For the week of December 16th, Paramount Pictures is bringing the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot to Blu-ray. The beloved comic-book action heroes have never gotten the big-screen movie version they deserved (as high as the nostalgia factor is for the Turtles' first cinematic excursion, that 1990 blockbuster is only noteworthy for some still-impressive practical effects work and for offering audiences a glimpse of a very young, very sleazy-looking Sam Rockwell), and - Spoiler Alert - this new iteration doesn't better the situation. Under the imprimatur of executive producer/blockbuster specialist/high-functioning sociopath Michael Bay, the Turtles look sleek but hollow; for all the technical verve of the CGI mo-cap suits used to turn Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek, and Jeremy Howard into photo-realistic heroes in a half-shell, the effects have little of the tactile wonder of the Jim Henson Creature Shop's efforts on the first TMNT venture. They look too real, and in a disquieting way - the increased articulation of the turtles' noses and mouths approaches uncanny-valley-creep, and the new Splinter (body movements by Danny Woodburn; voice by Tony Shalhoub) is such a good-looking rodent as to be almost completely disgusting. Still, one might overlook the design flaws if the turtles were more dynamic, but just as Bay gave the robots in his Transformers series off-putting faces and lips and then centered the attention around useless humans, so does Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles assume that instead of spending time around Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Leonardo, audiences are more interested in the flailings of their human counterparts. As April O'Neil, Megan Fox gets saddled with the majority of the narrative developments and pretty much fails to rise to occasion, but that isn't really her fault: even though Fox has proven herself to be an appealing comic presence in such films as This Is 40 and Friends with Kids, Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Evan Daugherty's formulaic script turns April into a vessel for exposition delivered either to the Turtle clan or to her obnoxious cameraman (a grating Will Arnett). Still, even when the Turtles get the spotlight, the movie doesn't know what to do with them. Despite getting to cut loose in a thrilling mountain chase, the Turtles feel hemmed in by director Jonathan Liebesman's cutty camerawork and action staging and the script's lack of character development/humor. In fairness, there may be a version that at least tries to gives more dimensions to the cast - old interviews with William Fichtner reveal that at one point, his corrupt businessman was actually supposed to be Shredder, a development that a) would have made more sense and b) would have justified Fichtner's presence here, but reshoots/rewrites have made Shredder a separate character and have left Fichtner with nothing to do - but given the vagaries of contemporary blockbuster moviemaking, we'll probably never see that version now. If nothing else, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles deserves some credit for clocking in at a fleet 100 minutes - unlike the other big 2014 summer release that bears Michael Bay's name, which feels like it's unfolding at a slightly longer pace than Ken Burns' thirteen-hour Roosevelts documentary - but short and good would still be a preferable scenario.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman notes that the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise is the gift that keeps on giving, an old reliable favorite of the 1980s that has somehow managed to survive in a modernized world and found a revival in Director Jonathan Liebesman's 2014 live action film, a film that is neither a follow-up to, nor a re-imagining of, the older films but instead a total franchise reboot meant for modern audiences expecting the latest in digital technology and large scope. It's a modern crowd pleaser in every sense of the term, which also makes it susceptible to all of the pitfalls modern cinema has to offer. Ninja Turtles, sadly but expectedly, falls into every trap. While the franchise has matured from its cartoonish and toy line origins, and even beyond the scope of its fun but visually limited older films, it has evolved into an extravaganza of recycled sights and sounds meant to excite the senses at the expense of story and characterization. Granted, how much real, emotionally detailed plot one can squeeze from a franchise based on four mutated turtles, their ratlike leader, and a Ninja foe named Shredder (not to mention a couple of overgrown animal henchmen who don't appear in this film) is up for debate, but the movie is so devoid of substance that it's borderline painful to watch. The movie is almost literally nothing more than new skin on the basic modern action-movie package, a Michael Bay-inspired flop that's all style and no substance, and even the style is starting to feel really old, really fast."
From Lionsgate comes the dramedy The Skeleton Twins. The previews for this one are extremely misleading; Lionsgate sold it as a quirky comedy starring two SNL veterans (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig) as a screwy brother-and-sister pair who reunite after ten years and get their groove back, thanks to some sitcom-ready misadventures and a well-timed Starship song ("Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," the de facto theme song from Mannequin, believe it or not). It looked fairly insufferable - Bridesmaids meets You Can Count on Me, maybe - so I'm very happy to report that the actual film is much better than the reductive trailers, and one that leans far more heavily on the "drama" side of the "dramedy" equation. Director Craig Johnson makes his intentions clear in the first scene, which shows deeply depressed actor Milo (Hader) committing suicide just before his sister Maggie (Wiig) also tries to kill herself; the only reason she fails is because she gets a call that Milo was unsuccessful in his own self-destruction attempt, and this opening turn of events is indicative of the tone for the rest of the picture: darkly comic but mostly pretty bleak. Furthermore, the more time we spend with Milo and Maggie, the less we can fault them for trying to kill themselves. Maggie has an over-protective husband (Luke Wilson) who wants a child even though she doesn't, and Milo is still haunted by the homophobic bullying he endured as a child as well as his unresolved feelings for his former high-school teacher (Ty Burrell) and the sexual relationship they had when Milo was fifteen. Johnson takes this grim material seriously, and the movie, though not an easy sit, is better for it - it would be very easy for The Skeleton Twins to tipple into sentimental pap (see this week's This Is Where I Leave You for a family drama that does just that and cops out every chance it gets), but Johnson keeps things low-key and bitter and real. It helps, too, that Wiig and Hader are so good. Wiig's dramatic chops are less of a surprise - she grounds the serious moments in Bridesmaids - but she's even better here, playing a thornier, more unsettled character. And Hader is a revelation. As the gay, self-loathing Milo, he's able to convey a whole realm of inner pain and regret, but he never tips his hand. This is a remarkably subtle performance, one that suggests rather than announces, and it reveals Hader to be an actor of uncommon pathos and understatement. He's opened up the door for himself as a serious dramatic actor.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that, "The Skeleton Twins turns out to be a rather audacious film that features brilliant and largely dramatic performances from two unlikely sources: Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. With Saturday Night Live's semi-august history of offering comedians a chance to stretch their actorly wings in more urbane and sophisticated fare, it probably shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Wiig and Hader are up to the task of depicting two estranged twins who reunite in the wake of one failed suicide attempt and one unconsummated suicide attempt. Hardly the building blocks for a 'laff riot,' as Variety might call it, many readers might be thinking by this point, and indeed The Skeleton Twins, while whimsically humorous in an off kilter way some of the time, is a quieter and more introspective character study than some might expect given the marquee value and built in demographic pull of its stars. Wiig and Hader portray Maggie and Milo, two wounded souls who, as the film opens, have decided independently to end it all, bringing a close to what seems to have been a lifetime of emotional turmoil. Milo has already slit his wrists and deposited himself in the bathtub for his final moments, while Maggie is ruminating over a handful of pills when her morbid meditation is interrupted by a phone call from a hospital informing of her brother's suicide attempt, which was upset when neighbors complained about the obnoxiously loud music Milo had been playing to escort him to the afterlife. That sets up a halting, fumbling reunion between the two, who had neither seen nor spoken to each other for ten years or so."
Sony is bringing the latest Woody Allen comedy Magic in the Moonlight to Blu-ray this week. Late-stage Woody Allen is always a risky proposition; for every legitimate triumph we get in the form of a Vicky Cristina Barcelona or a Midnight in Paris (the latter of which ranks as one of Allen's career highlights, its poky first ten minutes aside), we have to put up with four or five stinkers like Anything Else or The Curse of the Jade Scorpion or Hollywood Ending or Scoop or Whatever Works or about half of To Rome with Love or...well, you catch my drift. Allen's career now feels like the equivalent of viewing an artist's sketchbook in real time - lots of insignificant or unsuccessful dawdles surround genuine pockets of inspiration - so it's not terribly surprising to report that Magic in the Moonlight definitely falls more on the Scoop end of the spectrum rather than on the Midnight in Paris side. Like both of those pictures, the film is one of Allen's pure confections, a screwball comedy that finds Colin Firth's cynical illusionist trying to debunk the powers of Emma Stone's supposed mystic. True to form, they start falling for one another even as Firth finds himself questioning Stone's abilities, and everything pretty much plays out exactly the way you're expecting. The problem is, there's no pep, no air to this bauble of a movie - Magic in the Moonlight is another one of those examples where Allen attracts a dynamite cast (besides Firth and Stone, Allen has nabbed Hamish Linklater, Simon McBurney, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver, and the great Eileen Atkins) with a feels-like-a-first-draft script by virtue of the fact that everyone wants to work with Woody Allen. Darius Khondji's gorgeous, French Riviera-set cinematography might be the only exceptional thing about Magic in the Moonlight: it's certainly light-years better that warmed-over atheism one-liners (we're a long way from Annie Hall or Hannah and Her Sisters) or Allen's slack direction and pacing, which lets scenes play out in long takes but doesn't motivate the actors to pitch their timing anywhere close to the verve of the best screwball farces. And as talented as they are, Firth and Stone are probably the least effective members of the ensemble. The two have no chemistry together - plus, the age gap between the two is so distracting that Firth seems more like a disapproving uncle than an ardent paramour - and they can't sell Allen's lone stab at deeper resonance, a thematic undercurrent that casts the conflict between the two as the divide between faith and rationality. This idea is the film's most poignant conceit, and it makes that Allen, having entered the twilight years of his life, would want to wrestle more explicitly with what comes next. Too bad Magic in the Moonlight doesn't do this theme any justice. Maybe a rewrite would have helped.
For a far better example of how to serve this kind of feather-light comedy, there's Sydney Pollack's Tootsie, which is getting an HD upgrade from the folks at the Criterion Collection. This romantic comedy remains one of the most popular examples of its genre ever made, and it's almost as fresh and engaging now as it was in 1982. On one hand, Tootsie is a semi-reworking of Billy Wilder's great Some Like It Hot (minus the threat of violence that Wilder so expertly wields), with Dustin Hoffman starring as Michael Dorsey, a brilliant-but-difficult actor (think Edward Norton now or, say, Dustin Hoffman in 1982) who devises a unique solution to getting out of a sustained period of unemployment: he disguises himself as a woman and lands a part on a popular daytime soap opera. As with Magic in the Moonlight, none of what follows is particularly surprising. Would it shock you to learn that Michael falls for a fellow actress (Jessica Lange) who's unaware of the gender gap between the two, or that in pretending to be a woman, Michael becomes a better man? It's one cliché after another, except Pollack's direction is so assured that instead of groaning at the conventions, we're laughing at the jokes and enjoying the deep comic bench of Tootsie's supporting players, including Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, George Gaynes, and Pollack himself, who might walk away with the picture as Michael's increasingly frustrated agent were it not for the presence of former Ghostbuster and living mischief spirit Bill Murray, who (again, unsurprisingly) takes his tiny unbilled role as Michael's pretentious roommate and turns it into the funniest thing in the film, throwing out a series of mostly improvised one-liners ("That is one nutty hospital." "I don't like it when people come up to me after my plays and say... 'I really dug your play, man, I cried.' I like it when people come up to me the next day, or a week later, and they say, 'I saw your play. What happened?'") with aplomb. One should also not understate the fact that, as funny as Tootsie is, it's also legitimately moving. Hoffman might be playing a screenwriting convention, but he makes us appreciate Michael's inner growth, and he's got a touching chemistry with Lange's innocent starlet. The irony is that this film, which is so confident and breezy and charming, grew out of massive creative strife: Hoffman first brought in Harold and Maude auteur Hal Ashby to direct the film, and after Ashby left due to creative differences with the studio, Hoffman enlisted Pollack to take Ashby's place, a decision that only led to greater on-set arguments between the director and his notoriously prickly leading man, and that's not even counting the attempts to jerry-rig a workable screenplay. The on-screen credit may go to Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, but they are only two of the writers whose contributions Pollack Frankenstein'ed into the finished film. Other writers included Don McGuire, Robert Kaufman, Robert Garland, Barry Levinson, and Elaine May. That said, barring some slight over-length (do we really need two music montages?) and a terrible Dave Grusin score (and this is not the only Pollack compromised by Grusin's elevator-music stylings. See also: 3 Days of the Condor), the seams never show. There's a reason people mention Tootsie in the same breath as Some Like It Hot or It Happened One Night, and Criterion's new Blu-ray makes it so much easier to get reacquainted with the film.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review writes that, "while the chemistry between Hoffman and Lange is excellent and Pollack is simply terrific as the cynical agent, the film unquestionably looks and feels dated. One could argue that it does because the homosexuality and gender equality issues it tackles are now approached by the masses with an entirely different mindset, but the truth is that its script has a number of rough spots and it definitely shows. Indeed, most of the gender jokes are quite banal while the serious observations about the two sexes and their insecurities are so oversanitized that they frequently feel forced. (Compare Tootsie to Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot or even Frank Capra's It Happened One Night and see how notably sharper and better balanced these films are despite the fact that they are actually older)."