For the week of May 20th, Sony and Twentieth Century Fox are bringing George Clooney's war drama The Monuments Men to Blu-ray. Despite prestigious subject matter (the adventures of the Allied force charged with saving priceless works of art from the Nazis) and a peerless cast (besides Clooney, who also directed and co-wrote the picture, The Monuments Men stars Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett), the film's distributors pulled it from Oscar consideration season and dumped it in February, a decision that proved unfortunately apt. For all its surface strengths, The Monuments Men never comes together as a movie. Tonally, it's a mess, with moments of wry, Ocean's Eleven-esque humor colliding with solemn philosophizing on art and death; as gifted an actor and raconteur as Clooney is, his Lt. Frank Stokes comes off the worst in this latter regard. Stokes is less a character than a walking civics treatise on the importance of cultural identity. That said, the poky, ambling narrative certainly doesn't help boost the urgency of the situation. After a snappy opening that finds Stokes and Damon's Lt. Granger assembling their squad of Monuments Men, the team scatters all over Europe, and all the forward momentum starts to ebb away as editor Steven Mirrione cuts back and forth between the different parties. The episodic narrative conveys no sense of these men working towards a shared objective, and it denies us the chance to watch these actors play together.
While some of these pairings work (I could have watched a whole movie about Murray and Balaban's laconic duo, and Goodman and Dujardin get the movie's most legitimately suspenseful setpiece), you get the sense that this unit would be dramatically more interesting together than separated, and a blackly comic sequence near the end of the film where the reunited Monuments Men work to disarm a mine that Granger has stepped on only confirms this suspicion (it's more than a little perverse, too, that The Monuments Men splits up Clooney and Damon for most of the movie, considering how engaging their chemistry is in real life and in the Ocean's Eleven series). This is one of the most curious mainstream entertainments to hit screens in recent memory, though it certainly isn't without merit. Ungainly and dramatically inert as it might be, The Monuments Men isn't boring, and Clooney's filmmaking team keeps things looking and sounding consistently sharp. Plus, with the exception of Clooney's dull turn, the cast enlivens things considerably – in particular, Murray is a consistent delight, as he's the only one who successfully navigates between the somber and humorous tones that Clooney struggles to reconcile. You can tell the cast is having fun behind-the-scenes, and that feeling helps us enjoy the on-screen proceedings, but just to a point.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that "there's a fair bit of fun to be had with Monuments Men. It enjoys plenty of levity surrounding the dirty realities of war, which are here not depicted graphically but rather emotionally, the human toll representing the few times the picture truly finds its center, which at best runs parallel to the plot rather than in-line with it. Cast camaraderie never excites. There are a lot of very talented actors here and the film boasts one of the year's best ensembles, yet there's not that connection, that, pardon the somewhat overused World War II phrase, "band of brothers" feel to them. The individual performances are fine, for the most part, though the film never gets much real energy out of most of the players. On the technical side of the scoresheet, the film dazzles in practically every scene. It enjoys a thoroughly convincing and immersive visual setting, recreating the era with pinpoint detail and filmed in such a way that the audience feels always pulled into the environments. Even if the story isn't quite as engaging as it should be, the external qualities help to mask a somewhat stale, procedural, and very lightly bloated core."
20th Century Fox is releasing the Luc Besson-scripted-and-produced actioner 3 Days to Kill on Blu-ray. Kevin Costner stars as a skilled CIA assassin who, after learning he has terminal cancer, embarks on a breathless pursuit of two terrorists (Tómas Lemarquis and Richard Sammel) while trying to patch up his relationship with his estranged daughter (True Grit's Hailee Steinfeld), or something like that - Besson's screenplay is so needlessly convoluted in its reversals and reveals that the proceedings come off as ludicrous rather than ludicrously entertaining (case in point: Amber Heard as Costner's omnisexual CIA rival, who feels like she sauntered in from a far more bizarre picture). Another issue is director McG's approach to the many action scenes. McG has certainly shown a strong facility for on-screen chaos before – say what you will about Terminator Salvation or Charlie's Angels, but at least the action beats are great – but here the stunts come in choppy, borderline incomprehensible bursts, perhaps as a ratings concession to the MPAA. Costner certainly isn't at fault here. As Man of Steel and the Hatfields & McCoys miniseries demonstrated, he's still an immensely appealing performer, and like Liam Neeson in Taken, it could be great fun watching him enter his autumn years in full asskicking mode; in fact, he's the best part of this year's otherwise disappointing Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit for that very reason – that film did an expert job of highlighting the menace behind his All-American charm. But unlike Shadow Recruit or Taken, 3 Days to Kill never capitalizes fully on Costner's image and presence. It's just frenetic noise, and while you could do a lot worse (last month's District B13 remake Brick Mansions, for example), the film doesn't rise to the upper echelons of Besson's other thrillers. When Costner gets his own The Transporter, we'll all be in for a treat.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote "In a film this overly contrived, it probably shouldn't come as any huge surprise that the simultaneously unfolding stories of Renner's home life and professional life finally intersect in the film's final act, but here, too, the film doesn't serve either aspect particularly well. Besson and McG stoop to kind of low humor throughout the film as Renner becomes exasperated with Zoey's antics, but here the action ethos which has helped to define large swaths of Besson's career takes over, and Renner becomes the protective husband and father, albeit one prone to the psychedelic effects of whatever drug Vivi has provided him with. Vivi shows up as a sort of CIA Deus ex machina, in a surprisingly uninvolving climax that is too preordained to ever create much excitement. Even the film's supposedly bittersweet coda doesn't connect very strongly on an emotional level, since the audience has never been totally sure how they're supposed to react to Ethan Renner as either a family man or a hitman."
From Magnolia/Magnet comes Eugenio Mira's thriller Grand Piano. The film stars Elijah Wood as Tom Selznick, a neurotic concert pianist whose comeback performance is interrupted by the machinations of a crazed sniper (John Cusack, in what mostly amounts to a voiceover role); with both Tom and his wife (Kerry Bishé) in his crosshairs, the madman orders Tom to play a note-perfect set or else he'll start shooting. And that's not even the half of what Grand Piano has to offer – Mira and his screenwriter Damien Chazelle keep tossing in one plot twist after the next, from the nervous breakdown that temporarily ended Tom's career, to the sideline snooping of his sister-in-law and his boyfriend (Tamsin Egerton and Allen Leech), to – best of all – an "unplayable" piece that's causing Tom grief even before the sniper makes contact with him. It's all wildly implausible, but in this case, "wildly implausible" is a compliment. Mira isn't shooting (ha ha) for documentary realism but for a hyper-stylized movie atmosphere that recalls the florid chillers of Brian De Palma: the way Grand Piano papers over logic with masterfully edited setpieces and operatic camera moves isn't at all dissimilar from the movie-trumps-common-sense magic in De Palma's Snake Eyes, Dressed to Kill, and Passion. Were Grand Piano a longer picture, the narrative contrivances might torpedo the whole affair – and truth be told, it starts to unravel in the last act as it starts explaining the motivations behind Tom's situation and abandons his frenzied piano-playing for an ill-conceived Big Bad fight (Cusack is much scarier as a disembodied voice threatening Tom) - but at only eighty minutes without credits, it's fleet, cheerfully ridiculous entertainment.
Michael Reuben took a different approach, writing that "Grand Piano was made by people who fundamentally don't understand the world in which they're operating and, accordingly, have no idea of how to reshape it for an effective thriller. Let me put it in movie terms. Imagine one of those famous, edge-of-your-seat car chases from Bullitt, The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A., Ronin, or one of the Bourne films. Now imagine that, instead of focusing all of his energy and attention on driving the car, following (or evading pursuit) and avoiding a collision, our hero had to argue with an unknown assailant, figure out his motive, follow his orders and devise an escape plan. How long do you think the chase would last before he crashed the vehicle? As a concert pianist playing some of the toughest pieces in the world, Tom Selznick is already engaged in the equivalent of a high-speed car chase before Clem announces his presence, except that, as his conductor says, 'it's only music.' By the time Clem flashes the laserscope, Tom should crash and the concert should be over. The fact that every note keeps coming in perfect sequence serves as a constant reminder that Grand Piano is a contrivance (and a daffy one at that). That's the opposite of what a good thriller should do."
Finally, Shout Factory is giving Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre an HD upgrade. A remake of F.W. Murnau's silent classic, this 1979 Nosferatu closely aligns itself with its predecessor in many ways. Both films have the same story – a real-estate purchase places Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) in contact with vampire Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski), whose lust for blood sets him after Harker's beautiful wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) – and Herzog uses many of Murnau's camera setups and locations. Yet despite the intentional callbacks to the earlier film, Nosferatu the Vampyre feels like a Werner Herzog film through and through. Herzog loads the movie with quintessentially idiosyncratic touches: Roland Topor's manic performance as Renfield, an ending that exchanges horror-movie dread for a kind of morbid comedy, a German city overrun with 11,000 real rats, and exterior shots of Dracula's castle that have a crumbling, mossy veracity (the score by German electronica group and frequent Herzog collaborator Popol Vuh further helps to convey a sense of otherworldly terror). Most Herzogian is the title performance from Kinski. His Dracula is a fascinating study in contrasts; the vile, rat-like makeup (more viscerally disgusting than even Max Schreck's iconic Count Orlok look) is as florid as Kinski's demeanor is restrained, haunted. His Count Dracula is a centuries-old junkie, and only blood can (barely) stir him from incalculable depression and decay. This is one of Herzog's most accomplished fiction films, and it's a more than worthy successor to the 1922 original – my only reservation is that in two-and-a-half months, Shout is putting out the sixteen-film Herzog: The Collection, which also includes Nosferatu the Vampyre, and I can't imagine that anyone interested in this film wouldn't be interested in the other dark, mad wonders that Herzog has to offer.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "Herzog's basic story follows Stoker's relatively closely in the early going, with Harker setting off to finalize a real estate transaction with the mysterious Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) in Transylvania. Harker interacts with some of the locals before making to the Count's castle, at which point the real weirdness starts. Dracula is a bizarre, almost albino, character seeking to come to London, but Harker feels there's something not quite right about things, especially once he figures out he's a veritable prisoner and that the Count has unusual sleeping quarters. The Count seems to already have a telepathic connection with Lucy, and that hallucinatory quality is part of what gives this particular Dracula retelling much of its power. Also aiding the mood immeasurably is Herzog's very smart use of locations. Harker's trek to the Count's castle is incredibly scenic, if just slightly menacing, and later scenes like a now famous rat invasion off of a docked ship add a potent dose of fear and unease. But it's Herzog's conception of the main character that ultimately sets this Dracula tale firmly apart from the rest. Dracula isn't only a Freudian specimen in Herzog's formulation, he's also kind of ironically Nietzschean. This is a character who has in a way achieved the status of Übermensch, only to find it's lonely with no real playmates. Herzog, obviously deeply influenced by Murnau (as he himself speaks about in the commentaries on this Blu-ray), gives a certain Abstract Expressionist tint to much of the proceedings, choosing some odd, skewed angles to help represent the living nightmare that is Dracula as both a character and a story."