For the week of April 7th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing A Most Violent Year to Blu-ray, and the fundamental irony is that outside of some relatively brief gun violence and a chase scene that gains its intensity from how fumbling the participants are, this quiet, somber film does not deliver the bloodbath that the title suggests. Rather, writer/director J.C. Chandor is establishing a key bit of historical background; he sets the film in New York City, circa 1981, a time when violent crime was on the rise and the number of murders hovered over 2,100, and this fraught atmosphere contextualizes the actions of Chandor's protagonist, young oil magnate Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac). Morales wants to dramatically expand his business along the East River, but as the chaos of the city begins to impact his company's potential for financial growth, especially to the degree that it attracts the interests of a crusading D.A. (David Oyelowo), he finds himself torn between his desire to run a mostly honest business (and one of the beautiful subtleties that Chandor conveys is that while no one is 100% moral, there's a vast chasm between SOP corruption and blatant immorality) and the collective impulses of his closest family members and associates (Jessica Chastain and Albert Brooks, as Morales' mobbed-up wife and his lawyer, respectively) to succeed, no matter what the cost. In a sense, then, A Most Violent Year is a kind of anti-gangster movie: while the trials he faces wouldn't be out of place in The Godfather or especially Sidney Lumet's great bad-cop epic Prince of the City, Morales wants to define his power through righteousness as opposed to through violence and brute force. It's a typically atypical move from Chandor, who in just three films has evinced a willingness to tell a conventional story (the Wall Street-esque morality play of Margin Call; the survival thriller All Is Lost) through unconventional means (Margin Call's Masters of the Universe never receive their comeuppance; All Is Lost uses its protagonist's response to a natural disaster to ask all sorts of questions about fate and mortality). Certainly A Most Violent Year moves and talks as confidently as its predecessors, from its expert cast (Isaac has the smoldering magnetism of young Al Pacino, while Chastain attacks her part with a mix of Lady Macbeth and Michelle Pfeiffer from Scarface) to a burnished, autumnal visual palette (courtesy of Bradford Young) that recalls Gordon Willis in his heyday. However, the picture is also colder and less accessible that Chandor's other works - for the first time, he's making a movie in the style of other movies rather one that functions on its own. I already mentioned The Godfather and Prince of the City, and I could have also easily invoked Blue Collar and Q & A and Straight Time and The Friends of Eddie Coyle and any number of bleak, morally ambiguous neo-noirs that hit their apex in the 1970s. In that sense, A Most Violent Year is just as much a genre pastiche as, say, Django Unchained, but it's too self-important to be self-referential (only Tarantino can pull off both, it seems), and it can't really bear the weight, given how shallow the whole endeavor is. Still, worth a viewing, if only to see how technically gifted a filmmaker Chandor has become.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "Chandor moves these seemingly inartful pieces around on his cinematic chessboard surprisingly slowly at times, something that tends to actually increase tensions, since most audience members are going to be watching themselves, for some expected explosion of lunatic fury, an explosion which in fact more or less never materializes...Many people have expressed a perhaps unavoidable opinion that Chandor seems to be channeling Sidney Lumet with this film. While it's true Chandor has an eye for gritty urban environments that does indeed evoke some of Lumet's pieces, Chandor's examination of claustrophobia, one of the central tenets of Lumet's oeuvre, is weirdly open aired when compared to the iconic director of yore. Lumet delighted in small, enclosed spaces, watching his characters scramble in them like trapped animals at times. Chandor's formulation seems to suggest that when a noose is tightening around you, it doesn't matter if you're holed up in a tiny flat or out in the wilds of Manhattan - the rope is going to cinch one way or the other."
Warner and New Line are also bringing a NYC-based crime drama to Blu-ray, albeit a very different kind: the intense policier The Corruptor. If nothing else, The Corruptor is as bloody as A Most Violent Year is restrained; in order to tell the story of how two mismatched cops (Chow Yun-Fat and Mark Wahlberg) get tangled up in a web of Triad violence and police corruption, director James Foley stages the film as a number of violent altercations, from shootouts galore to severed body parts to a chase scene that sets some kind of record for level of collateral damage. In fact, many critics branded The Corruptor as a wannabe Hong Kong-actioner because of the violence and the presence of international action-star Yun-Fat when the reality is far more homegrown. Think Serpico with arterial spray, and you'll be on the right track. Yun-Fat's NYPD Lieutenant Nick Chen wouldn't be out of place in a James Ellroy novel - he fancies himself a peacekeeper, but he's only able to maintain that reputation through a long history of moral turpitude and sin. When this carefully constructed fiction starts blowing up (almost literally), Nick realizes that stopping the bloodshed and admitting his own complicity in the matter are not mutually exclusive. For about an hour, The Corruptor is a wonder: a tough, stylish, and exciting thriller filled with vivid supporting performances (from Byron Mann, Ric Young, Paul Ben-Victor, Brian Cox, and Kim Chan) and a phenomenal lead performance from Yun-Fat, who does some of his best work ever as the charismatic-but-dirty Chen. The problem is, Robert Pucci's script can't leave well enough alone, and it starts confusing "complex" with "unbearably convoluted." We get double (and triple!) crosses and secret identities and last-minute escapes, and these devices all work to overwhelm the nicely simmering interpersonal dramas at play. It also doesn't help that Wahlberg is so out of his element here. He's certainly excelled at playing cops and badasses (see also: Shooter, Lone Survivor, We Own the Night, The Other Guys, and of course The Departed), but he can't compete with Yun-Fat in terms of intensity and flair, nor does he hit the mix of naivety and intelligence that the part requires in the back end. It's a two-hander where one of the hands is broken, and it leaves The Corruptor as watchable but deeply flawed.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that "Over and over, Foley keeps bringing The Corruptor back to the drama of two men who mean well but keep being tempted, not with money, drugs or sex (though those are also offered) but with the chance to make a difference. An admirer of The French Connection, Foley stages a car chase so brutally effective in its toll on civilians that the MPAA insisted that the sequence be trimmed - the subject is discussed in the extras - but in Foley's mind, he wasn't making an action movie, just recreating what would happen if cops like Chen and Wallace found themselves pursuing two ruthless assassins with automatic weapons (as Foley notes in his commentary, when The French Connection was released, there was no such genre as "action movies")...Foley has said that some of his producers wanted him to resolve The Corruptor with bullets, and there is certainly no lack of gunfire in the final act, as Chen and Wallace are steered to a meeting at the New Jersey docks that each of them believes will allow them to bring an end to the Chinatown gang war. By this point, however, the partners are traveling on different paths, having become separated in the maze of conflicting loyalties and schemes that is, as Lee said, how things are done in Chinatown. Foley's resolution is less Hong Kong and more classic Hollywood, and The Corruptor is better off for it."
Warner is also bringing two Burt Reynolds favorites to Blu-ray: 1978's Hooper and 1981's Sharky's Machine. Of the two, Hooper definitely deserves mention in the pantheon of iconic Burt Reynolds vehicles like Smokey and the Bandit and White Lightning. Reynolds plays Sonny Hooper, a cocky stuntman who gets a big reality check when the studio brings in a young hot-shot (Jan-Michael Vincent) to help pull off the stunts on a big action movie. Like Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper is directed by Hal Needham, a former stuntman himself, and as a result, the gags have a certain insular, meta quality that's made Hooper a favorite among Reynolds aficionados, particularly in terms of how willing Reynolds is to tweak his own image. Sonny Hooper begins the film not a million miles removed from the grinning wiseass he played in the Bandit pictures, but as Vincent's star - and Hooper's own addiction to painkillers - begins to take its toll, we get to see past the facade, both of the character and of Reynolds' own celebrity. That said, Needham isn't making Sunset Boulevard or Day for Night: like Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper is a gag-a-minute romp, filled with crazy stunts and Sally Field and Reynolds' homespun charm, and Needham is content to not draw too much attention to the larger questions of art and mortality. Sharky's Machine, on the other hand, represents the opposite end of the spectrum: this is the same Serious Burt Reynolds who showed up to work in Deliverance and Boogie Nights, and while this cop thriller is nowhere near as good as those modern classics, it does have its signature pleasures. Chief among those is Reynolds' lead performance as Thomas Sharky, a Georgia cop who gets embroiled in a massive vice conspiracy. Sharky's tough but not cold - the more he gets involved with a frightened prostitute (Rachel Ward), the more cracks appear - and Reynolds clearly relishes the opportunity to play a real character, from his tender interactions with Ward to the casual banter he shares with character actors like Charles Durning, Bernie Casey, and Vittorio Gassman. Now, he's also acting as director, and one wishes he could have brought the same level of focus to the narrative. The film lurches back and forth from cop drama to relationship melodrama, and it's easily twenty minutes too long, but it's always engaging, and far better than the drecky thrillers that would come to define Reynolds in the latter part of his career (Malone, Cop and a Half).
Michael Reuben called Hooper "an action comedy that was every bit as loud and raucous as Smokey. But Hooper also has a melancholy undercurrent that distinguishes it from Needham's other comedies and which may explain why it didn't pack in the same size crowds as Smokey and, later, The Cannonball Run. As much as the film appreciates the nonconformity, jollity and moxie of the stuntmen (and stuntwomen) who risk life and limb for the sake of entertainment, it also acknowledges the toll their work takes on their health and private lives, along with the nagging awareness haunting every athlete that time is not on their side. The standing of Needham and star Burt Reynolds in the stunt world was such that they could literally get anyone and everyone, so that Hooper's stunt 'gags' are some of the most elaborate every captured on film, especially when one considers that everything was done practically, without the benefit of computer graphics. The concluding sequence, which is supposed to recreate an earthquake's devastation of a town, involved dozens of stunt players, countless vehicles, multiple explosions, collapsing towers, crumbling buildings and an exploding bridge, plus a rocket-propelled car. On a Needham film, there was no such thing as 'too much.'"
Of Sharky's Machine, Michael Reuben wrote that "one of the most interesting features of Sharky's Machine is how little it shows for an R-rated film. But it feels sordid and depraved, which is a function both of the performances and of the peculiarity of the relationships. Gassman's Victor exudes the sinister confidence of a man who has made his fortune by exploiting people in the most intimate and seductive fashion, then discarding them casually (and fatally) when they no longer serve him. Ward's Dominoe has the surface confidence of a practiced manipulator, but the surface covers an empty shell (or maybe something worse). Reynolds' Sharky has the intensity that made his Lewis in Deliverance so fascinating, but he also has something else inside him that comes out while he watches Dominoe - and, as any student of Hitchcock knows, relationships that begin in voyeurism rarely go well. On the surface, Reynolds' Sharkey is a classic hard-boiled cop with a soft center, but there's more to him. The film pauses during its third act to explore Sharkey's emotions - I can't be more specific without spoilers - and, to Reynolds' credit as a director, it isn't always a pretty picture."
Also from Lionsgate comes the first season of WGN's big foray into original scripted programming, the period drama Manhattan. Set during the early days of America's involvement in World War II, Manhattan eschews battleground conflict and focuses instead on Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the team of scientists and engineers racing to complete a working atomic bomb before the Axis Powers That Be can do likewise. Manhattan luxuriates in the 1940s period details - on a sheer production-design level, it's one of the most gorgeous shows on television (credit to producer David Ellison, who clearly put a lot of his Skydance/Oracle money into the program) - but it's no rose-colored jaunt into a Bygone Time. Manhattan's protagonists are working to create a better bomb, and their scientific knowledge of the kind of destruction and pain they will create if their plans are successful fosters all manners of interpersonal fissures in their community, not least of which is the divide between J. Robert Oppenheimer's top two design teams: the scientists working on "Thin Man" (led by David Harbour's unctuous, grinning Reed Akley) and the crew trying to engineer "Fat Man" on minimal resources and no budget, a team working under the auspices of David Benjamin Hickey's driven, haunted Frank Winter. The show fosters a bit of a "snobs vs. slobs" atmosphere between the two - the "Thin Man" scientists are all Brylcreemed hair and three-piece suits, while the "Fat Man" contingent is an assortment of period-appropriate misfits (the thirty-year-old virgin, the bumbling thespian, the closeted genius, the woman) - but the tragic stakes of the Manhattan Project and the series' stark, barren aesthetic design (The West Wing's Thomas Schlamme directs a handful of episodes, and he establishes a visual template that's half Chinatown, half-The Dust Bowl) keep the show from ever approaching an Animal House-esque farce. This is serious stuff, and when Manhattan is working - which, with the exception of the mediocre pilot episode, is most of the time - it deserves to be taken as such. The show regards the minutiae of scientific exploration and consequences with genuine gravity, but it's also generous enough to expand its focus to the other inhabitants of Los Alamos, allowing ample time for pointed looks at gender imbalances (the wives, personified by Rachel Brosnahan's young mother and Olivia Williams' bitter botanist-turned-doting spouse), racial prejudices, and Communist witch-hunts - think The West Wing dosed with Mad Men, and you'll have a pretty good idea of Manhattan's tone. Unfortunately, where Manhattan differs from those other two programs is in its leading man. On the page, Frank Winter is a great character - a genius who starts acting out in petty, immoral ways to atone for the larger sins of the Manhattan Project - but Hickey's flat, one-note performance conveys only a fraction of the role's complexities and inner torments (in a perfect world, you wonder What If the producers could have nabbed Edward Norton for the part - there's no one better at simultaneously conveying righteous entitlement, shame, and inner charisma). Hickey's unconvincing turn keeps Manhattan from attaining the prestige status it desperately wants, but its supporting roster is uniformly excellent, and it provides great turns for the likes of Brosnahan, Williams, Michael Chernus, Katja Herbers, Daniel Stern, Christopher Denham, Daniel London (as the paranoid, withdrawn Oppenheimer), Richard Schiff (who's absolutely terrifying as a government spook with no moral compass whatsoever), and especially Ashley Zukerman, who brings a Jake Gyllenhaal-esque intensity to his part as the hotshot young physicist torn between both teams.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Manhattan gives passing lip service to still debated issues like the morality of developing this particular weapon of mass destruction, something that is handled in a probably too pat way to ever resonate as emotionally as it might have. While that historical aspect is fascinating (albeit more intellectually than anything), Manhattan takes repeated stabs at more contemporary issues like NSA-esque government 'oversight' (as in eavesdropping), secret 'renditions,' black ops centers that specialize in torture, and more decidedly 21st century elements that sit somewhat uneasily up against what is admittedly one of the more evocative recreations of a historical milieu ever attempted for series television. In fact it's this show's immaculate production design that helps to establish a feeling for time and place much more so than some of the too contemporary seeming characters and plot machinations. Performances are by and large compelling, with Zukerman a real standout as Isaacs, an idealistic kid who makes a number of boneheaded decisions during the first season, leading to an impossibly melodramatic 'cliffhanger' wrap up (one actually involving Frank). Hickey is good in a somewhat more mannered performance, but the creative staff's decision to have Winter tooling about with a perpetual five o'clock shadow all the time just gets annoying after a while. We get it - Winter is a driven, compulsive character who just doesn't have time to shave."