For the week of August 22nd, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Shane Black's noir buddy-comedy The Nice Guys to Blu-ray. If Black didn't invent the buddy action-comedy (we might give that credit to Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night or Walter Hill's 48 Hrs.), then he's certainly responsible for bringing the genre to its apex with his script for the blockbuster 1987 thriller Lethal Weapon. I'd need to see it again to be sure, but I think The Nice Guys might be Black's best movie. Not only does it play like the purest distillation of all his obsessions (dimestore pulp fiction, buddy-cop adventures, horrible violence, screwball comedy, L.A. corruption), but it has an emotional resonance that far exceeds that found in Black's enjoyable-but-uneven 2005 crime comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (pros: great performances from Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, and Michelle Monaghan. Cons: a little too self-satisfied for its own good). The key is the title, which is both ironic and deeply sincere. On one hand, we laugh at the disconnect between "nice" and our beyond-flawed leads (Russell Crowe's casually sadistic enforcer; Ryan Gosling's profoundly inept alcoholic/private detective) as they bumble their way through a missing-persons case that has violent ties to the L.A. porn scene and organized crime. Black certainly knows how to mine his leads's relationship for all sorts of wonderful absurdist comedy. In that sense, the film offers an embarrassment of riches: Gosling and Crowe's violent "meet cute" that ends in Crowe giving Gosling a spiral fracture, Gosling's Lou Costello-inspired panic when he rolls down a cliff into a dead body, the bloody shootout that both men simply walk away from, Gosling's third-act alcoholic hallucination (which leads to my favorite moment, Gosling scrambling to find a gun on Crowe's ankle that exists only in his mind), or Gosling's manic insistence during the end shootout that he "doesn't think [he] can die" (and you gotta love Black's instinct to cast established cool-kat Ryan Gosling as a craven loser who panics at the slightest sign of trouble). However, the cosmic joke is that, at the end of the day, both men really do want to be nice. And as with The Last Boy Scout or Last Action Hero or The Long Kiss Goodnight (to list but a few of the notable properties on Black's screenwriting C.V.), the key is a little kid. Fourteen-year-old actress Angourie Rice deserves her name above the title just as much as Crowe and Gosling do - not only is she their equal in terms of screen time, but her character's presence motivates both men to be better even as the details of their missing persons case grow more sordid and complex. She makes Crowe's bruiser question his clear and obvious affection for violence, and she inspires her father to behave less like a third-rate conman and more like a committed investigator. Now, this trope isn't original. It goes back to the start of cinema, with films like Charlie Chaplin's The Kid and King Vidor's The Champ kickstarting all the clichés behind the "innocent kid helps the flawed adult make good" subgenre. But dammit if it doesn't work like gangbusters here, in part because a) Black writes such good kid characters (Rice's character never comes off as preternaturally adult or irritatingly cloying; she's just a bright child who's had to compensate in atypical ways for her father's spiritual failings) and b) even though his heroes do win the moral high ground, the corrupt machinations around them deny them public recognition and undo all much of their investigative legwork (and, in a nice touch, force Crowe's recovering alcoholic back off the wagon). Bittersweet endings go down easier than sappy ones, I guess. And it's that emphasis on tarnished morality, on trying to be good when the easiest way out is to be bad, that seems the most subversive touch in an action-comedy such as this one. If you're into this kinda picture (as I am), you're likely to think The Nice Guys is one of the year's best films.
Michael Reuben wrote that "the key to enjoying [the film] is to treat it as a period piece, a homage (or maybe a parody; it's a thin line) to the peculiar mixture of pollution and licentious glitz that characterized L.A. in the Seventies. The film's very opening, with its vintage Warner Bros. logo and driving instrumental lick from The Temptations' 1971 cover of 'Papa Was a Rollin' Stone,' serves as a winking cue that what follows is as much an idealized evocation of a bygone era as Chinatown's Thirties or L.A. Confidential's Fifties—except that this one is played for laughs, even when it's violent (which it frequently is). Like the heroes of those earlier neo-noir classics, Healy and March blunder into a web of sinister machinations by powerful forces attempting to determine the city's future, except that the evil plot, when it's finally revealed, is hardly the work of a criminal mastermind. It's more like the bonkers scheme of the villain in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, who invents the L.A. freeway system where 'traffic jams will be a thing of the past.' Crowe and Gosling are both intriguing playing against type, and Black has given them plenty of off-kilter dialogue, silly arguments and opportunities for physical comedy. He has also provided a diverting foil in March's precocious teenage daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice), whose disapproval of her father's deceptive business practices doesn't stop her from barging into his investigations. It's the same device that Black employed so effectively in The Last Boy Scout, except that here the daughter isn't a foul-mouthed brat. At times, she seems like the most mature member of the group."
One good buddy comedy deserves another, and if you're looking for an inspired double-feature, follow The Nice Guys with another new release: Shout Factory's long-awaited disc of the 1988 classic Midnight Run disc. For many, Midnight Run is the buddy-comedy gold standard - check out Parks and Recreation's Adam Scott waxing poetic on the film for the now-defunct website The Dissolve - and it's not hard to see why. Director Martin Brest and screenwriter George Gallo have created somewhat of a Platonic Ideal: Midnight Run employs the clichés of the genre so skillfully that we forget they're clichés, and it achieves this with a minimum of winking self-awareness (as much as I love Shane Black, he's been nudging viewers in the ribs since Lethal Weapon). We're just involved in the drama. Dig it: tough bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) is set to collect the $100,000 reward for arresting nervous embezzler Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin), except Mardukas' criminal actions have made placed him in the crosshairs of some very bad people (led by the late, great Dennis Farina as a coldly hilarious mob boss), so Walsh becomes Mardukas' unwitting protector in a cross-country chase from New York to L.A. Brest's work on the 1984 hit Beverly Hills Cop had certainly qualified him for this job, but whereas that earlier feature coasted off the charm of star Eddie Murphy (seriously - when you rewatch Beverly Hills Cop you realize the degree to which Murphy's charisma galvanizes an otherwise slight action-comedy), Midnight Run satisfies on all fronts. The action scenes are better done, with some great location work in the American Southwest (and in New Zealand, apparently, doubling America in some scenes), and Brest has assembled a Murderer's Row of great character actors to back his protagonists. I'd say Farina steals the movie (he's so good Barry Sonnenfeld essentially had him play a slightly softer version of his Midnight Run Big Bad in Get Shorty), except that distinction could also apply to Philip Baker Hall's pragmatic mob flunky, or to Yaphet Kotto's beleaguered FBI stooge, or to Joe Pantoliano's sleazy bail-bondsman, or to John Ashton's hilariously inept rival bounty hunter. Everyone is just that good. Ultimately, though, this is De Niro and Grodin's show, and their pairing is an inspired one. On paper, it's all surface distinctions: Walsh is an intemperate brute, while Mardukas is a nebbish coward, and they couldn't hate one another more. However, Gallo's script and the careful improvisations that both leads brought allow both men dimensions that reach outside traditional formula constraints. De Niro gives Walsh such humanity (we can see that his anger stems from deep regrets and more-than-a-little self-loathing), and Grodin uses Mardukas' anxieties as a decoy of sorts - he's a far shrewder operator than anyone realizes, and his understanding of human frailties both gets him in trouble with the Mob and helps him forge a genuine bond with Walsh. As a result, we care more about their misadventures because the two men care about each other. At the end of the day, Midnight Run is a big-budget ode to human friendships, and it's that emotional component we don't expect.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "George Gallo's screenplay is a model of efficiency in terms of setting up the puzzle pieces and then watching everyone flail in their various attempts to assemble them into their own version of what they want to see happen. It's therefore none too surprising when Jack almost instantly finds Mardukas (who has assumed the preposterous nickname The Duke, obviously culled from his surname not any perceived similarity to John Wayne). The rest of the film details Jack's efforts to get the Manhattan bound Mardukas back to Los Angeles before the bond expires, five days into the future. What would seem to be one easy five hour or so jet ride to success instead turns into a series of vignettes that could in fact have been entitled Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Midnight Run is a near perfect amalgamation of expertly drawn characters and a fun and funny premise. De Niro and Grodin play beautifully off each other, and in fact some of the funniest, perhaps even most surreal, moments in the film come later after the two have bonded and they begin to scam various locals out of cash to further their "adventures". Kotto is hysterical as the no nonsense FBI agent who realizes early on he has probably disastrously lost control of the situation. Martin Brest directs with energy, keeping the road trip moving improbably but believably along."
There's very little that's emotional about Starz and Anchor Bay's Ash vs. Evil Dead: The Complete First Season, but in this case, that's not a problem. Starz has been trying really hard to crack into the upper echelons of original premium-cable programming, to mostly uneven effect: outside of Outlander and its four-season Spartacus reboot, its most traditionally prestigious series have struggled to find footing (one season of the uneven-but-interesting Flesh and Bone; two seasons of the dull Magic City; two seasons of the turgid dramas Crash and Boss; two seasons of the brilliant-but-underloved Party Down). How funny, then, that one of the network's most engaging shows should be the bloody, thoroughly disreputable Ash vs. Evil Dead. From the title on down, everything about the TV horror comedy is blunt force; we follow Evil Dead and Army of Darkness hero Ash (cult icon Bruce Campbell) as he takes on an army of the Deadites, his sawed-off shotgun and chainsaw arm (yep, you read that right) his preferred tools for Deadite bodily dismemberment. That's pretty much it, with the biggest surprises mostly limited to a) what horrible creature Ash will battle per episode and b) how much red Karo Syrup will get sprayed around the set (answer to the second question: a lot). Yet the series never flags or gets hung up on its own mythology. Part of that is the insane energy it generates. Evil Dead director Sam Raimi helms the pilot, and he (and his Academy Award-winning editor Bob Murawski) set a template that the other episode directors (including Michael Hurst and Michael Bassett) do an admirable job replicating. It's practically a live-action cartoon show, full of distorted angles and whiplash editing and gross sight gags and loud classic rock, and the abbreviated episode length (outside of the pilot, each episode runs about thirty minutes) helps keep the pace taut and lunatic. Better still is the show's sense of humor. Ash vs. Evil Dead has no pretensions whatsoever towards serious Drama - it knows it's trash and revels in that fact. The show takes its tonal cues from Campbell's lead performance. Anyone familiar with the Evil Dead movies (particularly Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness) knows how profoundly inadequate Ash can be as a hero - he's the Ron Burgundy of horror protagonists, all moronic bluster and wholly unearned confidence (Ash's one superpower, if you can call it that, is that he can take a luxury-liner's worth of abuse and somehow not die) - and Campbell keeps finding new depths to Ash's idiocy, whether it's his pathetic vanity (Raimi introduces the character with a zoom-cut montage of Ash putting on...his girdle) or his unintentional complicity in the whole "dead coming back to life to kill and possess the living" problem (short version: Ash gets high and reads from the Book of the Dead to impress a woman he's trying to sleep with. Believe it or not, this isn't really a spoiler - we learn this in the first five or ten minutes of the show). Everything is just window-dressing, although I do like the chemistry between Ash and his so-called Wolf Pack (the appealing pairing of Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo). But this really isn't a show about people. It's about gore, and speed, and tasteless humor. On those fronts, it's a resounding success. For fans of the genre and of Evil Dead, highly recommended.
Martin Liebman noted that the show "plays through a budget many times larger than that of the original film, which remains one of the all-time great low-rent success stories in movie history. The show is much more polished, in most ways, at least, while trying its best to hearken back to the originals. Spiritually, it's mostly a success. Texturally, not so much. With the wider window and time to fill of a TV show - albeit one built on only ten episodes that average around 30 minutes each, most of them less - and source material that's fairly narrow in need, it's inevitable that the TV show doesn't come close to matching all of the original films' inherent qualities. That's not even to mention the decades that have passed since and the new, practically unavoidable standards for making material like this. Gone is the gritty, grainy film texture, here replaced by fairly noisy digital (see video below). Some practical special effects appear throughout the season, and there's plenty of blood spilled - the screen is all but saturated in just about every episode - but there's also a fair amount of cheesy mid-grade CGI that doesn't mesh at all with the series, either on TV or back to the films which just felt sticky, gooey, utterly and tangibly gross and gruesome, which is a lot of what made the classics work so well. It's definitely Evil Dead at its core, but it never quite feels right when it's all said and done."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Tony Richardson's classic British drama A Taste of Honey to Blu-ray. An adaptation of Shelagh Delaney's classic play of the same name, the film focuses on young Jo (Rita Tushingham), a teenage girl trying to navigate her way through 1960s Manchester, especially as she hopes to balance her own needs with those of her monstrously selfish mother (Dora Bryan). Jo finds refuge in the company of handsome sailor Jimmy (Paul Danquah) and gay drifter Geoff (Murray Melvin), but their support might not be enough as Jo's adolescent pressures become far more adult in nature. What made Delaney's original work so bracing was the seriousness with which she afforded the predicament of the "normal" teenager - when the world starts to close in on Jo, we couldn't be further from something like, say, the Disney pictures with Hayley Mills. No, A Taste of Honey is closer to Andrea Arnold's wrenching drama Fish Tank.
However, for all its realism, A Taste of Honey stands out now because of its playfulness. Richardson wants to honor the social challenges present in Delaney's original text, and the vérité camerawork (courtesy of DP Walter Lassally) certainly captures all the grit of the film's Manchester locations, but he's not crafting a piece of outright kitchen-sink miserablism like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger or Alan Stilltoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (the film adaptations of both Richardson directed, ironically enough). This is the same guy who would later make the zippy postmodern comedy Tom Jones, after all, and you can see the origin of a lot of that Oscar winner's flair in A Taste of Honey. Lassally's cinematography borrows a lot of tricks from the French New Wave - the opening sequence, which finds Jo playing kickball at school, shares some of the same invention that would power Richard Lester's great A Hard Day's Night - and John Addison's bubbly, charming score recalls Elmer Bernstein's peppy work on The World of Henry Orient. And maybe that latter picture is key to decoding A Taste of Honey. Ultimately, both films have the same goal: to honestly depict the hardships and joys of being young. Richardson clearly loves Jo, and he spends as much time luxuriating in her teenage pleasures, from goofing off in class to zipping around Manchester, as he does considering her many challenges. That affection feels most bracing today - Tushingham's lovely work wouldn't feel out of place on something like Freaks and Geeks. Ironically, it's the more overt attempts at social realism that doesn't strike with the same force, albeit through no fault of the film itself. In 1961, it was a big deal that Jo fell in love with a black man and confided sympathetically to a homosexual; in 2016, however, those issues are no longer boundary-shaking taboos (not to denigrate the work of Paul Danquah and especially Murray Melvin, both of whom give wonderful performances). What lingers is the human experience, and A Taste of Honey has ample evidence of that.
Svet Atanasov wrote that the film is "truly groundbreaking...The 'kitchen sink' look and atmosphere are certainly present here, but A Taste of Honey is a much mellower, even cautiously optimistic drama. There is even a good dose of light humor in it that effectively counters a lot of the edgier material. The delicate yet truthful manner in which Richardson depicts Jo and Geoff's relationship is crucial for the film's success. Basically, it seems them as normal human beings and treats them as equals, dealing with a reality that is likely to destroy their future for very similar reasons, which is a tremendous accomplishment. (Remember, this film was released in the early 1960s and bigotry is a major factor here. Jo will have a baby from an interracial relationship, while Geoff is 'different' because he is a young homosexual man). "