For the week of August 25th, AMC and Starz Home Entertainment are bringing Season Five of The Walking Dead to Blu-ray. For this year of the popular zombie thriller, showrunner Scott Gimple continues the narrative trend he began in Season Four. With the exception of the first few episodes, which focus on the protagonists' disastrous decision to travel to the Terminus safe haven (by this point in the series, you would think that the main characters would have all but accepted that two-word phrase as a dream at best and a lie at worst), this season again splinters the main cast in order to cover far more aspects of the zombie apocalypse. Sometimes we'll follow series lead Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), but just as often as not we'll stay with Melissa McBride's Carol for a while, or we'll follow Chad Coleman's sensitive brawler Tyreese, or we'll watch Abraham Ford (the great Michael Cudlitz) try to make sense of a world gone mad. The result plays more like a series of interconnected short stories than a single propulsive drama - who knew that, at heart, the Walking Dead team would aspire, if only a little, to the same contours and structures of the network's landmark Mad Men series? It's a bold decision, to be sure (if logistically necessary - this show's cast has gotten so big that it must be easier to schedule if you don't need everyone every day). It's also keeps The Walking Dead from being as dramatically satisfying as it needs to be. This is pure pulp - all the high-toned pretensions in the world can't obscure the fact that The Walking Dead exists because of the collective fascination with watching flesh-eating ghouls eat live humans in graphically creative ways - and the best way to serve up pulp is to keep it fast and mean (see also: the CW's Supernatural or Cinemax's Banshee). Like its undead characters, the show staggers along, and rather than illuminate more corners of a world in chaos, the move to subdivide episodes between the different cast members only serves to highlight how one-note everyone's reactions are (that said, if the zombie apocalypse does happen, and I spend most of my time lamenting my lost humanity and sullenly distrusting every new face I meet, I'll retract this criticism). Plus, the show keeps removing promising opportunities for conventional thrills: Andrew J. West makes a strong impression as one of Terminus' bloodthirsty founders early in the season, and the end flirts with the notion that Rick has become just as compromised as the Governor in Season Three, but the series abandons these dramatic avenues before they even get going. All we're left with, ultimately, is a whole lot of grimdark walking, punctuated by moments of horrible bloodshed and "shocking" deaths. The Walking Dead is certainly a popular show - there's no arguing that point. Now let's make it exciting.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "season five captures the very physical essence the show has to offer. The first episode is essentially a run-and-gun marathon that's endlessly bloody - whether zombie gore or the violent ends of the living - and reflective of the show's deeper theme that centers on man's inability to work together, to see eye-to-eye, to see his best come out when the worst surrounds him. Instead, as most every season has shown, the end of the world isn't merely concerned with the physical decay but rather than decline of man himself, reverting not even to the fringe base elements of his essence but, some, anyway, morphing into a disgusting creature that's really human in name and appearance only. The living have essentially turned into the dead - almost in a literal sense considering the people in Terminus - and as the season moves forward, it pushes through to explore man in various states of mental disfigurement from three perspectives, one a hierarchical group at a hospital influenced by power, the second a group attempting a return to some semblance of normalcy but doing so with an abundance of naiveté interfering with the dangerous reality that exists beyond the walls, and the third Rick's group that is, in many ways, a microcosm of the world around them but seeming always to end up doing the right thing, even if it costs them dearly in the end. In that sense, the show is superficially treading, for it, relatively well-worn ground, but it's met with an increased exploration of the very real inner consequences, the way the world isn't just shaping people in the moment but morphing them through long-term exposure to death, decay, personal loss, life as survival, and the very real feeling of hopelessness that seems ever-present, even when things superficially appear to be looking up."
One of 2015's biggest box-office flops hits Blu-ray this week: the Cameron Crowe rom-com Aloha. Through his 2001 drama Vanilla Sky, Crowe was one of the good guys - a populist who strove to make uncompromising entertainments for adults - and then Elizabethtown happened, and the roof fell in. Whether you think that picture is a One From the Heart-level boondoggle or a flawed-but-worthwhile effort undone by poisonous early buzz (that's a conversation for another piece, though I tend to fall in the latter camp, once you get past the Orlando Bloom miscasting and a stridently terrible first forty-five minutes), it put a break on his career that Crowe has been trying to remove ever since. To borrow a line from my favorite Avenger, Crowe deserves a win, and it's touching how he's styled Aloha as a meta-commentary on his own situation. His hero, Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), was an ace Air Force operative brought low by a war wound and a catastrophic on-the-job failing, and now he's looking for redemption, both professionally (being the point man for Bill Murray's military industrialist on a top-secret satellite project) and personally (reconnecting with Rachel McAdams' ex-wife and potentially starting a new relationship with Emma Stone's spirited flyer). Even with the venue changed from the movie business to the military, it doesn't take a psychiatrist to see the parallels between Crowe and Brian's lives, especially once you factor in Crowe's own failed marriage to Heart frontwoman Nancy Wilson. So far, so good: Crowe's drawing from his own experiences (hey, it worked for Almost Famous), he's working with an aces cast (and I haven't even mentioned that Danny McBride, John Krasinski, and Alec Baldwin also make appearances), and he's tying it all together with some gorgeous location-footage in Hawaii and a typically eclectic soundtrack. Yet if the modest success of We Bought a Zoo helped remove Crowe from the doghouse (or at least netted him a work-release furlough), then I'm sorry to report that Aloha has only thrown him back in. It's staggering how nothing works here, starting with the notion that for a guy trying to distance himself from the Elizabethtown debacle, it might not have been the best idea to make what is essentially a thinly veiled remake of Elizabethtown. Same basic plot, same basic leads (Bradley Cooper is far more suited for a Crowe part than Orlando Bloom was, but they're still making the same moves) - Baldwin even plays practically the same character that chewed out Bloom in that earlier feature. I get that, as the great Walter Hill once said, filmmakers only have a few stories to tell, but the similarities here are too uncanny and too numerous to mention.
Still, distancing itself from Elizabethtown would have only helped Crowe remove the stink of that earlier film. What sets Aloha apart is that it makes all new mistakes. As a rom-com setup, Aloha should be a slam-dunk, except nothing connects. We don't care about Brian's relationships with anyone: Cooper is way to old for Stone's Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Stone is having a good time, but she's so committed to the faux-screwball tone that she rushes through her lines without giving Cooper time enough to create a believable rapport), and while Cooper and McAdams have more plausible chemistry, we kinda hate them together since she's semi-cheating on Krasinski's taciturn-but-otherwise-decent husband. Even McBride, who's such an unpredictable, whip-smart comic force, struggles to enliven what is, essentially, Generic Comic Relief #4 (people call him "Fingers" because he's always moving his around. That's the level of ironic comedy here, folks). Murray, as usual, comes off best because it looks like he pretty much chucked the script and decided to keep himself amused the entire shoot; how else to explain the charming but utterly extraneous scene where he and Stone dance to Hall and Oates' "I Can't Go for That"? That said, their dance is no less random than anything else that happens in the film. It's hard to tell if there's a better film somewhere in the footage Crowe has, given all the reshoots and obvious recutting done to this iteration. The first half, in particular, artlessly jumps from scene to scene with little sense of transitional coherence or character motivation, and by the end, I was still unclear as to who certain people were. Or why Stone and Cooper's characters even should be thrown together. Or why, for a movie set in Hawaii, Crowe pays only basic lip service to the local community (and casts Stone, natch, as part Asian-American). Or, best/worst of all, what the hell are the specifics of Murray's plan. As far as I can tell, he's a Bond villain masquerading as lovable old Bill Murray (think Albert Brooks' Hank Scorpio from The Simpsons, except remove all the satire and comic bite). I'm still rooting for Crowe, but if he wants to keep from spinning off into late-period James L. Brooks territory, he's going to need to take a breath, and make something great. No pressure, right?
Martin Liebman called the film "a far cry from classic Cameron Crowe insofar that it's far distant from the tight, cohesive, charming, memorable, precisely crafted, fully engaging, heartfelt, and fun movies he's crafted in years past. It's a film with a score sheet heavily skewered to the negative side of the charts, confirming rather than contradicting the negative buzz and all but damning the movie to the scrap heap of disappoints and shoulda-beens. Structurally, Aloha seems to want its proverbial cake and to feast on it, too. The movie strives to put together a simple package of burgeoning romance and reconciliation with mild thrills, all set against an exotic backdrop. That's fine, not necessarily creative but in the right hands something that sounds likable enough. Yet Aloha is a scattered mess, a film that's poorly paced and put together, victim of a needlessly complicated plot, and home to characters that largely miss at the core level and share almost no tangible chemistry. Mix in drama about a satellite's payload and Hawaiian mythos and politics - which almost seem tossed in because they can be rather than because they should be - and the film plays out with one disastrous miss after another. Between the romance and reconciliation triangle, the Hawaiian lore, and the satellite story, one cannot help but wonder whether Aloha might have worked better as three separate films or, at least, entwined together with a good bit more skillful construction and artful editing. Each element has its strengths, which are evident in the film. For example, Bradley Cooper shapes the character as precisely as he can and finds a tangible, even agreeable, sense of hopeful rejuvenation at what becomes a turning point in the character's life. The myth-laden bits are interesting enough but don't necessarily add anything crucial to the movie, even as it's clear they're meant to reinforce and parallel character growth, to give some added weight to the development while playing to the core strengths of the film's setting. Yet such details are lost under the heavy handed direction, sluggish story details, and dismal pacing that surround them. Even the satellite angle and the Bill Murray character offer a passably generic foil of sorts for Cooper's Gilcrest, though it certainly screams 'contrivance' in every scene. Even the venerable Murray cannot do much more than lighten the load by sheer presence alone."
In its continuing effort to give notable releases from the Warner back-catalog Blu-ray showings, Warner Archive is upgrading The World According to Garp. The film is an adaptation of John Irving's landmark novel, which puts it in tricky territory. Filmmakers are drawn to Irving's works because of his incisive-yet-compulsively accessible attention to character and plot, but the film versions exist on a pretty wide spectrum: for every success (the Academy Award-winning The Cider House Rules), there is an equal and opposite failure (Simon Birch, anyone, and its bastardization of Irving's great A Prayer for Owen Meany), with some interesting near-misses (The Hotel New Hampshire, Tod Williams' underrated-but-flawed The Door in the Floor, which adapted part of A Widow for One Year) dotting the way in between. However, the reason people keep trying is because director George Roy Hill and screenwriter Steve Tesich got it so right their first time at bat with The World According to Garp. This kind of film is a miracle of sorts because we rarely make movies about people - full stop - anymore, and Garp is resplendent with character, not least of which is the title character (Robin Williams, in just his third big-screen turn), an aspiring writer who drifts (aimlessly, if not indifferently) through life's slings and arrows. This is the kind of story that ends up yielding an "And then..." summary when you try and describe it to friends. And then we meet his mother (Glenn Close), a former nurse who's now a feminist icon. And then he meets the love of his life (Mary Beth Hurt). And then he is unfaithful to her. And then they have kids. And then, and then, and then. To be sure, this isn't the book. To do Irving's original novel full justice, you'd need to reimagine it as a multi-hour miniseries, and at 136 minutes, this version edits out much of the book's Dickens-esque richness and texture (most notably, the film lacks the graphic sex and violence that permeates much of Irving's original novel). However, Hill gets the tone exactly right - while his film is certainly episodic in nature, that modular structure allows him to shift from low comedy to high tragedy on a scene-by-scene basis (or even at a moment's notice, like in the accident mid-film that irrevocably damages Garp's family and begins with an impruient touch that wouldn't be out of place in a Farrelly Brothers movie) in exactly the same way the book does. First a birth, then a death. First Garp befriends a football player-turned-proud transsexual (John Lithgow, in a career-making performance), then he becomes a wrestling coach. First a plane crashes nonchalantly into Garp's house, then his family faces an assassination attempt. It's just that kind of movie, and its casual messiness does as good a job of approximating the messiness of life as any fiction film I've ever seen.
Michael Reuben wrote that "Garp has been called both pro- and anti-feminist. In fact, it is neither, just as it is neither pro- nor anti-marriage, adultery, celibacy, or any of the other phenomena explored in Garp. Irving simply creates characters who live different aspects of these phenomena and lets them act out their nature. The most that can be said of the author's perspective is that, like his protagonist, he expects the worst but keeps trying. The 1982 film adaptation of Garp by director George Roy Hill (The Sting) received mostly respectful reviews, although fans of the novel were predictably disappointed at the many elements that had to be omitted to condense the sprawling narrative into a film. Critics who either didn't like or hadn't finished the book greeted the film with a reaction summed up by the late Roger Ebert: 'What the hell was that all about?' Today, with the novel's notoriety having faded, the film has a better chance of standing on its own merits. It must be said, though, that Hill, working from a screenplay by Steve Tesich (Breaking Away), did a remarkable job of recreating Irving's unique tone for the screen. He did it with careful, inventive casting, well-chosen locations and an unobtrusive style that sneaks up on the viewer much like Irving's prose."
Finally, we have Welcome to New York from IFC and MPI Media, but this particular Blu-ray release comes with a warning. The director's cut of the film is one of director Abel Ferrara's strongest films. In telling the story of debauched French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn (sort of...Gérard Depardieu plays a thinly veiled proxy named Devereaux), Ferrara gets at something jaundiced and horrible about the moral allowances we make when money and power are involved; Devereaux screws and rages his way through the film's first half, indulging all his lusty impulses with abandon (while Ferrara regards his subject from a distance, refusing to bask in his hedonism with the same subjectivity that galvanized, say, Martin Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, he and Depardieu do not shy away from any of the explicit content), and it's only after we become numbed to the orgy of flesh and abuse on display that he begins to reap the consequences of his actions. For Ferrara, this delay is the point, that Devereaux/Strauss-Kahn was able to misbehave for so long because of the implicit "perks" his status afforded him, although he's not the only one at fault - the most striking part of Depardieu's fearless performance is his utter disbelief that anyone would find him at fault because he's gone so long without our censure. However, this Blu-ray edition is not the director's cut: it offers a heavily cut version that does not carry Ferrara's approval. Some of the trims (more than fifteen minutes in total) soften the sexual content present in the director's cut, but just as many elisions deemphasize the political message, leaving the U.S. version strangely bowdlerized and aimless. I can't recommend Ferrara's intended cut enough, and it is available in some other venues (including a Region B-locked edition from the U.K.). But this version...vote with your dollar and skip it.
When Michael Reuben commented on the film, he wrote that "although most discussion of Wild Bunch's edits has focused on the film's first half, it is obvious that trims occurred throughout the film, because the latter half suffers from abrupt transitions and choppy pacing. This is most noticeable in a sequence involving what appears to be a consensual tryst between Devereaux and a young woman (Emmanuelle Vill) who is roughly the age of his daughter; it's an apparent flashback with no discernible connection to the story. What Wild Bunch's tinkering has left intact, however, is the element of Welcome to New York that struck me most forcibly, which is the performance by Jacqueline Bisset as Devereaux's wife, Simone, the film's version of Anne Sinclair, third wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. If the first half of Welcome to New York paints an unflattering portrait of an indulged monster, Simone's appearance helps explain how he got that way...Despite full knowledge of her husband's predilections, Simone has been pushing him toward a career in politics, even though the pressure of such a life is precisely the kind of strain that is guaranteed to expose a person's vulnerabilities and character flaws. As Simone rages at Devereaux over a betrayal that was utterly foreseeable, Bisset makes this wealthy and powerful woman every bit a match for her husband in monstrous inhumanity (the film also strongly hints that she paid off unnamed people to obtain the dismissal of his indictment). Welcome to New York raises provocative questions about the behavior of a man like Devereaux (or Strauss-Kahn). Where does it come from? How does it flourish for so long without detection? Is it enough to punish the perpetrator while ignoring the network of aiders and abettors who made his misconduct possible? At the film's end, a free but disgraced Devereaux stares at the camera, and perhaps he is reflecting on such questions. Or maybe his mind is a blank. As he tells the psychiatrist hired by his lawyers to evaluate him, he has no feelings. He doesn't appear to have thoughts either. He has been reduced to a bundle of sensory organs, drifting from one experience to the next - and such a creature could have been elected President of France."