For the week of September 8th, the most controversial new title is the Criterion Collection's new Blu-ray of Dressed to Kill. Since its release in 1980, director Brian De Palma's adult thriller has been no stranger to controversy; its then-explicit violent and sexual content made the film an instant target of the MPAA, and for years people could only watch the film in a compromised R-rated edit. Still, even before Dressed to Kill received a long-awaited director's cut (which Criterion honors in this new Blu-ray edition), viewers still responded to the formal and tonal mastery De Palma brings to the picture. For all its lurid content, and this is a movie where a high-class call girl is the hero, where sexually frustrated Manhattanites and razor-wielding transvestites wait around every corner, De Palma isn't making a simple grindhouse chiller (a la Lucio Fulci's near-intolerable The New York Ripper). No, Dressed to Kill is an immaculately styled homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, of all movies, one that begins as a high-toned society drama and turns into a violent psycho-thriller, and where the particulars of the plot - without getting too spoilery, the film concerns itself with a housewife (Angie Dickinson), her teenage son (Keith Gordon), her psychiatrist (Michael Caine), and a ditzy-but-not-dumb escort (Nancy Allen, De Palma's former muse) as they fall into the orbit of a murderer - pale in comparison with three or four setpieces that find De Palma at the top of his game. The film is a gilded shark, gliding through unfathomable savagery, and it's a trip to watch De Palma play his audience, generating suspense from Ralf Bode's Steadicam-goosed camerawork and Pino Donaggio's chilling score, from a romantic pursuit through the Metropolitan Museum of Art that turns into something else entirely, or from a subway chase that sees Allen's character flee from one possible killer into the clutches of another one. In its own way, Dressed to Kill is a perfect thriller, where De Palma's command of the medium is so full that it might take a few viewings before you realize how ingeniously constructed the movie is (his uses of humor and subliminal clues are especially subtle). Shame, then, that controversy rears its head yet again, this time over Criterion's new disc - while the Blu-ray bests MGM's previous Blu-ray in the features department, early screeners evinced an HD transfer that boasted a radical new grade of color-timing (kind of a sickly green) and, most unforgivably, some pervasive vertical stretching that pulled at the actors and sets like taffy. Criterion delayed their release to this week in order to press a corrected version of the transfer.
In his Blu-ray review of Criterion's second pressing, Svet Atanasov wrote that "Hitchcock's influence can easily be felt but the film most definitely has an identity of its own. Its attitude towards sex, in particular, gives it an edge that no other mainstream American film from the early '80s has. Brian De Palma's direction is flawless. The film flows, never stumbling or overwhelming with an attitude. There is sleaze and there is gore but they are perfectly mixed, effectively adding to the tense atmosphere not detracting from it. Each sequence is expertly shot – the camera moves and the manner in which shadow, light and color are utilized ought to be studied by aspiring young directors. De Palma's script is also first-class. Virtually all of the exchanges between the actors are full of incredibly sharp lines. When they remain silent, the camera carefully studies their faces or spends time observing object that would reveal what the viewer needs to know about them. There is absolutely no fluff. The film has many stars, but Dickinson impresses the most. What she manages to accomplish for the short period of time she is in front of the camera is quite remarkable. The museum sequence, in particular, where she follows the man is truly amongst the best of its kind. Allen and Caine are also outstanding in their respective roles. [Dennis] Franz, still looking very young and slim, is absolutely hilarious as the cocky detective." Of the new transfer, he writes "the film looks fantastic now. Depth and clarity are clearly superior and fluidity is a lot more convincing. There is a layer of light and beautifully resolved grain throughout the entire film which translates into better density. There are no traces of problematic sharpening corrections. Colors are stable and natural, never appearing even remotely artificially boosted. There are no large debris, cuts, damage marks, or torn frames, but I noticed a few tiny flecks. Finally, overall image stability is outstanding. To sum it all up, now that the framing issue has been eliminated, I think that the film looks very healthy and fresh."
The next title arrives on a wave of melancholy: Shout/Scream Factory's release of Shocker, the 1989 slasher movie from the late Wes Craven. I wish I could tell you that Shocker represents one of Craven's high-water marks, but unfortunately, the film is closer to The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 or My Soul To Take in his oeuvre than it is to A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream. The story goes (and this is apocryphal, so take it with a grain) that Craven was upset over the lack of profit points he had in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, so he came up with Shocker in an attempt to generate and control his own horror franchise. Short version: it didn't work. Part of what makes Shocker so dispiriting is how naked a cash-grab it is; you can sense that once Craven came up with his Freddy-wannabe (one Horace Pinker, who the great Mitch Pileggi tries to enliven despite some nonsensical backstory and a flood of terrible one-liners), that was it, plot and characterization be dammed. How else to explain the movie's wan supporting characters (Michael Murphy and a very green Peter Berg play the negligible heroes, with the former too colorless and the latter too inexperienced to make much of an impact) and bizarre structuring, where almost an hour of the movie passes before the plot begins (Shocker is a very long 110 minutes), and the executed Pinker gains the ability to possess people and continue killing? It's such a weird movie, and I don't know what's worse: Craven's "homage" (if we're being generous) to the post-Halloween II mythos in how he links Berg and Pileggi's characters or the sequel-ready setup that concludes the film. Still, Craven was such a consummate professional that he manages one genius setpiece even in this dross - when Berg and Pileggi do battle at the end, they do so jumping through TV Land, their arena changing aesthetics as they move from, say, Leave It To Beaver or a televangelism Hour of Power. For a brief, shining moment, Shocker morphs into an inspired Looney Tunes short, and it makes you wish Craven had more opportunities to indulge in this puckish sensibility.
Jeffrey Kauffman evinced a more favorable opinion in his Blu-ray review, writing that the film "turned out to be something of a critical if not a total box office disappointment, however, though seen now with a bit of distance it's a slight but still at least occasionally enjoyable slice (no pun intended) of whimsy, one which takes its concept of a villain existing as 'pure electricity' in some fun directions. Even the smartest of filmmakers can stumble at times, and Shocker is admittedly not the most intelligent film of Craven's career, which is not to suggest it's the total loss that some critics have averred since its release. There's little doubt that Craven only slightly masks concepts he'd already explored in A Nightmare on Elm Street (as he himself admits on the commentary track), but Shocker, for all its conceits and gimmickry, is a surprisingly personal film at times, at least insofar as Craven looks at the relationship between fathers and sons and how nature versus nurture can affect one's destiny...While Murphy and Berg are fairly bland in on the good guy side of the equation, the film belongs hook, line, and sinker (Pinker?) to Mitch Pileggi, who doesn't just chew the scenery, he virtually consumes it, pausing every so often to spit out invective at characters (and by default, the audience) in an often hilariously over the top manner. Shocker never actually ends up shocking much at all, but Pileggi's hyperbolism brings some needed energy to the film, and the fantastic tour through stock footage that caps the film makes some of the other drudgery a little more palatable."
From Warner Home Entertainment comes Gotham: The Complete First Season. The show's initial hook is irresistible for Batman fans: a police procedural that focuses on Gotham's finest - specifically Ben Mackenzie's young Detective Jim Gordon and Donal Logue's corrupt cop Harvey Bullock - well before the rise of the Dark Knight. This is fertile material, especially if you followed Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka's comic series Gotham Central, which examined the lives of Gotham's finest with a sensitivity and detail reminiscent of Tom Fontana's late, great cop drama Homicide: Life on the Street. However, as a Fox show, any possibility of understatement goes right out the window. Gotham is one of the most schizophrenic programs on network TV: from moment to moment, it tosses out a different dramatic approach. The relative subtlety and quiet decency that Mackenzie (who was so wonderful on TNT's cancelled-but-terrific policier Southland) tries to give Gordon, for example, clashes against the soapy melodrama of the love triangle between him, Barbara Keen (Erin Richards), and Gotham detective Renee Montoya (Victoria Cartagena). At times, the series gets a nice buddy-cop dynamic going with Gordon and Bullock's mismatched partners, and at times - too often, in fact - it seems a hair away from the campiness of the old Adam West Batman series, given the campiness that people like Robin Lord Taylor and Cory Michael Smith bring to their roles as, respectively, young iterations of the Penguin and the Riddler. Jada Pinkett Smith manages to strike a nicely menacing tone as underworld kingpin Fish Mooney, but John Doman is a far more sedate Carmine Falcone. And complicating matters further is the fact that, at its core, Gotham is a stealth prequel, drawing out the backstory for teenaged Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) to interminable, unnecessary levels (and turning Sean Pertwee's loyal butler Alfred into a former SAS operative). Whatever hope for a promising cop drama starts to fade about midway through Season One, and furthermore, longtime Batman aficionados might take issue with the show's parade of colorful villains; isn't a key element of the Batman mythos that his very presence drew out such rogues as the Penguin or Catwoman? Right now, that level of confusion permeates Gotham's DNA, although the promise of The Shield's Michael Chiklis as a tough-cop mentor for Gordon does make me optimistic - if cautiously so - for Season Two.
Of Gotham, Kenneth Brown wrote "it's the first season's writing, not necessarily its cast, that comes close to burning Heller's Gotham to the ground. Wince-inducing deliveries are one thing, but some of the dialogue uttered in the series would be laughable in the pages of a poorly penned comicbook. With several stories and subplots already attacking suspension of disbelief, is it any wonder so many character beats were met with skepticism and scorn? Gotham sometimes hews more closely to the original '60s television Batman than Nolan, Burton, or even Schumacher's adaptations of the Caped Crusader, with exaggerated, hyperextended dialogue that would be better suited to 'biff,' 'smack,' and 'bam' than the more serious, crime-ridden city at the heart of Gotham. There's still enough here to warrant a second chance, or a second season as it were. But there's also enough cause for concern to temper excitement and adjust expectations accordingly. I'll be watching the series when it returns to FOX later this month, but I also won't be surprised in the least if it's more of the same, immediately or eventually. Here's to hoping beyond hope that such cynicism will prove to be unnecessary."
Finally, Universal Home Entertainment is giving a Blu-ray release to one of its most requested catalog titles: Joel and Ethan Coen's neo-noir The Man Who Wasn't There. Largely ignored (if not outright derided) during its 2001 theatrical run, The Man Who Wasn't There has since found greater favor as one of the Coens' most unsung and idiosyncratic thrillers. Even writing "thriller" in this context feels slightly inaccurate; while the film contains a number of grisly deaths and salacious twists, these shocks occur at a remove, the result of the Coens filtering everything through protagonist Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton). Crane is as passive a lead character as the Coens have ever created (and considering these are the same people behind No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man, that's really saying something), a barber who regards everything that happens to him in the small California town of Santa Rosa with the same affectless countenance. Even more that their iconic Blood Simple, it feels like the Coen Brothers are paying explicit homage to the works of noir mastermind James M. Cain as they appropriate Cain's blend of mundane reality and lurid thrills. Thanks to Thornton's uncompromising, unshowy turn, Crane is such a blank (even though the film is wall-to-wall with Crane's narration, Crane has minimal dialogue within the film itself) that the only way the Coens can assure us he's not a vague specter is by having others constantly talk at him, most notably a blackmailer (Jon Polito) whose schemes turns Crane into an unwitting murderer and a criminal manipulator. But that description sounds far plottier that the film seems in the moment. Even as Crane goes about the business of covering up murders and implicating others, he - and the Coens - are occupied with matters elsewhere, including the secret inner life of Crane's wife Doris (Frances McDormand), the melancholy of a lonely father-daughter pair (Richard Jenkins and Scarlett Johansson), and the tranquil-menacing 1940s culture that ensnares the characters, with all its attendant difficulties (such as, I kid you not, UFOs). In a way, The Man Who Wasn't There is just as shaggy as the Coens' great noir riff The Big Lebowski, and as that earlier cult classic drew its energy from Jeff Bridges' charismatically shambling The Dude, so does this feature approximate the moody rhythms of Crane, making it feel long in ways that the Coens' movies often don't. Crane's sedentary pace infects the lurid plot mechanics almost to the point of torpor, but after a while, you key into the film's deliberate, dreamy energy. This is a long, slow waking nightmare, and our dawning realization of that chaos maintains our focus. It helps, too, that The Man Who Wasn't There is so beautiful (Roger Deakins' black-and-white cinematography ranks as some of his strongest lensing efforts), and that the Coens let in vast dollops of their trademark mordant humor - Crane's deadpan reactions to violence are always blackly funny, and Tony Shahloub walks away with the picture as Crane's fast-talking lawyer. This is essential viewing for fans of the Coen Brothers, as well as for those crime buffs interesting in the road less traveled.