For the week of May 19th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing American Sniper to Blu-ray. That the film, an adaptation of late Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle's combat memoir, is director Clint Eastwood's best film in almost seven years is no real surprise; minus his gritty dramedy Gran Torino, Eastwood's directorial oeuvre from 2008 to now has been an exercise in frustration, with the director taking interesting ideas and smothering them under logy direction and first-draft-quality scripts (see Hereafter, J. Edgar, and Jersey Boys, or better yet, don't). American Sniper soars by comparison because you sense that Eastwood isn't asleep at the switch - as he focuses on the struggles Kyle (Bradley Cooper) faces both overseas and back home during the Second Gulf War, Eastwood does some of his most muscular, compelling work since 1992's Unforgiven, crafting at least a dozen sure-to-be-iconic setpieces (the opening sequence, where Kyle has to make a snap judgment about shooting child; a pitched nighttime gunfight; a hunt for a rival sniper that turns into a full-on sandstorm) that throw Kyle's violent life into stark relief. Furthermore, like Unforgiven, American Sniper is definitely a Western of sorts. Kyle has the same taciturn menace that Eastwood brought to that earlier Academy Award winner (as well as to his iconic Spaghetti Westerns with Sergio Leone), and both films evince a hushed, terrified reverence for violence in all its forms. However, what makes American Sniper even more impressive - maybe even more impressive than Unforgiven - is the controversial pull it holds over the current American zeitgeist. This film is a Rorschach test for people's political and military beliefs. It is very possible for one person to see this film and declare it an unironic celebration of our troops and for another to think it a savage criticism of the U.S. military-industrial complex and the ways it abandons those individuals who pledge their lives for it. Eastwood is playing a very canny game here, layering in opposing meanings for both sides to decode (the action scenes are legitimately exciting, and Kyle cuts a badass hero figure; the war also kills Kyle's fellow troops in demoralizing ways, and his own PTSD proves fatal in terms of his reacclimating back to life with Sienna Miller's loving-but-unnerved wife), but he isn't pandering to both sides of the aisle. Rather, Eastwood has become such a skilled cinematic historian of violence that he's brave enough to acknowledge its many facets, no matter how good, bad, or ugly they might be.
From Lionsgate comes season two of Netflix's great Orange Is the New Black. In some ways, a show's sophomore year is its most important one; Year Two is when a series proves if it's a fluke or not. A good second season is the difference between The Killing and The Wire, and based on the evidence here, Orange Is the New Black is in the latter camp. Season Two picks up almost immediately after Season One's brutal cliffhanger: Piper (Taylor Schilling) has just delivered a savage beating to Taryn Manning's psychotic religious fanatic Pennsatucky, and now her fate remains very much in flux. For the first episode, showrunner Jenji Kohan and her writing staff strand Piper in the unforgiving world of solitary confinement and interstate incarceration, and the move is bracing - not only does the radical change in scenery and cast (other than Piper, the only returning cast member for this early stretch is Laura Prepon, who plays Piper's self-serving ex-lover) unmoor us from what had seemed like a profane-but-familiar "hang out show," but it indicates that, like the divisive second season of The Wire, the Orange Is the New Black has no problem tearing up the script and starting from scratch. However, this move proves to be somewhat of a tease, as Piper quickly returns to Litchfield Penitentiary, but in revealing her willingness to start completely afresh, Kohan ends up doing something more subtly revolutionary. As the season progresses, Piper and her prosaic domestic drama (her unresolved feelings for Prepon; her strained relationship with Jason Biggs' nebbish boyfriend back home) begin to recede into the background while the rest of the show's large, absurdly qualified cast takes on greater importance. Some of that time goes to fan favorites like Kate Mulgrew's fearsome prison cook Red and Natasha Lyonne's sardonic former junkie Nicky, but some of Season Two's finest moments come courtesy of previously marginalized characters, from Yael Stone's eternal optimist Morello (here, we get a fuller and achingly tragic look into her backstory) to Barbara Rosenblatt's Rosa, who gets the year's best flashback AND the season's brutal, bittersweet parting shot. Eventually, a plot of sorts emerges, as Red finds herself pitted against Lorraine Toussaint's sociopathic drug lord Vee, and the struggle between the two women splinters the Litchfield population in ways we don't expect. By the end, not only has the show achieved some of the texture of a great Russian novel, but it also no longer needs Piper, and the rumors of her increased presence in Season Three strike me as a regression from what is becoming television's next great humanist drama. Here's hoping Kohan has the guts to keep expanding her vision outward.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "The series continues to mine both weird (and sometimes gross out) humor (like showers backing up with feces due to inadequate plumbing) or push the envelope with supposedly shocking insights into the slightly depraved behaviors of the residents (a sexual conquest contest of sorts breaks out between two of the women). What's so surprising so much of the time about Orange is the New Black is how effortlessly it segues between the bizarre, slightly askew, comedic elements and the at times more emotionally overwrought personal stories of the women. There are times when the balancing act falters slightly, as in a tangential arc involving Larry (Jason Biggs) and Piper's former best friend Polly (Maria Dizzia). It's already been announced Biggs will not be returning for season three, making this arc feel ever more needless. The show's strength continues to be its almost ridiculously overstuffed ensemble cast within the prison, an aggregation of (mostly) female talent that is an embarrassment of riches. Perhaps surprisingly, season one standout Kate Mulgrew is pushed just slightly to the sidelines this year as Red, the former chief executive of the prison's kitchen, at least in the season's early going. The good news is that Red figures materially in what turns out to be the second season's most compelling storyline, a struggle for dominance with the unbalanced Vee."
Lionsgate is also bringing director Michael Almereyda's contemporary retelling of William Shakespeare's Cymbeline to Blu-ray this week. To anyone who saw Almereyda's 2000 reworking of Hamlet, this new film provides immediate cause for celebration. In updating Hamlet for YSK-era Manhattan and the world of corporate espionage, Almereyda created one of the definitive Shakespeare adaptation, a terse thriller (he whittled down the play's epic length to just under two hours) that commented trenchantly on the nature of personal freedom vs. public perception and provided full-throated showcases for the likes of Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles, and especially Ethan Hawke as the title character, a full-time slacker and part-time videographer who, in the film's wittiest touch, delivers his iconic "To be or not to be" speech in the "Action" section at Blockbuster Video. This Hamlet is just as engaging to both sides of the Shakespeare spectrum - the neophytes and the scholars - and you can sense Almereyda trying to work similar magic with Cymbeline. As with Hamlet, he sets the film in present-day New York, and he stocks the cast with the likes of Hawke, Ed Harris (as the title character), Milla Jovovich, John Leguizamo, Bill Pullman, Delroy Lindo, Penn Badgley, Anton Yelchin, and Fifty Shades of Grey's Dakota Johnson. Plus, if Wall Street provided grist for his Hamlet, now Almereyda is riffing on Sons of Anarchy (which is itself a very loose riff on Hamlet) - he transmutes the court intrigues of the Shakespeare play into the various political and personal dramas plaguing an influential biker gang. Commercially, it's a smart move (anything to get the kids listening to iambic pentameter), yet the end result lacks much of Hamlet's fire and interest, and for this one simple reason. The source material isn't that good. First performed around 1610, Cymbeline is late-period Shakespeare, and like the late-period works of Michael Mann, Clint Eastwood, or Brian De Palma, it often feels more like a jukebox remix of previous narrative and thematic conceits than a self-contained work of its own: the love triangle between Badgley, Johnson, and Yelchin's characters recalls the Romeo-Juliet-Paris intersection in Romeo & Juliet; Hawke's jealous wild-card is a less menacing version of Iago from Othello; and if you squint a little, Harris' woes over how to best structure his gang legacy after he's gone resemble Lear's moral/spiritual quandaries from King Lear. That sort of playful intertextuality is fun for fans of the Bard, but it doesn't make for thrilling drama, and Almereyda's version doesn't supply the cinematic virtuosity (see Julie Taymor's mad, brilliant Titus for how it's done) necessary to transcend the play's third-tier nature. What we're left with, then, is a trendy modernizing conceit, a handful of terrific performances (Hawke, once again, is the standout - there's no American actor better at naturalizing Shakespeare's words - but Johnson and Harris are almost as good), and a lingering sensation of is that all there is?
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "the original play can run for over three hours, and...Almereyda has stripped the story to its bare essence, albeit in a completely unfamiliar setting...Almereyda is to be commended for not seriously tinkering with Shakespeare's script, other than dramatically redacting it and adding a couple of interpolated bits (as, frankly, was exactly the case with Richard III). Performances are generally very good, though it has to be accepted that the contemporizing of the setting tends to support more naturalistic actors like Ed Harris as a matter of course. A large supporting cast also includes John Leguizamo and Bill Pullman, though often in such limited capacities that they don't really have much of a chance to strut their stuff. The ultimate question faced by this Cymbeline is: what exactly is gained by shifting this story to the present day and in the milieu of a biker gang? Unfortunately Almereyda, while quite facile in setting up this query, proves to be less successful in being able to actually answer it."
Finally, Olive Films is bringing a cult favorite to Blu-ray this week: the low-budget sci-fi thriller It! The Terror From Beyond Space. With a title like that, you know you're in sci-fi territory more The Quatermass Xperiment than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and certainly It! doesn't skimp on the bargain-basement chills on its impressively atmospheric but curiously spartan spaceship. However, like Mario Bava's similarly chintzy Planet of the Vampires, It! overcomes its budgetary limitations through scrappy plotting and a strong connection to one of the most iconic films ever made. See, the trouble starts after Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) returns after a doomed visit to Mars that resulted in the loss of his entire crew, and though the people on the spaceship that rescued him suspect Carruthers' influence in their deaths, what his accusers aren't prepared for is that the actual killer - a hulking alien monster - has made it onto the ship and is very, very hungry. Squint just a little bit, and you're in Alien territory; director Edward Cahn might not be the visual stylist that Ridley Scott is, and Robert Kent's script might lack the terse poetry of Dan O'Bannon, David Giler, and Walter Hill's shooting script, but the DNA to one of the great modern franchises lies in this unassuming bit of 1950s schlock. Luckily, it's a lot of fun outside of the Alien connection - Cahn brings the movie in at just under an hour, and he's pretty good about hiding the creature's costume shortcomings - and well worthy of Olive's attentions.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "It! The Terror from Beyond Space's pretty brief running time (barely over an hour) simply pits the spaceship crew against the marauding beast, with several "red shirts" (albeit in good old black and white) meeting their fate at the hands of the alien. There are a number of unintentionally funny moments sprinkled throughout the film, including the crew firing several pistols willy-nilly inside the spaceship, with nary a thought of depressurization. The film was obviously made on a shoestring budget (if even that), and frankly has extremely bargain basement level 'special effects,' which include stalwart Ray Corrigan stumbling around in his rubber 'It' suit. Never really very frightening due to this lo-fi ambience, as well as some kind of clunky staging courtesy of director Edward L. Cahn, It! The Terror from Beyond Space has passable performances, including from future television stars Marshall Thompson (Daktari) and Paul Langton (Peyton Place). A kind of weird mash up of more traditional monster outings with some frankly low-grade science fiction, It! The Terror From Beyond Space is probably not quite bad enough to warrant full on MST3K umbrage, but it certainly will provide more than enough fodder for those who like to shout at their televisions while stupid people vie to win their film's coveted Darwin Award."