For the week of August 19th, Sony Home Entertainment is bringing The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to Blu-ray. The first The Amazing Spider-Man was about as good a movie made solely to keep the Spider-Man-character rights from reverting back to Marvel Studios could be – while it never distinguished itself as strongly as Sam Raimi's bouncier, often witty Spider-Man trilogy, it also never dropped to anything resembling that earlier series' nadir (I'm looking at you, Spider-Man 3), and (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb got especially good performances from Andrew Garfield's new Spidey and Emma Stone's sardonic Gwen Stacy. You walked out of that last one feeling like there was room for improvement (in a good way), which The Amazing Spider-Man 2 delivers, but only in fits and starts. For every one thing this new picture gets right – better action sequences, Hans Zimmer's new Spider-Man theme, a surprisingly dark climax (no overt spoilers, save this: comic-book fans, it's exactly what you're expecting) – it bungles two or three other things. The film is simultaneously bloated and truncated - how else to explain Peter Parker's "enhanced" backstory, which twists and bends and jolts and makes little sense by the end (something about fate and genetic modification and Campbell Scott's unnecessary turn as Peter's father), or the cavalcade of underdeveloped villains (not only does Peter have to do battle with Paul Giamatti's Rhino, Jamie Foxx's Electro, and Dane DeHaan's Green Goblin, but even the villains get their own villains, in the form of B.J. Novak, Colm Feore, and Marton Csokas' sleazy authority figures) that recalls a Joel Schumacher Batman movie, or a high-profile supporting cast that Webb and screenwriters Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Jeff Pinkner use merely as placeholders for important characters in future movies (hence Felicity Jones and Chris Cooper popping up as, respectively, Felicia Hardy and Norman Osborn and getting nothing to do – their names are their most important features)? Even Garfield and Stone aren't as charming as they were the first go-round. We get an endless sequence of scenes where the two break-up and then get back together, and you can see Garfield and Stone sweat as they try to improvise their way through beyond-token relationship beats, maybe in the hopes that their natural chemistry will elevate the material (spoiler: it doesn't). Part of the problem is that despite all the talent on display, Sony is making a product rather than a movie. The studio desperately wants to compete with Marvel's Avengers-and-beyond roster, and so it's trying to reverse-engineer a universe from one superhero, with much of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feeling like a setup not for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 but for the proposed Sinister Six franchise that Sony is hoping to get off the ground. That flawed world-building accounts for how inconsistently the secrets are parceled out (much of the plot for this movie grew out of The Amazing Spider-Man deleted scenes – Sony wanted a whole, multi-film mythology where none previously existed), or why character growth and development fall a distant second to exposition dumps (DeHaan and Foxx's characters suffer the most in this regard – you can sense whole swaths of their motivations jettisoned in favor of more plot). Unfortunately for Sony, the audience picked up on these substandard building practices: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 struggled to gross $200 million domestically, and now Sony is pushing The Amazing Spider-Man 3 from 2016 to 2018. Here's hoping when it returns, the focus is on telling one good story as opposed to building a better blockbuster.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "Like most every other Spider-Man movie, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 falls over the map in terms of its action and drama. There's no shortage of stuff going on: flashbacks, Peter's search for his parents, Peter's on-and-off relationship with Gwen, Peter's relationship with Harry, Peter's relationship with his aunt, Peter's relationship with his alter-ego, the emergence of Electro, the slow build towards Green Goblin, backstory and scientific mumbo-jumbo galore, tons of action, a fair bit of comedy, and a mostly linear core story that's criss-crossed by all of the above. It's not that none of it works, it[']s that none of it works in perfect harmony...It's ultimately little more than a slick and stylized regurgitation of the usual Spider-Man battle antics that see him slinging around, shooting webs (with a little science-y help), and ending the battle with a few tears in his costume but otherwise ready for the next challenge. And that's the problem with the entire thing. It's all a bunch of themes and action scenes that have been done before. It's why the end is so good and almost simultaneously so bad, pushing the story forward and then really pushing it forward, skipping out on all the stuff that should have set the third installment apart but ultimately just ensured that it would (more than likely) be nothing more than another round of the same: more slinging, more city destruction, more cop cars piled up and burned out, and so on and so forth."
Sony is also bringing Only Lovers Left Alive to Blu-ray on Tuesday, and this picture couldn't be more different from The Amazing Spider-Man 2. A funky, offbeat horror-comedy, the film is the latest from independent cinema auteur Jim Jarmusch, and it would make a great triple feature with his other genre ventures, the psychedelic Western Dead Man and the gangster-Samurai-Beat Poem Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Here, Jarmusch documents the reunion of two centuries-old vampires, the aptly named Adam (Tom Hiddleston, whose presence technically acts as a link between this and the Marvel universe, though his ennui-filled bloodsucker couldn't be more dissimilar from Loki) and Eve (the incomparable Tilda Swinton), but their pairing doesn't portend the beginning of the Apocalypse or something horrible; Jarmusch couldn't care less about honoring hoary horror tropes. Instead, he turns Only Lovers Left Alive into an improbable - but wholly delightful - hangout movie, one that's more than content to follow Adam and Eve as they drift back into one another's orbit. They listen to records, they take night drives through a dilapidated Detroit, and they drink cruelty-free blood (supplied by Jarmusch favorite Jeffrey Wright), all the while reminiscing about a life that seems to move both too quickly and too slowly. Eventually, a plot (of sorts) surfaces, with the arrival of Eve's wilder younger sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), but Jarmusch doesn't let her presence upend the tone of deadpan cool he's cultivated, and he views the chaos she creates like Adam and Eve do, from a bemused reserve. Yet somehow, none of this plays like a hipster gag: Jarmusch deeply cares about his vampiric heroes, and behind all the dry wit, there's a keen sadness, an acknowledgment of the loss and pain that remains an inseparable part of life. If nothing else, Only Lovers Left Alive surely ranks as one of the year's best films, but I'm tempted to call it a personal best for Jarmusch as well – it's just as wise and funny as his great Mystery Train and Down by Law.
From Magnet/Magnolia comes the horror-thriller The Sacrament. Ti West, the film's writer/director/editor, has made a name for himself in the horror genre as a classicist à la Roman Polanski or Val Lewton. In films like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, West builds scares patiently, using careful framing and sound design (the latter courtesy of Graham Resnick) to ratchet up the tension until it seems primed to explode; jump cuts and graphic violence don't have much of a role in West's work. And if nothing else, The Sacrament disappoints because it doesn't follow any of these precedents. Although the setup is fine – a Vice producer (A.J. Bowen) documents the reunion of a fashion photographer (Kentucker Audley) with his sister (Amy Seimetz) at a mysterious religious community, and predictably horrifying results ensue – West bungles the execution by staging everything as if it's a faux-Vice exposé, complete with asides to the viewer and herky-jerky camera movement. That's right, it's a found-footage piece, which means all West's formal control goes right out the window, especially after things get bloody, and we're subjected to twenty-or-so minutes of horrible violence that bobs and weaves and distorts in the name of vérité. The film just feels careless in a way that none of West's other full-length features are, and not just in the sloppy, tossed-off aesthetic. For one, he can't guide his actors to give natural performances. Watching people like Seimetz and Bowen stage-deliver lines that should sound extemporaneous and off-the-cuff ruins the documentary approach (only Gene Jones, as the Elmer Gantry-like leader of the community, and Joe Swanberg's intrepid cameraman sell the reality of the film): we're a long way from Sara Paxton and Pat Healy's winning, utterly genuine protagonists in The Innkeepers. Furthermore, once you've figured out what kind of horror movie The Sacrament is – and Jones' appearance is a big clue – all the bloodshed plays out in a rote fashion. There's a direct antecedent to this movie, and if you're at all familiar with it, then The Sacrament won't surprise you. To be fair, West stages a couple good scares (including a poisoning that occurs in one agonizing take), but for a better version of this material, you should seek out Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans' brilliant "Safe Haven" segment from V/H/S 2. In a fraction of The Sacrament's screen time, "Safe Haven" provides better characters, more original shocks, and some breathtaking filmmaking. You know, the kind of things West excelled at.
Finally, Criterion is bringing Alfonso Cuarón's great Y Tu Mamá También to Blu-ray. It's interesting to rewatch this film on the heels of Cuarón's reinvention as maybe the most playful and inventive of all blockbuster directors; you look at the work he's done on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men, and the Academy Award-winning Gravity, and it makes this modest (in terms of scope and budget) picture all the more surprising. Y Tu Mamá También is a stripped-down, raunchy sex comedy that suggests what might happen if Michelangelo Antonioni directed Risky Business: Cuarón centers on Julio and Tenoch (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna), two horny teenage friends who, after their girlfriends go on vacation for the summer, manage to convince the older and more experienced Luisa (Pan's Labyrinth's Maribel Verdu) to accompany them on a road trip across Mexico. The two boys have little beyond sex on their minds, but Luisa's hiding a darker secret, and the intersection of those two mindsets gives Y Tu Mamá También its off-center, unique energy. This is a very funny movie, with Julio and Tenoch's idiot teenager antics offering many opportunities for rude humor, but Cuarón keeps tempering their libidos with sad truths, from the ways Luisa begins manipulating them into facing scary emotional realities to a narrator (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) that keeps informing viewers of all the messy heartbreaks and complications behind the Mexican landscape that Julio and Tenoch view only as background noise. The film is raw, sexually explicit, and deliberately ambiguous, and on first glance it couldn't be more dissimilar from Cuarón's subsequent big-budget phase. In a weird way, though, the film exists at the nexus of Cuarón's earlier humanist dramas (Great Expectations, Solo Con Tu Pareja) and his more recent blockbuster thrillers. While the issues on display are grounded in ways that, say, the time-travelling wizards of his Harry Potter venture or the global birth catastrophe powering Children of Men are not, Cuarón and his longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki capture both realms in the same loping, naturalistic style. There's a clear through-line between the way they use the tension of a single, complicated take to capture how a sexual experience changes Julio and Tenoch and how the routine space mission in Gravity can go so horribly awry. In both instances, we're looking at filmmakers giddy to build setpieces teeming with life on the outskirts, and bound to follow Said Life when it intrudes. The emotional wallop at the end of Cuarón's movies is undeniable, and Y Tu Mamá También is no exception.
Svet Atanasov commented that the film illustrates how "real life is a series of events, meetings, and departures, the significance of which most of us realize long after they occur. For Tenoch, Julio and Luisa this realization occurs at different points...For Tenoch and Julio it is at the end of the film, for Luisa it is at the very beginning of it...Sex has a very important role in it, and Cuaron never uses it to evoke impure feelings or sensations. On the contrary, because nothing about it is manipulated, it is inoffensive and harmless. The three leads are spectacular. Bernal and Luna play the two young boys who can't control their sexual urges to perfection. There is a scene...where they masturbate together in front of a giant pool that is beyond hilarious. Verdú is also sensational...Her performance is relaxed but remarkably confident. She undergoes a fascinating character transformation that is very effectively captured by Cuaron's camera. The hand-held camera footage could be slightly distracting at times but it is nevertheless effective. Also, many of the panoramic vistas from the Mexican countryside are beautiful but at the same time incredibly disturbing."