For the week of October 26th, Starz/Anchor Bay and the Weinstein Company bring the boxing drama Southpaw to Blu-ray. For many viewers, Southpaw will live or die on Jake Gyllenhaal's ferocious performance as fighter Billy Hope. In recent films like Prisoners and especially last year's brilliant Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal has been an enthusiastic participant in the demolition of his matinee-friendly looks; so it goes with Southpaw, where Gyllenhaal put on pounds of muscle and various facial prosthetics to play the good-hearted-but-self-destructive Hope. The physical transformation alone is astounding, but Gyllenhaal has so thoroughly internalized this character that it gains depths beyond the surface flash. We see how his boxing skills don't necessarily translate outside of the ring, as his lack of social tact and overall punchiness impact all his significant relationships, which means that all of his relationships carry the imprint of everyone who's ever hit him. This intensity of commitment recalls the best work of Robert De Niro or Daniel Day-Lewis - it's hard to believe that the film wasn't tailor-made for him, that it was actually developed for Eminem, of all people - which is why it's such a shame that the movie surrounding him is so bad. Strip away the violence and graphic language, and you've got the kind of clichéd male weepie that started going stale right after 1931's The Champ, except at least that earlier film comes about its emotions honestly. Here, you can feel director Antoine Fuqua working every melodramatic angle he's got, including the death of Hope's beloved wife (Rachel McAdams, struggling vainly to give an archetype some human shadings), a showdown with the psychopathic goon (Miguel Gomez) responsible for her death, Hope's crusty old trainer (Forest Whitaker, in a role he could play - and probably is playing - in his sleep), and, of course, the fate of Hope's precocious daughter (Oona Lawrence, giving the film's second-best performance), with Fuqua's faux-naturalistic grit coming off like a pretense of quality - we're a long way from Training Day, with its uninflected depictions of urban chaos. Far more damaging is the script from Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter. Anyone familiar with that FX series knows that Sutter struggles to balance his strengths (a fast and mean eye for plotting and action) with his tendency to make the emotional stuff as big and broad as possible, and Southpaw sees him positively drowning in the maudlin. Even before it reaches its beyond-predictable conclusion, Sutter has engineered the center to have the gooeyness of a warm marshmallow. Ultimately, the film gets a very light recommendation on the strength of Gyllenhaal's work, but we're a long way from Fat City or even Rocky territory.
Scream Factory continues doing the Lord's work with its new Blu-ray of Sam Raimi's cult horror classic Army of Darkness. Actually, anyone familiar with Army of Darkness knows that "horror" is stretching the definition somewhat; while Raimi's first two Evil Dead movies at least maintained a pretense of frightening terror (although Raimi was already starting to dilute the menace with his Three Stooges-infused Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn), this third entry makes almost no attempt to be scary. And that's fine - in fact, Army of Darkness has endured because of its through-and-through comic sensibilities. After a breathless opening, which conflates and condenses the events of Evil Deads 1 & 2 into less than five minutes, Raimi throws us into a kind of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court riff, with his idiot protagonist Ash (the wonderful Bruce Campbell) temporally dislocated and stuck in the Middle Ages, where he finds himself at the center of a conflict between a medieval village and an army of the dead. Strike that: Ash is so incompetent that he ends up wildly exacerbating the problems, bungling a transportation spell so badly that he unwittingly creates an evil doppelgänger (also Campbell) and jumpstarts the apocalypse. It's a bold choice, and one that pays comic dividends throughout - Campbell's smugly moronic hero plays like the action-movie antecedent to Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy character. And if Raimi isn't terribly interested in flexing his horror muscles, he certainly goes hog-wild indulging in the kinds of visual kinetics that made his Spider-Man Trilogy such a trip. When Ash squares off against the undead army, Raimi takes the opportunity to stage a grand (well, grand-ish, given the limited budget) homage to Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, using dutch angles and snap zooms to stage battles against stop-motion-reminiscent skeletons. The end result is a sprightly comic adventure that never stops generating gags and stunts, no matter which version you watch. Raimi's director's cut has an ending that delivers one final, brutally funny comeuppance to Campbell's stupid, stupid hero, but the theatrical version ends on a moment of delirious action mayhem that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Batman: The Complete Series (and makes possible Starz's new Ash Vs. Evil Dead series). An enduring favorite, and one that's mostly acceptable for the whole family (the R-rating is a joke - Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy is more inappropriate than this movie).
"Raimi and Campbell also address a central element of Army of Darkness, an aspect that perhaps undercuts some of this film's tone. As the director and star mention in passing several times, Ash is, to put it as gingerly as possible, kind of a screw up, but Army of Darkness wants to have its cake and eat it, too, in that regard, positing Ash as both a fool and a hero. Ash, to put it in the perfectly appropriate milieu of a Looney Tunes cartoon (considering the general ambience of the film, which is often quite Chuck Jones-esque), Ash thinks he's the Road Runner, but he's really Wile E. Coyote. That makes for some uneasy transitions as Ash, stuck in some unspecified feudal realm, serves as both the brunt of various indignities while also acting as a kind of Middle Ages James Bond, wooing the initially resistant Sheila (Embeth Davidtz) while also utilizing various 'high tech' gizmos (like his chainsaw hand) to aid in his war against the Deadites. Of course with a film as gonzo as Army of Darkness, any attempts to wring actual logic out of the proceedings are probably useless. The film is just a riot of shtick and other physical humor, laced with occasional verbal barbs that make great use of Campbell's arch delivery style. What makes Army of Darkness work, where by all accounts it really shouldn't, is the obvious lack of pretension that Raimi and Campbell bring to the enterprise. As evidenced not just by their work in the film itself, but their bickering, bantering commentary included on the Director's Cut in this set, the two were only too aware they were making a live action cartoon, a big, goofy, and irreverent 'horror' film that is never afraid of laughing at itself, thereby making it all the funnier for the audience."
One of this year's most enjoyable little sleepers is Joel Edgerton's thriller The Gift. Minus Exodus: Gods and Kings and the 2011 Thing prequel, Edgerton has proven himself a talent of real discretion and craft, which is why it first seemed so odd that he picked The Gift to be his directorial debut; the previews made it look like a well-cast-but-boilerplate melodrama in the vein of Fatal Attraction or John Schlesinger's Pacific Heights, with Edgerton playing a socially maladjusted loner who insinuates himself into the lives of a former high-school classmate (Jason Bateman) and his troubled wife (Rebecca Hall) that have just moved to Los Angeles. And, truth be told, the first forty minutes do play like an expert, if familiar, riff on movies of that ilk. Sure, Edgerton does a nice job of contrasting different tensions - between Bateman and Hall's Chicago transplants, between the couple and Edgerton's weirdo - but we're sure we've seen this movie before, so we prepare for the predictable (and violent, if Fatal Attraction and Pacific Heights are accurate indicators) showdown to occur. But here's the thing: that never happens. See, Edgerton also co-wrote the nifty Aussie neo-noir The Square, and just as that one took great delight in twisting and subverting viewer expectations, so does The Gift upend everything we think we know about the "bad neighbor" genre. Despite all his film's routine setups (Hall's lonely wife, Edgerton's A/V obsession, a friendly and way too inquisitive family dog), the payoffs are anything but, and while I'm loath to say any more (The Gift benefits from as little advance knowledge as possible), I can say that Edgerton still mines a tremendous amount of suspense even as he undercuts traditional thrills. That knack for exploiting familiar quirks even applies to his handling of the performances. Hall is always such a sympathetic presence, so we're with her even as her perspective begins to seem more and more unreliable, while Edgerton's own masculine charm now feels oppressive and ill-fitting in a way that's perfect for his awkward character. Best of all is Bateman. Ever since his big Arrested Development renaissance, Bateman has been typecast as quick-witted and decent, but as movies like Smokin' Aces and State of Play have illustrated, there's something genuinely unpleasant behind his affable veneer, and Edgerton exploits that rot to near-revelatory effect - Bateman does some of his best work ever here. Plus, Edgerton ends on a note of horror that manages to be both skin-crawlingly revolting and deliberately ambiguous. That's a hard combination to get right, but as with most of The Gift, the thrill comes from receiving the expected in the most unexpected fashion possible.
Finally, the Criterion Collection gives David Lynch's Mulholland Drive its North American Blu-ray debut. These days, serious and amateur cineastes alike regard Lynch in the same rarified air, so it might come a shock to remember that in 2001, the director desperately needed a comeback after the high-profile failure of his 1997 horror-thriller Lost Highway (Lynch actually resorted to selling that earlier film on posters touting Siskel and Ebert's "Two Thumbs Down"). Mulholland Drive reversed the course, revitalizing his career and scoring him a Best Director Oscar Nomination, and certainly the film's many champions have much to love here. Lynch has always been fascinated by the signifiers of Old Hollywood, but this feature sees him directly engaging the myth of celebrity with a story of two women - one (Naomi Watts, in a deservedly star-making performance) coming to Los Angeles to make it as an actress, and the other (Laura Harring) an amnesiac borrowing her first name from Rita Hayworth - becoming involved in a bizarre criminal conspiracy. At least, I think that's what happens. From the first frames, Mulholland Drive adopts the texture of a very vivid, confusing dream, a situation which means the movie is less concerned with what happens than with how it happens. As Watts and Harring's characters unite and try to determine the gravity of their situation, Lynch uses their investigation as a springboard for comic-scary vignettes involving evil cowboys, frustrated filmmakers (including The Leftovers' Justin Theroux), lesbian sex, degrading auditions, deranged elderly couples, frightening dumpster monsters, and Billy Ray Cyrus, of all people. You could be forgiven for thinking of this film as more of a sketchbook than a coherent narrative (Lynch initially planned Mulholland Drive for television, and he leaves all sorts of strange scraps from the feature's scrapped hour-long format, including an inexplicable, one-scene cameo from Robert Forster), but to his credit, Lynch has built the film around a genuine emotional core, culminating in an ending that both justifies and redeems all the weirdness that precedes it. That said, I can't quite hold Mulholland Drive in the same regard as Lynch's other masterworks. As formally and narratively audacious as the film is - and there are moments here that rank among some of his most indelible sequences - Lynch slips a little too easily into familiar dream-logic territory; he's covering territory that he explored far more viscerally (if without Mulholland Drive's seductive polish) in Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Furthermore, while Mulholland Drive's episodic nature proves conducive to replicating dream states, it also lacks the propulsive, if hazy, narrative momentum of something like Lost Highway, which occupies just as shadowy a dreamscape (Lost Highwayis a film, after all, where one protagonist morphs into another protagonist with little to no explanation) yet creates the impression of plot cohesion. For some, Mulholland Drive might seem too slack (I confess to walking out on it during its initial theatrical release - at the time, it struck me as too self-satisfied and purposeless), although perhaps its porous quality is what makes the picture so attractive to many viewers. Essential viewing, with reservations.
Svet Atanasov called the film "uncompromisingly hypnotic. Even if one does not understand the significance of everything that takes place on the screen, one feels an inexorable need to keep watching, and feeling, and speculating. It is a strange feeling for sure - like being awake in a bizarre dream. As stunningly beautiful many of the visuals may be, Mulholland Drive would have been a very different film without Angelo Badalamenti's music score - a striking blend of ambient and electronic tunes that give the film its unique pulse. Note: In 2001, Mulholland Drive won Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. A year later, the film also won Best Film and Best Actress (Naomi Watts) awards at the National Society of Film Critics Awards."