For the week of July 15th, Lionsgate is distributing the Blu-ray of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin. A British filmmaker who cut his teeth on a series of visually experimental music videos (he is responsible for Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" and Radiohead's "Karma Police"), Glazer entered the feature-film world with two strikingly iconoclastic pictures: the subversive British gangster thriller Sexy Beast and the austere, meditative relationship drama Birth, with its great Nicole Kidman performance. Under the Skin is his first film since Birth, and the ten years between the two have done nothing to diminish Glazer's talent for taking tired premises (in Sexy Beast, a former criminal pressured into one last job; in Birth, a woman confronted by her reincarnated ex-husband) and enlivening them through unexpected and surreal details. Under the Skin, too, is nominally a sci-fi horror. Its heroine is an alien (Scarlett Johansson) who assumes human form in order to ensnare men for her ghoulish, nefarious purposes, and already we're not a million miles removed from something like Species. However, if Under the Skin has any direct antecedent, it's Nicolas Roeg's 1976 cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, and how its central extraterrestrial (David Bowie, natch) receives a crash course in the ways of Earth culture. Johansson's unnamed protagonist may begin the film regarding humans as little more than fleshy commodities (and the sequences that show what happens after she seduces men are Kubrickian in their view of cosmic terror), but the more time she spends around our kind, the more she begins to...empathize with us? Respect us? Fear us? To the movie's credit, it's never quite clear, and Glazer's elision of conventional narrative explanations lets Johansson explore her character's fundamental ambiguities. It's a phenomenal piece of acting, whether she's flirting with her targets (in scenes that are largely improvised – many of the male "cast members," as it were, were random Scottish passersby who didn't know they were being filmed) or navigating her way through unfamiliar emotional and physical landscapes, and she alone helps to turn Under the Skin from an illusive sci-fi meditation into something greater: a treatise on the male gaze and gender stereotypes in contemporary society.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "Quite a bit of Under the Skin is intentionally repetitive and dreamlike. In fact, in another odd but visceral sequence, the alien picks up a badly disfigured guy (who suffers from what looks like Elephant Man syndrome) and takes him back to her flat, where he repeatedly asks her if he's dreaming. In just one of the film's oblique developments, the guy actually evades the alien's 'plans' for him, only to run smack dab into the film's other recurring character, a mysterious guy who zooms through the Scottish highlands on a high speed motorcycle, evidently acting as a clean up crew for any mistakes. There's little doubt that Under the Skin is an incredibly unique film experience, but its intentional obscurity frankly doesn't seem to hide much in the way of depth or nuance, and in fact seems to be simply a deliberate style choice more than anything. Why, for example, does the alien injure or kill a man she encounters on a rock strewn Scottish beach? What's with the gaggle of girls dragging the alien into a strobe light infested dance club? Do they think she's the woman the alien has 'become' by wearing that skin? And what exactly is the goal of the alien and the motorcycle rider? In fact, what are these two trying to accomplish? Does the conflagration that caps the film augur an end to this 'mission,' or is it simply going to begin again, as hinted at by the film's opening scenes? These are all central questions whose answers might at least help to make sense of the narrative, but based on an admittedly non-scientific survey of various responses to the film, there does not seem to be even a smattering of agreement on what these - or indeed many other - elements in Under the Skin actually mean. Like the alien herself, we're left to simply observe, perhaps comprehending little if anything."
From Warner Home Entertainment and Adult Swim comes the Season 1 set of the network's Black Dynamite cartoon series. This animated take on Scott Sanders and Michael Jai White's 2009 comedy favorite has the same basic format – a super-cool community leader/pimp (White) fights all manners of bizarre crimes – though it has jettisoned the film version's wittiest conceit: like Grindhouse, Black Dynamite reveled in the imperfect trappings of exploitation cinema, and it deliberately mined cinematic gaffes (blown lines, chintzy special effects, and nonsensical, haphazard plotting) to great comedic effect. The cartoon iteration, by comparison, is a far more polished beast, trading in faux-incompetence for a stylized, anime-esque aesthetic that looks like a mix between Samurai Champloo and The Boondocks (there's really only one bit of staged error: a visible boom-mike sight gag done in homage to the many boom drops in the film). In fact, this Black Dynamite often feels more like a spiritual sibling to The Boondocks than to the original feature film; the Black Dynamite series spends as much or more time satirizing political and cultural traditions of the 1970s and today, from barbed portraits of Michael Jackson, O.J. Simpson, and Richard Pryor, to jabs at the U.S. government policies towards drugs and the African-American community. While the show's increased social conscience is certainly admirable, it also isn't as angry or as focused as The Boondocks' best episodes (Sanders is a funny guy, but he doesn't have Aaron McGruder's volcanic sense of political indignation), and in the season's first half, a lot of the satire comes off as preachy and not particularly funny. What Black Dynamite excels at is pushing Blaxploitation clichés to absurdist extremes, and you can feel the show getting stronger the more it abandons its social agendas. An early episode that finds Black Dynamite's hype man Bullhorn (Byron Minns) getting embroiled in the world of interracial pornography is a delight, as is "Panic on the Player's Ball Express or That's Influenza Sucka," a mix of Murder on the Orient Express and Phantom of the Paradise that is the highpoint of Season 1.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Scanners to Blu-ray this week. Director David Cronenberg came onto the radar of many horror fans with this paranoid thriller about the schism between a groups of scanners, telepaths capable of great (and often gory) feats of mental manipulation. In a way, it's like an esoteric Hitchcock picture, complete with bewildered hero on the run Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), his plucky female sidekick (Jennifer O'Neill), and the amoral psychopath (Michael Ironside) willing to do anything to achieve his goal of world domination, except Cronenberg trades in traditional chase-movie beats for graphic violence and a sterile, oppressive mise-en-scene: most of the characters seem too disoriented and alienated to fully comprehend the thriller mechanics they must wade through. And it's that remove that makes Scanners more iconic than it is successful. Outside of its notorious head-exploding scenes, the film pokes along like The Parallax View on lithium, and Stephen Lack proves especially underwhelming; one wishes he could have brought a little more energy to compete with, say, the dynamism of Ironside's head villain. But the film does remain consistently interesting, especially for Cronenberg aficionados. More than either Shivers or Rabid, Scanners found Cronenberg asserting his now-trademark brand of chilly intellectualism into otherwise pulpy genre trappings – what other man-on-the-lam movie would spend so much time on the dispassionate evils of corporate culture, or on the crippling psychological ennui that accompanies having a terrifying psychic gift and not fully comprehending it? While the mix doesn't quite work here, it would just two years later, in the director's great horror-sci-fi-media satire Videodrome.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "The film is somewhat uneven, especially during the first half, where all of the key players and their agendas are identified...The obvious is discussed with puzzling attention that leads one to believe that the narrative could be a lot more complex. But it is not. The more time one spends with Vale, the more one begins to realize that his journey will follow a very familiar route. The finale is also underwhelming. The visual effects are good, but the moral dilemma Vale faces never becomes intriguing. It also feels like everything is rushed rather than carefully put together. Cronenberg once stated that Scanners was a very frustrating film to make because a lot was rushed during the production process. I think that the finale clearly proves that he was sincere. Despite its various flaws, however, Scanners is still worth seeing. For example, the sense of heavy paranoia that permeates the film is great. The nameless assassins that go after Vale and his temp partner...also create an element of surprise that push the film closer to the thriller genre (this reviewer thinks that there are some obvious similarities between Scanners and Sydney Pollack's 3 Days of the Condor). Also, it is the exploding head sequence the film is remembered for, but it is the terrific phone booth sequence everyone should have been talking about. It is absolutely brilliant. The fact that Cronenberg thought of it and then filmed it in the early 80s, long before the Internet was around, is quite incredible."
Also from Criterion is the Blu-ray version of Pickpocket, director Robert Bresson's compelling anti-morality play. I use "anti" because of Bresson's austere, refined style. Certainly the premise itself suggests a degree of heightened melodrama, with its protagonist Michel (Martin Lassalle), a conflicted Everyman who makes a conscious choice to enter a life of crime, namely pickpocketing strangers. To Michel, this action carries great spiritual power, as it proves that he has the power to deviate from conventional morality; no less of an authority on film as the late, great Roger Ebert believed that Bresson was using this petty crime as an avenue to comment on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. However, the beauty of Bresson is that his particular brand of moviemaking deliberately resists such overt thematic analyses. As in his masterful prison drama A Man Escaped, Bresson is less interested in subtext than in action, and he dramatizes Michel's internal debate through physical measures: Michel wandering the streets of Paris, the means by which he and his two associates (Kassagi and Pierre Étaix) steal from unsuspecting pedestrians, his fateful run-in with an undercover cop. The result is uncommonly tense and muscular: not a beat here feels unnecessary or out of place, and the emphasis on behavior means that viewers – not Bresson - imbue Michel with deeper resonance. It's possible to watch Pickpocket and see a layered examination of good and evil – it's just as valid to approach it as a straight, documentary-esque character study. Bresson doesn't set anything in stone, and that level of audience engagement helps set Pickpocket apart.
Svet Atanasov commented that "It has been said that Robert Bresson's Pickpocket was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment and Samuel Fuller's cult hit Pickup on South Street, but the story the film tells is largely unimportant. Indeed, the focus of attention is on the unique atmosphere in it and the manner in which it evolves as Michel faces different dilemmas. The film's visual style is extraordinary - the camera movement is well calculated, the framing is very precise (for example, there are no facial close-ups), and a number of transitions occur without big climatic moments. As a result, right until the final sequence - where a very important emotional shift occurs - the film looks almost unnervingly methodical and feels remarkably reserved. All of the main protagonists are played by visibly overworked non-professional actors who speak only when they must (Large portions of the film are silent). Their faces convey different emotions, but rarely reveal what they think or what their intentions are. This is all deliberate - Bresson forces the viewer to study their movement and placement rather than focus on their trivial dilemmas. The end result is a film that is seemingly wide open for interpretation. However, given that virtually all of Bresson's films have some religious overtones, it isn't difficult to argue that Michel's journey is a symbolic one, to a larger extent reaffirming Bresson's at times brittle faith in humanity and salvation."