For the week of February 8th, MGM and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment are bringing the blockbuster actioner Spectre to Blu-ray. Conventional wisdom states that all Bond films are only as good as their strongest entries, so by that logic, Spectre already has to face an uphill battle; its predecessor, 2012's Skyfall, remains one of Bond's finest adventures, with the franchise's genre requirements existing alongside better-than-usual writing (courtesy of Hugo and Penny Dreadful's John Logan), peerless filmmaking chops (two firsts: an Academy Award-winning director - Sam Mendes - and a cinematographic legend - Roger Deakins), and the series' best villain (Javier Bardem's Raoul Silva). For better or worse, Skyfall established that good Bond movies could also be good movies, full stop, but even though most of the key creative folks are back (minus Deakins - Interstellar's Hoyte von Hoytema fills in as DP) it's in that latter regard that Spectre just can't compete. As a Bond movie, it's fine. After the end of Skyfall applied a hard reset to the Bond universe (we're back to the status quo: male M, female Moneypenny, a snarky Q), Spectre finds 007 (Daniel Craig, once again) embarking on the kind of splashy Bond mystery that Roger Moore specialized in the 1970s and 1980s: while pursuing an assassin in Mexico City (the specifics of which unfold in a bravura single-take shot: nothing else in the film tops this sequence), Bond begins to suspect the existence of a covert criminal organization - the Spectre of the title - manipulating the world's most egregious social-political atrocities, and he begins jetting around the world to uncover the conspiracy. The many stunts and action setpieces never flag, but the tone is, like the Moore Bond vehicles, far jokier than the tortured, doomed Bond of Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, and Casino Royale. We've got a Jaws-esque henchman (Dave Bautista's Hinx), a car-chase that finds Bond struggling with technological mishaps as much as enemy gunfire, and even a callback to Blofeld, Bond's infamous kitten-stroking Big Bad from the 1960s and 1970s. Some of this material is good (I particularly liked Bautista, who walks away with the movie despite having almost no dialogue and who gets the picture's best fight sequence), but given the now ten-year investment in a grittier Bond, this lighter content feels particularly retrograde - why spend so much time investing in a more human Bond if we're just going to regress to an unkillable cartoon? In addition, the script is nowhere near as taut as Skyfall's. If nothing else, the 2014 Sony email leak revealed a host of narrative issues that the final version of Spectre did little to address. It's hard to believe that Logan is partially responsible for the ungainly story that Spectre boasts, although considering he receives credit with a small committee of writers that includes Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth, the end result might just be a case of Too Many Cooks. Maybe that's why we're saddled with two wan Bond girls (a wasted Monica Bellucci and Léa Seydoux, who's very talented but who spends most of her time here playing damsel in distress) or worse, the hackneyed mythology behind the titular criminal organization, which simultaneously a) retcons the last three Bonds by jerry-rigging Spectre as the Big Bad pulling all the strings, b) forces a contrived "personal" connection between Bond and Spectre, and c) wastes the great Christoph Waltz as a monologuing villain with sub-Spielberg daddy issues and a penchant for Nehru jackets (it hurts to write this, but Michael Lonsdale in Moonraker was a better Bond baddie than the Oscar-winning Waltz). More and more, I question the need for James Bond in today's spy-movie climate. Jason Bourne is more psychologically interesting, and Ethan Hunt has a great support system backing him (another of Spectre's biggest crimes: casting Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, and Ben Whishaw as M, Moneypenny, and Q, respectively, and then giving them almost nothing to do). Bond's just caught between two worlds, and his indecision is tiresome to watch.
Michael Reuben's Blu-ray review wrote that the film "represents the apotheosis of the Purvis/Wade approach, as it systematically revisits and reformulates Craig's previous Bond outings, purporting to reveal an ultimate enemy who has lurked unidentified behind the scenes of three feature films and billions of dollars in box office. The marketing made no secret of the fact that, in what amounts to yet another "reboot" of the franchise, Bond's chief enemy isn't just a Serious Bad Guy. He's a figure from Bond's own past, one who mockingly informs 007 that it's Bond who is responsible for the villain's career as an evil genius. Such intimate ties between a hero and his nemesis are the stuff of Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama and comic book franchises, but how many times do the impresarios of EON think they can get away with it for Bond...The conclusion of Spectre attempts to unite these many moving parts in a grand finale with the requisite pyrotechnics, narrow escapes and just desserts for the villains, but there's something off about the whole affair - and not just because we're asked to believe that Bond emerges from the fray a changed man. The late Richard Maibaum, screenwriter of twelve Bonds, used to say that the film's story should be driven by the villain's evil objective. A plot to subvert the entire Western intelligence apparatus sounds like a grand scheme, but when it's motivated by what amounts to sibling rivalry, the whole affair is trivialized. Skyfall lost some momentum at the end, because it turned out that its villain's elaborate machinations boiled down to a single act of revenge against 'Mommy.' But Spectre collapses entirely because it doesn't even try to hide the fact that Oberhauser is doing it all to get even with Bond."
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes the gothic romance Crimson Peak. Like, Spectre, this horror-tinged chiller arrived on a rush of great expectations; not only was Crimson Peak director Guillermo del Toro's first film since 2012's disappointing, kid-friendly Pacific Rim, but it was also his first R-rated picture since 2006's Academy Award-winning fantasy Pan's Labyrinth, a film that Del Toro promised shared similar thematic sensibilities as Crimson Peak. His observation is dead-on. Together, Crimson Peak, Pan's Labyrinth, and 2001's lovely The Devil's Backbone form a rough trilogy that examines what happens what the supernatural pushes against violent human affairs. In The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, those affairs dealt with the bloody fallout of the Spanish Civil War, and in Crimson Peak, Del Toro focuses on matters of the heart: while struggling against the gender constraints of the late nineteenth-century, young writer Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) meets a mysterious aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) who promptly romances Edith and whisks her off to his ancestral home, a place that houses ghosts both figurative and literal. However, as in The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro doesn't cast his specters as stereotypical figures of menace. Rather, they represent unresolved pain and suffering perpetrated through brutal human actions, which mostly come courtesy of Hiddleston's unhinged sister (Jessica Chastain, playing her character's camp villainy to the hilt and delivering the film's best performance in the process). It's an interesting inversion - subordinating the supernatural menace behind the human trauma on display - but unlike both The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, the end result proves less than satisfying. Part of my issue stems from the look of Crimson Peak. While the production design is, as per usual for Del Toro, utterly stunning - as much as it is a cliche to say the house itself is practically a character, the house itself is practically a character - Del Toro and DP Dan Laustsen are shooting in digital (probably as a cost-saving measure...such are the compromises made to support the R-rated genre feature), which has a smearier, strobier texture ill-befitting a 19th-century thriller. It's not quite Public Enemies-level digital noise, but the cinematography certainly lacks the velvet sheen of Del Toro's best filmic works. Plus, the film's ghosts look digital, even though Del Toro swears they're mostly practical in effect. More problematic is the film's rote narrative. Del Toro and his co-screenwriter Matthew Robbins last wrote the disappointing horror-thriller Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, and their work here shares many of the same flaws. Despite the great work of the actors (outside a boring Charlie Hunnam, everyone in the cast is great, including Deadwood's Jim Beaver as Edith's loving, pragmatic father), all the main characters are one-dimensional ciphers navigating a melodrama that goes exactly where you expect it to, and while you could argue that such cliches are staples of gothic fiction, the downside is we know what's going to happen long before the other characters do. After a while, you get the suspicion that Crimson Peak would work better as a silent film, where the images and mood are allowed to overwhelm the risible dialogue and plot motivations, but Del Toro doesn't seem to trust his audience enough. An interesting misfire, but a misfire nonetheless.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film is nevertheless an artistically successful and dramatically absorbing work of art that only disappoints in an uninspired conclusion to an otherwise brilliant film...This is a film of enormous style that's practically bursting at the seams with a lovingly assembled and gracefully photographed narrative that's enhanced by the use of color, visual metaphor and motif, and striking digital and practical effects. The movie expertly blends artistic grace with unsettling imagery and horrific scares, all of which only serve to enhance one another; no single element dominates another, at least when the movie is considered in its entire context rather than in the inherent beauty of individual shots, scenes, and sequences. The house, which serves as the movie's central location in its second and third acts, represents the proverbial nonliving character. Del Toro has crafted it in a graceful state of disrepair in which it literally 'bleeds' from the floor while pure white snow gently drifts down from a hole in the roof and piles inside. But it's the larger context of the story around it that transforms it, and indeed every other piece of the puzzle, from resplendent curiosity to central element in a much more complex story."
Each new week seems to bring a great new Warner Archive title, and this week is no exception: the distributor is putting out Christopher Guest's folk mockumentary A Mighty Wind. The great thing about Guest's output is that everyone has a different favorite: some people prefer the Rob Reiner-directed This Is Spinal Tap, some the deadpan theater-personality parody Waiting for Guffman, and some the dog-centric Best in Show (the one shared consensus: everyone thinks For Your Consideration is kind of a letdown). My favorite has always been A Mighty Wind, which isn't as broad as Guest's other films but is just as incisive - to put it in other words, he's hitting the center of a very small bullseye. You can see the genesis of today's hipster comedy trend in A Mighty Wind, which purports to document the present-day reunion of a group of iconic 1960s folk musicians. That setup alone is practically a Portlandia sketch writ large, and like Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's winning TV series, the humor comes from how the inherent ridiculousness of the premise (imagining any sort of uproar over a 21st Century get-together featuring people like Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, and Peter, Paul, & Mary) co-exists with the performers' total commitment to their parts. Guest's troupe (which includes, as it often does, talented farceurs like himself, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley Jr., Jennifer Coolidge, and the invaluable Fred Willard, who excels as a moronic former sitcom star haplessly pushing his failed punchlines) wants laughs, to be sure, but not at the expense of character. They burrow so deep into their roles that when we laugh, it's at complex, idiosyncratic displays of human behavior and not at easy gags, and that interest in humanity means we often get more from the film than just nuanced yuks. Case in point: the relationship between Levy and O'Hara's former lovebirds, a pairing that starts funny (Levy couldn't deal with balancing their love and their music and is now completely insane) and then progresses into something tender and moving and funny. It helps, too, that the songs are all so good. Not only are they hilarious, but many of these tunes could pass muster with the real thing, especially the title track, which triumphantly unites all the major folk groups before ending on as subtle and understated a dirty joke as I've ever heard. Guest's brand of deep-dive human comedy is in rare supply these days - the highest profile project he's had was the cancelled HBO series Family Tree - so here's hoping A Mighty Wind gets audiences re-engaged with his singular brand of humor.
Speaking of HBO, the premium-cable network is giving The Leftovers: The Complete Second Season a Blu-ray release this week. The show's first season was the definition of an acquired taste. While many (including myself) found The Leftovers' inaugural year to be the finest thing to spring from the energies of Lost and Prometheus architect Damon Lindelof, the first ten episodes were so wrenching and sad that you really couldn't blame anyone for jumping ship after the beyond-despairing pilot. Certainly, Lindelof and his creative team are still interested in plumbing the depths of human misery for Season Two - after all, it's hard to imagine a world where 2% of the population has suddenly vanished playing out with, I dunno, a three-camera setup and a laugh track - but they have also evinced a willingness to jettison much of what made Season One so distinctive and start afresh. Lindelof has voiced his appreciation for shows like The Wire that aren't afraid of losing familiar characters and plot beats if it means finding a greater thematic truth, and so it goes here: whereas that first season was a reasonably faithful adaptation of Tom Perotta's 2011 novel, Season Two uproots the cast and moves the proceedings from upstate New York to Jardin, Texas, the only place in the world that didn't experience any population loss. In essence, Lindelof has given concrete form to Hope itself (it's no accident that everyone refers to Jardin as "Miracle"), and this shift allows him to continue his ongoing study into the effects of depression on the human psyche. We started with denial through depression, and now we're moving into acceptance. For the cast of the show (including returning cast members Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Ann Dowd, Amy Brennaman, and Christopher Eccleston, as well as new faces like Kevin Carroll and the great Regina King), that's no small shift, given the titanic emotional surges they had to weather, and The Leftovers only grows in power as it has its characters tentatively try to make sense of this new world. This being episodic television, it's safe to say that "Miracle" is both more and less what our protagonists expect, but Lindelof deserves all the credit in the world for not ending the season in a mire of "shocking" plot twists and secret "revelations" and instead allowing the ineffable and mysterious to remain forever out of reach. So far, Lindelof has fashioned The Leftovers into one of the most moving statements on grief and depression that I've ever seen - as well as a sensitive and challenging religious document on par with Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ - and if he sticks the landing in Season Three, we're going to have a television series for the ages.
Martin Liebman noted that "Season two opens in spectacular fashion with something completely unexpected but essential in not so much understanding what's to come in the ten episode season - The Leftovers is never particularly blunt about the how's and the why's - but to lay a foundation for both the broader season arc and for the larger story within the series' universe. The open is probably the finest few minutes of television to come around in some time, considering its artful production; intense storyline that's compacted into several intoxicating minutes; and the superficially random, yet clearly essential, sense of import and foreboding alike that comes with it. It's the perfect example of the show's reach, emotional depth, and willingness to go beyond its confines to explore whatever it is that's deemed necessary to prepare the audience and establish the world's driving forces. Indeed, The Leftovers isn't about unforgivingly frustrating audiences, and it's not about spoon feeding them answers, either. The slow reveals, complex story lines, dynamically evolving characters and environments, and the sheer uncertainty of what's come, what's happening, and what is to come all work in a harmonious manner to impart more deeply complex emotional responses in the audience and depict a more subtly but forcefully evolving world on the screen."