For the week of January 25th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing Spike Lee's freewheeling musical-comedy-satire-tragedy Chi-Raq to Blu-ray. For at least five years, Lee has been in the wilderness, both thematically and narratively; both Red Hook Summer and Da Sweet Blood of Jesus had his characteristic anger but suffered the vagaries of microbudget production figures, and his Oldboy remake is so neutered of anything recognizably Spike Lee that it doesn't even carry Lee's traditional "A Spike Lee Joint" title card. You look at Chi-Raq, though, and you can see the same guy who made Do the Right Thing, Summer of Sam, and School Daze. At its core, Chi-Raq takes inspiration from Aristophanes' Lysistrata, except Lee and his co-screenwriter Kevin Willmott have updated the setting from Ancient Greece to present-day Chicago. The move isn't just an artistic caprice. Given the level of gun violence afflicting the South Side of the city (to give you an idea behind the size of the problem, the title of the film comes from blending "Chicago" and "Iraq"), Aristophanes' central conceit - that a group of women would withhold sex from their husbands until they stop killing each other - has an inspired, Swiftian logic. But Lee never lets the humor overwhelm the genuine hurt, as seen through the inciting incident: the random, brutal death of an eleven-year-old boy, an offshoot of the decades-long gang conflict between the Spartans (led by a very good Nick Cannon, of all people) and the Trojans (led by Wesley Snipes, in his best role since his underrated turn in 2009's Brooklyn's Finest). The bottomless despair of the mother (Jennifer Hudson) is enough to shake the Spartans' first-lady Lysistrata (Mad Men's Teyonah Parris, who deserved a Best Actress nomination for her work here) out of her complacency, and she leads the sexual rebellion against both gangs, a decision that sprawls into the spheres of national and state influences (including David Michael Kelly as a batty National Guardsman, Steve Harris as the head of a Black Panthers-esque political group, and John Cusack as a community-minded priest). And all the while, Lee's Greek Chorus (a wonderful Samuel L. Jackson, who could be a cousin to Do the Right Thing's Mr. Senior Love Daddy) keeps commenting on the action, cajoling us further and further into the story. In no way does Chi-Raq begin to resemble anything "perfect" - it's too uneven, too over-the-top, too impassioned, too silly, too much. But it's also the most appealingly messy feature Lee has made since 1998's He Got Game, and like that earlier sports drama, the coherence of Lee's overall efforts are secondary to the intensity of his message. At the start of the film, Lee flashes "This is an emergency" in big letters, and subtlety be dammed, but we believe him. Chi-Raq sweeps you along on raw power alone.
Spike Lee might be the first auteur getting a Blu-ray release this week, but he's not the last. Warner Archive is offering an HD upgrade of Alfred Hitchcock's great The Wrong Man. We can trace so much of the iconic director's oeuvre to one key section of his origin story; when Hitchcock was six, his dad had him locked up in a prison cell in order to punish him for a childhood transgression. Hitchcock only spent a few minutes in jail (and not with any other inmates), but the psychic damage was enough to fuel a lifelong fear of imprisonment that motivated so many of his protagonists. The Wrong Man is the clearest, most direct expression of that theme. Unlike his more escapist thrillers (Saboteur or North by Northwest, for example), The Wrong Man is a docudrama based on the story of Christopher "Manny" Balestrero, a jazz musician (played in the film by Henry Fonda) who's already struggling to provide for himself and his wife (Vera Miles) when he becomes the victim of an awful coincidence: through absolutely no fault of his own, Manny is mistaken for a notorious stick-up thief and arrested. That said, while The Wrong Man lacks the setpieces of Hitchcock's popular entertainments, it's no less gripping. Using all of his cinematic tricks, Hitchcock constructs The Wrong Man so that much of it plays out through Manny's subjective perspective (if you've ever seen Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, you'll recognize a lot of aural/aesthetic similarities between how the directors present Manny and Travis Bickle). We're stuck inside his skin, which begins to confine us the more he tries to prove his innocence. No matter what argument Manny and his lawyer (Anthony Quayle) make, Fate seems to be marshalled against them, and he sinks deeper and deeper into the justice system. At times, we can detect a note of black, black humor, given the nature of Manny's situation - it's as if he has no say whatsoever in his situation, with huge developments (both positive and negative) occurring at the whims of an uncaring world. But for the most part, Hitchcock allows this material more gravity than is normal for his works. This is his nightmare, come to life, and even the "docudrama" heading begins to gain a ghoulish, surrealistic power, especially given what happens to Manny's wife during his legal woes. If The Wrong Man isn't the first film I'd recommend to Hitchcock newbie, it's essential viewing just the same, and key to understanding what makes the Master tick.
Michael Reuben wrote that the film "has steadily gained in stature, even as the criminal procedures that ensnared Manny Balestrero have been replaced by alternate methods (though whether they provide any real protection against mistakes remains a subject of debate). Hitchcock may have wanted The Wrong Man to seem life-like, but that didn't prevent him from storyboarding every shot and pre-planning every cut. It could be argued that The Wrong Man features Hitchcock's style in its purest form, freed from such technical stunts as the continuous takes of Rope or the limited perspective of Rear Window. Instead, the director depicts the collapse of Manny Balestrero's world through subtly disorienting camera angles, unsettling editing rhythms and the expressive face of Henry Fonda in the lead role."
The last major auteur release of the week is Hou Hsiao-Hsien's romantic drama The Assassin. If you're familiar with Hsiao-Hsien, you know that he often works in a naturalistic, socially conscious realm (think Three Times and Café Lumière), a fact which makes The Assassin, his first film since 2007's Flight of the Red Balloon, somewhat of an anomaly: the film is a wuxia that, in its broad strokes, shares more in common with something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Like Ang Lee's Academy Award-winner, The Assassin hinges on a complex blend of political and emotional intrigues, as the title character (the luminous Shu Qi) finds herself torn between her duty to kill an important Chinese governor (Chang Chen) and her still-lingering feelings for the man, who was once supposed to marry her. However, despite that premise and a few martial-arts sequences (that are bloodless and over almost as quickly as they begin), The Assassin is as reserved and esoteric as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is accessible and action-packed. Although Qi's conflicted warrior becomes ever-entwined into her target's life, the specifics remain foggy, ethereal. You suspect that what matters most to Hsiao-Hsien isn't the why but the how of it all: the way the trees sway in the wind, or a meaningful set of glances between Qi and Chen from across billowing curtains. As such, what registers the strongest is the emotional register that the characters experience, with all the aesthetic and aural factors working to sustain that mood. Luckily, Hsiao-Hsien's mastery of the form is striking enough to justify The Assassin's sensory focus; working in boxy Academy ratio (minus a few short scenes in 1.85:1), Hsiao-Hsien constructs a swirl of colors and textures that feel simultaneously kaleidoscopic and confining, two characteristics that could define Giong Lim's understated, lovely score. We're invited to feel for these people, but not with the passion of, say, a Wong Kar-wai feature - Hsiao-Hsien wants to cultivate a measure of deeper consideration, and in that regard, he largely succeeds.
Jeffrey Kauffman called the film "a peculiarly ruminative film that sees large swaths of exposition playing out in relatively static dialogue scenes. In fact the film is a deliberate exercise in mise en scene, which again often brings the whole aspect ratio up, at least for those who obsess about presentation as much as about content. There's one relatively brief opening up of the frame to 1.84:1...which is somewhat perplexing considering its brevity. This strangeness is made perhaps even more so due to the fact that there are later sequences, notably a long court segment with two acolytes to Tian Ji'an presenting opposing viewpoints, where a wider aspect ratio could have helped Hou Hsiao-Hsien to simply leave his camera plunked down and stationary (something he seems to want to do most of the time in the film), instead of panning back and forth between various participants. Many readers may be wondering 'what the big deal is' with the aspect ratio issue, but for a film as dependent on style as The Assassin is, it's a question at least worthy of some consideration. If the attempt was to deliver an 'old school' feel to the film, which Hsiao-Hsien has alluded to in some interviews, why then that one brief opening up to widescreen 'glory'? And why the subtle fluctuations within the 'Academy ratio spectrum'? The fact is that as convoluted and even confusing as The Assassin's narrative sometimes is, from a pure content standpoint, there's not a whale of a lot of 'there' there, which means the film's presentational aspects (pun intended) rise all the more to the forefront. The Assassin is a fascinating film to watch, not just for its stunningly beautiful tableaux, but also at least in part due to the teasing technical questions it raises but never answers."
Finally, the Weinstein Company and Anchor Bay are giving the cooking dramedy Burnt a Blu-ray release. It has been a long time since I have seen film waste promising material and performers to the degree that Burnt does. Director John Wells has been, at one time or another, the showrunner on such acclaimed programs as ER, The West Wing, and Showtime's Shameless, and he's marshalled a cast that includes (deep breath) Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Daniel Brühl, Omar Sy, Matthew Rhys, Emma Thompson, Uma Thurman, and Alicia Vikander to service a Steven Knight script (Knight also penned Locke, Eastern Promises, and Dirty Pretty Things) that, at various points in its development, had attracted the likes of David Fincher. The pedigree is solid, is what I'm saying, yet barring a few bright spots, nothing about Burnt works the way it should. At the center of Burnt's issues is some serious confusion about what kind of movie this is. My guess is, the draft that caught everyone's eye was more of a pure comedy about a brilliant-but-unstable chef (Cooper, naturally) who gets clean and decides to make a run at greatness again. Cooper has an affinity for this kind of edgy farce (see: Silver Linings Playbook as well as his short-lived TV show Kitchen Confidential, where he basically plays the same exact character), and the plotting in the film's first half suggests a more lighthearted affair, as Cooper puts together his team, almost Ocean's Eleven-style, and banters with Miller's sexy, sardonic sous-chef. However, Wells is more renowned for his dramas (besides ER and The West Wing, he also directed the dysfunctional-family melodrama August: Osage County and the unemployment drama The Company Men), and the Weinsteins never found a potential Oscar bait project they didn't like, so maybe, somewhere along the way, when Wells and the Weinsteins realized they'd amassed all this talent, the comedy grew subordinate to some borderline-serious drama concerning Cooper's sobriety and mounting depression. The two styles never stop competing with one another. Just when you think the movie is going to get funny, we get hints of encroaching darkness, and when you think things are getting serious, the "hilarious" shenanigans begin. The blend never satisfies, so the whole movie feels like a waste: an accretion of talent and skill that goes nowhere.
Martin Liebman noed that the film "strives to tell a story that creates a parallel between the working philosophy in the high-end kitchen and the philosophy of life. Throughout the film, [Cooper's] Adam Jones learns to appreciate more than the vulgar hustle-and-bustle quest for perfection in the kitchen as he strives to rearrange his life, though it will take more than a few bad dishes to really sell him on the idea that he's had it wrong all along. But the movie runs into trouble when it becomes clear, beyond the fascinating din and haze of the hectic master at work and the kitchen operating at warp speed, that Burnt never really has anything new to say. The movie paints a fascinatingly intimate portrait of how things work behind the scenes in a top restaurant, but it's supported by fairly empty drama and predictable character arcs, minus a fairly shocking surprise in the final act that's regrettably cancelled out soon thereafter and, handled differently, could have offered a more honest look at the relative meaning of personal success and failure set against the professional backdrop. Indeed, the movie leaves a bitter taste when it takes the easy way out for Jones and Langham's, a disappointing audience friendly finale that betrays all the hard work the movie committed to building towards a greater character epiphany."