For the week of October 31st, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Star Trek Beyond to Blu-ray, and with it, the biggest tragedy of the summer. No, not "tragedy" in terms of the film's tone or overall quality. Rather, it's a tragedy that in a summer filled with dour, unpleasant studio bombast (the awful Ben-Hur remake, the even worse Independence Day sequel, the one-two throat-punch of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad), a blockbuster as fleet and enjoyable and unpretentious as Star Trek Beyond opened and closed to as little fanfare as this one received. Just as he did with the Fast & Furious franchise, director Justin Lin (replacing J.J. Abrams, who jumped ship ASAP to spearhead the Star Wars sequels) has given the Star Trek series a welcome shot of adrenaline, eschewing the world-ending menace of the grimdark Star Trek Into Darkness (seriously - Beyond acts as though we've skipped straight from the 2009 Star Trek) for a smaller-scale adventure that pits the crew of the Starship Enterprise (played once again by Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, and the late Anton Yelchin, all of whom deserve at least 55% of the credit for making these new Star Treks so watchable) against both the environment of a hostile alien planet and a brutal dictator (Idris Elba, under a small continent of latex makeup) nursing a mean grudge against Starfleet. Elba's dreams of vengeance certainly skew towards the "eradicate all Starfleet operations from existence" end of the spectrum, and sure, we get the requisite number of space dogfights and shootouts (including the umpteenth time the Enterprise gets destroyed at the end of the first act), but Lin has no desire to treat this material as grand opera. Rather, he keeps the proceedings humming along like a really solid episode of the Star Trek TV show, where the stakes can't get too high because otherwise, how would we enjoy the interplay between cast members old and new (MVP of the new bunch: Kingsman's Sofia Boutella, who walks away with the film as a Jennifer Lawrence-inspired alien badass)? Credit, too, must go to Pegg, whose script (which he co-authored with Doug Jung) is a cut above most four-quadrant blockbusters, balancing formula demands with engaging character beats, the best of which go to Quinto and Urban's wonderfully prickly Spock-and-Bones routine. About the only thing bad here is Paramount's marketing. Star Trek Beyond has three or four rousing action beats that would have been all the more impactful had Paramount not bent over backwards to spoil them all - one, in particular, might rank as the single most pleasurable action-movie moment of Summer 2016. So do yourself a favor. Ignore the trailer at the bottom of the page, and go into Star Trek Beyond as fresh as possible. You won't regret it.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film is "creatively derivative yet very fun. And while it works, one cannot help but feel that the emphasis on spit and polish over story and themes - even as the film boldly efforts to the contrary - leaves Star Trek just looking more like a popcorn film than serious sci-fi. Fortunately, the kinetic energy and relentless action are enough to keep the movie going. Visual effects are stellar, though much of them are so dependent on density and speed of movement that there doesn't need to be much detail for them to shine. It's in the bigger moments, however, that the film's special effects dominate. Lin's Trek thrives on a big scope and sense of scale (which the movie plays with from its opening sequence forward) and always allows its forward momentum to carry it through any lapse of dramatic import, empty character moments, or a villain who takes too long to develop but gradually builds into an enticingly layered character. If much of that sounds negative, it is. But Beyond manages to mask its shortcomings remarkably well. It's tailored to its strengths, does a commendable job of putting its weaknesses on the back burner, and the audience will never feel betrayed by the end product, warts and inability to walk that fine line between 'fan service' and 'homage' and 'thievery' included."
The old adage, "The best way to criticize one movie is to make another one," is on full display with Universal Studios Home Entertainment's new release of Bad Moms. All summer, it felt like everyone was talking so much about the female-led Ghostbusters reboot - how funny it wasn't, how funny it was, how much impact it needed to make, how little impact it actually made - that they missed the quiet success of this raunchy comedy about three moms (Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, and Kristen Bell) who decide to rebel against the strictures of their PTA-mandated lifestyle. Whereas Ghostbusters feels wholly compromised (gotta love its cast and crew, but they're hampered by the $100+-million budget and a PG-13 rating), the beyond-modestly budgeted Bad Moms (it cost about $20 million) gets to be its own, weird little thing, and I'm not just talking about playing to the relaxed content standards of an R rating. Bad Moms tailors itself specifically to its female leads, harnessing their respective comic personas to far better use than Ghostbusters did (outside, of course, of Kate McKinnon's wonderful comic turn). That means we get to watch Bell's wide-eyed nebbish bounce off Hahn's wild card, or Christina Applegate's domineering sociopath play a Mean Girls riff with Jada Pinkett and Annie Mumolo's social-climbing gadflies, and all without worrying that these talented, hilarious women are going to have to suppress their natural gifts in order to placate the various plot machinations or the demands of the studio. And Bad Moms ended up grossing almost $200 million. Now, I don't want to overstate the quality of the film. Cinematically, it's no great shakes (Jon Lucas and Scott Moore's point-and-shoot aesthetic makes you long for the relative polish of a Todd Phillips), and as great as the supporting players are, Kunis is a bit of a wet blanket in the lead. But there's still a lesson to be learned here, I think, and it's this: women are funny, and if you let them be, everyone wins.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that "The film works to find some balance in their journey, a bit of heart and a whole lot of humor. It's hardly original or even particularly memorable, but for those not too bothered by the banter, it's a fair and fun enough diversion from life's troubles, even as it's rather encompassing of them...The movie strives to tell a story of balance, then, and with some heart and (mostly) humor intermixed in between. The film favors more of a basic cadence and character arc for its protagonist rather than delving deep into the human psyche. It's more superficial than it is meaningful, which is what the movie sets out to achieve, using the characters' growing understanding of context and balance as a tool to promote the humor, not vice versa. It works well enough, thanks largely to some enthusiastic and capable performances from its trio of leads."
Critics and audiences started sharpening their knives for A24 and Lionsgate's The Sea of Trees almost immediately following its Cannes Film Festival premiere. The collective goodwill of director Gus Van Sant and stars Matthew McConaughey and Ken Watanabe just wasn't enough, so negatively did audiences respond to this drama about a grieving college professor (McConaughey) who has to postpone his suicide attempt after he becomes the unlikely savior to a seriously wounded Japanese stranger (Watanabe). As the two men travel through Japan's "Suicide Forest," they form a bond that forces McConaughey's character to confront the death of his wife (Naomi Watts), and...well, to quote The Big Lebowski, you can imagine where it goes from here. But for at least half its runtime, I was feeling a little more charitable towards Van Sant's latest caprice. Sure, it's too long and too mawkish and as subtle as a flying mallet, but it looks gorgeous (Kasper Tuxen's cinematography turns this into the most visually lovely Lifetime movie ever made), and McConaughey is as good here as he is in Dallas Buyers Club or Interstellar or True Detective - he's quickly gone from the next Tab Hunter to the next Paul Newman, turning in reliably excellent performances even when the movies themselves are beneath him. However, The Sea of Trees starts working overtimes to earn all the critical enmity in its back half, delivering a series of insipid twists with metronomic, hateful frequency. You'll probably be able to guess one of them by the end of the first act; what you won't be able to guess is how Van Sant and screenwriter Chris Sparling double-down on that nonsense. Suffice to say, their creative instincts are at best stupid and at worst deeply offensive. I've heard some people describe the end as Shyamalian in its idiocy, but I have to disagree - even Lady in the Water and The Happening weren't this breathtakingly dumb. A rare misfire.
Jeffrey Kauffman also criticized the film, writing that "things tip over into maudlin melodrama with a 'disease of the week' approach that might have been lifted whole cloth from any given Lifetime made for television movie...Some high falutin' philosophizing intrudes in the film's final act, with an emphasis on spirituality that some may find downright hilarious, what with hoary conceits like angel messages being delivered on fragrant breezes and the like. The Sea of Trees met with almost uniformly negative reviews upon its theatrical release (including by our very own Brian Orndorf), and I can certainly understand the disparagement. That said, there's a strange majesty to some of Van Sant's framings in the film, with cinematographer Kasper Tuxen wending in and out of the forest seemingly like a leaf blown on one of the breezes that are so frequently shown. The film's gorgeous score by Mason Bates is another standout, and there's no arguing that McConaughey and Watts bring more than sufficient star power to the film. But this is one outing that is simply too diffused to ever deliver any potent message, despite its all too ardent attempts to salve the wound of loss that virtually everyone suffers at some point in their lives."
Also from Lionsgate comes the racially charged procedural Imperium. Director Daniel Ragussis' feature stars Daniel Radcliffe in another of his "Please STOP seeing me as Harry Potter" turns. Radcliffe plays a sensitive FBI agent who goes deep undercover as a neo-Nazi in order to investigate three very different men with ties to white-supremacy violence: a bloviating, right-wing radio host (Tracy Letts), a hulking bruiser (Chris Sullivan), and a genial family man (Sam Trammell). If nothing else, Imperium deserves your respect for trying to impart a challenging, socially relevant message with real sensitivity and tact. Yes, a big part of the narrative unfolds under the thriller mandates of, say, a Mississippi Burning (especially regarding Nate's increasingly desperate hunt to locate a hidden white-supremacist with terroristic ambitions), but Ragussis is just as interested in finding the shared humanity between his protagonists and antagonists. I was reminded of Tony Kaye's flawed-but-incendiary American History X - Trammell, for example, plays a racist who is just as devoted to his family as he is to the cause, and we learn Radcliffe's main qualification for the job is his empathy, that he can view his targets as people, a characteristic that makes him a more effective FBI agent. However, I don't know if Imperium really works as drama. For one, the whodunit elements are so pared down that you'll probably have no trouble guessing Radcliffe's ultimate quarry. Furthermore, that sense of empathy ends up working against the film. Imperium tries so hard to be even-handed that it ends on a note more befitting an after-school special than a thriller. It just hemorrhages any suspense, and even Radcliffe's deeply committed performance can't hold our interest. Still, an interesting feature, if an imperfect one.