For the week of September 30th, Paramount Home Entertainment is bringing Transformers: Age of Extinction to Blu-ray. In theory, this picture marks the beginning of a new Transformers trilogy, with director Michael Bay jettisoning the story of Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky (some of you are already rejoicing at that news) to focus instead on poor Texas inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg, at his least Texan) as he and his daughter (Bates Motel's Nicola Peltz) become involved in the latest global conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons. At least, that's the idea - Age of Extinction can't decide if it wants to be a sequel or a fresh start. While all of the human characters and most of the Autobots are new (including John Goodman as a cigar-chewing, pistol-wielding Autobot and Ken Watanabe as an Autobot who, I kid you not, carries a samurai sword and calls Optimus "Sensei"), Optimus Prime returns, and his latest conflict with the humans exists solely because of the fallout after the Chicago melee that ended Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Ultimately, trying to suss out continuity doesn't matter; the only thing Bay cares about is blowing up stuff in Glorious IMAX 3D, and on that front, he doesn't disappoint. Although Bay doesn't have a setpiece as glorious as Dark of the Moon's hour-long siege of Chicago, he certainly doesn't want for trying, whether he's staging a high-wire escape over the Sears Tower, a parkour chase/fight through a Hong Kong slum between Yeager and a nefarious government agent (Titus Welliver, giving the film's best, most legitimately menacing performance), or an attack by rampaging Dinobots. You could frame any single shot: they're all that gorgeous and visually kinetic.
The trade-off, as it always is with Michael Bay, is that these ecstatic action-movie images accompany comedic and character beats that frequently violate any sense of decorum or good taste. As anyone who's seen Bad Boys II (where's that Blu-ray, while we're at it?) can attest, Bay is a gleeful anarchist when he's off the leash, and Age of Extinction's PG-13 rating doesn't deter him in the slightest. Age of Extinction isn't as racist as 2009's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (even the Asian stereotypes here aren't as willfully crass as that earlier film's Mudflap and Skids robots, whose Stepin Fetchit act would have been offensive in 1921), but that's about it. He lingers over random acts of cruelty (even after he grows a conscience, Stanley Tucci's billionaire tech magnate still barks at Wahlberg to run over fleeing civilians during the middle of an intense chase sequence) and the graphic deaths of comic relief characters, and his handling of gender politics is especially unsettling (and for Bay, who introduced his female lead in Dark of the Moon with a butt close-up, that's saying something). So much of this very long movie is fixated on the romantic and sexual states of Peltz's teenage daughter - the movie practically leers at her. The major subplot finds Wahlberg obsessing over who she's dating (at times, it seems like he's into her way more than he should be), with the eventual suitor turning out to be a twenty-something race-car driver (Jack Reynor) who carries around a laminated card just to prove he's not violating any statutory rape laws by romancing Peltz. This material is beyond creepy, and it occupies a disproportionate amount of the runtime. Age of Extinction maintains a delirious fascination - it's constantly topping itself, both in terms of action beats (after destroying large parts of Chicago again, Bay whisks the characters off to China and decimates wide swaths of Hong Kong) and crass non sequiturs (the John Goodman robot's needlessly violent reaction to a trapped, harmless-but-disgusting alien; the so-over-the-top-you-hope-Bay's-kidding-until-you-realize-he's-not product placements for Bud Light and Victoria's Secret) - and while the film is never boring (it's too insane), the almost three-hour runtime gets wearying. After 165 minutes of explosions and shootings and imploding buildings and screaming metal, fatigue sets in, and you might start thinking, "This is my life now; I never get to leave." For some, that's the highest compliment. For others, beware.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman writes that "Age of Extinction gets the formula right but really does nothing to set it apart from the other films in the series. The story is merely a means of tying together visual effects shots and cool photographic skills into a mostly coherent, and terribly linear, and far too long, demo reel. It's almost literally 150+ minutes of the same thing: big battles, lots of destruction, quirky characters, quips galore, flat but good-looking human characters, and the promise of chaos and 'Bayhem' that's delivered in spades, and all of the other cards in the deck, for that matter, which actually make an appearance, Iraq War-style. The movie is undoubtedly a success of technical triumph of the highest order. If it weren't so tired and stale it would be flat-out exhilarating, and it's so good that, even though it's all been seen before - all that's really changed are the details, like backgrounds and, sometimes, characters involved - it often captures one's attention on sheer strength and will of scope alone. The transformations, both the classic style and those new to this film - 'digital' deconstructions and reconstructions - look incredible, so much so that Blu-ray viewers will want to go frame-by-frame and watch the magic unfold in detail. The visuals are amazingly seamless both in terms of how real, and complexly so, that they look, and in terms of how naturally they integrate with real-world environments and human characters. There's not a bad shot in the movie from a technical perspective; blend that expertise with Bay's penchant for stunning camerawork and it's no wonder the movies keep making money, even if audiences are paying to see the same thing every time."
Warner Home Entertainment is streeting another Hollywood epic on Blu-ray with the release of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. On first glance, this gangster saga seems like a striking deviation for Leone from his iconic Spaghetti Westerns; in Once Upon a Time in America, Leone turns from the American West to New York City in the early 20th Century, a shift that narrows his focus visually (literally - he replaces the widescreen panoramas of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with the far narrower 1.85:1 frame to accommodate the increase in vertical information) and narratively - here, we aren't looking for buried treasure as the Civil War rages around us, but rather, we're following a quartet of best friends (played as children by Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Brian Bloom, and Adrian Curran and as adults by Robert De Niro, James Woods, James Hayden, and William Forsythe) as they grow into a life of crime. Once Upon a Time in America is a far more intimate story, yet in Leone's hands, that human-scaled drama gains operatic pitch. This film would become Leone's final feature, and it has an elegiac, autumnal feel. We sense Leone looking back on his life as a filmmaker just as he has De Niro's drug-addicted hood reflect on his own existence: it isn't an accident that De Niro's memories play like a great cinematic pastiche. To be sure, all the major gangster dramas make their way into this story - Leone borrows a little from Angels with Dirty Faces here, a little from The Godfather there, a hint of Howard Hawks' Scarface - but we also get references to films about the immigrant experience in this country like America, America as well as to the great Italian costume dramas of the 1960s and 1970s (there are strong notes of The Leopard and 1900 here). It's the gangster film as massive collage, and it gives Once Upon a Time in America a timeless, universal quality it might not otherwise have. In that sense, this film is identical to Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. Both take specific American situations and transmute them into myth. This new Blu-ray matters because it restores twenty-two minutes to the previously available director's cut (boosting the runtime from 229 minutes to 251 minutes), and these scenes help flesh out De Niro's complex, dreamy protagonist, particularly in his relationship with Treat Williams' union boss. They aren't essential to the film, but they are fascinating, if only as another indicator of how far Leone wanted to push his expansive vision.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that "Before anyone gets too excited, it should be noted that the restored scenes have been taken from less than ideal sources. Despite the best efforts of L'Immagine Ritrovata and the Cineteca di Bologna (working from scans made by Warner Brothers' MPI), the newly integrated material is easy to spot for its lesser quality. Nevertheless, the added scenes fill in crucial narrative gaps and deepen our understanding of key supporting characters who have always felt slighted in the existing 229-minute cut. For anyone who loves Once Upon a Time in America, or who simply appreciates cinematic storytelling on a grand scale as no one but Leone could do it, a few steps down in quality is a minor sacrifice just to have these scenes restored to their rightful place...In sum, the new scenes deepen and enrich an already extraordinary film, and while they may not be considered 'essential' (in the sense that the film doesn't stand or fall on their inclusion), Once Upon a Time in America is certainly better with them than without them. The fact that high-quality source materials could not be found is unfortunate, but the restoration wizards have done a remarkable job with what amounted to discards. Not long ago, these scenes could not have been rescued in any form...The film remains one of cinema's great achievements."
From MPI comes the noirish thriller Cold in July. So many movies feel the need to telegraph all their moves to the viewer that it comes as a shock when something like Cold in July comes along. The picture is director Jim Mickle's follow-up to his horror films Stake Land and We Are What We Are, and for a while, it seems like Mickle will be dipping his toe into another horror subgenre. The opening of Cold in July plays like a lost John Carpenter chiller from the 1980s (right down to Jeff Grace's uncanny synth score), as family man Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall, fresh from Dexter and sporting a very unseemly mullet) wakes up and realizes that someone has broken into his home. Mickle ratchets up the tension expertly, mining so much from blue shadows and Dane's clueless demeanor, and it all builds to a moment of...well, I'd better not say. I can reveal that Cold in July has more on its mind than being a simple home invasion thriller, and that every time we think we've pegged it down, Joe Lansdale's narratively ingenious script jumps genres, shedding them like snake's skin around its beleaguered hero. This is the kind of movie where knowing less going into it is absolutely a benefit: avoid the spoiler-y trailer below at all costs. Suffice to say, Mickle proves he's the real deal in the grade-A B-movie realm, and he makes Lansdale's work feel like a minor classic in the moment, with its carefully calibrated shocks and tasty performances for the likes of Hall, Vinessa Shaw, Nick Damici, and especially Sam Shepard & Don Johnson, who both give what could be a couple of good ol' boy stereotypes genuine humor and menace. It's slightly disheartening to report that once all is said and done, and you've had time to parse out exactly what Cold in July's endgame has been all along, the proceedings lose a good deal of their initial charge, despite Mickle's skill and filmmaking brio. Yet that first viewing is still a blast, twisty and violent and darkly comic - as one-and-done's go, this is phenomenal.
Finally, Millennium Media is bringing Are You Here to Blu-ray. This low-key dramedy came and went with little fanfare, and understandably so; the story of how a death reunites two estranged best friends, Are You Here is the kind of well-meaning but plodding indie that shows up every few months trying - to no avail - to ape the moves of better films like The Big Chill and Local Hero. The difference this time is, Are You Here has a pedigree that far outstrips most of its indie brethren. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner is making his big-screen directorial debut, and he's pulled together many of his Mad Men crewmembers (including composer David Carbonara and DP Chris Manley) to direct an all-star cast that includes Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis as the two best friends, Amy Poehler, The Office's Jenna Fischer, Ed Herrmann, and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and ascot enthusiast Peter Bogdanovich. And that's the problem: no one here elevates this formulaic material. Like, at all. On Mad Men, Weiner has proven himself to be such an astute observer of human behavior, yet he only trades on the most stereotypical characteristics of his absurdly talented cast. That's right: we get Wilson trading in on his melancholic, amiable slacker routine (he's a boozing, whoring weatherman with zero ambition whatsoever), Galifianakis playing a potentially mentally imbalanced manchild (we know this is a serious movie because Weiner starts taking his antics seriously in the third act), and Poehler doing a one-dimensional Type-A gloss on her great Leslie Knope character from Parks and Recreation. The only semi-fresh performance comes from Laura Ramsey, who's very endearing as Galifianakis' very young step-mom, and even she's a thinly veiled version of the selfless Earthmother archetype that Weiner uses to counterbalance Don Draper on Mad Men - think Don's California "wife" Anna, and you're not far off from what Ramsey's up to. The whole film feels undercooked – you get the feeling that Weiner churned it out in the brief hiatus between Mad Men seasons – and other than the giant squandering of talent on display, there's not a whole lot to recommend here. When David Chase, Weiner's mentor on The Sopranos, took to the big-screen, the result was the rock-and-roll drama Not Fade Away, which, while nowhere near as good as The Sopranos, shared that TV landmark's yen for provocative and challenging thematic/narrative content. Only David Chase could have directed it, whereas Are You Here could have come from any mid-level hack. The degree to which it's undeserving of Weiner's imprimatur is staggering.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review called the film one that "never dares to traverse down new avenues of exploration. It assembles tired characters constructed with recycled materials and places them in an unimaginative environment that's defined by strife and money, a cloudy mess of circumstance and strained relationships and wounded personal lives that slowly come into focus as the film progresses towards its conclusion. Yet it takes so many twists and turns that, while the outcomes aren't always predictable, they're not particularly noteworthy or satisfying, either. The characters are terribly uneven and uninteresting and are the greatest hindrance to that unsatisfying end. There's the stock wannabe playboy, the stock younger wife, the stock angry daughter, and the stock wayward son. Character dynamics are flat and stale, resulting in an experience that might flesh them out but that doesn't fully fill them in. Characters move forward by means of outward destruction and change or predictable ends throughout...in several more symbolic occurrences that won't be mentioned out of respect for audiences who haven't seen the film but that clearly represent an advancement facilitated by a gesture more so than a deeper understanding of person, place, or circumstance. It's not particularly well thought out and it's not very well executed, either, at least not in a dramatically satisfying sense."