For the week of July 4th, Warner Home Entertainment is releasing a more stripped-down (in terms of packaging) Ultimate Collector's Edition of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy. On a film-by-film basis, these retellings of the Batman story demonstrate what could happen if an auteur like Nolan married his unique vision to an iconic superhero narrative with a minimum of artistic compromises. Take the first film in the series, 2005's Batman Begins. Yes, this first entry lacks some of the assurance of the later Dark Knight ventures, especially once we enter a second half that hews to conventions, pitting Batman (Christian Bale, in the role that might define him, whether he wants it to or not) against a villain (Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow) with a ludicrously convoluted plan to destroy Gotham City (something something fear toxin in the water). However, as a corrective to what Joel Schumacher wrought in the overly campy Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, Batman Begins proves invaluable, letting Nolan reintroduce a sense of gravity to Bruce Wayne's long saga without losing any discovery or adventure. That first hour, which follows Wayne as he travels the globe looking for some greater purpose after his parents' deaths, remains one of the franchise's most indelible sequences, and it lets Nolan indulge in some twisty editorial gambits, cutting back and forth between past and present in an effort to reflect Wayne's fractured psyche (shades of Memento abound). That said, Nolan would plunge even deeper into the dark, psychologically nuanced world he'd created with the film's blockbuster follow-up, the Academy Award-winning The Dark Knight, which pits Batman against his greatest foe, the terrifyingly unpredictable Joker (Heath Ledger, in what might be his finest performance). Ledger is so good that he's part of the reason we excuse The Dark Knight for indulging in the same exact sin as Tim Burton's first Batman: namely, ceding more screentime from the nominal hero to the far more exciting Big Bad. But Nolan and his co-screenwriter (and brother!) Jonathan Nolan deserve equal credit - The Dark Knight might look and act like the Heat of superhero movies, but it's also a grand-scale morality play, casting Batman and the Joker as ideological absolutes warring over the soul of flawed, human district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). Anyone familiar with the comics knows roughly what will transpire, but Nolan never condescends to expectations, giving Dent's destiny the weight of great tragedy. To date, The Dark Knight deserves consideration as possibly the best comic-book movie ever made, so it's little wonder that so many found its follow-up, 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, lacking by comparison. The Dark Knight Rises doesn't have the same relentless focus, especially in the poky first half (the majority of which details Bruce Wayne's retirement, reentry, exodus, and re-reentry into the superhero game, and that description should read as awkward as the narrative flow in the finished film), which tries to meld Dickensian melodrama (Nolan has stated that Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities was his single biggest influence) to populist action with only intermittent success. However, Nolan's gift for spectacle reaches a grand apex here, staging massive action sequences with aplomb and selling us on the reality of one of Batman's gaudiest and least realistic nemeses (Tom Hardy, who plays Bane like a raw, exposed nerve). Yet he still hasn't lost his touch for intimate nuance. While he loses track of Bruce Wayne's story somewhat, he makes two wonderful additions - Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's dogged, resourceful Gotham cop John Blake - that further humanize and enrich what might otherwise be an empty spectacle. The last hour of The Dark Knight Rises is often emotionally devastating in all the right ways, and although some question Batman's ultimate fate, Nolan scores a last shot that is thematically perfect. While pictures like Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice try to adapt Nolan's gritty, more realistic aesthetic (to increasingly diminished results), even the more visually and tonally disparate comic-book movies released in the Dark Knight Trilogy's wake benefitted from its prestige. These three legitimized the genre, so much so that something like Captain America: Civil War gains so much more cultural significance than it might otherwise. Plus, taken as a whole, one could make the argument for this series as the most consistently excellent movie trilogy ever made. Your mileage may vary, but riches abound here.
From Kino comes a special "42nd Anniversary Edition" of Joseph Sargent's classic 1974 thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Despite its reputation as a pulse-pounding actioner (a rep partially earned through its association to Tony Scott's underrated and far more visceral 2009 remake), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is also a pitch-perfect black comedy about bureaucracy at its most inept. Sure, the meat focuses on the interplay between Walter Matthau's beleaguered MTA chief and Robert Shaw's criminal mastermind after Shaw hijacks a New York City subway car, but the whole reason that the hostage crisis occurs in the first place is because of Martin Balsam's flu-ridden and laid-off transit worker. He's dissatisfied with his job, gets fired, and then provides the technical know-how behind Shaw's steely muscle. And the heroes aren't much better! Matthau and his superior officer - played by the incomparable Jerry Stiller - approach the hostage crisis with measured enthusiasm, to say the least; the phrase, "They don't pay me enough for this," comes to mind. And the mayor won't even consider paying the ransom until his glib deputy (Tony Roberts, my favorite 1970s character actor) reminds him of the potential voting boost within the different city divisions, opining that "The Times is going to support you. The News is going to knock you. The Post will take both sides at the same time. The rich will support you, likewise the blacks, and the Puerto Ricans won't give a s***." That zinger is just one of many in Peter Stone's wiseass script, which finds time for one of the hostages to ask how much the ransom is because as he sees it, "A person likes to know his worth." The gallows humor is a bold choice, but so is the movie. The thing mixes genres, douses itself with social commentary, and comes up looking as fresh and unaffected as anything produced within the Hollywood studio. Director Joseph Sargent never made a movie this good; other than Jaws, neither did Robert Shaw. Dog Day Afternoon would not exist without this one, and Spike Lee's Inside Man borrows whole cloth from its urban barbs and racial unease. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the best kind of masterpiece – an unassuming one.
Brian Orndorf called the film "smoothly designed, building tension as activity swirls inside the Transit Authority Command Center, watching Garber [Matthau] try to pacify Blue [Shaw] and manage a rescue operation while surrounded by bewildered, bickering co-workers (the supporting cast is sublime, including Jerry Stiller, Kenneth McMillan, Tony Roberts, Dick O'Neill, and James Broderick). However, instead of focusing solely on communication efforts between the men, the script spreads to all areas of the crime, maintaining a refreshing sense of humor as cops swarm the area, the mayor is pulled out of slumber to comment on the situation, and the money drop is arranged, necessitating a heated negotiation over time as Garber has to move a million bucks in a hurry. Sargent adds some action-oriented flavoring to Pelham, with a mid-movie cash shipment turned into a race through NYC, and Blue is pushed to make good on his violent threats when the police move in too close to the train. Additional pressure is supplied by the crooks, with Grey an unsavory type who enjoys menacing the helpless, and Green is cursed with a persistent cold that plays a crucial part in the story. Matthau is magnificent as Garber, as hangdog as he gets playing a man determined to see justice served, but the real hero of the production is composer David Shire, who contributes one of the all-time top film scores with Pelham, bringing jazzy sensibilities and a driving beat to the picture, which carries the viewing experience in a particularly miraculous way. It's sensational work, aided by Owen Roizman's gritty, streetwise cinematography, which maintains a visual rhythm to the movie to compliment the aural one. While technical achievements are subtle, they're near-perfect, finding sound and set design achievements memorable throughout, adding a lived-in quality to the effort that keeps Pelham humble and direct."
Universal Studios Home Entertainment's By the Sea also hits Blu-ray this week. I'd be lying if I called director Angelina Jolie's latest film anything other than a misfire. A story about an unhappy couple (Jolie and Brad Pitt) who retreat to the French coast to repair their fractured marriage, By the Sea plays like Antonioni-lite. It so desperately wants to be L'Avventura or La Notte, except Jolie's Hollywood background proves detrimental - she's ultimately too willing to answer questions that Antonioni would have left frustratingly opaque, and that's when she's not too busy trafficking in clichés that Hemingway exhausted even before Antonioni. Pitt's depressed writer is an alcoholic, naturally, while Jolie's society woman self-medicates and barely speaks to her clearly aching husband; Jolie also throws in a lusty young French couple (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) to contrast against her leads's emotional void, and the sexual intrigues that play out between both parties either need more heat (think Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers) or some kind of genre twist (Dominik Moll's With a Friend Like Harry) to elevate them beyond Jolie's rather staid handling. Yet By the Sea is also an interesting misfire . With the exception of her well intentioned-but-too conventional Unbroken, Jolie has gravitated towards defiantly adult properties that allow their protagonists the freedom to be ambiguous. In the Land of Blood and Honey used Serbian genocide as the backdrop for the profoundly uneasy sexual-emotional relationship between its main characters, and By the Sea takes a similarly jaundiced approach to male-female unions. Sure, its leads might have movie-star glamour (and DP Christian Berger shoots Pitt and Jolie like they're in the most gorgeous perfume ad ever), but these surfaces barely mask their deep ennui. If Jolie's script is a little quick to resort to pat psychoanalytics (the reason behind their malaise is way too easy to ascertain), we still get a charge watching her and Pitt flail emotionally. Maybe we're projecting too much of the "real" them on the characters, and maybe that's unfair. But Jolie doesn't discourage us from doing that, and the more I think about it, the braver it seems.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing the 1979 action-comedy The In-Laws to Blu-ray. At first glance, Criterion's support of this particular title seems almost as mystifying as its early support for Michael Bay (consider The Rock and Armageddon, lest you doubt me). The In-Laws is a pretty generic buddy-comedy, one that sends Alan Arkin's fussbudget dentist on an improbable adventure with Peter Falk's slobby (and possibly insane) spy, and although director Arthur Hiller helms the proceedings with a certain workmanlike charm, nothing here screams "auteur sensibilities." That said, I'd wager that The In-Laws deserves the Criterion bump, if only for one reason: it is so very funny. There's something to be said for any populist Hollywood farce that entertains without pandering, and The In-Laws is just that. Screenwriter Andrew Bergman helped pen Mel Brooks's classic 1973 comedy Blazing Saddles, and he brings some of that film's lunatic flair to The In-Laws, particularly once the great Richard Libertini enters the picture as a profoundly crazy dictator whose closest relationship is with the puppet on his own hand. However, like Martin Brest's Midnight Run (a film that shares some vital DNA with this one) these buddy pictures are only as good as the main buddies, and Arkin and Falk make an inspired pairing. They play so well off one another, and although neither actor is outside his comfort zone - Arkin the a panicky nebbish, Falk the genial wild card - their comfort with their characters and with each other starts feeling like comic jazz, so improvisatory and experimental the two are. The best compliment I can give The In-Laws is that at its best, it feels like the two are making everything up as they go along, and that's exactly as it should be.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "the action can be quite entertaining, but Arkin and Falk's performances essentially make the film the minor classic that it is. The two are absolutely terrific. There is natural chemistry between them that produces quite an atmosphere and gradually changes the entire complexion of the story. For example, seemingly silly episodes become show-off pieces in which the two actors literally go all out on their characters. There are also episodes with some supposedly casual improvisations that become unusually competitive and as a result absolutely fascinating to behold. Then during the final act Libertini also joins the stars and further spices up the action with an entirely different kind of humor. "