The week right after New Year's is always a light one, release-wise. However, there are some notable titles on the way. For the week of January 2nd, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett's Blair Witch to Blu-ray. You got to give it to Lionsgate: their marketing for Blair Witch was one of the coolest PR gambits of the year, selling the film to the American public as The Woods before the last-minute reveal that, in fact, the picture fits right into the Blair Witch universe. Too often, marketing departments approach films like McDonald (they're content to make the material easily digestible) so kudos for the deception, although part of me wonders if the studio wanted to hide the fact that, like Jurassic World or The Force Awakens, the new Blair Witch is also a "rebootquel." In this case, Heather Donahue's brother James (James McCune) mounts a search party into the Burkittsville woods so he can further investigate his sister's disappearance, and this conceit allows Wingard and Barrett license to essentially remake The Blair Witch Project with a higher budget. It's not the most imaginative move from a creative standpoint (and it completely ignores the first Blair Witch sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which has now become the Star Wars prequels of the franchise: thematically rich but dramatically inert), but I had high hopes, given the presence of Wingard and Barrett. In both You're Next and The Guest, the director-writer duo had fun exploiting familiar horror-movie tropes through their canny use of unexpected genre elements; You're Next imagined how a slasher movie might play out if Jason Bourne were the Final Girl, while The Guest flipped the script from the killer's perspective, creating a variation on, say, Halloween if John Carpenter replaced Michael Myers with a psychotic Steve Rogers. Blair Witch, too, introduces an irresistible hook - how might our heroes use modern-day technology to confront an ancient supernatural evil - but the operative word here is "introduces." After taking great pains to equip their main characters with drone cameras, GPS trackers, and motion-sensor security cams, Wingard and Barrett mostly abandon any and all possibilities that such technologies might afford the narrative. One by one, the Blair Witch destroys these gizmos, and what we're left with is a gorier-but-hollow redo of the first movie. I'd be lying if I said Blair Witch wasn't scary, but it does rely way too heavily on jump scares, which is a shame, given the terrifying temporal insinuation that Wingard and Barrett add to the Blair Witch mythology (time and space don't necessarily work the same way once the Blair Witch has locked onto you). Again, though, Wingard and Barrett drop this provocative idea for more conventional frights, a decision that culminates in a sound-and-light-show finale that tries to amp up the intensity of the original Blair Witch Project's ending, albeit to diminishing results. That landmark 1999 chiller isn't a perfect movie, but it has a purity similar to the films of Val Lewton: it's a masterclass in suggestion, where the main characters use the potential of something awful to scare themselves silly. This new Blair Witch is a lot slicker, but it completely lacks that DIY mentality, and to its own detriment.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "it's almost pointless to get into the plot dynamics of Blair Witch, since they so relentlessly mimic those in The Blair Witch Project. What's kind of disappointing about all of this is Blair Witch seems in its early going to be attempting at least to develop some honest human emotion for James, a guy who has spent much of his childhood and now nascent adulthood trying to come to grips with whatever happened to his long lost sister Heather. James wants to believe she's still alive, and that gives the film a kind of disturbing undercurrent that could have been utilized much more effectively than it turns out to be. Instead screenwriter Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard, collaborators responsible for the often viscerally unsettling You're Next, seem content to merely plop down an assortment of types in the woods and then watch as their social structure disintegrates under the watchful eye of whatever supernatural force is lurking there. Kind of interestingly, Blair Witch is much more overt in its depiction of those supposedly inexplicable occurrences, something that would seem to anchor the film in a more unsettling 'reality' (since the original film only hinted at the horrors). Oddly, then, the opposite ends up occurring, with the now completely obvious intrusions by the witch playing almost like a parlor game where the hapless kids are toyed with for a while before they're ultimately disposed of. Part of what gave The Blair Witch Project whatever weird force it had was its very ambiguity…[but] there's no really similar uncertainty at play in Blair Witch, and rather weirdly the film is decidedly less scary as a result…The bottom line is, if you've seen The Blair Witch Project, you've (more or less, anyway) seen Blair Witch, and despite an uptick in tech in this film (hey, they use drones this time!), there's unfortunately not a simultaneous uptick in any fear factor."
Finally, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is reissuing a number of their romance-themed catalog titles. It's an odd bunch, both in terms of the timing (wouldn't this slate be more effective around Valentine's Day?) as well as the tonal inconsistencies between the films, but then I see Universal is using these Blu-rays to help promote the latest Fifty Shades of Grey movie, and the corporate synergy...I mean, thinking at play becomes much clearer. I guess both Leap Year and Love Happens have the most in common - both features are as lightweight as they get, the former a road movie that brings together two bickering travelers (Amy Adams and Matthew Goode) in Ireland and the latter a soaper about a lonely self-help expert (Aaron Eckhart) who learns how to focus on himself with the help of a beautiful florist (Jennifer Aniston). Those seeking surprises or nuance should look elsewhere; I'll allow that Leap Year has the benefit of some nice chemistry between Adams and Goode, but both movies are as formulaic as they get. Intolerable Cruelty, by comparison, offers a far more cracked perspective on true love, shifting gears into a broad farce about a sleazy lawyer (George Clooney) and a duplicitous widow (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who might be able to fall in love if they weren't so desperately trying to con one another. However, while Intolerable Cruelty works as a slightly-above-average rom-com, it's also a Coen Brothers picture, and we grade the Coens on a much higher curve. From that perspective, the film falls near the bottom of their oeuvre. You can see them struggling to blend genre conventions with their patented brand of weirdness: Clooney's gloriously stupid protagonist; an accidental suicide scene so riotous/shocking that the Coens trotted it out again in The Ladykillers. Unfortunately, the conventions win out.
Maybe the Platonic Ideal of Universal's romance options is Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice adaptation. Jane Austen's source novel set the mold for what a rom-com should be, primarily that tried-and-true staple where the more our two protagonists (Matthew Macfadyen and a wonderful Keira Knightley) hate each other at the start, the more madly they'll fall in love at the end. Yet this Pride & Prejudice never feels like a chore. Everyone in the cast - from Macfadyen and Knightley at the top and all the way down through ace supporting players like Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Jena Malone, Tom Hollander, Carey Mulligan, and Judi Dench - delivers spirited performances, and Wright brings a kinetic, Altman-esque technical virtuosity to the proceedings. Still, my personal favorite of the bunch? Harold Becker's flawed-but-fascinating Sea of Love. Why flawed, you ask? Nominally a thriller about a serial killer stalking lonely men, Sea of Love isn't particularly thrilling, generating little tension from its procedural aspects and culminating in a flat, uninvolving ending that leans hard on Roger Ebert's "Law of Economy of Characters." That said, if you ignore the genre aspects and focus on the film as a gritty, naturalistic character study, Sea of Love proves uncommonly engaging. No one writes NYPD cops better than screenwriter Richard Price - he understands their tribal codes, their weary mix of profane resignation and casual intensity - and it's a pleasure just to hear his characters chew the fat or talk their way through cases cold and otherwise (the opening undercover sting, which features a memorable early appearance from a young Samuel L. Jackson, is a masterclass in building humor and character through specificity and unexpected quirks). Furthermore, Sea of Love gets career-best work from stars Al Pacino and Ellen Pacino. Again, the plot stuff dictating their characters' moves (he's a determined cop, and she's the prime suspect that he can't help but fall for) isn't as interesting as their very adult chemistry. Part of that, sure, is sexual in nature (watching them together, you can't help but wonder if anything was going on behind the scenes - their rapport is that palpable), but just as interesting are the pragmatic realities governing their desires. We get so many romances about young people that it's refreshing to watch two older, mature adults try to negotiate a new relationship through a lifetime's worth of experience. If we need the serial-killer stuff to smuggle in this material, then so be it.