For the week of March 28th, The Weinstein Company and Starz are bringing Quentin Tarantino's Academy Award-winning The Hateful Eight to Blu-ray. To say that Tarantino has a devoted fanbase is the understatement of the year - a whole subsection of movie geeks got that way because of Pulp Fiction, and in recent years, the rest of the viewing population caught up with us, considering the critical and commercial fêting given to Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. But the audience just wasn't there for the comparatively smaller-scale The Hateful Eight, and I'm not surprised. About the most attractive thing about this snarlier, aggressive Western is Robert Richardson's gorgeous 70mm cinematography, and outside of a few location shots, most of it contents itself with capturing the chilly (thematically and literally), brutal interactions between very bad people. Chief among them is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson, in one of his finest performances), a Civil War hero and legendary bounty hunter who joins fellow bounty hunter John Ruth (the great Kurt Russell, doing an alternatively hilarious and scary deconstruction of John Wayne's whole persona) in a stagecoach ride towards Red Rock, Arizona. Tensions are already running high between Warren and Ruth, given the toxic presence of Ruth's captured quarry, the venal outlaw Daisy Domergue (Academy Award-nominee Jennifer Jason Leigh), but matters only worsen after the stagecoach picks up Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins, in a starmaking performance for anyone unfamiliar with The Shield or Justified), a Confederate Renegade who's none too thrilled to be sharing space with Warren's emancipated black man. And all of that is before a blizzard forces them to seek shelter in an isolated haberdashery with four other strangers (Demián Bichir, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, and Tim Roth, doing a Christoph Waltz impersonation that soon grows into something much darker) and, ultimately, a whole mess of blood and death. Only Ennio Morricone's playfully terrifying score won an Oscar, and the music gives a big clue into The Hateful Eight's true genre provenance: it's a giallo in Western clothing, complete with operatic violence, red herrings, and the most splattery whodunit you'd hope to see outside of a Dario Argento movie (Tarantino stages the simultaneous deaths of two characters with such grisly élan - you'll know the moment when you see it - that it'd be funny if it weren't so disgusting). Still, if Tarantino were just making a postmodern slasher, his audience might not have turned on it. Instead, he's up to something far more uncomfortable. Some critics have called The Hateful Eight a Django Unchained B-side, but the newer film is really more of a dark mirror. Once again, we hinge around two bounty hunters - one black, one white - coming together in the aftermath of the Civil War; again there's an immediate enmity between the African-American protagonist and a young Southern dandy who delights in killing black people. However, if Django spun this content into a gory, loquacious buddy-comedy, The Hateful Eight sees no such harmony. Russell's John Ruth is a mean-spirited bully who's far less progressive than he thinks he is; Jackson's Warren is all too happy to delight in the beyond-dehumanizing particulars of his work (he gets a showstopping monologue that is as audacious as it is revolting); and Goggins' Southern Gentleman quickly reveals himself to be an ignorant, borderline incompetent child. Their showdown culminates in a queasy celebration of death that's likely to offend blacks, whites, and women in equal parts, and that's how it should be. In light of Ferguson and Baltimore, the racial tensions have grown so severe that even Tarantino can't reconcile them with Django's crowd-pleasing orgy of violence. The bloodshed here curdles on screen; this is easily Tarantino's nastiest, most unpleasant movie, but for a number of viewers it might also stand as one of his best. Count this reviewer among the devoted. In some ways, the best film of 2015. Pity the Blu-ray isn't much better. While I'm able to excuse the lack of special features (where's Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, Quentin?), I can't justify the decision to offer only The Hateful Eight's theatrical cut. While the scene elisions are minimal (if not ideal - Russell loses a wonderful speech about his old horse, Roth's character doesn't get some small-but-nice character filigrees, and Leigh's big "musical" number actually unfolds in a chilling single take, the camera racking focus between her singing in the foreground and the far more menacing events happening in the background), the film demands the breathing room of the Roadshow Version. The Overture helps establish the sinuous, menacing tone before we see a frame of the film proper, and the Intermission is even more vital. Not only does it give us an opportunity to breathe and escape these unpleasant people, but Tarantino uses it so cannily, structuring the narrative so that key plot points actually occur while we're waiting for the picture to start again. Even when we think we have a break, The Hateful Eight is plotting against us - at least, in the Roadshow version, that is.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Tarantino's love of florid dialogue scenes has already stuffed this film to overflowing, even before bodies start dropping with alacrity and it becomes apparent that there may be something afoot at Minnie's Haberdashery that involves one of its temporary residents. This turns out to be both a good thing and a bad thing for the overall trajectory of the film. Christie's mysteries were often noted for their economy, where hosts of background information and previously hidden interconnections were often revealed in just a sentence or two, typically in the traditional 'Moishe the Explainer' sequence which often cropped up in the closing moments of any given tale. But here Tarantino spends a lot (as in a lot) of screentime detailing various conflicts between the characters, something that only tends to highlight what are obvious red herrings and which keep suspense from building very consistently. On the plus side, these frequent sidebars turn out to be the most colorful thing about the film, for when push comes to shove, the actual 'mystery' is almost mind numbingly easy to figure out, especially for those used to Christie tropes which often include elements like imposters or hidden relationships between characters."
A far more compromised slasher is 2000's Cherry Falls, to which Scream/Shout Factory has given a new Blu-ray makeover. On a script level, Cherry Falls had the potential to be one of the wittiest teen slashers ever made - the premise finds a mysterious killer butchering teens in the titular small town (sidebar: they shot Cherry Falls in my hometown of Richmond, VA, and I still remember the production company filming near the James River and at Thomas Jefferson High School), except unlike the prudish murderers stalking horny teens in Friday the 13th or The Prowler, this psycho only targets virgins. As such, the local teens (led by a young Brittany Murphy) decide to take matters into their own...*ahem* hands, but can they usher in adulthood faster than the killer can hunt them? The premise is so elegant you wonder why no horror movie tried it sooner, but the finished film doesn't have any of the requisite visceral or satirical impact. By all accounts, director Geoffrey Wright shot a version of Cherry Falls that delivered on the screenplay's sexual/violent excesses, but a fraught distribution struggle resulted in a) USA Films buying the film and then b) promptly releasing it on basic cable, a decision that led to massive cuts in the gore and sex. It's as oblivious a censorship decision as I've ever seen - why make a movie about the twisted relationship between sex and violence if you plan on excising all the sex and violence? - and it left Cherry Falls forever crippled. The finished film feels tepid and underdone (it never climaxes, so to speak), and the deleted footage was lost. What we're left with is a nostalgic what if, one that musters a few good performances (Murphy and Jay Mohr are especially impressive) and little more. Normally, I'm against the idea of remakes in principle, but if anyone wanted to take another crack at Ken Selden's script and treat it right? I'd be in favor of that.
But some remakes will not stand. Case in point: Warner's awful Point Break redo. The 1991 original is no one's traditional idea of "good," but it is frequently, compulsively watchable, whether we're marveling at the kinetic staging of Kathryn Bigelow's many action sequences (some beyond-vertiginous skydiving scenes; a car chase that quickly morphs into the greatest foot chase ever captured on film) or laughing at the film's transcendent stupidity (it's about surfers who rob banks while disguised as ex-presidents. Patrick Swayze plays the film's Zen-espousing villain Bodhi. Keanu Reeves plays a cop who goes undercover using his actual identity, all while carrying Gary Busey's burnt-out loudmouth of a partner in tow. Take your pick). As cult classics go, Point Break '91 is a doozy, which is more than I can say for this turgid, uninvolving iteration. From the jump, director Ericson Core has made a major miscalculation: whatever performance challenges former leads Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves faced, they were effortlessly charismatic, a characteristic that eludes both Édgar Ramírez and Luke Bracey. Ramírez has been good elsewhere (Carlos, anyone?), but he's too mopey and indifferent as Bodhi - we certainly don't understand why Bracey's Johnny Utah (yep, same stupid name) would be tempted to defect from the FBI and follow Utah's lead (so yes, anyone looking forward to the kind of homoerotic bromance that Reeves and Swayze shared should temper their expectations). Still, we don't understand much about Bracey; he is so boring an actor that I started to wonder if he was just a CGI placeholder for someone better (this guy makes Reeves look strongly emotive). The only hook that Core and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (of Salt and Law Abiding Citizen infamy) have is that now, Bodhi's extracurricular exploits aren't just bank robberies, surfing, and sky-diving - they make him an EXTREME ATHLETE so they can add wingsuits and rock climbing into the mix, and while these scenes are competently shot, they're no better than GoPro footage you can see - and for free, I might add - on YouTube. Plus, Wimmer underplays the most interesting aspect of the original movie, that Bodhi's Zen philosophy masks his genuine avarice and criminal cunning - there's no moment here as morally queasy as the one where Swayze's Bodhi freaks out during a robbery-gone-wrong and kills a cop. We never get that tension between his message and his actions. It's just a stupid action movie, with no sense of grace.
Michael Reuben's Blu-ray review noted that "Bigelow's 1991 Point Break concerned a gang of thrill-seekers who robbed banks both for the adrenaline rush and to finance a fringe lifestyle. Their charismatic leader spouted vaguely spiritual, New Age justifications for their activities, but there was never any question that he and his gang were criminals and parasites, no matter how charming (and at least one of them was a violent thug). The story's core conflict involved an FBI agent who infiltrated the gang, then found himself seduced by their lifestyle, despite a clean-cut, straight-arrow background (college quarterback, law school graduate, top in his class at Quantico). As the lawman and the cult leader alternated between friendly competition and deadly confrontation, a complex relationship developed, but the key to the FBI man's salvation turned out to be a woman who saw through the charades ('There's too much testosterone here' was her diagnosis, and she was right). The ride was fun while it lasted, but in the words of the song that played over the closing titles, nobody rides for free. Wimmer and Core dispense with everything that made Bigelow's film compelling… Point Break contains some undeniably remarkable action sequences: an extended flight from a mountain top in wingsuits, snowboarding down a vertical slope, bare-handed rock climbing that recalls the opening of Mission: Impossible II, and surfing scenes where the waves have formed in the deep ocean far from land and reach heights that dwarf even the Australian monster at the end of Bigelow's film. But the pounding repetition of such feats quickly wears out their ability to inspire awe, even if, as the publicity proudly asserts, many of the stunts were done for real, with little or no CGI. Good action sequences need credible characters who can make an audience feel the danger. Bigelow understood that, but Core doesn't have a clue."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving an HD upgrade to Vittorio De Sica's classic neorealist drama Bicycle Thieves. One of the touchstones in modern Italian cinema, Bicycle Thieves has justly inspired all sorts of critical commentary in the years since its 1948 release. People have remarked on its political agenda, its influence on Italian filmmakers, or its unique, vérité approach to fictional storytelling. But what often gets lost, if only a little, is how moving De Sica's work is. The story of a poor, decent father (Lamberto Maggiorani) who loses his bicycle and becomes ever more desperate trying to find it, Bicycle Thieves has the direct emotional impact of a fable. De Sica doesn't bury the narrative in extraneous subplots or details; while his docudrama-esque filmmaking style seems to give his Rome environs the richness of a Russian novel, we soon realize that these neorealist details exist solely to close in on Maggiorani's character. There's a heartbreaking simplicity to his struggle: he needs a bike to ride to work and provide for his family, but without it, their future seems doomed, and I think that's why so many people have ascribed so much meaning to the text. It's simple enough to support the hardiest observations. Still, at the end of the day, what we remember is Maggiorani, roaming the city with his son (Enzo Staiola) in search of anything resembling a better life. Along with De Sica's later masterwork Umberto D., one of the most powerful examples of Italian cinema.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "Vittorio De Sica's neorealist masterpiece looks grim and quite rough at times. Now it may seem appropriate to say that it has the appearance and vibe of a documentary feature, but many great documentary features have actually directly copied its visual style and tone. The drama on display is the type that hits hard and right in the heart. Absolutely nothing that Antonio [Maggiorani] and Bruno [Staiola] do while trying to track down the thief looks rehearsed. They choose where to go, what to say, and how to react - the camera is there only to observe them. The movement of people around them and their reactions do not seem choreographed either. The city is captured by the camera in exactly the same manner Antonio and Bruno are - unmasked and unprepared, always looking unglamorous and authentic. One can easily sense how cheap life is in the poor neighborhoods where the thief might be hiding. There are bystanders who look genuinely surprised and some even annoyed that a camera would dare to come this far and expose their miserable existence. These are simple yet incredibly powerful visuals, absolutely impossible to forget."