For the week of November 30th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Ben Stiller's Zoolander to Blu-ray; truth be told, Zoolander already received a limited Blu-ray run last year courtesy of Warner Home Entertainment, but that disc quickly went out of print, and now Paramount has picked up the licensing rights (and is making them available only at Wal-Marts across the country through Feburary 1st). In a weird way, though, that tortured home-media schedule proves oddly fitting within Zoolander's overall release history. When the film first made its theatrical premiere, it did so sporting one of the least enviable release dates in recent movie history: September 28th, 2001, or a little over two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. To say the country wasn't ready to laugh yet would be an understatement, and Zoolander vanished from theaters almost as quickly as it entered them (it also didn't help that the film received a much-publicized digital touch-up that scrubbed the World Trade Center from some of its NYC establishing shots). And that should have been that, except a funny thing happened - the damn movie got another chance, clinging to life on home video and DVD, its cult spurred along by those mad faithfuls who caught the film as many times as they could during its truncated theatrical debut. They recognized Zoolander, and quite rightly so, as one of the two or three finest comedies of the Aughts; it's a real toss-up as to whether or not this one has the edge over Adam McKay's Anchorman, but that's its only real competition. What Stiller and his co-writers Drake Sather and John Hamburg have done is to make a crowd-pleasing, populist entertainment that is also deeply, uncompromisingly strange. They set the picture in the world of high fashion, but Stiller and Co. really aren't interested in satirizing the ins and outs of that realm à la Robert Altman's Ready To Wear. Instead, they use all the trappings of haute couture as a springboard for a genuinely surreal farce about how catastrophically stupid male model Derek Zoolander (Stiller) finds himself at the center of a plot to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Sure, we get a few stabs at social realism (the Prime Minister wants to enforce harsher child labor restrictions, a move that would decimate the profit margins of fashion designers around the globe), but Stiller would rather pay grand-scale homage to, believe it or not, the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s. He gives the film the pop, absurdist glow of Theodore Flicker's The President's Analyst, and he even appropriates Zoolander's ka-bonkers brainwashing sequence from Alan J. Pakula's masterful The Parallax View because why not? Zoolander seems to exist as a direct illustration of the old dictum, "Comedy equals tragedy plus time," so all the low-hanging, institutionalized ennui of the '60s and '70s now becomes the stuff of high comedy.
In fact, many of the movie's most hysterical bits pivot off death and destruction, whether it's a "harmless" gasoline fight that ends in tragedy or an assassination scored to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's '80s electronica favorite "Relax," yet Zoolander never feels morbid or bleak (it's no Dr. Strangelove) because Stiller genuinely wants his audience to have a good time. All these bizarre comedic beats - and the movie is chock full of brilliant insanity both small (you got to love a movie so perverse that it casts iconic motor-mouth Vince Vaughn as a character with no dialogue whatsoever) and large (the never-tiresome running gags about Zoolander's go-to expressions when he's modelling come to a head in one of the most comedically satisfying pay-offs I've ever seen) - hum along in a glossy studio package that remains the most confident and aesthetically pleasing thing Stiller has ever directed. Only Edgar Wright consistently delivers this kind of visual invention and sheen, and the polish and beauty help make palatable the weirdness without tamping it down (along those lines: the film's deep roster of celebrities playing themselves, a hodge-podge of cameos/sight-gags that includes Winona Ryder, Donald Trump, Tom Ford, Tommy Hilfiger, Natalie Portman, Gwen Stefani, Lenny Kravitz, Heidi Klum, Fred Durst, Lil' Kim, Lance Bass, Cuba Gooding Jr., Christian Slater, Fabio, Stephen Dorff, Garry Shandling, Billy Zane, and David Bowie, the latter two of whom almost walk away with the movie during their brief-but-hilarious screentime). Besides his skillful handling of the action and gags, Stiller's ace-in-the-hole is the relationship between Zoolander and his equally stupid rival Hansel (Owen Wilson). The two characters share a surprisingly rich arc: at the start, Zoolander resents Hansel for his youth and burgeoning fame, and the movie gets a lot of mileage from their flinty anti-chemistry (Zoolander is desperate and bitter; Hansel is laid-back and arrogant). But when circumstances force the two to work together, we see this very genuine friendship solidify on-screen. The two actors are friends in real life, but they pull off that hat trick of making visceral their obvious affection for one another. Sure, the big turning point is a three-way sex scene that also includes a Maori tribesman and a Laotian monk, but that's just the kind of movie this is. Stiller and Wilson are so good together that it's easy to forget that Wilson actually disappears for much of the movie's middle forty minutes - their different types of chemistry leave that big of an impression. And I haven't even mentioned Will Ferrell's histrionic turn as fashion magnate - and conspiracy mastermind - Mugatu, or the wonderful straight-man turns from Christine Taylor and David Duchovny, or the string of absolutely perfect needle-drops throughout the picture. It's an embarrassment of riches. Paramount's making a sequel, and even though I'm not terribly optimistic about it, we'll always have this one. A perfect movie.
In his Blu-ray review last year, Michael Reuben wrote that the film "is unlike any other movie that Ben Stiller has directed. Its anarchic spirit is closer to Stiller's brilliant but short-lived television show or the collection of fake trailers that opens Tropic Thunder. Zoolander does have a story - a ridiculous story to match its dim-witted protagonist - but Stiller and his co-writers, John Hamburg (who would go on to co-write Meet the Parents and its sequels) and Drake Sather, are willing at any moment to put the story on hold for a physical gag, an extended sketch or a movie parody that's a self-contained little world. When Zoolander's soundtrack suddenly melts into the familiar strains of 2001's theme from Also Sprach Zarathustra, while the characters re-enact a scene from Kubrick's masterpiece, it's hard not to think of the film as Stiller's Airplane! The character of Derek Zoolander, dimwit male supermodel, came before the movie. (The name was a portmanteau of Dutch model Mark Vanderloo and American model Johnny Zander.) Stiller and Sather created him for a pair of short films shown at the VH1 Fashion Awards in 1996 and 1997 (both of which are included in the extras) and then decided to build an entire feature around him. Hamburg joined the team at a later date, and the commentary the three writers recorded for the 2002 DVD release gives some idea of the many story points the team considered, developed and discarded. Set in the fashion world of New York City, Zoolander opened on September 28, 2001, which turned out to be seventeen days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The timing may have seemed unfortunate, but in fact it was ideal. Speaking as a New Yorker who saw the film on its opening weekend, I found the film's farcical silliness to be good and much-needed medicine. The film is so well made, and the fashion industry remains so ripe for parody, that it still works even though today some of the celebrity cameos are likely to provoke a 'Who's that?' reaction."
Anchor Bay/Starz is bringing the first season of Fear the Walking Dead to Blu-ray. As the title suggests (rather inelegantly), this series is a prequel spin-off of AMC's hit Walking Dead program; Fear the Walking Dead follows a group of Los Angelenos (Kim Dickens, Cliff Curtis, Ruben Blades, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Shaun Hatosy, and Frank Dillane) during the first days of the zombie apocalypse. It's a pretty boilerplate description for a pretty boilerplate show: whatever quirks Fear the Walking Dead has (setting the show in L.A., or meeting "younger" zombies that haven't rotted as much as the ones in The Walking Dead) seem more and more like cost-saving methods, a way to do the same thing as The Walking Dead at two-thirds the price (most of Fear the Walking Dead was actually shot in Vancouver, natch). As a business decision, I guess it makes sense. The name Walking Dead still carries a lot of commercial weight, and Fear the Walking Dead premiered to extremely high viewership numbers. But there's just not a whole lot here. Outside of a few sporadic moments, the zombie mayhem underwhelms - we've yet to have a significant action setpiece with any of the same verve or scope as those in its flagship series - and the human drama isn't much better. Imagine a darker version of Parenthood in terms of its family complications (dealing with a blended family; divorce-related angst; Dillane's heroin-addicted burnout), and you're not far off. This lack of originality wouldn't be as galling were it not for the fact that the cast here features some of the strongest performers on either Walking Dead; Dickens, in particular, deserves so much better than this if judged solely on her work in Deadwood, Friday Night Lights, and Gone Girl. I get that zombies are still in vogue, but you can tell a story with them that doesn't feel so rote. Based on past and previous history, I'm still waiting for any version of The Walking Dead to achieve that goal.
From Lionsgate and A24 Films comes the gambling dramedy Mississippi Grind. Rehashing the past is always a dicey proposition, and so this picture, a semi-remake of Robert Altman's 1973 minor classic California Split, seemed destined for failure, or irrelevancy, or both. However, filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are sharper, savvier operators than most who mount a remake (they're also responsible for the wonderful baseball drama Sugar and Half Nelson, with its Academy Award-nominated Ryan Gosling performance), and they manage to get something out of Mississippi Grind that still feels unique and personal. Anyone familiar with Sugar and Half Nelson know that Boden and Fleck have a understated, lived-in eye for environment, and that aesthetic touch goes a long way here: in transplanting Altman's West Coast story to the dingy, wide-open spaces of the Midwest and American South, the directors are able to further demystify the lives of their gambler protagonists (Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn). There's no luxury here - hell, their lives lack even the dark shadows and noirish patina of John Dahl's Rounders leads - just workaday stiffs and muted greys and browns. Even when Reynolds and Mendelsohn get a chance to dally with two attractive local women (Analeigh Tipton and Sienna Miller), the film doesn't drift into melodrama - Boden and Fleck use their interactions as an excuse to reinforce just how cut off these men are from the rest of the world. It's a smart move, and one that allows Mississippi Grind to stay almost laser-focused on Reynolds and Mendelsohn, both of whom do exceptional work. Anyone familiar with Mendelsohn knows he's one of today's best working actors (I remember first seeing him as the loathsome villain Pope in Animal Kingdom), and he's certainly got the meatier role here. His Gerry is, to quote Billy Bob Thornton in another one of my favorite films about small-time losers trying to make it big, "an iceberg in search of the Titanic": he gambles as an extension of his desire to firebomb every bridge he might have to a normal life, and this self-destructive need extends into every aspect of his personality. However, Reynolds gives the most surprising performance, mainly since he's so good here. As Curtis (nominally the Elliott Gould part from California Split), Reynolds first comes off like an obnoxious motormouth, but the more time we spend with him and Gerry, the more we see he's the closest thing the movie has to a moral compass, a stable (relatively speaking) gambler who avoids long-shots when he can afford to and is fiercely loyal to Gerry. It's enough to make you wish he wasn't stereotyped into playing frat-boy horndogs and boring action heroes. By the end of the picture, what we've seen doesn't add up to anything revelatory, but it doesn't need to: sometimes sharp, small, and insightful is good enough.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a low-key character study of its own with a new HD upgrade of Downhill Racer. Director Michael Ritchie's sports drama didn't make much of an impact in 1969 (if we're to trust the bonus material on the Blu-ray, it's because Paramount shifted its promotional efforts almost entirely towards Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby), but over time its reputation has grown - I think it's one of the most unsung films of the 1960s. Along with his star Robert Redford, Ritchie made a dark, uncompromising antihero saga that, in its own way, is just as good as The Wild Bunch or Taxi Driver. This time, though, the violence is entirely psychological; we follow professional athlete David Chappellet (Redford) as he strives for nothing less than to be the best skier in the world. Screenwriter James Salter confines most of the film to Chappellet's European tour, but while this environment affords Ritchie multiple opportunities to stage thrilling racing sequences, Downhill Racer couldn't be further from a traditional sports drama. In Chappellet's eyes, winners and losers are irrelevant because he thinks he's better than anyone, and that jaundiced perspective informs the film's whole worldview. Chappellet is an empirically terrible person: he's abusive towards women, he's contemptuous of his opponents, and he dismisses anything his coach (Gene Hackman) does to build community between him and the rest of the U.S. ski team. However, despite all these massive personal failings, he's allowed to flourish simply because he's such a good racer. As such, there's very little uplift here, but its cynicism has only made Downhill Racer more timely. You look at the odious Chappellet, and you realize that there's not much separating him from athletes who can stage illegal dog fights, rape women, or murder their spouses and still get a pass because of their performance at The Show. It's a sobering message, and one that the whole creative crew here is committed to proving, with Redford scoring top honors. You've got to admire his sand: the same year as his lovable rogue in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and only two years after his breakout turn in Barefoot in the Park), Redford was willing to compromise his dashing pretty-boy image with a performance as remote and ugly as Chappellet. He's always been a more courageous artist than we give him credit. Here's a stark reminder of why.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "the film is very unusual. It has the raw appearance of a documentary feature, but its strength is actually in the eye-opening relationships between its key characters. Indeed, it is precisely the manner in which these relationships are observed that reveals the uncompromising and quite troubling environment in which professional skiers find themselves once they begin competing on the international scene. The main point is that a winner is untouchable for as long as he wins. He could be an unstable and abusive individual, someone that is utterly incapable of being a team player, but as long as he can deliver results his personality and morality essentially become irrelevant. In the early '70s to some this was probably a pretty far-fetched observation, but the evolution of professional sports since then has made it painfully obvious that the logic behind it has actually become even more potent (today, there are countless examples in virtually every single sport, with the most disturbing one being the fall of Lance Armstrong)...The impressive skiing footage was shot with hand-held 16mm cameras and doubles. The 16mm footage was then edited and integrated into the film."