For the week of March 4th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is releasing Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave on Blu-ray; it's a canny bit of synergy on Fox's part, given the film's three Oscar wins (including Best Picture) at Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony. However, for once, the end result merits the hype. 12 Years a Slave is one of 2013's best films, a beautiful and unsparingly brutal descent into the hells of slavery. In an Oscar-nominated performance, Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northup, a free black musician who is kidnapped and sold into slavery; Northup then spends twelve years trying to stay alive while looking for any opportunities to escape. That description makes 12 Years a Slave sounds much more like a thriller than it actually is. Though the film is intense - while limited in number, the instances of sexual and physical violence that Northup and his fellow slaves must endure are graphic and unsparingly realized - director Steve McQueen cares more about using Northup's experiences to document the slow, agonizing pull of time. No matter how radically his fortunes may change - he first finds himself serving at the estate of a relatively benign master (Benedict Cumberbatch), but his indiscretions against a hateful overseer (Paul Dano) cause him to be placed in the "care" of a vile, alcoholic sociopath (Michael Fassbender, giving the best performance in a cast loaded with great performances) given to unpredictable rages – Northup cannot extricate himself from this hell.
The more he struggles, the more slavery's dehumanization works against him, and as he did in Hunger or the underrated Shame, McQueen uses long takes and an excruciating sense of stillness to entrap Northup. It's in the way the camera lingers on him as he hangs from a tree, the pressure of his toes in the ground the only thing staving off strangulation. It's how he stages Northup's decision to join in a slave spiritual as a painful renunciation of his previous life as a free man. It's in the horrifying, wrenching setpiece where Fassbender's sadist forces Northup to whip fellow slave Patsey (Academy Award-winning Lupita Nyong'o), how the flayed skin isn't as terrible as the anguish on Northup's face. If 12 Years a Slave isn't a perfect movie, it's only because its award-season ambitions sometimes get the best of it: the beyond-all-star cast (besides Cumberbatch, Dano, and Fassbender, we get appearances from Michael K. Williams, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, Sarah Paulson, Garret Dillahunt, Taran Killam, and Brad Pitt in an extremely distracting cameo near the end) starts to feel like stunt casting after a while. Otherwise, this is great film, as sterling a plea for human decency in the face of great evil as Schindler's List.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review called the film "a completely unsettling experience, though its depiction of the resilience and ultimate triumph of the human spirit is incredibly uplifting. McQueen occasionally overplays his hand here, though, which is perhaps the only real critique that can be offered this otherwise devastating experience. The character of Tibeats [Dano] is almost cartoonishly villainous, something brought to bear in the early montage of a completely offensive song the character sings while a series of images of slave labor plays out. The film also is a bit screed like in its insistence that Bible thumping Southerners repeatedly bent scripture to their own advantage, drumming into mostly illiterate slaves that God wanted them to be subservient. And as viscerally compelling as Ejiofor is in the role, it's often a one-note characterization, formed out of (understandably) pained expressions with occasional sidebars of despair or (surprisingly occasionally) rage. The film also perhaps goes to the 'it would be better to die than to live like this' well, a point which is made perfectly well early on in the film, but which is revisited later in the plotline built around Patsey. But these are minor qualms in what is certainly one of the most shockingly brutal depictions of the horrid practice of slavery ever committed to film. Pundits may in fact try to convince blacks that they need to 'get over' this supposedly long ago horror, but few people of any race who watch 12 Years a Slave will be able to get over the impact of the film in any brief expanse of time, and perhaps not ever."
From the Weinstein Company and Anchor Bay comes the Academy Award-nominated martial-arts drama The Grandmaster. The latest film from visionary auteur Wong Kar-wai, The Grandmaster tells the story of Ip Man, the kung fu grandmaster best known for training Bruce Lee; Kar-wai follows Ip Man (the great Tony Leung, the director's favorite leading man) from adolescence to middle age, charting the major triumphs and hardships that his protagonist faced. In theory, this premise is similar to most traditional biopics, but Kar-wai - the director of the jazzy, improvisational Chungking Express, among others - labors to keep The Grandmaster from feeling anything but traditional. For one, he lets the fight scenes carry more importance than simple dialogue or exposition. Each one represents an evolution of character and philosophy, and Kar-wai and his cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd take care to stage and shoot them as such - the fights have a hallucinatory flair that's much in keeping with Kar-wai's lush, dreamy aesthetic. Furthermore, leave it to Wong Kar-wai to turn what might otherwise be a standard biopic and actioner into a moody story of unrequited love à la his masterwork In the Mood for Love. Ip Man's life-long competitor is the principled Gong Er (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's Ziyi Zhang), and their interactions – violent or otherwise – slowly begin to reveal depths of hidden feelings for one another. These bursts of romantic introspection are striking, and though they aren't a perfect fit with the more conventional subject matter (that said, it's very possible that any tonal/narrative bumps exist only in this cut of the film – this American version is twenty-plus minutes shorter than Kar-wai's director's cut), they still elevate The Grandmaster into something resonant and emotionally expansive.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman noted that "The martial arts represent extensions of the soul and expressions of self, of country, of ideals that, here, are better conveyed through martial arts rather than the spoken word. The film further benefits from disciplined actors that prove not only proficient in martial arts -- they have been impressively trained in the arts -- but in their deep understanding how the characters communicate, how they feel, how they express those feelings more through physical interactions and layered looks and less so through dialogue, particularly in the early and middle parts of the film. Tony Leung is superb as the lead character, blessed not only with the ability to convincingly display the martial arts necessary to sell the character's place in history but also to grow into him, to find the most powerful emotional currents as both he and the world around him evolve in ways within his control and out of his grasp alike. It's a powerful performance, one built as much through nuance as raw skill on the physical side of the ledger. Much the same may be said of Zhang Ziyi's character, one that is similarly disciplined and evolving. The actress proves similarly adept at portraying the character's full spectrum, both on the inside and the outside."
Far less satisfying is Sony's Oldboy remake. Even though the instinct to redo Oldboy is, at best, suspect and, at worst, crassly commercial - Park Chan-wook's Korean version is only ten years old and is, more importantly, one of the best films of the 2000s, leaving me to believe that someone at Sony and/or Film District wanted a new iteration only so viewers wouldn't have to parse through all those pesky subtitles - the raw materials behind Oldboy 2.0 are certainly promising. A cast that includes Sharlto Copley (in a performance so weird it makes Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans look like a model of understatement and restraint), Elizabeth Olsen, Samuel L. Jackson, and Josh Brolin as the protagonist, a scumbag ad executive who embarks on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after he is imprisoned (under the most bizarre of circumstances) for twenty years and then inexplicably released. A screenplay by Mark Protosevich, whose draft of I Am Legend remains one of the great unproduced screenplays. If that weren't enough, Spike Lee has taken over directing duties, and he is as unique and iconoclastic a filmmaker as Park Chan-wook is (plus, the last time Lee took a director-for-hire gig, we got the terrific heist picture Inside Man).
However, all of that only makes the end result that much more disappointing. The new Oldboy is a grim, joyless slog that does little to surprise or unsettle fans of the original film: minus a few exceptions, if you saw the previous Oldboy, you'll be able to set your watch to the "twists" that Lee and Protosevich dutifully mete out. That familiarity wouldn't matter so much if Lee brought some of his trademark fire and passion, but he's working at half-speed. The only times Lee seems invested are in the gruesome scenes of violence (Brolin's cringe-worthy showdown against Jackson; the lurid revelations that conclude the narrative), and after the extended scenes detailing Brolin's imprisonment, Lee rushes from bloody plot point to bloody plot point at the expense of theme or character. If nothing else, his Oldboy is watchable. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave, The Place Beyond the Pines) lends the proceedings a sleek, comic-book-like aesthetic, and Brolin gives it his all, but the movie doesn't deserve their skills. Maybe there's a version that does - in his pre-release interviews, Lee intimated that Film District nixed his much-preferred longer cut, which presented Brolin's epic multi-man melee in one continuous take (the theatrical version has cuts) and which had more to say about the nature of recrimination in the American justice system - but unless Sony sees fit to give Lee a second go-round in the editing room, we'll never know.
Martin Liebman commented that "it's a shame the film doesn't play as it should. The story is certainly not for everyone - it deals in terrible ordeals, grotesque violence, and shocking sexual conduct - but there's a deeper, much more fascinating study of revenge as viewed and executed from two very different perspectives, not to mention the film's examination of human solitude, captivity, and even, in more of a roundabout way, mind control. It's a film about base desires and animalistic instincts from the perspective of wounded spirits and warped minds. The film's brutal violence and unsettling revelations are balanced by the emotional hurdles one must overcome to grasp and accept and understand the story as it unfolds, to capture the essence of its disquieting and grossly awry twists that slowly reshape the film and render it unrecognizable within the context of the whole in its final moments. It's the failure to join the demented spirit with nuanced performances that hurt this version of the film, pushing its focus towards the shock value of its superficialities rather than more deeply examining the inner conflicts and the true driving forces beyond plot points. Audiences will know the story and character motivations but not necessary feel them. That doesn't lessen the impact of the film's final-minutes bombshells but it does render them significantly weakened at their core, making the audience's skin crawl but leaving its soul mostly settled."
This week sees a lot of catalog titles reaching Blu-ray, and one of the most notable ones is Fox's Garden State. Released in the middle of his tenure on Scrubs, this 2004 cult dramedy helped elevate Zach Braff past the success he'd found on television. Braff's story – about a struggling actor (Braff) who returns home to New Jersey after learning of his mother's death – struck a major chord with audiences and announced its writer/director/star as a major force in the independent film community. Or so it seemed - minus some screenwriting work (on 2006's The Last Kiss, for example), Braff chose not to follow-up Garden State with another personal project until just this year (his controversial Kickstarter-funded feature Wish I Was Here), and that lengthy gap in between caused public opinion to curdle on the film. In some ways, the delayed Garden State criticism is right on the money. For every detail that rings emotionally true (Braff's beyond-frosty relationship with Ian Holm's distant father; the palpable sense of nostalgia that accompanies him during his return home), Braff tosses in a moment or two that is too precious and twee: how Peter Sarsgaard's mom dates a Medieval Times employee (an early appearance from The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons) or Natalie Portman's too-adorable, helmet-wearing epileptic. Seen with fresh eyes, these tonal shifts make Garden State somewhat schizophrenic viewing, though what saves it is Braff's full-throated acceptance of the material. The film feels personal, even at its silliest. In that regard, it isn't dissimilar from his work as J.D. on Scrubs; both segue from humor to sorrow on a dime, but they commit to those extremes. Plus, Braff gets a lot of mileage from his cast (he's terrific, but so are Sarsgaard and Portman, the latter of which impresses because she makes an impossible, Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl caricature seem like a real person) and his still-iconic, Grammy Award-winning soundtrack (which features great cuts from The Shins, Zero 7, Iron & Wine, and Frou Frou).
Finally, Lionsgate will bring the recent blockbuster The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The second installment in the popular Hunger Games film franchise, Catching Fire opens as Hunger Games winners Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are returning home to their district after surviving the Games' brutal competition. Haunted by her actions, Katniss, in particular, wants nothing more than to settle into a life of quiet normalcy, but she becomes a pawn in the machinations of President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his new Gamemaker (the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who will remain in the two-part Hunger Games: Mockingjay) after the people of Panem begin holding up Katniss as a symbol of revolutionary freedom and change. Everything that worked about the first Hunger Games picture works here; an uncommonly sober and thematically resonant piece of mainstream entertainment, The Hunger Games soared because it took seriously the implications of its dystopian, "The Lottery-meets-Battle Royale" scenario, and because of Jennifer Lawrence's committed work in the lead: she is as good in these movies as she is in her Academy Award-honored performances from Winter's Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle. But whereas that first Hunger Games suffered under the influence of director Gary Ross - while his Pleasantville and Seabiscuit might have made him seem like a fine choice to helm these, he adopted a distracting, restless shooting approach that garbled many of the on-screen events, violent or otherwise - Francis Lawrence takes over on Catching Fire, and his presence makes all the difference. The helmer of I Am Legend and Water for Elephants, Lawrence is comfortable with the demands of studio filmmaking, and he turns Catching Fire into a pop entertainment that retains its social bite. He gives the political tête-à-tête between Katniss and Snow the intrigue of something like 3 Days of the Condor (big points, also, for adding Hoffman, Sam Clafin, and Jena Malone to the cast, the latter of whom stands out as an rebellious former tribute hiding serious psychological damage), and when the action shifts to the Hunger Games in the last hour, he shoots with an eye towards clarity and spatial coherence. So far, this is that rare movie series that gets better as it goes on - here's hoping the best for Mockingjay.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "This second film is much better paced than the first Hunger Games, and the interpersonal relationships are now well developed enough that less time needs to be spent delineating characters and more can be devoted to the increasingly labyrinthine plotlines. As heretical as it may sound, I personally found Jennifer Lawrence a little less effective this time around, with a few too many histrionics for the film's good. That's more than offset by the stellar work of the large supporting cast, especially people like Elizabeth Banks who really begin to fully flesh out people like Effie Trinket, who could otherwise be not much more than a caricature. Director Francis Lawrence (no relation to star Jennifer) stages things extremely well, modulating well between big (often special effects laden) set pieces and more intimate character drama."