For the week of July 18th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the "Ultimate Edition" of Zack Snyder's superhero extravaganza Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to Blu-ray. In its theatrical cut, Dawn of Justice was some kind of singular creation: one of the most incompetently crafted Hollywood blockbusters I've ever seen. To the credit of Snyder and screenwriter Chris Terrio (the screenwriting credits list both Terrio and Batman Begins scribe David Goyer, but by all accounts Terrio mounted a page-one rewrite of Goyer's original drafts, borrowing only character names and certain key plot details), they've engineered an elegant and provocative conceit to bring these superhero icons together. The city-wide destruction between Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod (Michael Shannon) that concluded 2013's Man of Steel drew no small amount of critical controversy, and Snyder and Terrio let vigilante avenger Batman (Ben Affleck) echo those concerns; fearing what damage Superman could inflict if he ever turned on Earth, Batman plans a one-man assault against the Man of Steel, even as his plans unwittingly ally the Caped Crusader with unhinged techno-billionaire Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg). But for everything that Dawn of Justice gets right - the first big setpiece, which reconfigures Man of Steel's Metropolis showdown from Superman to Bruce Wayne's on-the-ground-and-terrified perspective, the delightful banter between Wayne and Alfred (Jeremy Irons, who underplays the film's few laughs and makes them much funnier as a result), and Affleck's phenomenal performance (it feels like he's well on his way towards realizing the definitive live-action Batman, even if his "MurderBat" tendencies here fly in the face of most traditional Batman interpretations) - it bungles fifteen or sixteen other things. Snyder has claimed that it's Batman v Superman instead of Batman vs. Superman because he wanted to convey an ideological struggle more than a physical one (in fact, I'd be surprised if the much-hyped fight between the two leads took more than fifteen minutes), and while that ambition is all well and good, the execution is so blah. Despite the multi-million-dollar production budget, so much of Dawn of Justice consists of people gravely intoning tired platitudes about fate and death and gods at one another like it's a brain-dead philosophy class or something, with the actual action, as it were, mostly relegated to that Metropolis opener, an admittedly stunning Batman fight, the admittedly less stunning brawl between Batman and Superman, and the last half-hour, where CGI renderings of our heroes pound listlessly on a CGI villain that looks like a poorly rendered Lord of the Rings cave troll. It's enough to make you yearn for Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, which offered - and even in its weakest installment - a far more sophisticated blend of armchair philosophizing and widescreen action. Still, Dawn of Justice's sins against conventional superhero entertainment seem minor when you compare them to the film's truly inexcusable content. I'm talking about marginalizing Amy Adams' Lois Lane (one of Man of Steel's brightest spots) from an ace reporter to a) Superman support system and b) damsel in distress. Or giving Jesse Eisenberg's manic, obnoxious Luthor free reign whenever he's on-screen - I respect that Eisenberg is making some pretty bold choices here (it looks like he's styled his character's behavior on his American Ultra writer Max Landis, and for those unfamiliar with Landis' public persona, it's a little abrasive, to say the least), but Snyder's indulging of the actor's tics renders the character pretty unthreatening. Or reducing Superman to a supporting role in what should be the sequel to his own movie (IMDb claims that Superman has only forty-three lines of dialogue, and that figure seems high).
On a molecular level, the theatrical cut of Dawn of Justice feels broken, like editor David Brenner whittled it down to 150 minutes with little regard for what needed to stick (Superman's a non-entity, but Luthor and Holly Hunter's U.S. Senator get an extended tangent about drinking piss? Yeah, that makes sense)...so it's a relief to see that this "Ultimate Edition" restores about a half-hour of footage to the film, most of which is essential. In the theatrical version, Superman's interference with some African terrorists brings him some vague public criticism and generates an even vaguer investigation from Lois; now, the Africa sequence makes sense (we get why everyone would be so mad at Superman), and Snyder has restored key beats to Lois' case that clarify her objectives AND make her a more dynamic character. So it goes with Superman. I still think Snyder underserves Superman's innate nobility (we get a few small moments reinstated where he actually saves people, but Batman still comes off as the more overtly heroic character), but at least he's got something to do this time around besides mope - Clark Kent now receives an extended subplot where he investigates the Batman, and this, too, helps refine the central conflict between both men. Even Luthor's mania feels more organic in the Ultimate Edition, as we learn that he's being manipulated by an extraterrestrial menace broadcasting from within Zod's downed spaceship. This is one of those longer cuts that actually feels shorter because it makes more sense: no longer are we struggling to keep up with the inconsistencies and obfuscations that Snyder and Brenner's elisions caused. Now, I don't think Dawn of Justice has suddenly become a good movie, a la Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven director's cut. This was a movie crippled from its inception - the only reason Batman showed up is because Warner Bros. freaked when Man of Steel didn't gross as much as The Dark Knight Rises and wanted to add an IP that would guarantee a higher box-office return (oh, irony!). The lack of action doesn't help, nor do the hollow pyrotechnics of the big finale (we don't care about the Big Bad because it's only been introduced thirty seconds before it starts trying to kill Superman). Performance-wise, Eisenberg's Luthor doesn't work in either cut. Lois is more proactive in the new cut, sure, until a certain point when she's literally thrown off a building and reduced to a plot device. And while the thirty minutes of deleted scenes do yeoman's work in terms of benefiting the narrative, I question the need for a three-hour comic-book movie. Note the fat on the script level: Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman looks great but functions only as an extended teaser for a bunch of movies that aren't out yet (in three cases, I mean this literally - she watches little Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg clips on her computer. Nothing more fun than watching someone watch YouTube, I tell ya), the subplot with Scoot McNairy's Wallace Keefe never pays off in a satisfying fashion, and we still have no fewer than five dream sequences that you could cut with zero impact on the actual narrative (and I say this as someone who kinda likes the energy and style of the central "Knightmare"). But taken within those compromised parameters, this new Dawn of Justice is a far better movie, and the only iteration that viewers should watch.
From Warner Archive comes the romantic thriller To Have and Have Not. Director Howard Hawks' 1944 classic shouldn't work half as well as it does. Nominally the story of a weary fisherman (Humphrey Bogart) who finds himself drawn into the French Resistance's Caribbean operations during World War II, To Have and Have Not really grew out of a boast, of sorts. Hawks famously claimed he could make a good movie out of Ernest Hemingway's worst book, and so he began cobbling together a To Have and Have Not film version that improved on Hemingway's text. Hemingway helped a little on the script, as did William Faulkner, who was serving an unhappy (and non-lucrative) tenure as a Hollywood screenwriter; Hawks even brought in his Only Angels Have Wings and The Big Sleep collaborator Jules Furthman to help punch up the draft. Narratively, Hawks' To Have and Have Not certainly reflects that multiplicity of authors: it's incredibly loose and episodic, switching tones on a dime (a musical one moment; a romance the next; a comedy the next; then a thriller; then a jingoistic propaganda piece), and that's when it's not openly borrowing plot elements from Casablanca (long stretches of this film play like a faithful remake of Michael Curtiz's 1942 Academy Award-winner) or Hawks' own Only Angels Have Wings (note the bantering team atmosphere - the relationship between Bogart and Walter Brennan invokes Angels' Cary Grant-Thomas Mitchell partnership). Yet you've got to hand it to Hawks - he made good on his boast, turning this mish-mash of sources into one of his most purely enjoyable works. Intellectually, you know this picture doesn't hold together, but Hawks' direction is so confident and assured that you never question its internal logic in the moment. Plus, Hawks has an ace of a trump card: the romantic pairing of Bogart and young Lauren Bacall. The two were falling in love behind the scenes, and while that's not necessarily a recipe for good on-screen chemistry (Gigli, we hardly knew ye), Hawks was able to capture their utter delight with one another, enlivening otherwise rote melodrama through Bogart and Bacall's mutual fascination. We could watch a whole movie of the two flirting. Come to think of it, that's pretty much what To Have and Have Not is.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that the film's "war-time intrigue is entertaining, but it pales next to the romantic fireworks that ignite when a sultry new arrival named Marie Browning (Bacall) saunters into Harry's hotel room requesting a match in a tone that suggests she wants to do much more than light a cigarette. Harry [Bogart] quickly christens her 'Slim,' and she routinely addresses him as 'Steve.' The nicknames, which were borrowed from pet names used by Hawks and his wife, are just one of many signs of the couple's instant connection, as they circle each other (literally so, at one point) with the wary intensity of two prize fighters. When Hawks realized what was happening between his two stars off screen, he craftily seized the opportunity to center the film on the romance blooming between their characters, expanding Bacall's role so that long stretches of To Have and Have Not consist of nothing more than 'Slim' and 'Steve' sparring and jousting. A lot happens in To Have and Have Not - clandestine meetings, gunplay, a boat chase, emergency surgery, musical interludes courtesy of the piano-playing Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael), a stirring speech against the Nazis worthy of Casablanca's Victor Laszlo, and a tense showdown between Harry and the dastardly Renard - but all of it ends up feeding into the extended foreplay between the film's smitten couple, who, by all reports, only had eyes for each other both before and after Hawks called 'Cut!'"
Scream Factory's latest horror title is a features-packed, new encoding of the 1985 cult favorite The Return of the Living Dead. What co-writer/director Dan O'Bannon has done here is to take the format of the zombie film and skewer it playfully. Truth be told, zombie features had been moving in that direction anyways - George A. Romeo's epic Dawn of the Dead used the zombie menace as a satirical metaphor for American consumerism - but maybe not as radically as in The Return of the Living Dead, which often plays like Scream with flesh eating. O'Bannon imagines a world where the events of Romero's iconic 1968 chiller Night of the Living Dead really happened, except the government contained the menace and covered it up...until, of course, a couple of lowly medical-storage drones (the wonderful James Karen and Thom Matthews) unwittingly loose that same zombie threat onto an unsuspecting populace. Well, maybe not exactly the same: one of the most delightful things about the movie is that even though characters actively name-drop Romero and Night of the Living Dead, the zombies are a little different. They can run, for one, and their limited speech faculties make for some of the film's funniest moments (anyone who's ever done a zombie impression and groaned "BRAINS"? You owe this movie a sincere debt) despite their often horrifying visage: O'Bannon's "Tar Man" zombie is one for the ages, an alternatively scary-funny ghoul that could have stumbled directly from the pages of a Tales from the Crypt comic. But the humans get to have just as much fun, whether it's Karen and Matthews' wry Abbott-and-Costello act or the ludicrously hostile/pretentious '80s punks that have unfortunately taken up shop in a nearby cemetery. All of this delightful comic material works, and it's all the more surprising because O'Bannon might not seem like the first choice for wacky horror deconstruction. He's one of the handful of writers that helped bring Ridley Scott's grim Alien to the screen, but lest we forget, he was also responsible for penning John Carpenter's Dark Star, which functions as a parody of Alien and displays many of The Return of the Living Dead's mocking tendencies, albeit at a much smaller budget. Yet despite the winking self-awareness, O'Bannon honors the zombie-horror genre's fundamental nihilism. The fact that we like these characters (especially Karen and Matthews' affable working stiffs) will not save them, and O'Bannon uses our dashed sympathies to score an ending that's both blackly comic and deeply disturbing. George Romero would be proud.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is hosting the new restoration of Kung Hu's glorious wuxia epic A Touch of Zen. For years, A Touch of Zen has existed in muddy or truncated prints (or in a two-part version done against Hu's will), but now we get the true director's cut in its full three-hour runtime. Don't be intimidate by the length - A Touch of Zen is overstuffed with incident and action, and like Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, the extended time hustles along. Our protagonist is young Ku (Chun Shih), a naive scholar whisked into an adventure alongside the brave fugitive Yang (the beautiful Feng Hsu), an adventure that traverses through corrupt government provinces, haunted villages, and hordes of sword-wielding assassins. That's a lot, and what's all the more impressive about A Touch of Zen is how grand it feels. Hu conjures up great mystery from his sweeping widescreen vistas; however, like Citizen Kane, this is "an epic made of scraps," with Hu belying his relatively tiny budget through great location footage, careful framing (especially in terms of how he lets his natural physical environments dwarf his actors - instant production values), or the intuitive editing that lets Hu turn, say, a few extras into an army of killers marshaled against our heroes. In fact, critic David Bordwell credits the editing for so much of A Touch of Zen's success. Not only does Hu use it to mask the film's meager production assets, but he also creates his combatants' mythic fighting prowess in the cutting room, particularly in how he employs dropped frames and jump cuts to convey his characters' supernatural speed and agility. Even the controversial ending, which downplays the kung-fu elements in favor of something more mystical-transcendental, contributes to this sense of scope. Rather than resort to elaborate effects work, Hu experiments with lighting anomalies and negative-color imagery, and the effect is not dissimilar from the mind-blowing finale of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. All of these elements work together in service of something greater than the individual parts: it's rare to see smoke and mirrors become substantive, but that's just the case here. Yes, Kung Hu is making a great kung-fu picture, but he's also reflecting on the nature of the universe in ways that seem wholly germane and relevant to the fighting. And we're still feeling the influence of this one. Squint a little and you'll see, nestled deep in A Touch of Zen, a fight in a bamboo forest that seems strongly reminiscent of the big Yun-Fat Chow/Ziyi Zhang fight in Ang Lee's great Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Sure, Lee's remix is more technically accomplished - he moved the battle to the literal treetops - but the magic? That's all King Hu. A beautiful, singular piece of work.