For the week of July 7th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing the zombie drama Maggie to Blu-ray. And I do mean drama: if anything, Maggie deserves some kind of distinction in the undead-flesh-eater genre because of how meditative and sad it is, with director Henry Hobson and writer John Scott 3 (not a typo) choosing to emphasize the profound sense of loss that occurs when a simple farmer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) must care for his slowly zombifying daughter (Abigail Breslin). That's about it, and the film's reluctance to indulge in the bloody signifiers of the zombie apocalypse is admirable - as Maggie progresses, we realize it's not really a genre picture, that the zombie menace is a metaphor for the emotional and physical indignities that crop up during end-of-life care. That idea - using this familiar setting to smuggle in deeper notions of family and responsibility - is so novel that I wish Maggie were better than it actually is. Scott's script tends to lay out beats with little art (at times, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a Lifetime Movie about the stages of grief), and Hobson doesn't have the touch for pacing and mood that such a delicate, potentially ludicrous premise such as this needs. He adopts the same dirge-like tone for the whole movie, and after a while, we realize there's little build or pitch, just a flatline monotony (Maggie feels so much longer than its ninety minutes). The goal should be something along the lines of David Michôd's masterful, underrated The Rover, which does for the post-apocalyptic-Mad Max genre what Maggie attempts here, except that Michôd's filmmaking control is so expert that we regard the aesthetic/tonal demystification on the same wavelength as, say, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura or Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad. At this stage, Hobson doesn't have the same chops. Still, Maggie deserves your attention, if only for a little, because of how good Schwarzenegger and Breslin are together. That Breslin is heartbreaking in the title role isn't a surprise: the Academy Award-nominated Little Miss Sunshine star has a gift for underplaying potentially OTT material, and she finds the pathos in such an extreme situation (the part is 180 degrees removed from her little zombie-asskicker in Zombieland). But Schwarzenegger is even better, and in a far more uncharacteristic (for him) role. This is such a still, quiet performance - he only has a couple of relatively restrained "action" beats - that is never less than 100% convincing in assaying his character's river of pain. He's so emotionally present, yet he's canny in using his movie-star charm to keep our attention even when the direction and screenplay flounder (he pulls off a similar trick in last week's abysmal Terminator: Genisys). In a way, I wish Maggie had done better (was better), if only so that Schwarzenegger could have received more attention for what is, along with his work in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the best performance of his career.
Jeffrey Kauffman concurs that the film "treads a somewhat more subdued course, illuminating the inescapable sadness of Wade (and Carolyn) while also exposing Maggie's unusual combination of steeliness and vulnerability. Maggie is probably just the sort of odd, proto-indie film Arnold Schwarzenegger should be doing more of at this stage in his career, rather than warmed over (if enjoyable) action fare like The Last Stand and Escape Plan (not to mention The Expendables 2, The Expendables 3, and - dare I say it - even Terminator Genisys). Schwarzenegger is appealingly low key and effective here, offering a scraggly, disheveled rancher who's watching his world decay around him (one of the film's more strangely beautiful sequences involves Wade burning his fields, since it's thought the virus might be spread through crops). [Joely] Richardson is wonderful in a somewhat underwritten role, but the film probably belongs hook, line and sinker to Breslin, who makes Maggie a resilient soul who has no illusions about her fate, but who is still struggling with the emotions that the situation has foisted off on her."
A24 Films and Lionsgate are bringing the quirky revisionist Western Slow West to Blu-ray. In theory, we're covering familiar territory. Slow West is a buddy picture of sorts, as young Scottish immigrant Jay Cavandish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) teams up with roguish bounty hunter Silas (the great Michael Fassbender) to track the younger man's lost-love (Caren Pistorius) on the American frontier. There are echoes of Sergio Leone here, as well as John Ford's iconic The Searchers, and had Slow West decided to ape old poses, it would still be a worthwhile endeavor for Western fans. But director John Maclean (of The Beta Band fame) has an odd way of approaching this material that's more Jim Jarmusch than John Ford: just as the true nature of Pistorius and Smit-McPhee's relationship ends up becoming a wicked little joke, Maclean lets odd tangents and digressions dominate the feature. The traditional oater has been done - Maclean likes doodling in the corners, emphasizing the comedic dissonance between his leads (Smit-McPhee's near-alien fragility looks even more pronounced next to Fassbender's laconic cool), the overt physicality of his villains' true natures (there are enough odd faces and strange outfits to make the Coen Brothers jealous, with Ben Mendelsohn a reliable standout as the fur-coat wearing, strangely erudite Big Bad), or absurdist setpieces (a scene where hero and villain alike get drunk on absinthe, a fireside conversation about philosophy and the nature of the universe) that put the lie to the stereotype of the Western as a straightforward genre. Even Robbie Ryan's cinematography bucks conventions, ditching the widescreen expanses of a Good, the Bad and the Ugly for a hemmed-in, 1.66:1 aspect ratio. To Maclean's credit, this offbeat content never feels too hip for its own good. All the tangents and asides do just as persuasive a job in proving the fundamental unruliness and sprawl of the Old West as Once Upon a Time in the West or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and it's no accident that the hyper-violent shootout that concludes the picture borrows some of the pitch and elasticity of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Those animated entertainments, too, conveyed a deep and fundamental insanity about the "real" world with a modicum of screentime (Slow West clocks in at under ninety minutes).
Of Slow West, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "offers a rather subversive comedic quality at times, despite the somewhat dark and at times unabashedly violent aspects it also presents. Maclean's screenplay tends to wander out into the veritable wide open spaces at times, offering ruminations on the meaning of life (and love), while also detailing the Odd Couple-esque tendencies of its focal duo. The film manages to be both hyperbolically lunatic and grittily realistic, sometimes within the same sequence, a testament to the fine control Maclean maintains over the entire project."
In a continuing effort to put out more of its vast back-catalog on Blu-ray, Warner Home Entertaining is giving New Line's The Cell its U.S. Blu-ray debut. The film follows the manhunt for brutal serial killer Carl Stargher (Daredevil's Vincent D'Onofrio). When the FBI finds Stargher in a coma before he can locate the madman's still-captive victim (Tara Subkoff), the lead agent in charge (Vince Vaughn) recruits Jennifer Lopez's clinical psychologist for a daring, experimental mission: using state-of-the-art technology, they will enter Stargher's consciousness and search for clues about the victim's location. On a narrative level, Mark Protosevich's script goes to wholly unfamiliar places. If this film didn't begin its life as a "The Silence of the Lambs-meets Ordinary People/The Miracle Worker" thought-project, I'll eat my foot, given the metronome-like precision it evinces in hitting familiar story beats from both features. Yet once Vaughn and Lopez enter Stargher's mind, The Cell remains essential viewing for cineastes on the strength of its visuals alone. With the exception of his visually pedestrian Mirror Mirror, director Tarsem Singh has specialized in using rapturous, hallucinatory visuals to galvanize tired material, be it a 300-knockoff that looks like a moving Carvaggio painting or, as in his 2006 masterwork The Fall, a child's fairy tale that manages to mimic the free-form, associative power of the adolescent imagination. So it goes with The Cell - the tired serial-killer mechanics achieve a surrealist, hypnotic pull because of the intensity of the images. A grotesque, pierced despot gliding through an ornate marble chamber, his cape filling the room as it trails behind him. A cow, sliced into chunks and preserved in glass, its sections pulsing and writhing. A character who retains total, horrible lucidity as his his intestines are attached to a crank and then winched out from his body. Any one of these images would be enough to power a single movie, and Tarsem includes two or three dozen. In that regard, it doesn't matter that the three leads are curiously muted, performance-wise (although as Stargher, D'Onofrio manages to connect with the audience, both through the savagery of his actions/visage and through the curious tenderness he allows the character). Tarsem only needs them for what they'll add to his picture's visual fabric, and the remove with which they process the proceedings matches The Cell's carefully wrought sense of dream logic. Along with NBC's brilliant, equally stylized procedural Hannibal (#savehannibal), The Cell remains one of the only contemporary entries in the subcategory of serial-killer thrillers to truly add something distinct and aesthetically daring to the genre.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that "Tarsem's elaborate staging of Stargher's rituals with his victims' bodies are disturbing enough - the director out-Harrises Thomas Harris - but it's in the dream landscapes of Edward's and Stargher's minds that he creates a unique experience, moving beyond mere grotesquerie into a kind of grand theater of the bizarre. The many artistic influences and references have repeatedly been catalogued, beginning with the obvious nods to Alien creator H.R. Giger and vivisectionist artist Damien Hirst, but the important point is how Tarsem and his creative team are able to keep these extreme images tied to the essential elements of their underlying story. Different aspects of Carl Stargher's personality manifest themselves throughout Catherine's journey through his mind, including a childhood version played by Jake Thomas, but both the writing and the editing (and Lopez's performance as Catherine) help maintain the connection among these various manifestations and the increasingly extreme visuals that accompany them. Meanwhile, Novak's activities serve as a reminder of the stakes in the real world. As Tarsem emphasizes in his commentary, The Cell doesn't really show you a 'dream' world. Dream logic is very different from what Catherine experiences in her travels, and Tarsem cites David Lynch's Lost Highway and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (which he saw eight times in the theater) as examples of more authentic 'dream' films. No, as weird as it may be, The Cell remains an elaborate entertainment, staged strictly for your enjoyment (assuming this sort of thing gives you pleasure). It's the kind of subversive fare that might have been offered by the Théâtre des Vampires, in Interview with the Vampire, if they'd had 21st Century technology. At the end, you're glad you can walk away freely into the light and leave it behind, though you may find some part of the experience lingering in memory."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving an HD makeover to its The Killers package. In this instance, "Killers" has a genuinely plural meaning: it refers to the classic Ernest Hemingway short story, it refers to the pair of hitmen at the center of that story, AND it refers to the number of films itself. We get two takes on Hemingway's source material (three, if you count Andrei Tarkovsky's short-film version in the Blu-ray supplements) - Robert Siodmak's 1946 film-noir and Don Siegel's 1964 reinterpretation - and taken together, both films make for a fascinating study in adaptation and film styles. The original story is terse even for Hemingway. It watches two hitmen (played in the 1946 version by William Conrad and Charles McGraw) verbally menace the patrons of a small diner as they look for their target, boxer Ole "The Swede" Andreson (Burt Lancaster), who makes no attempt to avoid his fate, and the beginning of Siodmak's version offers a reasonably faithful retelling of the story, right down to the presence of Hemingway's favorite protagonist, Nick Adams (Phil Brown). However, this slight tale can't sustain a feature-film on its own (it occupies the first ten minutes of the picture), leaving Siodmak and screenwriters Richard Brooks, Anthony Veiller, and John Huston free to concoct a narrative that spins off from the Swede's death into a twisty caper involving gangland conspiracies, a heist gone wrong, and the machinations of a very seductive femme fatale (Ava Gardner). Truth be told, the specifics aren't all that unique - Siodmak cribs from Double Indemnity by making one of his leads a dogged insurance investigator (White Heat's Edmund O'Brien), and he either apes Citizen Kane or anticipates Sunset Boulevard by having much of the film unfold in flashbacks that reveal what lead the Swede to his end, even though those Orson Welles and Billy Wilder classics handle similar story constructions with greater wit and finesse. No, The Killers gets by on style alone, as Siodmak uses Woody Bredell's evocative chiaroscuro cinematography and Miklós Rózsa's wonderful score to give The Killersthe iconic noir surface, all dark shadows, brassy horns, and beautiful people trapped by their own obsessions. Other pictures might innovate in plot and character, but The Killers looks every inch a noir. Style is also something that the 1964 version has in spades. Gone are the monochrome textures and artfully composed frames, and in their place is a jazzier, looser aesthetic, one that pops in comic-book colors and appropriates some of the New Wave Movement's free-form camerawork and staging; while director Don Siegel was making this newer Killers for television, he was such a consummate, efficient artist (see also: Dirty Harry and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers) that he managed to turn the limitations of the medium into visual strengths. He also jettisoned many of Hemingway's original details. The film opens not in a diner but in a school for the blind, with Ole Andreson becoming Johnny North (John Cassavetes), a race-car driver turned doomed teacher. Furthermore, in a typically perverse touch (maybe he was just emboldened by the increased permissiveness of the 1960s), Siegel foregrounds the titular killers (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager), who take over the film after they kill North - in fact, it is Marvin's brutal, ice-cold enforcer who ends up leading the investigation into North's background after his target's passive acceptance of death fascinates the older man on an existential level. Like Slow West, this Killers is more interesting in the fine details than in the broad strokes (despite nice turns from Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan, of all people, as, respectively, North's main squeeze and the sociopathic gangster complicit in his killing), with psychology and personality (Marvin and Gulager are the kind of nervy hepcats that probably made a big impact on Quentin Tarantino) distinguishing what might otherwise be a blunt-force potboiler.
Of the 1946 version, Svet Atanasov wrote that "the film launched Lancaster's career and went on to earn four Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. The prologue essentially sums up Hemingway's original short story which chronicles the arrival of the killers in the small town but does not reveal any details about the Swede's past. The rest of the film actually introduces events from a different story about a real heist gone wrong, which producer Mark Hellinger liked. This story was developed by the great John Huston and later on finalized by Anthony Veiller. The film is very dark but it has a good sense of humor. The dialog is sharp and witty but it does not feel like the different characters try hard to impress. In other words, there is good balance between style and substance. Lancaster is terrific. There are numerous close-ups in which he already looks like a big star. Gardner is stunningly elegant throughout the entire film. Even during the card game where the Swede confronts Colfax and she isn't dressed to impress, she looks fantastic. O'Brien and Lambert also leave lasting impressions." Then, he called the 1964 version "surpris[ing] in...the attitudes of the main characters. Each, including Cassavetes' experienced driver, looks oddly comfortable while routinely challenging traditional '60s perceptions of 'good' and 'bad.' In other words, while the direction the story would follow becomes clear quite early the main characters' reactions are frequently very surprising (a great example with a number of such reactions is the first altercation between Cassavetes and Reagan with Dickinson next to them). This bold 'disrespect' is what makes The Killers so fascinating to behold. The film is also quite cynical, but a good dose of light humor is carefully infused in all the right places to make it look respectable. Marvin and Gulager are particularly good in maintaining the important balance."