For the week of June 2nd, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Andy and Lana Wachowski's Jupiter Ascending to Blu-ray. The Wachowski siblings need a win badly; after redefining contemporary blockbuster cinema with 1999's The Matrix, they've struggled to replicate that success, whether we're talking about two dispiriting Matrix sequels, an alternatively brilliant-maddening Speed Racer adaptation, and the twisty, postmodern melodrama Cloud Atlas. However, what all of these misfires share is a genuine sense of passion: you felt that the Wachowskis were following their muse, for better or worse. Jupiter Ascending, on the other hand, is a cash-grab, a naked attempt to synthesize all sorts of studio hits into one easily digestible package. You got your unassuming hero (Mila Kunis, with her natural charisma turned way down) who's destined for greatness (shades of Star Wars) even as galactic forces conspire behind the scenes (thank you, Marvel Universe), plus toss in a rag-tag group of misfits backing her (chief among them Sean Bean and Channing Tatum, who seems genuinely embarrassed to be playing - I kid you not - a part-man, part-dog, part-angel fighter who's also albino because why not) since everyone now rips off Firefly. It's the movie as Cuisinart product, but the worst part is, Jupiter Ascending doesn't even work as blockbuster escapism. Want proof? In the middle of this pulpy space opera, the Wachowskis devote a fifteen-minute interlude to satirizing corporate bureaucracy à la Brazil, complete with Terry Gilliam cameo. To be sure, it's the most entertaining part of the movie, but the target audience does not care. It's too convoluted to kickstart a franchise, the characters aren't worth following (you do Jupiter Ascending no favors if you watch it back-to-back with Guardians of the Galaxy, so rich is that latter picture's bench of leading and supporting characters), and even the wow factor isn't terribly impressive. You can subdivide the film's major action sequences into two camps: 1) Jupiter falling (and then being rescued...a strong female heroine, she is not) from precipitous heights, and 2) CGI sprites whirring and smashing into one another over muddy city/galaxy-scapes. For all their faults - and they are legion - the last two Matrix movies were not lacking in aural and visual wonders (I'm thinking of the virtuoso chase sequence that ends Reloaded or the striking, anime-inflected boss fight between Neo and Agent Smith in Revolutions), and it's a testament to Jupiter Ascending's badness that the Wachowskis can't generate one memorable image that isn't camp or ironically hilarious (I'm looking at you, Academy Award-winner Eddie Redmayne). The Matrix has never seemed so far away.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown wrote that "for those who bemoaned the plodding politics of the Star Wars prequels, welcome to a whole new level of noisy, colorful, flashbang zzzzz. For all its CG pomp and genetically spliced circumstance, contract negotiations, inheritance disputes and other tiresome matters of galactic law slow Jupiter Ascending to a crawl. And if Abrasax family melodrama and stock shares don't put you to sleep, the terribly convoluted story, sillier sci-fi flourishes, flat, bemused or indulgent performances (it's always one of the three), frantically shifting tone, and cringe-inducing comedy will make you wish you were. Even a brief foray into Terry Gilliam-inspired bureaucratic insanity (with a fantastic cameo by Gilliam himself) can't save the film from self-infatuation. Had the whole movie embraced such hallucinatory flights of fancy, such frenzied satire and bizarre, carnival-of-the-absurd visuals, Jupiter Ascending might have gotten off the ground. Instead, it's chained to the Wachowskis' delusion that this is mind-blowingly original sci-fi rather than a Frankensteinian patchwork of ideas from greater, grander space operas and sci-fi actioners."
Far more invigorating is HBO Home Entertainment's HD release of The Wire: The Complete Series. For five years, The Wire hummed along on HBO, as unobtrusive and underloved as a series that reaches sixty episodes could get. It didn't have the cultural cachet of The Sopranos, nor was it as consistently and immediately controversial as David Milch's masterful Deadwood. The word was that The Wire was broccoli, that HBO was only airing it out of obligation to its brilliant-but-unruly showrunner David Simon (who, if Alan Sepinwall's The Revolution Was Televised and Brett Martin's Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution are to be trusted, was more-than-a-little reminiscent in real life of The Wire's brilliant-but-unruly antihero Jimmy McNulty) and some vague, lingering feelings of social responsibility. That kind of borderline didactic programming is never an easy sell. How funny, then, that a perception can be so right and so wrong at the same time. By his own admission, Simon was after a grand-scale indictment of our society's ills, and he let each season of the show examine a different facet of contemporary culture. Season One is the most straightforward one: if nothing else, it remains the single greatest cop drama ever made (sorry, The Shield), a dense, multi-character procedural about an understaffed Baltimore PD division (including cops played by Lance Reddick, Dominic West, Sonja Sohn, Jim True-Frost, Seth Gilliam, Domenick Lombardozzi, and the great Clarke Peters) tasked with taking down the city's two biggest drug kingpins (Wood Harris' Avon Barksdale and Idris Elba's Stringer Bell, the latter of whom remains one of the most heroically tragic Big Bads in all of TV history). For pure procedural thrills, this season can't be beat, even though it manages to sneak in all sorts of salient observations about police corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement (on both sides of the law, in fact). But Simon had no patience or interest for delivering more of the same, and so he'd retool each season in order to cover a new topic.
If Season One was the story of the cops, Season Two was the longshoremen and the death of the working class. Season Three moved back into the city, but only to examine what would happen if you semi-legalized drugs to cut down on gang violence, while Season Four foregrounded the challenges faced in inner-city education and the nature of local politics. By Season Five, Simon was tying our hemorrhaging newspaper system to the death of personal and professional ethics, and what emerges when you take these seasons as a whole is something greater: the ultimate statement about The Way We Live Today. Now, Simon's disregard for convention can alienate viewers. Anyone who gripes about Game of Thrones having too many characters might have a stroke over The Wire's constantly shifting roster of characters - each season brings in a new universe of people, most notably Season Four, which virtually jettisons West's Jimmy McNulty (the show's ostensible lead) and promotes True-Frost's sweet-but-incompetent cop Roland Pryzbylewski to co-lead alongside four phenomenal teenage actors (Tristan Wilds, Julito McCullum, Maestro Harrell, and Jermaine Crawford). Furthermore, Simon's shots at his old vocation in Season Five (he wrote for The Baltimore Sun for over a decade) often move from probing commentary into sour grapes, particularly in his one-note treatment of the paper's ineffectual leaders (David Costabile and Tom McCarthy's ethically compromised newspapermen come off as far less nuanced than the show's whole roster of murderers and drug-dealers). But with a little patience (make it through the first six episodes of the series, and you'll be hooked for life), all these challenges melt away, and what you're left with is a near-perfect marriage of social justice and genre thrills. The totality of Simon's achievement is staggering, from the way he roped in some of the best living American crime writers (including George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane) to help deepen and unsettle his multi-tiered plots, to his deceptively quotable flair for dialogue (Wendell Pierce's Bunk Moreland is as linguistically profane as Ian McShane's iconic Al Swearengen is on Deadwood), and most importantly to the series' sterling cast, all of whom do the best work of their lives (and I've only mentioned a small fraction of the talent on display). This new set isn't the home-media apex that many Wire fans wanted - HBO has decided to reformat all episodes into a 1.78:1 widescreen frame instead of the intended 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Yet The Wire remains more relevant than ever, and to say it's the best show ever made about our American system is the understatement to end all understatements. Even with the likes of Breaking Bad and Mad Men dominating the conversation around contemporary television, The Wire is still the medium's high-water mark.
Of the series, Kenneth Brown noted that "The Wire doesn't tolerate easy questions, peddle simple answers, or promise comfortable viewing. It's often a grueling series; one that pulls no punches and offers little solace. And that's by no means a criticism. It's praise reserved for the best television shows to ever grace the medium. Simon's 'visual novel' is a sixty-episode masterwork of the highest caliber; a hard-hitting realization of television's potential and all at once a series that surpasses the potential, becoming something else entirely. Something piercing. Scathing. Thought-provoking. Unsettling. Living, breathing, bleeding. Important. Literary. Something meticulously crafted, superbly written, and extraordinarily performed. Something unlike anything the network has accomplished before or since, wherein the tagline 'It's not TV, it's HBO' has never been more appropriate. If that reeks of hyperbole, you've probably never experienced The Wire, which judging by its tragically troubled ratings, includes a great many people. It's not too late, though. HBO's new Blu-ray release makes damn sure of that. The Sopranos may have put HBO on the original series map, redefining and rebranding the premium cable network and influencing countless series on HBO and beyond. But it was The Wire that fundamentally altered - and continues to alter - the television landscape as we know it and drive public discourse, demanding unparalleled commitment from its audience, presenting viewers with the most challenging of themes, and never backing down from a fight. There haven't been many, if any, shows quite like it, but there should be. The Wire is something special, and should not be overlooked, underestimated or missed."
Walt Disney Home Entertainment is releasing McFarland, USA on Tuesday. File this sports drama under "extremely pleasant surprise." Nothing about the film seems like it would be surprising; in its broad strokes - relaying the fact-based story of how coach Jim White (Kevin Costner) came to the eponymous Southern California town in order to whip the high-school's struggling track team into shape - McFarland, USA looks like a veritable compendium of clichés. White is crusty but benevolent, his young wards are talented but unfocused, and it all comes down to The Big Race. The picture even tosses in a few other genre conventions for completion's sake, like the fish-out-of-water drama that occurs from White and his family trying to acclimate to McFarland's predominantly Hispanic community or the Dangerous Minds-esque quality of Thomas Valles (Carlos Pratts), an emotionally volatile teenager who might also be White's best runner, if he could ever get his personal life under control. It's all so familiar, but in this instance, profoundly conventional does not equal waste of time. McFarland, USA might tick off every box on the kid-friendly, sports-movie checklist, but it does so in an effortlessly confident and charming manner. Costner is born to play this kind of gruffly upstanding mentor figure (his work here recalls his underrated turn in the less well-made melodrama The Guardian), and Pratts is a star in the making: in many ways, the more successful version of this story centers exclusively around his character (McFarland, USA is good enough that you only realize later it's yet another in the continuing series of movies about non-Caucasian characters seen through the eyes of white protagonists). Best of all is the presence of director Niki Caro. The director of the brilliant Maori coming-of-age saga Whale Rider, Caro is the last person you might expect to helm a formulaic sports drama, yet her deft, iconoclastic filmmaking choices cause McFarland, USA to linger for longer than it should. Her handling of the running scenes are hazy and aesthetically lush - she brought in the great DP Adam Arkapaw (Top of the Lake, True Detective), who has an almost expressionistic gift for capturing bodies in motion - and she downplays the melodrama elements so that the rhythms of the characters feel more natural and improvisational, almost like a running-centric version of NBC's great Friday Night Lights TV show. If Disney ever contracted François Truffaut to direct a sports movie, it might look a lot like McFarland, USA, and that's a very good thing, indeed.
Kenneth Brown wrote that "Racial tensions fuel every conflict and subplot...though the film rarely explores such complex social issues to any thoughtful or nuanced end. Immigration, illegal or otherwise, isn't a component of the script, so no hot button pressing there; class warfare and economic inequality are, with White learning a few touching lessons in hard work from his students, who get up early and break their backs to earn meager wages and help feed their families. There's nothing offensive here, other than the usual well-intentioned but irritating stereotypes that define different segments of the film's Latino community. Disney may as well have its logo stamped in the corner of every sun-kissed, family friendly shot. And it isn't exactly problematic either, neatly packaging tough, timely topics in digestible, bite-sized story beats. Where the film fails is in giving the Whites and their new neighbors anything compelling to say...This is a true story after all. You can't fault every underdog cliché. But it's the lead-up to the big race that stumbles. Costner and Bello manage the White family drama nicely; all the fish-out-of-water anxiety, warm welcomes, and changed hearts and minds feels trite and manufactured. Side trips into the community, to Thomas' house and elsewhere, are stronger, but also fall into similar cookie cutter molds. It's never disingenuous, but you'll never forget that you're watching a movie. You'll also grow increasingly skeptical of how true to life this true tale really is."
Finally, from Sony Home Entertainment comes another TV series: Justified: The Complete Final Season. One of the most dependable programs on television, FX's hit thriller was entering its sixth and final season after a not-inconsiderable slump; although not without its moments (flavorful guest turns from the likes of Eric Roberts, Alan Tudyk, and Mary Steenburgen as violent figures on both sides of the law; all of the Dutch Leonard-inflected speech to pass from badass U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens' mouth), Season Five lost some of the ineffable cool established over the previous four years, thanks to an underwhelming Big Bad (Michael Rapaport, horribly miscast as a Florida hillbilly), a go-nowhere prison subplot involving Boyd Crowder's one true love Ava (Joelle Carter), and the ways that the sudden departure of a new cast member (Edi Gathegi's sly, villainous Jean-Baptiste) left showrunner Graham Yost's writing room scrambling to restructure the whole season. That season limped to a close, whereas Season Six begins with a reawakened sense of purpose - you can sense Yost and Co. laboring to stick the landing in the final year. The result is a run of television that rivals Season Two and Season Four (depending on who you're talking to) as Justified's final hour. After a season opener that breathlessly clears away all the Season Five detritus (including an appearance from Damon Herriman's Dewey Crowe that feels like a direct acknowledgment from Yost that the Crowe-centric shenanigans of the previous year did not work), we're back to the beginning, conflict-wise, with Raylan Givens (the invaluable Tim Olyphant) resolved to bring down local outlaw Boyd Crowder (Walt Goggins, who was supposed to die in the pilot episode but grew into the series' dark heart): Raylan's fellow Marshals (played by Nick Searcy, Erica Tazel, and Jacob Pitts, whose Tim Gutterson has maybe the best dialogue in a show festooned with great dialogue) are hoping to use Ava as a C.I. in order to drum up a RICO charge against Boyd, but Raylan is more of a by any means necessary sort of fellow, and this instinct sets the stage for a violent showdown between the two men. Of course, nothing is ever that simple on Justified, which means that Raylan and Boyd keep getting in the way of a fearsome pot kingpin (Sam Elliott, mustacheless and even more terrifying as a result) and his designs to take over Harlan County, and how his plans dovetail with Steenburgen's duplicitous crime lord, and I haven't even mentioned the return of Loretta McCready (Kaitlyn Dever). Or the way Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns) factors into this mess. Or Ava's drunk-but-wilier-than-he-looks uncle (Jeff Fahey). Or Markham's two linguistically menacing gunsels (Garret Dillahunt and Jonathan Tucker, both invaluable). Or Duke David Roberts' Choo-Choo, who looks and acts like he stumbled out of a particularly violent Coen Brothers movie. Or the aces finale, which - amidst all the blood and chaos - allows for a particularly jaundiced form of tenderness. This is all great stuff, and enough to make you yearn for more even as Justified goes out on a perfect note.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman noted that "there are plenty of things to take away from Justified's final season, perhaps none so important as the very firm, very deliberate, yet naturally occurring sense of self the show displays. The final season is by no means perfect - it's a bit slow in spots as it builds up towards the finale and the newer dynamics introduced throughout the season feel a little stale - but there's a certain assuredness to it, a deep understanding of its core and a deliberate, yet effortless, push to accentuate what it does best and build both the larger, sweeping, full-series narrative and character arcs as well as the more immediate plot lines towards the inevitable final ending that in no way disappoints and, in fact, demonstrates a keen sense of character growth and dramatic understanding of the show's strengths, where it's been, where it is, and where the audience can envision the characters when the final episode's credits roll. That's really what any program needs from its final episodes, a true understanding of what's gotten it to where it is and a journey to the end that doesn't merely satisfy the show's base requirements but cements its legacy and does so with an honesty that's true to the form while also acknowledging the journey and embodying the special qualities that made it uniquely entertaining and so very well rounded."