For the week of November 28th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing the Pete's Dragon remake to Blu-ray. For once, the remake people have got it right. It makes more sense to redo the bad movies than the good ones, and the 1977 Pete's Dragon is not a good movie; I don't want to trample anyone's nostalgia-tinged reveries, but other than the animation and a few of the songs, the original Pete's Dragon is a bloated, wonderless slog that feels cynically engineered to separate viewers from as many of their hard-earned dollars as possible. What it has is a great idea, and this new remake does a far more effective job of exploiting that idea. Once again, we have a young orphan (Oakes Fegley) who has a special bond with a magical dragon named Elliott, but that's about it in terms of the new film's connection to the old one, thanks to writer/director David Lowery. Lowery's last film was the stunning neo-Western Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which played like some ineffable mix of Robert Altman and Terrence Malick, and while his Pete's Dragon is definitely a kids' movie, it shares some of that earlier film's lyricism and sadness. Pete bonds with the dragon after a sudden car wreck kills his mother and father, and Lowery lets their deaths color the rest of the film - Elliott becomes a surrogate family instead of just a whimsical buddy, so Pete feels an even greater pull towards him after he gets "rescued" by a local park ranger (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her family (Wes Bentley, Oona Lawrence, and a great Robert Redford, underplaying his part as The World's Greatest Grandpa and stealing all his scenes as a result). In a way, this internal division within Pete recalls another kids' movie: François Truffaut's classic The Wild Child, which follows a feral child as French psychologists try to acclimate him back into society: Lowery even styles Pete in the early goings so as to resemble Truffaut's young hero. Now, I don't want to overstate the seriousness on display here. This is a Disney movie, after all, and it's filled with trailer-ready scenes of Pete and Elliott (who resembles nothing less than a big green dog with wings) playing in the forest and an action-packed finale where Elliott has to escape the clutches of a logger (Karl Urban) who'd like to turn the dragon into his own Ringling Brothers-esque attraction. But the scenes of quiet reflection far outnumber the standard light-show content, and I commend Lowery - and Disney, for that matter - for handling this story with more nuance and sensitivity than it might otherwise have received.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "begins with a sudden, emotionally charged, and dramatically effective opening scene. It's simple and honest, raw but thematically refined, and captured and presented with a grace that balances difficulty and beauty extraordinarily well. It sets the tone for the rest of the movie, a tone the viewer can only hope it can maintain, and it does. The film thrives on simplicity and an organic feel and flow. Every shot is gracefully composed. No moment is wasted. Every shot means something, every scene a story, every sequence a well-versed and complete piece of the larger whole. Music is key to the movie. As with its visual construction, there's a simple elegance to it and a purpose to every lyric and note. Whether contrasting a sense of adventure with a lurking anxiousness or playfulness with a feel of peril, there's always a balance in play and, perhaps more than any other single element, shapes the film by enhancing the sense of wonder, character details, and that adventurous spirit within, which the movie reveals as its driving thematic force in the wonderfully composed opening moments. This is cinema at its most contemporarily genuine, approachable, agreeable, honest, and lovable."
Also from Disney comes Steven Spielberg's adaptation of The BFG. We say "miscast" when an actor isn't quite right for a part; do we have a phrase for when a director is miscast? A lot works here: the special effects are genuinely magical; the rapport between Mark Rylance's title character and Ruby Barnhill's young Sophie is alternatively touching and funny; and despite the presence of some very nasty giants (most notably Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement as the meanest and stupidest of the bunch), the whole endeavor is pleasantly low-stakes and relaxed (I've heard The BFG described as Spielberg's first "hang-out" movie, and that assessment is dead-on - The BFG makes you realize how frenetic most kids' movies are, even the great ones). However, I'm not convinced Spielberg is the right guy for this job. Roald Dahl's original novel is, as per usual, a veddy British concoction of light whimsy and dry humor, whereas Spielberg's default is maximalist wonder. He always goes big (that's his most distinctive trait as a filmmaker), and for the film's first two-thirds, he makes that instinct work for him. It doesn't feel like Dahl at all, but it does make sense that if you met a giant and then got transported into a realm of flesh-eating other giants and magical dream catching, you'd be regarding everything with unfiltered amazement. Auteurs bend the material to their will - Spielberg is doing no differently here. But these tendencies fail Spielberg in the third act. Dahl ends The BFG with a sequence of restrained lunacy: to stop the evil giants, Sophie and the BFG seek out the employ of (I kid you not) the Queen of England (Penelope Wilton), and their interactions involve fitting a giant into Buckingham Palace, military helicopters invading a fantasy land, a last-minute call to Ronald Reagan, and an extended series of fart jokes that leave no one (include the Queen!) unscathed. It reads as silly, and it should be, but Dahl's gift for understatement adds another level of humor; he regards all this nonsense with a sly wit and priceless understatement. God love Spielberg, but light comedy is not his forte (Catch Me If You Can aside, vide his labored efforts on 1941 or The Terminal), and he bungles all the humor in the finale because he never modulates that sense of moon-eyed wonder. The only name filmmaker who could capture the proper tone is probably Wes Anderson, which is why Fantastic Mr. Fox remains the best of all the Dahl adaptations. That 2009 animated feature plays so fully to both Dahl and Anderson's sensibilities. Ultimately, The BFG is a misfire, but it's a sweet and genuinely endearing one.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman noted that the film "is nothing if it's not magical. It's born of the perfect pairing, really, with Dahl's imagination and Spielberg's instincts behind the camera merging to make a movie that may not be uniquely touching or in any way thematically spectacular but that sees both craftsmen doing what they do best, which is dreaming big and creating something that's at once both comfortable and familiar while at the same time different and distinguished. The story is mostly about dreams, both in a literal and figurative sense. The film is in many ways the intersection of dream and reality, the merging of the imaginary with the tangible world at one's fingertips. Its ability to commit to, shape, and thrive in a world that's practically timeless, familiar yet unique, and populated by characters who are much the same, all reinforce the idea of the dream and its place in shaping one's life. Even as the dreams are essentially personified or made into some tangible matter, there remains a sense of honest direction as the story unfolds, something real and relatable as the movie takes the audience by the hand and, not even so much with a pronounced wink but certainly a subtle, knowing nod, guides its viewers through a world of wonder that may not literally exist beyond the screen but that metaphorically most certainly does in everything the world has to offer."
I'm so conflicted about how I feel towards Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's home-invasion thriller Don't Breathe. For about two-thirds of its runtime, I was sure I was watching a new horror classic. Director Fede Alvarez has tapped into some primal unease about The Way We Live Today, focusing on three friends (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, and Daniel Zovatto) struggling to make it in present-day Detroit. When the toughest (Zovatto) of the three suggests they rob a lonely blind man (the great Stephen Lang), the group figures a quick smash-and-grab will help them escape their daily social and economic hardships...except the blind man is nowhere near as helpless as they assume, thus kicking off an increasingly violent standoff. These scenes are often unbearably tense - Alvarez makes good use of the soundscape, and his decision to shoot long setpieces in almost total darkness turns the film into a sensory experience. Imagine Jodie Foster's final pursuit of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs stretched out to feature-length, and you'll have a better feel for what the picture's offering. Even better, Alvarez gets nicely grounded performances from his three young leads and an iconic one from Lang: with almost no dialogue, Lang creates such a rounded, believable menace. He makes the character's backstory palpable, grounding his monstrous actions in genuine human psychology. Had Don't Breathe sustained this delicate showdown, it would be a contender for the best horror film of the year. But man, once Don't Breathe lurches into its third act, it just lost me, and I wouldn't be surprised if others feel the same way. For one, it falls back on some unpleasant tropes of sexual violation towards women. Whatever you're imagining isn't half as distasteful as what Don't Breathe actually offers. Between this and his Evil Dead remake, Alvarez seems to be a little too comfortable menacing his female leads with the threat of rape. However, even more problematic is how this threat cheapens the characters. Prior to the ending, our sympathies are all over the place: we fear for our main characters, but they do invite Lang's horrible retribution on themselves - they are criminals breaking into his house, after all. The ending simplifies all that - Evil Villain, meet Frightened Kids. No more, no less, and all with the promise of a sequel to come. I still think a lot of Don't Breathe will satisfy horror fans, and maybe that's the problem. The good stuff works so well that we're more comfortable ignoring the bad.
Martin Liebman calls Don't Breathe "the antithesis of the modern genre movie, playing things straight and honest, and even if it doesn't always surprise, it works on atmosphere, straightforward storytelling, and streamlined direction rather than hoping that a flood of stuff and gore and jump scares can mask the fundamental flaws that prohibit so many other movies from succeeding. In fact, the movie's best scene, and a couple of others to a lesser extent, take the reverse course of the jump scare, silencing the stage to build tension rather than inundating it with the sorts of sudden bursts of chaos that have lost their effectiveness over the years. Instead, the movie plays to its story and strengths, living up to its title but also doing what it can to, contrary to its namesake, breathe new life into a stale genre that's largely grown ineffective and tiresome over the years. It's very well paced, too, wasting almost none of its sub-90-minute runtime on needless filler or fluff. Characters and their motivations are quickly established. While not necessarily novel, it's enough to propel the movie forward and reach the crux where the only slowdowns occur by design to increase tension. Audience attachment to characters grows as the story develops, as new revelations come into focus. Again, much of it isn't exactly going to rewrite the screenwriting 101 handbook, but what the movie does do well is cater to its strengths and only fuss around where it must, not where it can. If for no other reason, Don't Breathe is worth a watch if only to revel in its well defined simplicity and the know-how that runs it. Alvarez is the real hero here. He's put together a movie that's not only fluent in its terror but that's supported by a terrific atmosphere and location that play to the movie's strengths. The house is just open enough to give the material room to work while dark and claustrophobic enough to engender a real sense of terror. Hiding places are few, but strategically positioned to allow heightened tension in various scenes. Then again, the movie's best moments are those aforementioned bursts of silence where characters stand off like an old west showdown where it's not who is quick on the draw but who can remain still and quiet the longest that's destined to win."