For the week of March 31st, Warner Home Entertainment has Blu-rays for two blockbusters about space travel. The most recent (a co-production with Paramount) is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, which finds the Memento and Dark Knight auteur turning to the skies for the epic tale of how, in an effort to save the inhabitants of a dying Earth, a group of scientists and astronauts (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, and, as the scene-stealing military robots TARS and CASE, Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart) take advantage of advances in deep-space travel in order to investigate the possibility of habitable planets existing at the other end of a mysterious galactic wormhole. As the mission grows more perilous - and if there's one thing that Nolan excels at, it's crosscutting between dangers of increasing scope and import - the ultimate fate of our planet weighs on the crew, particularly McConaughey's Cooper, who is desperate to return to his kids (played as children by Timothée Chalamet and the wonderful Mackenzie Foy). No one ever accused Nolan of lacking ambition - after all, here's the guy who turned the third Batman movie into a grand-scale homage to Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Citiesand a parable for the Occupy Wall Street movement - so it's saying something that Interstellar represents Nolan's most bold work in terms of scale. From the film's oppressive, Dust Bowl-inspired first hour to its exploration of desolate alien planets (Iceland doubled for the extraterrestrial expanses, as is its wont), Nolan keeps tossing in visual wonderments that galvanize five or six terrific setpieces, including a handful of interstellar voyages that are, in their own way, as impressive as scenes in Stanley Kubrick's oft-imitated-but-rarely-equaled 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet Interstellar is no mere popcorn entertainment. It aspires to the same rarified air as 2001 or Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff, and that lofty goal encapsulates all of Interstellar's strengths and weaknesses. When Interstellar is working - and it has moments finer than anything the rest of the 2014 cinema crop had to offer - that sober, portentous tone gives it the weight of a great elegy, a sensation that Hans Zimmer's aching, organ-heavy score only reinforces. Chief among those strengths is McConaughey's brilliant lead performance, which is as good as his justly lauded turns in Dallas Buyers Club and True Detective. He's a man torn between his love of family and his yen for exploration, and in one heartbreaking moment (a series of recorded messages beamed across galaxies), those two passions conflate and casually destroy him. Thanks to McConaughey, Interstellar isn't just about a dying planet; it's an ode to people like Chuck Yeager and John Glenn, to those who felt a biological imperative towards expanding our conception of the universe. McConaughey is so good that he helps to paper over the film's more problematic moments, such as some awkward crosscutting between the mission and Earth (where the principal cast shifts from McConaughey and Hathaway to Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, and Topher Grace, of all people), the unsatisfying move from space drama into space thriller (despite its nicely pathetic-villainous turn from a Big Movie Star), and a script that occasionally sags under the weight of its own ambitions. Critics have often accused Nolan and his brother Jonathan of ladling on Big Themes with little regard to subtlety or nuance (see also: the vitriol that the Dark Knight and Inception screenplays generated), but Interstellar is the first time where those complaints seem well founded. Hathaway has a speech about the nature of love that clarifies theme in the most thuddingly obvious fashion possible, while Caine recites Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" so many times that it practically deserves billing under McConaughey. As narratively and aesthetically daring as Nolan is, he doesn't have much faith in his audience to read subtext, and I can imagine a better version of this script that deemphasizes the dialogue and foregrounds the moments of visual poetry. Still, for all its flaws, Interstellar lingers in the mind like few movies do. It ends, and we yearn for its expanses, warts and all.
Of Interstellar, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "manages to pack in a dense and fully realized yet fundamentally familiar future world in its opening minutes, sharing a good deal of information in relatively short order but, in these early moments, making every line and shot matter as it almost effortlessly builds towards the more fascinating realms of its core story. As the movie inches ever further away from its 'Disaster movie' underpinnings and closer to its true narrative purposes that eschew typical genre convention, it opens up to explore a much more satisfying field of view that's not concerned with imminent destruction or the physical salvation of lives but instead a broader examination of the connection shared by humanity. There, the hero, or heroes, are defined not so much by their outward actions but by their inward essences and how they use that internal guide to not only reach point B from point A but also to bend their will and broaden their understanding of themselves, and everything around them, to accomplish their goals of togetherness, understanding, and yes, even salvation, though not necessarily in the traditional usage of the terms. In many ways, the film uses the idea of the wormhole and the simple demonstration of unrelated but overlapping points on a folded plane not so much to depict part of the science behind the film but rather to demonstrate the driving force that is its exploration of mankind through the prism of both the shared and disparate experiences of place and time between Cooper and his daughter Murphy. It's a complex narrative to be sure and one that's difficult to explore without spoiling the movie in its total, but needless to say there's a wonderful bit of storytelling and multifaceted detail that the audience will find both compelling and evolving with every watch."
Also from Warner: the Diamond Luxe Edition of Gravity. The big selling point for this edition is a snazzy new "Silent Space Edition" that removes Steven Price's Academy Award-winning score, but the film itself remains a marvel, a thrill ride that "never falls prey to the bloat and overwrought pomp of most four-quadrant epics (*cough the Transformers series cough*). His film runs a lean and mean ninety-one minutes and dispenses with all nonessential narrative beats: we follow two astronauts (Bullock and Clooney) as they try to make it back to Earth after space debris destroys the rest of their team. That's about it, and like last year's similarly minded All Is Lost, Gravity proves that viewers don't need much more. Cuarón's emphasis on the increasing perils that Bullock and Clooney face generates sheer white-knuckle terror. His sense of staging and momentum are unparalleled, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's love of long, unbroken takes means we often get no hard cuts to break the suspense of a given moment. This rollercoaster approach to movie-making has caused some critics to call the film pretty but shallow, yet Cuarón and his co-writer (and son) Jonas clearly have more on their minds than popcorn entertainment. In their conception of Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone, they've created a potent (if not terribly subtle) metaphor for the challenges of engaging fully with life. In Gravity's opening moments of calm, we realize that Dr. Stone has taken to the emptiness of space for very personal reasons, and her minute-by-minute decisions to keep going when everything goes to hell represents nothing less than a struggle for rebirth. It's a remarkably physical performance, but in her actions, we get a full portrait of a woman whose demons exceed any of the space-born catastrophes she faces. Bullock is at the top of her game here (she's even better than her Academy Award-winning Blind Side work), and the movie around her responds in kind."
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review noted that the film "is a stunning achievement in filmmaking. Cuarón and his team have created something truly special here, both in terms of technical innovation and storytelling mastery, and the visual effects, outstanding as they are, serve the script and performances at all times, just as they should. And once again, Warner delivers a first class Gravity Blu-ray release. The 2-disc Diamond Luxe Edition features a dazzling 2D video presentation, a tremendously effective Dolby Atmos (core Dolby TrueHD 7.1) surround track, and nearly six hours of bonus content, including a Silent Space music-less version of the film, a new 40-minute documentary, another featurette, and a quick laugh with Sandra Bullock. If you haven't already added Gravity to your collection, there's no time like the present."
This week also sees the releases of two Academy Award-honored biopics from 2014 - The Weinstein Company's The Imitation Game and Twentieth Century Fox's Wild - and happily, both eschew the rise-to-ruin-to-rise-again format of something like The Theory of Everything in order to focus on a few brief, intense experiences in the lives of their protagonists. The Imitation Game, for example, plays more like a thriller than a conventional biopic of brilliant mathematician, engineer, and scientist Alan Turing (a terrific Benedict Cumberbatch), with Graham Moore's Academy Award-winning script highlighting Turing's attempts to break the Nazi's Enigma encryption machine, a task that ultimately leads to the creation of the first computer A.I. system. As Turing and his team (including Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong, Allen Leech, and Matthew Beard) labor to beat the Nazis at their own cryptography game, Turing finds himself on the watch for enemies both within and without: namely, enemy spies looking to steal his codebreaking secrets as well as allies who might report Turing's deeply hidden homosexuality to the British government. The biggest problem with The Imitation Game is that it feels like a TV movie - director Morten Tyldum does little to justify the film's presence on the big-screen - but it's so well acted and paced that its lack of visual flash barely registers. Aesthetic intrigue is definitely not something that Wild needs to worry about, however. Director Jean-Marc Vallée, fresh off his Oscar-winning triumph Dallas Buyers Club, adopts a rough, vérité style that presents life in disjointed, achronological fragments: it's the perfect cinematic device to tell the story of Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) who goes into an emotional and physical tailspin after the death of her mother (Laura Dern) and tries to break free by hiking the length of the Pacific Coast Trail. Strayed's nonfiction memoir about this experience - and the shorter essay "The Love of My Life" that inspired it - is consistently harrowing in its depiction of her own sexual and psychological destruction, and Vallée's film stays true to the text (Witherspoon is fearless here in a way she's never been) while also adding in a level of natural peril - the potential dangers of the hike come at us in visceral fragments, as does the rush of flashback and memory that haunts Strayed. Wild received Oscar nominations for Witherspoon and Dern, yet it still feels underappreciated. This is a far better, tougher movie than people acknowledged.
Of The Imitation Game, Martin Liebman commented that the film "paints a portrait of a man, one of the most complex characters ever depicted on the screen. Alan Turing is an eccentric man, obsessive compulsive in his daily routine, and a social pariah. But he's quick-witted, capable of playing the back-and-forth game and exposing weakness and unbalance even in casual conversation, speaking directly without much of a filter. That plays an interesting contrast against, but also sets a foundation for, his love for puzzles and ability to understand them, decipher them, and ultimately build a machine to do the job of breaking them with a speed and efficiency many degrees of magnitude more quickly than even the sharpest human mind. Yet he can barely carry on a mundane conversation about what he wants for lunch and whether he'd like to join his co-workers for a bite to eat. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal - he's 'barely making par' next to great minds like Newton and Einstein - and he seems to enjoy both playing down to his audience and build up beyond their level. He slowly grows more accustomed to working with others, but doing so forces him to face a number of realities about who he is, what he does, what he is capable of doing, and how he has done it. By the end, it all seems to come back to his sexuality."
Finally, HBO Home Entertainment is bringing two of its most acclaimed half-hour comedies to Blu-ray: Veep: The Complete Third Season and Silicon Valley: The Complete First Season. Of the two, Veep took the longest to find its footing. Despite a dynamite cast (headed by the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and the guiding hand of The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci, Veep's inaugural didn't have the spark or freshness of the satirical heights Iannucci hit with The Thick of It; at best, it was an amiable, half-speed merge of Arrested Development and The West Wing. However, the show got sharper and funnier about halfway through its sophomore year, and now it's one of HBO's best programs. Part of the reason why Season Three is so good is because Iannucci and his team have introduced actual stakes. As Vice President Selina Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus) begins her bumbling, beyond-awkward campaign for the President's seat, the show gets a chance to riff on the myriad election conflicts that can arise - in many ways, this is the piss-take version of The West Wing's great seventh season. However, it's more than that. Veep has gotten more comfortable, and that ease allows its dense bench of comic ringers (including Tony Hale, Matt Walsh, Gary Cole, Kevin Dunn, Randall Park, and especially Timothy Simons, who steals every scene he's in as the White House's unbearably pathetic liaison between the President and Selina) to grab hold of Iannucci's funny-profane dialogue and run with it. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, came out of the gate fully formed and only got better. Series creator Mike Judge is also no amateur when it comes to television sitcoms - he's made it into the pantheon of great TV on the strength of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill alone - and Silicon Valley continues this trend with its journey of a painfully awkward computer programmer (Thomas Middleditch) and his vaguely hostile group of roommates/partners (T.J. Miller, Martin Starr, Kumail Nanjiani, and Zach Woods) as they try to beat a menacing, Google-like company (personified by a very funny Matt Ross) in the development of a revolutionary compression software. There's so much potential for failure here, in that a) David Fincher aside, computer programming isn't inherently dramatic and that b) the premise seems ripe for the kinds of easy geek bait that The Big Bang Theory peddles out on a weekly basis. But Judge is such a master of mining humor from the tiniest, most idiosyncratic forms of human behavior that none of the jokes hit us in the way we're expecting - he hews to the type of time-delay comedy that has you laughing harder two weeks later - and his own experience in the programming world (plus the suggestions of his Mountain-View-based technical consultants) gives the humor a richness the authenticity that makes it funnier and wonkier. Case in point: the show's wonderful season finale, which features maybe the longest and most mathematically precise penis joke ever crafted. Part of the danger of starting on such a high note is the fear that subsequent seasons won't be able to match the pitch of Season One (and, in a heartbreaking turn of events, the show lost one of its breakthrough characters, the offbeat tech magnate Peter Gregory, when actor Christopher Evan Welch died due to lung-cancer-related complications), but what we have here ranks as some of Judge's best work.