For the week of September 16th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the new Godzilla to Blu-ray. It seemed like a good idea at the time: take the world-famous movie monster and put him in the care of Gareth Edwards, whose micro-budget 2010 film Monsters did an uncommonly effective job of blending an absorbing human story (a kind of serious It Happened One Night, with Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able in the Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert parts) with tantalizing scraps of movie monsters. And to be sure, there are moments when it feels like Edwards might be making the Jaws of giant-monster fare – his opening sequence, which watches as Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston, in the film's best non-lizard performance) loses his wife (Juliette Binoche) in a kaiju-related nuclear catastrophe, is legitimately wrenching, and portends the darker, more thoughtful tone of the 1954 Japanese original, with its Godzilla-as-metaphor-for-nuclear-holocaust subtext. However, after that startling opening, Edwards jumps forward fifteen years, as Brody and his grown-up son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) investigate how the disaster that ruined their family is connected to two very nasty beasts (which the film calls MUTOs), and with that shift, the movie loses what intrigue it had generated. Many viewers have complained about the lack of Godzilla himself – he makes his first big appearance about an hour into the movie, and then doesn't surface again until the San Francisco-set climax – but that gripe shortchanges Edwards' frequently witty methods of concealing the monster; the big MUTO-vs.-Godzilla showdown in Hawaii, for example, is incredibly subversive in the way it toys with our blockbuster expectations. The problem is, Edwards never provides us with worthwhile human protagonists when Godzilla isn't rampaging through cities. Jaws had a deep bench of interesting human characters, whereas here, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen's nominal leads feel like placeholders that screenwriters Dave Callaham and Max Borenstein (with an uncredited assist from Frank Darabont) threw in until they could come up with more dynamic characters (one hopes Joss Whedon is able to get more out of Taylor-Johnson and Olsen in The Avengers: Age of Ultron as, respectively, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch), while the infinitely more talented supporting cast (Cranston, Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, and the great Ken Watanabe) either die before the movie really gets going or spend their screentime gravely intoning clichéd portents of doom. By the time we reach the Big Boss Fight at the end, we're worn out, and not by the action (which, admittedly, is pretty cool – a scene of paratroopers base-diving into San Francisco is terrifyingly vertiginous, and Godzilla gets one excellent finishing move). It just gets tiring looking at people we don't care about while the monsters we do scurry out of sight at every opportunity.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman was far more complimentary to the film, calling it "really everything the audience expects and, perhaps, a lot that it doesn't expect. If one's exposure to Godzilla comes from the 1998 American film and maybe bits and pieces of the Japanese films on cable TV, viewers might be in for a shock considering the intimacy with which the film is made and the steadiness and scale and awe-inspiring visuals and serious tone that greet them, particularly throughout the mesmerizing second half of total chaos across the Pacific and the Western United States, all converging on the helpless San Francisco/Oakland bay area. This film leaves behind the fun and boisterous and moderately comedic [Roland] Emmerich take (there are no overt jabs at film critics or obvious comic relief characters or any real moments of levity, for that matter) for a decidedly serious approach that's not just a matter of tone and pace but also of mood, photography, and visual effects. Even as the film wallows in a somewhat mediocre story that predictably centers on a family separated by disaster, it builds up a palpable intensity through the first half that absolutely explodes in the second, even if the action is often seen from 'perspective' shots, such as through a school bus window, by way of a closing door, via the eyes of a parachutist, or back in the distance as monsters almost silently fight it out while other actions involving human characters play out in the foreground. The film's photography is its most startlingly wonderful asset. It pulls the audience in so deep - even if the action is sometimes so far - that the sense of intimate peril is never escaped until the credits run."
Godzilla especially suffers this week because it streets on the same date as a new Blu-ray version of Sony's Ghostbusters, and the proximity comparison does the new movie no favors. At thirty years old, Ghostbusters is still one of the great monster movies of all time, and it succeeds because it emphasizes the right things. The monster lore is fine; something something Gozer, something something ancient prophecy, something something end of all humankind as we know it. It's fairly rote pulp (although Richard Edlund's still impressive VFX goes a long way towards grounding the fantasy in something resembling reality), but we care just the same because of how engaging the characters surrounding the mayhem are. Along with the Action 4 News Team in Anchorman, the Ghostbusters themselves are the closest we've gotten to a Marx Brothers revival in the past forty years. Ernie Hudson is the sympathetic Everyman (the Zeppo of the group), while Dan Aykroyd's childlike Ray feels like a (non-mute) riff on Harpo in the same way that the late, great Harold Ramis stands in for Chico with his acerbic Egon. And then, as the film's resident Groucho, we have the one, the only, Bill Murray, who plays every scene - ghost attack and exposition-dump alike - with wink and a sarcastic quip. Everyone remembers Murray's big moments ("The flowers are still standing!" "We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!" "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"), but some of his best scenes pair him with Sigourney Weaver, who does a wonderful Margaret Dumont alongside his Groucho. The care and humor afforded to Weaver's nominal love interest is indicative of the attention afforded to all the characters, and I mean all the characters: director Ivan Reitman stocks the cast with ringers down to the smallest parts, including Annie Potts' wonderfully deadpan Janine, William Atherton's slimy EPA official Walter Peck (who's the butt of the film's dirtiest jokes), and Rick Moranis' hilariously self-confident dweeb Louis Tully. Everyone is so enjoyable that we fall for the ghost-and-monster nonsense hook, line, and sinker - we even take seriously the sight-gag brilliance of Ghostbusters' final Boss Fight. Sony's new Blu-ray set also contains the much maligned Ghostbusters 2, which is ripe for rediscovery. No, this sequel isn't as good as the original, and it's easy to see why critics in 1989 leveled such harsh unoriginality charges at the film (it really just replays the first Ghostbusters with a fancy new coat of paint, not unlike last year's Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues). But it's consistently funny, even when it's rehashing old beats - Murray's casual insouciance barely redeems an ending that swaps out one unlikely giant creature romping through Manhattan with another equally unlikely one - and given that Ghostbusters 2 is the last time we'll see the original Ghostbusters together in live-action, it retains a certain nostalgic, melancholy charm.
Of the Ghostbusters I and II two-pack, Martin Liebman wrote "Where Paramount got it wrong with Star Trek: The Compendium, Sony gets it right with Ghostbusters I and II. For almost half the price of The Compendium - which included two previously released movies and only new supplements for one of them - this Ghostbusters bundle includes an all-new movie never before released to Blu-ray and a new soundtrack and several new extras for the original film. Add a handsome DigiBook casing that includes a 25-page booklet, and the value is only increased. At time of writing, this two-pack costs only a couple of dollars more than buying Ghostbusters II individually, making this the steal of the series' Blu-ray release history. Very highly recommended."
Of the many TV series hitting Blu-ray on Tuesday (Warner's The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Seventh Season and Arrow: The Complete Second Season releases, Fox's Sleepy Hollow: The Complete First Season, Universal's Grimm: Season Three, and eOne's From Dusk Till Dawn: Season One), the best - the richest, the strangest, the most emotionally and intellectually involving - is Lionsgate's Season Two set of the NBC procedural Hannibal. If Season One was a surprise (not only did showrunner Bryan Fuller expand on the Hannibal Lecter mythos in a fashion both reverent and unpredictable, but he managed to sneak a show that would have been too daring and uncompromising for HBO onto basic cable), then this sophomore year is a confident trip down the rabbit hole. For the first half of the season, the roles are reversed (Spoilers to Follow): after successfully framing FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy, who's so good at making the boring hero anything but) for murder, serial killer-psychiatrist-gourmand par excellence Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen, in the role of his career) finds himself guiding the FBI through a series of grisly killings while Will languishes in a maximum security prison. It's such a canny way to kick off the carnage – turning Hannibal into a reluctant hero (even as he plots his own "extracurricular" activities) and irrevocably blackening Will's reputation (Fuller and his staff of talented director make sure to frame and dress Will so he looks not unlike, say, Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs) – and it would be enough to sustain a whole year's worth of drama, but at the halfway point, Will wins his freedom, and...well, to say things get weird would be an understatement. Suffice to say, Hannibal is interested in deeper themes than just grindhouse revenge, and that sense of exploration lends the relationship between Hannibal and Will deepening resonance as the season lopes towards its brutal, devastating finale. (End Spoilers) No network drama last season was as experimental as Hannibal; no procedural was as keen on using graphic violence and decay as a Rorshach Test for psychological extremes. All that, and the show still fires on all conventional entertainment cylinders, making time for last-minute rescues and shocking plot twists and stellar guest stars, the best of which are Firefly's Gina Torres (whose on-screen chemistry with her real-life husband Laurence Fishburne is heartbreakingly good), Veep's Anna Chlumsky, Jeremy Davies (of Lost and Saving Private Ryan fame), and Boardwalk Empire's Michael Pitt as a Big Bad who gives the second season its funniest – and most grotesque - moment. The only bad thing about Hannibal is having to wait for 2015 for new episodes.
"Hannibal would seem to be bound by certain strictures, at least when one considers the fact that any fan of Harris' source novels is going to know that sooner or later Dr. Lecter is going to get caught and end up in stir, sometimes with a less than flattering face guard plastered across his supple jaw. It's to Bryan Fuller's credit, then, that so far at least Hannibal has managed to dodge several potential traps, as evidenced by the fact that it's Will behind bars and not Lecter as the second season gets underway (after that unsettling 'preview' of how the season will end). The preview itself helps to quash some latent fears about how far Fuller was willing to push the canon, for there were already some nattering naysayers who thought that the first season strained credulity with how much Lecter was able to continue getting away with, with only Will as a potential threat. Without spoiling too much, it's clear in the opening sequence that Will is no longer alone in his suspicions of Lecter, and in fact that element plays out several times in the second season, with a number of supporting characters slowly coming to the conclusion that Will may not be bat guano crazy after all and that Lecter definitely is adept at vivisecting more than mere pâté de foie gras. In the meantime, though, 'Bizarro World' Hannibal continues through its first half dozen or so episodes with Will locked away in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane while Lecter gets to put on his shiniest shoes and pretend to be a real, honest to goodness FBI profiler for several disturbing cases. "
Hannibal works so well because it takes its world seriously; as surreal and abstract as the proceedings get (and there are times when the spirits of Goya, Bunuel, and Picasso run wild on this show), everyone in the cast and crew commits to that pervasive madness. The same can't be said about Lawrence Kasdan's Dreamcatcher, a film as iconically misbegotten as Tommy Wiseau's The Room and one of the least scary scary-movies ever made. Dreamcatcher had all the ingredients, on paper, for a can't-miss big-screen proposition: based on a popular Stephen King novel (is there any other kind?), Dreamcatcher boasts direction from The Big Chill and Silverado auteur Kasdan, a script by Kasdan (who also co-wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back) and William Goldman (the screenwriting legend behind Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, and Misery), cinematography from Academy Award-winner John Seale (he won an Oscar for The English Patient, no less), and a cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Tom Sizemore (before he sunk to DTV obscurity), Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, a pre-Justified Timothy Olyphant, Jason Lee, Donnie Wahlberg, and a pre-Homeland Damian Lewis. What all these smart and talented people overlooked was that as financially successful as the Stephen King source material was, it was also one of his most uneven and narratively deranged books. King wrote Dreamcatcher while in recovery for the 1999 traffic accident that almost killed him, and the end result reads like the waking consciousness of someone under the influence of serious painkillers, what with its fever-dream concoction of childhood nostalgia, telepathy and mind palaces (which Hannibal, ironically enough, uses to far better effect), military satire (an especially hawkish Colonel gets his name from Kurtz in Apocalypse Now), military action, alien conspiracy thriller, and Cronenbergian body horror (King creates these monsters that gestate in your intestines and then emerge from a very disgusting place). Most film versions would scrap the madness and start afresh, but it's the film version's commitment to realizing this lunatic material that has secured its place in Bad-Movie Valhalla. You watch Dreamcatcher in disbelief that a cast and crew this talented would want to make what is, essentially, a dumbed-down version of King's own It crossbred with a scatological take on Alien, and every scene has a kind of dread fascination, from the hilariously inauthentic "banter" between Lewis, Jane, Olyphant, and Lee's pre-fab best-friend group, to Freeman's alternatively histrionic and bored turn as a mustache-twirling villain, to CGI-aliens that would be gross if they didn't look so cheap. Plus, Kasdan has no facility for staging horror (he lets his actors overact while downplaying the necessary blood-and-guts), and so nothing works. You watch Dreamcatcher, and the question isn't, "How did Kasdan not land another directing gig for almost ten years after this one," but rather "Why are any of these people still employed?" An unintentional comedy masterpiece.
Michael Reuben called Dreamcatcher "a film that feels like pieces of different movies stitched together, as if competing versions of the script had been randomly shuffled...As Dreamcatcher leaps back and forth among the mystical backstory of the four friends, the cloudy details of the alien invasion and the megalomania of Col. Curtis (who was named "Kurtz" in King's novel), the story becomes as messy as the bathroom where Jonesy and Beaver find Rick McCarthy's body after the alien has finished using it. As soon as any tension or suspense begins to build from the creature-feature storyline, we're suddenly dropped back into the battle of wills between Curtis and Owen, which feels like a different movie—and just when that begins to go somewhere, it's back to the aliens, or maybe into the past for another visit with Duddits. Editors Carol Littleton (E.T.) and Raul Davolos (The Way) have done the best they can with individual sequences, but the most skilled editor in the world can't prop up a structure whose narrative foundation is so badly fractured. By the time Dreamcatcher reaches its grand effects-laden finale, you can be impressed by the wizardry, but you've lost any emotional connection with the events...The Blu-ray of Dreamcatcher has already been discounted to a bargain price; so the curious may want to experience it just to see how so many talented people can work so hard to produce such a misfire. It's hard to make a good movie under any circumstances, but it's especially so when the director and the material are mismatched. Kasdan was clearly most comfortable with the scenes of character interaction, but Dreamcatcher needed the crass showman of the movie producer played by Steve Martin in Kasdan's Grand Canyon, who asked his editors, in all seriousness, "Where's the money shot? The viscera on the visor?" Kasdan wrote that character as a parody, but you need to be him if you want to make an effective creature feature."