For the week of October 17th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment gets to claim the week's most important Blu-ray release: the five-film Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection. Comedy nerds, rejoice: we get the five funniest movies from three of the funniest people to ever speak the English language (and Zeppo). And when you watch these in sequence, you can see the Marx Brothers honing their craft on camera, taking each film as an opportunity to get faster and weirder and funnier. Not that they started at too much of a deficit. Take 1929's The Cocoanuts, for example. Cinematically, it's a filmed stage play, with directors Robert Florey and Joseph Santley content to let their actors line up along horizontal lines and speak at each other - Intolerance, this is not. But the lack of polish matters not one whit. We're too busy laughing at the verbal dexterity of the three main characters (and Zeppo) as they talk themselves into nonsensical oblivion. The Cocoanuts also establishes the template that most Marx Brothers movies would follow. Groucho plays an inexplicably powerful authority figure (this time, he runs a popular Florida resort) who spends the rest of the film verbally sparring with Chico and Harpo's unscrupulous conmen AND flirting/humiliating Margaret Dumont's comically haughty society woman (also Zeppo is there, or something). That's about it, and considering the Marx Brothers' vaudeville polish and the barbed repartee in Morrie Ryskind's script, that's all we need. 1930's Animal Crackers doubles-down on the insanity - the stuff involving the stolen painting is really just the background for a series of lunatic asides, the craziest of which is Groucho's side-eyed presentation as famed big-game hunter Captain Spaulding. Animal Crackers is definitely funnier than The Cocoanuts, but it also errs slightly in terms of runtime: at 97 minutes, it lacks the brisk velocity of the Brothers' finest work. Enter Monkey Business from 1931, which is twenty minutes shorter and has moments that rank among the Marx Brothers' finest big-screen moments. I cannot tell you how many times I've watched the long opening act, which finds the Marx Brothers stowing away on a cruise ship and trying like hell not to get caught, even as they resort to such buffoonery as individually imitating Maurice Chevalier despite sharing literally zero similarities with the famous French crooner-actor.
But as funny as the Marxes are at pretending to be some they never could be, they're even better when approximating something they're terrible at. To wit: 1932's Horse Feathers, which is the second-funniest film they ever made and which finds them playing in the sandbox of college football. We're almost in full-on Dada logic here, given the film's ludicrously convoluted plot that involves Groucho's beyond-inappropriate college dean, his dealings with two idiot betting enforcers (Chico and Harpo, natch), the school's lascivious "college widow" (throwing the movie into a one-sided love triangle between the woman, Groucho, and Zeppo), and a rigged football game that keeps escalating the level of crazy. It makes no sense, nor should it. But as great as Horse Feathers is, it plays as mere prelude to the Marx Brothers' 1933 masterpiece Duck Soup. Here, the surrealism finally takes center stage. Groucho plays the head of the fictional country Freedonia, and every decision he makes draws Freedonia closer to war against neighboring Sylvania. In many ways, Duck Soup is every inch the paradigmatic Marx Brothers feature. Groucho "romances" Dumont whenever he's not enduring Chico and Harpo's jackassery (also Zeppo exists, I guess), with some zany songs and brilliant physical comedy (Harpo and Groucho's mirror standoff deserves mention alongside Buster Keaton's finest hours) tossed in to leaven the formula. But this time, the Marxes aren't going at it alone. Director Leo McCarey is helming the ship, and anyone who's seen An Affair to Remember or the brutally sad Make Way for Tomorrow can attest to his mastery behind the scenes. McCarey removes all the studio concessions (so, no Harpo-playing-the-harp/Chico-playing-the-piano interludes, and no side love-interest nonsense that doesn't features the Brothers Marx) while adrenalizing the Marxes' beloved absurdism to such a degree that by the end, the film takes on a grim pallor: Groucho ends up leading his country to war out of spite and pettiness and ego and sheer lunacy. You don't have to look hard to see the potential parallels with today's political climate or the shared DNA between this and Stanley Kubrick's even-bleaker farce Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The cinema exists for films like Duck Soup. I can imagine no higher compliment. But anyone who cares about film preservation needs to considering picking up this set. We take studio releases for granted, and the truth of the matter is that a) migrating any given studio's back-catalog to a new home-media format costs a lot of time and money and b) ensuring that the classics make their way to high-definition is by no means a certainty. I mean, we live in a world where even James Cameron doesn't have his entire oeuvre on Blu-ray, let alone a group of scrappy misfits like Marx Brothers. A purchase of The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection tells the studios that you care about restoration and film preservation. When it comes to movies, voting with your dollar is the only viable option. Luckily, the movies themselves are pretty good, too.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "what's fascinating about the early Marx Brothers efforts is how they very subtly display signs of the assimilative fervor that many first or second generation Jews of that time period experienced, where it became paramount (no pun intended, considering the studio which released the early Marx Brothers efforts) to 'blend in.' That may seem positively non-intuitive, given the Marx Brothers' predilection toward anarchic behavior and just outright silliness, but when seen through the prism of an early to mid-20th century 'Jewish identity,' the first five Marx Brothers feature films offer not just laughs galore, but a rather interesting example of so-called 'ethnics' rather brilliantly invading the American consciousness in an almost subversive way. In this respect, the Marx Brothers become one of the most potent examples of what might be termed cultural immigration, where their Jewishness may have been slightly cloaked but no less ingratiating in the long run. That 'cloaking' may be nowhere more obvious than in the persona of Chico, a Marx who spoke with a faux Italian accent and who seemed to be something of a grifter at times. Cloaked in another way but perhaps arguably more ostensibly Jewish, at least on one interpretive level, was Harpo, the weirdly childlike mute who seemed to often be the hapless scapegoat in many of the films, the outsider whose very powerlessness (as evidenced by his inability or unwillingness to speak) created 'problems,' albeit often in a comedic way. The most obvious paradigm of Jewishness is of course Groucho, with his hyperarticulate verbal humor and a probably more than slightly lecherous mien which may in fact be a precursor for some of Woody Allen's more sexually charged material. Zeppo, the kind of 'forgotten' Marx Brother, and the one whose film persona is probably the blandest, may therefore somewhat ironically be seen as the best symbol of those aforementioned assimilative tendences - Zeppo had 'learned' how to be an American first, blending in as the troupe's straight man and therefore almost seeming like an outsider himself, at least within the insular world of the siblings' relationships."
From Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment comes Independence Day: Resurgence. The first Independence Day is one of the great contemporary Hollywood blockbusters: scary, thrilling, and goofy, with an absurdly qualified cast hitting some sublime note pitched between campy and serious. It's also a fully contained story, and one that, on a narrative level, never begged for a sequel (hell, you could argue it is its own trilogy, given how cleanly it demarcates its "July 2," "July 3," and "July 4" sections into beginning, middle, and end). But Independence Day also made a lot of people a lot of money, and that's all the justification any studio head has ever needed to force-feed a sequel down our throats. Still, surely the Resurgence team could have done better than this? I'll admit to digging the central premise, which finds the aliens from the first film looking for a rematch against a Planet Earth that's spent twenty-five years finding new uses for all the alien tech that rained down at the end of ID4. But like pretty much everything about Resurgence, this cool idea serves as window-dressing, and little more, for a series of uninspired dogfights against bigger, meaner alien ships. Sure, one could also label its predecessor all flash and no substance, but a) the largely practical FX work there has so much more personality than the murky CGI jumble the new film gives viewers, and b) we cared about the action because we cared about the characters. Not so here. Of the cast, only Jeff Goldblum connects at all, and only because he's doing his Goldblum shtick - like Christopher Walken, Goldblum can enliven tired material through sheer force of quirk. Everyone else flails, with lowest marks going to the Teen Beat-ready troika of Liam Hemsworth, desperately wishing everyone would think he's Chris, Jesse Usher, playing Will Smith's son without bringing any of Smith's charm or presence or good humor, and Maika Monroe, who's wonderful in The Guest and It Follows but registers zero presence here (plus, why isn't Mae Whitman playing this part? She's still acting and barely older than Monroe, and OH YEAH, she played the same character in the first movie). There's a perverse anti-charm to this movie: five writers (Nicolas Wright, James A. Woods, Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich, and James Vanderbilt) are credited, yet they collectively thought that it was a good idea to fashion a brutal African warlord as one of the side-heroes? That we'd rather watch people talking about how much bigger these new alien warships were than actually spending significant visual time with them? That Goldblum and Judd Hirsch, both of whom had such wonderfully prickly chemistry together in ID4, would recapture that magic by spending the movie separated from each other? The only time the movie's broken logic yields positive results is for a - I kid you not - kaiju-inspired fight against a giant alien monster at the end, but it's over and done before we've had any real time to enjoy it so we can get to the nonsensical cliffhanger ending. This movie is why it's best to leave well enough alone.
In another franchise-related news, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering the delightful B-movie pairing of Waxwork and Waxwork II: Lost in Time. This double-feature set is part of the initial run of Lionsgate's "Vestron Video Collector's Series" packages. In the 1980s and 1990s, Vestron churned out a run of entertainingly junky genre programmers (Chopping Mall, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud, the masochistic zombie classic Return of the Living Dead 3), but none of which were as good as 1988's Waxwork. Thinking about Waxwork, I'm reminded of the tagline for the similarly spirited '80s slasher Pieces - "It's exactly what you think it is," and so it goes with Waxwork, which centers around a wax museum filled with living, murderous wax creations. Think House of Wax meets Nightmare on Elm Street (given that much of the film follows a group of teenagers trying to avoid certain death at the hands of these wax abominations), and you're not far off. And to be sure, you can enjoy Waxwork on purely disreputable terms, especially in the film's much bloodier director's cut. That said, I've always thought Waxwork to be a cut about your typical '80s slasher. Credit must go to director Anthony Hickox, who uses the film as an attempt to create a horror-movie sandbox. A werewolf attack lets him indulge in some American Werewolf in London-lite hijinks, and if you're puzzling at the inclusion of wax zombies, well, all the better to turn the movie into Night of the Living Dead for a minute. We get Dracula attacks and the Phantom of the Opera and an interjection from the Marquis De Sade that briefly injects the film with some Cronenbergian sexual perversion, and that's all before an anarchic climax that lets British thespians David Warner and Patrick Macnee compete to see who can chew the most scenery amidst a monster battle not a million miles removed from the ending of Joss Whedon's (admittedly smarter and wittier) Cabin in the Woods. Horror-movie freaks go to the cinema for movies like Waxwork. I wish I could say the same for its 1992 sequel Waxwork II: Lost in Time, but this follow-up misses out on so much of what made the original so much fun, despite the presence of Hickox and returning star Zach Galligan. This time, our heroes are jumping through time and space as part of some ongoing battle between God and the Devil (don't ask), but while Hickox still indulges in some more movie homages (including an Alien riff), the experience is a whole lot jokier and a whole lot fresh than it was the first time around. Still, you can do far worse in the DTV realm, and at least we get some fun turns from Bruce Campbell and Alexander Godunov. Worth it for Waxwork alone.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is offering the latest from Woody Allen this week, the wistful dramedy Café Society. From roughly 1967 until about 1995 (1997, if you love, as I do, Allen's misanthropic Wild Strawberries riff Deconstructing Harry), Allen enjoyed the most consistently excellent filmmaking run in all of American cinema, which makes his late-period run so frustrating. Before, we'd go from Annie Hall to Interiors to Manhattan in less than three years; now, we have to suffer through three or four Curse of the Jade Scorpions or Hollywood Endings to get to one Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Midnight in Paris. I guess you can't blame him – Allen is over eighty years old, after all, so if anyone has earned the right to be inconsistent, it's him. Plus, much of Allen's recent oeuvre doesn't vacillate so wildly between quality poles: more often than not, you get something like Café Society, which proves slight but pleasant. It helps that Allen is working in the nostalgia-tinged mode that served him so well in Radio Days and Bullets over Broadway, focusing on Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg, who could play the Woody Allen proxy until time immemorial) who dreams of making in 1930s Hollywood. Of course, this being a Woody Allen picture, Bobby's professional ambitions go hand-in-hand with all sorts of personal complications, not least of which is his sweet, tentative courtship of a young woman (Kristen Stewart) secretly having an affair with Bobby's powerful – and very married – uncle (Steve Carell). Whenever Café Society focuses on this love triangle, it maintains a beguiling (if insubstantial) charm. True, Carell doesn't really have the presence to pull off "fearsome Hollywood powerbroker" (not that you can blame him – he was a last-minute replacement for Bruce Willis, who would have been a far more formidable romantic and professional rival but apparently didn't gel with Allen), but Eisenberg and Stewart are so good together it doesn't matter. The two fall into the same honest chemistry they shared in the underrated 2009 drama Adventureland, and we quickly get invested in their relationship. It's Allen's most winning romantic coupling since Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo. And you can sense Allen's renewed interest in their scenes together. Working with the great DP Vittorio Storaro, Allen bathes the film in golden, vivid colors, and he seems content just to point Storaro's camera at Eisenberg and Stewart and let them be. The problem is Allen's usual problem: the older he gets, the more content he is to just shoot his first draft, warts and all (call it The Clint Eastwood Factor). Sure, the Eisenberg/Stewart material is great, but Allen keeps throwing in narrative curlicues, most notably a return trip to New York City where Bobby gets involved in the murderous doings of his mob-connected brother Ben (Corey Stoll, who walked away with Midnight in Paris but barely registers here). This part of the film would work best at the madcap pitch of Allen's gangster comedy Bullets over Broadway (there are A LOT of similarities as is), except Allen never wavers from the same winsome melancholy as the Eisenberg and Stewart scenes, and the potential for farce just withers and dies. Some of that is intentional, I suppose. Café Society is very much an autumnal feature concerned with the past and the way that all things end (Allen's own narration lacks his traditional nebbish snap – there's real regret in his voice, like he's looking back on a time that never belonged to him), and if Allen pushed himself to a more polished draft, he might be able to better match that tone. As is, Café Society stands as an also-ran. A pleasant enough one, but an also-ran all the same.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that the film "just kinds of stands there, waiting for something that never quite arrives, kind of like its focal couple...The unrequited love angle would seem to be perfect for Allen's particular sensibility, but Café Society never really fully investigates it, ultimately pairing Vonnie with Phil and Bobby with a new main squeeze named Veronica (Blake Lively). The second half of the film actually starts delving more into Ben's criminal activities and how they impact Bobby, another kind of odd detour in a film already filled with them. As with even the least effective Allen film, there are enjoyable tidbits sprinkled throughout the diffuse story. At least a couple of these actually involve Ben, with Allen delivering nicely staged punchlines regarding Ben's 'negotiating' tactics. But these are brief oases in what is otherwise a kind of surprisingly bland saga, one that almost certainly would not have satisfied weary audiences back in the thirties looking for something to help them forget tawdry private lives such as the ones on display throughout the film."
Guillermo Del Toro makes children's movies for adults. Sometimes that instinct turns his features into extended exercises in viscera: he pores over his nauseating Reaper vampires in Blade II with all this clinical zeal of some kids examining a dead animal carcass on the road. Sometimes he faceplants, as with the disappointing Crimson Peak, which struggled to marry the emotional intelligence of a thirteen-year-old girl to the graphic FX details of a Fangoria spread. And sometimes he creates magic, as with his dazzling fantasy Pan's Labyrinth, which Criterion is upgrading this week. The third part of a loose trilogy that began with Cronos and The Devil's Backbone (the latter Del Toro's other perfectly pitched fable-for-adults), Pan's Labyrinth takes viewers to the bloody aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Horrified by the actions of her new fascist stepfather (the revolting Sergi López, who's essentially playing an all-too-human Big Bad Wolf), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) retreats inside a fantasy world of mythical creatures and ancient prophecies, but she isn't prepared for when her escape grows just as disturbing as anything in the real world. If there's anything I have to take Del Toro to task for here, it's that he once claimed that he tried to foreground the cruelty of the fairy-tale world by underplaying the violence in the real world, and this assertion (I forget where he said it) is complete nonsense. We see Lopez cave in a man's face with a wine bottle, a punishment that remains unmatched until someone subjects Lopez to a particularly grisly form of mutilation. Nothing we see in Ofelia's dreams - a giant cave frog vomiting up its own guts, a fairy-eating "Pale Man" who sees through eyes embedded in his hands - has the same blunt-force impact, if only because the fantasy setting does dull the sting of the violence. If anything, though, Del Toro's misconception is our gain. Try as she might, Ofelia can't hide from the world's horrors - even her imagination starts acting against her. The situation lends the film a hard-edged realism that's often lacking from Del Toro's works. Sure, the movie nerd who obsessed over screen monsters is present (and I haven't even mentioned Doug Jones's title character, who remains a stunning example of practical makeup work), but we also see the man whose father got kidnapped when Del Toro was a boy, who knows what people will do to each other when they're feeling petty and small and weak. That second guy is in charge for most of Pan's Labyrinth's increasingly bleak second half - all the magic in the world can't help his protagonists dodge a real gut-punch of an ending. This film is still Del Toro's high-water mark, and I wonder if he'll ever top it.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "Pan's Labyrinth has been recently remastered, with the involvement of its creator, Guillermo del Toro, and I think that folks that like the film will be very happy with the end result. The newly remastered Pan's Labyrinth will be available as a standard Blu-ray release as well as in the Trilogía de Guillermo del Toro deluxe box set, which also includes the early hits Cronos and The Devil's Backbone."
Finally, just one week after its release of Robert Altman's legendary revisionist Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Criterion is giving an upgrade to another of Altman's finest films: the kaleidoscopic L.A. drama Short Cuts. As his 1992 comeback picture The Player demonstrated, Altman was continuing to evolve his craft until well into his seventies, and Short Cuts is no exception. In overall scope and form, it's another one of Altman's iconic ensemble dramas. Whether we're talking about the satire of the American character that is Nashville or the gentle misanthropy of his A Wedding, Altman loved overstuffing the frame with actors and watching them ping-pong against one another, and so it goes with Short Cuts. Three buddies (Fred Ward, Buck Henry, and Huey Freakin' Lewis) find a dead body on a camping trip but decide to keep fishing instead of immediately informing the authorities. A frustrated husband (Chris Penn) fights to keep his sexual desires sublimated as his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) dispassionately works a job as a phone sex operator. A gentle cellist (Lori Singer) suffers in the orbit of her abrasive lounge-singer mother (Annie Ross). A motorcycle cop (Tim Robbins) barely hides his infidelities with another woman (Frances McDormand) because he desperately wants to hurt his wife (Madeleine Stowe), while a pair of long-suffering winos (Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits) try to heal each other as they drift in and out of sobriety. And that's not even counting the oddball makeup artists (Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor) who love each other as much as they love their effects work, or the suburban housewife (Andie McDowell) rocked by the sudden death of her son, or even an appearance by the one-and-only Alex Trebek. These people glance and drift off and among one another in ways that aren't at all removed from Altman's other ensemble pieces...except Short Cuts isn't entirely Altman. For inspiration, he's working from a series of short stories by Raymond Carver, adapting and reappropriating parts of Carver's pieces as he sees fit. The result is a singular beast. Short Cuts certainly has the relentless psychological intimacy of Carver's best works, but it's also unmistakably Altman's baby, delighting in the performers and the roving, textured world they occupy. It's hard to do that, to pay homage to one great artist while fully indulging your own creative whims (see Birdman, which ultimately reduces Carver as little more than a hip literary in-joke used to buttress Alejandro González Ińárritu's technical virtuosity), but part of me wonders if that challenge wasn't the very thing that interested Altman in the first place. One of the seminal films of the 1990s.