For the week of November 9th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Terminator: Genisys to Blu-ray. In principle, director Alan Taylor's newest installment in the Terminator franchise needed to do some very heavy lifting for the sins of its immediate predecessors. I mean, here's a series that roars out of the gate as a low-budget thriller in 1984, then manages to both top those lofty heights and establish a whole new vocabulary for blockbuster filmmaking in 1991, only to wither behind bad scripts and worse gimmicks in 2003 and 2009 (even with its terrible T-X villain and a way-too-jokey Arnold Schwarzenegger performance, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines comes off better than the sullen, one-note Terminator Salvation; would that Salvation had anything as good as Rise of the Machines' big car chase or its surprisingly downbeat finale). Heck, the Terminators had fallen so far that even Warner was willing to let its hold over the rights lapse, which meant that only a big win for Paramount, Taylor, and Genisys would help retrieve the series from public ignominy. In practice, however, the best you can say about Genisys is, "Eh, at least it's a little better than Salvation." For about an hour of its two-hour runtime, Taylor and Co. manage something watchable. Not good, mind you - Taylor isn't as skilled a craftsman as James Cameron is, especially when it comes to making us not notice how neutered this PG-13 blockbuster feels in comparison to the first two Terminators, and he's also saddled with an annoyingly hammy Schwarzenegger turn (the T-800 goes cuddly) and an annoyingly bland one from Human Placeholder Jai Courtney as young Kyle Reese - but mindless in a Sunday-afternoon-matinee way and featuring enough time-travel quirks to keep the geeks interested. See, the big twist (that I'm willing to spoil. Paramount's marketing gave up the ghost on a whole host of surprises that the movie clearly wants to nest until the last possible moment) is that an attempt on the life of John Connor (Jason Clarke, filling in for Christian Bale, filling in for Nick Stahl, filling in for Edward Furlong) warps the timeline so that events we think we recognize from the first Terminator play out in radically different ways. Think a brain-dead version of Back to the Future: Part II, and you're on the right track. It's fun watching Taylor and screenwriters Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis retcon iconic scenes to have different endings (and I love how they integrate Byung-hun Lee as the T-1000), and had the film played in the 1984 sandbox for its entirety, I'd give it a slight pass. However, at some point, the T-800, Reese, and Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke, who's an appealing presence but nowhere near as intimidating and interesting as Linda Hamilton in T2) get caught up in the timeline, and the movie just folds. Part of the problem is the overload on CGI-murk - a number of action sequences wouldn't have passed muster in 2003 - but the film also doubles down on two underwhelming villains, one of whom (Matt Smith) is a walking cliffhanger for a sixth Terminator that might never come, and the other of whom (I won't spoil the identity, even though all the previews did) suggests a daring new direction that the series squanders under insipid monologuing and routine Boss Fights. Is delivering a dumptruck full of money to Jim Cameron's house really not an option going forward?
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "starts strong. Very strong. The future war bits are fantastic. They're dark, scary, and violent. The action is well staged, the special effects are seamless (as they are throughout the movie), and seeing some of the heretofore behind-the-scenes details play out is a pleasure. It's even great as it painstakingly recreates -- down to the finest little details -- several shots from the original movie and surprises with a sudden curveball that tells the audience that this no remake, essentially turning those lovingly recreated scenes into teases that are quickly forgotten. Terminator Genisys essentially takes the Star Trek Into Darkness approach, at least in its first act, telling basically the same story and capturing the same essence but changing things up a great deal along the way. It worked for J.J. Abrams, but it doesn't really work here. The movie quickly loses its way, reworking franchise lore while, at the same time, desperately trying to tidy up its messes in a way that doesn't work at all. The two seem frequently at odds. Genisys wants to be the other movies but it wants to be its own movie. It wants to work its way into the fold while tearing up the instruction manual. It's a frustrating watch that grows ever more painful as it moves along towards a series of forced and fatigued action scenes and a dull ending that just promises another movie rather than portend an uncertain future, as did the brilliant closing shots of Terminator 2."
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes Trainwreck, and it, too, follows the same half-on, half-off template as Terminator Genisys. To wit, the first half is quite good. In relaying her unique, bawdy stand-up sensibilities into a fiction film, comic Amy Schumer and director Judd Apatow have engineered a familiar but very funny setup to a conventional romantic comedy. Schumer stars as Amy (hmm...) Townsend, a successful magazine writer who is defiantly and aggressively single; anyone familiar with Schumer's relationship-based stand-up bits will feel very comfortable in the early-goings, with her on-screen proxy using wry humor and a healthy scatological bent (including one of the funniest Game of Thrones references that I've ever heard) to help her drift through one-night stands and shallow relationships (for a long time, the movie's MVP is wrestler John Cena, who damn near walks away with the movie as Amy's dim-but-sweet sorta-boyfriend). That said, it will surprise no one that Amy's anti-commitment ways begin to buckle when she meets a charming sports doctor (Bill Hader) who slowly begins to drag Amy into the realm of the committed relationship - at the end of the day, Schumer and Apatow are just doing a hard-R riff on the kind of rom-com material that Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn popularized in the 1930s and 1940s - but Schumer and Hader have such good chemistry together (Hader, in particular, does wonder with what was probably Generic Super Boyfriend 101 on the page) that, again, we're willing to roll with the routine. After all, it worked for Apatow with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which overcame its own formula to become one of the great comedies of the early aughts, and Schumer is just as talented (if not more so!) a creative partner as Steve Carell was on the early film. But whereas The 40-Year-Old Virgin got funnier as the more conventional it got (any movie that can undercut romantic treacle with an insane Elizabeth Banks performance and a chase scene scored to Asia's "Heat of the Moment" will always hold a special place in my heart), Trainwreck decides it wants to be a full-on, James L. Brooks-esque dramedy about halfway through, and the laughs start drying up. We get lengthy subplots about Amy's sickly father (a wonderful Colin Quinn) and her own self-destructive habits, yet these darker realms don't have the kind of laser-focus on nuanced human behavior that Apatow serves up every week on Girls. It also doesn't help that Schumer isn't as adept at drama as she is at comedy (her deficiencies become more pronounced every time we see her opposite Brie Larson, who plays Schumer's younger sister and gives the film's best performance - Larson is so emotionally present that she scores both laughs and the picture's most heartfelt moments, and I kept daydreaming about a spinoff movie that could center around her and her gloriously eccentric family), or that when Trainwreck finally does rouse itself to be funny again, the jokes are all reheated. Apatow references his Larry Sanders years for some celebrity skewering jokes to increasingly diminished results (the Lebron James-as-himself stuff is okay; the bits with Matthew Broderick, Chris Evert, and Marv Albert are interminable), and he redoes The 40-Year-Old Virgin's big dance finale with less energy and no charm. Plus, he lets Trainwreck evince a creepy moralistic strain, as much of the final hour seems like it's punishing Amy for her liberated behavior. Get married and start a family, and all will be okay, you can sense Apatow saying, but based on her own stand-up, I'm not sure Schumer agrees. If you really want to see Schumer at her best, watch her brilliant Inside Amy Schumer parody of 12 Angry Men. At a fraction of Trainwreck's runtime, it manages to be funnier, darker, and way more subversive.
Martin Liebman noted that the film "just ties too hard. Nothing about the movie feels in the least bit organic. Not the characters, not the relationships, and not even most of the humor. Even the funniest bits - which come from the sports world celebrities scattered throughout the movie - are really one-off gags that don't contribute much meat to the movie. But then again, neither does most of the other humor. Trainwreck never quite gets the line and the delivery on the same page, and it emphasizes the line over context. The movie feels like a Schumer stand-up routine painfully expanded to over two hours and filled with needless fluff that slows it down and grates on the nerves rather than keep the viewer ensnared in a web of seamlessly strung-together laughs in a context of a more believable plot line. That Amy might find herself finally at a point that the right man can swoop her off her feet is believable within the characters' greater context, but that the world's foremost sports physician would fall head over heels for a troubled woman struggling to find herself and even maintain a presentable front isn't...[Hader]'s attraction always feels more like the desperate geek who will take whatever comes his way rather than someone experiencing a real, honest, heartfelt, deeply-defined love."
In many ways, though, the release of the week is Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's double-feature pack of Bad Boys and Bad Boys II. Forget the first Bad Boys for a minute; while it's a fine slice of buddy-cop action (with a funny performance from Martin Lawrence and a star-making one from Will Smith), it's also normal. It goes exactly where you think it will. It does everything you think it will. It uses formula as a palliative, making it the most easy-to-love of all director Michael Bay's movies. Bad Boys II is a far different creation. If the broad strokes seem familiar - Miami cops Mike Lowery (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) take on a vicious Cuban drug kingpin (Jordi Mollà, doing a histrionic and often incoherent riff on Al Pacino's Scarface baddie) - the execution is anything but. See, Bay was rebounding from the critical and relative commercial failings of his Pearl Harbor, and if that sudsy WWII epic found him on his best behavior, Bad Boys II lets him indulge in all his basest instincts, as if he's trying to make up for the Oscar-baiting Pearl Harbor. Bad Boys II is easily the most hateful and sociopathic movie Bay has ever made, with various setpieces jockeying for most offensive: a rave scene where the camera stays at floor-level so it can look up the female dancers' skirts, a chase where the bad guys toss dead bodies at Lowery and Burnett as they're driving 100mph (this scene, BTW, comes on the heels of one where Lowery ogles a very busty dead woman), a climactic demolition derby where our heroes drive a Hummer straight through a Cuban shanty town. With every successive action or comedy beat, Bay rises ever further below vulgarity, until even the relatively quiet moments take on a perverse, hostile menace. I'm thinking about the cavalcade of gay jokes thrown Burnett's way after he quite literally takes a bullet in the butt, or the extended impromptu interrogation that Lowery and Burnett give to a suitor of one of Burnett's teenage daughters. Bad Boys II doesn't care if you like it - it's too busy actively trying to piss you off. And oddly enough, it's that uncompromising anti-charm that makes it endearing. Unlike Bay's almost-as-hateful Transformers movies, Bad Boys II doesn't aim itself at children (even if it's far less mature than a lot of thirteen-year-olds I know). Bay earns every inch of the film's R-rating, gleefully covering all the vulgar jokes and splattery head-shots, so at least you know from the jump exactly how bad things are going to get (it's a far cry from sneaking racist Stepin Fetchit stereotypes or uncomfortable sexual politics into all-audiences fare about CGI robots punching each other). Furthermore, it helps that the action scenes are frenetically and viscerally mounted to within an inch of their lives. Bay did such a bang-up job with the film's big MacArthur Causeway chase that he's ripped it off, to less impressive results, in both The Island and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and that shanty-town massacre? One of the most thrilling scenes of Bayhem he's ever captured. Some of you may claim that this is all too much, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong: at two-and-a-half full hours, Bad Boys II sometimes feels like its own three-film franchise. But it also never stops devising new ways to shock you, and for good or ill, isn't that why we go to the movies?
From Sony Picture Home Entertainment comes the first season of Better Call Saul. Showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have attempted one of the most risky propositions in TV-dom: to make a successful spin-off of a beloved series character. This is easier said than done; for every Maude we get four or five Joeys or The Cleveland Shows, and Gilligan and Gould have only further complicated matters by trying to spin-off their landmark TV thriller Breaking Bad. If any show deserves consideration as "Best TV Ever," it's Breaking Bad, so why risk tarnishing a blue-chip brand? As Gilligan himself put it, the shadows of something like After MASH loom large, a situation which makes it all the more surprising that Better Call Saul is so good. Part of its quality has to do with selection. A Breaking Bad sequel doesn't need to exist (plus, so many people died at the end), and the series also offered enough flashbacks to make redundant a Walter White prequel (to echo Patton Oswalt's infamous rant about the Star Wars prequels, we don't need things explaining how the stuff we love came to be), but a prequel about Bob Odenkirk's shyster lawyer Saul Goodman? There's promise there - Odenkirk became such a memorable part of Breaking Bad not just because he supplied the very dark series with some of its most overt comedy but also because Goodman had such texture that you could imagine the character's rich inner life outside of his interactions with Walter White. In realizing what they left off the page in Breaking Bad, Gilligan and Gould have also deepened Goodman, especially since when we first meet him, he's not Saul Goodman at all. Saul begins life as Jimmy McGill, a struggling Albuquerque lawyer living perpetually in the shadow of his brilliant-but-disturbed litigator brother Chuck (Michael McKean). Ostensibly, Better Call Saul is a crime drama, and to be fair, McGill does dip his toe into the criminal underworld - most notably with a scheming county treasurer (Jeremy Shamos) who wouldn't be out of place in a Coen Brothers movie as well as with a very familiar psycho from Breaking Bad - but the heart of this season lies in the alternatively pathetic and touching relationship between the brothers McGill. In trying to balance his love for Chuck with his naked envy of Chuck's status, Odenkirk gives Jimmy a touching vulnerability that, at its best, is downright Willy Loman-esque, and McKean matches him, beat for beat, as Jimmy's unwitting conscience. Their dynamic is so full that the season's other major subplot, the introduction of Goodman's taciturn fixer Mike Ehrmantraut (the great Jonathan Banks), almost feels like an afterthought, despite Banks' tremendous work (he actually gets to be the focus of the season's best episode, "Five-0," which barely features Jimmy). Still, it's hard to worry too much about a show that has more good material than it needs. The biggest problem with Season One is it's too short – I eagerly await more time with poor, deluded, and doomed Jimmy McGill.
Martin Liebman wrote that "the show quickly establishes its own identity and, even as there's a connection to Vince Gilligan's other brainchild, there's never a sense of dependence. Even as the show builds towards Breaking Bad - though it's nothing but a looming juggernaut that the characters never even imagine at this point - and paints in a few details and inserts a few winks, it stands on its own as an exceptional character study in which Jimmy (Saul) builds a future in a present that's an always evolving landscape defined by his past. This isn't simple backstory - basic how's and why's - but instead involved, richly detailed human drama that manages an intensely defined and evolving foundation set against an oftentimes breezy and humorous overlay. The show enjoys an interesting contrast in how it depicts Jimmy and Mike, painting the latter in a far darker light while leaving Jimmy's story a little more open and approachable but with a physical and metaphorical darkness hovering about it (viewers will understand when season one reaches its key revelation and turning point at the end of episode nine). This is exacting, precisely crafted television and easily one of the most endearing, engaging, and engrossing shows of the post-Breaking Bad era."
Finally, from Michael Haneke and the Criterion Collection comes the experimental drama Code Unknown. Starting with his landmark 1997 anti-thriller Funny Games, Haneke has developed a reputation as a master of cinematic sadism, so willing is he to punish the audience over their perceived viewing failures; as elegantly crafted as Cache, Le Temps Du Loup, and The White Ribbon are, you watch these films with your heart in your throat as Haneke guts you. All of which is to say, Code Unknown stands unique in Haneke's oeuvre because it is both a continuation of this mischievous approach as well as, along with his heartbreaking Amour, the most humanistic and accessible of all his works. In its broad strokes, Code Unknown concerns itself with the systems that humans establish for themselves, and what happens when an act of random, minor ugliness towards an homeless woman (Luminița Gheorghiu) causes one of those systems to spiral out of control. The moment creates a ripple effect, spilling out into the lives of those people immediately impacted by the incident (including Thierry Neuvic, Ona Lu Yenke, and Haneke's Cache star Juliette Binoche), but Haneke isn't mounting an Amores Perros or Crash-esque study of how we're all connected and alike despite our surface differences. I'm sure he'd find that approach too facile, and we get a key into his process through the film's subtitle: "Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys." The entire film plays out as a series of fifty single-take shots, all wending around the incident event, and Haneke will often start a shot a beat too late or end a beat too early, creating a sense of perpetual elision. According to Haneke, the world can be confusing and abrupt, and his film makes us feel that sensation in our guts through its very incompleteness. However, despite the fragmentary nature of the picture, Haneke affords his individuals such dimensions. There are no one-note ciphers here – Binoche's actress Anne has the same fundamental humanity as Gheorghiu's vagrant – and so, against all odds, we make a connection with these people. An art film, through and through, but a continually intriguing and challenging one.