For the week of September 19th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is streeting a new, twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Beauty and the Beast. Watching the film now, it's easy to forget what a critical film this was for the Mouse House. With the critical and commercial success of The Little Mermaid lining Disney's coffers, the studio wanted to solidify its reputation as the "Broadway of Animation," and this dark fairy tale about a young woman's burgeoning relationship with a savage beast seemed to be the perfect fit. But it was almost not to be. Disney had tried bringing this story to the screens many times, including just before The Little Mermaid in 1987, and every time, the creative team would scrap their ideas after extensive pre-production development. However, The Little Mermaid ultimately provided the missing ingredients: Mermaid lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken, whose musical stylings would prove so vital to Beauty and the Beast. They helped inspire the project, and today, it's their music that lingers far longer than any element in Linda Woolverton's fine-but-conventional script or the animation team's accomplished-but-too glossy designs (on one end of the spectrum: the Beast, who remains a marvel of traditional cel animation. On the other end: some early CGI landscapes that have the soulless polish of a computer-animation test reel). Ashman and Menken wrote pieces that defined the major characters in ways both concise and imaginative. The song from which the heroine takes her name ("Belle") suggests her spunk and independent spirit just as "Gaston" perfectly conveys the deluded self-absorption that would make that particular antagonist so hateful. "Something There" lets the Beast be both regal and charmingly lovesick, while "Be Our Guest" humanizes a bunch of literal inanimate objects better than a lot of live-action characters are. Often times, you have to suffer through the songs to get to the juicy plot stuff, but in Beauty and the Beast, the reverse is true. The music is a shot of adrenaline that the rest of the feature, successful as it might be, can't really replicate.
Universal Studios Home Entertainment and STX are offering the Civil War drama Free State of Jones this week. I want to like this movie so much more than I do. For one, it details a fascinating aspect of Civil War history, that of Newt Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a Confederate soldier whose open hostility towards both slavery and secession leads him to create the "Free State of Jones," a multi-racial collective existing illegally outside the parameters of the Confederacy. That's such a rich text, and one that could allow writer-director Gary Ross a far better platforms for his gifts than the first Hunger Games ever did. The confines of genre filmmaking don't suit Ross - he's at home wrestling with thornier cultural and social narratives, be it the strictures of the 1950s in Pleasantville or post-Depression America in his great Seabiscuit. But his ambition gets the best of him here. Even at almost two and a half hours, Free State of Jones hustles through Knight's life, barely pausing on any of the elements that could sustain a full feature: his brutal war experience, his relationship with Gugu Mbatha-Raw's former slave, or his increasingly violent rebellions. By the time Free State of Jones is jumping almost 100 years in the future to chart the racially motivated court case of Knight's great-great-great grandson, you begin to suspect that Ross loves the material a little too much. In trying to provide a survey of all the important historical events, he ends up losing any hope for a satisfying narrative thread. Furthermore, his filmmaking isn't as bracing as in Pleasantville or Seabiscuit. Ross doesn't get the credit he deserves for his cinematic chops - Pleasantville turns an overt morality play into an experimentally stunning display of light and color, while Seabiscuit is the kind of Cinemascope history lesson that Hollywood just doesn't make anymore - but he seems hamstrung in Free State of Jones. The 1.85:1 frame is too limited, denying us the kinds of widescreen vistas that would best suit Knight's story, and the compositions have the plodding, workmanlike flatness of a History Channel reenactment. What saves Free State of Jones is McConaughey's ferocious performance. No longer is he content to coast on his charm and good looks - he gives Knight more grit and instability than he has on the page. McConaughey alone turns an otherwise conventional "white savior" picture into something far more unpredictable, and redeems much of the tiresome formula.
From the Criterion Collection comes the bracing neo-noir Blood Simple. Blood Simple announced the Coen Brothers as a cinematic force of nature. Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane or Wes Anderson with Bottle Rocket, Joel and Ethan Coen emerged as fully formed auteurs, with Blood Simple as distilled an example of their filmmaking ethos as possible. The film plays like some twisted mélange of James M. Cain and the extended murder setpiece in Torn Curtain; we open on a hillbilly love triangle that grows ever more torrid when a jilted husband (Dan Hedaya) hires an epically sleazy private eye (M. Emmet Walsh, in his greatest performance) to kill his unfaithful wife (an impossibly young Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz). However, since this is noir, nothing goes as it seems, and the murder contract explodes into one brutal, messy act of violence after another. Emphasis on "messy": Joel Coen had cut his teeth editing Evil Dead for Sam Raimi, and Blood Simple adopts a horror film's zeal for bloody mayhem. The violence in this movie hurts and takes forever to mete out, especially in the long, grisly sequence where one character tries - and fails - to sufficiently clean up the gore left after an attempted murder, and all while trying to deal with the not-quite-dead-yet victim. And yet this horrible act is often very funny, thanks to the Coens' unique sensibilities. They've long cultivated an environment of stupid people doing horrible things to one another, and that instinct begins here. If any of these characters were more self-aware, the movie would list into the realm of tragedy, but from top to toe, these people are so dumb, from Walsh's parasite-of-a-private eye to Hedaya's angry lummox to Getz's dim-bulb Lothario. Even McDormand - who might be the most traditionally sympathetic character - comes off less like a manipulative seductress than a dim kid with little idea of the trouble she's in and, as we learn in the film's virtuoso climax, even less sense of who's doing what to whom. We laugh, not so we may not cry, but because that's what you do when the Coyote gets blown up by his own idiot schemes, and that, I suspect, is exactly the response the Coens want.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "if the great American directors from the 1940s and 1950s were still making noir films during the 1980s, their work probably would have looked very similar to the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple. This may sound like a bizarre speculation, but this film oozes the kind of special ambience that is present in many of the early noir classics…The cast is wonderful -- and at least Walsh should have been nominated for an Academy Award -- but the film's visual style is quite simply extraordinary. Barry Sonnenfeld, who later on went on to direct a number of huge blockbusters, does some absolutely incredible things with light, shadow and colors that prove yet again that great films get made by people with great imagination and skills, not by astronomical budgets. The film's sound design is just as impressive. There are various sequences with very original and wonderfully timed effects that raise the intensity level in spectacular fashion."
Finally, Olive Films is giving "Signature Edition" upgrades to two classic Westerns: High Noon and Johnny Guitar. Both pictures offer strikingly idiosyncratic takes on Western archetypes, albeit in very different ways. Of the two, High Noon seems the most traditional: it's a melodrama about a brave, decent ex-Marshal (Gary Cooper) who tries to rally support against the quartet of killers (Ian MacDonald, Sheb Wooley, Robert J. Wilke, and a young Lee Van Cleef) on their way to put him down. Director Fred Zinnemann directs with a crackerjack sense of pacing and space - in the film's greatest conceit, he lets the drama play out in real time so that we become as desperate as Cooper's hero is, given that everyone who refuses to help him wastes time that he could be spent preparing for battle. Yet the film's most significant architect is screenwriter Carl Foreman. Foreman was a blacklisted Hollywood writer who used the genre constraints of the Western to smuggle in a trenchant anti-Red Scare message. As he sees it, Cooper is the only one willing to stand up against a broken system, one that most around him support, even if only through inaction. It's a tough, important movie. Johnny Guitar, on the other hand, wastes no time in convincing viewers it is deeply, wonderfully loopy. During his heyday, director Nicholas Ray was quick to appropriate a genre for his own outré or perverse purposes (he's the same madman behind Rebel Without a Cause and the profoundly unsettling Bigger Than Life), and Johnny Guitar might be the most overt example of his experimentalism and flair. Even the title is misleading; while the title character (played by Sterling Hayden) is an important one, the main character is his ex-lover Vienna (Joan Crawford), a tough-as-nails saloon owner with a history of violence and a contentious relationship with the locals. It's Vienna who motivates the plot, especially once her rivalry with Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) flares up, and Ray barely hides the subtext that Vienna and Emma, too, were former lovers whose barely contained passion motivates the central conflict. Johnny, by comparison, can't help but seem recessive and weak (the fact that he's a reformed gunslinger only underscores his impotency), and it isn't far into the film that we realize Ray is doing something revolutionary. He's making a feminist Western during a time (the 1950s) when absolutely no one did. Johnny Guitar is political, yes, and strange and compelling and oddly funny. It's a great movie.