For the week of June 3rd, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Lone Survivor to Blu-ray. Based on the nonfiction book by Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor documents, in minute, hellish details, the battle that erupted between a hundred Taliban warriors and the four Navy SEALs (played on-screen by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, and Emile Hirsch) who found themselves stranded in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains. Part of what makes the film so interesting is how director Peter Berg modulates the tone; if Luttrell's memoir is far more explicitly politically conservative, then Berg's movie version maintains an ambivalent keel. His Lone Survivor is definitely pro-soldier: Luttrell and his fellow SEALs are courageous and brave and never less than righteous, almost hyperbolically so - the opening sequence portrays life among the SEALs in the same stirring, gently lyrical mode that Berg brought to both the film and TV versions of Friday Night Lights, and the extended firefight that dominates Lone Survivor shows the SEALs meting out - and absorbing - damage that might seem unrealistic in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. That said, the fact remains that these men were capable of such feats (a little outside research reveals that Luttrell and his squad really did endure the brutality tossed at them - it's legitimately incredible/horrifying how many times each man was shot or otherwise injured), and Berg allows them to retain their physical and emotional qualities while casting a critical eye at their surroundings. His depiction of modern warfare is as frightening and terrible as anything in Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down, and he doesn't neglect to show how some key blunders in the U.S. military bureaucracy only made things worse for the four doomed SEALs. Only at the very end does Berg's film stumble. He stages a thrilling shootout in a Pashtun village, and though the sequence does illustrate the heroism of the Afghani civilians who came to the SEALs' aid, in real life, the situation resolved itself in a far less viscerally charged - but no less powerful - manner. Still, even though Berg deviates from the record to make room for Hollywood conventions, Lone Survivor remains a marvel, a scary, tragic, and exciting look at how combat tests the bonds of friendship.
In his Lone Survivor Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "Director Peter Berg holds absolutely nothing back from a visual perspective. He never creates superheroes out of the men, despite the sheer amount of damage inflected upon them. Almost from the first shots in the firefight they're depicted as weary and slowed, bloody and broken, standing more on courage and purpose than on working feet and legs. They are portrayed heroically but realistically. The film never goes into machismo territory, never portrays its characters as anything less than human and terribly frail. They hurt, they bleed, they feel; all the training they've endured, all the mental conditioning they've taken in carries them as far as human endurance fueled by adrenaline, pushed forward by that training, and supported by an unbreakable will allows, and no further. Technically, the film is beautifully put together. Its action scenes feel authentic in delivery, and the realism with which the men fight and operate, down to the finest details on weapons operations and combat tactics, enhances the action in a way that throwaway Action films that create de facto Terminators out of their characters could never understand. The audience will almost literally feel every hit, each bullet that barely misses, each explosion that's inches away from disaster. It's as intimately and painstakingly crafted as Saving Private Ryan and one of the most realistically brutal depictions of war most will ever experience in motion pictures."
From Shout Factory comes the idiosyncratic thriller Ravenous. The cult of Ravenous has steadily grown over the years, and while I'm sure the film's original distributor - 20th Century Fox - would have liked for it to have found widespread success back in 1999 (Ravenous tanked hard at the box-office), its underground reception is much deserved. Part of the fun is watching the picture shift genres: it starts out as a seriocomic morality play of sorts, as U.S. soldier Boyd (Guy Pearce) finds himself demoted to remote Fort Spencer in the Sierra Nevadas. Boyd's cowardice during the Mexican-American War is the military's worst-kept secret, but he seems no worse than the oddballs populating Fort Spencer, and for a little while, it seems like Ravenous might be content to fashion itself as an 1840s version of Catch-22 - Pearce's supporting cast (including Jeffrey Jones, David Arquette, Jeremy Davies, and Neal McDonough) pitches things at an inspired pitch of light surrealism, a tone that composers Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn reinforce with their deliberately anachronistic and atonal score. Yet without losing its sense of humor, Ravenous moves into a different key as Robert Carlyle's mysterious Colqhoun enters the picture. He's a weary traveller with a tale of snowbound horrors and cannibalism, and...but I've already said too much. Suffice to say, Ravenous takes great pleasure in playing Pearce's nervy coward off Carlyle's slippery rogue, and their conflict creates an atmosphere of...greater comedy? Visceral horror? Social satire? A cry in favor of vegetarianism? Postmodern myth? All of the above? It's a testament to the late director Antonia Bird that all these styles mesh so well. At times, you wonder if Bird knew that Ravenous would effectively torpedo her feature-film career (although she worked consistently for television until her death in 2013, she never again directed a theatrically distributed feature after Ravenous) and was hell-bent on getting everything she might possibly want into it. To her credit, the effort never shows. For all its oddities, Ravenous always seems confident and self-assured. Perhaps Fox was foolish to expect Titanic-level dollars from this one – it's too strange, too offbeat. But it's also wholly its own beast, an uncompromised work from a studio system that mostly demands compromises.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review notes that the film "features a well constructed plot and some really good performances, and if it doesn't quite catch the brass ring, it's generally unsettling and provides a great showcase for Robert Carlyle, an actor who has become famous for disappearing into a variety of sometimes odd characters. Ravenous was a disaster in its theatrical exhibition despite a fairly wide opening and at least lukewarm (if not ecstatic) reviews, but with the ensuing years of cookie cutter horror offerings glutting the home video market, it now seems like an unusually original and spooky entry into at the very least the cannibalism subgenre. The film's screenwriter was Ted Griffin, who went on to such blockbusters as Ocean's Eleven, but who was here making his debut in a rather spectacularly twisted (in both senses of that word) fashion. Ravenous has a number of fun surprises along the way, along with introducing a couple of new elements into cannibal mythology."
MGM and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment are giving Sergio Leone's The Man with No Name Trilogy another HD iteration. Despite the slight inaccuracy of that label (Clint Eastwood's central cowboy actually does have a name in each entry, though the fact that it changes from film to film suggests a certain degree of impermanence), these three pictures remain the iconic Spaghetti Westerns, the ones with which Leone has secured his legacy in screen history. They really demonstrate the old, "it's the telling, not the tale" adage; Leone and his screenwriters crib equal parts from Yojimbo, Lawrence of Arabia, the oaters of Budd Boetticher, and even Hollywood adventures like Gunga Din to craft the narratives for A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. However, it's the style that makes these features feel like more than crass ripoffs. Leone might appropriate parts of other films with abandon, but he recasts them in a harsh, unforgiving light. These aren't the fun Westerns that John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and the Cisco Kid headlined – Leone's "heroes" are venal, petty, and cruel, and if Eastwood's character comes off as more likable than the rest, it's only because the people he kills are so much worse (shades of Richard Stark's "Parker" character). Everything, from morals to geography (while the three films are set in Mexico and the American Southwest, Leone shot them primarily in Spain and Italy), is off-kilter in Leone's world, and that dislocation makes his Westerns fascinating to consider. Now, there already is an available Blu-ray package collecting the three films. What sets this one apart is MGM and Fox's treatment of the last film in the unofficial series, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When it first made its Blu-ray debut, the film was marred by print defects and excessive DNR, all of which corrupted the texture of Leone's aesthetics. This new version finds the distributors trying to remedy those issues, à la their handling of the Patton and RoboCop remasters.
Also from MGM and Fox is the hilarious The Birdcage. The Birdcage is that rare beast: an Americanized remake of a beloved foreign classic that manages to be as good (or better!) than the original, in this case the 1978 French comedy La Cage aux Folles. Both films have the same plot: a loving gay couple (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane) resorts to farcically drastic measures in order to seem straight when their son (Dan Futterman) introduces them to his fiancée's ultra-conservative parents (Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest). Other than the language change, The Birdcage transports the action from St. Tropez to Miami and injects a heavy dose of Bill Clinton-era political satire into Hackman's storyline, yet it never feels like a bland copy of La Cage. Of course, considering the film's primary architects, it would be hard to achieve "bland" - for comedy geeks, The Birdcage matters because it reunites legendary comedy duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and even though both are operating behind the camera (Nichols directed the film, and May wrote the script), the end result has the same freshness, the same warped sensibility of their best stage routines. A scene where Williams tries to teach Lane how to act more masculine feels like it could have been an unused Nichols/May skit, as does practically everything involving the couple's flamboyantly moronic housekeeper Agador (Hank Azaria, who steals every scene he's in - his attempts at propriety during the family dinner that concludes the film reach Marx Brothers-levels of lunacy). Still, as hilarious as the film is, it's also fundamentally warm. Nichols and May take Williams and Lane's relationship seriously, and we buy them as a long-suffering, quirky, yet deeply committed pair. It helps that Williams is uncharacteristically reigned in. Minus his frenzied impersonation of modern dance choreographers, he's playing the straight man (no pun intended) to Lane's emotional wild card, and the dynamic makes sense. Besides the fact that this tonal division of labor helps to keep the audience from getting exhausted (Williams and Lane riffing at full throttle for two hours would get very old, very fast), the character differences explain why their characters' relationship works. Williams grounds the manic Lane, who in turn adds some needed unpredictability to Williams' life. Best of all, even though The Birdcage is, to an extent, a "message movie," it rarely stoops to actively preach tolerance since it's more concerned with being funny. This is how you make a remake: with verve, style, and endless good humor.