For the week of May 5th, Shout Factory is bringing a new edition of Mad Max to Blu-ray. For anyone familiar with the baroque, surrealist action mayhem of director George Miller's later Mad Max entries - The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, this 1979 cult favorite might come as a surprise: at the end of the day, it's so small. Sure, Miller stages a couple of bang-up chase sequences, but the majority of the film is a bleak, borderline-nihilistic thriller that shares more in common with Death Wish than with Doomsday. While the film does take place in a post-apocalyptic Australia, we're seeing the beginning of the societal breakdown - mostly in the form of roving, vehicular gangs - and its impact on the titular character (Mel Gibson). Highway patrolman Max is content to fight crime during the day with his partner (Steve Bisley) and then retreat to his loving wife (Joanne Samuel) and child afterwards, but to quote John Lennon, life's what happens after you've made other plans, and soon he's thrust into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Those well versed in Miller's approach to action filmmaking will certainly find a lot to love about these sequences, which mostly comprise the last twenty or so minutes of the film. The rest is a slow burn that's far more contemplative than the big finale; Max is very reticent to let his darker impulses overtake him, and a good portion of the film unfolds during the long idyll that he and his family share before tragedy overtakes them. For some, this restraint might prove unsatisfying, yet Miller's handling of melodrama (as well as his subtle future vistas, courtesy of DP David Eggby) and Gibson help turn Mad Max into compelling cinema. They make the film a stealth character study; we get to watch as the world breaks Max, and thus this is a tragedy as much as it is an action movie.
Jeffrey Kauffman called the film "something of a middle ground between the 'polite' 1959 Stanley Kramer opus [On the Beach] which saw a gaggle of fairly well to do characters simply sitting around chatting until the inevitable happened, and the more recent Guy Pearce vehicle [The Rover] (no pun intended, given The Rover's emphasis on cars), where a seemingly crazed individual goes on a rampage for some initially unclear reason. In practice, however, Mad Max is decidedly toward The Rover end of the spectrum, filled with outstanding chase (and crash) sequences as it depicts the trials of one Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson, in the role which would help launch him into international superstardom), a policeman charged with keeping order in the Outback, where gangs of marauding bikers terrorize the countryside (think The Wild One transported down south and forward in time a century or so)...Miller seemingly effortlessly helms several white knuckle action sequences, including the viscerally intense chase sequence that starts the film, and which introduces both Max as well as the concept of a nefarious biker gang running amok in the outlands...Miller, working with DP David Eggby (who's featured on the commentary) may not 'play by the rules' in terms of traditional editing techniques or even at times basic continuity flow, but the camera cartwheels, cranes, and dollies almost choreographically throughout the opening, lending an unusually kinetic ambience to an already inherently exciting segment."
From Paramount Pictures comes the historical drama Selma, which documents how, in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) organized the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march in order to garner support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Selma makes two smart decisions right off the bat. The first is the discipline it shows in limiting its subject. The temptation when making a film about anyone as towering as Martin Luther King Jr. is that you'll fall into the standard rise-and-fall clichés of the biopic - see also: Abby Mann's stirring, wholly unsurprising 1978 miniseries King - but writer-director Ava DuVernay sidesteps this issue by staying focused on the Voting Rights Act. Nothing else gets in the way, and ironically, we get a better sense of King the man because we see him reveal character through action rather than through pat exposition and biopic conventions. King is the other sterling element in Selma. While Oyelowo has been quietly carving out an impressive screen oeuvre (from nice turns in A Most Violent Year and Lincoln to being the only member of the cast who didn't embarrass himself on Lee Daniels' atrocious The Butler), his work as Martin Luther King Jr. should have shot him into the stratosphere. Equal parts subtle and grandiose, Oyelowo lets you see the very human intelligence at work (his scenes manipulating Tom Wilkinson's LBJ and Tim Roth's George Wallace are some of the best in the film), and he turns the film's biggest potential shortcoming - not having the rights to any of King's speeches - into a major strength. We don't get to fall back on what we know about King, and so all his decisions feel fresher, more unpredictable. However, despite Oyelowo's towering work (and an eclectic cast that includes Andre Holland, Carmen Ejogo, Tessa Thompson, Giovanni Ribisi, Common, Alessandro Nivola, Dylan Baker, Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr., Martin Sheen, Stephen Root, and the invaluable Wendell Pierce), Selma doesn't have the impact it should, and a big part of the problem, unfortunately, is DuVernay: while she did great work on the low-budget indie Middle of Nowhere (which also starred Oyelowo), she doesn't quite have the chops to pull off a project with such an ambitious scope. At her best, she gives Selma the pace and momentum of a pretty good television show (and to her credit, she's not afraid to let her characters be funny in the midst of great political and racial turmoil), but there are also key moments where her ambition exceeds her filmmaking reach; in particular, the film's climactic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge falls flat because of some curious moves DuVernay makes (especially some spectacularly ill-advised slow-motion work). That said, Selma is always watchable, and it makes this period of time seem immediately accessible (Paramount's decision to distribute the film to every high school in America is both a canny bit of marketing and an important concession to historical and cultural literacy). It just isn't the great film that the Civil Rights Movement deserves.
Martin Liebman wrote that "Selma, even for the historical richness of its story and the relevancy of its message of equality, wouldn't work anywhere near as well as it does without David Oyelowo. Around him, the movie is fairly dry, competently assembled but absent a real heart or purpose beyond its historical recreations. Oyelowo, on the other hand, embodies King with a stature and presence befitting the legend and the light of his message, persistence, courage, and moral clarity. Oyelowo looks and sounds the part, critical in any performance of this nature but he rightly, and necessarily, goes well beyond an outward recreation. He finds the underlying spirit, sense of purpose, and the great significance in every line and movement as King is both inwardly and outwardly challenged, as he and his allies seek to advance their cause and their opponents seek to hinder, both on the streets and behind closed doors. Oyelowo's portrayal brings a far greater sense of history, of character, of being to the part than one could have realistically conceived, not so much in his replication of King but instead in finding that drive, that fire, that soulful understanding of the human condition and the vision and determination to see real equality in his time. Oyelowo doesn't necessarily make King a hero, not in the costume-and-cape sense of the term, but rather he makes him a man, breathes a tangible, approachable, very real and naturally defined essence into a character many know but many may not fully understand. It's a shame the movie around him isn't tighter, more thoroughly defined, and engrossing."
Universal and DreamWorks are bringing Steven Spielberg's 2005 drama Munich to Blu-ray on Tuesday. Technically, the film made its HD debut in February as a Best Buy-exclusive, but now Universal is giving it a wider release. That's a very good thing because it gives audiences a chance to catch up on Spielberg's most overlooked and controversial feature. Despite its five Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director), Munich alienated audiences for a very strong political reason that, given Spielberg's personal and artistic histories, might have come as a surprise. At its core, the film dramatizes Israel's response to the PLO terrorist attacks against the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) put together a covert Mossad strike team (Eric Bana, Ciarán Hinds, Hanns Zischler, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Daniel Craig) to travel around the globe and kill those Palestinian agents responsible for Munich, and if Spielberg had merely constructed a procedural around the strike team's efforts (à la Z or The Battle of Algiers), I suspect no one would have taken such umbrage with the film. Working in full scope cinematography for this first time since 2002's Minority Report, Spielberg is operating at a virtuosic peak here, with his mastery of pacing, cross-cutting, and subtle camera takes (the opening sequence, which alternates between an uncanny recreation of the Munich attacks and the world's response to them, is one of the best things he's ever shot) working to turn large chunks of Munich into as pure a thriller as anything Alfred Hitchcock ever made. For all its graphic violence - and Munich's level of brutality makes both Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan look tame - the film offers one riveting setpiece after another as the team hunts their targets (a killing interrupted by the intended victim's young daughter; a hotel-room bombing that goes spectacularly awry). However, as technically and cinematically polished as Munich is, Spielberg is working with a not-so-secret weapon: Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels In America), who took Eric Roth's conventional procedural script and turned it into something far more unsettling. Despite the team's violent actions, its individual members are painfully human (Bana's affable family man; Craig's brusque tourist; Hinds' dapper intellectual; Zischler's fastidious antiques dealer; Kassovitz's anxious toymaker), and every person they kill complicates their response to Munich. The line between justice and vengeance vanishes (especially in a gory, horrifying scene where Bana leads the surviving members of the squad against a beautiful assassin), and their moral superiority curdles into a toxic mix of violent guilt and endless paranoia, particularly in their dealings with a mercenary intelligence organization (personified by Michael Lonsdale and Mathieu Amalric, the latter of whom is a dead ringer for Roman Polanski circa 1975) that describes itself as "ideologically promiscuous" and has no qualms about selling the PLO information about the very men tracking it. And it's that ambiguity that turned people against Munich. Not only do Kushner and Spielberg refuse to valorize the murders perpetrated in the name of Israeli solidarity, but in their treatment of a PLO member (Omar Metwally) who strikes up a tentative friendship with Bana's undercover agent, they also allow the Palestinians a full measure of humanity. In Kushner and Spielberg's dark vision, an eye for an eye makes us all blind, a sentiment they drive home with the film's devastating final shot. Perhaps so close after 9/11, people weren't ready for that message. Here's hoping they are now.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that "Spielberg minimizes nothing, neither the terrorist attack itself nor the price paid by those who struck back. Lest all this sound like heavy going - or to echo my professional colleague, 'Why should I want to see that?' - Spielberg remains a master storyteller, capable of maintaining suspense and staging a taut action sequence with such apparent ease that his technique is almost invisible. The hit squad's elaborately choreographed (and sometimes improvised) attacks on their targets, with either bombs or bullets, are masterful set pieces, each with its own setup, rhythm and payoff, and every one fits precisely within the film's larger architecture so that the roughly two hour, forty-minute running time never drags. Spielberg even finds moments of comedy in the least likely places, like the Mossad officer who insists that Avner [Bana] keep receipts, or the wonderful dinner table scene when Ephraim [Geoffrey Rush] insists that the team reveal their sources of information and they all refuse. Such moments are essential against the increasingly grim tableau of violence, stealth and ultimately paranoia, as the team itself becomes a target for assassination."
Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the Frank Sinatra Collection to Blu-ray. Warner has been releasing more of these filmmaker sets of late (think the studio's very nice Frank Darabont Collection), but in this case, "collection" implies a range that just isn't present in this five-film set. As iconic a stage performer as Frank Sinatra was, he was also a fairly prolific screen presence, and this set offers but a sliver from his over-fifty-film career. Maybe a better title would have been "Frank Sinatra: Most of the Films He Made with Gene Kelly, One Catalog Staple, and Two of the Rat Pack Pictures"; we get Anchors Aweigh, On the Town, Guys and Dolls, Ocean's 11, and Robin and the 7 Hoods, with the two Kelly-Sinatra films and Robin and the 7 Hoods making their Blu-ray debuts. That said, while this package doesn't remotely approach being comprehensive (and maybe that's an impossible dream, given that some of Sinatra's best features like From Here to Eternity belong to other studios), these five films do share the genial insouciance from which the Chairman of the Board made his name. In some instances, the movies are actually too genial. While completists might thrill to have Robin and the 7 Hoods available in high-definition, the picture is the set's nadir, a sloppy, unfocused crime-comedy that updates the Robin Hood legend to gangland Chicago as Sinatra's crook with a heart-of-gold (aptly named "Robbo") unites his closest confederates (Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Bing Crosby, filling in for Peter Lawford) in an attempt to bring down the venal Guy Gisborne (Peter Falk). That setup is groan-inducing, but the execution is downright soporific. By 1964, the Rat Pack movies followed the same template: plunk the camera down (Gordon Douglas' direction is less than inspiring), have Frank and the gang belt out a few tunes (the high point is "My Kind of Town"), and be back at the Sands for drinks and golf by noon. Making a movie was almost incidental, and if not for Falk's enjoyable performance as the heel, there'd be even less to recommend here. 1960's Ocean's 11 is not much better - Lewis Milestone brings none (or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, wasn't allowed to bring) of the verve he showed on All Quiet on the Western Front - but the film gets by on the Rat Pack charm (this time, Lawford and Joey Bishop get to stand around and carouse) and some wonderful period footage of the Bad Old Las Vegas. Still, the remake is the one to seek out for actual cinematic pleasures - nothing in the first Ocean's 11 has the melancholy bite of George Clooney's first conversation with a bitter Julia Roberts, which feels like someone dropped a chunk of Casablanca in an otherwise frivolous Hollywood blockbuster (Steven Soderbergh and Ted Griffin understood that good writing and direction finish what star-power only starts).
However, the collection improves immeasurably with the inclusion of the flawed-but-fun Guys and Dolls. The 1955 adaptation of Frank Loesser's classic Broadway musical, Guys and Dolls drew more attention for the real-life rivalry between Sinatra and his co-star Marlon Brando; Brando got the lead Sky Masterson part that Sinatra had coveted, leading Sinatra to undermine everything Brando was doing, especially his "mumbling" acting/singing choices. However, over-length is the film's biggest apparent problem: Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht's script is a snappy delight, and Brando and Sinatra do aces work as Masterson and his best friend Nathan Detroit (although Sinatra is, predictably, the far better singer of the two). Best of all are the Kelly/Sinatra pairings, even if I might give the edge to the Stanley Donen-&-Gene Kelly directed On the Town. Donen and Kelly were also responsible for Singin' in the Rain, and you can see them honing that later classic's virtuoso attention to spectacle and music in this 1949 favorite. On the Town is a fairly small story (Kelly, Sinatra, and Jules Munshin play sailors on leave for twenty-four hours in New York City), but the location footage and Leonard Bernstein/Roger Edens score give this blithe musical comedy genuine scope. Plus, Sinatra meets his match in Gene Kelly. If Sinatra was the charismatic, moody crooner, then Kelly was the hyperkinetic hoofer, and the back-and-forth between their characters mirrors the back-and-forth between their entertainment styles. Like Guys and Dolls, the Academy Award-winning Anchors Aweigh suffers from a distended runtime (it takes two and a half hours to pull off what On the Town nails in ninety minutes), but this 1945 musical is so enchanting that the length often feels indulgent in the best way. Again, Kelly and Sinatra are sailors on leave (this time in Hollywood), again their search for temporary love brings them into one musical complication, and again the plot is barely a hanger for some of the most delightful musical numbers ever filmed, chief of which are Kelly's "La Cumparsita" number and the still-technically dazzling duet between him and Jerry (of Tom & Jerry fame). Kelly is so good here that Sinatra can't help but recede into the back a bit. Perhaps that's why they only made three movies together: maybe Sinatra couldn't stand working with an equal.