For the week of October 14th,Twentieth Century Fox is bringing X-Men: Days of Future Past to Blu-ray. A freewheeling, fairly loose adaptation of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's two-issue X-Men story arc, Days of Future Past finds Fox's X-Men universe folding in on itself through a series of temporal dislocations. In the near-future, a race of fearsome automatons known as Sentinels have almost wiped out the planet's mutant population, a situation that forces Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) to concoct one last, desperate offensive: they'll send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to 1973 to reunite their younger selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) and prevent the start of the Sentinel program. That's right - Days of Future Past is the Back to the Future II of the franchise, as the film warps time and pulls together most of its mutant characters (and adds a few new ones, the most enjoyable being Evan Peters' deadpan Quicksilver, who headlines the picture's most showstopping action sequence: a prison breakout scored to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle") to wrangle the continuity threads established by X-Men: The Last Stand, The Wolverine, and X-Men: First Class into one coherent whole. However, one can track back the most profound influence on Days of Future Past to a DC property: director Bryan Singer (returning to the X-Men world after his beloved X2) puts so much emphasis on the 1970s milieu and the political climate that spawns the Sentinels – Peter Dinklage's brilliant, twisted inventor Bolivar Trask is able to bend the ear of Richard Nixon (Mark Camacho) in order to further his anti-mutant agenda – that, at times, it feels like he's doing a kid-friendly version of Watchmen, right down to the way he turns Jennifer Lawrence's embittered, now-rogue assassin Mystique into a Comedian-like political agitator (in one setpiece, Mystique even travels to the frontlines of the Vietnam War to investigate some beyond-unethical mutant testing). That heightened sense of social awareness is the best thing about Days of Future Past, and it's a strong reminder of the human touch the series lost when Singer left to make Superman Returns. Singer has always viewed the mutant struggle as a parable for the struggle of all disenfranchised groups (parts of X-Men and X2 invoked both the Civil Rights Movement and the LGBT advocacy cause), and this compassion gives his X-Men entries a resonance that exceeds the many action sequences. And therein lies the problem. What is most interesting about Days of Future Past are the human moments - Mystique's righteous anger, Professor X's self-loathing (and subsequent substance abuse, in the wake of the crippling accident that ended First Class), Magneto's keen sense of betrayal – and the action, for all its pomp and circumstance, simply can't compete. By the time Magneto is using RFK Stadium as a key instrument in yet another pro-mutant terrorist act, all we see is another fancy CGI showcase, and one that doesn't have the power of, say, a fraught conversation between McAvoy and Fassbender as they try to reconcile a lifetime of grudges towards one another and still come up short. The inner lives of superheroes...that would be an exciting stage in blockbuster-movie evolution, and one that Days of Future Past deftly, heartbreakingly sidesteps.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman writes that "X-Men: Days of Future Past does its best to infuse these elements with some ostensible human (and/or mutant) interest, most having to do with the long simmering conflicts between Charles and Erik, especially with regard to Mystique, but the film actually is more successful as a kind of time traveling caper outing. While Logan and his troupe are attempting to put aside their differences, Mystique is on the prowl for Trask, who is both smarmy and deadly (especially for the mutants on whom he's been experimenting like some 1970s version of Josef Mengele). When the day of the supposed Trask killing arrives (centered around the Paris Peace Accords at the close of the Vietnam conflict), the various parties converge, and while Logan's group does keep Mystique from killing Trask, a number of unexpected developments seem to suggest that the 'river of time' might be momentarily detoured, but cannot be significantly altered. As fun as the time travel element is, especially with regard to the wonderful production design that brings the decidedly kitschy seventies back to life, Kinberg's screenplay doesn't really toy with mind games the way this genre tends to. The film is structured more traditionally as a pure and simple adrenaline rush, one whose excitement is built largely around an uncertainty as to what Magneto's motives actually are, and whether or not Mystique will finally listen to reason (telepathically delivered by Charles). The film's final set piece, which sees Magneto moving an entire football stadium, plunking it down to create a fortress around the White House where Nixon and Trask are sequestered, is hyperbolic and boisterous, but also surprisingly involving. The film probably glosses over conflicts too easily throughout its running time, as well as tying everything up in a perhaps overly tidy package by the end credits. Logan's trip through time seems to ameliorate any number of traumas and tragedies that have befallen the X-Men in previous cinematic outings, to the point that some may wonder if, like that famous season on Dallas where Bobby returned from the grave, it's all been a dream."
Fox/MGM Home Entertainment is bringing Fargo: Season One to Blu-ray. Following in the footsteps of American Horror Story and True Detective, this limited series resolves a massive, multi-faceted drama over the course of its ten-episode season; in this case, showrunner Noah Hawley has turned to the Coen Brothers' Academy Award-winning crime drama of the same name for inspiration, approximating the Coens' own wry, blackly comic - and often very violent - style for a seemingly tangential narrative about how the chance meeting between downtrodden travel agent Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) and criminal enforcer Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) reverberates through the lives of a few dozen people in and around the small town of Bemidji, Minnesota. For most of the pilot episode, you can sense Hawley getting his bearings. Much of these early goings play like an accomplished but not terribly imaginative gloss on the Coens' original film, with Freeman doing his best William H. Macy impersonation as a henpecked nobody angling for a better life and Thornton coming off like a fearsome mix of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare's brutal-but-inept kidnappers. And then, something happens, and you realize that Hawley is just baiting his hook. His Fargo is, in many ways, a darker and even more challenging work that what the Coens wrought, and he's fearless in terms of taking established character tropes and then perverting them in the most horrible - yet logical - fashions. Not least of which is the format of the show itself: Hawley overstuffs the series with references to other Coen Brothers films, of which Fargo itself is just the organizing agent. Besides the visual gags referencing Coen templates (a restaurant specializing in White Russians, for example), we get nods to the big Albert Finney shootout in Miller's Crossing, the fatalism of No Country for Old Men (the more we see of Malvo, the more he reminds us of Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, and Keith Carradine's ex-cop is cut from the same cloth as Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell), and the creeping, existential surrealism of Barton Fink (in the series' most magical, inexplicable moment) - we even get a little Jewish mysticism that could have come straight from A Serious Man. All of that would rank as mere fan service were it not for the presence of the actors, who give this bizarre, sometimes impenetrable material the human touch it needs. Freeman is doing something much more different than a Macy proxy, and minus his shaky Midwestern accent (which improves as the show goes along), this might be the most challenging, interesting work of his career. Thornton's in more familiar territory (especially as a veteran of actual Coen Brothers movies The Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable Cruelty), but he brings a welcome lightness to an otherwise terrifying character, a trait that pops up in all the villainous parts, most notably Adam Goldberg and Russell Harvard's ASL-conversant hitmen. Best of all are Colin Hanks and Allison Tolman's mild-mannered cops, who give Fargo its moral core without sacrificing complexity or character depth. Now, not everything works here. A sideplot involving Oliver Platt's supermarket magnate is beautifully acted and often very funny (and it provides the series' most indelible twist) but ultimately has little bearing on the main proceedings, and Hawley fancies stunt casting even when it isn't always effective. Bob Odenkirk steals every scene he's in as Tolman's idiot superior, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton excels as a greedy nincompoop who's too dumb to realize he's utterly doomed himself, but Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele are far less compelling as two doltish FBI agents who wouldn't be out of place on the pair's own Key & Peele TV show. Still, on the whole, Fargo proves just as compelling as the movies that inspired it, and that's a very good thing.
Another TV show hitting Blu-ray this week is Showtime and Paramount's Season One release of the horror drama Penny Dreadful. In this case, definitely emphasize "drama" over "horror": although the show traffics in all sorts of ghouls and goblins (at its core, it's a high-toned version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), it moves at a pace that recalls such languid, character-driven TV shows as Mad Men and Deadwood. Outside of a brief vampire skirmish and an attack by...something in the pilot, Penny Dreadful doles out its twists and turns at an extremely measured rate over the course of its eight episodes; the show lingers on character interactions, including a séance that takes up the majority of Episode 2, to the backstory-heavy Episode 5 ("Closer Than Sisters," which does a intriguing job of retelling one of the least iconic sequences from Dracula), to Episode 7 (the season's high-water mark) and its single-location Exorcist homage with Eva Green's Vanessa Ives battling a terrifying demonic possession. Anyone expecting the straight horror chills of The Strain will probably be disappointed and likely bored - even when the monsters do attack, these action sequences are over in a flash and lack the grisly spectacle that makes The Strain and American Horror Story so compulsively watchable. That's the bad news. The good news is, the character work is so compelling as to almost mitigate the slow pace and lack of overt scares. Series creator John Logan is the acclaimed screenwriter of films like Gladiator and The Aviator, and if you're familiar with those two, you've got a sense of his muscular approach to dialogue and behavior. Penny Dreadful is no different, and one of its most pleasurable traits is how he lets his protagonists luxuriate in words. Outside of Joss Whedon's great Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I can't think of a horror program that's privileged the spoken word as much as this one. The dialogue is like candy, and it's a welcome corrective to the sub-literate blatherings found on, say, any given episode of The Strain. It helps, too, that Logan's cast is so game. Besides nice, affecting work from Rory Kinnear, Helen McCrory, and Reeve Carney, Timothy Dalton lends his considerable charm and gravitas as a world-famous adventurer with a secret shame, and he's assisted in his battle against the undead by Danny Sapani's African warrior, Harry Treadaway's tremulous doctor, and Josh Hartnett's American gunslinger (I'm being a little coy in not mentioning character names - some might constitute spoilers - though I can say that Hartnett is quite credible as a tortured badass). Best of all is Eva Green (as she often is) as Dalton's sidekick and spiritual advisor. Even when she's saddled with less-than-ideal material (Dark Shadows, 300: Rise of an Empire), Green always elevates her part through her keen sense of camp and performance, and Penny Dreadful acts as a showcase for her particular brand of magnetism. We can never quite place Vanessa's role in the group, and it's a tribute to Green's alluring, unpredictable work that this stock heroine ends up far darker and more complex than we initially suspected. Penny Dreadful has its characters down; if it can up the creep factor, this could be a horror show for the ages. Fingers crossed.
Finally, Universal Studios is bringing the Steven Spielberg Director's Collection to Blu-ray. Of the eight films in this set, four are previously available on the HD format, and rather than spend too much time on them here, I'll refer you to the Blu-ray.com archives to read what my esteemed colleagues had to say about Jaws, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and its enjoyably mean-spirited follow-up The Lost World, with its great Pete Postlethwaite performance and puckish tone that finds Spielberg at his most Joe Dante-esque. However, the other four films are far less familiar – this Director's Collection marks the long-awaited Blu-ray debuts of Duel, The Sugarland Express, 1941, and Always. Well, maybe "long-awaited" only applies to three of the four: the dud is the soggy fantasy Always, which saw Spielberg returning to the pure romance genre for the first time since his 1968 short film Amblin'. Spielberg's instincts to pursue the project made sense (sort of); he fashioned Always as a remake of one of his favorite films, Victor Fleming's A Guy Named Joe, updating the action to the world of present-day aerial firefighters to tell the story of a daredevil pilot (Richard Dreyfuss, who's about as believable as a hotshot flyer as Woody Allen was as a Bond villain in Casino Royale) who dies on the job, only to return to Earth as a spirit watching over Holly Hunter's spirited love interest. It's a solid premise, but at 122 minutes, it drags along – instead aiming for some of the screwball flair of Howard Hawks' great flying drama Only Angels Have Wings or his own Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg is too content to settle into a soft-focus, somnambular groove with way too many scenes of Dreyfuss staring at the afterlife in gape-mouthed awe. Truth be told, A Guy Named Joe overstayed its welcome as well at 121 minutes, but at least stars Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne had chemistry. Dreyfuss and Hunter have precious little of it, and the lack hamstrings the movie to a degree that even a spirited John Goodman character part and beautiful aerial footage can't fix.
However, the rest of the three newbies are much better. For a crash-course (pun intended) in Spielberg's cinematic gifts, there's no better place to start than with 1971's Duel. This TV-movie – it premiered on ABC's "Movie of the Week" – put Spielberg on the map, and deservedly so. Working with a tiny budget ($450,000, or about $2.5 million today, which is less than what it costs to produce an average episode of Game of Thrones) and a ten-day shooting schedule (Spielberg actually went over schedule by three days), the then-twenty-five-year-old filmmaker churned out a primal thrill-ride about a beleaguered everyman (Dennis Weaver) trying to escape the clutches of a psychotic – and, in a neat touch, unseen – truck driver. For all intents and purposes, Duel is one long chase, and it still holds up today, thanks to Spielberg's masterful command of tension, Richard Matheson's taut teleplay, and some stunning desert car-chase footage from DP Jack Marta. There's a pretty ruthless narrative economy at work here, with Spielberg and Matheson structuring Duel into three parts – the initial pursuit after Weaver inadvertently pisses off the trucker; a long, tense respite in a road side that finds Weaver crawling out of his skin wondering if he's still being followed; and Weaver's ultimate offensive strategy against his attacker - as a means of better parceling out the terror and the hero's hard-fought journey. It's a skill that's served Spielberg well in all his multi-million-dollar adventures. Even in the Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park pictures, Spielberg has always privileged the value of logically building to action rather than overloading viewers on non-stop chaos. In its own smaller-scale way, Duel is as effective as the director's more universally heralded thriller Jaws.
Perhaps Spielberg's most overlooked film is his first post-Duel venture, the road movie/hostage drama The Sugarland Express. Despite the film's pulpy hook – after busting her husband (William Atherton, whose bumbling naïf here is a far cry from his EPA stooge in Ghostbusters) out of jail and abducting a highway patrolman (Michael Sacks), troubled misfit Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) leads the Texas Police on a merry chase across the state as she tries to get her infant son back - The Sugarland Express is surprisingly low-key; even the "chase" that unfolds happens at a far less frenzied pace than the one that occupied Duel, with Lou Jean, her husband, and their gradually-less-unwilling captive dawdling and idling towards her endgame. It's a small film, one that's quirkier and more idiosyncratic than anything Spielberg made before or since, and given the lack of sensationalistic elements, you can see how the picture got lost in the fervor that erupted over Jaws. Yet viewed in the context of Spielberg's body of work, The Sugarland Express looks less like a quaint anomaly and more like an unsung gem, and a key step in his development as a filmmaker. This is the first film Spielberg shot in anamorphic widescreen, and as movies like Minority Report and War Horse have demonstrated, he is a master of the 2.39:1 ratio. That mastery emerges fully formed here, with Spielberg using the ultra-wide camera space to stage complicated long takes against the expanses of the Texas heartland. Furthermore, The Sugarland Express shares an important characteristic with Jaws: they are the two most human movies in Spielberg's directorial catalog. Rightly or wrongly, after Jaws Spielberg stopped making movies about people and started making them about characters (two big exceptions: Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Daniel Day Lewis' towering, multifaceted turn as the title role in Lincoln), but he once had such a generous appreciation for human behavior. In both Jaws and this, he employs a Robert Altman-like amount of overlapping chatter, the result of which makes the dialogue seem wholly improvisatory (though Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins' script is uncommonly sensitive and well observed), and he's always giving his cast tiny little grace notes to play, whether it's Atherton's unfettered glee at a Looney Tunes cartoon; Hawn's stubborn, almost foolish optimism in the face of the most dire moments (and if nothing else, The Sugarland Express deserves a reevaluation because of Hawn, who gives the performance of her life as Lou Jean); the quiet worry that Ben Johnson's police captain has for the criminals he's tracking; or the state of Texas itself, the denizens of which keep checking in on Lou Jean during the federal pursuit and egging her along. Yet none of this material feels like a marking-time exercise – Spielberg gives The Sugarland Express genuine heft, most notably in a tough, surprisingly fatalistic ending that may have cost the film some box-office success but also cemented its position in the director's oeuvre. The Sugarland Express has always had its cheerleaders (Pauline Kael was a big fan), but it's never too late to support the cause.
For mamy, the jewel of the Director's Collection is 1941, Spielberg's gargantuan period comedy that depicts how a rumored Japanese attack in the days following Pearl Harbor causes a case of mass hysteria that spreads through Los Angeles like a wildfire. 1941 is, by far, the craziest and most unrestrained picture that Spielberg has ever made; along with screenwriters Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale (plus uncredited contributions from John Milius), Spielberg treats World War II like a three-dimensional Mad Magazine splash-page, filling the frame with sight gags, grand setpieces, movie stars (the likes of Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Toshirô Mifune, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Warren Oates, Eddie Deezen, Dub Taylor, Robert Stack, Patti LuPone, Nancy Allen, John Candy, Michael McKean, Slim Pickens, and even a very young Mickey Rourke show up in both major roles and in blink-and-you'll-miss-'em cameo appearances), salacious material, in-jokes, and just enough sly one-liners to fill the few spaces where something isn't exploding or pratfalling or dancing or screaming (and my oh my, does 1941 set some kind of record for on-screen screaming). Not surprisingly, as New York, New York was to Martin Scorsese and Sorcerer was to William Friedkin, 1941 was Spielberg's great folly, a near-flop (although the film has found a lucrative second life on home media, during its initial run it grossed just under $32 million domestically, a figure that didn't begin to cover its estimated $35-million production budget) that critics derided for its lack of control. To some extent, the film's detractors are right – at the end of the day, Spielberg is bringing his ample gifts to elevate what is little more than a smutty, two-and-a-half-hour-long Looney Tunes cartoon. Yet it is this blend of cinematic brilliance and lack of control that has resulted in the film's cult following. For all its excess (and as that word suggests, you have to take the good with the bad. Good: an aerial dogfight over the Hollywood Strip that is better than the flying scenes in a lot of serious WWII movies. Bad: the uncomfortably rapey interplay between Dianne Kay's gorgeous USO escort and Treat Williams' psychotic American G.I.), the film has a scope and frenzy that is never less than mesmerizing.
Spielberg is working on a scale that outdoes the size of pretty much anything he's ever made - in his attempt to make a grand-scaled comedy that would top the likes of The Great Race and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, he ended up going bigger than his Indiana Jones pictures or even his epic war dramas Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List. This is the rare comedy where, funny as it is (MVP is a toss-up between Joe Flaherty's unctuous radio host, Aykroyd's hilariously efficient/patriotic tank sergeant, and Belushi's flying ace who comes across like a demented mix of Top Gun's Maverick and the Tasmanian Devil), the gags play second-fiddle to one virtuosic setpiece after another, the best being a jitterbug contest/full-on riot that suggests what might happen if Vincente Minnelli and Buster Keaton teamed up to make a musical. One thing that hasn't aged so well (and probably wasn't all that acceptable in 1979) is how the film traffics in Asian stereotypes that could have come straight from Allied Propaganda circa 1943, but as broad as the Japanese caricatures are, Spielberg leavens the racism (a little) by making everyone else just as shortsighted and ridiculous as the Japanese cast, with the Allied officers coming off as a particularly inspired mix of stupid and destructive – in his handling of Warren Oates' mad colonel and Robert Stack's Dumbo-loving General Stilwell, Spielberg gets at a kind of bureaucratic incompetence that feels culled straight from Stanley Kubrick's landmark satire Dr. Strangelove. In addition, the dammed thing manages to hang together even as things get wilder. As they demonstrated in their scripts for Back to the Future and Used Cars, Bobs Zemeckis and Gale have an unerring sense of story construction: rarely do they introduce a detail without paying it off in the end. So it goes with 1941, which keeps accumulating characters and sideplots and action in tornadic fashion until the grand climax, a pitched artillery battle between a seaside house, a Ferris Wheel (don't ask), and a Japanese submarine that manages to destroy a sizable chunk of the California coastline while simultaneously tying a bow on every little B-plot and character arc. So, yes, 1941 is too loud, and too crazy, and too much. But it's also a singular, fascinating artifact: the lone indulgence from a great filmmaker who, for all the critical and commercial triumphs he's had in the years since 1941, has always been a little too scared to ever indulge again.