For the week of January 27th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Fury to Blu-ray. The film is director David Ayer's second 2014 feature, the first being the violent thriller Sabotage, and one-word titles aside, the two films could hardly be more dissimilar. Whereas Sabotage was a gory, junky procedural that aped the run-and-gun aesthetic of The Shield, Fury is a classically composed WWII drama very much in the vein of Saving Private Ryan or Anthony Mann's Men in War. The film centers on young Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a very green Army typist who gets assigned to a Sherman tank during the last days of the war; there, Ellison struggles to balance his humanity with the extremely battle-hardened attitudes of the tank's crew (including Shia LaBeouf, Jon Bernthal and Michael Peña) and Staff Sergeant (Brad Pitt). For its first 100 minutes or so, Fury feels like a new classic. As clichéd as the setup is, Ayer injects fresh energy into the situation, from the nicely combative dynamic between stars Pitt and Lerman (even if Pitt appears to be playing the serious version of his Inglourious Basterds character) to the startling details of the tank's day-to-day grind: as late in the war as it is, the situation is remarkably fraught for the tank squad, as their hollowed-out psyches lead them to commit brutal - and, many times, questionable - atrocities against soldiers and civilians alike. Ayer also scripted Training Day, and he gives what might be a sentimental idyll mid-film in Fury - a tender rendezvous between Lerman, Pitt, and two local German women - the suspense of that earlier film's terrifying sequence where Denzel Washington leaves Ethan Hawke in the care of some very bad men. It's to Ayer's credit, though, that he refrains from explicit moralizing or condemnation: he's content to present the behavior of the Allied protagonists rather than saddling them with a lot of trite dialogue. All of those positives make Fury's final half-hour all the more disappointing. Pitt and his men decide to make one last stand against the German army, and we get a kind of Wild Bunch-lite showdown that eschews character development in favor of bloody conflict, all of which is entertaining enough but far more rote than what was a superior war drama. I'd liken the shift to the last half-hour of Collateral. In both instances, these top-notch morality plays content themselves with mere action-movie thrills. Still, Fury remains well-crafted and highly watchable all the way through, even if it does cop out in the ninth inning.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that Fury "makes for not only a harrowing, realistically violent motion picture, but one that pushes further than any move before it. It portrays a world in which there are no heroes but only people performing a task, a task which has made them almost numb to anything but the lifeblood that runs through their veins and the veins of those who share the tough yet fragile steel death trap they call 'home': the inside of a Sherman tank. These are men who have had the humanity largely wiped clean from them, men to whom war has scraped away the heart and degraded the soul. The only instinct that pushes them onward, it seems, is the will to live, which for them means destroying other people who have likely been similarly destroyed from the inside out in a war that superficially sees men finished off from the outside in. Whether in the heat of battle with tracers zipping overhead and shells ricocheting off the tanks' steel bodies or tucked away in a moment of reprieve in the relative safety and silence of an occupied home, the war tears at them, determined to rip away every last bit of them that makes them human...It does something else: it brings them closer together, closer in that huddled belly of armor and gunpowder in which they may have largely lost themselves but that together rediscover the best man has to offer - toughness, duty, honor, respect, friendship - even when those things have otherwise been removed from their very cores."
Next up from Warner Home Entertainment is the wannabe prestige picture The Judge. The flagship feature from Susan Downey and Robert Downey Jr.'s "Team Downey" production company, The Judge seemed like a return to the more serious fare that Downey had largely abandoned since becoming the biggest star in the world. Downey himself had spoken admiringly about the film, tweeting that it represented "the kind of movie [he] grew up wanting to make," and certainly the film's high-profile cast (besides Downey, the film co-stars Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga, Dax Shepard, Vincent D'Onofrio, Denis O'Hare, Ken "White Shadow" Howard, and the great Billy Bob Thornton) seemed to suggest the best kind of Hollywood blue-chip property. How sad, then, to say that The Judge not only does not live up to the hype but falls far short of Downey and Co.'s many pretensions. It's hard to believe that the charming, live-wire star of The Pick-Up Artist, Two Girls and a Guy, Wonder Boys, and Zodiac was really angling to make something that, at its best moments, functions as a mediocre Lifetime movie that happened to luck into a great cast. From the jump, nothing about The Judge surprises. I write that Downey plays a hot-shot, big-city lawyer who has to return to his small hometown and defend his estranged father (Duvall), and I barely need to say anything else - chances are you know exactly what kind of movie The Judge is. Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque's script hits all the expected narrative checkpoints: would it surprise you that Downey and Duvall's animosity towards one another stems from misguided love, or that Vera Farmiga plays the down-to-earth local gal that Downey should get with, or that Billy Bob Thornton's rival prosecutor is practically the Prince of Darkness? The whole film feels like a Mad-Libs movie template, and while convention isn't a bad thing if you supply the right amount of filmmaking brio to compensate (see Fury above), director David Dobkin (you know, the firebrand auteur behind...uhm, Wedding Crashers and The Change-Up) can't make the proceedings feel any more substantial than a boilerplate airplane novel. In fact, Dobkin seems to have equated importance with length, and so he stretches The Judge out to an interminable 141 minutes long, bloating it with useless subplots (the less said about Downey's relationship with Jeremy Strong's mentally challenged younger brother, the better) and more endings than The Return of the King. I guess The Judge looks good (Dobkin got Steven Spielberg's longtime DP Janusz Kamiński to shoot the film), and it has precisely one good scene - a heartbreaking bathroom meltdown between Downey and Duvall's characters that, I guarantee, is the reason Duvall picked up a surprise Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work here - but everything else is wasted space. The Soloist was more resonant than this creaky bit of claptrap; heck, Iron Man 3 had a Downey performance with more nuance and insight.
Kenneth Brown noted that "The Judge is as formulaic as they come; so formulaic that it lifts the formula of at least three different genre pics. It's the sort of movie that will never appeal to all viewers, never garner critical acclaim, and never find its way onto the awards docket. But that's where an honest trailer becomes a godsend. I don't have to watch The Judge to know it's not for me. It's right there in the trailer, confirmed by critics, and hailed only by a small but vocal minority. I also didn't have to watch the entire film to know it's precisely the kind of film my mother would adore, that my sister-in-law would expend a box of tissues watching, and that several of our dearest family friends would revisit multiple times, coming away more satisfied with each viewing. Personal Taste is obviously the culprit, followed by co-conspirators Expectation and Familiarity. But there's nothing wrong with that. Want to know if The Judge is for you? For once, a trailer is more interested in assembling the right audience than in trying to fool everyone into thinking it's the next groundbreaking, award-winning modern classic."
In yet another part of its continuing effort to update MGM's back-catalog, Shout Factory is giving Kenneth Branagh's Henry V an HD upgrade. Today, some viewers might not afford Branagh adapting William Shakespeare the proper attention - and to be fair, ever since his mammoth, 65mm Hamlet version, Branagh has taken on the Bard to diminishing results - but in 1989, his Henry V was a major event. For one, Branagh was explicitly putting himself in comparison with Lawrence Olivier: it was Olivier who previously brought the play to the screen with his rousing Technicolor version from 1944, which played like a grand mix of Shakespeare and The Adventures of Robin Hood. For another, Henry V was to be Branagh's directorial debut, and given his success on stage - he'd already amassed theatrical triumphs in the Billy Plays and Another Country - expectations for his film career couldn't have been higher. It's a measure of the film's success that Henry V ranks not only as one of the great Shakespeare adaptations (maybe the great Shakespeare adaptation) but as one of the most striking debut feature from a first-time filmmaker. If Branagh had any insecurities or apprehensions about his work, it certainly doesn't show; from the very beginning, a spirited recitation of the prologue that Derek Jacobi delivers in present-day London that quickly gives way to the doom and gloom of the 15th Century, the film moves with such confidence. Branagh's work behind the camera recalls Orson Welles in how he's able to get so much from so little - this is an epically scaled work that constantly belies its modest $9-million budget, with the director's inventiveness behind the camera creating the illusion of scope, especially in the grueling Battle of Agincourt that brings Henry V to its bloody climax. That said, the film's relative size is just a fringe benefit. Rarely has Shakespeare's language seemed so extemporaneous and natural, and that quality begins and ends with the cast. As the title character, Branagh himself assays a King Henry for the ages (he's a firebrand, through and through), and he doesn't even give the best performance. That honor might go to Robbie Coltrane's Falstaff, or Brian Blessed's Duke of Exeter, or Paul Scofield's cadaverous Charles VI, or Emma Thompson's Lady Katharine, or the quintet of Judi Dench, Richard Briers, Geoffrey Hutchings, Robert Stephens, and a young Christian Bale as Prince Hal's former ruffian friends. The whole film just works, and by the end, the issue isn't whether or not Branagh's efforts match Olivier's. It's to what degree Branagh has bested the Great Master.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "Shakespeare lays out an oddly bifurcated operational mode on the part of Henry. He is charming and accessible, but he is also absolutely ferocious if he feels he's been crossed. That doesn't necessarily mean he feels remorseless, as one devastating scene proves where Bardolph (Richard Briers), a friend of the king's, is brought to justice. Branagh interpolates material from other Shakespeare plays into Henry V, though he keeps the general structure of the original play more or less intact. It's interesting to note that Shakespeare himself tends to forestall the romantic angle between Henry and Charles VI's daughter Katharine (Emma Thompson), leaving the consummation (such as it is) for the final scene in what is supposed to augur a kind of 'happily ever after' for combatant nations along with the betrothed. A large and extremely colorful array of great British character actors fills every nook and cranny of Henry V with delicious bits. Judi Dench, Geraldine McEwan, Robbie Coltrane, Ian Holm, and Robert Stephens all do great work, bringing the sometimes impenetrable language of the Bard fully to life. The film is also notable for how kind of unvarnished it is. This is not a big, glossy 'Hollywood' production and instead trafficks more in an almost verité style, especially with regard to the battle scenes (though Branagh goes a little 'Peckinpah' at times with slow motion effects). The incredibly evocative score by Patrick Doyle is one of the film's chief accomplishments, supporting the action effortlessly without ever intruding on the redolent language."
Finally, from Cinedigm comes Open Windows, the latest film from indie genre favorite Nacho Vigalondo. Vigalondo made a big splash on the arthouse scene with his inventive sci-fi-thriller Timecrimes, and while Open Windows ditches the sci-fi angle (save for the opening sequence, which functions as a clever wink at both Timecrimes and Vigalondo's 2011 follow-up Extraterrestrial), it still evinces Vigalondo's affinity for remixing and tweaking standard genre formulas. In this case, he's riffing on Rear Window, with his tale of how website editor Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood) becomes the unwitting witness/participant in the brutal stalking of movie-star Jill Goddard (former porn-star Sasha Grey), except Vigalondo adds a uniquely 21st-Century twist: the whole story unfolds through digital screens, or the "open windows" of the film's title. Vigalondo mashes up this narrative through different phone and webcams (the movie frame resembles an computer desktop at times, stuffed with different pages and screens); we only see Nick through the cameras connected to his computer. It's an interesting decision in theory, but it's one that makes Open Windows far more of a slog than Vigalondo's previous features. For one, the screen interface puts us at a distance, as we can't get lost in the inherent drama of the story, and while that remove might be intentional on Vigalondo's part - he's certainly playing with the nature of spectator and performer, and the responsibility each side has - it doesn't allow for the kind of pulpy, visceral energy the picture demands. Furthermore, as the action intensifies, the editing between these tiny screens becomes too incoherent; a late-stage car chase is pixelated muck. It doesn't help either that Vigalondo plants a number of twists and reveals that beggar belief, but even those feel betrayed by the aesthetic. Elijah Wood's other Hitchcockian thriller from 2014, the underrated Grand Piano, was similarly nonsensical, but it looked beautiful - the film moved with the sheen and glide of Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill or Blow Out. Open Windows, by comparison, moves like De Palma's found-footage attempt Redacted: well meaning but tiresome.