For the week of September 22nd, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing The Flash: The Complete First Season to Blu-ray. In theory, The Flash should be a welcome corrective to the world of DC television procedurals. Whereas Arrow is too vapid and Gotham is too tonally schizophrenic, The Flash takes its cues from its title character, the winning Barry Allen (Grant Gustin). Sure, Barry has a tragic backstory (Mom died under mysterious circumstances when he was a kid, and Dad took the fall), but he's mostly well adjusted, a card-carrying geek working for Century City's forensics department when a freak electrical storm turns him into the fastest man on Earth. The show places emphasis, then, on Allen's optimism and spirit as he decides to fight crime, yet as promising as that setup seems, the show fumbles most of its most important beats. From the pilot, The Flash can't sustain our interests, but it sure works up a full coat of flop sweat trying to make something stick, whether it's the ridiculous weekly battles (the Flash fights a talking ape. I'll repeat that - the Flash fights a talking ape) or the naked attempts at fan service (like bringing in the original Flash's John Wesley Shipp to play Barry's dad or Mark Hamill to reprise his role as the Trickster from that earlier program). The shame is, not all is dire. Gustin remains a sunny, irrepressibly likeable lead despite all the bad dialogue he has to swallow (it's a shame Zach Snyder and Co. are going with an Ezra Miller Flash for their big-screen Justice League team), and Ed star Tom Cavanagh matches him step-for-step (metaphorically) as STAR Labs' brilliant, crippled mastermind Harrison Wells; Cavanagh, in particular, is so good he's able to sell us on some real plot humdingers in the season's final stretch. But they can't save a program as fundamentally marred by bad characterization (Jesse L. Martin's Joe West is a generic tough-but-loving cop archetype, while Candice Patton is terrible as the object of Barry's affections) and writing (the stench of Greg Berlanti, who also co-wrote 2011's terrible Green Lantern, is all over The Flash) as this one is. The most frustrating thing about Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the precedent it set for all TV "entertainments" - Whedon took what would be, in any other hands, enjoyable fluff and turned it into something frequently magistrial and winning, with some of the best dialogue on TV to boot. He made great TV that masqueraded as pure escapism, and he made it look so effortless that when something like The Flash brings the escapism but leaves out the great, we feel the lack. For The Flash to improve, it needs to take itself more seriously, and that doesn't mean shifting into Mad Men mode or getting all grimdark like the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy or The Walking Dead: if nothing else, I applaud The Flash for willing to be so silly, since fun shouldn't be a dirty word. But a little seriousness of purpose would improve matters immeasurably - here's hoping the Flash braintrust starts trying to make something as far from disposable as possible, and fast.
From the Criterion Collection comes a new, feature-packed edition of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. In 2012, this beautiful dramedy was a reassurance of sorts, proof that Anderson hadn't completely lost his way in live-action (his animated Fantastic Mr. Fox is pretty much peerless) after the one-two punch of his beautiful-but-unfocused The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and his moving-but-unpleasant The Darjeeling Limited. Moonrise Kingdom has Anderson operating at the same heartfelt, deeply moving level that made Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums so vital. In telling the story of preteens Suzy and Sam (newcomers Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman) who fall in love and decide to flee from their tightly regimented hometown of New Penzance (played by a variety of Rhode Island locales, including Newport, Jamestown, Narragansett Bay, West Greenwich, Rockville, South Kingstown, and Tiverton), Anderson tosses in all the aesthetic and narrative quirks that have served him so well: forbidden love, autumnal locales, eclectic needle-drops (only here will you find Hank Williams given equal air time as Benjamin Britten), as well as a cast studded with veterans from other Anderson productions (if I told you that Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman show up in key supporting roles, would you be surprised?). Yep, everything looks the same, save for the frame. With the exception of his debut feature, 1996's Bottle Rocket, and long chunks of his masterful The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson has shot all his live-action films in super-wide widescreen, but Moonrise Kingdom comes in at a far less expansive 1.85:1. That look is narrower, more T.V.-sized, and it means that all his textures and details feel cramped, constrained. Try as they might, Suzy and Sam can never really escape New Penzance – it's an island, natch – and the 1.85:1 frame makes us feel their confinement. For all its loveliness, Moonrise Kingdom is the first Wes Anderson film that we don't want to live in. It's Anderson's tacit admission that all is not well, that even his peerless visual eye can't hide genuine pain and suffering. To a person, his leads are broken, regardless of whether we're looking at Bill Murray and Frances McDormand's miserable married couple or Suzy's rage issues or Sam's fear of abandonment or Bruce Willis' alienated police captain; only Edward Norton's cheerily professional Boy Scout Master Ward doesn't start the film miserable, but it doesn't take him long to get there – after he loses Sam on his watch, Ward carries the shame like an albatross. It's very telling that the hurricane barreling towards New Penzance inspires less urgency that Suzy and Sam's idyllic exodus – the storm is just the punchline to a very sad joke. And yet Anderson fills his film with joy enough for ten movies. A foot chase late in the film has the comic absurdity of a Buster Keaton gag, and its humor is matched only by Jason Schwartzman's dry, deadpan turn as the most irresponsible camp counselor imaginable. I loved how laconic Gilman's Sam is in the face of fellow Boy Scouts who hate him, and how Anderson lets his tormentors slowly, grudgingly realize that Sam isn't such a bad guy. Best of all is the virtuoso setpiece showing Sam and Suzy living (and loving) in the wild; Anderson stages the sequence as a tween homage to Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika, and he even goes so far as borrow a hint of that classic film's frank sexuality. But that's just the world Wes Anderson has created. It's cold and wet and full of scars, and it's also quite magical.
Svet Atanasov had a different response, writing that "there are select episodes that are both witty and funny, but they never engage one in a way that would ultimately make one care about the main characters. Indeed, because the desire to amuse over a short period of time is so obvious and so overwhelming, it actually feels like one is viewing a collection of colorful clips with well timed climaxes rather than a feature film that wants to tell a moving story (the footage with Harvey Keitel, for instance, feels completely generic and disposable). There is also a general awareness amongst the actors that they are in an abstract reality where conventional logic is some sort of a major disadvantage for those who employ it. As a result, many of the awkward moments do not occur naturally and look disappointingly overpolished. There is a lot to admire when it comes to the film's visual style and appearance. The framing choices are excellent and the panoramic vistas from Rhode Island are so strikingly poetic that one has to wonder why more filmmakers are not visiting the area. The film's color scheme is also very impressive."
This week also sees a number of cop dramas that, while imperfect, provide a fair amount of entertainment. Kino gets top marks with its release of Busting, Peter Hyams' 1974 thriller about two LAPD detectives (Elliott Gould and Robert Blake) on the trail of a dangerous crime boss (Allen Garfield). Cynical buddy-cop pictures were de rigueur in the '70s (see also: Robert Culp's Hickey & Boggs and Richard Rush's Freebie and the Bean, the latter of which shares many tonal similarities with Busting), but Busting remains one of the best because of how grimy it is. Hyams never makes police work seem glamorous; this is a daily grind with little fanfare, and as such the downbeat ending doesn't come as a surprise since the heroes already spend the whole movie suffering. Still, while the picture doesn't provide the same level of escapist thrills as Hyams' later buddy-cop comedy Running Scared (which deserves a rediscovery, by the way), it never sinks into total nihilism, thanks to Gould and especially Blake's affable, bleakly funny leads. "Bleak" is a word that really can't apply to Carl Schenkel's The Mighty Quinn - despite the web of murder and conspiracy it weaves, this Denzel Washington-starring caper is as breezy and light as its Caribbean locales, and chief among its pleasures is Washington's lead performance. By 1989, Washington was famous but not a star (he'd already received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for 1987's Cry Freedom), but the one-two punch of this and Glory changed all that: if Glory cemented his reputation as a dramatic powerhouse, The Mighty Quinn made him a Cary Grant-level heartthrob. His Chief of Police Xavier Quinn is one of the great star performances, an enormously relaxed and likable turn that never looks like its stretching for effect and is all the more impressive as a result. We get some melodrama between Quinn, his unhappy wife (Sheryl Lee Ralph), and Mimi Rogers' seductive outsider, as well as a mystery that may or may not hinge on Quinn's best friend-turned-criminal rogue Maubee (the once-and-future Meteor Man, Robert Townsend), but none of that matters as much as watching Washington play in his element.
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is giving one of the greatest American films a 40th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray: Sidney Lumet's 1975 Dog Day Afternoon. Lumet made his fair of undisputed classics, so it's saying something that in a career including 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Network, Prince of the City, The Verdict, Running on Empty, and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Dog Day Afternoon stands as his seminal feature. Lumet was one of the masters of the New York crime drama, and for a little while, Dog Day Afternoon seems like it will rank as an engaging-but-unspectacular example of the genre. Al Pacino and John Cazale star as Sonny Wortzik and Sal Naturale, two full-time losers who immediately get in over their heads when they try to stick up a Brooklyn bank: before they even realize it, they've got a room of hostages and an army of cops surrounding the building, and we're looking at something that looks like it could have come from the pages of an Elmore Leonard story. Sonny is likable but wholly unqualified for criminal life, Sal seems like a twitchy wild card, and we're hoping they can keep it together long enough to work out a peaceful solution with Charles Durning's affable cop before the Feds take over and kill everyone. Certainly this material is entertaining, and Lumet stages it with vigor...but it's also not the whole story. See, Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson took their cues from a real-life Brooklyn hostage situation in 1972, and reality provided them with a level of idiosyncratic surprise that Hollywood can barely muster. Sonny sucks at crime because he's not a criminal - he's a nobody who's turned to grand larceny in order to, I kid you not, give his lover (Chris Sarandon) a sex-change operation - and Sal is less psychotic than he is deeply, profoundly stupid (we're talking Coen Brothers-level moron - he thinks Wyoming is a separate country outside of the United States). How these character details disseminate through the cast of characters provides Dog Day Afternoon with its singular pleasures: we're not expecting the bank tellers to feel comfortable enough in captivity to start gossiping like they're having a sleepover, nor are we prepared when Sonny becomes a flash folk-hero, galvanizing both the blue-collar neighborhood folks and the LGBTQ community that gather in droves outside of the bank. Lumet loves all of this material, and he wields it in support of the film's tragicomedic tone. I don't know what's more wonderful - that a major studio bankrolled a movie this offbeat, or that its influence continues to endure. Ridley Scott's 2007 American Gangster is practically a mash note to Lumet's style of filmmaking, while Spike Lee's Inside Man lifted the heist narrative and the flip-sympathetic attitude towards NYC culture straight from Dog Day Afternoon (as well as a few of its actors - Lionel Pina and Marcia Jean Kurtz play small-but-key roles in both movies). An effortlessly tremendous piece of work.