For the week of November 14th, Pixar and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing Finding Dory to Blu-ray. The sequel to the 2003 megahit Finding Nemo, Finding Dory focuses instead on, you guessed it, the scatter-brained Blue Tang (Ellen DeGeneres) that helped clownfish Marlin (the great Albert Brooks) search for his missing son Nemo (voiced here by Hayden Rolence). This time around, Dory herself yearns to locate her missing parents, but the journey proves more perilous than she expects, and she becomes separated from Marlin and Nemo, biding her time among the other inhabitants of a marine-life institute. That's right - it's basically the same movie with a slightly different spin, and this rote narrative is indicative of all Pixar sequels that don't have Toy Story in the title. For a company capable of putting out something as emotional and challenging as Inside Out, it's a little disheartening to watch them fall back on old standards. Everything here feels too familiar; even the supporting cast of "wacky" characters (Ed O'Neil's red octopus; Kaitlin Olson's near-sighted shark; Brad Garrett's amiable porcupine-fish) could have been downloaded straight from Pixar's "Comic Relief" hard drive. Where Finding Dory excels, and what justifies its existence, is in its exploration of the title role. It's always a risky proposition, ceding more screentime to a popular supporting character - Pixar itself struggled with this prospect in the Mater-the-Tow-Truck-centric Cars 2 - but Dory herself proves such an engaging character that we're happy to spend some time with her. Sure, we get some backstory that deepens our understanding of her, especially with regard to her family, but she's still the same sunny, lovably frustrating character we saw in Finding Nemo. DeGeneres is never as engaging as she is in these movies, pixels-to-real life ratio be dammed. Plus, few mix heartfelt and silly as well as Pixar does. That said, even the relative skill on display here feels a bit formulaic, and I'll be interested to see Pixar level off this recent, sustained run of sequels. The studio is better when it innovates - these surface renovations are too easy.
Martin Liebman wrote that "it's not until later when it starts to mold its own identity, expose its heart, and elicit a deeper emotional response beyond the fun of reuniting with old favorite characters and partaking in the first steps of new adventure. Indeed, much of the film's beginning feels more like a collection of fun scenes rather than an original story, but as it circles around cues from the first film, it slowly expands its base to the point that the outer reaches feel sufficiently unique to carry the movie to its predictable, but satisfying, conclusion. Beyond that, the movie looks expectedly gorgeous, never feeling bolstered or reworked from the tone and texture of the first film, comfortably recreating the world and characters and adding its new layers with a seamless sense of transition that keeps it in-line with the last film, at least on a pure textural level. What really makes this film, and the one before it, stand apart is the spirit with which it builds it charters. Part of that is the quality voice component and the digital construction, but the screenwriters have done something special with the world and characters, beyond even many other 'talking animal' features, by exploring to a much greater extent, finding a tangible sense of self, purpose, place, and soul in the characters that's often lacking or, at worst, nonexistent in other like films."
Disney and Lucasfilm's are offering a new, 3D special-edition release of Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens. Following its December release, the sci-fi adventure quickly broke box-office records and ushered in a whole new era of Star Wars fandom, and for one simple reason: The Force Awakens is not the prequels. Whereas George Lucas' artistically questionable prequel trilogy made money from distending a generic origin story to near-redundant length (seriously, only Revenge of the Sith covers consistently relevant content, and even it's twenty minutes too long and suffers from terrible acting and even worse dialogue), The Force Awakens lights off for the territories, picking up some thirty-plus years after the events of Return of the Jedi; the fascistic New Order (led by Adam Driver, Domhnall Gleeson, and Andy Serkis, the latter buried under unconvincing mo-cap character design) is looking to reclaim the previous Empire's control over the galaxy through capturing the missing Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, who's second-billed and in the movie for maybe ninety seconds), but it faces unexpected resistance in the triumvirate of Han Solo (Harrison Ford), former stormtrooper Finn (Attack the Block's John Boyega), and Rey (Daisy Ridley), a young orphan whose connection to the Force might be stronger than anyone - including herself - could possibly imagine. Director J.J. Abrams has long revered the original Star Wars trilogy (one could argue he was trying to turn his two Star Trek movies into stealth Star Wars entries, much to the detriment of any and all things Star Trek), and he evinces the same breakneck pacing of those first three movies, sending the heroes through a breathless adventure and then rolling credits just as the main conflict ends. Abrams packs in enough X-Wing dogfights and Millennium Falcon chases and lightsaber battles and blaster showdowns for three movies, and while few of these moments have any iconic pull (only the heroic reappearance of the Falcon and the climactic lightsaber duel between Finn, Rey, and Driver's menacing Kylo Ren linger - that last showdown feels like something Kurosawa would have made had he the latest in modern technology and weren't dead), they hustle so quickly (major props to editors Mary Jo Markey and Maryann Brandon) that we can't help but get caught up in the Flash Gordon-serial quality of it all. That said, For all its flash and excitement, the new film is desperate to reference the first Star Wars trilogy. Rey's journey is a gender-swapped take on Luke's story in A New Hope; Serkis plays the same kind of behind-the-scenes puppeteer as Ian McDiarmid's Emperor; and the bad guys' Evil Plot here employs yet another Death Star with all the same weaknesses. For all its flaws (legion as they might be), the Prequel Trilogy wanted to take a novel approach to tired material (a blockbuster trilogy about trade regulations? Signs and wonders). It failed spectacularly, but you can't ignore the ambition on display. By comparison, you keep waiting for The Force Awakens to do something different, to try and innovate, and it takes the safe path every time. Here's hoping Rian Johnson can make a Great Movie - and not just a Great Star Wars Movie - with Episode VIII.
Martin Liebman wrote that "it's a shame Disney didn't release this right off the bat, but double dipping profits and all that. Regardless, without a UHD presentation on the market (which one would think is bound to come sooner or later), this is, by far, the definitive version The Force Awakens. The 3D video is fantastic; fans of the film, the Star Wars universe, or 3D in general owe it to themselves to experience it. The added supplements - including the wonderful commentary track - and attractive packaging make this one of the year's best releases, if not the best."
From Shout Factory comes the coal-black thriller Dead Ringers. In 1988, this unsettling feature drew raves for star Jeremy Irons, and justly so. Playing twin gynecologists who share a successful practice and then, later, a host of debilitating physical and mental obsessions, Irons gives a master class in understated virtuosity. You always know which twin is on screen, so precise are Irons' gestures and mannerisms, yet Irons never resorts to the kind of broad hackwork you might see in, I don't know, Superman III. Somehow, his work remains minimalist even when Dead Ringers embarks on a series of ever-more Grand Guignol developments, and his restraint makes the proceedings all the more chilling. Logically, you'd expect a person going through what Irons' characters are going through to completely unravel, except Irons just lets the light in his eyes grow dimmer and dimmer, until that anesthetized malaise becomes creepier than any overt displays of emotion. Irons had been great before in movies like The French Lieutenant's Woman or the phenomenal Brideshead Revisited, but Dead Ringers was his coming-out party as a bonafide moviestar. However, Dead Ringers was also a key picture in the oeuvre of director David Cronenberg. Today, the film seems very much a piece with his more recent A Dangerous Method or A History of Violence - dark, psychologically penetrating character studies where the psychic violence hurts just as much as the physical violence - but in 1988, Dead Ringers couldn't have appeared more of an outlier. Cronenberg had cut his teeth on brainy-but-disgusting horror films (Rabid, Videodrome, or his 1986 masterpiece The Fly), so to have seen him plumbing the mind almost exclusively for disturbing revelations about human nature and desire would have been bracing. Sure, I have to say "almost" because Dead Ringers does include its fair share of genuinely squirm-inducing moments (most of which involve the horrifying surgical instruments the twins use) and even one or two gory shocks, but the rigor with which Cronenberg employs these exploitation-ready beats demands respect. Just as Dead Ringers made Irons a star, it could gave Cronenberg Serious Auteur cred, and he's been happily dining off it ever since.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Akira Kurosawa's great Dreams to Blu-ray. The general consensus among serious cineastes is that, if you're talking late-period Kurosawa, highest marks go to either Kagemusha or Ran, but I've always preferred Dreams, a lush and mysterious anthology feature that takes its inspiration from the subconscious. And not just any subconscious: many of these pieces seem to plug directly into the life of the master filmmaker. It makes sense; by 1990, Kurosawa was closer to the end of his life than he was to the beginning, and you can sense him using his vocation to make sense of his autumnal fears and obsessions. Sometimes Kurosawa's approach is playful, as with the artistic reverie "Crows," with its self-aware cameo from Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh. Sometimes he seems to portend apocalyptic doom, whether it's death by the elements ("The Blizzard") or nuclear holocaust ("Mount Fuji in Red" and "The Weeping Demon"). But the results are always visually stunning, and in ways that feel less staid than Kagemusha or Ran. Those latter pictures adopted a stark, tableau-like aesthetic that often clashed with the visceral dramas on display (you can't help but yearn for the kinetic charge of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai or The Hidden Fortress). Kurosawa devotes the same exacting attention to the frame in Dreams, except the film's ethereal, drifting qualities pair better with the painterly mise-en-scene. Dreams has more in common with Disney's Fantasia, in fact, and that merge of the picturesque and the profound proves irresistible. A great film, and one ripe for rediscovery.