For the week of August 1st, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Batman: The Killing Joke to Blu-ray. Those familiar with the title will understand why, alongside the epic-sized The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke might be Warner and DCU Animated's most anticipated feature. This new film adapts Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's iconic 1988 graphic novel that recontextualized the relationship between Batman and the Joker, contrasting the Joker's diabolical attack on the life - and sanity - of Commissioner Gordon with the Clown Prince of Crime's far more tragic origin story. Despite its brief length (only about fifty pages), Moore and Bolland delve into the psychologies of both hero and villain in a manner that, while controversial (particularly in how they define a clear backstory for the otherwise elusive Joker), has influenced every single iteration of these two characters, from Tim Burton's Batman to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, and every animated series in between. And for about forty-five minutes of this Killing Joke movie, director Sam Liu and screenwriter Brian Azzarello do justice to the source material, crafting a faithful and intense thriller that retains a much harder edge than any of the other DCU features (The Killing Joke sports a well deserved R-rating: it's even less kid-friendly than the R-rated Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). Plus, it benefits immensely from the vocal performances of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, who reprise their Batman: The Animated Series roles as the Caped Crusader and the Joker, respectively, and who clearly relish the chance to take their characters into psychologically perilous terrain (Hamill, in particular, is the MVP - it's maybe his most unnerving at-bat voicing the Joker, and that's saying something). The problem is - and it's a Titanic-sized one - that half-hour covers most of The Killing Joke as it exists on paper, so to pad the runtime to feature-length, Liu and Azzarello have done something disastrous. Major Spoilers to Follow: they've invented an extended opener that refocuses The Killing Joke on Barbara Gordon (Tara Strong). In theory, it's not a bad idea - in the graphic novel, the brutal treatment the former Batgirl receives at the Joker's hands drew the most negative reader criticisms, and promoting her to a full-fledged character (rather than just an objectified victim) could have offset some of Moore and Bolland's initial creative choices. However, Liu and Azzarello make some even worse choices, presenting a Barbara Gordon who's sexually obsessed with Batman and who consummates the relationship (I kid you not) in the most uncomfortable fashion possible. This behavior isn't interesting - it's shocking for the sake of being shocking, and it further cheapens Barbara after the Joker's attack since it makes it seem like his actions are some kind of karmic retribution for her own lust. I guess you could skip the first twenty-five minutes and enjoy a fairly straight version of The Killing Joke, but having seen the whole thing? I can't help but feel like my appreciation of all things Killing Joke-related has soured considerably. Proceed with caution.
Also from Warner comes Keanu. The first "official" big-screen pairing of humorists Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, this hard R-rated comedy casts the two as mild-mannered suburbanites whose association with the titular kitten (yep, you read that right) sends them careening into the path of Mexican drug cartels, a massive gang war, two coldblooded assassins (also played by Key and Peele), and more George Michael songs than you'd probably expect. Or maybe not - Keanu announces its intentions early on that it's going to be riffing exclusively on the differences between our milquetoast protagonists and the criminal world in which they find themselves, differences that the film exploits to mostly successful comic effect. Key and Peele are their usual charismatic selves (Key, in particular, is a standout as the big George Michael fan who's hilariously ill-equipped for a life of murder and mayhem), and they get strong support from a cast that includes Tiffany Haddish, Method Man, Luis Guzman, Will Forte, and two very funny cameos, one from the first person you'd expect (hint: what's the title of the movie?), and another from the last. Their biggest coup was bringing over Key & Peele series director Peter Atencio to helm their adventures. Atencio was responsible for giving the TV show a sheen and scope that far belied its modest budget, and he works the same magic here. Keanu is that rare mainstream comedy that looks like an honest-to-god movie rather than a collection of improvisations. However, as amusing as it is, Keanu still feels like a missed opportunity, and I suspect that's for the most unavoidable of reasons: Key and Peele are geniuses. When they ended their hit Comedy Central sketch comedy last year, many reacted with a similar horror to when Dave Chappelle walked away from Chappelle's Show, but in my estimation, losing Key and Peele was the far greater loss. Over the course of five seasons, the pair had established themselves as two of the most conceptually and formally audacious comedians the medium has to offer, lasering topics of cultural and societal import with absurdist brilliance, but Keanu reduces them to making the world's most surreal cat video. I get that they were probably hedging their bets with their first big-screen foray - the Comedy Central viewership is one thing, but I doubt most of America would be ready for something on par with their hilarious, disturbing "Continental Breakfast" sketch - but I would have hoped for something a little more daring than some (admittedly funny) racial stereotype gags that were starting to lose their freshness when Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor trotted them out in Stir Crazy. There's a germ of a great idea here, how contemporary men feel obligated/threatened into living up to all the representations of conventional masculinity they see in the media, but Key and Peele have already done that, and better, and in five minutes, to boot. So, yeah, if you're looking for a harmless, mostly funny ninety minutes at the movies? Keanu will suffice. Just try not to think about what else Key and Peele could be using their talents on instead. They could hold mountains in their hands. Anything else, by comparison, is going to seem like a letdown.
Michael Reuben's Blu-ray review noted that "contemporary film is littered with the failed efforts of talented sketch comedians who underestimate the challenges of the big screen. SNL is responsible for more than its share, but it can't be blamed for Keanu, the first feature from Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, fresh off their successful five-year run on Comedy Central as Key & Peele. Working with their TV director, Peter Atencio, the duo offers a haphazard yarn that veers wildly from one skit to another without ever finding a consistent tone...Some routines hit their targets, and one could probably cull a good episode (or even two) of the team's old show out of Keanu, but overall it's a lazy enterprise. Sketch persona and movie characters are two different breeds; the former are creatures of the moment, while the latter have to be credible and consistent throughout a story's beginning, middle and end. Rell and Clarence begin as two regular middle class guys who are strangers to violence and terrified of thugs, and much of Keanu involves their ludicrous attempts to masquerade as gangstas. In the crunch, though, they prove to be just as instinctively proficient at firing guns and killing their adversaries as any of Cheddar's crew, thereby validating the very stereotype they're supposed to be mocking. That isn't comic subversion; it's just sloppy writing."
Both Lionsgate's The Lobster and Magnolia's High-Rise merit your attention, if nothing else, for how thoroughly they confound expectations. In the case of The Lobster, major discrepancies exist between the theatrical trailer and the film itself. I don't blame A24 marketing department at all - it is a very good trailer, and it achieves the near-impossible feat of making something as singular and bizarre as The Lobster seem easily digestible. Both trailer and feature do share the same general setup, that we (personified by Colin Farrell's middle-aged sadsack) live in an alternate, vaguely dystopian society that offers single people a pretty bleak ultimatum: find a partner in forty-five days, or risk being turned into a non-human animal. But whereas the trailer (and if you haven't seen it, take a couple minutes and check it out below) conveys a certain lightness of spirit, like a bouncy mix of Luis Buñuel and Wes Anderson, the actual film is far darker and more opaque. While it is not without humor (the premise alone is inherently, deliberately ridiculous), the laughter generated alternates primarily between bone-dry and faintly horrified. Farrell might look like a joke (he gained forty pounds and hid his good looks behind glasses and an unflattering mustache, all to breathtaking effect - it's one of his best performances), but the film takes his loneliness seriously, even as he and his supporting cast (which includes Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw, Léa Seydoux, and John C. Reilly, who at times comes off like the real-life version of his Check It Out With Dr. Steve Brule misfit) subject themselves to all sorts of physical, emotional, and sexual indignities, and all in the name of true love. The old axiom holds fast - we laugh here so we don't cry. The key is director Yorgos Lanthimos. Anyone familiar with his 2009 drama Dogtooth has a far better idea of what to expect from The Lobster; in Dogtooth, Lanthimos reveled in how outsider cultures navigated the world through their often disturbing traditions, and his tweaking of the rom-com format allows him the same privilege in The Lobster, especially once Farrell's character joins a group of exiles whose dissatisfaction with the status quo has driven them to even more bizarre and draconian codes of behavior. The Lobster never allows its viewers to get comfortable, and that's the point: if love makes us crazy, then Lanthimos wants to follow that thread to its absurdist extremes, and damn the consequences.
That spirit certainly permeates High-Rise which is an even more savage and off-putting criticism of societal morays. Consider the source: author J.G. Ballard, who published High-Rise in 1975 and is also responsible for writing Crash, a beyond-graphic examination of the blurred distinctions between sex and violence that inspired David Cronenberg's controversial, NC-17-rated film adaptation. With High-Rise, Ballard turns his attentions to class warfare, the divisions of which he represents through the geography of a sleek, ultra-modern apartment complex. The top floors house the debauched, entitled elite (in the film, Jeremy Irons acts as their figurehead) while the bottom floor contain a disenfranchised lower class (led by the righteously angry Luke Evans), and stuck in the middle is a coolly detached doctor (Tom Hiddleston) torn between the ideologies of both sides. This kind of heated allegory has few contemporaries - Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer plays with many of the same ideas, albeit in a more genre-friendly fashion - and Ballard's original novel still retains the power to shock. The film itself, though, is much less impactful, and curiously so. Certainly it has a phenomenal cast - Hiddleston feels born to play this part, and both Sienna Miller and Elizabeth Moss offer fearless support - and director Ben Wheatley has given the proceedings a sheen as sleek and devastating as the building itself. Ultimately, I suspect that High-Rise might be one of those confounded "unfilmable pictures" because of its very content. Yes, in terms of sex and violence, Wheatley retains an faithfully brutal edge (without sending the film tippling into literal pornography), but tone (there's that word again) on the page can be quite different from tone on screen, and there's the rub. Ballard's text is dripping in atrocities, except he conveys them with a remove that both magnifies and softens our gut reaction. Take the very first line: "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." Ballard packs in so much depravity under the veil of understatement so we can better process the horror, and our relative comfort is, of course, so much more disturbing. Just by its very nature, the film can't help but shove the chaos in our face, and after a while, a curious thing happens - we become numb to the suffering and pain. You could argue that we're supposed to feel that way because Hiddleston's character does, too, except that ideally, polemics should move their audience to some action, and this one doesn't. All the mayhem just gets boring, and I'm sure Wheatley would rather we not tune out.
In some ways, the biggest surprise of the week is Lionsgate's crime-caper The Trust. Squint a little, and The Trust looks no different than any of the DTV (or "limited release") fare that star Nicolas Cage has been cultivating over the last ten-plus years. It's got an easy genre hook (Cage and Elijah Wood play unhappy Las Vegas cops who plot a heist), a near-monosyllabic title (The Trust, which dredges up sonic associations with Cage's Outcast, Rage, or the spondaic Pay the Ghost), and a Cage performance that seems reverse engineered to allow him full actorly indulgences (a ridiculous mustache; an affinity for putting hot sauce on lemon wedges apropos of nothing; an epic screaming scene that both increases and deflates the dramatic tension) at the experience of anything resembling internal coherence. Yet The Trust distinguishes itself from the likes of Left Behind, Seeking Justice, and Trespass by dint of the fact that it's actually pretty good. Directors Alex and Benjamin Brewer have made, in essence, a solid episode of Justified that unfolds from the villains' perspective. The villain dynamic there (and in most Elmore Leonard capers, actually) works thusly: a group of criminals (usually two to three) are looking to get rich quick, but they stumble into more problems than they anticipated when a) they discover that their ill-gotten gains carry unforeseen complications (in this case, the sheer amount of drug-related spoils as well as the human cost necessary to secure the loot) as well as b) one member of the group reveals him or herself to be more unhinged. No points for guessing which of our two leads that disclaimer refers to. Still, this hardy template works, and the Brewers bring just enough disposable flair to keep the proceedings interesting. The Trust zips along at ninety minutes and then vanishes, like a pulp-crime novel read on the beach. But their biggest coup is capturing the dynamic between Cage and Wood. Jaunts into on-screen depravity aside (gotta love his Sin City and Maniac psychos), Wood has always been an empathetic on-screen straight man: that expressive face of his reads everything, so he is able to up the tension just by increasing the panic in his eyes. Hell, he makes Cage better through his reaction shots alone. With a lesser actor, Cage would devour the scenery, but the Brewers are smart to cut back to Wood in the heat of Cage's most histrionic moments. Wood always looks as genuinely taken aback as we would be. Want a preview? Film yourself watching Vampire's Kiss and then rewatch your responses. That's Wood's default expression around Cage. The Brewers mine their interplay for both comedy and tension: if Cage's co-star doesn't know what he's going to do next, what chance do we have? I don't want to overpraise The Trust too much. In the annals of Nicolas Cagedom, it's nowhere near the level of his work in Adaptation or his more recent career triumph Joe (for which he should have received an Academy Award nomination). But it's very solid and not terribly embarrassing. Considering some of Cage's career lows, that's high praise indeed.