For the week of April 10th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing the Academy Award-nominated Hidden Figures to Blu-ray. If you're really looking to be contrarian, the worst thing you can say about this fact-based dramedy is that it plays things way too safe. While the film purports to cover the racial and gender injustices that mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson (the incredibly winning trifecta of Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe) faced as African-American women during their tenure at NASA, it does so in as inoffensive a manner as possible. Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson best most of the major setbacks thrown their respective ways, get the moral high ground over a snooty engineer (Jim Parsons), and even win the quiet admiration of their tough-but-fair project director (Kevin Costner, doing his trademarked Kevin Costner thing), all while finding time to impress John Glenn (Glen Powell) and romance a hunky military officer (Monáe's Academy Award-winning Moonlight co-star Mahershala Ali). Again, it's the happiest look at the Civil Rights era that you could ever ask for - think The Help but WAY less stressful. And yet, affable as it might be, Hidden Figures remains a consistent delight. You know it won't be as socially incisive as Do the Right Thing, but you're having too much fun to care. Director Theodore Melfi directs with a light touch that makes the clichés go down much easier, and he's wise enough to know that really, all you need to do is point the camera at Henson, Spencer, and/or Monáe and let them do their thing. Even in lesser hands, Hidden Figures would stay afloat off their energy. Plus, I can't help but see something quietly revolutionary about the film. Here's a picture that pretty much deifies the intellectual contributions of three black women, and it did so to a rapturous audience response ($223 million gross worldwide and counting). In its own crowd-pleasing way, that popularity feels more culturally important now than ever before.
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes the cop comedy War on Everyone. If this film came from anyone else, it'd be underwhelming but forgettable; the film plays like one of those Tarantino knockoffs that popped up in Pulp Fiction's immediate wake, all glib dialogue and violence (Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña play two misanthropic, gleefully corrupt cops who make their introduction running over a mime and then pondering the sound Said Mime will make - yep, it's that kind of movie) and none of Tarantino's formal or linguistic mastery. However, you can't just drop it into that Things to Do In Denver When You're Dead/Destiny Turns on the Radio box because of one thing: writer/director John Michael McDonagh. See, McDonagh is one of those filmmakers whose work thus far actually merits comparison with Tarantino's. In both The Guard and his masterful Calvary, McDonagh effortlessly mixes whiplash screwball dialogue, shocking violence, and surprising moral relativity. Both films care deeply about how difficult it is to be good in a world that is anything but, and that perspective lends his movies real gravity. Well, he's chucked that last characteristic for War on Everyone, and so what we're left with is just smutty chaos that's way too happy to be crass. Now, I would like to think that the film is more subversive than it seems, that McDonagh is criticizing anyone who wishes he'd make something more "commercial" by pandering nonstop to commercial instincts, except War on Everyone even fails as parody. That opening mime scene is about as good as it gets, and everything that follows repeats it to more and more diminishing results - Skarsgård and Peña bluster their way through a predictable cop-movie cliché before swearing/shooting their way out. Plus, neither actor seems all that jazzed to be here. Skarsgård doesn't quite know how to play the (relative) wild card of the pairing, and the (usually) effortlessly charming Peña can't create a character around McDonagh's ornately stylized dialogue - he keeps looking for opportunities to improvise that don't materialize. Again, I wouldn't care if Gary Fleder or Tom Schulman was behind the camera, but McDonagh has the potential to be one of the greats. My advice for him? Reunite with Brendan Gleeson and get back to business. My advice for everyone else? Pretend War on Everyone doesn't exist.
For a far more engaging mix of humor and violence, check out Arrow Video's House: Two Stories collection. Neither feature (1986's House and its 1987 follow-up, aptly titled The Second Story) ranks among the high points of '80s horror, but they're fast and entertaining and more than a little goofy. You get the sense that House 1 director Steve Miner was a big fan of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II, given how closely his film hews to that template. We have a hero (William Katt) isolated in an old dark house, and ghoulish monsters/visions plague him at a near-slapstick pace. This first House tries to distinguish itself with some light social relevance - Katt's character is a Vietnam vet, so the film flirts with making his PTSD the root of his troubles - but for the most part, House is content to be a haunted funhouse. One can argue that House 2: The Second Story pushes things too far in the frivolous direction. This sequel is a decidedly PG-13 affair as two yuppies (Arye Gross and Jonathan Stark) get involved in a madcap affair that involved, I kid you not, ancient Mayan treasures and a haunted crystal skull. Minus the actual house, I couldn't suss out any continuity between the two, with the sequel ditching the violence for kid-friendly baby dinosaurs, a genial zombie cowboy (Royal Dano), and distracting appearances from both John Ratzenberger and Bill Maher. Still, for fans of '80s cheese, The Second Story should prove satisfying. Unfortunately, some controversy has dogged this Blu-ray release. For one, it isn't complete. The set is missing the third (The Horror Show) and fourth (House 4: The Repossession) entries in the franchise, and while neither is terribly impressive (especially House 4), Arrow's UK set includes all four. More problematic are the framing issues plaguing some of the transfers. Some early reports have claimed that, as with Arrow's Hellraiser set, a number of shots have been misframed to a distracting degree - like, you can see crew members working just off frame. Arrow hasn't yet announced if/when it will be issuing a recall, but these concerns do keep the House editions from feeling definitive.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the original House became an unexpected hit, leading of course to several sequels, the first of which Arrow has collected with its progenitor in a handsomely packaged new two Blu-ray set which also includes Arrow's typically wide assortment of supplements, which in this case include not just on disc bonus material but a nice hardback book entitled The House Companion...I hadn't seen House in years when I revisited it in preparation for this review, and I have to say I was really struck this time by the pure oddity of a horror comedy built around a guy obviously suffering from probably several forms of PTSD...I'm kind of surprised by the viscerally negative reaction House II: The Second Story seems to evoke in even some fans of this franchise. The film doesn't quite work, but it's kind of goofily enjoyable on its own terms, and some of the effects are kind of quaintly lovable as well."
Finally, HBO Home Entertainment is giving a Blu-ray release to its acclaimed half-hour comedy Veep with this Complete Fifth Season release. After taking a year or so to find its footing, Veep quickly became one of the funniest shows on television, thanks to a dynamite cast (headed by the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus and featuring invaluable support from the likes of Tony Hale, Matt Walsh, Gary Cole, Kevin Dunn, Randall Park, Timothy Simons, Hugh Laurie, Peter MacNicol, and Sam Richardson, who steals every scene he's in as a genial staffer who is either the smartest person in the Selina Meyer administration or the absolute dumbest) and the guiding hand of The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci. However, Season Five came with a major production shakeup: after ending Season Four on a hilarious cliffhanger that tied up former VP Selina Meyer's Presidential bid, Iannucci announced that he would be leaving the show and installing Curb Your Enthusiasm's David Mandel as showrunner. Due respect to Curb Your Enthusiasm, but Veep operates at a different pace, and I credit Iannucci's brilliant melding of screwball comedy with Beltway satire. How wonderful, then, to find that under Mandel, Veep doesn't lose a step. In fact, Season Five might be its strongest year yet, with Mandel only intensifying the bitterness and comic misanthropy on display. Meyer is so pissed about the tie that she never stops to ask maybe the most relevant question of her campaign - if she's even temperamentally qualified to be President - and all her efforts during the long recount process further compromise her agenda, whether that's sleeping with the head of her new banking task force (a very funny John Slattery) or using the death of her horrible, horrible mother to her own political advantage. And that's not even taking into consideration the machinations of her folksy, devious VP candidate Tom James (Laurie) or the unintended consequences of her neglected daughter Catherine (Sarah Sutherland, Kiefer's daughter). Everything Meyer does seems to lead her waist-deep in crap, and we viewers wouldn't have it any other way.