For the week of November 21st, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the stunning animated adventure Kubo and the Two Strings to Blu-ray. Ever since its 2009 horror-fantasy Coraline, Laika Studios has established itself at the forefront of American mainstream animation. Its use of painstakingly detailed stop-motion technology makes every Laika film a big-screen Event, and in that regard, Kubo and the Two Strings might be the studio's most audacious feature. It's a story about stories, namely the ones that young, one-eyed Kubo (voiced by Art Parkinson) tells to the villagers in a small Japanese town, stories about a noble samurai warrior battling the evil Moon King. However, Kubo gets a violent reality check when the real Moon King's two daughters (Rooney Mara) kill his mother (Charlize Theron) and try to rip out his other eye (so, yeah, those with young children may want to seek entertainment elsewhere). Armed with his magical shamisen and the help of a talking monkey (also Theron) and a brave-but-stupid samurai beetle (Matthew McConaughey), Kubo sets off to defeat the Moon King and save the planet, but the journey is fraught with peril, given a) the strength of the Moon King's power and b) the fact that if these things were easy, we'd have no movie. Still, that description sounds more conventional than much of Kubo and the Two Strings actually is. On the animation front, Laika has outdone itself, crafting delicate origami designs and world-ending monsters with equal aplomb, the latter of which deserve special attention. Unlike Coraline or 2012's ParaNorman, Kubo isn't rooted explicitly in the horror genre, but that doesn't stop its baddies from being viscerally unsettling, whether we're talking about the unsettling blankness of the Moon King's daughters (their faces are the stuff of nightmares) or a sea filled with bulbous, grotesque eye-monsters serving a ravenous, gaping teeth-maw that would put the Sarlaac to shame. Laika's never shied away from the horrifying or the disturbing in its (ostensibly) family-friendly features, and this new picture is definitely no exception. But more importantly, Laika has also always been committed to giving the downtrodden a showcase in Hollywood animation. If Pixar makes movies about the popular kids (even Remy the Rat in Ratatouille is a glib, well-liked presence), Laika is more interested in the weirdoes, the outsiders, and the oddballs, with the emphasis on "interested" - they have such empathy for Kubo, whose life is already marked by one emotional/social hardship after another (the early scenes, which have him tending after his mother, who's suffered an Alzheimer-like cognitive disorder, are as wrenching in their own small way as the first ten minutes of Up) before the bad guys show up. I'm not sure where I'd place Kubo in Laika's small-but-increasingly distinguished cinematic output. My gut still wants to go with Coraline or ParaNorman over this, if only because Kubo deflates ever-so-slightly during a generic (but visually audacious) Boss Fight between Kubo and Ralph Fiennes' terrifying Moon King. In fact, that tendency towards an end brawl might be Laika's lone shortcoming: with the exception of The Boxtrolls and its blackly comic, Grand Guignol climax, all of the studio's films tend to trade in the nuance and sensitivity of their first ninety minutes for a light show against an evil villain. Still, I can't deny the craft in the formula, and to its credit, Kubo and the Two Strings quickly rebounds from that convention for a coda that suggests its hero will always be haunted by emotional forces less easily defeated. That, plus the perfect Beatles song (in a gorgeous Regina Spektor cover) playing over the end credits. If Kubo and the Two Strings doesn't win the Best Animated Feature Oscar next year, I'll eat my hat.
Martin Liebman wrote thatthe film "walks that very fine, and rarely traversed, line between accessible children's fare and dramatically dark and perilous adult-oriented action and adventure film. The movie can be as bleak as it can be hopeful, as dark as it can be bright. It begins with a baby Kubo, washed ashore with his mother after barely surviving a harrowing storm at sea. The baby's face is partially wrapped in a bloody bandage, obviously the victim of some trauma to its eye. The film explores dark themes through Kubo's maturation to adulthood on his quest, but at the same time it builds a story of hope and heart, honest and soulful characterization, and detailed action that's ornate and complex yet not too scary for kids who are likely in it more for the raw materials than the substance below. The film finds that middle ground effortlessly and fully throughout, saying quite a bit about life and its adventures while building around blossoming cultural icons and identities as well as more universal concepts of life and what it means to both live and understand it."
From Warner Home Entertainment comes director Todd Phillips' satirical comedy War Dogs. Loosely based on true events, the film follows David Packouz (Miles Teller, glumly serving up straight-man duties here), a young Miami nobody whose friendship with the far-more-unstable Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill, for better or worse) launches him into the realm of international weapons dealers and all that distinction entails. Packouz and Diveroli use their contacts to gain fame and fortune, but they also quickly fall afoul of some very scary people. That said, War Dogs is less about realpolitik than it is about cinema, specifically the cinema of Martin Scorsese. I have never seen a movie that so desperately wants to be a Scorsese film as much as this one does. From Teller's wall-to-wall narration (cribbed from Casino, Goodfellas, and/or Taxi Driver, just for a start), to the endless series of Top 40 needle drops (a little CCR here, a little Aerosmith there, with some Iggy Pop for punk cred), to even the opening scene (which winds its way to a freeze-frame in pretty much the same way as GoodFellas does), Phillips is making a pretty aggressive offering to the alter of Scorsese. Lots of other filmmakers have done likewise. One can read Boogie Nights as P.T. Anderson's porn-flavored tribute to Scorsese, and certainly both Pain & Gain and American Hustle would be nothing without Scorsese's hyperkinetic, subjectivity-privileging influence. But here's the thing: Todd Phillips completely lacks the necessary chops for such an homage. Note the use of "necessary" - he's not a bad filmmaker at all (regardless how you'd rate their quality, his Hangover films have more polish and aesthetic brio than most mainstream Hollywood comedies), but he's also a thoroughly born-and-bred studio workhorse. He lacks the interiority and personal vision of either Scorsese of his most distinctive acolytes (say what you will about Michael Bay, but he has as singular a big-screen vision as any of his more highbrow peers. Also Pain & Gain is pretty great), so when he does ape a move that would work for Scorsese, it feels hollow. How else to explain his way-too-on-the-nose music choices in War Dogs ("Sweet Emotion" when Teller enters the gunrunning business), or how his appropriation of Hill's Wolf of Wall Street scumbag (swap out the ridiculous fake teeth for a ridiculous hyena laugh) swerves quickly into Pandering Caricature Territory? It's especially galling when Phillips tries to match Scorsese's much-lauded gift for conveying information; the moments in Casino or Goodfellas or The Color of Money where we learn about how Scorsese's unscrupulous heroes make a living rank among those pictures' most electrifying moments, but Phillips' efforts to do likewise for the gunrunning business just come off as droning exposition. Ultimately, War Dogs isn't bad (it's watchable, and if you've never seen, like, another movie, I guess it isn't boring), but it is guilty of overreaching without the abilities to do so. Wake me when Goodfellas is on again.
Far better is Lionsgate Home Entertainment's thrilling neo-Western Hell or High Water. In its broad contours, we know this story: in order to protect his family farm from avaricious bankers, a struggling cowboy (Chris Pine) and his outlaw brother (a fantastic Ben Foster, who deserves at least a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work here) start robbing the same financial institutions holding the debt on his mortgage, but their actions put the two sibling in the crosshairs of two wily Texas Rangers (the wonderful buddy-duo of Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham). Yet despite the familiarity of all the narrative beats (would it surprise you that Foster's character is a bit of a wild card? Or that Bridges' ornery lawman is nearing his retirement? Or that the robberies get increasingly violent as the legal stakes rise?), Hell or High Water impresses through its vivid action and its nuanced approach to human behavior. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan also penned last year's phenomenal crime-thriller Sicario, and his two scripts share many of the same strengths: a deep respect for the psychological toll of hurting people and being hurt, a rich string of mordant humor (Hell or High Water often feels like the Great Lost Justified Episode, so barbed and flavorful are its verbal exchanges), and an attention to characters beyond just the leads. I mean, how many simple crime dramas would make time for the everyday trials of a work-a-day waitress (Katy Mixon, stealing the film in her two-scene appearance) or Bridges & Birmingham's contentious dialogue with the owner of a restaurant they want to use for their stakeout? Time and time again, Hell or High Water keeps reminding us that life always exists outside the confines of the Western plot, and that generosity of spirit carries over to the film's even-handed approach to the actual robberies. On one hand, we root for Pine and Foster given how venal the bank executives seem, but on the other, we never forget the mounting human cost of the brothers' actions. Credit, too, must go to director David Mackenzie, who as a Scotsman, brings an outsider's perspective to familiar tropes. He has a way of shooting both landscapes and small desert towns that makes them both mythic and alien, and his action scenes privilege spatial clarity over post-production editing murk. What's old is new again, or at least feels that way. If there's anything keeping Hell or High Water from being the best fiction film of the year, it's Pine's lead performance. It's not that he's bad - he isn't, and he's rather good in his final confrontation with Bridges - but he's far less substantial a presence on-screen than any of his co-stars, and while I get that he's supposed to be the one most inexperienced with violence and criminality, I kept imagining what someone like Matt Damon ten years ago or Jeff Bridges forty years ago would have done with the part; those two are far more skilled in making normalcy compelling than Pine is. That said, it's a testament to everything else about Hell or High Water that the ostensible lead can underwhelm and still the end result comes out looking better than most American films released this year. A gripping, masterful piece of work.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "is less concerned with crime film genre tropes than it is with exploring the relationships between these two sets of partners. Without spoiling some of the context which gives [the film] its really authentic ambience, an almost genetic predisposition toward poverty and perhaps usury plays into the plot dynamics, something that again manages to make the brothers more sympathetic than they might otherwise be...The film wends its way to an expected showdown, but there's more of an emotional tether to events than tends to be the case in less nuanced crime centered films, simply because Sheridan has so artfully crafted this quartet of outcasts. There's an elegiac quality to Hell or High Water that is one of its strongest assets...The bittersweet emotional ambience of Hell or High Water is only magnified by shots of wide open vistas (New Mexico evidently subbing for Texas), where man's attempts to forge something akin to civilization seem woefully inadequate."
The Lionsgate-distributed "Vestron Collector's Series" gets two new releases this week: the horror sequels C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud and Return of the Living Dead 3. Both of these films share the distinction of being sequels in name only - Bud the Chud jettisons mostly everything about the 1984 C.H.U.D, while Return of the Living Dead 3 retains the government-caused zombie menace and nothing else - but they couldn't be more dissimilar from one another in terms of quality. On one end of the spectrum: the tiresome, jokey shenanigans of Bud the Chud. Vestron titles always had certain budgetary...limitations, but Bud the Chud feels cheap even when compared to the rest of the Vestron oeuvre. The monsters in the first C.H.U.D had a rubbery inventiveness, but not so here - the zombies-not-zombies get pale skin and cruddy teeth, and that's about it. More problematic is the lack of anything resembling social relevance. If C.H.U.D tried to use its Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers as a metaphor for the plight of the homeless in urban areas (I'm not saying it was successful, but the thought does count), Bud the Chud seems more inspired by Weekend at Bernie's, offering a subpar farce about two high-school nincompoops whose attempts to replace a body in the morgue unintentionally kickstart a zombie-not-zombie invasion led by the title character (Gerrit Graham, giving it his all). But that description makes the movie seem more entertaining than it actually is; we have to suffer through tedious slapstick as Bud bumbles through the kids' parents' house and mostly gore-free violence. Only the late Robert Vaughn comes out of this thing looking okay, and only because his contempt for the material is so thick. Luckily, Return of the Living Dead 3 is good enough to compensate for Bud the Chud's failings. It's a marvel: a scary, sexy, unexpectedly moving chiller that uses its budget limitations to its best advantage. To wit: director Brian Yuzna and writer John Penney can't replicate the large (ish) zombie menace of the landmark 1985 cult classic The Return of the Living Dead, so they don't even try. Instead, they limit their focus to the doomed lovers Julie (Melinda Clarke) and Curt (J. Trevor Edmond), two teens whose bond transcends petty things like life and death. Literally - Julie dies in an accident and returns as the undead after getting a dose of reanimation toxin, but her love for Curt lingers, and the two try to reverse the effects before her mounting desire to eat human flesh overtakes her fundamental humanity. This setup sounds cheesy, and it is, a little, but Edmond and especially Clarke (who creates a horror icon for the ages) sell the hell out of these romantic clichés. We believe in them, and their obvious affection for one another elevates this bargain-basement material. It helps, too, that Yuzna's splatter-riffic tendencies leaven the schmaltz. Yuzna cut his bones producing 1985's great Re-Animator, and he brings a heaping helping of that earlier picture's perversion to this one. See, in order to keep Julie's fundamental goodness awake and alert, she kinda needs to hurt herself, and her mounting sadomasochism gives the film a sexual charge that has more in common with the works of David Cronenberg. In its own way, as good as The Return of the Living Dead.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a welcome Blu-ray upgrade for Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. Prior to this 2005 dramedy, Baumbach specialized in arch, Woody Allen-lite fare (I'm thinking of 1995's slight-but-hilarious Kicking and Screaming), but he honed his New Yorker-ready insights to a killing edge here, telling the story of Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank Berkman (Owen Kline) who are trying to cope with their parents' increasingly bitter divorce. A lesser filmmaker would skew our sympathies towards one branch of the family or another, but Baumbach gives every member of the Berkman clan the freedom to be, at some points, off-putting and petty. Father Bernard (Jeff Daniels, in a performance that should have won him an Oscar) is the worst kind of frustrated intellectual - a pedant whose overbearing opinions on art and culture barely mask deep resentments over the larger critical community's relative indifference towards him - but mother Joan (Laura Linney) is no better as she disconnects from her family with an almost clinical remove: you can sense her viewing every painful interaction from the outside so she might use it for fodder in a future novel. Their shortcomings then mutate through their children, whether it's in the form of Frank's disgusting masturbatory reveries or Walt's yearning towards elitism at all costs, even if that means, say, plagiarizing a Pink Floyd song and then justifying the theft by asserting that he "felt like [he] could have written it." Baumbach still maintains the characteristic wit of his earlier features, but the laughs curdle this time around, so broken is the family dynamic. Now, this rebranding, as it were, was both a blessing and a curse. As good as The Squid and the Whale is, it does carry a nasty, misanthropic charge that Baumbach only doubled down on in subsequent features. I can appreciate the cinematic and literary qualities of Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg while also acknowledging that I never want to watch them again, so unpleasant and bitter are the central characters (thank god for Baumbach's sunnier Frances Ha and Mistress America, both of which suggest he can soften his characters' ennui without losing his edge). But unlike a lot of the upper-middle-class miserablism that his filmmaking peers proffer, Baumbach still allows for the possibility of something resembling grace. Take that stunning final scene, with Walt peering at the titular squid-and-whale diorama in the American Museum of Natural History. We first see it as Walt does, in all its spooky, violent glory, but Baumbach brings us in closer until we see the inherent artificiality of the diorama: its plasticine texture, its lifeless rigor. Even though it scares Walt now, it won't always, and maybe that far-away promise is enough. Maybe. This is a great movie.