For the week of November 25th, Lionsgate is bringing The Expendables 3 to Blu-ray. The proposed finale to Sylvester Stallone's Expendables action series (and "finale" could be both by design and by accident - while Stallone has said in interviews that this third film would offer his protagonists a final send-off, the film's anemic box-office haul certainly doesn't encourage another entry), The Expendables 3 finds the team (Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, and Randy Couture) going on the offensive after their four newest and youngest members (Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz, and Glen Powell) fall into the hands of a venal arms dealer (Mel Gibson, one of the only people having fun here). The film's got a hint of some interesting subtext: Stallone's Barney Ross hires the younger Expendables after one of the original members is gravely injured, and for a moment, you can sense Stallone's own mortality and perception of his advancing age in the action genre, but that potentially interesting material soon becomes secondary to dumb one-liners and irritating fan service (Arnold Schwarzenegger continues to embarrass himself while Harrison Ford fills in for Bruce Willis in the "Can you believe they paid me $3 million for three days work?" CIA handler cameo). Many viewers expressed concern over this film's PG-13 rating (both the first Expendables and its 2012 sequel were rated R), but as frustrating as the concessions to the PG-13-rating might be (and if you were expecting this unrated version to remedy that problem, here's a tip - don't hold your breath), the lack of graphic gore feels like small potatoes when compared to the film's far more endemic concerns, like, say, how director Patrick Hughes (who directed the striking neo-Western Red Hill) abstracts and chops the film's many action scenes into digitized muck, or how Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt, and Sylvester Stallone's script cedes too much screen-time from established butt-kickers like Stallone, Statham, Li, and Lundgren to the far less interesting/dynamic JV-Expendables Squad (Lutz, Rousey, Ortiz, and Powell look cool but have almost no charisma between the four of them). Or how Snipes gets a dynamic entrance and then spends the rest of the movie sitting on the backburner. Or how Kelsey Grammer is here at all. Or how Terry Crews isn't around enough. Here's how disappointing The Expendables 3 is - it doesn't even function as a passable time-waster like the first two Expendables did - the film only comes to life whenever Gibson or Antonio Banderas (who's practically playing a live-action, hyperkinetic riff on his Puss in Boots character) shows up. Stallone is still a screen icon, but here's hoping he takes the hint and quietly walks away from this franchise.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman writes that, "with a formula as set in stone as some of the Botoxed faces on display in The Expendables 3, it's probably a shortcut of sorts that provides an opportunity of sorts, perhaps not even necessitating the fineries of an actual screenplay. That may then beg the question as to why it evidently took three people instead of a mere algorithm to come up with the predictable pile of excess that is this film. Resolutely unambitious but just as undeniably slick and manufactured as might be expected (maybe a better name for this franchise would be The Expectedles), The Expendables 3 expends—er, make that expands its list of yesterday's heroes to include such stalwarts as Harrison Ford and (heaven forfend) Mel Gibson, at least cast here as the bad buy to trade in on his tarnished image. The film kicks off with what is its stock in trade, a spectacularly staged action set piece that sees Barney (Sylvester Stallone), Christmas (Jason Statham), Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) and Toll Road (Randy Couture) engaging in a take no prisoners assault on a train which is in fact a mission to free a prisoner held on board, a former member of this elite squad named Doctor Death (Wesley Snipes). This opening sequence is everything that Expendables fans have come to relish about the series - it's big, noisy, flashily accomplished and completely improbable. Someone with a stopwatch probably planned and edited this film, for like clockwork little bursts of violence or grander, longer sequences built on similar action hyperbole tend to erupt every twenty minutes or so, but that still leaves close to two hours of other material that the film needs to slog through, and the increasingly tired banter of aging males bonding just isn't enough to carry this installment."
In addition, Magnolia Pictures is releasing an extended director's cut of Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac. For a man who has always thrived on controversy, Nymphomaniac shows von Trier taking his yen for provocation to a whole new level. Over the course of almost six hours, the director examines Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a middle-aged woman whose life has unraveled in a series of increasingly graphic sexual encounters. Emphasize graphic: to heighten the already explicit sex scenes, von Trier hired porn actors to have intercourse on camera and then digitally superimposed their copulating genitals onto his main cast's bodies. As such, this may be the most prestigious "adult" film ever made – where else can you find people like Gainsbourg, Jamie Bell, Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgård, Shia LaBeouf, Uma Thurman, Connie Nielsen, Christian Slater, and Willem Dafoe engaged in such racy conduct? But sex is only a diversion, a Trojan Horse concealing a full-on excursion into von Trier's mind. For all its salacious material (and anyone looking to see what happens when a major filmmaker makes a legitimate work of pornography won't be disappointed), Nymphomaniac is but a framework for von Trier to ruminate on...everything, from his career, to the universe, mathematics, religion, fly-fishing, and the nature of man. It feels like a culmination of sorts, a commentary on von Trier's life from the Europe Trilogy (The Element of Crime, Epidemic, and Europa), to the Dogme 95 flirtations of Breaking the Waves and Dogville, through his Depression pictures (Antichrist and Melancholia). The film's massive length makes sense in that context, as does its largely episodic nature, since it can cover more ground without needing to adhere to narrative conventions while using the picaresque format. As such, it's amazing that Nymphomaniac holds together at all, but that's all von Trier, from his precise control of tone (Nymphomaniac careens from legitimately hysterical to genuinely horrifying, and sometimes all in the same scene, as in Thurman's virtuoso cameo) to his facility with actors, of whom Gainsbourg and newcomer Stacy Martin are the standouts, delivering fearless performances as the old and young versions of Joe, respectively. This director's cut is certainly more graphic - von Trier now lingers on sexual material that he previously expressed in starting flashes - but the majority of the new runtime affords the characters (rather than just their body parts) more depth, including a poignant backstory for the man that young Joe "accosts" on the train, more revealing detours into Joe's tortured mid-life psyche, and - most delightfully - further ruminations on the universe from Skarsgård's daffy, frustrating Seligman.
Kino Video is offering Blu-ray upgrades for two of director Robert Altman's most unsung films: 1973's The Long Goodbye and 1974's Thieves Like Us. These loping, idiosyncratic crime dramas didn't make much of an impact commercially during their initial box-office runs, but time has revealed them to be near-masterpieces and perfect encapsulations of how Altman's sideways, improvisatory style could transfigure the most familiar of genre tales. And in both instances, it's not like Altman was working with inferior stock. The Long Goodbye is his adaptation of Raymond Chandler's masterful noir thriller, a detective story par excellence that begins with Chandler's iconic noir P.I./knight errant Philip Marlowe becoming implicated in the death of a friend's wife and twists itself into a hard-boiled mystery that involves a brilliant, alcoholic writer, his possibly duplicitous wife, a shady rehab clinic, and a secret that might date back to World War II. By all accounts, Rio Bravo and The Empire Strikes Back screenwriter Leigh Brackett wrote a very faithful adaptation...which Altman promptly threw out in order to service his own noir vision. While the basic outline is from Chandler and Brackett (we get many of the same characters - most notably Sterling Hayden as the alcoholic writer, Nina van Pallandt as his wife, and a memorably creepy Henry Gibson as the head of the clinic - and it's the same dead-wife setup that kicks off the proceedings), Altman is less interested in watching Marlowe (Elliott Gould, in his finest screen performance) root out the conspiracy than he is in setting this out-of-touch P.I. through a hallucinatory version of 1970s Los Angeles. As Gould embodies him, Marlowe is a shambling, barely coherent eccentric (he mumbles easily 50% of his on-screen dialogue), but one look at his surrounding environment, and we immediately forgive him his lack of polish. Working with the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, Altman deliberately blows out his California landscapes with too-white flashes of light and smeary color, and he fills in the places we can see with a rogue's gallery of 1970s types far stranger than anything Chandler could dream up: Marlowe's female neighbors, a group of twenty-something health nuts who always seem to be in varying stages of undress, or Mark Rydell's frightening gangster-producer, who surrounds himself with hilariously overmuscled bodyguards (including a young Arnold Schwarzenegger). The question becomes, then, can a white knight like Marlowe exist amongst the corruption and confusion of 1970s culture, or will his moral armor tarnish under the influence? This is a remarkable film, just as fresh and funny and odd as when it was first released (its virtuoso opening sequence finds Marlowe involved in a most strange case, indeed: he needs to feed his hungry cat), and we can feel its influence in such neo-noir favorites as The Big Lebowski, Drive, and P.T. Anderson's upcoming adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice.
If anything, the source material for Thieves Like Us is even better. The film is a loose adaptation of Nicholas Ray's noir masterwork They Live by Night, which plays just as fast and loose with noir's rules as Altman's take on The Long Goodbye. Ostensibly, it's a romantic caper about what happens when a small-time hood (Farley Granger) falls in love with a lonely country girl (the great Cathy O'Donnell), but Ray was just as perverse as Altman (vide Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life, his deeply cracked takes on, respectively, teen melodramas and '50s message movies), and as such, They Live by Night plays a bit like noir without noir: Ray is more interested in the tentative, halting relationship between Granger and O'Donnell, and how they seem nothing less than little kids playing grown-up in an otherwise cruel and uncaring world. It's a fascinating and strangely lyrical piece of work, and Altman - to his credit - latches on to that poetic aspect rather than to the crime story. His Thieves Like Us is a sensory experience - we see the gangly, perfectly imperfect faces of Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall (replacing Granger and O'Donnell), we hear the constant radio chatter that roots us in Depression-era Americana, and we feel such a palpable sense of backwoods subsistence (Altman shot in some great mossy locations around Mississippi) that the film has a temporal dislocation effect. It's such an immersive picture in that regard, yet we don't process Thieves Like Us in any straight visceral way. Rather, it maintains the fabric of a dream, as Carradine and Duvall drift through these vivid backdrops from one misadventure to another. For some viewers, this approach might prove frustrating. Altman cares even less about genre than Ray does; even though Thieves Like Us is a half-hour longer than They Live by Night, that added time is local color and odd curlicues as opposed to heavy dramatic incident, which makes the sudden outbursts of violence (Altman may have been a filmmaking maverick in many ways, but even he wasn't above feeling the influence of the 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde) jarring in ways that aren't wholly successful. What Thieves Like Us is, is wholly Altman, and regardless of its flaws, he's still operating at full capacity.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura a Blu-ray upgrade. This landmark arthouse staple has brought Antonioni praise and derision in equal parts; although no less an authority on cinema as Martin Scorsese praised L'Avventura for its uncanny replication of "the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery," this acclaim couldn't have been further away from the film's premiere at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, where the intensity of viewers' jeers sent Antonioni and his leading lady Monica Vitti hightailing it out of the screening. Even fifty-four years later, it's easy to see how this film could generate such powerfully diametric reactions. Objectively, L'Avventura remains one of the most beautiful films ever made. While Antonioni centers his film around a trio of Italian tourists (Vitti, Gabrielle Ferzetti, and Lea Massari) vacationing off the coast of Sicily, this is no mere travelogue: using stark black-and-white photography and negative space, Antonioni crafts a vision of contemporary society that is both luminous and foreboding, that attracts the film's protagonists without ever fully revealing itself. And that's the sick-brilliant joke at the center of the picture - for all its intrigue and mystery, Antonioni never allows viewers to get their bearings in conventional narrative terms. I'm loathe to spoil too much - much like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which was also released in the same year, L'Avventura hinges on its director toying with our expectations of protagonist and antagonist - yet to paraphrase Jeremy Davies from Solaris, even if I told you what happens, I'm not sure it would tell you what happens. Suffice to say, something happens to one of the main characters, and as the other two try to investigate, the less they realize. But Antonioni isn't interested in playing fair. The first in his loose "Alienation Trilogy" (he followed up this with La Notte and L'Eclisse), L'Avventura jettisons its traditional mystery for an existential puzzle: namely, how do we fit into this universe, and does it care about us? Based on this uncompromising view of society, Antonioni's answer seems to be "absolutely not," but even that perspective isn't certain. Like Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad or Monte Hellman's The Shooting, L'Avventura changes and mutates with every viewing, slipping away just as we think we've figured it out. A seminal film experience, for better or worse.
Svet Atanasov noted in his Blu-ray review that "L'Avventura [is] a groundbreaking film. It is not words but the carefully selected visuals, the precise camera movement, even the placement of different objects around the lovers that reveal what they fear and dread. The film's rhythm mirrors that of Sandro and Claudia's relationship. At times it is steady, quite energetic, other times it dramatically slows down. There are also sequences where the camera senses that the two lovers need time and quietly pulls back, temporarily allowing them to be alone with their thoughts. The two leads are sensational. Vitti not only looks stunningly beautiful, but also incredibly relaxed in front of Antonioni's camera. Ferzetti, one of the greatest Italian actors from the post-war era, is incredibly convincing as the confident but needed lover. Though her time in front of the camera is limited, Massari also leaves a lasting impression."