For the week of September 2nd, Summit and Lionsgate are bringing the sports drama Draft Day to Blu-ray. Well, maybe sports-analytics: as with the Academy Award-nominated Moneyball, Draft Day focuses on those in charge of picking a team, in this case Kevin Costner's Sonny Weaver Jr., who, as the (fictional) GM of the Cleveland Browns, gets one very hectic day to try and orchestrate a complicated draft selection. Perhaps it's best to talk about what Draft Day is versus what it isn't. It is a rousing, relatively smart piece of populist entertainment Costner gives one of his best, most likeable performances, and director Ivan Reitman seems more engaged here than he's been since...what, Dave in 1993? To convey the constant intensity of Sonny's day, Reitman employs a number of visual tricks, from split-screens to layered panels, and while neither one of these devices is revolutionary (if you've seen 24 or Ang Lee's Hulk, then you're already well acquainted with the aesthetic Reitman borrows), Reitman uses them confidently to pack the frame with as much visual information as possible. On those terms, Draft Day is a solid triple (to use a sports metaphor). That said, what Draft Day isn't is Moneyball, and that comparison ultimately harms the more recent feature. Whereas Moneyball had no problem throwing viewers into the deep end with regard to performance analytics and sabermetrics, Draft Day offers up a far more watered-down version of the draft; even as a novice to that realm, I sensed I was getting the Classics Illustrated take, and while that approach doesn't prove fatal to Draft Day, Moneyball deserves even more credit retroactively for employing a tech-and-statistics-savvy template and still coming off as approachable and entertaining. More disappointing is Draft Day reliance on formula. Sabermetrics is an unconventional topic, so Reitman and screenwriters Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman compensate by applying Screenwriting 101 formulas to all the major characters and conflicts. Not only does Sonny need a successful draft to please his domineering boss (Frank Langella, natch), but he's also coping with impending fatherhood (the wonderful Jennifer Garner, who could easily play Costner's role, is saddled with a stock supportive girlfriend part) and a personal rivalry with the Browns' head coach (a typically crusty Denis Leary). None of this material is poorly done, but it's so rote, and even more so when held up against Moneyball's comparative lack of three-act narrative beats. Again, Draft Day merits a viewing, but maybe don't watch Moneyball first.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "while some of Draft Day might be too inside baseball (to horribly mix sports metaphors), the screenplay...shies away from too much specific technical information, doling out the broad outlines of what's at stake in just the first few minutes of the film. The leading contender to be the number one draft pick is Heisman winner and University of Wisconsin quarterback Bo Callahan (Josh Pence). That pick is a foregone conclusion, and therefore the Seattle Seahawks, sitting in pole position (there go those mixed metaphors again), are expected to snatch up Callahan when they're first at bat (sorry, it's bound to stop sooner or later). Weaver, sitting in a forlorn seventh draft position, knows he has no chance of getting a player of Callahan's abilities, and when team owner Anthony Molina (Frank Langella) tells Weaver to 'make a splash,' there's only so much the hapless GM can really offer to do...Comparisons to Moneyballare probably inevitable with Draft Day, for both films want to expose the inner workings of major league sports, especially with regard to how to build a winning team. Moneyballis probably the more poetic of the two films, but despite Draft Day's relatively more prosaic quality, my hunch is some might end up caring about Weaver more than they did about Brad Pitt's Billy Beane. The ironic thing here is that in Moneyball, Beane and his team were analyzing things according to a quantifiable metric, certainly one of the most prosaic activities imaginable. By contrast, Weaver works entirely at the instinctual level, so much so that his questioning of Callahan's integrity starts to grate on everyone from Molina on down. But this may also be why the character resonates so deeply - he's a man of emotion, and that comes through quite clearly in Costner's unforced but forceful performance."
In addition, Universal Studios is releasing a spate of their horror-themed catalog on Blu-ray: the roster runs the gamut from the family-friendly ghost comedy Casper to standalone editions of eight films from the Universal Classic Monsters: Essential Collection, making room in between for features like John Badham's stylish 1979 version of Dracula, the 1984 adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter, Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs, the serial-killer thriller The Watcher (with its misguided attempt to turn Keanu Reeves into a John Doe or Hannibal Lecter-type horror icon), the paranormal chiller White Noise, and the misbegotten Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle The Return. Of those, The People Under the Stairs deserves a special mention. A modest success when it premiered in 1991, the film has garnered a cult following, and for good reason: it's one of Craven's most idiosyncratic pictures. Always an uncommonly thoughtful horror auteur - this is the same person who turned The Hills Have Eyes into an allegory for the Vietnam War, used Freudian dream symbology to give A Nightmare on Elm Street its unique tenor, and saw Scream as a commentary on violence in cinema (and on the responsibility of filmmakers who use violence) Craven was stunned by the intensity of the racial and class tensions at work in the 1980s and early 1990s (think the Rodney King beating and the L.A. riots that followed), and he used The People Under the Stairs to vent his frustrations at the state of America. Here, a poor, noble kid (Brandon Adams) breaks into the home of his repellent landlords, the Robesons (played by Twin Peaks' very own Hurley couple, Everett McGill and Wendy Robie), in order to provide for his struggling family, but he unearths a literal house of horrors that the deranged Robesons would kill and worse - to protect. This is not a subtle movie: the outcasts (represented as primarily African-Americans, women, and the mentally impaired) are the heroes, and the rich white establishment (the inbred Robesons have converted all their wealth into gold and expound at length about returning to family values) is the villain. But The People Under the Stairs retains an antic, nightmarish lunacy that, while not wholly successful (for someone who's had so much experience with bloodshed, Craven actually whiffs the violence, which veers uneasily from graphic verisimilitude to Looney Tunes-esque chaos), taps into the feeling of class warfare almost as potently as Spike Lee's great Do the Right Thing. What's more, The People Under the Stairs remains one of Craven's most timely films,: the recent events in Ferguson stress the same kind of unrest and cultural divide that fractured this country over twenty years ago.
From Lionsgate comes the romantic-comedy spoof They Came Together. For comedy geeks, They Came Together is a big deal; it marks the latest effort from Stella, The State, and Wet Hot American Summer alums David Wain and Michael Showalter. As with their underrated 2005 comedy The Baxter, Wain and Showalter use They Came Together to parody rom-com tropes, specifically those popularized by the late Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless In Seattle), and even more specifically Ephron's own You've Got Mail. There are times when you might think Wain and Showalter simply Mad-Libbed new details into the You've Got Mail script: the plot involves the romantic misadventures of Joel and Molly (the incomparable Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler), two unlucky-in-love Manhattanites who meet-cute and then learn that Joel's candy-store corporation is set on running Molly's independent candy-shop out of business. In their version, Wain and Showalter constantly take the piss out of the clich้s, whether it's giving Joel a crop of one-dimensionally "diverse" friends (Kenan Thompson, Jason Mantzoukas, Jack McBrayer, and Ken Marino) to offer him transparent relationship advice, saddling Molly with every stereotypical relationship problem possible (she is, in order, a single mother - with an ex-boyfriend who cheated on her - trying to find love while avoiding the advances of Ed Helms' hilariously pathetic suitor. Oh, and she's got an ex-husband in prison) or having the couple repeatedly assert that New York City itself is practically a character in their romance. Just poking fun at the rom-com template might make for a nice Funny-or-Die short, but what keeps They Came Together is how committed Wain and Showalter are to the art of the absurdist non sequitur. This is a movie where Rudd's hangdog tale of misery to a helpful bartender yields a ninety-second back-and-forth of the two repeating the same inane lines over and over again, where the fourth wall crumbles in moments where Joel and Molly meet a snooty French waiter with a literal stick up his butt and when the movie pauses mid-stream for a love montage that contains footage of the making of the song used in the love montage. The film gets weirder and weirder as it goes along, and while I suspect casual moviegoers may find the easy surrealism a bit grating, Stella and The State fans will be right at home. Most mainstream romantic comedies don't comment on their protagonists' insane behavior, but They Came Together makes Said Insanity the very text of the movie. Recommended, with reservations.
Of They Came Together, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "stupid comedy is hard, and stupid spoof comedy is even more difficult. Case in point: perhaps the most iconic stupid spoof comedy of all time, Airplane. For virtually the entire running time of this beloved film, one juvenile gag after another - some verbal, some physical, all resolutely 'dumb' - cascade over each other with frenetic hilarity, leaving some viewers out of breath from laughing. Now, some may argue with the description 'stupid' or 'dumb,' and by using those terms I intend absolutely no disparagement toward the very smart creatives like the Zucker brothers. But let's face it - films like Airplaneare not exactly models of No๋l Coward levels of wit and sophistication. And that's part of their allure, isn't it? They Came Together aims for the giddy heights of Airplane (as evidenced from several pull quotes slathered across the case of this Blu-ray) but fails to really take flight, despite the promising genre of rom-coms providing grist for the skewering mill, much as disaster films did for Airplanedecades ago. Part of the problem with They Came Together is that the Zuckers set the template so inexorably for this type of parody that David Wain and Michael Showalter struggle to do anything innovative with the genre. Instead, we're treated to a series of appropriately lame brained gags that sometimes hit their mark, but just as frequently don't. Results are too haphazard here to ever generate a consistent tone of hilarity, but if accepted on its own slapdash merits, They Came Together offers enough amusement to coast by on, helped immeasurably by the innate charm and charisma of stars Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd."
Finally, Cinedigm is bringing Kelly Reichardt's drama Night Moves to Blu-ray. In films like Wendy and Lucy and Meek's Cutoff, Reichardt proved herself a master of objective subjectivity she surrounds her actors with stripped-down, austere dialogue and narratives and then encourages them to convey whatever internal turmoil they might feel through those spartan means and Night Moves gives that style a genre gloss. Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard star as three scruffy environmentalists who decide to strike back at Big Industry by bombing a hydroelectric dam, and for the first half or so, Reichardt is in full thriller territory. Without reaching for dramatic effect, without breaking that remove that has defined her work as a filmmaker, Reichardt tightens the screws on her protagonists, whose well laid plans seem to encounter the potential for catastrophe at every turn. Seemingly innocuous moments the sudden appearance of a friendly camper (Lew Temple), a friend of Sarsgaard's saying hi to the group at a restaurant, Fanning's gentle haggling with a store manager (James Le Gros) over the proper requirements to buy fertilizer become unbearably tense because they overlay the group's clandestine planning. It all culminates in a brilliant suspense sequence at the one-hour mark where the three try to set their bomb under cover of night, and it's here that Reichardt's gift for understatement yields most impressive results: she's able to make such well-worn devices as a ticking-down digital readout and the last-minute appearance of an unsuspecting stranger feel vital and terrifying. Unfortunately, the problems start piling up in the second half, both for the protagonists and for the audience. The aftermath of the bombing is Murphy's Law in effect, which is fine dramatically, but Reichardt errs in shifting the focus almost entirely to Eisenberg's anti-social loner. He's a fine actor, but unlike, say, Reichardt's favorite actress Michelle Williams (or even Fanning and Sarsgaard, both of whom are terrific the movie never quite recovers when they stop showing up), Eisenberg is not charismatic enough to bear the full weight of the second half. This part of the movie has his character buckling internally over the repercussions of his actions, yet Eisenberg doesn't convey that inner pain his features aren't expressive enough to fill in the gaps left by his relative lack of dialogue. By the end, when he's forced into increasingly desperate places, we're unsure of whether or not stress and time wore him down or, as in Breaking Bad, whether that instinct towards amorality was there all along, and that uncertainty leaves the ending and, by proxy, the whole movie feeling flat and abrupt.