Romero make some salient points about the disconnect between honor and celebrity, as well as the nature of popular entertainment in contemporary America. If Knightriders doesn't deserve a place near the top of Romero's oeuvre - the movie's ambitions sometimes exceed its reach, and it's often punishingly long and unfocused at 145 minutes - it remains a fascinating curio, an iconic filmmaker's honest attempt to move beyond the types of movies that would define him.
In his review of Arrow's Region B Blu-ray, Svet Atanasov noted that "There is enough material in...Knightriders for two different films. The first would have been a nice retro comedy, possibly something similar to Jean-Marie Poiré's Les Visiteurs. I am unsure about the second one. It could have been a road film, perhaps something similar to Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow. Or a cheap Easy Rider copycat...One part of it wants to be serious, but quickly confuses the viewer because most of the time the actors act as if Romero never told them what type of film there were making. There is another part, however, that is...so wild and so kitschy that at times it looks like half the cast was on drugs while Romero was shooting. I like the first part better. It is more serious and makes some sense. Here the leader of a troupe of traveling medieval entertainers slowly begins to realize that in America you have to pay in order to be free...All of this is filmed in a way suggesting that Romero might have been deeply influenced by the classic story about King Arthur and his knights. The second part is strange...Some of the fights are rather well filmed, but there are some very strange characters amongst the spectators. Some are drunk, some look stoned. Some are just trying to act but can't and it definitely shows...The poor editing really is the film's biggest weakness. The basic idea behind it is very interesting, but the film desperately needs some balance. For a while the clashes are entertaining but then they become tedious because they make it virtually impossible to care about the main protagonists and their dilemmas."
Finally, the most physically impressive Blu-ray package of the week is Criterion's twenty-five-film Zatôichi: The Blind Swordsman set. As with the distributor's America Lost and Found: The BBS Story and John Cassavetes: Five Films collections, the Zatôichi bundle offers nothing less than a boxed film-history course. Taken as a whole, the Zatôichi have left an indelible mark on world cinema. For almost thirty years, audiences thrilled to the adventures of the title character, a blind masseur whose kind demeanor masks beyond-deadly swordfighting skills. As Zatôichi moved from village to village, righting wrongs in the name of honor and decency, the films themselves pushed at the restrictions of the samurai saga, blending kinetic, visceral fight scenes alongside a tonal aesthetic that changed every time Zatôichi found himself in a different predicament. What started in a classical, Kurosawa-esque vein could grow fragmented or experimental, or violent and gritty, or even light-hearted and whimsical. Zatôichi even made time to honor other icons of Japanese cinema: how else to explain his run-ins with Toshiro Mifune's Yojimbo or the Shaw Brothers' One-Armed Swordsman? His journey has inspired countless other programs, whether direct reboots - Takeshi Kitano's 2003 remake and the Rutger Hauer actioner Blind Fury, for example - or spiritual siblings such as David Carradine's Kung Fu series. Furthermore, the Zatôichi pictures comprise one of the longest-running movie franchises of all time: twenty-six films (the twenty-sixth, 1989's Zatôichi the Blind Swordsman, is not included in this set), plus a TV show that ran from 1974-1979, and all starring the same person, Japanese film star Shintaro Katsu. That last fact is mindblowing enough on its own - it'd be like if Sean Connery was still playing James Bond and had an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.-style weekly procedural to detail 007's many side adventures.