For the week of May 23rd, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing The Finest Hours to Blu-ray. This docudrama takes inspiration from a 1952 Coast Guard search-and-rescue mission; when a brutal storm tears an oil tanker in half, the Guard sends out a small-but-brave team (including Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Kyle Gallner, and John Magaro) to save the survivors (including Casey Affleck, Josh Stewart, Abraham Benrubi, and Graham McTavish) even as the weather begins to threaten everyone's chances of getting home. Despite the presence of Star Trek's Pine and what I'm sure is an army of digital technicians (making good CGI water isn't easy), The Finest Hours feels like it missed its release window by about, oh, sixty years, give or take. The last time I saw a big-budget studio adventure as square and earnest as this one, it would have starred John Wayne or Gary Cooper. The Finest Hours is utterly sincere in its appreciation of American values and heroism, both on the open waters and off - The Borgias' Holliday Grainger plays Pine's worried-but-stalwart fiancée, who injects a little Sirkian melodrama into the picture as she tries to do what she can from the shore. Even Disney doesn't make live-action pictures as guileless as this anymore: in, say, Pirates of the Caribbean or The Lone Ranger, we get a far more self-aware deconstruction of the stereotypical "hero," and based on The Finest Hours's anemic box-office showing, maybe this profound lack of irony was the wrong commercial choice. However, if you're willing to submit to its "Yes, ma'am/sir" view of the world, The Finest Hours provides a consistently engaging experience. Unlike the similarly wide-eyed Pearl Harbor, The Finest Hours comes by its optimism honestly, so that when its kind, decent heroes start facing ever worse perils, we have an even greater regard for the gravity of their situation. Credit must go to director Craig Gillespie. In only a few years, he's developed a knack for taking clichéd, dramatically exhausted situations - a dramedy about a guy who falls in love with a Real Doll (Lars and the Real Girl), a sports movie about a white agent looking for baseball talent in a foreign land (Million Dollar Arm), and a remake of a beloved cult classic (Fright Night) - and imbuing them with more heart and energy than they deserve. So it goes here. The Finest Hours might be past its expiration date, but Gillespie either doesn't know or care. He never looks down on the material, getting invested, tonally consistent work from his cast and crew (save from Affleck, who's compelling, but weirdly so - there are times it seems like he's aping Brando when Joel McCrea would have been the more sensible template). A really pleasant surprise.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film pays attention to its details, ensuring a more complete and convincing experience. Though more than a few effects shots, particularly as Bernie and his crew search out the tanker on the 36500, are not as seamless as one might hope - the green screen effect is pretty obvious - the larger scale elements are wondrous. Deadly, but wondrous. Walls of water, tidal waves, and the broken tanker are all immensely impressive. The movie's more involved digital effects are magnificent. Water practically spills into the stage, and even on sets, such as down in the tanker's depths where the men must battle not only the flooding waters and mechanical troubles but their own fears and disagreements about how to best survive the situation, are richly realized, seemingly, down to the last bolt, bulkhead, and button. The movie does teeter on trouble with less than complexly drawn characters, and the resultant performances can be a little flat and stiff, but as the movie focuses more on what's inside than outside, it can get away with rather flat arcs that don't get lost in the shuffle but that only really serve to drive the greater narrative of human excellence and endurance under pressure."
Would that I could say the same about Paramount's Zoolander No. 2. You will find no bigger fan of Ben Stiller's 2001 comedy classic Zoolander; along with Adam McKay's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, this lunatic conspiracy farce remains one of the Aughts' two or three most perfect comedies. And now, just like Anchorman, Zoolander is the recipient of a vastly inferior sequel. At least Anchorman 2 is unnecessary but funny - outside a few scattered gags here and there, Zoolander No. 2 is unrelenting in how it squanders the gifts of one hysterical person after another. If you told me I'd find a Ben Stiller comedy largely chuckle-free, I'd say, "I've already seen The Watch. What's your point?" But if you told me that Stiller would belly-flop alongside Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Jerry Stiller, Fred Armisen, Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, and writers Nick Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and John Hamburg (I Love You, Man)...well, that might surprise me a little more (and if you told me that Kiefer Sutherland, of all people, would come out of this thing scoring the best laugh, then I might die of shock). But then again, we start getting red flags from the jump, whether it's the film's over-reliance on cameos from trendy celebrities who are just not funny (Katy Perry, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande, and a terrible Justin Bieber, who's never seemed less in on the joke then when he's desperately trying to be funny), or the way the new film undoes everything the first Zoolander accomplished. It was deeply satisfying watching Stiller's idiot supermodel find stability and something resembling grace (or its moronic equivalent), but rather than keep charting his progression, this sequel goes the Ghostbusters II route and hits the reset button, killing off Zoolander's wife (Christine Taylor, here a ghostly cameo) and estranging him from his son (Cyrus Arnold, who, to his father's chagrin, is fat and unappealing. That's the extent of what passes for wit in this new film) so that Zoolander can once again become miserable and culturally irrelevant. The twist now is that Owen Wilson's Hansel is similarly depressed - their professional rival is an androgynous model played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who might have been able to bring the funny if Zoolander No. 2 gave him anything of value to do - but we're quickly back to the territory of the first movie with a celebrity conspiracy, a histrionic villain (actually two: Ferrell's now-grating Mugatu and Wiig's legitimately nauseating, unfunny Donatella Versace parody), and a kitschy Billy Zane cameo. This time around, the magic is gone, and more than anything, Zoolander No. 2 plays like a contractual obligation that Stiller and Co. are delivering through gritted teeth. Maybe there's a lesson here. Money is never the best reason to make a comedy. It can be one of the best reasons (this is America, after all), but bad things happen when it's the only reason. I would have thought the people behind Zoolander would have known that. Shame.
Scream/Shout Factory is offering one of the year's most exciting catalog releases; for years, we've had to settle for MGM/Fox's barebones Manhunter disc, but now, Scream/Shout has put together a special, features-laden version of Manhunter that includes director Michael Mann's preferred director's cut. Not that the theatrical cut was too shabby. Along with his 1981 crime drama Thief, Manhunter remains as crystalline and focused a representation of Mann's fundamental filmmaking ethos as anything he's ever done. Mann sees the world in terms of dialectics - the good and the bad - but he's never content to create some binary segregation between the two, preferring instead to examine where good and bad blur into one another. The obvious example is his 1995 masterwork Heat (Al Pacino's obsessive cop vs. Robert De Niro's principled robber), but Manhunter adds an even more ghoulish wrinkle, centering on Will Graham (William Petersen), a former FBI profiler pulled from retirement in order to hunt a brutal serial killer (Tom Noonan, beyond chilling). That setup is the stuff of nighttime police procedurals, yet Mann complicates matters through his emphasis on Graham's psychology. Graham quit the force because his gifts stem from an extreme empathy for the deranged - essentially, he felt his own moral compass shifting the more he immersed himself in evil actions (initially personified by Brian Cox's incarcerated Hannibal "Lecktor," who makes the most of his ten-minutes-or-so of screentime), so his renewed interest puts his soul at hazard as much as it does his body. Certainly, this dichotomy isn't unique to Michael Mann. Mann has long valorized the thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville (Le cercle rouge, Le Samouraï), who was also keen to play with archetypes of good and evil, and the Will Graham story finds its origin in Thomas Harris' bestselling novel Red Dragon. But given Mann's own predilection for marrying strict formalism (a strict color palette; rigorously designed widescreen frames) to surrealist expressionism (his use of sound and music; the ways he shifts and distorts action and movement through editing), Manhunter represents a near-perfect union between content and form. That goes double during the film's most bracing narrative conceit. For about sixty minutes, we follow the case through Graham's eyes, and then Mann shifts (shockingly, abruptly) to the killer's perspective. We might expect to see a monster at work, and we wouldn't be wrong. Noonan's Francis Dolarhyde is one of the great screen villains, a sadist who views murder as a near-orgasmic celebration of self. Still, Mann never lets us forget Dolarhyde's core humanity, highlighting the ways that draw him back to the light: a increasing awareness of his own mental illness, or his tenderness towards a blind coworker (a very young Joan Allen). Ultimately, Mann is a realist. Just as Pacino and De Niro were powerless to break from their archetypes, so do Graham and Dolarhyde ultimately fulfill their respective roles as hero and villain, and in a blistering shootout that makes iconic use of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." But they do so with an understanding of the other person, and that level of empathy is rare to police thrillers, even if it is Quintessential Michael Mann. One of the great films of the 1980s, and the best adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel (that said, it only just edges out Bryan Fuller's surreallist television masterpiece Hannibal).
Jeffrey Kauffman called the film "relentlessly stylish in the typical Mann way… [and] as disturbing as The Silence of the Lambs, albeit in a completely different fashion... Fans of the Hannibal television series who haven't previously seen Manhunter will find it a fairly comfortable fit, probably more so than The Silence of the Lambs, for both the obvious fact that it offers Graham instead of Clarice Starling, but also because it tends to focus on Graham's psychological scars as well as his increasing tendency to become rather like his prey. In this tale, Lecter (I'm going to use the 'preferred' spelling despite the film's choice) has been imprisoned for several years due to Graham's investigatory prowess, though Graham is much the worse for wear due to the after effects of that very investigation... The film's famous set piece involving a journalist learning the hard way not to cross Dolarhyde remains one of the most riveting moments in the entire Lecter canon, and certainly in any of Mann's films...Mann's stylish visuals keep Manhunter an unusually 'scenic' horror thriller, but it's the gravitas of the performances that really makes this film so visceral."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a new HD upgrade of Robert Altman's late-career masterwork The Player. When this caustic showbiz satire appeared in 1992, critics and audiences rejoiced, but not necessarily for the reason you'd expect; most praise centered around Altman himself, and the way he'd used the one-two punch of this and 1993's brilliant Short Cuts to emerge from the wilderness that was the 1980s filmmaking landscape (1988's Tanner '88 and parts of Popeye excepted). All of that is true, and necessary to furthering the great director's legend. The Player and Short Cuts did begin a late-stage career renaissance that, at its best, rivals Altman's 1970s run. However, that discussion undermines (if only a little) how damn good The Player is on its own merits. Working with Michael Tolkin (he adapted The Player from his own novel, and if you ask me, his screenplay is better than his very good book), Altman produced a view of Hollywood that he only could have derived from years of resisting the same system. For Altman, movies are autonomous financial conglomerates, synergistic packages of money and celebrity that allow art little purchase. In this world, the vapid studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is king, except he finds himself beset by forces both within and without: a conniving junior executive (Peter Gallagher) who's hoping to make his name on a trendy "no stars" pitch (delivered, in hilarious fashion, by Dean Stockwell and Richard E. Grant's wonderful nincompoop duo) and, somewhat more chillingly, a pissed-off, unseen writer who's all too willing to suggest that Griffin pay for the sins of Hollywood with his life. How Griffin ultimately reacts provides The Player with its most bitter thrills. Without going too far into spoilers, Griffin's quest for self-preservation leads him into an...interesting relationship with both Vincent D'Onofrio's self-loathing screenwriter as well as D'Onofrio's beyond-opaque girlfriend (Greta Scacchi), yet what stings the most is the bracing dose of nihilism that Altman brings to the scene. You've seen films like The Player before - it occupies the same corner of Hollywood noir as Sunset Boulevard or Ace in the Hole, movies where the pursuit of fame and fortune lead people to some awful actions - except earlier iterations apply a modicum of moral relativism. Good will out, and the evil do suffer. Not so here. As Altman sees it, assuming you make everyone rich, you can do just about anything, no matter how horrible or self-serving your actions are. That's a message more in line with No Country for Old Men than with, I dunno, Singin' in the Rain. That said, as despairing as The Player is, it's also consistently, mordantly funny. Tolkin's dialogue is filled with great zingers (most courtesy of Fred Ward and Whoopi Goldberg as, respectively, the studio's head of security and a no-B.S. homicide detective), and Altman takes pains to create this insular, funhouse world by loading the film with celebrity cameos. Some are small (Jack Lemmon and Jeff Goldblum appear in blink-and-you'll-miss-'em spots), some are bigger (we get a nice movie-within-a-movie bit from Scott Glenn and Lily Tomlin), and some? Again, no spoilers, except to say that Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts get to play the single greatest celebrity cameos I've ever seen, and yes, that's including Ocean's Twelve. If The Player isn't the best film Altman ever made, it's certainly in the top three.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "The film is loaded with stars that don't do a whole lot of acting. There are a few pre-scripted juicy lines that pop up here and there, but the majority of the chatter and attitudes on display are authentic. It is quite the circus. These people are so detached from the real world that it frequently feels like they are actually sleepwalking though their lives. The only time when they appear awake is when they get hurt or lose someone special. It is hard to feel sorry for anyone that voluntarily enters the circus and endures the abuse. Altman finds some humor in the awkward contrasts that define the place, but there are no innocent souls there. The circus is full of hypocritical chameleons that are convinced that on the road to success there should be no rules protecting the weak. Mill is a seasoned player who has reached the top. There are bigger players that he must be careful with, but he feels comfortable where he is. His goal is to remain there for as long as possible and walk away only when he is ready. The film chronicles his maneuvers to preserve his power while other players try to force him out of his comfort zone. The fluid cinematography makes the film look strikingly modern. It is a bit like an unedited documentary that could end up being about a lot of different things -- a murder case, a paranoid executive, the quiet revolution in a studio with big ambitions, or the fractured and dangerous reality of hypocritical Hollywood. It is a difficult film to profile, but absolutely fascinating to behold."