For the week of May 6th, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Zootopia to Blu-ray. For more than half its runtime, this animated comedy is as traditional as you might expect from the Mouse House, playing as a mismatched buddy-cop adventure, of sorts, that pairs Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), an optimistic police officer and rabbit, with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a wisecracking con-fox, as they investigate a series of disappearances in the titular city, which exists because of a fragile peace between predators and prey. And had Zootopia maintained that safe course, it still would be a worthwhile piece of family entertainment. It's often beautifully animated, with great vocal performances (Goodwin and Bateman make a great team, and they receive excellent support from the likes of Idris Elba, J.K. Simmons, Jenny Slate, Maurice LaMarche, John DiMaggio, Octavia Spencer, and Alan Tudyk, who's quickly becoming Disney's good-luck charm for their animation department, considering the way he's galvanized the likes of Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen) and a steady stream of clever verbal and visual gags, the best of which is the extended sequence where Judy and Nick have to suffer through the most hellish bureaucratic nightmare possible at the DMV (it's run by literal sloths, naturally). However, as Judy and Nick continue their investigation, they arrive at a place that...well, seems a little uncomfortably resonant with today's political climate. After the disappearances, the city's natural predators find themselves under intense media scrutiny as protestors call for their expulsion in order to "[get] back the Zootopia [they] love." Now, co-directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore (who's responsible for Wreck-It Ralph and two all-timers of The Simpsons and Futurama: "Marge Vs. The Monorail" and "Jurassic Bark," respectively) claim they weren't influenced by any specific political candidates - and given that Zootopia has been in development for years, I tend to believe them - but the unintentional correlations between the film's themes and some of the current anti-immigrant sentiments are interesting to consider, even if they're not fully developed. This is, after all, a four-quadrant studio movie, so any asides towards political relevancy all-but vanish by the time the (predictably) happy ending arrives (and if there's one serious complaint I have about Zootopia, it's that narratively, the resolution and unraveling of the central conspiracy isn't as interesting as it might otherwise be; for a film that lifts so much from L.A. Confidential and Chinatown, it does so in a less inspired way than Rango or Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Disney needs to sell tickets, and I can't blame them, especially when the film itself is as enjoyable as this one is. Still, Zootopia exists as a reminder, if only a little, that art doesn't exist in a vacuum: the outside world always finds a way in.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "doesn't really explore new and exciting themes, so the movie is better enjoyed for its characters, locations, and, to a lesser extent, its technical qualities. The story is more than adequate in framing the movie's quirky fun and setting a stage through which it can explore those themes, but the film shines brightest elsewhere. Judy and Nick are strong characters, more similar than one would think going in, with largely parallel arcs that move apart but come closer together again as their adventures reveal who they are below the surface, particularly as Nick's backstory is revealed. There's no shortage of supportive thematic imagery - the fox repellant Judy's parents give her being the most obvious - that helps prop up the movie's overt themes that it chooses to wear on its sleeve rather than more subtly woven into the story. That's arguably the movie's biggest weakness, but there's at least enough fun around it all to make up for the central bluntness and parallels to today's headlines (xenophobia, personal identity, adherence to societal norms vs. individuality, etc.) that adults, for sure, will grasp early and often. But the story and themes allow the movie to journey through some really great moments and have a lot of fun exploring its world, a world that, even physically, is all too familiar but reworked for the contemporary, clothes wearing, headphone listening, car driving, busy-busy-busy biped animal kingdom."
As if to convey the scope and variety that animated cinema can offer, Paramount Home Media Distribution is giving the stop-motion drama Anomalisa a Blu-ray showing. The film represents the union of filmmakers Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman; while Johnson specializes in stop-motion animation, he tends to favor more idiosyncratic options like Adult Swim's Moral Orel or the "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" episode of Community (in fact, Community masterminds Dino Stamatopoulos and Dan Harmon helped produce Anomalisa), all of which makes him a perfect partner for Kaufman, whose boldly comic and fantastic efforts at mapping the human psyche (in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York) have solidified his reputation as a cinematic surrealist on par with Luis Buñuel. So it goes with Anomalisa. Its subject: customer-service expert Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), who travels to Cincinnati to promote his new book but cannot escape the depths of his own misery. Michael hates his family and feels alienated from everyone else, yet he finds the potential for hope when he meets Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh, in her second great performance of 2015), a mildly disfigured young woman who's both deeply appreciative of and deeply confused by Michael's intense affection. Kaufman's screenplay is characteristically brilliant. No one is better at conveying insecurity and self-loathing in a way that's still approachable and funny, and he gives Michael and Lisa such depths. On one hand, we understand that Michael is seeing what he needs to see in Lisa, and so we question his grand designs for their relationship. On the other hand, Lisa is so warm and approachable and human that we understand his affection. We grow to want the best for her, even if that's not being with Michael. Now, you might read that description and wonder why this story needs to be animated - Zootopia certainly seems to merit the freedom and elasticity of the format. But that's where Johnson's particular artistry shines. Stop-motion animation is defined by its constraints - it takes so long to animate simple actions, and its animators work from maquettes with rigid physicalities - in the same way that Michael feels constrained by his surroundings. He's always aware that things around him are artificial, and so are we: Johnson and Kaufman stylize Michael's world so we never forget we're watching a cartoon, from their decision to leave the face-plate lines on the characters (most contemporary stop-motion features digitally remove these lines) to their having character actor Tom Noonan (Synecdoche, New York, Manhunter) voice all the characters who aren't Michael or Lisa. In a world where everything seems fake and uniform, of course Lisa would make the impression she does. One of the year's best films.
Martin Liebman wrote that "crafting the movie with puppets actually helps to reinforce the story's themes about identity and perception. While Anomalisa is worth a watch for its technical workmanship, the film uses its scale and characters to great effect and, eventually, the puppetry gives way to the themes and the audience embraces story over visuals, context over flesh and bone. The work here is remarkable. Built to 1/6 scale, everything looks amazing, from characters and locations to small touches like ice cubes, a meter in a taxi, or a phone in a room. Everything in the film represents a clear labor of love for the material and the craftsmanship necessary to make it live and breathe. The world is amazingly well detailed, down to rain on windows, condensation on a bathroom mirror, even a urine stream that looks remarkably fluid and lifelike. Characters are a little jerky by design, but again it's the voice talents of David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan that help overcome the puppetry's inherent limitations and make the movie soar. The voice talent is remarkable, with the leads giving an incredible sense of life, self, and purpose to the characters and Noonan doing a remarkable job of voicing any number of support characters with the same rhythm necessary to accentuate Michael's perception of the world."
Also from Paramount is Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. From its trades announcement, this violent siege picture found itself under much public scrutiny. Michael Bay's name alone brings all sorts of negative baggage (and really, can you blame anyone who had to suffer through Pearl Harbor or any of the Transformers movies?), but couple his dubious cultural cachet with one of the most politically incendiary tragedies of recent years? I know a lot of people were worried that Bay would turn the film into some jingoistic campaign platform (don't know if you were aware, but it is an election year), yet most serious cineastes just didn't want him to apply his bombast and customary...ahem, lack of subtlety to such a sensitive subject. However, in many ways, 13 Hours is the biggest movie surprise of 2016. It's rare you can say that Bay is the perfect person to direct something (his talents seem best served by beer commercials and sociopathic toy cartoons), but screenwriter Chuck Hogan's script actually plays to Bay's strengths. Whatever you think of him artistically or politically, Bay remains a distinctive visual stylist - he's a maximalist who specializes in the accretion of chaos - and 13 Hours presents, for the most part, a brutal combat situation that gets more intense as the fighting continues. Even before the film erupts into one bloody firefight after another (pitched primarily between the U.S. Ambassador's compound and the Benghazi CIA operations base), Bay keeps the tension cranked as high as he can. Benghazi circa 2012 was one of the most dangerous places in the world, a fact that turns even menial recon ops into potential nightmare material for the movie's primary CIA contractors (John Krasinski, Max Martini, David Denman, Dominic Fumusa, Pablo Schreiber, and James Badge Dale, giving the film's best performance). Working with DP Dion Beebe (Collateral) and editor Pietro Scalia (Gladiator), Bay creates harsh, discordant images, with the propulsive editing and jittery digital camerawork keeping us from getting our bearings, and if the aesthetic gets a little disorienting (a common complaint lobbed at Bay), that's how it should be. As the audience, we should be on our toes the whole time: we should always be wondering whether a random passerby means well or ill. Once the shooting does start, it's almost a relief, if only because Bay's protagonists are so freakishly competent at handling themselves in combat. Sure, their skill (and the way Bay fetishizes their bodies) is reminiscent of the military stuff in, say, Transformers, but it makes more sense here because a) the Benghazi contractors are former Navy SEALS, and those guys can do almost anything (and I'm not being glib), and b) they actually did hold back hostile Libyan forces for an ungodly period of time. As with his great Pain & Gain, Bay's relative fidelity to the truth helps us swallow what might seem clichéd or patently ridiculous in his non-docudramas. Now, regarding the film's politics...that's more complicated, in good and bad ways. Good: Bay affords the Libyan characters more humanity than you might expect, and he acknowledges that the situation there requires far more nuance than simple military interference. A blackly funny running joke is that the Benghazi political system is so broken that even in the heat of battle, the CIA can never quite tell who's on their side and who's against them. Bad: you wish Bay could have afforded all his characters that same level of nuance. As compelling as his six heroes are, Bay presents their CIA superiors in baldly one-dimensional terms, from the section chief (David Costabile) who shirks away from every tough decision to an arrogant intelligence agent (Alexia Barlier) who almost never makes the right call. But ultimately, those are small quibbles in what is otherwise a frighteningly tense and exciting war movie. When Bay's characters are holed up in the CIA compound and fighting back waves of attackers, we could be watching an updated version of Zulu or Assault on Precinct 13, and that's very good company to be in.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman noted that "the one area where the movie stumbles, however, is in how it draws its characters. Introductions are quick and, particularly as night approaches and the battles begin, the sheer chaos leaves many of the characters in a scramble. It's not always clear as to who is where and doing what. The maelstrom of gunfire, quick cuts, darkness, and rapidly evolving landscape often leave the audience struggling to keep up. In that way, Bay manages to recreate a frenzied chaos. On the other hand, it diminishes some of the work the film previously accomplished with its characterizations. The same holds true in many scenes for the characters as they struggle to determine friend or foe. The film uses the language barrier to excellent effect as roadblocks, convoys, and clusters of armed men are often ambiguous to the men, whether they're the friendly '17 Feb' fighters or the attackers who wish them harm. 13 Hours creates an enormously effective fog of war, though whether it's too effective for the greater narrative is up for debate. The one constant, however, is why. 'Why' is a question that looms large over the movie, largely as it pertains to the stand down order and the inability of those on the ground to secure reinforcements from nearby quick reaction forces, call in armed air support, or even flyovers to, maybe, scare the enemy from conducting further attacks. That frustration is tangible and paramount to the story, and Bay's ability to weave that frustration so deeply into the already frenzied narrative only helps solidify the movie's mission of recreating the night in all of its physical and mental anguish alike."
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes the Coen Brothers' 1950s-set Hail, Caesar!. The Coens make two kinds of movies - significant works (No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man) and larks (Intolerable Cruelty, The Hudsucker Proxy) - and Hail, Caesar! falls squarely in the lark category. Ostensibly, this showbiz satire centers around Capitol Pictures "fixer" Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as he tries to triage the many studio-related problems that arise in a twenty-four-hour period - most notably the Communist-related disappearance of dimwitted megastar Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, doing a wicked parody of lantern-jawed matinee idols like Charlton Heston or Victor Mature) - but really, you get the sense that Joel and Ethan came up with a bunch of sketches set during Hollywood's Golden Age, and then they cobbled together a loose narrative framework to contain the gags. Even for the Coens, Hail, Caesar! feels less tethered to story than normal, and they made The Big Lebowski, which by comparison plays like Inception. Yet as thin as the plot is, the film still works - it might be just a collection of sketches, but what a collection it is! Several of their setpieces rank among the funniest things they've ever concocted: an asinine religious discussion that Mannix presides over with a rabbi, a priest, and two ministers (big props to character actor Robert Picardo as the rabbi, whose mounting exasperation with his Gentile peers almost steals the whole movie); a dead-perfect Busby Berkeley parody spotlighting Scarlett Johansson's beautiful-but-crass starlet; everything with Clooney's glorious nincompoop, especially his unquestioning devotion towards his Commie captors and his attempts to convey wonder while shooting a Quo Vadis-esque Biblical epic ("Squint against the grandeur" might be one of the Coens' most sublimely goofy lines); the extended verbal tête-à-tête waged between Ralph Fiennes' Vincente Minnelli proxy and Alden Ehrenreich's beyond-earnest cowboy star; and, best of all, the seven-minute "No Dames" dance number that simultaneously lampoons the unintentional homoeroticism present in so many "shore leave" pictures from the 1940s AND acts as a virtuosic celebration of Channing Tatum's song-and-dance skills (if anyone deserves to be the next Gene Kelly, it's Tatum). To say more would give away too many of the film's surprises - the previews already spoil too much, including a couple of cameos that would have been funnier if left unannounced - but if you're at all a fan of Old Hollywood and its attendant foibles/treasures, you'll find a lot to love about Hail, Caesar! It helps, too, that there's just enough meat on the bone here to keep Hail, Caesar! from becoming as insubstantial as Burn After Reading or The Ladykillers. As willing as the Coens are content to mock Tinseltown, they're just as quick to acknowledge that there's no business like it; Brolin's Mannix is a devout Catholic whose many studio labors attain a Christ-like resonance that's both ludicrous and borderline moving, especially when compared to the temptations of a Lockheed-Martin rep hoping to recruit Mannix by espousing the atom bomb's destructive power. No one dies making a movies (although a few people come close here), so Hail, Caesar! generates an affection for the moviemaking process that never curdles into, say, the bile of Hollywood satires like The Player. This might be their sweetest, most loving movie as a result, and you need look no further for proof of that than Ehrenreich's Hobie Doyle. On the surface, Doyle seems like another in a long line of epic Coen morons, but the more time we spend with him - and in many ways, Hail, Caesar! is Hobie's movie - the more we realize he's utterly genuine and kind, and about four times smarter than people give him credit. He exists in the same rarified sphere as Fargo's Sheriff Marge: both are wholly decent and good. Leave it to the Coens to bury that kind of surprise in their otherwise poisoned pill.
Martin Liebman praised the film, noting that "Joel and Ethan Coen didn't think up Hail, Caesar! overnight. The duo has reportedly had the idea in their back pockets for well over a decade, a time in which they've only solidified their legacy and earned the right to make a movie like this, something that's more catering to their own whimsy than something with a broader appeal. The movie certainly plays with no shortage of apparent self-reflection not so much on the filmmakers themselves but rather the good and bad of Hollywood nostalgia, larger ideas and, on the flip side, more tangible angles within the business proper. It's also an homage to the classic stylings of a bygone era, a lovingly recreated period piece with enthusiasm to spare, even when the movie doesn't always finds its way down a more traditional straight-and-narrow narrative path. The script isn't so much aimless as it is wayward. It takes a look at several different characters and situations without much of a uniform, A-to-B-to-C approach. But that's part of the charm. It's a broad stroke overview peppered with peepholes that allow audiences a taste of inside baseball and a glimpse at some of the shenanigans that take place on the set, in the offices, and beyond. It's a fun picture, a little frustrating at times but a satisfying venture considering the sum of its parts."
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing a new, extended version of Ridley Scott's great The Martian to Blu-ray. Scott's had a rough go of it in recent years; while I enjoyed his esoteric, hateful morality play The Counselor, you have to struggle to find good things about Exodus: Gods and Kings or Robin Hood, and the less said about Prometheus, the better. Not so with The Martian: this wonderful sci-fi adventure is Scott's most purely enjoyable film since 2007's American Gangster. At its core, The Martian is a full-length version of that scene in Apollo 13 where Mission Control tries to engineer a quick solution to make a square air-filter cartridge fit into a cylindrical port, and I mean that as a compliment. Of the thousand ways to mine drama from the story of a Mars astronaut (a perfectly cast Matt Damon) accidentally marooned on the Red Planet, Scott and his screenwriter Drew Goddard (of Cabin in the Woods fame) follow the same grounded approach as Andy Weir's source material, focusing on all the issues that their hero and NASA (personified by the likes of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Mackenzie Davis, Sean Bean, Kristen Wiig, Benedict Wong, and a scene-stealing Donald Glover) must tackle in real-time. At times, we're looking at catastrophic system failures, whether it's an airlock breach or a hydrogen-based explosion, but more often than not Damon's Mark Watney faces less sexy indignities, like using his own waste to grow food or figuring out how to field-strip a landing rover of all but its most essential components. Thanks to Scott's muscular, kinetic direction, these smaller challenges become just as suspenseful as any Michael Bay scale adventure - Scott and DP Dariusz Wolski employ a barrage of digital cameras (some large, some GoPros-sized) to put us as close to Mark's predicament as possible - even when relying, in large part, on hard science and ground-level pragmatics. Only the big finale resorts to action-movie heroics, but Goddard's script is smart enough to find the inherent comedy in some of Mark's big Hail-Mary attempts. That last bit is The Martian's biggest surprise - it is very, very funny. Goddard cut his teeth writing for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and his dialogue has that series' same kind of wiseass élan. Glover might as well be playing a character from Community (my biggest complaint is that he isn't in the movie more), and for all his heroism, Damon's character remains a perpetual goofball (although Damon is so good that we realize much of his ironic front masks real panic and self-doubt). To his credit, Scott allows the humor to breathe, with little of the self-seriousness that's plagued, oh, every movie he's ever made. For all the drama that Watney faces (and The Martian is a real nail-biter), it's a real kick and, in its own wry, confident way, one of the two best sci-fi properties Scott has ever helmed.
Finally, Broad Green Pictures' financial melodrama 99 Homes goes wide this week (previously, it was just a Best Buy-exclusive). We've seen a lot of films recently that deal with the state of the American financial market: for better or worse, the most high-profile ones seem to adopt a certain histrionic tone, whether we're looking at The Wolf of Wall Street's apocalyptic excess or The Big Short's blackly comic moral didacticism, and that heightened register makes sense, if we're talking about the titans of finance who treat their positions and influence the same way a Roman king would. But the financial crisis also impacted a lot of regular people, and 99 Homes deserves credit for returning the focus to the downtrodden American public. That's writer-director Ramin Bahrani's M.O.; with just four previous films under his belt (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo, and the racing drama At Any Price), Bahrani has established himself as a particularly deft and sympathetic chronicler of America's fringes, of those people and places that threaten to get swallowed up in our cultural sprawl. So it goes with 99 Homes, which personifies the financial crisis through unemployed single father Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield). Nash is one of many Floridians evicted after the housing market, but he finds salvation through an unlikely source: Rick Carver (Michael Shannon, giving the latest in a string of predictably brilliant performances), a coldly pragmatic real-estate operator who enlists Nash as his evictions assistant. The beauty of 99 Homes is that Bahrani is able to use this comparatively small-scaled drama to merge the literal with the figurative. In many ways, we could be watching a docudrama, given the specificity of detail and environment; Carver's foreclosure methods are ripped-from-the-headlines (and scarily so), and even though Bahrani shot the film in New Orleans (it's set in Orlando), he and ace cinematographer Bobby Bukowski give the proceedings the mucky, humid texture of the Florida mainland. However, these realistic elements end up serving a morality play that is far more allegorical in nature. Garfield's downtrodden everyman is stuck between two poles, and it's telling that neither is particularly good - if he works for Carver, Dennis will make lots of money but lose his soul (and Shannon plays the part like it's old Scratch himself, his crisp suits and gleaming .45 pistol signifying Carver as a figure of menace and seduction), and if he doesn't, his family will starve. We're a long way from the relative clarity of something like Oliver Stone's Wall Street (where it boils down to a choice between Gordon Gekko's devil or Martin Sheen's angel), and that's the point: things are a whole lot worse now than in 1987, and the only options left are bad ones. Bahrani renders this struggle so vividly that it's a bit of shame when he loses control of the material at the end. As with At Any Price, he has trouble handling melodrama once it hits a certain pitch, and 99 Homes's climax displays many of the same flaws as that earlier racing drama. Luckily, the rest of the movie is much better, and on the whole, it's a bracing look at a problem that is very much in development.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wrote that "America certainly needs a movie like 99 Homes, which provides a frightening reminder of daily life for the less fortunate, watching good, solid families mangle financial battles and suffer crippling losses, with suicide showcased here as popular option for the hopeless. Bahrani has a chance to pore over both sides of the argument, inspecting the plight of the hardworking homeowner who can't catch a break, trying to keep children fed and the lights on, and there's Car[v]er's way, with the numbed professional working the system in full, trying to communicate to clients the pitfalls of debt. However, 99 Homes is not an academic study of the housing crisis, it's a dramatic take on it, and Bahrani is ready to vilify Car[v]er for his predatory ways, turning the character into an immaculately tailored, vaping ghoul who gets off on the power the job provides him, barking orders at his minions while juggling two women and multiple homes he's preparing to flip. Shannon is terrific in the role, but he's visibly trying to keep Car[v]er on a short leash, fighting Bahrani on broader points of evildoing, maintaining a perspective of longstanding experience (he's heard all the sob stories) as the screenplay gradually fits the real estate agent for a black hat. Car[v]er is no saint, but the realism of his slick ways (scoring properties with a 'cash for keys' program that gives underwater homeowners a fast way out of their problems) is much more interesting than the evil amplification the screenplay ultimately gives him."