For the week of October 12th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing Aladdin to Blu-ray. North-American audiences have long awaited this disc, which certainly looks and sounds better than any of Aladdin's other home-media excursions. For some, though - including this reviewer - this adventure-comedy has always left them a little cold. As aggressively and smartly paced as the film is, it remains one of the most sanitized takes on the Arabian Nights stories; it even lacks the visual weirdness and poetry of the Kordas' 1940 masterwork The Thief of Bagdad. The title character (Scott Weinger) is spirited but bland, a charge that one could also file against his heavily Westernized love interest Jasmine (Linda Larkin). Heck, this thing is so safe that Jonathan Freeman's Jafar has to work hard to establish any dramatic stakes (although to his credit, Freeman makes for one of Disney's most menacing Big Bads, so silky-sadistic is his villainy). Aladdin is popular, sure, but most of it rarely rises above the level of just "good." Yet the film deserves a seat among the studio's most iconic animated features for one reason, and one reason alone: the presence of Robin Williams as the Genie. Narratively, Williams is just the comic relief, spinning his improvisatory genius into G-rated gold, even if Aladdin would have no earthly clue who the Genie is referencing with his Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Buckley, and Jack Nicholson impersonations (and really, animation provides the perfect medium for Williams' brand of humor, with supervising animator Eric Goldberg free to transform the character into the subject of whatever free-association riffs Williams dreams up). However, as was often the case with the best of Williams' screen work, he wasn't content to be just be funny (although it helps that he is funny as hell in the role), and he lends the Genie such open humanity. It's in his easy bond with Aladdin, or the tremble in his voice when he falls under Jafar's subjugation. The Genie is as vivid as the best of Williams' live-action performances, and whenever he enters the film - which is often - Aladdin sparks like little else in the Mouse House. For Williams's fans, this Blu-ray is essential viewing, if only for the outtake reel that offers some never-before-seen Genie material that Williams generated in the studio. Just be prepared to watch it and cry.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown called this film "one of the most effortlessly entertaining and surprisingly cohesive entries in the Disney animated canon. Bolstered by incredible voice work, not just from Williams but the likes of Jonathan Freeman (Jafar) and even Gilbert Gottfried (Iago), the film is easily one of the funniest entries in Disney's long and storied history. The film is also graced with a wonderfully integrated song score (Tim Rice picked up the pieces from the deceased [Howard] Ashman and contributed some incredibly effective pieces, including the Oscar winning 'A Whole New World'). Composer Alan Menken continued the winning ways he had already established with Beauty and the Beast, contributing a wonderfully melodic and evocative score that easily bridged pop, theater and Middle Eastern styles. Aladdin also is one of Disney's most impressive feats of animation from this era, with skillful (if relatively minimal) use of the then nascent CGI technology nicely melded with a traditional 2D hand drawn approach. Character designs are gorgeous, and the backgrounds are simply lustrous, with one of the most distinctive palettes from this era of Disney film."
Still, Aladdin is Lawrence of Arabia compared to Disney's misbegotten Tomorrowland, which came (and flopped) to little fanfare last May. Sure, it had to compete with the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron, but the finished film is so wan that you can't just fault the studio for crappy timing. Blame Damon Lindelof: he wrote the Tomorrowland script, and the final product bears the unfortunate hallmarks of his work on the similarly subpar Prometheus and Cowboys & Aliens. That means that for about an hour, Lindelof maintains our interest. He gets a decent amount of mileage from the story of Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a teenage girl whose interests in science and exploration (her father is an engineer at a shuttered NASA program, and Tomorrowland is as much an ode to that forward-thinking mythos as Ridley Scott's The Martian) leads her to frustrated inventor Frank Walker (George Clooney) and the mystical city of Tomorrowland. Slowly but surely, Lindelof has Newton's character peel back the mystery at the core of the titular city...and then his story structure craps the bed, writing itself out from corners by jumping through city-sized plot holes and burying all the mystery under frenzied exposition and a terrible villain (Hugh Laurie, slumming it for a paycheck). Yes, it's clear that the final product bears serious post-production tinkering - you don't hire editor Walter Murch for this kind of picture unless you're praying that he can shine a turd golden, especially when he's lending his Oscar-winning services to a movie that ultimately hinges on a big whatzit threatening to blow up and destroy everyone. The real victim, though, is director Brad Bird, an animation titan (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and the phenomenal The Iron Giant) who made a successful transition to live-action with 2011's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol but has now backslid about as far as a major director can go; he only manages a couple of showcases for his whip-smart sense of staging and timing (Clooney and Robertson's first big escape from a horde of evil robots; a delightful interlude involving Keegan Michael Key and Kathryn Hahn), and he can't wrangle the unsatisfying twists of Lindelof's script into a satisfying narrative. I love his message, that we've grown perilously cynical towards intelligence and wonder, but minus Claudio Miranda's gorgeous cinematography, there's precious little here to marvel at.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "asks much of its viewers and offers little in exchange. Faith in story, belief in characters, and awe in setting altogether return a rather dull affair, surprisingly and unfortunately, in a movie that has its heart, and its budget, in the right place. Yet it ultimately fails to launch in a trajectory anywhere approaching a deeply meaningful destination. The picture has no problem blasting off and building momentum in its first act but it struggles to maintain it in the second. The third act's revelations tie the story together very well and nobly effort to bring some much-needed depth and insight to the story, but it's a case of too little, too late for a film with a burdensome weight and lethargy that are significantly more dense than the buoyant gravitational pull around it, too heavy to maintain uphill momentum, and certainly too bulky to make the otherwise startlingly beautiful visual effects more than ancillary curiosities. There's a better movie in here somewhere - a leaner, more precisely shaped, more finely honed picture with story depth to spare - but Director Brad Bird's...film stutters more often than it soars, feels lost more often than it points true, seems content to bombard the senses but largely ignore the heart."
From the Criterion Collection comes David Cronenberg's 1979 chiller The Brood. Criterion has already done right by Cronenberg three times prior - for fans of intelligent horror, Scanners, Videodrome, and Naked Lunch rank among Criterion's very best release - and the distributor's work here will hopefully give The Brood the cultural boost it deserves. In terms of its placement in the director's oeuvre, The Brood bridges the gap between Cronenberg's earlier, splattery body horror fare (Shivers, Rabid) and his chillier, more psychological resonant thrillers (Videodrome, Dead Ringers). In fact, for The Brood's first two-thirds, the scariest material comes from the human psyche; suffering from a nasty divorce, Cronenberg channeled his ennui into the story of Frank and Nola Carvath (Art Hindle and Samantha Eggar), an estranged couple battling for custody over their young daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds). Frank doesn't think Nola is mentally stable enough to care for the child, especially once he discovers she's under the care of Oliver Reed's mysterious psychotherapist Dr. Raglan, and so he spirits Candice away from Nola and Raglan's experimental treatments...except then things get really weird. For Cronenberg, the true horror springs from a couple no longer capable of seeing eye-to-eye on anything, and from Raglan, whose charismatic facade masks a skilled psychological manipulator (Cronenberg has long fixated on the terror of someone invading your conscious without your say-so), and while he does stage a number of attacks and murders during this first hour, these physical shocks don't relieve this tension: the emotional violence is so much worse, thanks to Cronenberg's razor-sharp direction (this was the second film he shot with master cinematographer Mark Irwin), Howard Shore's unsettling score, and especially Eggar's quietly unhinged work as the scorned mother. We could be in the territory of his A History of Violence or his unsung 2012 psychodrama A Dangerous Method, and it's only when those internal conflicts reach a roiling boil that Cronenberg switches gears, revealing the significance of the film's title and delivering the kinds of gory twists that made him notorious. In anyone else's hands, the shift from artful thriller to bloody mayhem would be a huge letdown, but Cronenberg has so carefully considered the metaphor behind The Brood's central body-horror conceit that the flowering of graphic bloodshed feels wholly natural and organic. It helps, too, that he clearly gets such a kick from the viscera - only David Cronenberg can fetishize the most horrible thing you've ever seen to the point that you'd never consider looking away from it. More than just an early curio, The Brood maintains a spooky kick and solidifies why Cronenberg has become such a force with which to be reckoned.
Svet Atanasov called the film "slow but not tiresome. As Frank gathers information about Dr. Raglan's technique, Cronenberg gradually alters the entire identity of the film - the thriller elements are slowly replaced with horror elements and the main characters undergo profound transformations. By the time Frank visits Dr. Raglan's clinic, the focus of attention is effectively shifted elsewhere. Long before the final credits appear the viewer knows exactly how Cronenberg feels about psychotherapy, but the film never switches into a preachy mode. Instead, Cronenberg bombards the viewer with all sorts of different ideas and observations that force him to ponder why things have gotten so ugly. Despite the limited resources some of the visuals are quite incredible. The graphic sequence at end, for instance, is still mighty impressive. In fact, it single-handedly elevates the film to an entirely different level. Hitchcock's very best films have such powerful sequences that are always vividly remembered when the director's legacy is discussed. The acting is very good. Reed is very convincing as the slightly mad scientist whose passion for knowledge has unleashed an evil force. Eggar is also fantastic. Hindle's performance is somewhat subdued but he is also believable as the looking for logical answers husband and father. The weak link here is the child actress Cindy Hinds, who often looks unusually cold."
Finally, Warner is streeting another spate of catalog titles, with many this time from Paramount's back-catalog. Given that many of these films are of an uncommonly high caliber, it's hard to carp over the economic politics behind how and why these fell into Warner's hands. First up is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which remains one of the seminal works from director John Ford. Even as a Western, the picture seems like an outlier; it lacks the visual panache of The Searchers or the raw action of Stagecoach, nor is it, like The Quiet Man or The Sun Shines Bright, one of Ford's wry dramedies. But as a piece of myth debunking, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ranks right alongside Fort Apache or Ford's wonderful middle vignette from How the West Was Won. From the title, we're resting on a foundation of lies, as we begin to see what really transpired between meek attorney Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), noble cowboy Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), and the vicious title outlaw (Lee Marvin) who takes it upon himself to make Stoddard's life hell. The world might know one thing, but the truth is something else entirely, a thematic situation that lets Ford undercut many of the masculine hero tropes he helped create. Plus, he gives this morality play more weight than we're expecting, what with the film's still-timely focus on the ethics - or lack thereof - in politics. A great film, wise and complex. Just as bracing is Don Siegel's 1979 crime masterpiece Escape from Alcatraz, which is far less narratively knotty than The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance but carries the formal precision of a Zen koan. For Siegel, the setup is everything: Clint Eastwood plays an Alcatraz inmate who wants out. That's it, and the emphasis Siegel puts on clear, strong character relationships (between Eastwood and his fellow escapees; between the inmates and Patrick McGoohan's sadistic warden) and vivid physical actions is reminiscent of something by Bresson (perhaps his prison masterpiece A Man Escaped) or Siegel's own Riot in Cell Block 11. Like those films, the simplicity on top belies the focus and craftsmanship that Siegel spent so many years internalizing - lest we forget that the Escape from Alcatraz shoot was so intense that it damaged the longtime working relationship between Siegel and Eastwood. As hard and unyielding as a rock wall.
Of Escape from Alcatraz, Michael Reuben wrote that "the fifth and final collaboration between director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood was a docudrama ideally suited to both of them. In recreating the notorious 1962 escape masterminded by Frank Morris from the supposedly escape-proof island prison, Eastwood took on an interior role in which stillness said more than dialogue, while Siegel had the task of guiding a cast through the steps of a meticulous procedure in a limited space while maintaining dramatic tension. Although the pair fell out over business dealings, their artistic collaboration was never better...The escape itself is an extended and masterfully realized sequence in which the tension never slackens, but Richard Tuggle's script does not rewrite history. The three escapees were never found, but neither were their bodies. No one knows for sure whether they made it, but Tuggle has exercised just enough literary license to dissolve the Warden's smug self-assurance."
Far more ethereal a thriller is Peter Weir's 1985 Academy Award-nominated hit Witness. The first of Weir's two collaborations with star Harrison Ford, Witness begins like a conventional policier: Ford plays John Book, a tough Philadelphia cop who becomes the protector of a young woman (Kelly McGillis) and her son (Lucas Haas) after the boy witnesses a brutal murder. The opening fifteen minutes are certainly gripping enough, as Ford becomes aware of a police conspiracy (including a very mean and pre-Lethal Weapon Danny Glover), but they're also rote in a way that Weir's work never is. However, when Book is grievously injured, he and the young family flee to the woman's Amish farm, and Witness becomes something far more special. Without losing any of the traditional genre thrills - including a budding romance between Book and the mother and a still-tense ending shootout - Weir conjures a delicate poetry from the Amish rituals (somewhere between the physicality of his great Master and Commander and the dreaminess of his Picnic at Hanging Rock), and he transforms Witness into a story of life in transition, with Book the bewildered outsider who must choose between his world of violence and the Amish's traditions and culture. To Weir's credit, Book makes his decision honestly, with a minimum of Hollywood gloss. I might prefer Ford and Weir's later picture, the surrealist adventure story The Mosquito Coast, but Witness remains one of the 1980s most iconic features. Finally, Warner is giving Ridley Scott's underrated dramedy Matchstick Men a Blu-ray showing. Scott isn't exactly known for his character work (it's saying something when Thelma & Louise and The Martian rank among your most humanistic features), so Matchstick Men surprises through its emotional grounding. Although the film is nominally a con-artist comedy à laThe Sting, writer Ted Griffin (the screenwriter behind Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, The Sting's heir apparent) has crafted a stealth character study. His subject: Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage), a veteran grifter whose neuroses exceed his confidence mastery. Whenever Roy isn't working a mark, he's under the thrall of debilitating OCD, and his condition intensifies with the arrival of his long-lost teenage daughter (Alison Lohman). That logline is as high-concept as they get (would it surprise you that Said Long-Lost Teenage Daughter begins studying under her old man?), except Scott and Griffin cut through the treacle for about three-quarters of Matchstick Men's runtime. As sleek as the movie is (John Matheson's cinematography is as diamond-cut as his Gladiator lensing), Scott prefers to underplay grand emotional moments, and Griffin's script offers a steady stream of one-liners that galvanize the great work from Cage and Lohman. Roy gives Cage a perfect showcase for his balance of mania and subtlety - his YouTube-worthy excesses have roots in genuine psychology and pain - and he charts such a tender relationship with Lohman, who gives the performance of her life (so far) as a young girl who's both more and less naive than she seems. Unfortunately, Matchstick Men loses itself in a twisty finale that undercuts Cage and Lohman's thematic arcs (and criminally wastes the great Sam Rockwell as Cage's partner-in-crime); had it stuck the landing, we'd be discussing the film on the shortlist of Scott's signature works.
Michael Reuben commented that Matchstick Men is "one of the hidden gems of [Ridley Scott's] diverse career, a film ripe for rediscovery...Scott has said that he was careful not to shoot his San Fernando Valley locations with too glossy a texture, lest the film resemble a commercial, but he likes the look of the place and he can't help making a picture that's visually appealing. Whether it's the interior of Roy's house illuminated by the undulating blue water from the huge backyard pool in which he never swims, or the massive Anaheim Convention Center that doubled for LAX, or the high school in Venice where Roy goes to pick up Angela, or the various drug stores, supermarkets, restaurants and shopping mall offices where so much of Matchstick Men takes place, Scott and DP John Mathieson find interesting angles and striking light that gives the film a timeless, formal elegance. The film hasn't dated in twelve years and probably won't date in twelve more. Though he surrounds the central relationships with a beautiful frame, Scott favors closeups, because he wants to focus on what is happening inside the frame. The cast, especially Cage and Lohman, have such remarkable chemistry that you are thoroughly drawn into their characters' emotional dynamic. The film takes several viewings to absorb, but it's worth it."