For the week of May 12th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the hit drama Fifty Shades of Grey to Blu-ray. The film represents the apex of prestige for a property that began as smut; after author E.L. James developed some erotic Twilight fan fiction, she tweaked the material to cover different characters and situations - Bella Swan and Edward Cullen became Anastasia Steele (the spirited Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), both of whom get involved in a torrid sexual liaison with one another - and then published the revisions to international success. That kind of success (forty-five million copies sold in North America alone) makes Hollywood very eager, and so here we are with a film version directed by Nowhere Boy's Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Saving Mr. Banks's Kelly Marcel. As writer-director combos go, that's a fairly upscale choice, and one that promises a creative uptick from the source material's dubious literary quality, which is sleazy pornography at its best and boring nonsense at its worst. To be fair, the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey looks great, with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey giving the images a burnished, Williams-Sonoma sheen, and Taylor-Johnson lucked out when she signed Dakota Johnson, who manages to make Steele far quirkier and more engaging than the timid college student she is on the page. But as positives go, that's about it. Fifty Shades of Grey's biggest crime is that it's so deathly dull. When you boil it down, the film's really only about a guy trying to convince a girl to sign a contract, and Taylor-Johnson and Marcel have trouble eking out any measure of suspense/conflict from the sleek visual texture and the leads' endless supply of smoldering looks. Not that the latter matters much: I haven't seen two people who are less convincing as on-screen lovers since Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in Gigli (and at least they were romantically involved off-camera; rumor has it that Johnson and Dornan hated each other, and that enmity shows). Plus, the film bungles the cheapest, most obvious reason for Fifty Shades of Grey to exist - it is deeply, profoundly unsexy and surprisingly tame, especially as an adaptation of high-toned porn (the movie sports a comfortable R-rating). Universal is already planning a sequel - the aptly titled Fifty Shades Darker - but already the film seems like something that only the faithful want to see. Taylor-Johnson and Marcel have exited after creative differences with James (her husband, Niall Leonard, will be penning the script for the sequel, in a move that doesn't seem like nepotism at all), Johnson and Dornan want more money to keep shooting, and the film's titanic $85-million gross on opening weekend plummeted by 74% just one week later. Universal once netted a bundle off the adage, "if you build it, they will come," and I've got to believe that the studio executives shepherding Fifty Shades Darker into existence are desperate to believe that statement will hold fast.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review remarked that Fifty Shades Darker "isn't an impressive film. The bulk of it is scripted to appeal to viewers who have a soft spot for romantic tearjerkers. A young and beautiful girl meets a handsome bachelor with deep pockets and the two then fall madly in love. Well, almost - because it turns out that the bachelor is far more interested in playing with his kinky toys and prefers not to sleep in the same bed with the girl his heart desires. As the girl tries to figure out what is wrong with Prince Charming, she slowly succumbs to the Dark Side. So there is a part of this film that is also scripted to appeal to viewers who have a soft spot for edgy romantic dramas. Only the edgy material is essentially limited to a series of cliched exchanges and a couple of sessions that will give folks familiar with the BDSM scene a serious headache. The film's biggest weakness, however, isn't the questionable script, but the terrible acting. Simply put, there is zero chemistry between the two leads. For example, early on they frequently look annoyed with their debates and consistently overreact in ways that are strikingly unrealistic (see the conversation in the coffee shop where Christian suddenly snaps and walks away). And when eventually the clothes fall off, the acting becomes flat-out unbearable."
Also from Universal comes the Michael Mann thriller Blackhat. The film, which focuses on the manhunt a joint Chinese-American task force (a miscast Chris Hemsworth, Tang Wei, Wang Leehom, Holt McCallany, and Viola Davis) organizes in order to stop a ruthless cyber-terrorist (Yorick van Wageningen) plotting to violently manipulate the global market, managed to squander its semi-positive buzz with frightening speed; any topical pretensions writer-director Mann might have hoped to capitalize on (the very real threat of cyber-terrorism, fresh in everyone's minds thanks to the big Sony hack that broke less than two months before Blackhat's theatrical release) couldn't weather Universal's beyond-timid pre-release treatment, which held critics' screenings until the absolute last minute, a move that always dredges up the stink of failure. And fail Blackhat did - considering it made just under $18 million worldwide on top of its estimated $70-million budget, we're talking pure fiasco territory, the kind that ends careers and reduces the financial solvency of major studios to absolute zero. Certainly, many of Mann's filmic choices are questionable at best. His and Morgan Davis Foehl's script can't drum up one original narrative device to save its life, from its insistence on formulaic clichés (Hemsworth's master hacker looks like Thor - with a distracting Chicago accent - and not like this guy), a somewhat fluid approach to reality (for all the documentary accuracy Mann brings to the technical proceedings in the first half of the film, the team's cyber-investigation eventually degenerates into a series of pitched gunfights), and some legitimately stupid dialogue (poor Hemsworth gets all the worst lines - "I'm doing the time. Time's not doing me" is especially egregious - although Leehom gets in on the fun when he refers to Hemsworth's character with the delightfully Seussian "blackhat hacker named Hathaway" moniker). And yet, I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a charge from the film. As obtuse and goofy and rough as it is - and that roughness applies to the aesthetics, as Mann and his Luck DP Stuart Dryburgh push the digital camerawork of Miami Vice and Public Enemies to even more pixelated abstractions - it's never less than 100% a Michael Mann movie, and a perfect example of the auteur theory in play. It isn't just the aesthetics that give up the ghost. The autodidact protagonist that finds his moral compass vacillating between law and order; the forbidden, preverbal romance that blossoms between Hemsworth and Wei's characters; the atmospheric, digital-noise filled cityscapes; the graphic, sudden violence: they bear Mann's stamp like a fingerprint, so much so that much of Blackhat plays like a compendium of Greatest Hits from Mann's screen oeuvre. Hemsworth is a beefier version of James Caan from Thief, while his connection to Wei is a riff on the Robert De Niro-Amy Brennaman union in Heat. Leehom and Hemsworth share the same unspoken trust as the screen version of Miami Vice's far more sullen Crockett and Tubbs, and Hemsworth's big A-ha moment feels cribbed straight from William Petersen's "Just you and me, sport" scene in Manhunter. Even the big action climax, which finds Hemsworth taking on the Big Bad in a crowded Jakartan ceremony, works like a modernization of the end fight in The Last of the Mohicans, as strategic planning and ranged warfare grow tighter and more intimate (and bloodier) as hero and villain fight their way towards one another. For better or worse, Blackhat is Mann's Body Double, and devotees of his style should have a lot of fun. That said, a plus-sized reel of moments and references does not a movie make - here's hoping Mann gets his act together for the rest of the viewing public.
However, Blackhat is practically Citizen Kane compared to the next film, the beyond-dispiriting farce Mortdecai. On paper, I guess this looked like a good idea: Kyril Bonfiglioli's four novels about the title character - an inept art dealer and even more incompetent smuggler who bungles his way from one bawdy-comic misadventure to the next - are hardly the stuff of classic literature, but they're engaging enough and certainly not wanting for movie-ready gags and action, and they probably seemed even more exciting to Lionsgate when Johnny Depp committed to make the film the start of his next big franchise (Depp dropped out of The Grand Budapest Hotel to make Mortdecai, which in retrospect is more depressing a statement than "John Travolta turned down An Officer and a Gentleman to make Staying Alive"). Plus, Depp brought along Jurassic Park-Spider-Man-Mission: Impossible scribe David Koepp to direct the film, and the last time Depp and Koepp worked together, they produced the underrated thriller Secret Window. However, the end result is so bad it clears buildings, and Depp deserves 99.999999% of the blame. As far back as his great Edward Scissorhands, Depp has shown a predilection for disguising his matinee idols looks behind odd voices and bizarre prosthetics, but his best collaborators (Tim Burton, Mike Newell, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Mann, who got one of Depp's toughest, least affected performances in his otherwise unsatisfying Public Enemies) knew how to strike a balance between shtick and story. Here, Depp goes so far over the top that Koepp doesn't have a chance - Depp makes Captain Jack Sparrow look nuanced and restrained. His Charlie Mortdecai is a shrill, irritating mélange of tics - his slicked-back hair, rotting Terry Thomas-teeth, affected upper-crust accent, and wavy blonde mustache - and he's constantly working the room with one "hilarious" bit of business after another (like his predilection to sympathy vomit whenever Gwyneth Paltrow's character feels nauseous). Even if Koepp had wanted to tamp him down, Depp steamrolls over everything and everyone in his vicinity, not least of which is a cast stocked to the gills with comic ringers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Goldblum, Olivia Munn, and Paul Bettany. To a person, these actors approach the film like it's classic farce and wind up scoring the only laughs (McGregor and Bettany deserve highest marks for elevating all their scenes as, respectively, as Mortdecai's long-suffering romantic rival and his hulking manservant Jock), but then we're back to Depp and his interminable flailings. You wonder who he thought Mortdecai was for - the film clearly wants to tap into some of that goofy Austin Powers energy (hence its obsession with silly mustaches and vomit), but the picture's raunchy gags (Koepp and Depp seem to think erections and nymphomaniacs are never not funny) netted it an R-rating so that kids and teenagers can't see Mortdecai on their own - and then you realize Depp's just trying to amuse himself, and poorly at that. Depp has already been floundering under high-profile flops like Transcendence and Tusk, so it's really saying something that Mortdecai might be his creative nadir. If Depp's smart, he'll stay far away from oddball prosthetics and $20-million paychecks and go full McConaughey - all other roads lead to low-point Mickey-Rourke-or-Marlon-Brando territory.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman took a far more positive stance towards Mortdecai, writing that "the film is best in its patently goofy moments, which include Blake Edwards-esque sight gags (many of them featuring the hapless Jock, who goes from one life threatening injury to the next, most at the hands of Mortdecai himself). Less winning are Mortdecai's attempts to inject a kind of overly arch sensibility into the farcical goings on, something that typically brings things to a screeching halt (comedically speaking), while also tending to push the performers over into 'trying way too hard' territory. What might have helped the situation is a more compelling mystery, something that the film starts to develop but then leaves pretty much hanging, opting instead for frenetic set pieces involving Mortdecai getting into and out of various scrapes. Mortdecai is big, glossy and superficial, but it's not the out and out disaster that so many have made it out to be. With a bit more ebullience and bit less (obvious) effort, it could have been an at least reasonably light and fluffy soufflé. As it stands (and/or falls, as it were), it's an overstuffed and pretty dense feeling pancake - heavy on the overwrought comedic carbs but awfully slight on any truly nourishing content."
Finally, from the Criterion Collection comes Leo McCarey's 1937 classic Make Way for Tomorrow. Legend has it that when McCarey won the Best Director Oscar for that same year's The Awful Truth, he remarked in his acceptance speech, "Thanks, but you've given this to me for the wrong picture." After seeing Make Way for Tomorrow, it's easy to see why he might have said that. As charming as The Awful Truth is - Cary Grant and Irene Dunne give great screwball chemistry - Make Way for Tomorrow might be McCarey's masterwork, and yes, I have seen Duck Soup. Here, he's not dealing with feuding debutantes or absurdist war atrocities: his subjects now are Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi), an elderly couple who lose their house and spend the rest of the film trying to get whole again. They move from one of their children's homes to the next, and you can easily imagine McCarey playing their journey as some kind of farce, complete with colorful characters and ready-made villains in the form of the Coopers' selfish extended family, except McCarey has no desire to play for the cheap seats. Their family members are often well meaning (McCarey doesn't shy away from how difficult it might be for grown children to suddenly deal with the realities of their aged parents) and Bark and Lucy are more adaptable than standard Hollywood conflicts dictate. Ultimately, the misfortune that befalls them grows from tiny, well-intentioned indignities that stack up until Bark and Lucy find themselves at risk of spending their twilight years apart from one another. If Make Way for Tomorrow has any shortcomings, it's in McCarey's creative convictions. The end of the film is so bittersweet that you can't blame the studio for wanting to soften it, for wanting to give Moore and Bondi a more uplifting send-off. But that's the beautiful, aching power of the film. At the end of the day, McCarey is making a tragedy, and one that's brave enough to find ultimate heartbreak in the simple fact that life is short and unfair. In its own way, a perfect film, and the clear antecedent for films like Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story and Alexander Payne's Nebraska.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that the "film...is as unsettling as it is beautiful to behold...It feels so strange that a film so old could look so modern. Think about it. It is 1937. An elderly couple loses their home to a bank because they could not make their mortgage payments. They don't have any savings. The American economy is in terrible condition. The couple realizes that they don't have much time left to live. All they have is each other. Sound familiar? It does to me. There are so many couples in America today whose stories are very, very similar. Make Way for Tomorrow is an incredibly simple, breathtakingly beautiful film that touches the heart in a special way. What it shows is very real, devoid of melodrama, free of clichés. You could be smart, you could do everything right, and your life could still be a disaster. You could be in love, you could be happy, but you could still suffer."