For the week of June 24th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the action extravaganza 300: Rise of an Empire. From a structural standpoint, this newest installment in the 300 franchise is a frustrating experience. For its first thirty or forty minutes, director Noam Murro (taking over for Zach Snyder, who limits himself to producing and scripting duties this time around) is content to introduce the Athenian warriors under the command of Themistokles (Strike Back's Sullivan Stapleton) as they combat the Persians during altercations occurring simultaneously as the Spartans' doomed crusade from the first film, but then the film switches gears, jumping back to show the origin stories of Persian antagonists Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and Artemisia (Eva Green); it isn't until the movie is half over that we catch up to the end of the original 300, as Themistokles takes on Artemisia in an extended naval battle that, admittedly, suffers for the lack of Snyder's keen action staging behind the camera (Murro is a competent forger, but he doesn't come close to matching the Man of Steel director's knack for visceral poetry). Essentially, this is that rare movie that wants to be prequel, sequel, and side-quel, and while that isn't an impossible goal – the underrated Bourne Legacy pulled off a similar trick with surprising aplomb - Rise of an Empire's just-over-ninety-minute runtime (excluding end credits) doesn't give it the space to craft a satisfying any-quel. The result is a sequel (or something) that feels like it ends just as it's getting started.
On the other hand, despite these narrative failings, Rise of an Empire does improve on 300 in some ways. That first picture's uncomfortable fascistic overtones are tamped way down here; though Stapleton isn't as charismatic as Gerard Butler's King Leonidas, his Themistokles is a more enlightened fellow in a lot of ways, and thus more sympathetic – his attack on the Persians isn't as pronounced a fool's errand as Leonidas'. It helps, too, that we have a villain as compelling as Green's Artemisia. In any other film, she might be the hero: Artemisia fights against the Greeks because they murdered her family and sold her into prostitution, and for all her hyperbolic fleets of villainy (at one point, Green lustily kisses the decapitated head of one who crossed her), Green never lets us forget the broken humanity behind her very justifiable revenge. Even Themistokles sympathizes with her, to a degree, leading to the 300 series' most audacious moment, a graphic fight-sex scene that unfolds like the X-rated version of the similarly staged Johnny Depp-Eva Green-tryst in Dark Shadows, as Themistokles and Artemisia try to use their bodies in whatever way necessary to make the other person yield. It's a great scene in an alternatively undercooked and exciting picture, and it wouldn't work without Green, who's proven herself a master of finding subtle grace notes in campy excess (see her work on Showtime's Penny Dreadful for more proof of this).
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown called the film not "the full-fledged sequel it could have been, or even very satisfying on its own terms, but it has the makings of a great film and, I gotta say, I enjoyed a good chunk of it...Stapleton is a magnetic lead who brings far more to the table than the script provides, drawing upon his innate grit and gristle to deliver a hero worthy of the 300-verse. Green, meanwhile, is a sexy, slinky femme fatale from start to finish, chomping down on the entire film and gnawing through action sequences with the fierceness and ferocity of a true warrior princess. Santoro is excellent, especially in the pre-god Xerxes flashbacks, and [Lena] Headey, though a bit out of her element when charging into battle, lends emotional weight and gravitas to an otherwise glorified cameo. The high seas action is a blast too, at least once you give up the hope that it will ever amount to anything more than an exercise in let's top ourselves again! blood-letting. The ship combat is reasonably thrilling (above all, the first two naval skirmishes), the swordplay is fairly exciting, and the callbacks to the first film are, every now and then, pretty clever. 300 is still the smarter, savvier, more visually stirring comicbook actioner, but I suspect Rise of an Empire is better suited to mass audience consumption. So grab some popcorn, switch off the ol' brain-pan and watch sword pierce flesh, metal splinter wood, and ancient Persian might dash itself on the rocks of Athenian and Spartan will."
From the Criterion Collection comes an all-new HD upgrade of Richard Lester's classic Beatles comedy A Hard Day's Night. These days, the idea of a feature-length movie about a popular band tends to lead people to one of two conclusions: the embarrassingly hagiographic (One Direction: This Is Us) or the misguided vanity project (From Justin to Kelly). Not so with A Hard Day's Night. Lester ends up blending two disparate styles to wildly successful results. The film looks like a documentary, but it's more Don't Look Back in its look than Katy Perry: Part of Me; to show The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, as if you didn't already know) bumbling through London on their way to a television performance, Lester employs all sorts of vérité aesthetics, including handheld camerawork, jump cuts, and gritty monochrome photography. A Hard Day's Night looks like reality, a condition that takes on a more prankish, teasing light when you realize that their narrative is a complete fiction. Lester has made a great farce, when all is said and done, with The Beatles his madcap agents of chaos, delighting in all the mayhem they can create. Much of it, too, is of a surprisingly verbal nature – The Beatles fire off screenwriter Alun Owen's witty dialogue with the absurdist flair of the Marx Brothers. However, Lester's greatest conceit is that as inspired and funny as the Fab Four are, they don't give the iconic comic performance in the movie: that distinction belongs to Wilfrid Brambell, who plays Paul's "very clean" grandfather like the reincarnation of Bugs Bunny. A Hard Day's Night is so daring and funny that it work even without the host of great Beatles tracks. As is, the band's rendition of songs like "All My Loving," "Can't Buy Me Love," "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You," and the title track are just icing on the cake. One of the essential titles, folks.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review noted that the film "has that unique energy that is present in many of Jean-Luc Godard's early films. It is so overwhelming that it is almost irrelevant where the film wants to go and how it wants to get there...The film was scripted but it frequently looks and feels like George, John, Paul, and Ringo are simply being themselves while Lester's camera observes them from afar. The magic is in the careful framing and editing. The entire film is essentially a large collection of uneven episodes blending behind-the-scenes footage with music clips that remind of the various music mockumentaries MTV popularized. However, these episodes are so effectively framed and edited that the energy they sustain until the final credits roll makes it quite easy for one to believe that George, John, Paul, and Ringo might have been unaware that Lester's camera was filming them."
From Lionsgate comes the 1970s period drama Blood Ties. A remake of the 2008 French film Rivals, Blood Ties concerns itself with the relationship between two siblings, small-time hood Chris (Clive Owen, struggling mightily with an inconsistent American accent) and his NYPD cop brother Frank (Billy Crudup), and what happens when the end of Chris' prison sentence put the two in direct conflict with one another. Funnily enough, Blood Ties is not unlike 300: Rise of an Empire in that one performance makes it (semi) worthwhile. Almost nothing in the film is original; you can trace the hackneyed setup back to Pat O'Brian and Jimmy Cagney in 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces, and what rankles is that director Guillaume Canet does little to freshen up any of the clichés. His great 2006 thriller Tell No One gave heart and intensity to what would otherwise be a serviceable Michael Douglas-vehicle from the early 1990s, but he's far too content to wade through logy crime-movie tropes. Owen's story is boilerplate "just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in" stuff, rife with his Noo Yawk lackey (The Wire's Domenick Lombardozzi), two stereotypical love interests (Mila Kunis as the virgin; a miscast Marion Cotillard as the whore), and yet another ending that delivers a variation on the Carlito's Way finale (although Canet deserves props for tweaking it in an unexpected fashion). Also, for the love of all that is holy, can we please call a moratorium on a) casting Noah Emmerich as gruff police captains and b) using the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" to score scenes of drug use? It's certainly possible to make these tired beats feel fresh – co-screenwriter James Grey did just that with his underrated We Own the Night, which galvanized a not-dissimilar Cain-and-Abel-style crime drama through Grey's formal mastery (the film came off like a modern-day Greek tragedy) – but Canet presents these beats in a lo-fi, B-movie aesthetic that never transcends the material (think of it as an homage to Sidney Lumet as opposed to an actual Sidney Lumet movie).
Nor does it help that Blood Ties seems torn between pulp thrills and loftier aims. This version is a "Good Parts" take that races from one melodramatic twist to another, yet you sense the strands hanging from some richer, deeper cut: Owen and Crudup's long-suffering sister and father (Lili Taylor and a very affecting James Caan), Owen's attempts to reconnect with the children he hasn't seen in over a decade, or Crudup's borderline-illegal methods of separating a brutish thug (Bullhead star Matthias Schoenaerts, doing a flawless Brooklyn accent) from the woman (a very good Zoe Saldana) Frank once loved and lost. Still, I said Blood Ties is still worth watching, and that's entirely due to Crudup's brilliant performance. As a conflicted NYPD cop, Crudup does some amazingly internal work. His Frank barely knows how to express himself verbally (even his big Thanksgiving-day explosion at Chris comes out in stuttering, uncertain flashes), but the precision of his facial gestures and body language conveys everything we need to know about Frank's interactions with the world around him. Watch Crudup as he escorts Owen's character to his long-estranged family, or how he regards the far-too flashy Christmas present that Owen gives Caan – there's a lifetime in those glances, a whole backlog of disappointment and resentment, both at himself and at his brother. Crudup has made a stealth career of being the best thing in flawed movies (see also: Waking the Dead, The Watch, Thin Ice, Public Enemies, and Watchmen), and so it goes with Blood Ties, where he delivers one of his finest, most underappreciated turns in a movie that does not deserve his gifts.
Jeffrey Kauffman commented that "the marketing hype surrounding Blood Ties suggest it's an 'edge of your seat thriller,' a description that will probably only ring true if you consider roiling family dysfunction and star-crossed love affairs 'thrilling.' Co-writer and director Guillaume Canet made some waves on this side of the pond with his take on Hitchcockian suspense with the generally quite effective Tell No One, and interestingly actually starred in the original French version of this film, a 2009 Jacques Maillot effort entitled Les Liens du Sang. Despite running quite a bit longer than its progenitor, Blood Ties has an oddly lurching quality to it which suggests some salient information may have been left on the cutting room floor, which in turn begs the question, in favor of what? For an ostensible 'thriller,' Blood Ties is curiously lacking in either suspense or action, and instead tends to play out like a neo-modern reinterpretation of those hoary old Warner Brothers films where two brothers or friends grow up on opposite sides of the law. The film is nonetheless notable for a nicely rumpled and occasionally vicious star turn by Clive Owen as recently released murder convict Chris Pierzynski, a guy who seems to have noble intentions at least some of the time, but whose life story has spiraled out of control and continues to dribble away down the drain as the film progresses. Chris is paroled into the care of his distant and curt brother Frank (Billy Crudup), a New York City cop who alternates between scowling at Chris and tentatively attempting to help him forge a new life outside of the joint. Blood Ties takes place in a somewhat squalid mid-seventies timeframe, and while there's no outright allusion to American made cop films set in this same period (The French Connection, Serpico), in some ways the film's most successful element is its recreation of an era, one which might be seen as a sort of smarmy underbelly of a somewhat similar but flashier production design seen in American Hustle."
Finally, the cerebral mindgame Enemy finds its way to Blu-ray this week. Enemy represents the second collaboration between director Denis Villeneuve and star Jake Gyllenhaal, the first being last year's thriller Prisoners, and the two movies couldn't be more dissimilar. Whereas Prisoners was a technically accomplished yet narratively conventional picture (think Zodiac as written and directed by Law & Order showrunner Dick Wolf), Enemy is far chiller; a loose adaptation of José Saramago's novel The Double, the film stars Gyllenhaal as Adam Bell, an alienated college professor whose life takes an existential turn when he discovers an actor (Gyllenhaal again) who looks just like him. The obvious inspiration for a film like this is David Cronenberg's great Dead Ringers, with its iconic lead performance(s) from Jeremy Irons as disturbed twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, and certainly Villeneuve makes some clever nods towards that earlier work; both take place in Toronto, and both hinge on the key differences between the visually identical protagonists (Adam is almost painfully reserved, while his double Anthony is more brazen and aggressive, and Gyllenhaal does a brilliant job of differentiating between the two through subtle body language and character nuances)
However, Enemy makes it clear early on that Adam and Anthony are not long-lost twins or otherwise biologically related, and that incongruity adds a layer of inscrutability missing from Cronenberg's 1988 masterwork. The two men share no apparent links, yet they find themselves drawn to something in the other person, and...well, it's hard to say what it all means. Villeneuve shoots Enemy like a Kafka-esque nightmare, all inky blacks and sickly yellows and damp cityscapes threatening to overwhelm his leads, and his dreamlike interjections of giant spiders trying to navigate this world call to mind The Metamorphosis. That said, Enemy could be about achieving some kind of new physical transformation, or it could be a paranoid look at the war between the sexes, as both Adam and Anthony struggle to define themselves in proximity to their relationships with the different women in their lives (played by Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, and Isabella Rossellini). These shadings take on an increasingly psychosexual dimension as Enemy nears its trippy conclusion, and in truth, Villeneuve flirts with both incoherence and misogyny in the way he limits his female characters to fit Gyllenhaal's mounting paranoia towards them. But again, it's hard to say what he's really up to, and that alternating sense of confusion and mystery might very well make Enemy a minor classic among headtrip fans.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "the smartest thrillers that play on perception and ambivalence often offer two (or sometimes more) 'solutions' to looking at things, any of which are equally comprehensible and meaningful. Enemy instead posits a whole raft of questions without providing any truly understandable answers. The film begins with an epigraph from Saramago which states 'Chaos is order yet undeciphered,' but cynics may want to paraphrase Freud's famous maxim about the cigar and say 'Sometimes chaos is just chaos.' There are a lot of tantalizing elements in Enemy, but it's obvious virtually from the get go that Gullón and Villenueve have little overt interest in deciphering anything (despite Villenueve's published claims to the contrary), leaving the viewer grasping for analytical straws where there indeed may be none. A huge gamut of analyses have sprung up in Enemy's wake, including everything from Adam and Anthony actually being the same character in the throes of a psychotic break to the entire film being a heavily veiled critique of totalitarianism. The questions may loom larger than the answers in Enemy, but that may be one of the most salient reasons the film musters such a weirdly hallucinogenic and hypnotic allure."