For the week of October 21st, Starz and Anchor Bay are bringing the dystopian thriller Snowpiercer to Blu-ray. The latest film from Bong Joon-ho, Snowpiercer first gained notoriety for the protracted battle between Bong and his American financiers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who – true to form – wanted to trim twenty minutes from the film's North American release. In the end, Bong won out, and this Blu-ray presents his full director's cut. In the wake of a genetically caused ice age, the last vestiges of humanity survive on the titular train, which travels throughout the remnants of the destroyed planet. Yet on the train, all is not well, as the upper classes force the poor and downtrodden to the squalor of the train's last three cars, thus inspiring two revolutionaries (Chris Evans and John Hurt) to stage a coup against the train's authoritarian power (personified by the great Tilda Swinton, who's doing a pretty brutal Margaret Thatcher caricature) in the hopes of wresting control away from the train's brilliant, enigmatic creator (played by a Big Star whose identity I won't spoil here). This central metaphor is not subtle, nor is it particularly logical. The mind reels when trying to figure out the practicalities of a train that's miles long and crisscrosses the whole planet on a perpetual-motion engine. However, this setup is no more unbelievable than, say, a war between space aliens that can transform into various forms of product placement, and with Snowpiercer, Bong isn't claiming to be realistic. He's working in a purely metaphorical realm, and the decision proves liberating from both philosophical and creative fronts. Evans' desperate strike against the 1% isn't half as preachy as it might be in a more realistic setting – much like Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim, Snowpiercer is so stylized that it functions as a live-action anime – and the visual wonderments on display are so striking that the film gains traction simply through its consistent inventiveness. Werner Herzog once said that we need ecstatic images or else we'll die, and if that's the case, then Snowpiercer is doing its part to extend our lifespan: each train car offers not only dangers and mysteries but also new and strange aesthetics, from a Stygian "food" processing plant to a super-bright and peppy education center (headed up by The Newsroom's Alison Pill) and everything in between, like some inspired mix of Terry Gilliam and Upton Sinclair (Hurt's revolutionary is actually named "Gilliam," thus making the correlation to the former explicit). Ultimately, for all its visual delights and political undertones, Snowpiercer works because it's an entertaining movie. Anyone familiar with Bong's Mother or The Host knows how good the director is at ping-ponging from one emotional state to another, and Snowpiercer shows him at the top of his game in terms of balancing tones – in any other movie, we might get whiplash moving between a brutal axe battle between Curtis' team, the decadent excess of one of the upper train cars, some lost-in-translation comedy between Evans and Song Kang-ho's reluctant partners, a heartbreaking third-act confession from Evans (his shining moment as an actor, and the moment that pissed off the Weinstein brothers the most when they first saw Bong's director's cut), and a lyrical stop for sushi in an aquarium train-car, but in Bong's hands, these shifts feel necessary. Snowpiercer might be his first English-language feature, but it's still as weird and uncompromising as any of his Korean-language pictures. You can see why it freaked out the Weinsteins so much. You can also see why it's great. One of the year's best films.
Martin Liebman called the film "a beautifully grim, darkly captivating, and uniquely assembled picture that's one of the best of its kind and easily one of 2013's finest...At its most basic, Snowpiercer works through a number of allusions, calling to mind classic works like Animal Farm and other critiques of humanity through an unequal class system. The film integrates ideas on the division of resources, the haves and the have nots, conditioning, punishment for falling outside the system, and an idea of order out of chaos and everything working in harmony, even when life isn't so harmonious for those carrying out the least glamours roles, whether they're even aware of what they are doing or not. Where the film truly shines is in how straightforward it is with its approach. Even Orwell wasn't this blunt. Sure, the movie builds on the ideas and reveals a number of secrets in due time, but there are no hidden messages here, nothing really wrapped up in disguise, no parallels, no dots for the audience to connect, no deeper understanding of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, politics, or history required to understand what the film is saying and why it's saying it. Those things will help, but the film does a tremendous job in making it all very clear without losing its impact or purpose. That's a very fine line to walk, and the film pulls it off flawlessly, even more impressive considering just how deep the proverbial rabbit hole goes as the film moves towards its end. And that's not even considering some of the more 'superficial' surprises that are revealed along the way, such as the source of the back-ender's gelatinous 'protein bars' and the 'creative' use of the dark tunnels through which the train must occasionally traverse. At the end of the day, however, the one broad message to take away from the movie appears to be that man, no matter how pushed to his limit, how dwindled his numbers may become, cannot escape some animalistic need to rule, to make distinctions, to rise to the top, even in times when survival boils down to a clash between technology and tribalism."
In a neat coincidence, Universal Studios is streeting its own dystopian sci-fi actioner on Tuesday: The Purge: Anarchy. In theory, The Purge: Anarchy is the sequel to last year's surprise hit The Purge, but for the most part, the two films share the same unifying premise – in the near future, the U.S. government sanctions a period every year where, for twelve hours, crime is legal – and nothing else. While The Purge was a home-invasion horror movie that skewed much closer to The Strangers and Ils in terms of tone, Anarchy is a full-scale action movie that abandons the single-home setting for the sprawl of downtown L.A. as five strangers (Frank Grillo, Zach Gilford, Kiele Sanchez, Carmen Ejego, and Zoë Soul) band together during the Purge to battle the city's most destructive and psychotic denizens (think The Warriors without the Village People outfits, and you'll be on the right track). The Purge: Anarchy isn't on the same level as Snowpiercer although its political sentiments are just as radical; it also presents society as under the thrall of a corrupt central government that subjugates poor people and minorities to ensure the continued success of the wealthy, and it also moves in favor of the downtrodden citizenry rising up in violent revolt. However, The Purge: Anarchy's ripped-from-the-headlines details (it's set in a not-so-distant future where the biggest threats aren't those individual citizens who have decided to go aggro for the Purge: it's a rampant lack of gun control and brutal law enforcement squads that practically reenact the chaos in Ferguson, Missouri, with the government's willing approval) lend the film a far more didactic tone that Snowpiercer was able to sidestep through its whimsy and sci-fi surrealism. Director James DeMonaco (who also wrote the Assault on Precinct 13 remake and the underrated thriller The Negotiator) is shaking a bloody finger at audiences, and if you're not in the same political camp as he is, you're likely to feel assaulted, and not in a good way. What helps is the film's pace and general intensity. The Purge: Anarchy is inveterately preachy, but it also moves like a bullet train and never lacks for white-knuckle suspense sequences, the most thrilling being a quiet respite in an apartment that goes south so fast and a climatic showdown between the film's heroes and a cadre of millionaires who are hunting them down with state-of-the-art technology; DeMonaco's approach here is less Michael Moore and more John Carpenter, and it's on that latter level that The Purge: Anarchy is most successful. At its best, it plays like a high-energy B-movie, a canny merge of Escape from New York and The Road Warrior that's entertaining enough to make the message go down a whole lot smoother. Plus, if nothing else, the movie deserves credit for giving Frank Grillo the badass showcase he's always deserved. Grillo has done consistently fine work in films like Warrior and The Grey, and Marvel gave him a nice little villain part as Crossbones in this summer's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but he carries The Purge: Anarchy as an unnamed soldier whose thirst for vengeance ends up unintentionally leading him towards something like redemption. With very little dialogue, Grillo is able to convey so much, and he's such a convincing physical presence: DeMonaco wisely limits the aggressive shakycam whenever Grillo jumps into action. It's the kind of star-making performance that makes you think of the best of Kurt Russell or Clint Eastwood, and if Marvel's got any sense, they'll hand Grillo the keys to the Punisher franchise after seeing him at work here.
From Sony comes the dispiriting comedy Sex Tape. Cameron Diaz and a frighteningly slimmed down Jason Segel star as a bored married couple who, in an effort to spice up their relationship, make a sex tape...and then embark on a listless comic odyssey to get the video back when it's accidentally beamed out of their cloud and into the digital ether. Even with the recent celebrity hacking scandal, the film feels completely untethered to reality; this world is only a few steps removed from the kind of lifestyle porn of a Nancy Meyers movie like It's Complicated or The Holiday, albeit with more scatological humor. It's a world that blames incompetency about "the cloud" for Segal and Diaz's predicament rather than, say, legitimate and increasingly warranted fears about digital security and hacking. But, hey, any concessions towards reality might actually raise the stakes, and we can't have comic suspense jockeying for supremacy alongside stale attack-dog jokes and genital humor. Such is the curious case of director Jake Kasdan. After overwhelming critical support couldn't keep his great early films Zero Effect, The TV Set, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story from sinking at the box-office, Kasdan retreated into the world of consumer-friendly pablum like this and his 2011 hit Bad Teacher. I'll give Sex Tape the slight edge - unlike the lethargic Bad Teacher, it at least has some semblance of pace, plus a couple of scene-stealing cameos from Jack Black and Rob Lowe, whose lunatic energy belongs in a better movie - but in both instances, Kasdan is so much better than the material.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman writes that "even beyond its 'duh' premise, the film doesn't get much right. The gags are by-and-large predictable, uncreative offshoots of the various scenarios that play out, most of which are limited to dull second and third acts in which the couple attempts to seek out whoever may have one of their iPads and get it back, always to predictably absurd results. The first act isn't any better. It's nothing but establishing a 'sex, sex, sex' relationship and then switching to 'no sex, no sex, no sex' and beating the audience over the head with each one, presumably to make it clear that the couple likes sex but doesn't have sex, so that a lengthy on-tape sex session makes sense. That's fine, but an entire act is just too much. The script is packed with one-liners that the scriptwriters obviously hoped would come to define the movie and become infused in popular culture, 'the full Lincoln' being the most obnoxiously obvious. As far as the performances, Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel at least give it an honest go, but it's clear they're trying way too hard to walk an untenable line between audience-friendly (even under the R-rating) and bedroom-realistic antics while adding a side of armpit licking for good measure."
Finally, Lionsgate is issuing the first half of Mad Men: The Final Season on Tuesday. In many ways, these seven episodes are acting as damage control for the much maligned sixth season; critics and fans alike criticized the show's sixth year for its supposed stasis (despite the fact that the characters' lack of forward momentum is kind of the point, especially in the case of Jon Hamm's Don Draper, whose inability to grow during that season causes him to hit rock bottom), and Season Seven almost immediately changes that, throwing the characters orbiting in and around Sterling Cooper & Partners into drastic change (Spoilers to Follow). With Draper on indefinite hiatus following his Season Six meltdown, the agency is almost unrecognizable from its early days, and the creative department is particularly gutted due to the installation of a) an unctuous, unimaginative new creative director (Allan Havey) who's constantly sparring with former Draper protégé Peggy Olsen (Elizabeth Moss, brilliant as always) as well as b) a new super-computer designed to boost SC&P's public persona. But everyone's feeling the pull of time, from Draper's family, past and present (ex-wife Betty [January Jones] is alienating her children and husband; new wife Megan [Jessica Paré] is a struggling actress isolated in the Hollywood Hills; and his daughter Sally [Kiernan Shipka] is trying to navigate boarding school without losing her soul), to his former corporate adversary Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), who's trying to live the California lifestyle after separating from his wife (Allison Brie) on the East Coast, to John Slattery's sardonic, melancholy Roger Sterling, who sinks deeper into drug-and-sex-addled despair when his daughter (Elizabeth Rice) runs off to join a hippy commune. It's all very soap-opera-y – and the aforementioned description doesn't even cover the more lurid circumstances that befall side characters like Bob Benson (James Wolk) and Michael Ginsburg (Ben Feldman) – but true to form, even when Mad Men is shaking things up, it's doing so at a measured, glacial pace that gives the proceedings the weight of a great short story. However, showrunner Matthew Weiner and his writing room do an interesting thing with all this change. Around episode five or six, we realize that it isn't change at all that's sweeping SC&P: it's the ability to start over, to start fresh, and that potential proves as unsettling to the characters as the personal freedom they so desperately seek. By the time we reach episode seven ("Waterloo," with its wonderful showcase for co-star Robert Morse), Weiner and Co. have put us in a strange predicament. Only seven episodes may remain, yet Mad Men doesn't feel like it's winding down. It keeps deepening, keeps revealing new facets of its characters, even as we know the end is near. The worst thing about these episodes is that there are only seven of them – it's going to be a very long wait until Spring 2015.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Mad Men, perhaps a bit like the decade it's been covering over the past several years, might feel a bit tired in the early going of this season, as characters are bi-coastal and certain machinations unfold that spill out into both Don's professional and personal lives. Despite the somewhat lethargic ambience, there's something very interesting that begins unfolding over the course of these initial episodes. For those who wondered if Don's 'secret identity' would ever become more than an intriguing sidebar (albeit one that obviously informed the character), there are indications here that showrunner Matthew Weiner and his writing team will be reinvigorating that idea, especially as Don's own machinations become somewhat desperate. The unspoken allegory here is of course between truth and illusion, the very foundation of much of modern advertising. Weiner never really exploited this concept overtly, and yet it was there from the first moment the camera panned in to the back of Don's head, refusing to divulge the face of the character. When that face finally was shown, it was, in a word, two-faced, much like the disconnect between the utopian universe depicted in ads and the down to earth products that a consumer finally brings home after having relented to buy them."