For the week of July 11th, Lions Gate and A24 Home Entertainment are bringing Jeremy Saulnier's riveting thriller Green Room to Blu-ray. Hands down, this is the most gripping and relentless American film I've seen all year, and that's saying something, considering Saulnier's track record. His previous film, 2013's Blue Ruin, was a deliberately paced revenge drama that unfolded like a nightmare, given how cannily Saulnier meted out suspense (there are three or four sequences in Blue Ruin that merit comparison with the best of Hitchcock or the Coen Brothers). But Green Room is even more impressive in the regard, and it shows that Saulnier can broaden his scope without sacrificing tension or character nuance. His protagonists are the Ain't Rights (Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat, and the late Anton Yelchin), a struggling punk band mounting a beyond-anemic tour of the Pacific Northwest, and it's a testament to Saulnier's gifts that we'd happily watch a straightforward drama about these four musicians. Saulnier has such a clear-eyed understanding of the punk milieu and the demands of the road, and his leads are so immediately engaging that we're eager to follow them anywhere, whether it's siphoning gas to make it to the next town or playing an abbreviated set for no one in particular in the middle of a small Mexican restaurant. And thus the trap is set - after about twenty minutes, the Ain't Rights get invited to play a gig at an isolated Neo-Nazi bar, and...well, the Ain't Rights find themselves barricaded in the venue's green room against a horde of angry white supremacists (personified, oddly enough, by Patrick Stewart, who's slightly miscast but no less compelling). To say that things get very bad, very fast, would be the understatement to end all understatements. I'm loath to spoil too much even though Green Room, thankfully, doesn't hinge on ridiculous twists or last-minute reveals: minus one moment, Saulnier plays fair with his audience (all while subjecting his immensely likable leads to ever-more horrifying trials), and even that aforementioned "cheat" ends up delivering a brutal jolt to the heroes (and to us). Rather, it's because Saulnier generates thrills from logical, exceedingly desperate moves and countermoves that the less you know, the better. He immerses us tick-deep in this siege situation, and the fun comes from watching heroes and villains alike react and improvise to the other side's bloody machinations. And I want to stress bloody. Anyone who saw Blue Ruin probably remembers the handful of viscerally upsetting gore shots, but the body count is so much higher this time around, and Saulnier delights in rending his cast's flesh regardless of character importance (no one is safe here). Yet the violence never feels exploitative. If Saulnier lingers on anything, it's the pain of the living (one of his leads suffers a horrible - and non-fatal - wound that made me physically uncomfortable), whereas he'll show you just enough of a fatal wound before cutting away and letting you imagine the rest. As such, Green Room is hard to watch but not impossible, and the carnage maintains a controlled fury. Saulnier might be the most skillful manipulator of on-screen bloodshed since Martin Scorsese. We also never lose sight of character amidst the gore, which means we can appreciate the lovely work from Macon Blair (as Stewart's put-upon lieutenant), Yelchin (whose honest, unforced reactions to the chaos make the film seem even more terrifying than it already is), and especially Imogen Poots, who starts Green Room as an anonymous piece of white-trash and emerges as the kind of no-B.S. warrior woman that Howard Hawks idolized. Some might carp that this is just exploitation fare, but when it's done this well? As good or better than most certified prestige pictures. You watch Green Room with your heart in your throat and your hands over your eyes. A great, great movie.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the film is often squirm inducing, due to both some visceral special effects work regarding some of the injuries doled out, but also due to an increasingly claustrophobic emotional ambience that is only exacerbated by the incessant thumping of punk rock that's supposedly emanating from the nearby performance space...The general context of the film is so unusual and viscerally presented that a lot of the story tends to resonate in rather remarkable ways. While there are some passing tips of the Freudian hat toward psychological underpinnings (an especially chilling moment comes when the killer 'confesses' to the band that it was their music that drove him to his act), Green Room frankly isn't all that interested in exploring the interior world of its characters. That might have been an insurmountable obstacle in a more mundane setting, but here the surface is compelling enough that viewers can almost intuitively discern the needed subtext."
And the hits just keep on coming! Just as good is Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some, which comes courtesy of Paramount Home Media Distribution. Everybody Wants Some is as relaxed as Green Room is intense. It's a spiritual sequel (of sorts) to Linklater's classic teen dramedy Dazed and Confused; if Dazed and Confused covered high school, then Everybody Wants Some moves onto college, specifically the seventy-two hours prior to the first day of freshman classes. Linklater follows young pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner) as he arrives on campus, gets settled in his team's dorm house, and...that's about it. Stretching back to his breakout film Slacker, Linklater has always favored the hangout picture over something with a more rigorous narrative (hell, School of Rock is probably his "plottiest" film), and here, he privileges casual minutia, whether Jake's moving from bar to bar at night, watching TV, or engaging in an endless series of competitions with the other members of his baseball team (most notably Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Will Brittain, Forrest Vickery, Juston Street, Quinton Johnson, Wyatt Russell, and Glen Powell, who steals the film as the alternatively sleazy/reflective Finnegan). It's their goofy interactions that form the spine of the film, and at times, you might think that Everybody Wants Some resembles a more high-toned version of, say, Animal House or Porky's, especially given the team's relentless focus on drugs, alcohol, and sex. As a friend of mine put it after a screening, "This is like Dazed and Confused if all the characters were Wooderson." Now, all of this material is entertaining, particularly an extended drug trip or the wonderful, giddy way a few of the guys find themselves moshing at an underground punk show. But Linklater has always been an uncommonly thoughtful filmmaker, and he never lets the hijinks overwhelm his deeper objectives. As Russell (son of Kurt, and he shares his dad's smile, easy charm, and awesome beard) intones late in the movie, "Here for a good time, not a long time," and that's the key to what Linklater is after. We're seeing these kids at their physical primes, but as the countdown to class keeps reminding us, at some point, the fun has to end. This understanding gives all their interactions, no matter how petty or childish, a hint of melancholy that deepens once Jake starts spending time with Zoey Deutch's sensitive, funny theater major. All of a sudden, the male-dominated environment in which Linklater has immersed us gently evaporates, and we realize - even if Jake doesn't - that there's a world outside of baseball, a world that's something like adulthood. Even the setting is a subtle masterstroke on Linklater's part: he takes us back to 1980, so even if any of these kids go pro (which is unlikely), their time is already past. Everybody Wants Some is so assured and confident that it's tempting to underrate what Linklater has done here, but make no mistake. In its own wry, easygoing way, Everybody Wants Some contains multitudes. One of the year's best features.
In terms of older catalog titles, Kino is bringing William Wellman's great The Ox-Bow Incident to Blu-ray this week. I've read this 1943 Western described as a "Noir Western," and that label couldn't be more apt. Whereas most Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s upheld a clear, unambiguous vision of the American West (even something like John Ford's Stagecoach is less ethically complex than it seems; others might Claire Trevor and John Wayne's protagonists to be disreputable operators, but we know they're morally sound despite their lack of social stature), The Ox-Bow Incident operates in a world of ethical shadows and moral uncertainty. Wellman does so much in just seventy-five minutes. When The Ox-Bow Incident begins, we think it's going to be a procedural of sorts; Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan's cowboys get pulled into the hunt for some rustlers suspected of killing and robbing a local rancher. And we're with the outraged posse for a little bit, so righteous is their anger, until they land upon three outsiders (Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, and Francis Ford), and the whole tone of the piece changes. For one, he shoots the film like a nightmare, eschewing wide Western vistas for dark skies and looming trees that box in the characters. Furthermore, Wellman keeps mudding our sympathies. During their interrogation, the three suspects keep revealing more and more inconsistencies than point towards their guilt, but they're so emotionally unsteady that it's hard to buy them as cold-blooded killers, especially Andrews' sensitive family man. By comparison, the posse's sense of justice quickly curdles into something else - we suspect they'd rather lynch the three men than find the truth. It's a horrible situation, made all the more fraught because Wellman won't even let us rely on Fonda as a moral exemplar. Here is Tom Joad and Abraham Lincoln, for Pete's sake, yet he keeps vacillating between craven self-interest and subservience to the mob: the main reason he joins the posse is that he doesn't want to be a suspect himself, and by the time Fonda begins to offer up some kind of resistance to the group's bloodlust, his efforts seem all the more futile. Suffice to say, this is no 12 Angry Men, where he's able to appeal to man's better angels. Wellman maintains an uncompromising vision to the last, and the whole piece culminates in a series of horrible reveals that puncture the myth of the American West. The Ox-Bow Incident isn't held in the same regard as the greats of the genre, and hopefully this Blu-ray will correct the omission.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf writes that the film "is more relevant today than it was back then. It's a striking discovery and a classic motion picture, which uses traditional western elements to secure familiarity as it explores the challenges of rational thinking in a difficult situation of feverish condemnation...The old west...isn't a place of defined heroism, but a darker place of longing, finding a nomadic type like Gil (Fonda) futilely trying to secure normality as he returns to claim a lost loved one. He's soon caught up in a troubling stand-off over murder and messy accusations, with men's lives on the line as a lynch mob forms and justice is summoned through aggression, not thought...The feature keeps to a meditative mood, with Gil trying to address reason with those who blindly condemn. Tensions are carefully stoked, and larger points on human behavior are made with care, delivering a strong message on the unpredictability of violence and the need for participants to act with logic, not mindless submission."
Finally, Arrow Films is offering a new restoration of Ken Russell's insane Crimes of Passion. Frankly, it feels a little redundant to type "insane" next to Russell's name. Everything Russell has directed, whether he's adapting D.H. Lawrence (Women in Love) or courting mainstream Hollywood (Altered States), feels touched with madness, and Crimes of Passion is certainly no exception. The more layers of this sexy onion you pull back, the loopier it seems. We begin with John Laughlin's bored family man/secret surveillance expert and watch him become obsessed with Kathleen Turner's alluring fashion designer/escort, and already, we're off to the races. Russell bathes the whole thing in hothouse colors and inky blacks and graphic sex (especially in the unrated director's cut), so that even though the contours of this lurid melodrama seem familiar (even Billy Wilder dealt with similar material in Irma La Douce), the handling keeps us off-center and confused. But Russell delights in vaulting over the top, and he's got a trump card more outré than any of Turner's sexual exploits: Anthony Perkins, whose phony reverend and prostitute enthusiast makes his Psycho lunatic look downright reserved (the rumor is that Perkins was huffing actual amyl nitrates to get into character, and if that's the case, you can picture Russell cackling just off camera, "Finally, someone nuttier than me!"). However, Russell has never trafficked in excess for excess' sake - all of this insanity does serve an unironic exploration of desire and identity. Laughlin's home life represents social conventions, and his explorations of Turner's world reveal a buried impulse to embrace his own dark side, to escape the banality of stereotypical American culture. It's not an accident that the protagonists here all have double identities or fake identities; the only way these characters feel comfortable transgressing is to pretend they're someone they're not. By the end, Russell is advocating in favor of demolishing those boundaries, and even though this message keeps kinda lost in the mayhem (Crimes of Passion doesn't hang together at all), it proves so much more thoughtful than this type of exploitation fodder might otherwise be.