For the week of July 29th, Paramount Home Entertainment is bringing Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery to Blu-ray. It's hard to think of something new to say about this most iconic of cult television shows. Filmmaker David Lynch's bizarre, singular mix of police procedural, soap opera, absurdist comedy, and horror ranks alongside The Prisoner and Freaks and Geeks as one of the few shows that emerged fully formed, and that inspired a whole generation of TV showrunners despite its relatively limited episode count; in just thirty episodes, Twin Peaks managed to implant its DNA into such small-screen projects as Lost, The X-Files, The Killing, True Detective, American Horror Story, and The Sopranos. In fact, the show is so influential that it's easy to forget how wildly it could vary in quality. The abbreviated first season (only seven episodes) is a thing of beauty, a perfect television run that introduced viewers to the world of Twin Peaks and how the death of young Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) kickstarted a period of spiritual decay that revealed the deep rot at the town's core. The cliffhanger finale promised even more blissful, terrifying mysteries to come, and they did, although not at the same confident pace. Behind the scenes of Season 2, Lynch and showrunner Mark Frost were struggling with ABC to get their vision of the show on-screen, and that tension is present throughout the season. For every moment of pure Lynchian weirdness (including a few that feel deliberately distended, as if Lynch was throwing a defiant kiss-off to the network that nonetheless crippled the show's forward momentum), there's a ABC mandate, like the premature resolution to the Laura Palmer case that happened midway through the season and left Frost and Lynch scrambling to generate material for the back-end. This move almost fatally compromised Twin Peaks, especially in the way that it relegated Kyle MacLachlan's brilliant, daffy FBI protagonist Dale Cooper to the sidelines, but the show found its way by the end, a finale which is as frightening a piece of television as has ever been seen. By that point, it was too late: ratings were down, and ABC wanted out of the auteur business. Yet Twin Peaks endures, and this Blu-ray set bundles all thirty episodes with the controversial Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me prequel/epilogue and ninety minutes of Fire Walk with Me deleted scenes. This "lost" footage is a revelation, particularly for people who left Fire Walk with Me unsatisfied. We get character beats from many Twin Peaks favorites, and though this stuff isn't essential to the movie-length story Lynch wanted to tell, it provides a welcome, often funny break from the unrelenting horrors of Fire Walk with Me.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown comments on the legacy of the series, how after Season Two "Lynch and Frost split. Irreconcilable differences. Key members of the cast parted ways. Most stood by their director, but others, Kyle MacLachlan in particular, felt abandoned, while still others like Lara Flynn Boyle held a grudge, refusing to return to the Lynch fold. Wounded, reeling, and above all obsessed, Lynch hurriedly announced, wrote and produced the now-infamous 1992 theatrical prequel Fire Walk with Me; sans Boyle and with a distressing eleventh hour change that, by MacLachlan's own request, reduced Agent Cooper's role to a glorified cameo. Booed at Cannes, eviscerated by critics and flatly rejected at the box office (earning less than $5 million), the feature film was nothing short of the saga's death knell. Twin Peaks was no more. And yet the series continues its rise from the ashes, even some twenty-two years after its immolation. Still largely unfinished and unresolved, yes, but with a growing fanbase as fascinated by the series and its strange smalltown mysteries as it is by the story of its production, tumultuous run and untimely end. Make no mistake, despite its faults, Twin Peaks altered the television landscape forever. We still reap the benefits today. It remains as engrossing a story as it ever was, with a bold, surreal, cinematic eccentricity that stands in defiance of its age and almost prophetically ahead of its time."
Also from Paramount comes Darren Aronofsky's Biblical epic Noah. A dark retelling of the Noah's ark story, Noah finds Aronofsky firmly entrenched in the same brainy fantasy territory as his metaphysical romance The Fountain. Both films were long-gestating passion projects, and both seemed designed to push the director into cosmic realms far more expansive than the brutally intimate emotional spaces of Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and the Academy Award-winning Black Swan. The big difference is, budget mandates from Warner Bros. meant that Aronofsky had to scale back the extent of his Fountain ambitions (despite spanning thousands of years and galaxies, the final screen version of The Fountain cost a relatively paltry $35 million), whereas with Noah, Paramount pretty much gave him carte blanche. If nothing else, seeing Aronofsky adopt his style for the $125-million blockbuster crowd is a trip - the hip-hop montages and gritty camerawork remain, but now they're vividly realized through massive sets and photorealistic CGI. But here's the thing about studio compromises: for every time that they gut an artist's creative intentions (see Twin Peaks above), they can also force a filmmaker to get even more focused and creative. The Fountain at $35 million is as lean and purposeful a feature as Aronofsky has ever made; there's not an ounce of wasted space, with everything supporting Hugh Jackman's heartbreaking quest to defeat Death and save his dying wife (Rachel Weisz). Noah, however, tends to sprawl. Besides the efforts of the title character (Russell Crowe, in the best performance he's given in a long time) as he tries to save the planet, Aronofsky tosses in his family's struggles – most notably a neglected son (Logan Lerman) desperate for his father's affections and an adopted daughter (Emma Watson) torn apart by her inability to conceive a child – alongside the mustache-twirling machinations of Ray Winstone's Tubal-cain to secure humanity's place on the ark, the involvement of the Transformer-like Nephilim angels in preparations for the Earth's flooding, and even a bizarre cameo from Anthony Hopkins as Noah's giggling, prescient grandfather Methuselah.
It isn't that any of this added stuff is terrible (though Hopkins comes the closest), but Aronofsky's creative instincts don't really lend themselves to any sort of bloat. He works best in concentrated bursts and at 138 minutes (the longest of all Aronofsky's movies, beating out The Wrestler at 109 minutes), Noah doesn't have the same focus. So it goes with the film's thematic instincts. In many ways, this is as calculated a response to established Christian doctrines as Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Aronofsky's vision makes room for evolution (represented through the most thrilling montage in a film stuffed with thrilling montages), condemns corporate and industrial greed, and casts Noah as a militant environmentalist whose actions towards the people around him grow increasingly deranged as he becomes convinced of humanity's folly (once his family sets sail in the ark, there are times when Noah comes off like the early-Man version of Jack Torrance from The Shining). Yet this is also a film that believes deeply in the presence of God, allows for a myriad of religious miracles, and even subtly argues that to effective powerful change, one must always remain truly devout. Both sides make for provocative discussion, but they don't really work sandwiched together. Again, it's indicative of too much money and time mudding the end result. Aronofsky might have the freedom this time to do everything, except directing is all about making choices, and it feels like precious few of those were made here.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that "Noah won't replace the family Bible, but then again nothing could, or should, do that. It's easy to understand why the film divided audiences as it did. It's nowhere close to the Biblical portrayal of Noah, which is admittedly a rather short stretch in a long chapter of an even longer Bible. There's no way to make a Noah movie without adding to or subtracting from the basic text on which it is based, lest one make a largely silent film that lasts mere minutes or, on the other hand, fails to speak to or entertain its audience. Why, then, make the movie in the first place, and why make it so different from what people who have known the story since Sunday School expect of it? That's a question better left to Darren Aronofsky and Paramount, but the film did do considerable business and will no doubt sell a considerable number of Blu-ray, DVD, and digital units. Taken at face value, the movie is an entertaining and beautifully constructed picture, a borderline masterpiece of simple storytelling on a rather small scale set against a large backdrop and a huge dramatic arc. Taken literally, on the other hand, the movie is an absolute failure when compared to that, again, to quote Paramount, 'cornerstone of faith.' Audiences, as always, should decide for themselves but should certainly, at least, give the movie a try before writing it off completely, a move that's understandable in context but discouraged in a broader sense."
Even more vital a look at madness in cinema is Shout Factory's sixteen-film, thirteen-disc Herzog: The Collection. If director Werner Herzog has a mission statement, it is, by his own admission, that cinema exists to document "ecstatic truth," a condition that results when filmmakers capture life using cinema's many stylistic and dramatic qualities, and this package offers a great overview into the many ways that Herzog might pursue that truth. Here's a man whose fiction efforts still retain the patina of documentary, whether it's harnessing the very unpredictable mania of leading man Klaus Kinski to dramatic effect (their five films together: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde, all of which are included here, as is the My Best Fiend documentary about their working relationship) or employing the mentally challenged Bruno S. to headline The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, yet whose documentary features often contained a fair degree of fictional manipulations: I'm thinking of how Herzog staged some of the actions of the people he encountered in the Sahara for Fata Morgana, or how he got fighter pilot Dieter Dengler to recite a very Herzogian speech about jellyfish as if it were Dengler's own reminiscence in Little Dieter Needs to Fly. If there's any unifying factor, it's his sense of obsession, of being willing to plunge headfirst into life and emerge with a movie trailing behind him. The one problem with Herzog: The Collection is that it's a little too limited; for all its heft, the set only covers the first thirty years of Herzog's career. While that window includes some legendary fare, it wholly neglects his body of work from the last fourteen years. That run is nothing to scoff at – his great documentaries Grizzly Man and Into the Abyss, his idiosyncratic Invincible and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and his surprisingly engaging "Hollywood" movies Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans and Rescue Dawn, among many others - and its absence makes Shout's efforts feel less comprehensive than they could.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that Herzog "has been a seeming force of nature in film for decades, helping to define the New German Cinema (a somewhat later analog to the French New Wave). Herzog's filmography is rather breathtakingly diverse, traversing...traditional fiction, quasi-biographies, and a large number of documentaries. Through it all, Herzog himself has become the subject of considerable controversy, at times seeming to be as obsessively motivated as some of his film subjects. The auteur's off-kilter blend of nihilism and often black humor has given him and his films a decidedly unique place in contemporary media, to the point that a supposed note Herzog jotted off to his cleaning lady became an internet sensation (it's actually a brilliantly written parody by Dale Shaw). Shout! Factory, a label which repeatedly stubbed its corporate toe on its last big deluxe boxed set built around the talents of one person (Bruce Lee: The Legacy Collection, the only time in my reviewing career I have had to start over from scratch due to a complete recall and reissue) may seem to be throwing caution to the wind by upping the ante with this release...Werner Herzog fans are suddenly awash in an embarrassment of riches."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 favorite The Big Chill to Blu-ray. This wry dramedy shows Kasdan at the peak of his filmmaking powers; younger moviegoers might only know him today as the dubious talent behind the middling comedy Darling Companion and the genuinely risible Dreamcatcher adaptation, but in the 1980s, Kasdan was the preeminent American chronicler of white, upper-middle-class ennui (minus his 1985 Western Silverado and his underrated I Love You to Death, the only films he was associated with that really deviated from his favorite subgroup were his screenwriting gigs for Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi). That might sound like an underhanded compliment, as Kasdan's reticence to branch out into other social/cultural strata did lead to his creative downturn in the 1990s and 2000s, but in 1983, what would become stale still felt heartfelt and genuine. Kasdan deserved mention in the same breath as people like Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, and Woody Allen, and it was The Big Chill that gave him that prestige. The picture has a simple yet compelling hook: seven college friends (William Hurt, Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Jobeth Williams, Jeff Goldblum, Mary Kay Place, and Tom Berenger) reunite in early middle-age to mourn the suicide of their group's unofficial leader Alex (a barely glimpsed Kevin Costner – we only see him as a corpse, and we never see his face). As they commiserate over their loss, the group (plus Meg Tilly as Alex's much younger girlfriend) reminisces about life during and after college, including the niggling suspicion that each of them might have peaked while at school. There's something fundamentally European about the film in its willingness to let adults be adults for 105 minutes - we don't get any melodramatic plot twists or sudden revelations, and what little sex there is comes off as matter-of-fact and understated – and that's enough for Kasdan. He's so good at writing dialogue and sketching these eight individuals that despite its melancholy overtones, The Big Chill remains an immensely pleasurable experience, a kind of darkly tinged hangout movie that doesn't show its age too much because, at its core, it only concerns itself with people talking to one another. That's not to say it doesn't have issues, most notably a certain fundamental glibness (Kasdan ladles on the 1960s pop soundtrack a little thickly, and some of his character resolutions are too pat), yet the writing and performances help overcome this concern and cement The Big Chill as Kasdan's masterpiece (even if Body Heat is more conventionally exciting and Grand Canyon is more ambitious).