For the week of July 21st, Paramount Home Entertainment is distributing Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's wonderful comedy What We Do in the Shadows on Blu-ray. Clement and Waititi are two of the primary architects behind HBO's late, great series Flight of the Conchords, and What We Do in the Shadows shares that program's offbeat sense of humor. It's a mockumentary about a vampire clan living in downtown Wellington, New Zealand, except that these bloodsuckers are about as far from Twilight or Underworld as you can imagine; theirs is a decidedly motley crew consisting of sensitive dandy Viago (Waititi), slovenly oaf Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), debauched ladies man Vladislav (Clement, doing a hysterical riff on Gary Oldman from Bram Stoker's Dracula), and Petyr (Ben Fransham), the Nosferatu-esque ghoul rooming in the basement. Together, they do...not a whole lot, really. While What We Do in the Shadows has some semblance of a plot - the vampire foursome struggles with initiating Cori Gonzalez-Macuer's relentlessly average dude into their group, all while preparing for their annual Unholy Masquerade Ball - so much of the film's charm comes from watching these ageless monsters squabble and bicker over the pettiest of concerns. Deacon thinks he can use his bravado to shirk house responsibilities (one of the film's high points is the "erotic dance" Deacon performs before his mostly nonplussed housemates), Viago pines over the One That Got Away (i.e., the elderly woman he was too timid to turn when she was much younger), Vladislav obsesses over the possibility that he'll see his ex-lover "The Beast" at the ball, and so it goes, using highlighting these base, pedestrian concerns in a pretty savage parody of reality TV drivel like The Real World or Jersey Shore (the mockumentary aesthetic also allows Waititi and Clement to make a subtle jab at all found-footage horror movies, since nothing much happens there, either). However, simple parody might fill a half-hour short on this subject - Waititi and Clement keep our attention with their emphasis on character. Like the faux-documentaries of Christopher Guest (This Is Spinal Tap, Best in Show), all of What We Do in the Shadows comes from extensive improvisations, and that freedom to develop and explore allows for a richness in character detail that most comedies largely eschew. Odd as they are, we have such a clear sense of the leads, and that generosity of spirit extends even into the supporting cast (Jackie Van Beek plays a very Mel-like sycophant as the group's pathetic human "familiar," and Flight of the Conchords' Rhys Darby damn near steals the film as the passive-aggressive head of a rival werewolf clan). Factor in the movie's keen sense for well-deployed gore (there are two moments of extreme bloodletting that made me laugh more than any other comedy this year), and you've got a minor comedy classic in the making.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "part of what makes What We Do in the Shadows so charmingly agreeable is how well it incorporates little throwaway things with the big things. It's not just the same old tired things regurgitated for the umpteenth time, even if those sorts of things - coffins, nighttime shenanigans, turning people, drinking blood - play a major part in the movie. They're effortlessly blended with little things like a vampire working pottery or arguments about doing the dishes, all the while the classic genre motifs are presented in an uproariously funny manner that breathes new, exciting life into an otherwise tired collection of trite details. A feeding goes bad, resulting in blood spraying everywhere. A vampire accidentally invites a vampire hunter over to the flat. The idea of being 'invited' into a private place extends beyond homes and to public places, like bars. Little gags are sometimes lifted directly - and with full credit given - from other films, like The Lost Boys. It's all completely absurd, but it works. The film essentially throws everything it can against the wall, and whether through sheer luck, sharp writing, a deep knowledge of the genre, a feel for precise comedic timing and delivery, or all of the above, almost all of it sticks."
Scream Factory is offering a far less arch horror entry this week in the form of I, Madman, but that lack of overt comedy doesn't make the feature any less fun. Director Tibor Takács first made an impression with the cult 1987 classic The Gate, but in many ways, this 1989 follow-up is even better. Jenny Wright stars as used-bookstore employee Virginia Clayton, who is obsessed with horror literature, and much of I, Madman's first act has an enjoyably Walter Mitty-esque tone (think the James Thurber short story, not the maudlin Ben Stiller dramedy) - see, Virginia has an active fantasy life, so when she really gets into a tale, she imagines herself in the story, a device that lets Takács construct lurid pulp fantasies around Wright, casting her as the winsome damsel in distress amidst gothic lighting and chiaroscuro shadows (and one of the film's greatest pleasures is how Takács creates all sorts of charming noir-horror effects on a shoestring budget). However, things change when Virginia stumbles upon the eponymous novel, and her daydreams of the story's crazed doctor (Randall William Cook, pulling double duty as the film's lead effects supervisor) begin to bleed - pun intended - into the real world. At some level, you can see similarities to New Line's Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and if Takács and screenwriter David Chaskin played up that connection to secure financing, then good on them. That said, I, Madman is a whole lot more playful than those Freddy Krueger-starring slashers - there's a real "let's put on a show" attitude to the proceedings here, with Takács less interested in graphic violence (although there is some) than he is in fostering a porous, candy-colored relationship between dreams and reality, all of which culminates in a lovely battle that finds Virginia and the mad doctor facing some inventive stop-motion monsters (Cook won three Academy Awards for his work on the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and while his I, Madman effects are far more primitive in nature, you can see the invention that made him such an integral part of Peter Jackson's team). I, Madman isn't perfect (do we really need the whole subplot with Clayton Rohner's boring cop boyfriend?), but it remains a clever little sleeper.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "starts out like gangbusters with a couple of patently bizarre sequences which will throw many viewers for a loop as they attempt to navigate the story's interweaving of 'read' and 'real' elements. This tantalizing insecurity about what's going on would seem to be the film's major calling card, but ultimately a more traditional eighties ambience finally takes hold, somewhat undercutting (no pun intended) the really inventive elements which are presented so winningly in the film's opening scenes. Performances are very good in I, Madman, with Cook really showing that he knows what to do after the makeup is applied."
Warner Archive is bringing yet another cult favorite to Blu-ray: Mark L. Lester's 1991 thriller Showdown in Little Tokyo. The film, which follows tough LAPD officer Chris Kenner (Dolph Lundgren, of course) as he wages a war against Yakuza leader Funekei Yoshida (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), does little to distinguish itself from the rest of the American action movies that appropriated Asian culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s: toss in an established Western action star who's proficient in martial arts (Lundgren shows up here, but we could just as easily be talking about Steven Seagal in Above the Law, Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport, or Wesley Snipes in Rising Sun), make him a cop/soldier/assassin on the edge, and then surround him with Asian actors in the heavy and cannon-fodder positions. Sure, Lester has a decent flair for filming action, and the picture hustles along through its eighty-minute runtime, but it doesn't come close to defining the genre the same way Above the Law or Chuck Norris' Code of Silence did. No, what made Showdown in Little Tokyo a staple of video-rental culture was Lee's spirited performance as Lundgren's sidekick. Despite having only a handful of features to his name (including a memorable appearance in the 1986 Kung Fu movie), Lee attacks his second-banana part with gusto; from his introduction, which has one of the great moments of instant bonding in buddy-movie history (Lee excitedly telling Lundgren that the two are going to solve their big case and then "eat fish off those naked chicks"), to the big throwdown against Tagawa's goons, Lee gives a full Movie-Star turn (even the dopey one-liners that screenwriters Stephen Glantz and Caliope Brattlestreet have penned sound better coming from Lee's mouth), and Lundgren is smart enough to stay out of his way and handle all the boring exposition scenes. A year later, Lee would get promoted to top-billed with the silly-but-fun actioner Rapid Fire, and two years after that, he'd be dead, killed in the process of delivering what would be his finest work in Alex Proyas's brutal The Crow. He's Action Cinema's James Dean, and his brief, promising ascension begins here.
Michael Reuben noted that "pared to its essentials, Showdown is little more than a series of brutal encounters, spiced with macho posturing, sexual sadism and gratuitous nudity, all of them leading to a final battle between Kenner and Yoshida (with Murata and Sato duking it out as a warm-up act). Their concluding encounter, armed with samurai swords, is fairly satisfying, but one has to swallow a lot of improbabilities along the way. These include one of the least convincing biker gangs ever to appear in a Hollywood film (they're both customers and distributors for Yoshida's new brand of crystal meth) and a sequence where Kenner, who is supposed to be a seasoned samurai warrior, hides Minako in his personal retreat - because no one would ever think to look for them there, right? Less than a day passes before Yoshida's men burn the place to the ground...When Brandon Lee enters, he brings a certain lightness with him, but it isn't enough to offset Lundgren's leaden presence."
Finally, Criterion is hosting the HD debut of Stephen Frears' classic My Beautiful Laundrette. This wry dramedy helped to define the Frears Brand, as it were; prior to My Beautiful Laundrette, his most well-known film was the 1984 thriller The Hit, which traffics in a kind of oppressive nihilism that, The Grifters aside, doesn't seem to fit in Frears' oeuvre. Well, save for one element: in this midst of The Hit's killers-and-killing fatalism, Tim Roth turns in a striking performance as an inexperienced hitman whose exuberance for mayhem reflects the rather boundless curiosity - almost idealism - he has for life itself. It's the kind of open-hearted, human-scaled character work that Frears would focus on almost exclusively, and it's as if Roth's character alone helped establish the tone of My Beautiful Laundrette just one year later. Gone are the violence and spiritual void, and in their place is a sunny but clear-eyed look at social and sexual politics in Thatcher-era London. Here, young Pakistani transplant Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke) is trying to make a name for himself in 1980s British culture while satisfying the diametrically opposing impulses of his family - his sullen, alcoholic father (Roshan Seth) hates his new home and can't see Omar succeeding in a meaningful way, while his far more profit-minded uncle (Saeed Jaffrey) delights in his ability to exploit the ins and outs of the British capitalist system - so he starts directing his energies towards renovating and managing a laundrette in downtown London. In a lesser film, Omar would proceed through a rags-to-riches journey, learning all sorts of lessons about status and Who He Really Is along the way, but Frears isn't interested in that kind of pat storytelling. He's far more content to create a world through induction, using Omar's travails in small-business management to get into time-and-place specifics of the Pakistani community in London, of the netherworld between commerce and identity, of character itself, and it's in that last area that Frears, working with the great screenwriter Hanif Kureishi is most successful. There are no types here - everyone emerges as a full individual with unique desires and whims (Seth and Jaffrey are wonderful as Omar's authority figures, but so are Shirley Anne Field's as Jaffrey's understanding mistress and Rita Wolf as a potential love interest) - and that goes double for Omar, who's nowhere near the wide-eyed innocent that his father and uncle perceive him to be. Not only is he far more adept at negotiating the political and financial realms that come with the laundrette, but he's also secretly gay and carrying on a clandestine affair with Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), his longtime best-friend - and former skinhead - helping him run the laundrette. Their relationship remains one of Frears and Kureishi's finest achievements (it helps, too, that Day-Lewis is so good here - even more than his turn as Helena Bonham Carter's priggish suitor in A Room with a View, his work as Johnny was his star-making performance). There are no fey stereotypes or easy jokes here. Omar and Johnny are refreshingly pragmatic, and they're already well versed in the knowledge that Who You Are need not having any bearing on What You Do. Through them, we realize that My Beautiful Laundrette is really a story about reinvention and adaptation, a thread that carries, in one way or another, through Frears' finest works, all the way from Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Dangerous Liaisons, and The Snapper and through High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, and The Queen.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review noted that the film is "rude but painfully honest...It was released during Margaret Thatcher's era and it sees Britain not as its leader once promoted it, but as it was - a country of extreme contrasts, full of dangerously disillusioned people. What is unusual about My Beautiful Laundrette, however, is that it is also light, witty and strikingly uplifting. One can easily sense the static in the air, but unlike the kitchen-sink dramas from the '50s and '60s this film actually finds plenty of beauty and humor amidst the chaos and violence. In other words, instead of trying to force one to agree with its points, it allows them to gradually emerge in a sea of opposing views. Without Hanif Kureishi's brilliant script, My Beautiful Laundrette almost certainly would have struggled to remain relevant during the years. Kureishi, who grew up in Bromley in south London, is a man who clearly understands that racism and discrimination have deep economic roots. It is not that skin colors are irrelevant, but economic inequality is very much what breeds the hatred that turns people against each other. Plus, the desire to reject one's weak identity and imitate those who are responsible for its devaluation...The cast is excellent. There is an outstanding chemistry between Warnecke and Day-Lewis that makes seemingly ordinary sequences look special."