For the week of September 15th, the biggest title on display is Universal Home Entertainment's Furious 7. This action-adventure is the latest installment in the successful Fast & Furious franchise, and given the billion-dollars-and-change the film picked up at the worldwide market, it's almost an inevitability that there will be another. Humans breathe air, water is wet, and Vin Diesel and Co. will keep cranking out Fasts until time immemorial. Not that I'm complaining, mind you: as relentlessly stupid as these movies are, they're also paced within an inch of their lives and a whole lot of fun, even when they stop making sense. Consider the case of Furious 7. At its core, it's a revenge story, with Jason Statham's fearsome Deckard Shaw hunting the Fast and Furious crew (Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson, and Dwayne Johnson, who's been this series' MVP since his introduction in 2011's Fast Five) after they put his little brother (Luke Evans, making a thirty-second cameo in bandages and burn makeup) in a coma at the end of Fast & Furious 6. So far, so good, except Furious 7 defaults at overstuffed and keeps going, which means writer Chris Morgan keeps tossing in subplots with abandon. Diesel is trying to help his amnesiac beloved (Rodriguez) restore her lost memory, Walker is struggling with the banalities of suburban life, and oh yeah, the whole gang gets mixed up with a shadowy government agent (living legend Kurt Russell, who walks away with the film, as is his wont) who offers them protection from Shaw in exchange for their driving and covert skills - because apparently, somewhere in between Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, Diesel's crew graduated from thieves/adrenaline junkies to a cross between James Bond and the Justice League - as he mounts a cross-continent strike against a brutal gunrunner (Dijmon Hounsou, as much of a high-profile nonentity here as he was in Guardians of the Galaxy). We start in London, we're in Los Angeles just long enough for Statham to blow up everything, and we make side jaunts to Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi because why not? It's all nonsense, but it's such high-energy nonsense that the movie's 140 minutes fly by in what feels like four, thanks to director James Wan's keen sense of pacing and mayhem. In a franchise filled with improbable action, he sets a new high bar, goosing action beats both macro (Diesel and Walker driving a super-charged luxury speedster through the top floors of three skyscrapers) and micro (a bruising one-on-one between Statham and Johnson) with the spatial coherence he honed on the horror hit The Conjuring. That's not to say there aren't issues - Johnson gets sidelined for most of the movie after a great introduction, and the film's sexual politics are as appalling as the action is stunning (the way Wan's camera leers at the female cast members might make Michael Bay get self-conscious) - but chances are, if you're already a Fast fan, you'll have no trouble switching your brain off. Ultimately, the biggest concern is a real-world one - the specter of Walker's untimely death hangs over the film, but Morgan and Wan make that uncertainty and pain part of the texture of the film, and although it adds a dose of striking emotionalism that doesn't really gel with the comic-book vibe, it still proves a moving sendoff for Walker.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman called the film "the biggest, baddest action franchise going today...Furious 7 retains the franchise's core elements of muscle cars, musclebound heroes, and sexy women but shows its full evolution to wild, gun-toting, blow-stuff-up, insane stunt extravaganza that actually still works very well as an extension of the series' core values and the characters' central qualities. Furious 7 sees no shortage of iconic, breathtaking action moments that will leave audiences shouting 'wow!' and 'dang!' as it doesn't just settle for more of the same recycled antics but rather innovates with dangerously cool stunts and sequences that embody both the franchise's traditional four-wheeled mayhem as well as its newfound foray into top-shelf action. But more than that - and more important than that - is how well Furious 7 gets to the real heart of the franchise, and that's in the heart of its characters. The big action is grounded in the tangible bond of family that exists amongst the core, and the movie is clear to acknowledge as much as its central strength in a key moment where a newcomer sizes up the group. Cast chemistry is off-the-charts strong and, more than anything else this film or the entire series has to offer, the way it translates to a family of characters makes for the single most defining element, the lifeblood, essentially, that elevates The Fast and the Furious from popcorn series to legitimate, lovable, and long-lasting franchise."
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy. The pitfalls of the modern musician biopic are legion; even ones as relatively skilled as Ray and Walk the Line fall prey to the kinds of structural and tonal homogeneity that are the stuff of ZAZ-esque parody features. As a result, it's with genuine surprise I can report that Love & Mercy quickly and effectively deviates from the norm. Yes, it does relay some instances from the life of Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson, but this is hardly a "I was born; I grew up" retelling of his life. Instead, director Bill Pohlad and screenwriters Michael Alan Lerner & Oren Moverman bifurcate the picture, contrasting a young Wilson (Paul Dano) as he struggles to produce the band's legendary Pet Sounds album in the 1960s with his emotionally devastated, painfully withdrawn self (John Cusack) in the 1980s. Initially, the effect is jarring - Dano and Cusack look almost nothing like one another (it doesn't help that many viewers have such a clear image of Cusack as a twenty-something) although Dano eerily resembles Wilson from the '60s - but the decision to split the performance in this way proves thematically resonant. Dano's interpretation of Wilson is fuller, more open, so we see the currents of genius at work behind Pet Sounds as clearly as the psychological and emotional unsteadiness looming around the corner. By the time we get to Wilson in the '80s, Cusack's haunted, hollowed-out visage does more for the part than any pat screenwriting could - here's a man so broken that we have to look closely for any remnants of his past self, and even then we might miss them. By the end, what we get most acutely from Love & Mercy is a sense of Wilson's difficulties with community. He alienates himself from the Beach Boys (played by Jake Abel, Kenny Wormald, Brett Davern, and Graham Rogers) even as he produces their seminal record, and their absence makes it easier for Dr. Eugene Landy (a scene-stealing Paul Giamatti) to psychologically manipulate Wilson into accepting a state of near-total emotional subservience. The contrast between the two actors yields a richer portrait of the main and allows the film to distinguish itself even as it finds itself lapsing into conventional melodrama: as entertaining as Giamatti is, he's practically a mustache-twirling baddie, particularly as he starts butting heads with Wilson's nurturing girlfriend Melinda Ledbetter (a very fine, understated Elizabeth Banks) for control of Wilson's soul. But that's a small issue, and one worth enduring for the strength of Dano and Cusack's respective turns (Cusack, in particular, hasn't been this good in a long time).
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "the bifurcated structure of Love and Mercy might have come off as nothing other than a mere gimmick were it not for the uniform excellence of the performances. While Dano and Cusack are obviously front and center and command the lion's share of the attention, it's probably Giamatti's machinating Landy who ends up being the most unforgettable character in the film. Landy's legacy is hotly disputed to this day, but Giamatti portrays him as a kind of power mad obsessive whose own psychological "issues" seem to affect his treatment (and/or treatments) of Brian (and to a lesser extent Melinda). Banks is unusually expressive in her role, nicely modulating Melinda's evolution from a kind of gobsmacked bystander into an advocate for Brian's rights... Brian's consciousness is confronted by any number of timeframes, with various people from his past and present colliding in a cathartic display that seems to indicate if memories can't be completely evaded, a psychological détente of sorts is at least possible that will allow Brian to be, in a paraphrased form of a song initially intended for Holland, carried home."
Also from Lionsgate comes a standalone version of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. This slasher picture - the sixth in the venerable Halloween franchise - was previously available only if you got Starz/Anchor Bay's limited edition package of Halloween: The Complete Collection; it is a special "producer's cut" that restores over ten minutes of footage to the film. A quick reality check: the producer's cut does not do for Halloween 6 what, say, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven director's cut did for its theatrical version. Granted, it seems borderline criminal to compare the two films, but bear with me - if the longer Kingdom of Heaven transformed a bad/frustrating movie into a near-great one, the Halloween producer's cut helps clear the walkways on a still-structurally unsound property. Fact is, no matter what restorative work occurred, Halloween 6 was never going to be good. Some of the problems stem from the performances, which range from amateurish (Marianne Hagan's Kara Strode) to distractingly hammy (Donald Pleasance looks uncomfortable the whole time, and a young Paul Rudd gives an unintentionally funny turn as grown-up Tommy Doyle - he's attempting Captain Ahab but achieving nascent Brian Fantana) and never provide us with the human core necessary to counter-balance Michael Myers' brutality. But Joe Chappelle's tension-free direction doesn't help either. Even in this version, which tries to substitute pure suspense for some of the graphic bloodshed that the reshoots added, Chappelle can't come close to the creeping, insidious menace that Halloween godfather John Carpenter generated in the first entry. Worst of all is Daniel Farrands' script. Farrands builds off of the mystic suggestions left at the end of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers and creates a whole Druid connection to Myers' reign of terror that simultaneously provides risible explanations for his actions while retroactively robbing them of their power (because, hey: nothing says unfathomable terror like an overly convoluted Druid conspiracy, amirite?) However, even with those issues, this iteration of the film remains its definitive cut. It might be dramatically unsatisfying; it might commit to a mythology that seems at odds with the Halloween series' simple stalk-and-slash aesthetic; but it feels cohesive in ways that the incoherent 84-minute theatrical version did not. That one judders and skips from one (reshot) kill sequence to the next, leaving dangling threads from the longer version hanging provocatively, whereas here, we can see the whole path, for better or worse. Still, it's hard to watch Halloween 6 and wish the series had stopped after Part Three, or better yet, after Part One, and left the Boogeyman in the shadows...
Finally, the folks at Starz/Anchor Bay are bringing Josh and Benny Safdie's Heaven Knows What to Blu-ray this week. It has been a long time since a movie made me as viscerally uncomfortable as this one did; the first time I saw it, I walked out of a theatrical screening less than thirty minutes into the film. The Safdie Brothers eschew any conventional attempts to orient people inside their story of heroin junkies looking for grace on the streets of New York - they're almost daring their audience to look away, assaulting viewers with Sean Price Williams' darting, unstable cinematography, Isao Tomita's unnerving electronica score (which repurposes classic Debussy compositions into nerve-shredding soundscapes of dread), and almost nonstop, graphic depictions of antisocial behavior. You might think that just because you made it through Panic in Needle Park or Requiem for a Dream that you're well-prepared for this one, but from the opening sequence, which watches as broken addict Harley (Arielle Holmes) slashes her wrists in order to prove her love to her manipulative beloved Ilya (X-Men: First Class' Caleb Landry Jones), the Safdies want to violently disabuse you of that notion. And perhaps that's as it should be. No matter how grueling the goings get, no matter how unstable the picture seems (at times, you'd think the frame was ready to come apart at the seams), the Safdies aren't striving for chic miserablism. They are making a movie about desperate, broken individuals, so why shouldn't their movie capture the omnipresent peril running through their lives, especially since most of their narrative has a terrifying basis in reality; Holmes, who gives a performance both terrifying and empathetic, is a recovering heroin addict, and her stories of the street formed the spine of the Safdies' vision. The risk is that the Safdies might exploit Holmes for dramatic appeal, but thankfully, that never happens. Harley is never less than 100% human, and the Safdies slowly let in unexpected grace notes, including the rare moments of calm she gets with the dealer (Buddy Duress) who loves her unrequitedly or the interactions between her and Ilya where his monstrously self-absorbed facade drops, and we can finally understand her obsession with this man. Heaven Knows What is never an easy sit, but stick with it. The film rewards your attention, even when you yearn to look elsewhere.