For the week of August 18th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing the Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection to Blu-ray. The set bundles together twelve shorts from Disney's recent production history; while the studio has been pushing the inclusion of the Tangled and Frozen-related "Tangled Ever After" and "Frozen Fever" as the collection's biggest selling points, it's the variation in the other ten features that makes for more compelling viewings. Many people have seen "Paperman," the visually stunning, mostly silent romance that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2013 (and if nothing else, this package provides an easy opportunity to remedy that omission), but I'd wager that far fewer are familiar with "John Henry," a spirited rendition of the classic American folk tale that uses boldly stylized art (akin to the breathtaking aesthetic on Fantasia 2000's "Rhapsody in Blue" sequence) to convey the title character's fight against a technologically advanced steam engine. Shift 180 degrees, and you'll get the throwback farces "The Ballad of Nessie," which recalls 1941's The Reluctant Dragon in both tone and style, and "How to Hook Up Your Home Theater," a Goofy lark (literally!) that has the absurdist freshness of Goofy's other "How To's" from the 1940s and 1950s. That said, nothing's as absurd as "Get a Horse," a Mickey Mouse short that, at times, feels like it's running off a Charlie Kaufman script. Perhaps most striking of all is Roger Allers' "The Little Match Girl," a proposed entry in the aborted Fantasia 2006 project that takes its inspiration from a Hans Christian Andersen fable and moves in ways that are far more melancholic than the average Disney cartoon. Sure, there are a few clunkers ("Operation Secret Santa" is slighter than anything else here, and I'm not as enamored with "Feast" as many others are), but Disney has done good work here...provided you overlook the fact that most of these shorts are already available on other platforms. "The Little Match Girl" is on the The Little Mermaid disc, while "Paperman" graced Wreck-It Ralph, and "Feast" was a supplement on Big Hero 6. When Winnie the Pooh hit Blu-ray, it carried "Nessie," just as Cinderella took "Tangled Ever After" and Frozen nabbed "Get a Horse." "John Henry" first hit home-media on the American Legends DVD, and speaking of DVD-only, "How to Hook Up Your Home Theater" graced the Have a Laugh: Volume 1 package in two versions. "Operation Secret Santa" was on the Prep & Landing: Totally Tinsel Collection, and
even "Frozen Fever," which is making its home-media debut here, will get a second Blu-ray release when the live-action Cinderella hits the format. Still, for those animation aficionados who are just getting into the Blu-ray game, Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection is a good place to start.
Kenneth Brown wrote that "one thing that unites [the shorts]...is passion; passion for the animated short art form, for pushing animation to brave new places, for experimenting in ways feature films are often unable, and the passion of Walt Disney Animation Studios, who continue to produce animated shorts in an era that questions their value, relevance and importance...Though decidedly hit or miss, the Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection features a number of excellent animated shorts, chief among them 'Paperman' and 'Feast.' The only downside is that many of the shorts have been released on Blu-ray as extras with other titles, so Disney collectors and completists may already have most of these in their collection."
From Warner Archive comes the vampire melodrama The Hunger. For fans of the late, great director Tony Scott, The Hunger on Blu-ray merits much rejoicing for two reasons: now almost all of Scott's major features have received Blu-ray upgrades (only Beverly Hills Cop II - in this country, anyways - and The Fan remain MIA on the format), and this one, in particular, retains a singular position in his oeuvre. The Hunger is Scott's only true horror film (I guess you could make an argument for The Fan, too, but it's more of a psychological thriller. Plus it's mostly terrible, so there's that), telling the story of Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve), a centuries-old vampire living the high-life in Manhattan with her undead partner John (David Bowie). Emphasize high-life: they traipse through the city like haughty runway models, attending all the hottest clubs and nightspots while pausing occasionally to satisfy their bloodlust (Bowie has never been so perfectly cast, and yes, I have seen The Man Who Fell to Earth). If Bret Easton Ellis wrote Dracula, it'd look a lot like Miriam and John's NYC travails, and Scott gives the whole endeavor the billowing smoke and fetishized sheen of a beautiful nightmare. His critics used to equate Scott's customary aesthetic gloss to high-end commercials (Roger Ebert famously described the coupling between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis in Top Gun as if the two were "the stars of one of those sexy new perfume ads", a claim that one could certainly level at the way characters move through The Hunger), but for Scott, this glistening style was less a concession to corporate excess than it was representative of a heightening, of sex, of power, of adrenaline, of pain. By design or otherwise, his protagonists live on the razor's edge, and so we feel movies like The Hunger on a subcutaneous level before we have time to process them intellectually. It's in the way Miriam and John butcher their first on-screen victim (an act that Scott crosscuts with images of savage primates) or in their casual appreciation of one another's flesh - the film is a sensory overload, even when (especially when) those senses begin to rot, and the plot, as it were, begins. For whatever reason, John begins to age rapidly, and in her attempts to stop his sudden decay (one brilliant sequence finds John gaining about fifty years over the span of one five-minute conversation), Miriam finds herself drawn to beautiful gerontologist Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon) who doesn't suspect the supernatural components to John's condition. In contrasting these elements, Scott manages his most visceral examples of sensory interplay; the ghoulish imagery of John's vampiric defects is equally important as Miriam's erotic pursuit of Sarah, the latter of which culminates in a sex scene that shocked audiences in 1983 and still retains much of its hypnotic power. A lesser director might make viewers choose between realms - the living and the dead - but that's not Scott's game. For him, they exist simultaneously, and what seemed like style trumping success now plays like a heated arthouse thriller: Antonioni (or maybe Nicolas Roeg) intermingling with Wes Craven, maybe. Rarely do first-time directors express their dominant obsessions so fully during their first at-bat, but Tony Scott was a true original, and The Hunger is a prime example of what made him so vital.
Of The Hunger, Michael Reuben wrote that "the fact that The Hunger appeared in 1983, just as the AIDS crisis was focusing both public and medical attention on blood-born pathogens, is not accidental. Nor is it surprising that the film's most nightmarish sequence isn't any of the Blaylocks' gory feedings, or even the Grand Guignol parade of corpses created for the changed ending on which the studio insisted. The scenes in the film that attracted the most attention at the time, even more than Miriam's "seduction" of Sarah Roberts, are those when John Blaylock is left sitting in the waiting area of the Park West Clinic, because Dr. Roberts thinks he's a crank who will simply get bored and leave. During a space of two hours, John ages by about forty years, and Dick Smith's remarkable makeup captures his physical disintegration with the kind of ghastly realism of which CGI can only dream. The 1980s were a decade in which a majority of America's baby boomers hit their fortieth birthday. Fitness clubs, jogging and healthy eating became all the rage, as a generation that worshipped youth suddenly discovered that it, too, was growing old. John Blaylock's predicament in The Hunger was precisely the nightmare that too many members of the film's contemporary audience were trying to repress. No wonder the studio didn't like Tony Scott's vision. The elegant painter of so many advertising fantasies had committed the ultimate sin: He'd painted a gorgeous canvas of youth, then etched a grinning skull in the middle with the words 'Memento mori' beneath...The Hunger remains a unique experience for anyone who believes that cinema is an art form based on sight and sound. Visions and harmonics as striking as these are rare indeed."
Plus, if we really want to talk about true style without substance, we can look at another release this week: Shout Factory's new Blu-ray of Hackers. Ostensibly a slick caper about a group of tech-savvy high-schoolers (including Jonny Lee Miller, Jesse Bradford, Renoly Santiago, Matthew Lillard, and a very young Angelina Jolie, whose movie-star charisma is already in full force) banding against an unscrupulous tech consultant (Fisher Stevens), Hackers seems more like slightly ridiculous speculative sci-fi than a cutting-edge techno-thriller; it's got more in common with, I dunno, Things to Come or Metropolis than with anything resembling real hacking. Even Michael Mann's maligned Blackhat got more right about the digital frontier. Better yet, check out the recent series Mr. Robot for one of the most accurate depictions of hacker culture I've ever seen. And this isn't a case of time catching up with the film. In 1995, Hackers seemed barely plausible as a technological artifact. No, what lingers now are the surfaces - as a film about hackers, Hackers is an abject failure, but as a time-stamped slice of 1990s aesthetics, it remains a potent time capsule. Characters have names like Cereal, Lord Nikon, Phreak, and The Plague (and only semi-ironically, to boot), and they wear tie-dyed crop-tops and rollerblade constantly and speak exclusively in slang, and it's all so quaint, like stumbling across a feature-length movie starring Spin Doctors and No Doubt. Director Iain Softley might cast all of these archetypes in genuine flair and polish, but at the end of the day, he's contributing to the well-worn Youth Culture genre, which present the teens of their respective eras as unfathomably hip and more than a little alienating (in that sense, Jolie is perfectly cast). Squint just a little, and you can see the ghosts of Can't Stop the Rock or Footloose.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review writes that the film "ultimately traffics in fairly standard 'rage against the machine' (and/or The Man) tropes, but it does so in an inventive milieu, one which director Iain Softley invests with some really interesting visual flourishes. Several times, for example, otherwise routine settings like an aerial view of the Manhattan skyline morph into things like a computer circuit board. While occasionally more than a bit on the cartoonish side, performances are generally quite winning. Miller displays some of the same snark he evinces as Sherlock in Elementary, and his scenes with Jolie have the requisite spark and banter. (Miller and Jolie married shortly after the film wrapped, separating and ultimately divorcing a couple of years later.) The supporting cast is large and eclectic (to say the least), with some nicely colorful turns. That said, Fisher Stevens simply doesn't emanate much menace as The Plague, seeming to be more like The Low Grade Virus (pun probably intended) instead."
Finally, Kino is offering a Blu-ray upgrade of the 1992 sports comedy Diggstown. Despite more-than-a-few clunkers (The Couch Trip, The Island, and Cops & Robbersons, anybody?), the best works from director Michael Ritchie remain perpetually underrated; we owe him a debt of gratitude for Downhill Racer, Prime Cut, the original Bad News Bears, Fletch, The Candidate, and Diggstown, which might be the most unjustly neglected of the bunch. At its heart, Diggstown is a caper about the efforts that huckster Gabriel Caine (James Woods) employs to con Bruce Dern's venal small-town kingpin, and if you can't get excited over the prospect of James Woods getting a chance to indulge in his patented brand of motor-mouthed charm/sociopathy, I can't do anything for you. He's masterful here, playing a perpetual schemer who practically charms his victims into falling for his tricks even though they know they're getting fleeced - his performance is a reminder of both a) how good Woods can be in the right leading role (his work here ranks alongside his Salvador and The Hard Way turns) and b) Ritchie's enduring fascination with those rogues who extricate themselves from problems they've caused with their own big mouths (great double-feature idea: this and Fletch). If Woods were the only good thing here, Diggstown would still be worth watching (he single-handedly makes dreck like Cop and True Believer seem like they aren't out past their sell-by dates), but Ritchie supports him with a genuinely twisty, Damon Runyon-inflected script (courtesy of Steven McKay) that actually gets funnier and more surprising as it enters its third act as well as a cast of ringers that adds wonderful little inflections as counterpoints to Woods' loquaciousness, from Oliver Platt's feigned naivety to Dern's legitimate menace. Best of all is Lou Gossett Jr., giving his best performance as the lynchpin of Woods' con, a washed-up boxing trainer that Woods hopes to turn into a menace in the ring. The interplay between the two men gives the film the flavor of a great buddy picture, with Gossett Jr. as our wry proxy: he knows Woods has a something up his sleeve, yet he's willing to submit himself to the plan, if only to see how everything shakes out. Diggstown itself maintains the same appeal. As con-man movies go, it's right up there with George Roy Hill's The Sting.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wrote that the film "undeniably fun, especially when it concentrates on setting traps for Gillon and his cronies, with money the primary bait. Fitz actually kicks off the plan, besting locals at cards and pool, greasing up hostilities for Gabriel, who swoops in to take advantage of those blinded by revenge opportunities. Ritchie maintains consistent escalation, focusing on brewing antagonism between Gabriel and Gillon, who share a common goal of humiliation, barely keeping disappointments masked as the scheme unfolds and the wager develops from a basic wad of cash to utter disaster for the loser. Diggstown has its moments in the first half, with a snarky attitude and run of deception, while training sequences are also diverting, watching Palmer go from a doughy 48-year-old gym manager to the fighting machine he once was, putting his faith in Gabriel despite a sketchy history with his mischievous promoter. There's a subplot exploring the town namesake, a physically incapacitated boxing champ exploited by Gillon (played silently by Wilhelm von Homburg, who portrayed Vigo in Ghostbusters II), but little is known beyond the basics (perhaps this is another literary chapter lost in translation), leaving Ritchie to mastermind physical conditioning montages, with Palmer working diligently to get in shape and sharpen his hustle, preparing to box a horde of ferocious contenders."