For the week of January 18th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the rap docudrama Straight Outta Compton to Blu-ray. Post-Oscar nominations, all the talk surrounding director F. Gary Gray's film involves its near-total exclusion from the Academy Awards discussion, but five months ago, the main word was success. Success, in that here was an R-rated, two-plus-hour-long drama for adults that grossed over $200 million dollars at the box-office. And from the jump, it's clear why: this is a good movie, with confident direction (Gray hasn't been this on top of his game since 1998's The Negotiator) and a clear, sure sense of purpose. We begin with Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) at a drug deal gone awry, and the movie never really lets up, striding into an involvement with musicians like Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and Ice Cube (O'Shea Jackson Jr., Cube's real-life son) that ultimately leads to the founding of the historic rap group NWA. For a little over an hour, Straight Outta Compton feels as vital and interesting as any 2015 film release. As an evocation of the mood and environment that led to NWA, Straight Outta Compton is near-flawless, with Gray and DP Matty Libatique bringing the early '90s back to life with uncanny precision, but the film also draws all sorts of parallels between the 1990s and today. Both time periods share the same intensity of racial tensions - it's hard, in particular, to watch the film's depictions of police brutality and not think of Baltimore or Ferguson, Missouri, yet Straight Outta Compton never becomes a slog because it's so persuasive in conveying the ability of art to transcend the world's indignities. However, for all the picture's timeliness, for all its visceral spark in the early goings, it ultimately succumbs to the same formula that afflicts so many biopics. Take a step back, and Straight Outta Compton is a simple rise-and-fall story; that means, after the thrill of watching NWA coalesce, we have to watch it crumple under stressors both within (Eazy-E's shocking health troubles) and without (the machinations of the group's manager Jerry Heller), and all before the pat credits notification that valorizes Dre and Cube. Considering Dre and Cube are listed among the film's producers, it's hard to not question their largely positive depictions here, if only a little. Again, none of this familiar content is bad - it even has its pleasures, chief of which is Paul Giamatti's wonderfully sleazy turn as Heller (he could be a blood relation to his Love & Mercy scumbag) - but it never surprises on a level higher than a glorified episode of VH1's Behind the Music.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "never forces its narrative. The film evolves organically and believably. Never does it feel like a mere recreation of history. Instead, it comes across as a loving, though certainly raw and thematically gritty, portrait of the artists who changed the world by reflecting honestly on their life and the externalities that shaped it. While their story isn't unique at its most fundamental level - it's the classic story of a rise from nothing to something, of making the most of talent, of making the best of a difficult life - it is rather unique for its ability to stay true to the essence of the artists, to find the same level of poetic sophistication, groundbreaking novelty, and honest crudeness that made their music a success. Gray's direction stays the course, too, finding a thoughtful middle that doesn't glamorize or rebuke. The story evolves linearly and offers more a finely honed reflection than a messy, scattered, and overindulgent construction. Gray allows the music and the characters to speak, to push the story, to see it through its high and lows, which are sometimes overlapping or even one and the same, if one reflects on them in a certain way (consider what influenced Cube to pen "F*** the Police" and the resonance the song engendered afterwards). This is the music biopic done right. It's hard because has to be, and that edge gives it a legitimacy and an enthralling rhythm that helps shape a narrative that sparked not only a movement but gave rise to a generations of performers, highlighted the importance of lyrical honesty, and gave credence to an art form that's more than the sum of its admittedly crude externalities."
Also from Universal comes the adventure-drama Everest. Based on true events - the likes of which received popular exposure both in David Breashears, Greg MacGillivray, and Stephen Judson's IMAX documentary Everest and in Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book Into Thin Air - the film focuses on the 1996 Mt. Everest expedition that went horribly awry; two teams of climbers (played in the film by the likes of Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Hawkes, Naoko Mori, and Michael Kelly) ascended the mountain only to face horrific weather conditions that resulted in the deaths of eight people. If that description sounds pretty bleak...well, then, you might want to seek "entertainment" elsewhere. Director Baltasar Kormákur's previous American features were the far more lightweight actioners Contraband and 2 Guns, both of which do nothing to suggest the level of bleakness and despair found here. By and large, Kormákur sticks to the horrible physical realities of the climb, which means that we spend much of Everest watching a bunch of likable, talented individuals slowly perish from freezing or asphyxiation (to say that "starpower" here doesn't matter is an understatement - any one of these people could die at any time, billing be dammed). Whether or not you want to experience this wrenching tale is another matter, though. While Kormákur stages some ace suspense sequences in the early goings and never loses our interests, once the weather turns on our protagonists, the film becomes more of an accretion of dead bodies than a conventional adventure. Furthermore, on a character level, the actors are doing all the work here - William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy's screenplay conceives character in mostly archetypal terms: the tough guy who's softer than he seems, the jovial thrill-seeker, the nerd who wants to prove himself, the hero with the pregnant wife. Still, you've got to hand it to Everest. As grueling and simplistic as it might be, it maintains a brutal integrity that's unique to the big-budget Hollywood picture, and that's worth something, I suppose.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "can essentially be whittled down to two unique elements that work in rugged but beautiful harmony: the humanity behind the story and the technical prowess that makes the movie happen. At the center of the movie is the human drive and man's determination to conquer, in this case to conquer not one another but nature. But why? Is 'because it's there' worth a life and the very real risks associated with such an endeavor? One of the few areas where the film slightly stutters comes from its lack of deeper psychological insights into the climbers' psyches. That endless determination to beat the mountain is there...but that determination never quite feels grounded in a relatable dramatic mechanism. Nevertheless, the film demonstrates the human will at its most determined and its most vulnerable, simultaneously, which is what makes the movie, and this particular true-to-life story, so fascinating. It's sort of like the metaphorical unstoppable force, in this case the human condition, meeting the immovable object, in this case Everest, with Mother Nature ultimately deciding the outcome. The film is, at its most superficial core, about the struggles up and down the mountain - the energy and will necessary to ascend and the much more dangerous descent - but beyond the cold, the lack of oxygen, the frostbite, the body's inability to cope is the question of why, of the human spirit, of man's thirst to prove his worth. The film examines that, often more in the guise of a pure adventure film, on both extremes in the struggle to the top, the fleeting moment of triumph, and the descent into near certain death."
One of this week's most exciting releases is Olive Films' Let There Be Light: John Huston's Wartime Documentaries. Huston has earned cinematic immortality for his work on such features as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Fat City (among many, many others), but just as key to understanding his creative impulses is this series of four WWII documentaries: Winning Your Wings, Report from the Aleutians, San Pietro, and Let There Be Light. For one, these projects helped deepen his creative eye; the reason films like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Asphalt Jungle have such immediacy stems from the crash-course in vérité filmmaking that the documentaries afforded him. Huston himself was never one for shying away from uncomfortable material (see his profoundly unnerving Reflections in a Golden Eye for more evidence of this point), and you see that fearlessness both in the shooting conditions - he got much of this material under fire - and in the subject matter of the WWII pictures. While many WWII documentarians were offering jingoistic propaganda pieces glorifying the Allied war experience, Huston peered into darker corners, including catastrophic Allied intelligence blunders (San Pietro) or the emergence of PTSD in WWII veterans (Let There Be Light). Like so many of his great protagonists, Huston just didn't give a damn - he wanted to make the best possible films, regardless of what public opinion demanded - and as such, a number of these documentaries have been suppressed and/or languishing in the public domain simply because the Army really didn't want to expose the public to such complicated, morally ambiguous messages. They're in the open now, and we're the better for it. Sidebar: of these four films, Let There Be Light deserves special attention. Not only is it a blistering, masterful piece of work, but it is also the single biggest influence on the theatrical cut of P.T. Anderson's The Master. Sure, Scientology provides the P.R.-ready hook, but PTA builds off so many of the themes in Let There Be Light (Anderson even lifts whole sequences from Let There Be Light and re-appropriates them for his own ends) that The Master practically functions as a stealth sequel.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "one of the more interesting tangential issues which arose when the United States entered World War II is how many male Hollywood stars simply left their cushy Los Angeles lives and enlisted to become part of the fight. Could you imagine any star in the 1950s, 1960s or later voluntarily signing up to fight in any of the many conflicts which followed World War II, whether that be Korea, Vietnam, or even Iraq and/or Afghanistan? Many top box office attractions like James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda and Clark Gable joined various branches of the armed services and fought with distinction. But it wasn't only those who performed in front of the cameras who were moved to join the fight, and it is now part of the annals of film history that such celebrated filmmakers as Frank Capra helped to craft a series of documentaries that were meant to spark a 'rah rah' spirit back home while also encouraging the hordes of fighting forces overseas. If Capra and John Ford are regularly cited for their wartime film efforts (several are included in WWII in Hi Def and Why We Fight), a relative newcomer by the name of John Huston was also plying his filmmaking trade during the conflict, and this new compilation collects several of Huston's World War II documentaries in one set...[which] is a fascinating collection of pieces that serve to remind contemporary viewers that the United States was just as involved in 'propaganda' as any Axis power was during World War II. The highlight here is no doubt Let There Be Light, which still retains an incredible emotional power, but the other three films all have their compelling points of interest."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a new upgrade of the Coen Brothers' wonderful Inside Llewyn Davis. If nothing else, this release would be significant for marking the Coens' Criterion debut: that the film itself is a near-masterpiece certainly doesn't hurt matters. Inside Llewyn Davis would make a great companion piece with the Coens' A Serious Man. Both films try to sketch the no-man's-land between human endurance and an indifferent universe; like A Serious Man's long-suffering physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), folk singer Llewyn Davis (the great Oscar Isaac, as good here as he is in A Most Violent Year or Show Me a Hero) wants nothing more than to succeed in a world that seems like it could care less about him. As Llewyn bounces from one gig to another in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, he faces an onslaught of injustice and failure. Much of this is unforgivingly bleak - Llewyn's failing artistic aspirations fall in line behind his minute-to-minute struggles to get out of the cold and find something to eat - which makes it all the more remarkable that, ultimately, the Coens are making a comedy. They have no nostalgia for the folk genre, the members of which come off as deluded (Justin Timberlake and Stark Sands' peppy nitwits), abrasive (Carey Mulligan's profanely aggressive singer), or both, in the talented-but-dyspeptic Llewyn's case. Better still are Llewyn's interactions with other facets of the '60s counterculture, from his continued leeching off the cluelessly "cultured" Gorfeins (Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett) to his mid-movie road trip with a crippled, bodily-function-obsessed jazz musician (John Goodman, stealing the film, as he is wont to do for the Coen Brothers) and his near-mute valet (Garrett Hedlund, doing an inspired riff on both James Dean and On the Road's Dean Moriarty), and the Coens further underscore the absurdity of Llewyn's plight by paralleling his hardscrabble existence with the strangely epic journey of the Gorfeins' missing cat (a journey that is all the funnier and more mysterious for happening almost entirely off-screen). Ultimately, though, the film rests on Isaac's heroically grumpy performance, which gets our sympathies without ever angling for them. He's got a cockeyed way of looking at misfortune, like he's been expecting it all along. And maybe that awareness is what leavens what might otherwise be the Coens indulging in another skillful slice of misanthropy. When Llewyn stumbles, it isn't simply because the universe is uncaring and cruel, as it is in A Serious Man or No Country for Old Men. At the end of the day, Llewyn is kind of a jerk, and he invites this misery on himself. The great thing about the movie? Llewyn knows this, too.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman called the film, "a morbidly fascinating watch on a dramatic level and a beautifully captivating watch on the artistic level. The Coen brothers' artistic vision, brought to life by Bruno Delbonnel's Oscar-nominated cinematography, reinforces the story's rather bleak human themes with a subdued palette and frequently dark, shady, or low-key visuals. The film feels both depressingly hopeless and technically gorgeous at the same time, a representation of the filmmakers' skill at finding a perfect visual harmony for a very imperfect world. The cast is equally excellent. Oscar Isaac shines in the title role, exploring the dark recesses of a hopeless life with incredible mastery of the character, his environment, his prospects, his musical talents, his ambitions, his precious few successes, and his too-numerous-to-count failures. Isaac's command of the character and understanding of the landscape - the physical landscape around him and the inner landscape that is the revolving door of tragedy in his life - is truly special, a performance that was unjustly passed over for an Oscar nomination."