For the week of October 10th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing this year's controversial Ghostbusters remake (newly rechristened Ghostbusters: Answer the Call for home media) to Blu-ray. This big-budget comedy seemed to bring out the worst in certain people; a particularly hateful subgroup of Internet trolls took the greatest umbrage possible at a bunch of ladies taking over for the original Ghostbusters (I like to think their protestations to their screens looked a little something like this), going so far as to flood any semi-related message board with bile and frighten Ghostbusters co-star Leslie Jones off Twitter. These "Ghost Bros" turned a studio comedy into a needlessly political agenda, and if you've any soul whatsoever, you were rooting for this new Ghostbusters to succeed just to shove it down the film's worst critics' throats. How disappointing, then, that Ghostbusters 2016 just isn't that good, albeit for very different, non-gendered reasons. Director Paul Feig and writer Katie Dippold (of Bridesmaids and The Heat fame) come up with a solid setup. After a series of paranormal catastrophes begins hitting Manhattan, a paranormal investigator-turned-skeptical professor (Kristen Wiig) teams up with her former partner (Melissa McCarthy) to fight back, little realizing how their actions will draw the ire of both New York's governmental bureaucracy (represented by a very funny Andy Garcia, whose Jaws reference might be my favorite thing in the movie) and the human lunatic (Neil Casey) manipulating the city's hauntings. Feig and Dippold even work in some none-too-subtle meta-commentary about how the new Ghostbusters (who also include Leslie Jones and the great Kate McKinnon) can't catch a break because of their gender. There's just one problem: almost none of this is funny. It begins promisingly, with a hilarious cameo from Silicon Valley's Zach Woods, but then...nothing. This is a movie that ropes in SNL's Cecily Strong and Veep's Matt Walsh and gives them zero to do, that sees both Wiig and McCarthy jockeying for the straight-man designation and gaining no laughs in the process, that overrelies on Chris Hemsworth (as the team's hunky moron of a secretary) and his willingness to look stupid instead of, say, trying to find the kind of comic rapport between the main characters that made the original movie so wonderful. And speaking of which: it's a cold day in Hell indeed when the least funny thing in your movie is comic legend and national treasure Bill Murray, who doesn't even try to hide his contempt and disinterest for the project. Only Kate McKinnon escapes unscathed, and it's through sheer force of will: most of her lines are functional, boring exposition, and she subverts almost every one through her sly line readings and offbeat reaction shots. Now, mind you, the new Ghostbusters is rarely bad (you can watch this thing without undue pain), but the lack of overt laughs starts to wear on you after a while. It doesn't help that Feig finally crashes into his limitations as a director. Feig is one of the good guys - he's earned a lifetime goodwill pass for Freaks and Geeks alone - but he just cannot direct action. With a few exceptions, the straight action setpieces in The Heat and Spy comprised those features' least engaging moments, and Ghostbusters doubles down on the (unsatisfying) mayhem, spinning the final half hour into an uninspired and boring CGI lightshow that would be almost intolerable were it not for a few choice McKinnon moments (her deadpan "This is always how I dreamed I'd die" line as she's being crushed by a giant inflatable-balloon ghost, and her execution of the only semi-satisfying action beat in the whole movie). You know what I'd like? To give this whole team a do-over. Let 'em spend a little more time, let 'em come up with weirder, more idiosyncratic moments, and then show that revision to the public. 'Cause I know they can all do better, and I worry that as is, the bad guys feel like they've won.
Speaking of controversy: Lionsgate is streeting the revenge thriller Blood Father. The premise is warmed-over Charles Bronson - a deadbeat dad reconnects with his wayward daughter (Erin Moriarty), and his long-dormant parental skills get a violent workout as he becomes her only protector against a gang of ruthless drug pushers (personified by an epically sleazy Diego Luna). So why the controversy? Well, when your hero is played by Mel Gibson, people tend to take notice, and not for creative reasons anymore. Gibson has detonated his public image at least two times over within the last twenty years - drunkenly insulting members of the Jewish faith; hurling racist and sexist invective while threatening his ex-wife - so you can't blame anyone not willing to give him any more chances. I mean, that's the debate, isn't it? To what extent can you separate the artist from the art, and what does your willingness (or unwillingness) to say about yourself? All valid food for thought. However, the fact remains that, unsavory personal characteristics aside, Gibson remains a potent screen presence, and his natural magnetism galvanizes Blood Father. His John Link never feels like a compendium of action-hero clichés. There's a weight to this man, and a sadness, too. You sense his tortured history (and maybe Gibson's own personal struggles make for unintentional assets) as well as his simultaneous terror and hope during his efforts to save his daughter - part of this guy hates resorting to violence, but another part knows it's the only way he can redeem himself in the eyes of someone he's failed. He's such a nervy, unpredictable performer, and director Jean-François Richet lets him motivate the proceedings, offering unfussy, crisp action scenes that capitalize on Gibson's physical prowess. If nothing else, Blood Father acts as a reminder of how exciting it is to watch Gibson kill his way out of a problem. Without Gibson, Blood Father would be a straight-to-On-Demand groaner. With him, it's a hell of a B-movie, one that lingers far longer than it should. Is it worth the moral conundrum? That's up for you to decide. But it's an objectively entertaining picture. So it goes.
Just as thrilling a B-movie is Wes Craven's 1977 cult classic The Hills Have Eyes. For a generation of fans raised on Alexandre Aja's glossy 2006 remake, the Craven original should prove bracing. Sure, the overall plot and framework is the same - while on a road trip in the desert, a large extended family finds itself under attack by a pack of vicious cannibals - but the execution couldn't be more different. Just five years after his grueling revenge thriller The Last House on the Left, Craven expands his scope without doing much to alter the gritty, vérité-esque aesthetic that made his previous feature so brutal. We've got larger action sequences, more violence (if not as viscerally rough as the killings seen in The Last House on the Left), and a bigger cast of characters, but we see it all as through a documentary scrim. In a way, the film feels like the natural antecedent to something like The Blair Witch Project. The flatness of the images and the unpolished performances (poor Martin Speer and Robert Houston...their heroes seem like they stumbled in from a bad soap opera) create the illusion that we're watching some kind of terrible documentary, and that goes double for the cannibalistic villains themselves. Today, we'd get some kind of elaborate FX makeup (think Aja's remake, or the Stan Winston-designed hillbillies in the Hills Have Eyes-inspired Wrong Turn), but the most iconic image of terror here is Michael Berryman's naturally distorted visage: his face is scary enough to inspire the darkest nightmares. The sense of realism is unparalleled, and that's all Craven. In interviews, he's alluded to trying to capture some of the chaos and terror of seeing the Vietnam War on TV, the sense that this insidious violence was corrupting those that watched it. Given what happens to those heroes who don't immediately succumb to the bad guys, I'd say Craven's message came through loud and clear. He always was the horror genre's most thoughtful director, and while his films certain got more polished, the unstable texture of The Hills Have Eyes lingers like few horror films do.
Finally, we get two wonderful new releases from the Criterion Collection. The first is Robert Altman's 1971 classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Altman has always been one of modern cinema's most interesting directors, but only a handful of his films deserve that much coveted masterpiece appellation. And of that group of unassailables - which includes Short Cuts, The Player, Gosford Park, The Long Goodbye, and Nashville (although an argument could also be made for 3 Women and M*A*S*H) - McCabe & Mrs. Miller might stand tallest, if only because it's the most singular film in a career studded with them. Ostensibly, the picture is a revisionist Western, but even that distinction is limiting since nothing about McCabe & Mrs. Miller feels even vaguely Western. Gone are the wide open spaces and deserts; Altman has replaced them with the arboreal muck of the Pacific Northwest, where it's always wet and cold (the weather has three modes: mud, rain, and snow) and where the inhabitants of his "Presbyterian Church" (the name of the town was coined from its only derelict church, so already you should have a sense about the film's use for religion) pile in on one another in cramped, small rooms with low ceilings and dripping boards. Every detail seems calibrated for maximum discomfort: Vilmos Zsigmond's over-exposed widescreen frames the actors like grotesques in a Breughel painting, caught between pools of inky dark and harsh light, while John Gusselle, Barry Jones, and William Thompson's revolutionary multi-channel sound design turns group scenes into a cacophony of indistinguishable noise. It's in this godforsaken place that we first meet John McCabe (Warren Beatty, in his richest, most nuanced performance), a gambler and self-proclaimed businessman (and rumored gunslinger) who wants to bring light to the masses, in a manner of speaking. Along with his business partner Mrs. Miller (a phenomenal Julie Christie), McCabe designs to give Presbyterian Church a high-end brothel. That description reads more whimsical (maybe like an early 1900s riff on The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) than it plays in the film. Even as McCabe's plans start to yield financial dividends, Altman maintains a slow, funereal control over the material, one that benefits immensely from Leonard Cohen's dirge-like score. No good can come in this world, and it's no surprise when McCabe and Mrs. Miller's success attracts the attention of some brutal killers (Hugh Millais, Jace Van Der Veen, and Manfred Schulz). Still, Altman continues to deny us traditional Western tropes. If anything, he's making a commentary on the nature of American capitalism. The most disquieting figure in the film isn't one of the killers but rather the blandly genial lawyer Clement Samuels (William Devane) who suggests that McCabe risk his life with all the enthusiasm of a person about to enjoy a really good cup of coffee. For Altman, it's the business conglomerations that swoop in and destroy, and one wonders if he was drawing on his own experiences within the Hollywood Machine. It all comes to a head in a showdown that plays like nothing else in the Western genre. In his juxtaposition of beautiful snowfall with the creeping, savage violence that explodes between McCabe and the killers, Altman draws on an apocalyptic power that wouldn't be out of place in a horror film. McCabe & Mrs. Miller isn't an easy sit - I count at least four failed viewings in my own history with it - but it rewards patience and focus like few films do. One of the great American films.
The second is a much-needed upgrade of Richard Linklater's Academy Award-winning Boyhood. Boyhood focuses on young Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a young kid who, along with his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter), navigates the perils of adolescence, not least of which are the complications resulting from his divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette). That's a simple setup, but the execution is anything but: Linklater shot bits and pieces of Boyhood over twelve years, thus allowing viewers to, in effect, watch these people grow up on-camera. Now, this conceit isn't as mind-blowing as some of Boyhood's biggest fans might have you think, and Linklater would be first to admit it. In the documentary genre, Michael Apted's Up Series has been documenting the lives of the same group of Britons since 1964, and as far as fiction goes, we've got François Truffaut's Adventures of Antoine Doinel, the five films of which follow the title character (played by Truffaut's long-time on-screen proxy Jean-Pierre Léaud) from troubled youth into unsettled middle-age. Heck, even Linklater has approached this cinematic device before in his Before... series, which checks back with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's garrulous lovers every nine or so years. But Boyhood's compression makes it unique since we get to register twelve years of changes in just under three hours, and in that regard, the picture feels unlike anything Linklater has ever made. He's quite literally documenting a life, and the scope accompanying such a task far exceeds the genial, ambling pleasures of his iconic Dazed and Confused or his hit comedy School of Rock; in addition to the constant physical changes that Mason and his family go through (and for all that has been written about watching Coltrane and Linklater grow up on camera, it's just as bracing to see Hawke and Arquette age from their early thirties into their mid-forties), Linklater uses a barrage of subtle details to cue us into the passing of time. He's one of the few directors to recognize the inherent value of pop culture, the way many of us measure our lives in Top 40 singles or movie releases, and so he lets us track Mason's development through a Coldplay song here, a Harry Potter book-release party there, an impassioned defense of The Dark Knight and Pineapple Express, all of which help time-stamp various sections of the film. For a certain generation of viewers, those cultural totems alone will be enough to endear them to Boyhood's world-view, yet Linklater's masterstroke is in how he manages to make this very specific experience seem eminently universal. Even if you don't know or care why Mason likes Bright Eyes, you still connect to his teenage ambivalence over finding a career path, or how his initial disinterest towards his mom's new husbands eventually blossoms into distrust once they start getting abusive. And it isn't just Mason - Linklater has always been one of the most generous of all American filmmakers, and his fullness of spirit means we get ample time to watch how time marinates Mason's whole family, with Hawke and Arquette scoring top marks. Hawke's absent father might be verging on a stereotype - he's the endearingly deadbeat dad whose maturity gene doesn't kick in until way late in life - but the way Hawke plays him is anything but routine, and his live-wire, improvisatory energy galvanizes Boyhood whenever he shows up. And Arquette is a quiet revelation as a woman who uses the fallout from some epically terrible relationships as battle armor, girding herself and her children a little more every time something goes wrong. She has a couple of moments near the end of the film that are quietly devastating, and it's a testament to how fully she embodies the weight of the years that these emotional depth charges land with the force they do. But that's the whole movie for you. It's an accumulation of moments, and together, they can take your breath away. This is a great movie.