For the week of July 25th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Hardcore Henry to Blu-ray. If you're going by description alone, this bloody, frenetic actioner couldn't seem more familiar. It's practically another riff on Deadpool about a genetically modified super-soldier (the title character, naturally) who goes on the warpath after another super-charged badass (Danila Kozlovsky) tries to kill him and kidnaps his wife (Haley Bennett). However, Hardcore Henry offers one major innovation. If people have complained that movies are becoming too much like video games, then Hardcore Henry ushers in the logical next step in that evolution: the entire movie unfolds from a first-person camera perspective, with Henry's fists perpetually on-screen to deliver the kinds of shootings/stabbings/beatings you'd expect were you at the helm of Call of Duty or Halo. It's a bracing development, to be sure, and Hardcore Henry writer-director Ilya Naishuller (and his very talented army of stuntmen/choreographers) deserves all the credit in the world for seamlessly applying a video game's elastic treatment of action to the more grounded realm of a live-action movie. Naishuller pulls off some technically stunning setpieces - most notably a midair chase/shootout/fight that recalls the most exciting level in Monolith's great No One Lives Forever - that are all the more impressive because of the obvious physical perils. I mean, no fewer than two different cameramen had to relinquish filming duties because of injuries suffered during shooting, and the sheer variety of mayhem on-screen makes me wonder why moreHardcore Henry DPs didn't suffer the same fate. In a sense, these kind of movies are critic-proof. The gimmick is so strong that it makes all narrative/artistic shortcomings pale by comparison. It doesn't matter, for example, that none of the characters is more than a one-dimensional cipher (poor Haley Bennett comes off worse as the lone female of note in a film with the emotional intelligence of a fourteen-year-old boy), or that Sharlto Copley does some beyond-grating work as Henry's omnipresent exposition guide...ahem, sidekick. You come to Hardcore Henry for the sheer visceral thrill of it all. That said, a little of the POV action goes a long way. It's not so much the motion-sickness aspect (while seeing the film in theaters made for a queasy experience, it's much easier to process on home-media's smaller screens) but rather the limitations of the central conceit. No matter how well shot and staged the action is (and lots of Hardcore Henry rank as demo-quality material), I had the same problem here that I had watching a friend play, say, Doom for ninety minutes straight: you can appreciate the aesthetics and the technical skills, but after a while, you'd rather a) play the video game yourself or b) watch something that takes better advantage of film's cinematic possibilities. Something like John Hyams' great Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, for example, tells the same exact story as Hardcore Henry but does so with more surrealistic verve and thematic insight. Still, we live in the era of the televised StarCraft competition - I suspect a lot of viewers won't share the same concerns as me, and that's cool.
Martin Liebman commented that the film's "video game roots are easy to see, as are its inspirations from other, far greater, sci-fi films like RoboCop and Total Recall. Make no mistake that plot plays secondary in Hardcore Henry. Unlike its superior sci-fi brethren, and even some of the games from which it draws its inspiration, it has precious little to say about anything. The movie thrives on its visual acumen, its ability to seamlessly create chaos right in front of the camera as an individual jumps, runs, climbs, and shoots his way through impossible obstacles and a parade of bad guys. The film's driving force is its ability to maintain repetition - not breaking the first-person perspective - while keeping it as fresh as possible by throwing Henry onto increasingly challenging obstacles and through increasingly impossible odds. But the movie does start to fatigue when it becomes clear that plot plays completely secondary to the spectacle. Sure it's fun to watch, and try to figure out, how the filmmakers accomplish this or that and awe at the movie's daring stunts and seamless transitions, but the shaky-cam style and breathless, relentless pace begin to wear thin and threaten to wear the viewer down. The movie is more experience than it is emotional engagement, more entertainment than it is meaningful moviemaking. It knows its place, plays to its strengths, and doesn't overstay its welcome. It's not anything special beyond the surface, but it doesn't try to be, either."
Just as formulaic is Anchor Bay's release of Sing Street. If you've seen The Commitments (and if you haven't, what's wrong with you?), you've already got a leg up on Sing Street, which presents an even more rosy, feel-good version of some spirited Irish rockers. In this case, our hero is young Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a Dublin teenager who starts a rock group amidst the cultural shifts in pop culture circa 1985. Sing Street is so big-hearted and sweet it makes Almost Famous look like, I dunno, Gimme Shelter: Conor's primary creative drive is to win the heart of a beguiling fellow classmate (Lucy Boynton) - he doesn't even really know that much about making music - although he soon begins to see the band as a way out of his grinding middle-class community. That premise sounds harsh but is actually the plot of like a half-dozen UK-centric rom-coms in the 1990s (Brassed Off and The Full Monty were always my favorites). Yet there's formula and then there's good formula, and Sing Street falls squarely in the second category. I suspect that's the doing of director John Carney, who has evinced a knack for this kind of populist musical fare. His Once took what could have been Brief Encounter with buskers and made it seem vital and real, and he works a similar magic here, enlivening clichés through his canny use of Dublin locales and his attention to character details. The story might be a marshmallow, but Dublin in the 1980s gives it just enough grit, as do all his performers. Walsh-Peelo and Boynton are an immensely appealing pairing, although the MVP award might go to Jack Reynor, who is as good here as he was terrible in Transformers: Age of Extinction. Reynor plays Conor's older brother Brendan, and it's his guidance of his younger brother's musical travails that gives Sing Street its extra resonance. As much as he loves seeing Conor grow, Brendan can't help but look at Conor's successes and think of his own musical failures. Brendan never loses that tension, and neither does the film. Carney is wise to let in that melancholy, whether it's Brendan or the marital dissolution of Conor and Brendan's parents (a wrenching Aiden Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy); it's a reminder that for all the film's humor and spirit, it also takes place in the real world (if only tangentially), and that all dreams do spring from something darker. An unsung delight.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "fully saturates its audience into the 1980s. The film follows very basic concepts of love and affection, friendship, rebellion, family strain, uncertainty, and escape. Its timeframe is important insofar as it influences the style of music, the dress, even the technology the band uses to make their music and videotape their performances, but beyond the cruder era-specific details is a much more grounded and absorbing coming-of-age story of maturity beyond the moment and love beyond lust. Certainly, though, the music shapes and reflects the movie's story, dramatic rhythm, and soulful arc. Music is the story, literally and metaphorically alike, with lyrics that get to the core of Conor's feelings, just with a pop-happy beat. The movie is, then, at once both a contagiously catchy toe-tapper while at the same time a tender, honest, and wide-eyed look at what it means to grow up, in Conor's case right in front of the audience's eyes, in love, behind the microphone, and as a human being all at the same time. Music is certainly the movie's lifeblood. Blending classic hits with original songs - which are strikingly authentic to the era and, frankly, about as good as anything to come from it, particularly up against the real-life hits that play such an important role in the film - Sing Street's pulse and purpose is shaped by those tunes, by lyrics that mean something, and some catchy beats, too."
From Drafthouse Films comes The Invitation. I can't say enough good things about so much about director Karyn Kusama's slow-burn psychological thriller. Kusama (and screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi) start with a little bit of Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, sending us to a dinner party with Logan Marshall-Green's Will. To say Will is dreading the get-together is a huge understatement - Will's bringing his girlfriend (Emayatzy Corinealdi) even though the hosts are his ex-wife (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband (Game of Thrones and Treme's Michiel Huisman), and more pressingly, Will hasn't seen his former spouse since the tragic death of their young son two years prior. And it's that very emotional anxiety that lets Kusama complicate matters. Will is still so overwhelmingly distraught that his sadness complicates everything else. Like the arrival of two outsiders (the unpredictable Lindsay Burdge and a melancholy, imposing John Carroll Lynch) unknown to everyone save Blanchard and Huisman. Or the bars on all the windows. Or the way Huisman's character keeps locking the doors even though his house is in a tony Hollywood Hills neighborhood. Or the revelation that Blanchard and Huisman met in a grief-support group that seems suspiciously like a cult. Or the way that, try as they might, none of the guests can really bring themselves to leave the party. Kusama has always been a good director - her 2000 drama Girlfight remains one of my favorite indie debuts, and even something like the uneven Jennifer's Body has genuine authorial spark and energy - but I never knew she was capable of something like this. For the first seventy or eighty minutes, we could be watching Roman Polanski at his Repulsion-era peak. Kusama never tips her hand in terms of Will's paranoia, deriving so much tension from his increasingly mounting hysteria and the subtly unnerving demeanor of his hosts: even her use of DP Bobby Stone's widescreen frames is masterful, in terms of how she manipulates us by hiding valuable information just outside our field of vision (a scene where Will watches Lynch's character move his car to let another person leave the party is a marvel of suspense blocking and framing). In fact, Kusama does such an expert job of maintaining ambiguity that it's almost a shame to report The Invitation does have a clear endgame in play, and here's where I have to tread carefully. Let's just say that the film's formally and narratively audacious beginning and middle give way to a more conventional ending, and that as skillfully as Kusama handles the conclusion, we do lose most of the wonderfully agonizing uncertainty. Still, would that most thrillers were crafted with this level of care and nuance, and kudos to Kusama for finding the mystery in even the most familiar of settings; the very last shot does a brilliant job of taking any traditional thriller clichés and recontexualizing them in a more unsettling light (pun intended).
Finally, the most transcendent release of the week is Criterion's new The New World Blu-ray. For some (this reviewer included), The New World represents the end of an era for writer-director Terrence Malick, the capper to a thirty-two-year filmmaking run that produced four films, all of them masterpieces: the elegiac chase picture Badlands, the doomed romance Days of Heaven, the spiritually wrenching war drama The Thin Red Line, and finally The New World. Viewed as a whole, the four films speak to the nature of history (without exception, all four are period pieces) and how we're doomed to both valorize and condemn the past, although none of them make that statement as profoundly as The New World does. With unerring aesthetic brilliance, Malick conjures up Jamestown, 1607, at that most historic of meetings - the English colonists under Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) and the Tsenacommacah Indians under Powhatan (August Schellenberg). That's the macro, and certainly much of The New World unfolds through visceral, practical details: the harsh Virginia environment that the English have to face, the quality of their ramshackle settlements (realized by Malick's longtime set designer Jack Fisk), the uneasy relationship between the British and the Native Americans. But the micro is even more iconic, given that the English's presence in North America pull mutinous explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas (then-newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher) into one another's orbits. Their halting, tentative bond forms The New World's core, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anything more magical in all of Malick's oeuvre. But more than anything, I'm struck by the control he wields over this tale. There's certainly no mistaking The New World for anything other than A Terrence Malick Film, yet unlike his late-stage trifecta of The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and especially Knight of Cups, Malick's experimentations with form and character never overwhelm the main narrative. Farrell and Kilcher give two of the best performances in any Malick feature - Kilcher, in particular, is so good you wonder why she never reached these heights again, although maybe her work here represents a singular meld of director and performer - and for all the picture's drifting, Emersonian-esque (as in, Ralph Waldo) camerawork (courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki, who was hitting one of like a half-dozen career highs here), it never loses focus. Malick balances The New World into three distinct sections: the arrival in Virginia, John Smith's tentative assimilation into Pocahontas' Tsenacommacah tribal division, and finally Pocahontas' own travels to England. These sections feel even more pronounced in Criterion's restoration of the 170-minute Extended Cut, where Malick uses title cards and seismic plot developments (Smith's judgment at the hands of Powhatan; the brutal skirmish between the English and the Native American) to create an operatic sense of progression through the doomed John Smith-Pocahontas union. That feeling isn't accidental, considering that Malick repeats the prelude to Wagner's Das Rheingold as a kind of spiritual refrain. And maybe that's the key to understanding what Malick has wrought here. Certain critics took him to task for using his considerable cinematic resources to boost what is, essentially, the fantasy version of the Pocahontas story. They're not wrong. Outside of his set and costume design, if you're looking for historical accuracy, seek help elsewhere. But those detractors are missing the point. Malick is interested in the mythic version of this tale as a means of studying the distinctions within, between fact and fiction, between truth and fantasy, in an effort to elevate the whole of human experience, good or bad. It's history as grand opera, and we're all the better for it. One of the great films of the 2000s.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review noted that "a lot of the stories in the film are actually told through the bodies of different characters. And this is hardly surprising as there is no other director that understands how to film bodies quite like Malick does - in his films simple looks and gestures routinely reveal a lot more than words can. Here large segments of the film are essentially dialog-free because everything that you need to know about the feelings and experiences of its characters is channeled through carefully observed body movements and sounds. There are a few segments where it does feel like Malick goes slightly overboard with the panoramic/meditative footage and causes an unusual shift in the progression of the relationship between Smith and Pocahontas. However, the shift also allows Malick to essentially leave some gray areas in the narrative that make it easier to (rightfully) interpret their actions in different ways. In the final act Pocahontas travels to London with John Rolfe (Christian Bale) and her experience there is also used to force you to rethink what the discovery of the New World in a slightly different context."