For the week of January 9th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the action-thriller The Accountant to Blu-ray. Here's the thing: The Accountant is not a good movie. It's one of those high-concept features where everyone was so impressed with the initial idea - "What if Rain Man were a contract assassin?" - that no one quite figured out the actual movie. To wit: you'd think the ideal version of this story would follow Ben Affleck's high-functioning autistic killer on jobs like a skewed version of Jason Bourne, but then the movie takes a hard turn into the world of corporate espionage where Affleck uses his math skills to uncook the books of different international criminals. With that turn, we're introduced to a plucky fellow accountant (Anna Kendrick, doin' that patented Anna Kendrick Thing she does so well) who's unaware of Affleck's lethal prowess, and a Treasury Department Official (J.K. Simmons, sleepwalking through another gruff authority-figure part) tracking Affleck's work, and hordes of shady rival killers, mostly notably Jon Bernthal's wide-eyed sadist, and you begin to realize that The Accountant is overloading on plot (and I didn't even mention the flashbacks to young Affleck's childhood) to distract you from the fact that it has nothing new to say, that its high-concept is just papering over a generic thriller about $50 million and at least two Academy Awards away from a DTV caper starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. But for all its faults, The Accountant is consistently, relentlessly entertaining. Director Gavin O'Connor is best known for the sports dramas Miracle and Warrior, and he employs the same dependable, workmanlike attention to story and character here. I credit O'Connor for the film's sure sense of pace, even when not a whole lot stands up to any logical scrutiny. Hell, it grows more enjoyable the sillier it gets! A lot of critics hated the third act, when Bill Dubuque's script ditches its Ludlum-meets-Grisham aspirations and turns full pulp, but I had a blast with all the silly twists and bloody violence. It turns out that, in a lot of ways, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice wasn't the only superhero movie Affleck headlined in 2016, and as anyone who has seen that flawed tentpole can attest, Affleck is pretty compelling when he's meting out beatdowns with righteous abandon. The Accountant is the kinda bad I can get behind.
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes the docudrama Deepwater Horizon. For some, it'll be impossible to extricate what the film is from what it could have been. Director J.C. Chandor (of All Is Lost and A Most Violent Year fame) started developing the project as a socially conscious examination of the 2010 BP oil spill disaster, covering both the chaos on the titular oil rig as well as the environmental and political fallout that followed the catastrophe. However, Lionsgate and Summit grew concerned about the commercial prospects of Chandor's vision (especially coupled to the feature's mounting pre-production costs: Chandor built a scale replica of the Deepwater Horizon), and Chandor ultimately left the project, with Peter Berg (Lone Survivor, The Kingdom) replacing him and delivering a far more conventional action-disaster movie that focuses exclusively on the Deepwater Horizon, complete with a likeable hero (Mark Wahlberg, star of Berg's Lone Survivor and their even more accomplished Patriot's Day) and a hissable villain (John Malkovich, playing an unscrupulous BP executive with zero ethics and a distracting ludicrous Cajun accent). On one hand, Chandor is so talented a filmmaker that this shift feels like a loss, especially given the complexity of his vision. But let's give credit where credit's due. This revised Deepwater Horizon might not be the ideal version of the story, yet it still does a damn fine job under its more limited parameters. Berg is one of the most aggressive, underrated action-movie directors out there (he even gives something as lightweight as the 2003 action-comedy The Rundown real verve and step), and he crafts a disaster movie for the ages. The scope of this thing dwarfs, say, The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure, except we don't have to suffer through many of the obnoxious staples of the disaster-movie genre. Outside of Malkovich's bizarre performance (we're talking Christopher Walken-in-Gigli weird) and a few concessions to blockbuster conventions (Wahlberg and his on-screen wife Kate Hudson are definitely playing glamorous, super-Hollywoodized versions of their real-life proxies), Berg keeps the human element grounded and believable, letting conversations and actions unfold with improvisatory naturalism, and we're reminded that this is the same director who did such a good job of reflecting small-town America in his masterful sports drama Friday Night Lights. As a result, when all hell breaks loose, we're more invested, and Berg uses our emotional investment to gut us, particularly during the harrowing sequence where Kurt Russell's affable, principled rig supervisor gets blown up mid-shower and has to crawl, naked and bleeding from every part of his body, to something resembling safety. Moments like these are as gripping as anything I've seen in 2016, and Deepwater Horizon has more than enough of them to keep viewers from wondering what could have been with Chandor. As consolation prizes go, not a bad one.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman smartly noted that the film "is undeniably exciting, but it's also a weird mashup of disaster film and what might be termed a 'popcorn flick,' something that might be more acceptable if the story weren't based on real life. It seems a little churlish (and frankly maybe a lot churlish) to be deriving a dose of adrenaline off of the sad series of man-made mistakes that resulted in such carnage...There's quite a bit of expository material, some character based, a lot of it detailing the technical aspects of what led to the disaster, before all hell breaks loose a rather surprisingly long way into what is not really that lengthy of a film. At that point, Deepwater Horizon tends to tip more into traditional disaster film mode, with one devastating explosion after another taking out various characters as heroic efforts to stem the tide (so to speak) ultimately end up failing. Director Peter Berg (who collaborated with Wahlberg previously on Lone Survivor) keeps things moving at a breakneck pace once the carnage does start, but a certain amount of patience needs to be afforded the film in the early going. That said, the subliminal dread that builds during the early scenes is often palpable and probably only adds to the ultimate 'payoff' once the disaster begins unfolding."
However, even more controversial than Deepwater Horizon is Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment's release of The Birth of a Nation. The social agenda behind this film is impeccable. Writer-director-star Nate Parker, looking to negate some of the damage done by D.W. Griffith's infamous 1915 ode to the Ku Klux Klan, reappropriated Griffith's title for this story about Nat Turner's 1831 slave revolt. The move allowed Parker to artistically shift the balance of power, and initially, the Hollywood system responded ecstatically; The Birth of a Nation premiered at Sundance last year to thunderous applause and a $17.5-million acquisition fee from Twentieth Century Fox. However, the film's cultural/commercial cachet has since plummeted, and not because of anything content-related. No, once details of Parker's involvement in a 1999 rape case resurfaced, The Birth of a Nation took all the damage, and any awards or box-office ambitions Parker may have had vanished. I'm not here to rehash the details from Parker's past or to weigh in on his guilt or innocence: he was acquitted in 2001, and I'm no lawyer. Rather, I'm interested in the long-standing argument about separating the art from the artist. At times, the level of artistic achievement seems directly proportional to the artist's personal setbacks - are genius and corruption then linked inextricably? Is that bond just the cost of making great art? And is it possible to view to work on its own terms, or should the sins of the artist remain shackled alongside it? These questions have dogged cultural studies for generations, and they still linger today, whether you're talking about people like Pablo Picasso, Roman Polanski, or Kanye West. These issues seem to intensify when you factor in the quality of the work. To wit: Polanski did some reprehensible things in 1977, but are we justified in mitigating his crimes because he made Chinatown and The Pianist (as well as at least a half-dozen other pictures)? Maybe Parker has not been able to withstand the criticism levied his way because his Birth of a Nation is decidedly not a great film. It's a good one, and Parker proves quite compelling as Turner in the lead, but it also feels very much like a first film. Parker is prone to sweeping, hyperbolic visual choices that can't help but seem a little amateurish (he just doesn't have the control yet to make them work), and for all his lofty political intentions, the title "theft" is the most incendiary thing about the film. Down the line, this picture is a straightforward historical drama - Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight are far more daring, both aesthetically and thematically, in how they examine the implications of American slavery. One wonders if public opinion would have turned on Parker if The Birth of a Nation were as accomplished as either of those two. I'm not here to answer any of those questions. I don't even know how I feel about the situation. But I can say that the picture furthers an uncomfortable conversation that keeps occurring, for better or worse.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a Blu-ray upgrade to the single greatest screwball comedy ever made: Howard Hawks's 1940 classic His Girl Friday. You can keep your Philadelphia Stories or Bringing Up Babies (also directed by Hawks and this film's only competition for the throne); I'm sticking with this farce about how a scheming, Machiavellian newspaper editor (the great Cary Grant, in one of his two or three best performances) uses the city-wide hullabaloo over an escaped death-row inmate (John Qualen) as fodder to drive a wedge between his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell) and her soon-to-be husband (Ralph Bellamy as the screen's most iconic Baxter). If His Girl Friday were just a celebration of Hawks's peerless filmmaking craft, it would best most other screwball comedies. You will not find a faster, more breakneck comedy; rumor has it Hawks paced this thing with a metronome, and his cast tears through Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer's supremely witty dialogue like skilled auctioneers - as such, the amount of incident packed into just ninety minutes is staggering (I'd bet even money that Aaron Sorkin let this film seep into his bones before he started writing screenplays). Plus, as he established with his 1939 masterpiece Only Angels Have Wings, Hawks loves a value-added premise, so His Girl Friday functions as both a whiplash comedy AND a gripping newspaper thriller: Hawks is more than happy to cede the screen to Russell or the likes of Frank Orth, Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, and Regis Toomey as they investigate Qualen's story. But what really cements His Girl Friday's legacy is its surprising, proto-feminist approach to the screwball genre. You've seen this kind of movie before, and most of them hinge on the male lead convincing the female lead that he's the only thing that can make her life complete. Certainly that element exists here, and you can argue than Hawks stacks the deck the second that we see Grant's effortlessly charming trickster next to Bellamy's profoundly boring insurance salesman. However, Grant's Walter Burns is sharper than many of his screen counterparts, many of which Grant also played - his Awful Truth and Philadelphia Story lotharios don't have anything on Burns. Burns is smart enough to tempt Russell with what she really wants: her old newspaper job, and with it, the thrill of the streets and the story and a hard day's work. In a time when most Hollywood heroines were content to be pampered heiresses and matriarchs, Russell's character wants to be the best damn reporter alive. Getting back with Grant? That's just a fringe benefit, and one that helps equalize the gender dynamics at work. A fleet, thrilling, quietly progressive comedy.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "There is a short text that appears immediately after the opening credits that seems quite ironic now. It warns that the image of the media that is preserved by the film is from the 'dark ages of the newspaper game,' which implies that at the time when the film was released a lot had already changed for the better. But fast-forward to present days and the hypocrisy that is highlighted in the film actually feels perfectly normal. In fact, even the most ridiculous behind-the-scenes bargaining and factual fabrications that are shown in it look perfectly normal because after this year's election cycle there is enough evidence that they are essential elements of the daily routine for many contemporary professional reporters that continue to play the game. Sad but true...His Girl Friday works in the same manner and for the same reasons Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels does. The two are based on brilliant scripts that blend comedy and social criticism that ultimately give them dual identities. So on one hand these are very charming, at times irresistibly funny films, but on the other hand they are also socially aware films that quite accurately dissect the reality in which their characters exist."