For the week of March 14th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing the Academy Award-winning The Big Short to Blu-ray. Like the Oscar-nominee Moneyball (itself a production from this film's producer and co-star Brad Pitt), The Big Short takes its inspiration from a Michael Lewis nonfiction text that correlates math to larger themes of morality and culture; if Moneyball saw its protagonists trying to assess sports excellence through sabremetrics and inside statistics, The Big Shortwatches as a group of stock traders (personified by Pitt, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Finn Wittrock, John Magaro, Rafe Spall, Hamish Linklater, Jeremy Strong, and Christian Bale, who won an Oscar nomination for his work here) leveraged the 2008 financial crisis into huge economic windfalls. But while Moneyballtook a sober, too-reserved approach to its sports drama (it's the kind of movie you like better afterwards than when you're actually watching it), The Big Short maintains this pitch of palpable, furious anger. Given that so many Americans are still struggling with the immediate effects of the recent recession, the mortgage crisis hasn't lost any of its dread hold on the culture – we don't know whether we should root for the film's heroes as they game the system or consider them something akin to war profiteers. It's the film's big masterstroke, keeping us always poised between respect and revulsion, and it's one that's old hat for director/co-writer Adam McKay (who's now an Academy Award-winner - he and Charles Randolph picked up Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay). Somewhere along the line, McKay got pigeonholed as a director of stoner comedies, and that distinction blunt the savage political edge he's brought to his best pictures: Anchorman demonstrated the degree to which the American public would swallow nonsense "infotainment" as long as it came packaged in a sleek, classy form; Step Brothers excoriated a certain type of male archetype that assumes he deserves easy success on the merits of being rich, white, and spoiled; and The Other Guys practically functions as a dry run for The Big Short, with its villains corporate raiders and its sympathies lying with those smart enough to see evil in the unfair financial transaction. Unlike those other films, though, McKay keeps the subtext text. Imagine a whole movie pitched like The Other Guys' infographics credit sequence, and you'll have an idea of what's happening here. Working with editor Hank Corwin and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, McKay cultivates a feel that's somewhere at the nexus of Oliver Stone, MTV, and cinema verite. The movie arrives as a barrage of images and sounds, including docudrama reenactment, documentary footage, YouTube clips, and celebrity explanations (in the movie's wittiest conceit, McKay argues that the reason the American people got screwed during the recession was because they didn't understand the needlessly complicated financial jargon tossed their way, and so he enlists the likes of Selena Gomez, Anthony Bourdain, and Margot Robbie – naked in a bubble bath, of course – to break down some of the most important concepts), all of which flow together with the deftness of a great video essay. If I have any major criticism, it's that I'm not sure that The Big Short counts as a movie-movie: it often feels like a documentary that featuring famous people. However, like everything else McKay has directed, The Big Short is often very funny. Not like, say, Martin Scorsese's chilling The Wolf of Wall Street – McKay doesn't want us to make this mistake of idolizing his main characters (at one key point, when Wittrock and Magaro's green traders hit it back, Pitt's far more grizzled financial expert reminds them that they "just bet on the failure of the American economy. Don't [expletive] dance") – but in an absurdist, astounded fashion. He lets the characters break the fourth wall to acknowledge that what we're about to see is a screenwriting conceit, or he'll stage something like Carell's investigation of the Florida housing market as if it were pulled from a slightly less outré Bunuel or Fellini film. And that's not even discrediting the contributions of the actors, whether it's Gosling's beyond-venal day trader (I'm beginning to think he might be a stealth comic genius, considering how easily he steals scenes from funny people like Carell or Linklater) or Bale's autistic, death-metal-loving hedge-fund savant. Ultimately, McKay wants us to choke on our laughter: how else to explain the final fifteen minutes, which finds the main characters getting everything they want at the loss of the their souls? Maybe his instinct his far less calculated. They say you laugh to keep from crying, but at a certain point, funny just won't cut it anymore.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "perhaps more than anything, however, it's in how the movie presents the issue that makes it entertaining as an experience, agreeable as a work of art, and informative as an educating tool. It's at once smart and insightful yet easy enough for the layman (though perhaps not Lehman's) to understand. The movie makes a habit of breaking the fourth wall, of directing its explanations straight to the audience and with relatable metaphors, like blackjack and food preparation. At two hours, it never feels a second too bloated. It moves fast, the characters are sharp and well written, and the performances are astounding. Christian Bale is particularly amazing as an analyst who lives in his own world, whose intelligence and powers of market perception are bested only by his aloofness and ability to focus under his own terms, which usually involves Heavy Metal music blasting into his ears. Bale stands a head taller than his peers, but the movie is populated by magnificent performances that capture the true spirit of the Wall Street world with incredible depth and apparent authenticity. Director Adam McKay makes use of unconventional techniques - particularly through the manipulation of sound - to drive home not just the story but, more importantly, its characters and themes."
Another recent Academy Award-nominee is the Weinstein Company's Carol. It, too, is an adaptation of a literary favorite, in this case Patricia Highsmith's 1954 romantic tragedy The Price of Salt, which examined the doomed relationship between a closeted housewife (Cate Blanchett) and the much younger woman (Rooney Mara) she encounters in a chance meeting. The connection between the two is immediate, but so are the perils – Blanchett's conservative, self-loathing husband Herge (Kyle Chandler, doing brilliant work in an atypically unsympathetic part) or the political culture of the 1950s, which looms over the two lovers like a shroud, tempering their passion even when (especially when) they head out on the road to try and escape the pressures of their home lives. Director Todd Haynes has always been fascinated by the ways that society restricts human instincts, and like Far from Heaven, his miniseries take on Mildred Pierce, or his terrifying Safe, Carol is just as much an indictment of The Way We Live as it is a character study or a melodramatic love story. On the surface, you might mistake Carol for the best film of the year. It is immaculately styled and presented (big tip of the hat to costume designer Sandy Powell and Haynes' frequent DP Ed Lachman, the latter of whom is working in gorgeous 16mm film), and Haynes brings admirable formal restraint to the whole affair. Plus, Blanchett and Mara do some of the finest work of their career. As glamorous as she is, Blanchett's title character is a raw nerve, and those moments where neurotic feeling punctures her exquisite façade are some of the movie's most gripping ones, while Mara's relative youth adds a tension of its own: to what extent is she in love, and do we even want to see her pulled into Carol's deeply unhappy orbit? I can't help but wish, however, that Carol were a little wilder. Although thematically similar, Far From Heaven and Safe let Haynes indulge in his experimental side – I missed the former film's explosions of color and sound or the latter's creeping insidious menace (and let us not forget his phenomenal I'm Not There, an experimental art-film disguised as a music biopic). Highsmith's original novel was also far more engaging; the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and its four sequels, Highsmith was a consummate genre pro, and she brought genuine mystery and tension to The Price of Salt even as it dealt with more traditional affairs of the heart. Carol could use some of that pitch and verve. For a film dealing exclusively in forbidden passions, it feels a little bloodless.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that "the movie is arguably more a technical masterpiece than it is a narrative masterpiece. While the story is satisfyingly engaging and tangibly complex on its emotional front, there's no mistaking the movie's gorgeous assemblage that will leave cinephiles awestruck. The picture was shot on Super 16, which gives it both a moderately grainy veneer but also an accentuating softness that not only amplifies its period feel but also heightens intimacy with the material. Colors are also not pushed very hard. The palette presents a soft and slightly muted scheme, one that, like the film texture, offers more an embrace of the material than a straight-edge reproduction of it. Likewise, score is softly accentuating and extraordinarily complimentary. Production design is terrific, transporting audiences to a bygone era filled with tactile wonders that the film uses, again, in exquisite complimentary form. Todd Haynes' and cinematographer Edward Lachman's lensing enjoys a blend of intimate characterization and suggestive photography by way of regularly perfect frame juxtaposition and placement. Carol is well worth a watch - a must see, even - even for those who may take issue with its story. It's simply too beautiful a film from purely a stylistic perspective to miss."
Swing too far in the other direction, and you get Sisters, the latest comedy from Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Theirs is a curious situation: best friends since their days in Second City and Saturday Night Live, Fey and Poehler are two of the funniest people on the planet who are partially responsible for two of the greatest sitcoms ever made (30 Rock and Parks and Recreation, for all you philistines out there), yet their movies never fully capture either their natural buddy chemistry or their essential comic spark. Sure, Sisters is a little funnier than their previous venture, the sporadically amusing Baby Mama, but it's also nowhere near as good as a mediocre episode of 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation. Whenever they make a movie, they just veer too far into easy formula. Here, Poehler is a straight-laced do-gooder and Fey is her wild-child sister, and the two decide to throw a massive party after learning that their parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) mean to sell their childhood home. I can't blame you for yawning at that setup – I did, too – and unfortunately, the execution never transcends that conventional description. I counted two half-hearted attempts at subversion: 1) having Fey and Poehler play the opposite of who you'd expect them to play (can't they play capable, intelligent, charming weirdoes just once in the movies? Why does Hollywood relegate them to characteristics you'd expect to see on an all-call casting list?), 2) operating with the relaxed content parameters of the R-rating (ample profanity, the intermittent gross-out joke), even if the idea of a mainstream, R-rated female comedy stopped being original after Bridesmaids came out in 2011. At some point, it still feels like Fey and Poehler are working with restrictors on, and I'd love to see their unfettered comic vision on the big screen before I die. Where Sisters works, as with Baby Mama, are in the smaller parts. Baby Mamahad scene-stealing supporting roles from the likes of Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver; so it goes here with Maya Rudolph, John Leguizamo, Jon Glaser, and WWE star John Cena, who works the same magic he pulled in Trainwreck and damn near steals the entire movie as a hunky drug dealer named Pazuzu (yep, after the demon from The Exorcist). Still, Fey and Poehler should be the main attraction, and Sisters just doesn't deserve them.
Martin Liebman called the film "a comedy about coming home and accepting the final death knell of days gone by when the childhood home is sold to strangers...Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are not real life sisters, and physically they don't resemble sisters, but they seem indelibly attached at the hip in the greater world of celebrity and certainly in Sisters. In the film, they command the screen with an uncanny depth of combined character. Neither Fey's Kate nor Poehler's Maura are particularly novel or even interesting characters, but the actresses' abilities to so richly shape their relationship almost completely hides the rather unimaginative character angles that drive them throughout the movie. They are, for all intents and purposes,Sisters, and everything else merely seems like background noise supporting their antics and relationship with one another, even when they're occasionally left to their own devices, Kate working through her personal issues and playing "party mom" and Maura engaged in hijinks with a hunky handyman. The chemistry-laden duo laps up every last bit of uncreative nonsense the movie throws their way and transforms all of those been-there, done-that shenanigans into an entertaining romp through midlife crises by way of a childhood prism blended with the mother of all over-40 parties."
Finally, the release of the week is from Criterion and its lovely new special edition of John Frankenheimer's 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate. What can be said about The Manchurian Candidate that hasn't already been said? It remains the finest of all political thrillers; it's the apex of Frank Sinatra's not-too-shabby acting career; or my favorite cliché, it feels as fresh today as it did in 1962. You've heard those, and I have, too, so how about something else? The Manchurian Candidate might be Frankenheimer's finest film from the 1960s. Right up to his death, Frankenheimer remained a master of suspense staging and action (well, not including Reindeer Games), giving films like Ronin (although definitely not Reindeer Games) a classical precision that bolstered their conventional thrills, but the 1960s were his peak: in short order, he turned out genre masterworks like Seven Days In May, Seconds, and The Train, and The Manchurian Candidate still might best them all. At its core, The Manchurian Candidate has an unbeatable hook: what if Communist forces were programming unwitting American soldiers to be brainwashed assassins, and what if one such assassin (Raymond Harvey) was killing on the behalf of a Joe McCarthy-like senator (James Gregory), AND what if the only man (Frank Sinatra) capable of unraveling this conspiracy was also still reeling from his own psychological conditioning? It's the best kind of pulp - fevered, intense, complicated – and Frankenheimer directs the hell out of it, crafting sequences for maximum impact. Frankenheimer will do whatever it takes to rattle us, whether that means destabilizing us with terrifying surrealism (the brainwashing sequences are nightmare material, and Frankenheimer makes them equal parts scary and funny), goosing us with random non sequiturs (what should be a normal "meet-cute" between Sinatra and Janet Leigh has a Tim and Eric -like disregard for logic or behavioral conventions), or pushing the violence further than we expect; just when we think the movie might get safe or soft, Frankenheimer will deliver a nasty shock, like the horrifying late-stage assassination that obliterates our sense of where a "conventional" thriller should go. But he also isn't trying to be provocative for page hits, so to speak. The political world that he and screenwriter George Axelrod have concocted is genuinely subversive - it's like a funhouse mirror of our elected offices. Global wars are fought and won in the mind. Extreme left-wing agitators push their agenda through extreme right-wing demagogues. The American Family is an incestuous cabal, as seen through the completely unwholesome attraction between Harvey's character and his scheming mother (Angela Lansbury, in her finest performance ever). And the media regards everything with the same intrusive leer, from campaign stump speeches to political assassinations. It's a hot-house view of America that prefigured the turmoil our country would enter after JFK's death and certainly feels more-than-a-little reminiscent of this current election cycle. That way lies madness, but according to Frankenheimer and Axelrod, all other roads are down. One of the great American films.
Svet Atanasov praised the film, writing that "The brilliance of this film comes from the incredible vision of its creator. It is carefully structured as a pseudo-documentary - the unusual camerawork and sharp editing routinely give it an edge and pace that feel strikingly contemporary - but it has the visual elegance of a classic noir picture as well. More importantly, the dissection of America's socio-political reality of the late '50s is so precise that it seems odd that at the time the powers that be were not alarmed by its message (or maybe not so much, because the exact same political hysteria that makes the film so fascinating to behold is now again part of our reality and yet very few appear to be alarmed by its presence). There are brilliant performances as well. Harvey is tremendous as the emotionally unstable hero. Sinatra is equally convincing as the former captain looking for logical answers. Gregory also leaves a lasting impression as the overly ambitious senator. The true star of the film, however, is Lansbury, whose astonishing performance should have earned her an Oscar award."