For the week of April 14th, Shout Factory is bringing the Australian horror feature The Babadook to Blu-ray. With this feature, director Jennifer Kent makes one of the most impressive feature-length film debuts in recent memory (she got her start as an actress and has appeared in such films as Babe: Pig in the City); The Babadook is an emotionally resonant, viscerally terrifying chiller that deserves comparison with Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining - it's that good. Like those films, The Babadook transcends its horror trappings through a strict commitment to nuance and character, in this case Amelia Vannick (Essie Davis), a hospice-care nurse suffering from a brutal case of depression, and with good cause: still reeling from her husband's sudden death (The Babadook is light on gore, but it earns its stripes with some brief, horrifying flashes of how he died), Amelia finds herself more and more distanced from her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), whose obsession with fighting monsters makes him a social pariah at school and a source of alien, uncomfortable tension for Amelia. She can barely look at him without wanting to scream, and as her anxiety rises with the intensity of Samuel's troubles, Kent's got us, so persuasive is her aesthetic realization of postpartum stresses. It helps, too, that Davis and Wiseman are so phenomenal as the fraught mother-son pair - if the Academy Awards didn't treat horror films like second-class citizens, both performers could have had legitimate shots at Oscar nominations. In fact, we'd be willing to watch a straight drama about their psychological battle of wills, so it's all the more impressive that when Kent shifts into full-scale terror, she's able to enrich the human drama already on display. See, Amelia and Samuel find a children's picture-book called Mr. Babadook (and the illustrations alone have an expressionistic menace that would give Tim Burton nightmares), and after reading it, they invoke a vicious, relentless spirit determined to claim their souls. The monster itself - a looming, top-hatted monstrosity that wouldn't be out of place in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - is scary (though Kent enhances its creep factor through the quick, fleeting glimpses we get of it - we never see it long enough to make rational sense of the damn thing), yet what lingers is the suspicion that it's only feeding off the psychic torment that Amelia and Samuel were already giving off. This is a brave, fearless work of art, and while some have criticized it for a third-act that bears some similarities with the end of the first Nightmare on Elm Street, Kent and her team are wise enough to adhere to their own chilling rule about the title character: "You can't get rid of the Babadook."
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "it probably goes without saying that Mister Babadook does indeed start tormenting Amelia and Sam - or does he? The Babadook plays with perception and paranoia, as well as whether a supernatural incursion is actually happening or is simply the figment of a fevered imagination (or two), in a way that is more than a bit reminiscent of The Innocents (based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw). Is Amelia bonkers, projecting her grief over a devastating loss not only onto her helpless son but [also] to an inchoate interloper from the beyond? Or is Sam the deluded one, a kid so beset by anxiety and remorse that he invents monsters as a coping mechanism? Or is something entirely more sinister, if decidedly less rationally explicable, actually happening? To Kent's immense credit, The Babadook manages to make 'all of the above' the most probable 'answer' to the film's central quandary, and yet what's most remarkable about this film is that ultimately it doesn't matter what is happening, or even why. Whether or not the Babadook is a manifestation of the roiling, angst[-]ridden psyches of mother and/or son is ultimately irrelevant. The Babadook is the 'elephant in the room,' so to speak, and ultimately it doesn't matter how it got there. As a symbol for the anchor like grief pulling Amelia and Sam down into the depths of despair, the Babadook is obviously incredibly redolent. But as a simple 'monster under the bed,' the Babadook is just as redolent."
The Weinstein Company is bringing Tim Burton's recent drama Big Eyes to Blu-ray. What makes Big Eyes so special on the surface is that it represents Burton's least "Burton-esque" picture since 2003's underrated Big Fish. That's right - no Expressionistic art decoration, no fairy-tale setting, and no appearances from Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. No, Big Eyes a human story, and like Burton's masterpiece, the wry biopic Ed Wood (which Big Eyes scribes Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski also wrote), it hinges on a melancholy story of celebrity that seems too bizarre to be true: in this case, Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), the eccentric mind responsible for the series of "Big Eyes" paintings in the 1950s...except that's not quite true. In reality, Keane didn't paint anything - his painfully withdrawn wife Margaret (Amy Adams) was the true artist, and for years Keane was able to manipulate her into giving him the credit until her moral/artistic compass would no longer accept their deception. What might read as melodramatic plays, to Burton's credit, as offbeat and nuanced, thanks to Burton's direction. While the subject matter isn't fantastical, Burton brings enough stylistic flourishes - a rococo Danny Elfman score, Technicolor-infused cinematography (courtesy of Bruno Delbonnel, doing his best James Wong Howe), and a cast of grotesques (chief among them Terence Stamp, Danny Huston, Krysten Ritter, and Jason Schwartzman) that wouldn't be out of place in an Edward Gorey illustration - to give the film the texture of a dream that's part Vertigo and part Mad Men. That understated whimsy (a phrase I never thought would apply to Burton) undercuts the formula and helps make Big Eyes as striking to look at as Margaret's art. How lucky, too, that Burton was able to get Amy Adams, who keeps getting better and better with every movie. On the page, Margaret is withdrawn to the point of invisibility, but Adams gives her an inner, ethereal strength that proves equal parts winning and heartbreaking. We never lose sight of her, even if she does. The problem, and it's a big one, is that the deception at the center of the film never works thanks to a fundamental piece of miscasting. Christoph Waltz is a great actor - he's been brilliant before, and he will be brilliant again - but he is so histrionic in his interpretation of Walter Keane that even though we get how he could overwhelm Margaret, we never understand how he could fool so many of the cultural elites in the art world. He's just too transparently nefarious, and Waltz pitches the role at such a loud volume that he torpedoes the delicate mood Burton has cultivated, so much so that we end up doubting the film's most historically accurate moments because of Waltz's broadness (a stranger-than-fiction court scene plays as unconvincing farce even though ninety percent of it actually happened). It'd be much easier to write off any other film with this kind of miscasting, but Burton's stellar efforts make this a misfire of a far more tragic sort.
Starz and Anchor Bay are bringing the first season of the limited series The Missing to Blu-ray. The brainchild of Harry and Jack Williams, this Starz-BBC co-production looks at what happens after young Oliver Hughes (Oliver Hunt) goes missing in a small French town; in an inspired narrative decision, the Williams' bifurcate their story, jumping back and forth between Oliver's disappearance and its immediate impact on his parents (Frances O'Connor and James Nesbitt) in 2006 and the increasingly desperate search that Nesbitt's broken father mounts alongside a retired French detective (the great Tchéky Karyo) in 2013. Like HBO's phenomenal True Detective, The Missing is a show about how the past and present collide, and the lingering after-effects of extreme trauma. On one hand, The Missing functions as a crackling thriller, filled with the kinds of procedural jolts that enlivened Zodiac and True Detective, and an expert supporting cast (Jason Flemyng, Ken Stott, Saïd Taghmaoui, Émilie Dequenne, and Arsher Ali) to supply all the requisite bureaucratic obstacles and red herrings. Yet what makes The Missing linger is its focus on the raw grief behind the thriller mechanics. As terrible as Oliver's abduction is, the psychic damage on the living is far more gutting - every time O'Connor and Nesbitt struggle with their pain (she by burying everything inside her; he through alcohol and wild emotional shifts), we're reminded of the human cost behind the thrills. An impressive premiere season.
Martin Liebman wrote that the show's "does move through the course of its eight-episode season as one would expect - with slow reveals, small clues that unravel the larger plot, frenetic searches, and slowed-down bouts of regret and remorse, and cliffhangers urging the audience to come back for more, and as quickly as possible - it maintains a freshness and accessibility, helped by a seemingly perfect semi-compact length that gives it room to breathe and explore but not so much room as to frequently create a disconnect or, worse, meander for the sake of filling up a time slot. This is precise, delectable storytelling that unfolds like a good mystery novel. The pace is consistent, the narrative is tight, the characters are well defined, and the series never betrays the audience's trust, insults its intelligence, or jumps to dramatic conclusion without at least tangible, if not concrete, evidence pushing the protagonists forward. It's smart, engrossing television that may be more or less bite-sized entertainment compared to television seasons sprawling out at three times the length but The Missing proves just as engrossing and enjoyable as most anything out there of this nature."
From the Criterion Collection comes the Preston Sturges classic Sullivan's Travels. Made during the start of his remarkable eight-year run (1940-1948) as a writer-director, Sullivan's Travels might be Sturges' most indelible feature, if not his funniest (that distinction would go to either The Lady Eve or The Palm Beach Story). Like 8½ or Barton Fink after it, Sullivan's Travels is a movie about movies and the cracked dreamers making them, in this case John Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a Hollywood hit-maker tired of churning out facile pap with titles like "Hey Hey in the Hayloft" and "Ants in Your Plants of 1939"; no, Sullivan wants to get respectable, and fast, and so he decides to jettison the comforts of his studio position and bum around the country in order to gain the necessary life experience to make something socially responsible (a preachy message movie called O Brother, Where Art Thou, and yes, the Coen Brothers are big Sturges fans). It's a patently ridiculous idea that Sturges clearly acknowledges as such - even incognito, Sullivan can't quite ditch his bumbling entourage of publicity reporters and studio hangers-on, and he ends up living the kind of farce from which he's trying so hard to distance himself. Movies can't help but be unrealistic, Sturges seems to be arguing, because at their core, they exist on fantasies, and he illustrates this concept through a series of madcap slapstick gags and the most beautiful hobo ever captured on film, an unemployed actress played by Veronica Lake. No matter what Sullivan does, life doesn't give him the inspiration that he wants...until it does, in a series of brutal reversals that wrench Sullivan's Travels from outright comedy to pure tragedy and recall the postmodern narrative games that conclude Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's brilliant Adaptation. In any other movie, this shift would read as unbearably didactic (and some critics have docked the film for the level of catastrophe it shovels at its hero in the third act), but Sturges uses Sullivan's troubles to illustrate a social observation with more nuance than Sullivan himself could ever accomplish, that the world is often cold and harsh, and that we must laugh to keep from crying. That's the point of the cinema, and a perfect encapsulation of Sturges' oeuvre.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review called the film "unquestionably Preston Sturges' best film. It is witty, funny and poetic but also painfully honest in its dissection of America's socio-political reality of the Great Depression era. It is also a very bold and personal film that makes it crystal clear how its creator felt about the system he was a part of. The film is loaded with messages - about the double standards that defined life in America, racism, and Hollywood's obsession with profits - but it does not overwhelm. On the contrary, it moves briskly and has a terrific sense of humor that effectively prevents one from overanalyzing the moral standards of its characters. A more serious attitude towards the rampant hypocrisy Sullivan and the girl constantly face surely would have made the film one big snooze-fest. The script is pure gold. It is lean, witty and full of fantastic one-liners that give the film its identity. This type of brilliant writing is also the very reason why virtually all of Sturges' films still feel remarkably fresh (see the fantastic exchanges during the initial encounter between Sullivan and the girl in the empty diner). The film's visual style is equally impressive. Cinematographer John F. Seitz's camera positioning is very precise while the framing frequently gives the film modern depth and elegance."