For the week of November 11th, Twentieth Century Fox and Dreamworks are bringing How to Train Your Dragon 2 to Blu-ray. What made the 2010 original feature such a pleasant surprise was how little it pandered to commercial audiences - the first How to Train Your Dragon is one of the few non-Pixar features to equal the charm and entertainment of its Toy Story-producing rival - and I'm happy to report that this sequel is at least as good as its predecessor. Director Dean DeBlois does something that's fairly rare within traditional animated fare: he lets his characters grow with the times. It's four years later, and Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) has proven his worth in the eyes of his father Stoick (a wonderful, very moving Gerald Butler, who's better here than in 90% of his live-action performances) and is now preparing to take on greater responsibilities in his newly dragon-friendly community, but the presence of a power-mad warlord (Dijmon Hounsou) and Hiccup's long-lost mother Valka (Cate Blanchett) force our hero and his loyal dragon Toothless to make some moral choices they never thought possible. We viewers might not be expecting what transpires, either. While How to Train Your Dragon 2 delivers on the level of pure summer escapism (the flying scenes are better than anything in even Man of Steel, and the climactic battle against Hounsou's forces has a scale missing from most live-action blockbusters), it isn't afraid to dig a little deeper. Sometimes that's in the form of little grace notes, as in the surprising throwaway comment that Craig Ferguson's Gobber makes about halfway through the film, but it's also in a handful of staggeringly emotional jolts. Valka's reunion with Stoick would be just as heartbreaking in live-action as it is in animated form, and Hounsou's evil plot forces the characters into situations that they can't joke or fly their way out of. This is the Empire Strikes Back of the How to Train Your Dragon series, and it has a resonance that I wasn't expecting. Now, How to Train Your Dragon 2 isn't a completely peerless summer entertainment. Its mandatory comic-relief characters (T.J. Miller, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are amusing but nonessential; Blanchett's mother-warrior becomes less vital to the story as it nears its apocalyptic finale; and Hounsou's enraged villain carries some unfortunate racial undertones that DeBlois and his team should have gently massaged out of the story. However, the good stuff is so good that these negative bits don't matter. What lingers is Hiccup's ever-deepening relationship with Toothless, or the way that DeBlois trusts his audience enough to raise the narrative stakes into some pretty harrowing places without dipping into unfathomable darkness like Maleficent does. Ultimately, How to Train Your Dragon 2 works because it makes its fantasy universe matter - that's something that both kids and adults respond to.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman notes that "While there are certainly formulaic elements to this sequel, what constantly surprises in How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the emotional richness that DeBlois brings to the enterprise. Hiccup is a young man on the cusp of power, albeit a power he's not sure he really wants to assume. His relationships with Stoick and Valka (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Astrid) drive this film into unexpectedly fulsome territory, and a devastating development late in the film may crack even the hardest heart. Once again filled with ravishing imagery (rendered with a newer technology that was unavailable during production of the first film), How to Train Your Dragon 2 is consistently visually alluring while also providing real depth and nuance for its motley crew of characters. Too often sequels are content to simply rehash events and characters from whatever film came before them, but How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the rare follow-up that manages to build upon its progenitor's legacy. Hiccup and Toothless are still flying high, and many fans will probably be hoping that it's not another five years until How to Train Your Dragon 3 arrives at theaters."
Also hitting Blu-ray this week is one of the great cult TV shows of all time: Warner is bringing Batman: The Complete Series to the HD format. For 120 episodes (and one movie!), Batman (Adam West) and his sidekick Robin (Burt Ward) took on a rogue's gallery of Big Bads, running the gamut from the instantly iconic - the Joker (Cesar Romero), the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the Riddler (Frank Gorshin and John Astin), and the alluring Catwoman (Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt) - to the incredibly ridiculous - King Tut (Victor Buono), Egghead (Vincent Price), Mr. Freeze (played at different points by George Sanders, Eli Wallach, and Otto Preminger!), and Bookworm (Roddy McDowell) - and doing so in a bright, candy-colored style that one could charitably call unrealistic. This is a world where Batman's utility belt has an accessory tailor-made to combat any possible villain, where the heroes' punches and kicks generate a "WHAM!" or "POW!" text exclamation. In other words, it's about as far from Christopher Nolan's grim and serious Dark Knight Trilogy as is humanly possible, and it even makes Tim Burton's lurid, ghoulish Caped Crusader adventures (1989's Batman and 1992's Batman Returns) look like serious explorations of the line between good and evil. But then again, the TV iteration of Batman never aspired to any serious dramatic pretensions, so it's important to keep in mind that its campy, intentionally goofy milieu is a fundamental part of its DNA. For those viewers still smarting from the one-two punch of Joel Schumacher's silly, insignificant Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, this small-screen Batman may be a little hard to take. That said, this Batman is silly in a more knowing, less bombastic fashion - plus, its jokes are actually funny, a concept that Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman never got the hang of - and it is, in its own way true to the spirit of the comic books. DC's Silver Age saw Batman turn from brooding vigilante into a quipping hero (for a brilliant examination of this mode, check out the animated Batman: The Brave and the Bold), and the TV show was only paying homage to that very popular style. Whether or not it works now is very much up to the individual viewer, but there's no disputing that Batman is its own beast, for better or worse.
From Warner Bros. comes Clint Eastwood's big-screen adaptation of the beloved musical Jersey Boys. At first glance, turning to a poppier project seemed like a great move for the Oscar-winning filmmaker. Though well intentioned, the last two pictures that Eastwood directed - the metaphysical romance Hereafter and the sprawling biopic J. Edgar - were narratively and aesthetically inert. They felt like first drafts that were a few revisions away from a successful revision, and Eastwood mired them in a visually dark, funereal mood that removed any and all flashes of spontaneity and humor. By contrast, Jersey Boys was a blast on stage, a freewheeling, tuneful recreation of how the Four Seasons (played here by John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, and Boardwalk Empire's Vincent Piazza) rose to fame and success. By all accounts, Jersey Boys should have energized Eastwood...yet the end result falls so flat, primarily because Eastwood forces the material to fit him, as opposed to the other way around. His instincts here are all wrong, beginning with his decision to scrap John Logan's muscular draft for Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice's first-draft (are you sensing a pattern here?); Brickman and Elice jump way too quickly from one significant development to the next, leaving certain characters woefully underdeveloped (Renée Marino makes a great first impression as Frankie Valli's wife, and then the script promptly runs out of things for her to do) and over-relying on the fourth-wall-breaking narration from the Four Seasons (a conceit that worked on stage but feels forced here) to patch over the leaps in time and action. Plus, true to form, Eastwood's regular DP Tom Stern shoots what should be a bright musical in a desaturated, coffee-filter hue that's more Mystic River than Dreamgirls, and his editors Joel Cox and Gary Roach never get any real momentum going until the denouement, a showstopping rendition of "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" that brings back all the characters (living or dead) for one final number and almost convinces you that you were watching a better movie. Along with Piazza and Christopher Walken's nicely menacing turn as a local mob boss, it's one of the only lively things about this very moribund "entertainment."
Finally, Kino Video is giving White Lightning and its 1976 follow-up Gator HD upgrades. For fans of star Burt Reynolds, these two pictures are essential viewing; they follow the ongoing adventures of Gator McKlusky (Reynolds), a Southern reprobate and small-time thug who finds himself begrudgingly going after all manners of corrupt law enforcement agents and criminal syndicates. Of the two movies, 1973's White Lightning is easily the best. Director Joe Sargent stages the action (including a great car chase where Gator jumps his car onto a moving barge) with meat-and-potatoes flair, and it was early enough in Reynolds' career that he wasn't content with phoning in this kind of mildly disreputable programmer - he gives Gator as much charisma and interest as his great Deliverance turn. By the time Gator came around, Reynolds was pulling double-duty as both star and director, and the result is one of his laziest, most self-serving "performances." Gator is little more than the Bandit on half-speed, all knowing winks and minimal effort, and even the action isn't as good (Reynolds the director bungles the staging by the great stuntman Hal Needham). Country-music legend and fellow Smokey and the Bandit veteran Jerry Reed does some nice work as Gator's main nemesis, but on the whole, Gator is only necessary for die-hard Reynolds fans, and even they might be checking their watches. Still, it's good to have both on Blu-ray, if only to valorize the now-dormant genre of Southern grindhouse cinema.