For the week of November 18th, Sony Home Entertainment is bringing the hit comedy sequel 22 Jump Street to Blu-ray. 2011's 21 Jump Street should have been a colossal miscalculation, but let's give credit where credit's due; as they did with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and this year's smash animated comedy The LEGO Movie, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller took a pretty naked attempt at monetizing 80s nostalgia (in this case, the delightfully cheesy teenybopper cop procedural that made Johnny Depp a star) and turned it into a very pleasant surprise. The film was about two times smarter and more idiosyncratic than it had any right being, and it got a lot of mileage from the stellar comic energy between Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum's inept cops-turned-unlikely undercover agents Schmidt and Jenko. See, Miller and Lord played up the obviously corporate angle of the whole affair (in a wicked cameo appearance, Nick Offerman informed Schmidt and Jenko that they could attribute their assignment to the fact that "the guys in charge of this stuff lack creativity and are completely out of ideas, so all they do now is recycle s*** from the past and expect us all not to notice"), and if anything, that meta-flavor is even more vital to 22 Jump Street. As Ice Cube's histrionic Captain Dickson told our heroes at the end of the first movie, Schmidt and Jenko are now going undercover as students at the local college to find the suppliers of a particularly nasty street drug, and if that setup seems a little too familiar, then you're in on the joke - Miller and Lord are gunning for unimaginative, formulaic sequels that recycle the same plot in marginally different surroundings. Characters are constantly referencing how similar things seem or the proper procedures for behaving in an action sequel - the stunts get bigger and take on a kind of lunatic exaggeration, almost like a less sociopathic Bad Boys II - until the brilliant end credits, which effectively demolish Sony's ability to make another one of these movies without looking very, very stupid (granted, that fact has never stopped the studio before...). And yet, I'd be lying if I said that 22 Jump Street was as entertaining as the first one. Sure, it's more self-aware, but the first movie had better jokes and a keener appreciation of character: it wasn't content just to skewer the nature of remakes and reboots. This one, by contrast, is more of a one-joke movie although, thanks to Lord and Miller's Frank Tashlin-like ability for staging gags and Channing Tatum's wonderfully dopey lead performance (if nothing else, these movies deserve all the credit in the world for revealing him to be an inspired comic wild man), it's a very funny joke. Plus, the line gets blurry between parody and embodiment, with certain key beats - Schmidt and Jenko's forced relationship problems, or Schmidt's romancing of another improbably gorgeous young woman (Amber Stevens) - delivered almost with a straight face. Still, for the most part, it works, but everybody should quit while they're ahead, or risk watching the snake eat itself.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman called the film "22 Jump Street works so well because it's so brazenly open about what it is. The complete lack of seriousness is its best asset and it remains fresh by topping itself time and time again, going further and further but never so far as to feel forced or repetitive, either of which would alienate the audience and destroy everything the movie works so hard to build. Instead, the viewer is kept enthralled, wondering what wacky, rhythmic stunt, revelation, or deliciously corny event will happen next. Even the most extreme bits of randomness work. It's all perfectly timed and so well conceived that it doesn't feel at all planned but effortlessly natural, a pure, unadulterated result of how these characters work together and, sometimes, alone. The movie, then, feels completely comfortable with itself, with everything it does, everywhere it goes, whether in its endlessly absurd humor, poking fun at its own style and genre, or mimicking the off-the-wall, transparent '80s action movie style it so lovingly embraces where laughs, character camaraderie, and well-developed action prove far more important than detailed plot lines. The movie is at its best when under the microscope of self-deprecation but it works very well with every last little wink and nod that sees it through and molds it into one of the finest comedies since, well, 21 Jump Street (and stay tuned for the credits which offer perhaps the best post-film shenanigans ever, right up front)."
If 22 Jump Street does little to tarnish the reputation of its predecessor, then this week's other big sequel - the bloody comic-book actioner Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - is far more dispiriting. The first Sin City might be Robert Rodriguez's best film. A star-studded visual extravaganza, the film helped kickstart the string of Frank Miller graphic-novel adaptations (Miller co-directed the film alongside Rodriguez), and for good reason; not only did it make thrilling, kinetic use of then-emerging digital technology (Rodriguez created most of the film on green-screen sets), but it also paid homage to noir literature (especially the acid noir from the likes of Jim Thompson or David Goodis) in a manner both respectful and parodic. Unsurprisingly, Rodriguez has been promising a return to Sin City since its release in 2005, but the nine years separating that film from A Dame to Kill For have clearly pushed this project well past its expiration date. It's a little stunning, actually, how such a sure-fire property could belly-flop in so spectacular fashion: the degree that A Dame to Kill For doesn't live up to the first Sin City might be the most memorable thing about it. The film borrows the same structure as the first film, with Rodriguez and Miller alternating between different stories. In the first, hulking savage Marv (Mickey Rourke, sporting facial prosthetics that don't quite match KNB's great Marv makeup from the first film) goes on the warpath after a simple misunderstanding; the second finds P.I. Dwight (Josh Brolin, replacing Clive Owen from the first movie) falling under the spell of a very evil femme fatale (Eva Green, who, as she was in 300: Rise of an Empire, is once again is the very best thing in a very bad movie); the third focuses on young gambler Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, wasted) looking to beat Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) at his own crooked cards game; and the last picks up with Jessica Alba's tortured stripper Nancy as she mounts her own agenda against Roark. This reads like a lot, yet at 102 minutes, these stories can't help but feel rushed. Brolin's story gets the most screen time (its actual graphic novel is the source of the A Dame to Kill For title), while Marv, Nancy, and Johnny's adventures are far more truncated - each of these three exist to receive and/or dispense horrific amounts of violence and then vanish from the narrative. You wonder if these narrative decision stemmed from casting contracts, like maybe Rodriguez had Brolin and Green for the longest amount of time but only had his other leads for a couple of days a piece. There's so little invention here, so little of the first film's visual or linguistic wit - this lack of humor is especially puzzling considering that William Monahan, who added real spark to his Edge of Darkness, London Boulevard, and The Departed scripts, apparently worked on the screenplay - and that lack extends to the flat visual compositions and desultory casting decisions (besides Green, only Boothe and Stacy Keach make an impact; everybody else - including Lady Gaga, Christopher Lloyd, Christopher Meloni, Dennis Haysbert, Ray Liotta, Rosario Dawson, Jeremy Piven, and Bruce Willis, who I doubt was ever on the set with any of the other actors - feels like stunt casting at best and an afterthought at worst). Worst of all, there's nothing more. The previous Sin City was violent, but in its empathy for Rourke, Willis, and Clive Owen's brooding agents of destructions, it achieved a twisted grace. Here, that feeling has curdled into irony: everything exists for the sake of looking cool, and not an inch more. For the first time in a long time, Robert Rodriguez seems like he's got nothing else to prove, and that self-satisfaction proves fatal. The guy who directed Sin City nine years ago? He was willing to do anything to show you a good time. This new guy? He wants to finish shooting every day at 4 PM. So it goes.
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review draws attention to "a moment, much too early in A Dame to Kill For, as a pair of comically undersized cars chase each other in a circle around Marv's head, [where] it starts to become clear Rodriguez and Miller are far more attached to the visual flair of the sequel than anything more substantive. Each shot ups some undefined ante, leading to erratic, disconnected cinematography beholden to CG wizardry and self-important id. Harsh contrast, bursts of color and comic-panel framing aren't used all that intriguingly, but predictably, and often without significance; a flash of gold, a dash of red, a splash of white blood, a shadow-drenched silhouette, most in service of spectacle that isn't there. Set pieces no longer leap off the comicbook page, they meander out of the FX team's offices. And the dialogue flatlines. So many words. So little actually said. It's steeped in grit and gumshoe gristle, sure, but it rarely creates characters that are as magnetic or compelling as those that populate the original Sin City. Likewise, the music simmers with hard-boiled fanaticism, dutifully throttling muted trumpets, growling saxophones, operatic strings and pulsing percussion whenever the stakes are raised. Yet it rarely evokes the rage, heartache and tragedy Rodriguez and Miller are aiming for."
Walt Disney Home Entertainment is putting out another round of Studio Ghibli animated classics; this time, we get HD upgrades of Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and The Wind Rises. Master animator Hayao Miyazaki directed all three features, and taken together, they provide a wonderful survey of his range and scope within the genre. His 1989 fantasy Kiki's Delivery Service is the most conventionally "kid-friendly" of the three pictures. It might be even more gentle and carefree than Miyazaki's other family entertainments My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo. The plot, as it were (like most of Miyazaki's works that are aimed exclusively at younger audiences, Kiki's Delivery Service is far more interested at ambling along in a fairly conflict-free zone as opposed to drumming up a lot of busy action), follows young witch Kiki (voiced in the American dub by Kirsten Dunst) as she lights off on her own to make it in the big city. And that's about it. We get some minor heartache as Kiki tries to adjust to life away from her parents, and the second half goes a little Spider-Man 2 when Kiki loses her powers – Miyazaki uses this development to gently weave in subtext regarding the attendant perils of teenage maturation – but for the most part, this is a hangout picture: Miyazaki is far more interested in watching Kiki and her sly talking cat (the late, great Phil Hartman) interact with the eccentric baker who helps her start her own courier service or Kiki's lightly flirtatious/antagonistic banter with a free-spirited local boy (Matthew Lawrence). It's a film of small pleasures, and one big one – the still-amazing sequences that show Kiki flying all over the city to deliver packages. As anyone who has seen Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, and especially Castle in the Sky can attest, Miyazaki has a great, abiding love for the sky – and a healthy respect for its dangers – and these sequences here give Kiki's Delivery Service an electricity it might not otherwise have. It's not one of Miyazaki's masterworks or even his best film about growing up (the right answer for both those categories is Spirited Away, which is frustratingly AWOL on Blu-ray in this country), but what it does, it does very, very well.
On the subject of Miyazaki's masterworks: if Spirited Away is his best overall film, then 1997's Princess Mononoke comes very close. Certainly, it's his most exciting film, a viscerally satisfying adventure that throws viewers into a life-or-death conflict during the Muromachi period in Japan. Miyazaki's hero is young Ashitaka (Billy Crudup), a doomed prince whose efforts to cure himself of a supernatural curse place him right in the middle of the conflict between powerful industrialist Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver) and the title character (Claire Danes), a defender of the forest who looks at Eboshi's technological innovations and only sees death and destruction for the land. The film is a full-scale epic and one of Miyazaki's few straight adventure stories, but it's also one of his most thematically complex works. Beneath all of the action and violence – and this is the one Miyazaki feature I wouldn't recommend sight unseen to children: Princess Mononoke is easily the director's most adult venture, and with its many scenes of intense combat, it fully earns its PG-13 rating – there's an undercurrent of environmental renewal and love (Mononoke cares more about the creatures of the wild than she does humans, and for good reasons – people seem to destroy everything they touch) as well as a potent antiwar message. As Miyazaki sees it, man's power also comes from his ability to destroy (Eboshi asserts her strength with state-of-the-art bullets and firepower), and he presents this force-through-violence situation as one that is increasingly untenable. Happily, though, none of this material ever comes across as preachy because Miyazaki roots these themes in compelling characters and rich action (including an opening hunting sequence that Keanu Reeves' 47 Ronin ripped off to diminishing results). Princess Mononoke isn't just one of Miyazaki's finest films; it's one of the best fantasy films of the past twenty years. It also has one of the best dub tracks of any Miyazaki picture. While some of the dub talent is distracting (God love him, but Billy Bob Thornton has no business being here), Crudup, Driver, and especially Danes are terrific, and they've got the benefit of a literate, respectful dub adaptation by fantasy icon Neil Gaiman (DC/Vertigo's Sandman series, American Gods, Good Omens), who softens some of the original script's cultural references without ever losing track of what makes this film so very special.
Finally, we get The Wind Rises, which deserves that "final" moniker in one profound sense: now that Miyazaki has retired, The Wind Rises may be his last film. Tonally, it also feels like a career summation. Although the film is nominally a biopic about aviation designer/engineer Jiro Horikoshi (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Miyazaki deals with Jiro's life in ways that directly reflect on his own existence as a filmmaker. It hardly feels like an accident that Miyazaki chose Jiro as his protagonist, given Miyazaki's own love of flying, and Jiro's achievements in that field – particularly his dream-bound relationship with legendary designer Giovanni Caproni (Stanley Tucci) – allow Miyazaki to animate the finest flying sequences of his entire career; some reviewers have complained that The Wind Rises is too earth-bound to qualify as a great animated movie, but there's no way to achieve what Miyazaki does in the sky on a live-action budget. Martin Scorsese tried with The Aviator, and even his striking flying sequences don't approach the majesty of what Miyazaki is able to achieve through traditional animated methods. It's such a full encapsulation of Miyazaki's art, and that level of artistic achievement also connects Jiro to the director. If Jiro has a fault, it's that he is devoted to his art to a fault, and anyone who's familiar with Miyazaki's obsessive, perfectionist tendencies when approaching his own animation will be able to see the two as kindred spirits who went after two separate paths: one made movies, and the other helped make planes, but the creative spark is the same in each situation. In fact, Jiro's spark has made The Wind Rises easily Miyazaki's most controversial effort. At the end of the day, Jiro's passion for flight led to the creation of the Japanese Zero, and some critics have accused Miyazaki of whitewashing Jiro's labors to free him of the culpability he may have had in any of the deaths associated with that instrument of aviation warfare. That argument seems to be missing the forest through the trees somewhat – part of what gives The Wind Rises its unique edge is the lurking subtext of these war-related deaths (which Miyazaki doesn't completely elide), that Jiro is so focused creatively he doesn't grasp the real-world implications of his actions – but it's also reaffirmed Miyazaki's viability as an artist even in his declining years. It takes a special kind of talent to get under people's skin the way Miyazaki has, for better or worse. Sometimes, they call it genius.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown calls The Wind Rises "Hayao Miyazaki's stunning, heartaching farewell to animation; a film so moving, personal and affecting that it's hard to imagine a more fitting project capping the Studio Ghibli co-founder's illustrious career. Though some will no doubt suggest a sweeping fantasy epic would have been more appropriate (something more akin to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away), Miyazaki's largely fictionalized account of aircraft designer and engineer Jiro Horikoshi (1903-1982) is all at once an absorbing period drama, a captivating romance, a jaw-dropping piece of deftly executed hand-drawn animation, and a glimpse into the mind of a man of invention, innovation and wondrous imagination. And it's in that regard that Miyazaki's Horikoshi and Miyazaki the filmmaker are almost inseparable. Where one begins and the other ends is only known to Miyazaki, a revered icon here and abroad whose animated films have inspired and influenced more animators, directors, screenwriters and illustrators than could ever be counted. The Wind Rises is both fiction and non-fiction, biographical and autobiographical, surreal and real, dreamlike and grounded, hopeful and haunting, beautiful and simple. It's a fascinating, multilayered masterwork that's one of Miyazaki's finest films and greatest achievements."