For the week of February 13th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is releasing the sci-fi drama Arrival. I'm going to get pilloried for this one: people love Arrival, if its eight Academy Award nominations are any indication, yet I found so much of the film hugely problematic. It certainly begins strongly enough. Director Denis Villeneuve proves as expert at building tension as Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, cultivating a global, ambiguous menace after a fleet of alien vehicles position themselves around the globe. How wonderful, too, that he's more in tune with Close Encounters than Independence Day, given that he privileges discussion and interaction. Arrival's thrills don't stem from combat or violence but from language as a withdrawn linguist (Amy Adams, who's terrific) and a theoretical physicist (Jeremy Renner) attempt to understand these aliens before the world governments respond more harshly. The delicacy of this setup, coupled with Bradford Young's gorgeous cinematography, takes on a dirge-like power. Only Forest Whitaker underwhelms as the Army Colonel tasked with recruited Adams; he uses a Boston accent so distracting and irrelevant to the character that you wonder why Villeneuve didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't working. However, right around the midpoint, all that wonderful buildup starts paying off, and in ways that didn't work for me. For one, we get an extraneous Major Crisis which is really just a way to inject some conventional thrills into a story that was, up to that point, so resolutely interested in the cross-cultural perils of linguistics. But more importantly, it becomes clear that the film is trafficking in some narrative trickery that undercuts much of the work before it. To say much more would likely piss off a whole mess of people, but suffice to say, there's a Twist, and unfortunately, this twist doesn't supplement the themes already at work - you realize the movie doesn't work without it. It cheapens the work of the cast (Renner, in particular, becomes a plot device at best), and it reverses that old Casablanca adage, expecting us to believe the problems of two people do amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Plus, I'm not sure the twist hangs together, with a crucial phone call playing, in retrospect, like an unbelievable paradox. I have this theory now that Villeneuve might be the new Ridley Scott, and it isn't just because Scott tapped him to direct the Blade Runner sequel. No, Villeneuve shares Scott's gift for both consummate visual mastery as well as questionable narrative discernment. Give the two a great script (like Villeneuve's Sicario or Scott's The Martian) and they'll make a great movie, but their aesthetic gifts aren't enough to override a flawed piece of writing. Villeneuve's track record is better than Scott's (I love Sir Ridley, but the Black Rains and White Squalls far outnumber the Gladiators), but Villeneuve has also made fewer movies. His Prisoners crumbles under an overwrought and predictable third act, while Arrival puffs up the importance of its central twist so that you won't notice how hollow the movie is. It pains me to dislike Arrival. We need smarter, empathetic sci-fi tales like this one, and the film's central message of togetherness is genuinely moving. But the more I think about Arrival, the less I like it, noble ambitions and all.
Martin Liebman enjoyed the film far more than I did, writing that "even as the film follows with a series of scenes that feature Louise attempting to communicate with the aliens, wanting to understand, first, how they perceive written communication and, later, deciphering what it means, the film still pushes towards that singular question: why? Why are they here? Communication is, at first, a barrier, the most obvious one, but so too is the very concept of human perception. Again without spoiling the film, Arrival proves to be much more than a simple back-and-forth between two species, more than the process of sorting through their written communication and appropriately translating it. It dives into some heady territory and some deep philosophical and psychological concepts along the way, too, particularly as so much is revealed in the third act. Hints, or things that could be interpreted as hints, are laced throughout. The visiting ships appear almost egg-like. The aliens' written language is, at its most fundamental level, circular in nature. Are those clues or coincidence? Something to keep in mind while watching the movie. If one could levy a criticism around the film, it would not be of the film itself, but rather its audience. It might be that man isn't quite ready to tackle the concepts it has to offer. They're hard, not in a way that the audience cannot decipher them, but hard in that it breaks down established and understood reality. It resonates and surprises in its own linear progression, but beyond that is a film that enters some exciting but at the same time terrifying areas that challenge the very notion of life as man has known it, thought of it, written of it, since he was able to wrap his head around it. The movie is about how man communicates not only with an alien race, but with himself."
I suspect if you're in that coveted 13-to-18 age demographic, you'll think Universal Studios Home Entertainment's The Edge of Seventeen is one of the year's best films. Writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig has created a teenage heroine for the ages: Nadine Franklin (Hailee Steinfeld, even better here than in her Academy Award-nominated True Grit turn) merits comparison with Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles or Lindsay Weir in Freaks and Geeks, so winning are her attempts to try and eke out something resembling happiness from her teenage years. And the odds are stacked against her. Her best friend (Haley Lu Richardson) has started dating Nadine's self-righteous older brother (Blake Jenner, whose Everybody Wants Some is still the best teen dramedy of 2016), her bitter mother (Kyra Sedgwick) barely tries to understand her, and the only person who'll give her the time of day is her misanthropic history teacher (Woody Harrelson, coasting off his infinite realms of charm and good humor). For Nadine, the very act of existence is a struggle, and that acknowledgment - that for many, high school is a cesspool of misery and rejection - helps Craig maintain a level of honesty that the film's more glib antecedents (Mean Girls, Easy A, take your pick) mainly gloss over. On the subject of honesty - Craig is also working within the parameters of an R-rating, and it's refreshing to see a movie about teenagers where the main character actually talk like teenagers, four-letter words and all. However, despite the swearing and adult content, The Edge of Seventeen is very much a kids movie. I suspect anyone who's put adolescence in their rearview might find the proceedings a little sitcom-lite. Every time The Edge of Seventeen seems like it's heading towards harder edges, Craig quickly steers things towards a pat conclusion, whether that's softening Nadine's awful sexual experience with some feel-good homilies or plastering over some of the more unsettling undertones between Nadine and her teacher (he swears around her with abandon. She shares graphic sexual details with him. In real life, he'd be looking for a new job) so that we'll think he's the father she never had. We even get a meet-cute where Nadine meets Mr. Right (a very appealing Hayden Szeto) so that the film can contrive to keep them apart for no reason: he's so handsome and funny and quirky and talented that we don't buy Nadine would treat him like Ducky while mooning after a broody James Dean-wannabe (the boring Alexander Calvert). Still, I like Pretty In Pink, so an R-rated certainly satisfies a certain nostalgia twinge. But too safe is still too safe, no matter how well done it might be.
From Sony Home Entertainment comes Ang Lee's war drama Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. There's no way to look at the film as anything other than a misfire. The story of a shell-shocked Army specialist (Joe Alwyn) trying to reconcile civilian life with a brutal tour of duty in Iraq - and all while he and his squadron are making an appearance at a Super Bowl Halftime Show - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk suffers from as severe a case of tonal mismanagement as I've ever seen. Ben Fountain's source novel is many things, chief of which is funny - at times, it recalls Joseph Heller's Catch-22 in its caustic, blackly comic vision of life during wartime. But Lee has made a full-throated drama, and this shift fundamentally unhinges the film. Lee wants us to cry at moments that Fountain was mocking (Makenzie Leigh's syrupy Christian cheerleader; the various machinations of Chris Tucker's unscrupulous film producer as he tries to sell Billy's story), and that mismatch leaves us unmoored. Even the central absurdity of Billy's situation (in the book, the halftime show proves as psychically disruptive as his combat experience) feels a little too plodding and literal, and you can't blame audiences for largely rejecting was Lee was selling. And yet cinephiles owe it to themselves to catch Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, flaws and all. Lee has long been the cinematic poet laureate of outsider culture, and his soldiers (which also include Garrett Hedlund, Beau Knapp, and a very good Vin Diesel) here have the same tender grace of Lee's kung-fu warriors in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or his alienated suburbanites in The Ice Storm. Alwyn, in particular, is touchingly unaffected in the title role, although Kristen Stewart gives the film's best performance as Billy's lonely, damaged sister. If nothing else, the film proves an interesting technical gambit, although not necessarily in the ways Lee intended. Lee has said he wanted to shoot a film in a high-frame rate after his experience on Life of Pi (the 3D and digital effects created, he claimed, excessive strobing of the image), and perhaps that film would have been a more natural fit, given its fantastical content. Some of the HFR scenes in Billy Lynn, by comparison, look awful - at 120 frames-per-second (or at least 60, if you're watching the 4K Blu-ray edition), you're always aware of the artifice, with visible makeup and costuming popping to a distracting degree, and that's not even taking into consideration how HFR seems to accelerate movement to Keystone Kops levels. But these scenes are kind of hypnotically awful. Even as the HFR distracts from Lee's thematic concerns, you can't take your eyes off the screen. Furthermore, every so often the aesthetic will match perfectly with the content, and the possibilities of Lee's shooting style become ever more evident. The combat scenes (particularly a brutal one-on-one fight) and central halftime show are uncomfortably visceral, and a conversation with Steve Martin's football-team owner has the snap of live theater. It might be that HFR works better at strategic moments rather than whole features, but kudos to Lee for taking a big swing, even if it mostly misses.
Finally, Warner Archive is giving Sydney Pollack's crime thriller The Yakuza a Blu-ray release. I've always wanted to like The Yakuza more than I do. The story of a world-weary detective (the splendid Robert Mitchum) who heads to Japan in order to rescue a friend's daughter from the yakuza, the film was one of the first Hollywood productions to delve semi-seriously into the Japanese underground, and you can tell Pollack is enthralled by the world before his camera. He lets Mitchum be his eyes, regarding this criminal culture with equal parts fear and fascination, whether it's the core of honor behind all illicit activities or the shocking violence that jars the film at strategic intervals. In particular, Pollack stages a late-film attack on Mitchum and a climactic raid on the villain's lair that both crackle with excitement - to date, they represent Pollack's high-water marks as a director. Kudos, too, for the genre-hopping inherent in the Paul and Leonard Schrader (with assists from Robert Towne) screenplay. The Brothers Schrader fold in clear noir tropes alongside archetypes of the samurai movie and then tie everything together with an unusually satisfying mismatched partners angle. See, the great Ken Takakura owes a debt to Mitchum's character, and their bond grows into something far richer than most films of this ilk offer. But the problem, unfortunately, is Pollack. As beloved a Hollywood figure as he was, Pollack's signature Hollywood entertainments were often poky and slower than they should have been (3 Days of the Condor is a taut thriller with twenty minutes of extraneous Faye Dunaway love interest stuff; Tootsie might be a perfect screwball comedy if you cut both syrupy music montages and trimmed a half an hour), and The Yakuza is no exception. The core of the film thrives in the uneasy respect that Mitchum and Takakura have for one another, and whenever their dynamic gets center stage, The Yakuza ranks among Pollack's finest films. But Pollack is far too precious about the filigrees adorning what should be a muscular noir picture, so he keeps killing the pace, whether that's indulging the saccharine romance between Mitchum and Keiko Kishi or ceding so much screentime to Richard Jordan's loyal henchman Dusty (Jordan is great, but...given what ultimately happens to him, I question the need to give the character a go-nowhere subplot). I guess the good outweighs the bad - it's the reason I keep returning to the film - but I keep envisioning a version where the filmmaking on display is as disciplined as the representations of Japanese culture.