For the week of January 14th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is issuing Riddick on Blu-ray. Riddick is, in many ways, the sequel that shouldn't be. While Pitch Black, the first science-fiction thriller featuring Vin Diesel's charismatic murderer Richard Riddick, made a big splash among cult-movie aficionados, its bloated 2004 follow-up, The Chronicles of Riddick, softened and distorted everything interesting about Riddick (gone was Pitch Black's taut survival horror; in its place was a bunch of sub-Conan and Star Wars nonsense about Riddick's royal/mystical bloodline) and lost Universal over $50 million in the process. Everyone had given up on Riddick, save Diesel, whose reintegration into the Fast and Furious universe came with the stipulation that he could own the Riddick character, and he then parlayed the massive success of Fast Five into this new Riddick adventure. In Riddick, Diesel and series writer/director David Twohy mostly eschew the mythology from The Chronicles of Riddick in an effort, as Riddick notes self-referentially, to get their edge back. They strand Riddick on another hostile planet, and he's left with only his wits and killer instinct to survive. For its first forty minutes, Riddick riffs on something like The Naked Prey. We watch Riddick tend to his wounds (a gnarly bone resetting sets the stage for this film's R-rated action), study the planet's alien life, and plot his escape, and these actions unfold with little dialogue – it's as muscular and involving a slice of blockbuster cinema as anything you're likely to see. Unfortunately, Riddick can't maintain this focus, and the remaining eighty minutes see the film become a soft Pitch Black reboot, with Riddick alternatively terrorizing/aiding two groups of bounty hunters (including Matt Nable, Jordi Mollà, Dave Bautista, Bokeem Woodbine, and Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff) as they defend themselves against a savage alien predator. This last section isn't bad, but it's not as inspired as what came before it, and you wish Diesel and Twohy had the conviction to keep things laser-focused on their antihero (maybe Diesel's Fast & Furious 6 commitment is the reason he spends most of the second act off-screen). Still, it's a major improvement on The Chronicles of Riddick, and it should make viewers (cautiously) optimistic for further screen journeys of Richard B. Riddick.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown writes that "Riddick's first act is a silent, all too efficient killer; a stripped down scrapper hellbent on refining the series formula and embracing its primal urges…It's the movie Chronicles critics wanted nine years ago and the actioner Twohy and Diesel have been promising (Not to mention a bloody, brutal Wall-Eif you squint and watch it just right). When the mercs arrive, though, the film spirals into series homage that occasionally borders on self-parody. Whereas Riddick opens his third actioner on the ropes, fighting to make it through the night, he soon resumes his weirdly omnipresent shenanigans, lurking and smirking in plain view while yet another band of dim-witted mercenaries look everywhere but up. From there it descends into a rehash of Pitch Black, with a sea of alien beasties rising out of the ground and forcing Riddick and his adversaries to work together to survive…Fortunately, beneath all the familiarity lies a sinewy action spectacle with more nerve and gristle than most. Chalk it up to Diesel's unflinching love of Riddick, Twohy's colorful misfits and derelict alien worlds, the pair's fondness for crowd pleasing action and savage kills, or maybe the series' return to the muck, murk, and mud of a decisive R rating…whatever the source of its swagger, Riddick pins its Big Dumb Fun badge to its sleeve with pride. No cut corners. No pulled punches. No dropped balls. Twohy's script may leave something to be desired, but Diesel doesn't falter, his castmates are having a blast, the film's FX delivers, death hits hard and sacrifice hits harder, and there are more than enough memorable moments to go around. Yes, Pitch Black remains the better film. And yes, if you aren't already head over heels for the series, Riddick isn't going to inspire a change of heart. However, franchise fans will be thrilled with Part Three, even while spotting every flaw and misstep it entails. Here's hoping Twohy and Diesel have more in store for their merc-mauling antihero in future installments. Riddick is a fun, functional redux; a tasty appetizer. Bring on the main event."
From Twentieth Century Fox comes the dramedy Enough Said. If nothing else, this romantic comedy - the newest film from Please Give auteur Nicole Holofcener - deserves credit for successfully pulling off a screen rarity: a tender, moving, even sexy relationship between two 50-year-olds. Hollywood tends to go young or go home, so it's a welcome shock to see Holofcener devote the time to the burgeoning love affair between Julia Louis-Dreyfuss' lonely masseuse Eva and James Gandolfini's single father Albert. Both Louis-Dreyfuss and Gandolfini are talented comic actors, so their interactions have the spark and bite of good screwball comedies, but they also successfully convey the genuine pathos of two people terrified of how difficult finding someone later in life can really be. Gandolfini, in particular, is a marvel; in one of his last screen performances, he gives Albert a shambling self-consciousness that grows sweeter and more endearing the more time he spends with Eva. If Enough Said only focused on these two, it would be one of the year's best films, but Holofcener sabotages her otherwise delicate work in one small-but-crucial way - the inclusion of Catherine Keener's Marianne. Keener is a brilliant actress, but her character feels ported in from a lesser movie. As Gandolfini's ex-wife who befriends Eva, she exists for the sitcom-worthy contrivance of making Eva doubt her otherwise mature and adult connection to Albert. It's a serious misstep in a film with so much to offer.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Enough Said has been something of a critics' darling this past year, reaping a rather surprisingly consistent amount of praise since its release. Perhaps I'm cynical (well, there's probably no perhaps about it), but my personal opinion is that at least some of the accolades being heaped upon the film stem from the shock of Gandolfini's death. Some readers may be ready to throw brickbats my way (get in line, please, and also realize it's a very long line), but I'd argue for a bit of perspective on both the pleasures and pitfalls Enough Said provides. A few theatrical reviewers have (rightly in my opinion) pointed out the shallowness of the script, as well as the absolutely annoying second act denouement that hinges on one of those coincidental conceits that only ever takes place in films. A lot of the dialogue is awkward and stilted, and not always only when it's supposed to be. The film has a proto-indie spirit which is okay as far as it goes, but when you have the considerable (though arguably small screen) star wattage of Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini, both bringing "television baggage" along with them whether or not they want to, there's a certain disconnect between the material and the performers. The saving grace here is, ironically enough, the overall heartfelt tone of the piece, which helps to elevate what are essentially non demanding performances from the stars. Louis-Dreyfus has her typical ebullient charm, even if one never quite believes her angst and fussiness. Gandolfini is, as mentioned above, wonderfully disheveled and natural, but Albert never really makes much of an impression, at least until a major showdown toward the end of the film, something Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus play extremely well. Keener is fine in a somewhat underwritten part that is basically there only to provide a supposed reveal that most students of Screenwriting 101 will see coming long before it actually arrives."
Starz and Anchor Bay are bringing Lee Daniels' The Butler to Blu-ray. Since its release, the film has staked a claim for itself as a notable Oscar hopeful. The story of White House butler Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker, playing a fictionalized version of real-life Presidential butler Eugene Allen), who served over five decades of American presidents, The Butler seems genetically designed to win Academy Awards. It has an Oscar bait cast (there's Best Actor winner Whitaker, of course, alongside Oscar winners/nominees Robin Williams, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Terrence Howard, and Cuba Gooding Jr., but The Butler also features talented - if non-Oscar acknowledged - performers like John Cusack, Liev Schreiber, Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, Clarence Williams III, James Marsden, and Alan Rickman), it deals with very important themes (politics, race, equality, etc.), and it has the full force of the Weinstein Company and Oprah Winfrey (who plays Cecil's wife) backing its Oscar push. There's only one problem: look past the surface sheen and the stunt casting, and the film is wholly unremarkable. Normally, I'd shiver at the very involvement of Lee Daniels; his Shadowboxer, Precious, and The Paperboy were sterling examples of lurid trash, yet they had a pulse that The Butler lacks. Daniels is playing it safe, and it turns out there's something worse than crazy Lee Daniels - boring Lee Daniels. He has no interest in trying to goose Danny Strong's beyond-formulaic script, which – as in Strong's previous efforts, Recount and Game Change – thinks it can revitalize otherwise tired biopic clichés through the application of topical political references, even as it neglects anything resembling dramatic surprises or human nuances (Strong's characters don't talk – they bark exposition at one another, like a full-length version of the "The 60's are an important and meaningful time" gag from Walk Hard). Whitaker is good, as he almost always is, and his scenes with on-screen son David Oyelowo feel imported in from another, better movie, but the movie doesn't deserve his power and grace. Don't believe the hype.
Martin Liebman writes that "the film badly fumbles its casting of historical figures, however, and nearly every secondary character comes across almost as a caricature of the person. Robin Williams as President Eisenhower, Liev Schreiber as President Johnson, John Cusack as President Nixon, and Alan Rickman as President Reagan are fair to fully unconvincing, some barely looking the parts and others barely capturing the mannerisms, dialects, or spirits of the men they portray…Only James Marsden as John F. Kennedy really seems to fill the shoes with the gravitas his character commands. He captures a charming innocence and the energy of the President's youth very well, perhaps not hitting every accent or looking like a mirror image of the late 35th President, but he's certainly a beacon amongst a collection of dubiously cast and (mostly) poorly performed Presidents. The film does shine where it's needed the most. Forest Whitaker delivers an Oscar-caliber performance and one of the finest of his career, arguably bettering his astonishing, Oscar-winning effort as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland…Whitaker falls into [the] part and never leaves, and he's even better outside the black tie White House position and in the more intimate and equally important story-driving family scenes. So good is Whitaker that the performance reinforces one of the more subtle points the film tries to make, showing that Gaines is in many ways a superior public servant than those he serves, remaining steadfast and true to himself and never truly unwinding and losing sight of who he is, where he's been, and where he's headed."
Lionsgate's slasher You're Next has the reverse problem: the film's pre-release hype did it no favors. After making its premiere at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, You're Next didn't receive a proper theatrical run until this past August; nine times out of ten, that kind of delay reeks of a studio trying to bury a stinker (Exhibit A: the long-shelved – and terrible - Red Dawn remake). Happily, You're Next represents the one time a good movie gets lost in the shuffle. Director Adam Wingard has been toiling in low-budget horror for years now – he made A Horrible Way to Die, as well as the "Tape 56" and "Phase I Clinical Trials" segments from, respectively, V/H/S and V/H/S 2 - and You're Next is a real step up for him in terms of filmmaking savvy and maturity. As Wingard goes about the business of tormenting his characters, the members and extended members of a dysfunctional family who find themselves under attack from a group of masked killers, he plays for speed and scares rather than for grisly torment: Wingard roots this slasher in action cinema just as much as he does in genre mainstays like Friday the 13th, crafting a number of impressive setpieces that pit the antagonists against a surprisingly resourceful protagonist. To say much more about this point would spoil some of the fun, but suffice to say, Wingard has another, more postmodern agenda for You're Next to serve. The film has a self-referential air, and part of that effect comes from his cast, which Wingard has stocked with prominent filmmakers from the indie-film community (such as A.J. Bowen, Amy Seimetz, Simon Barrett, Larry Fessenden, Joe Swanberg, and Ti West). However, it's the revelation of certain third-act plot points that puts You're Next in thematic territory consistent with other postmodern horror classics like Scream or Cabin in the Woods (the latter of which also sat on the shelves for over two years). That's refined company, as far as these types of pictures go, and if You're Next isn't quite in the same league, it's only by a matter of degrees. A real surprise.
Of You're Next, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote, "At least this time it isn't teenagers who are mercilessly slaughtered after a healthy dose of sexual romping. And that may be the single greatest clue offering a summation of what to expect in You're Next, an extremely graphic but often darkly humorous horror film that combines elements of a typical home invasion thriller with a comical look at family dysfunction that plays like something Woody Allen might have come up on a particularly twisted bender. The film starts with a couple doing the nasty (rather enthusiastically, it might be added) in an isolated country mansion (is there any other kind in this type of film?). While the man takes a post-coital shower, the woman ventures downstairs, where she's surprised to find a patio door open. She closes it, and puts a CD on the player, pressing the 'repeat' button. She mixes up what appears to be a screwdriver, and sits down to take a sip. And then the carnage begins. We don't actually glimpse much of what happens to the poor lass, but when the male exits the shower, he finds the charming message 'You're next' scrawled in blood on his bedroom mirror. And of course within mere seconds that epitaph comes true. And so You're Next reveals both what it will and will not be. The film is rather deeply ensconced in any number of traditional horror movie tropes, but it revisits many of them in at least slightly skewed or unexpected ways. You're Next is rife with plenty of gore, but the real allure here, at least for those who don't necessarily like to wallow in blood and guts, is the often breezily snarky interplay between a large family that has gathered for a reunion which ends in absolute carnage all around."
It's a new year, which means a new Pride and Prejudice Blu-ray set. I can't find fault with the main feature; this 1995 BBC miniseries remains the most iconic film adaptation of any Jane Austen novel, and it's certainly the most comprehensive screen version of Pride and Prejudice (though the underrated Joe Wright-Keira Knightley version is almost as good, in its abbreviated way). Director Simon Langton and writer Andrew Davies (who also scripted the BBC's excellent Bleak House miniseries from 2005) use the film's five-plus-hour runtime to get at something mostly neglected from the another Austen adaptations: for all her inventive wordplay and sparkling romantic-comedy plotting, Jane Austen was also a master of the "hang-out" novel, and the miniseries replicates the experience of luxuriating inside Austen's world in a way that never feels overlong or indulgent. The icing on the cake, of course, are the lead performances from Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, both of whom do a spirited "will they or won't they" act as, respectively, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Firth's refined smoldering gets all the credit, but Ehle is even better – she makes sensible and wry seem like the two sexiest qualities in the world.
In his Blu-ray review of a previous Pride and Prejudice set, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "There are at least a couple of reasons I would argue have set this version apart from several others. The productions values - while perhaps not quite as lush as might be expected from a big budget feature film - are uniformly excellent, wonderfully capturing the flavor of Austen's era. And the casting is of course next to miraculous. Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth have become rather definitive as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. But adding inestimable color to this production is the absolutely fantastic supporting cast, a large and at times diverse crew that includes lovely turns from great character actors like Alison Steadman as Mrs. Bennet and Julia Swahala as Elizabeth's sister Lydia (On a somewhat tangential note, alert viewers will note how similar Swahala looks to a young Helena Bonham-Carter in this role. Interestingly, Bonham-Carter's own somewhat distant cousin, Crispin, was given one of his first major roles in this adaptation, as Mr. Bingley). But perhaps the two most important elements in this version are its absolutely pitch perfect sense of humor (something that newcomers to Austen's world may actually be surprised about - Austen was not humorless, as some have averred) and the equally precise and nuanced emotional tone this version sets from virtually the first moment."
Also from Lionsgate: director James Ponsoldt's lovely, humane The Spectacular Now. Ponsoldt's previous feature was the addiction drama Smashed, and while that was a solid piece of work, The Spectacular Now plays like the work of a far more accomplished filmmaker. Ponsoldt's hero is Sutter Keely (Miles Teller, fulfilling the promise of his great supporting performance in Rabbit Hole), a charismatic teenager who begins a tentative relationship with outsider Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley); their time together reveals some of the hidden rot at Sutter's core and challenges his shallow assumptions about success and happiness. In its natural, unforced approach to teenage adolescence, I'd liken The Spectacular Now to John Duigan's Flirting or Cameron Crowe's Say Anything - Teller, in particular, has the same off-rhythm timing and charisma as John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler. At the end of the day, what really distinguishes The Spectacular Now is its total lack of sentimentality. Ponsoldt has great affection for his leads, but he's too smart to believe that young love conquers all, and he gives his film a darkness it might not otherwise have. Teller and Woodley are a terrific screen pairing, and Ponsoldt surrounds them with rich performances from Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Brie Larson, Andre Royo, Bob Odenkirk (in his third - after Breaking Bad and Nebraska - impressive dramatic turn of 2013), and Kyle Chandler, who demolishes his upstanding, Coach-Taylor-from-Friday-Night-Lights image as Sutter's cold, distant father. One of the year's best films.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "There's frankly not anything incredibly new or innovative about The Spectacular Now, other than its rather beautifully unvarnished look at two disparate souls, each of which has its own baggage. In fact it's the baggage—some inherited, some self-created—that becomes the film's defining theme. Aimee is out to make something of her life, ostensibly by escaping to Philadelphia to attend college, but she still has to deal with psychological shadows cast by her overbearing mother. Ironically, Sutter has consigned himself to living in the moment, albeit completely without ambition (and usually with a swig of alcohol at his beck and call), but he, too, is haunted by a shadow - of his long estranged father (played wonderfully by Kyle Chandler in one of the film's nicest sequences). Both of these kids are looking at their nascent young adulthoods from radically different perspectives, and it's here that The Spectacular Now really starts to develop the emotional wallop that it eventually manifests in spades. The film has one devastating surprise late in the game which threatens to turn the film into a lachrymose tearjerker. But here again screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (adapting the novel by Tim Tharp) and director James Ponsoldt step back from a cliché-ridden precipice to set the film in a hopeful direction. While it's at least arguable that the final moments of the film are a bit too pat for their own good, they also serve as a fitting symbol for what Sutter himself has had to go through to begin to realize ruts are only as real as you choose to make them."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is distributing two stellar crime dramas: Rififi and Thief. The story behind Rififi director Jules Dassin is almost as interesting as the film itself. Dassin was just making a name for himself as a director of skillful, tough film noirs (Thieves' Highway, Brute Force, Night and the City) when he became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist; he immigrated to Europe and, in 1955, reestablished himself in a big way with Rififi, which both brought Dassin renewed critical and commercial acclaim and netted him the award for Best Director at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. For sheer entertainment value, Rififi still can't be beat – this tense story of four criminals (Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, and Dassin himself) who plan a jewel heist might traffic in clichés that weren't new when John Huston trotted them out for The Asphalt Jungle five years earlier, but Dassin's sense of ruthless pacing and unsentimental characterization keep the material fresh and exciting. The film also did something Dassin couldn't have predicted – it set the template for almost every heist movie released in its wake. Rififi's band of quirky thieves recalls the Ocean's Eleven movies, while Servais' brutal-yet-honorable Tony le Stéphanois is the antecedent to the professional criminal favored by folks like Jean-Pierre Melville and Michael Mann. Then there's the heist itself, a near-silent, thirty-minute exercise in suspense that is as thrilling an example of pure cinema as anything seen before or since. You can be sure that Brian De Palma took a good look at this scene when he was making Mission: Impossible: even Dassin revisited it in his underrated caper Topkapi.
Svet Atanasov called Rififi "A gangster film that has influenced generations of film directors around the world…[It] blends the intensity and elegance of film noir with the playfulness and exuberance of the nouvelle vague. Rififi is also a notably dark film in which innocence is in very short supply. The robbery that takes place halfway through the film is legendary. It lasts approximately half an hour and it is completely devoid of dialog. The communication between the thieves is done through simple gestures and looks. When they finally enter the jewelry store and open the safe, the tension is almost unbearable. As the story progresses, the film gets darker and grittier but not as fatalistic as it could have been. Eventually, the famous code of honor is also brought up, though it is not used to glamorize gangster lifestyle. The cast is excellent. Servais is terrific as Tony, the quiet but dangerous thief who likes to be challenged and despises liars. It is always difficult to read him. Naturally, a lot of his decisions, especially during the final third of the film, are quite surprising."
It's fitting to pair Rififi with Thief, considering the through-line to Thief director Michael Mann. This is one of the most assured debut features ever made, though Mann was certainly no novice by this point in his career; a veteran of TV crime procedurals like Starsky & Hutch, Police Story, Police Woman, and the gritty telefilm The Jericho Mile, Mann was already steeped in the criminal ethos that would power films like Manhunter or his iconic Heat, and Thief represents Mann's cop-criminal dichotomy at its purest form. To him, picking one side is less a vocation than an expression of being, and so it goes with Frank (James Caan, in the performance of his life), a career criminal who specializes in jewel heists, with an emphasis on "specializes": if all Mann did was detail the rigors of Frank's profession, Thief would still be a masterful crime drama. At times, it feels like an illicit documentary, with Mann and Donald Thorin's camera covering the different layers behind Frank's robberies, his interactions with a menacingly avuncular gangster (legendary character actor Robert Prosky), and the institutional loyalty created through years of incarceration and his connection to Willie Nelson's dying criminal. But through Frank, Mann goes one step further – he shows us the kind of person who excels at crime. In a way, Frank is the man Robert De Niro professes to be in Heat - his self-discipline is so great that he truly can walk away from anything in thirty seconds if he feels the heat around the corner, but Caan never lets us forget the scared kid lurking behind Frank's steely professionalism. The reason Frank is so good is because he's emotionally stunted, unable to connect with anyone outside his chosen field, and that lack gives Thief its depths. By the end, when Frank goes about the business of liberating himself from his criminal associates, we realize we're seeing something we haven't seen before: a crime masterwork that doesn't need to call back to the gangster pictures of the 1930s and 1940s.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review praises Thief as "unlike any other American crime film from the early '80s. One is the fact that it was shot in Chicago, the director's hometown. In this film the city is the only other character whose style rivals that of Caan's enigmatic thief. During the day it could look calm and friendly, but at night it becomes bleak and dangerous. The heavy neon lights are captured in such a way that each time they emerge on the screen the intensity immediately goes up a notch. In other words, Mann knew exactly where to go, what to look for and how to shoot it to convince the viewer that like the thief the city also has multiple identities. Some real troublemakers from Chicago were chosen to play important characters. Real thieves were also invited to serve as technical consultants during the shooting of the key break-ins. Mann also insisted that real tools are used in these sequences. Even the big vault Caan's crew worked on was real. Needless to say, Thief is not only an incredibly stylish film, but a remarkably realistic one as well. The bold electronic soundtrack is what glues everything together. Created by the legendary German electro/ambient group Tangerine Dream, the music does not just enhance the terrific atmosphere; it is actually used in very specific ways to create dimensionality which the visuals alone could not have possibly introduced. There are also entire sequences where the music (or the unique industrial sounds) essentially replaces what would have been traditional dialog."