For the week of April 24th, Lionsgate and Summit Home Entertainment are bringing the Academy Award-winning La La Land to Blu-ray. If you're looking to, it is very, very easy to criticize this musical comedy. Call it too long. Call it too glib. Call Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone uninspired singers/dancers, and call writer-director Damien Chazelle tone-deaf for suggesting that only a handsome white dude (Gosling, natch) is capable of saving jazz. And while we're at it, call the optics of the La La Land team mistakenly receiving the Best Picture Oscar over the more socially progressive Moonlight beyond unfortunate, right? Any defense I try and offer isn't going to hold up. And yet, for all its faults and imperfections, La La Land transported me in ways that few of 2016's cinema offerings did - had I the time and space, I would have walked right back into the theater to see it again after my first screening. What Chazelle sustains over the course of its 128 minutes is a kind of technical virtuosity that borders on pure cinema. He's cited Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort as being a particular inspiration, and certainly La La Land's big opener, where scores of people stuck in L.A. traffic spontaneously break out into song and dance, reflects Demy's hand. But as he demonstrated in his masterful jazz drama Whiplash, Chazelle has a command of mise-en-scene that recalls Martin Scorsese - imagine Scorsese directing the "You Were Meant for Me" number from Singin' in the Rain, and you'll have a sense of the way the editing and camera movement propel La La Land. In fact, the Scorsese connection runs even deeper, I'd wager. On the surface, La La Land resembles Scorsese's own pure musical New York, New York: both features attempt to blend whimsy with emotional realism by showing what happens when their protagonists (Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli in New York, New York; Gosling and Stone in La La Land) clash over their respective creative passions (saxophone playing vs. singing for New York, New York; jazz piano vs. acting for La La Land). Scorsese, however, never quite managed his intended balance of spectacle and psychological realism (it's hard to reconcile Boris Leven's thrilling production design with the almost Cassavetes-esque approach to improvisation that De Niro uses), whereas Chazelle pretty much nails the two, and nowhere as achingly as in the final musical number. It still feels a little too soon for spoilers, but Chazelle gets us so invested in Gosling and Stone that we can't help but root for them as a couple even as their relationship becomes untenable, a relationship that the finale mythologizes to bittersweet effect. Again, it's easy to hate La La Land, but for a certain subset of viewers, it's even easier not to.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "props must be given to Damien Chazelle for having had the fortitude to even get a patently whimsical musical like La La Land made, and if there's one thing this film gets right, it's the overall tone, along with some really wonderfully inventive stagings that offer great visual presentations of several songs. Chazelle's writing is also very smart and often quite funny, quickly establishing the characters of jazz (?) pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and actress Mia (Emma Stone). The two keep meeting cute, in time honored film (not just musical film) fashion, until of course a romance blossoms. The film charts a fairly realistic emotional course within its dialogue scenes while indulging in pure fantasy for several of the song sequences. Sidebars include Mia's girlfriends as well as a faltering relationship with a boyfriend named Greg (Finn Wittrock), while on the Sebastian side of the aisle there are detours on his quest to 'rescue' jazz from attrition when he joins a more pop fusion band fronted by his friend Keith (John Legend). It's all paper thin, but it's to Chazelle's credit as well as to the performing chops of an ace cast that so much of this content lands so well. But a musical has to be (or at least should be) built around great songs, and it's here that for me personally La La Land simply didn't fulfill my particular needs for whatever reason. Again, props must be paid to composer Justin Hurwitz for delivering some really sumptuous orchestrations (and props to him for orchestrating, a job that is regularly farmed out to 'experts'). But the tunes are kind of meh and the lyrics are hardly in Sondheim (or frankly even Sherman Brothers) territory."
From Kino Lorber comes the nature documentary Microcosmos, and oh boy, has time not been kind to this one. I remember somewhat of a media frenzy breaking over this one in 1996 (well, maybe a subdued frenzy, given that this is just a nature documentary, after all), and for good reason. Using traditional camera technology, filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou were able to capture insect life with unprecedented clarity, bringing the camera tick-close (ha ha) to all sorts of arachnid and insectoid species. The experience was dream-like, almost soothing - there's a direct throughline between Microcosmos and Teletubbies, in terms of the drifting approach to mood and texture. However, whatever novelty Microcosmos once had vanished once Discovery and NatGeo got their own 24-hour programming channels, to say nothing of the high-definition artistry present in the BBC's Planet Earth and Planet Earth II (in particular, the 4K release of the latter might be the single most beautiful thing I've ever seen, former and present spouses be dammed). By comparison, Microcosmos is just fine. The mood is fine. The technical/aesthetic elements are fine. And fine, unfortunately, is no longer good enough. Chalk this one up to the sands of time.
Brian Orndorf wrote that the film "doesn't have a plot. It's more of a tour, initially descending from the heavens to a world that exists between blades of grass, spotlighting the daily lives of insects of all varieties. To achieve this miniature vision, the helmers use special equipment to zero in on the tiniest of details, hunting for unique behaviors, movements, and predatory instincts to share with viewers, generating an atmosphere of observance instead of straightforward education. Microcosmos doesn't identify the stars, it exists with the insects, highlighting their wonderful oneness with the planet and periodic warfare with one another."
Warner Home Entertainment is offering a Blu-ray showing to the first season of TNT's crime drama Animal Kingdom. Showrunners John Wells and Jonathan Lisco find inspiration in David Michôd's phenomenal 2010 gangster picture of the same name, repurposing the action from Australia to Southern California but keeping the same general thrust, namely what happens when disaffected teen J Cody (Finn Cole) goes to live with his outlaw family (Ellen Barkin, Ben Robson, Jake Weary, and Shaun Hatosy) after his mother overdoses. As in the film, the show begins with his mother's death, except something is a little off - the movie lingers on the comic-horrifying tableau of J sprawled out on the couch watching TV next to his mom's corpse, but the show rushes along to get the paramedics involved. It's a small change but a telling one, and indicative of the series' larger pacing problems. You can track that issue back to the original movie. Michôd's Animal Kingdom is one of the least plotty gangster movies you'll ever see - Michôd is far more interested in mood and emotional temperature - and the series struggles mightily for the first half of its run at stretching out those spartan narrative events. Yet the series is often too busy; Wells and Lisco seem to be aping Sons of Anarchy in terms of style more than anything Michôd did (Michôd is the Michelangelo Antonioni of genre filmmakers), and the overcranked aesthetics clash with the more measured plot turns. It doesn't help that the performances sometimes suffer in comparison to the actors in the original Animal Kingdom. For example, in 2010 Sullivan Stapleton and Luke Ford made for a compelling ying/yang pairing as the Cody's most and least emotionally volatile siblings, whereas here, Ben Robson and Jake Weary hit pretty much the same note (hostile irritation) over and over again. And Finn Cole is borderline terrible in the central role. One of the great things that James Frecheville brought to Cole's movie counterpart was a chilling ambiguity - until the ending, we were never sure if J was a dim adolescent or a sly operator. Cole just seems vacant, and our attention drifts whenever he's on screen. All that said, I'm sticking with Animal Kingdom. For every bad/unsatisfying performance, you can find an impressive one. Scott Speedman is quite good as the only Cody-adjacent team member with something resembling a conscience, and if Barkin isn't as viscerally terrifying as Jacki Weaver's criminal matriarch, she uses this disturbing sexuality to how she manipulates her three children. And Shaun Hatosy is a revelation as Pope, the Cody's most unstable family member. Hatosy has the hardest job: he's taking on the role that made Ben Mendelsohn famous, a role that ranks with Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight as one of the great movie psychopaths of recent years. Wisely, Hatosy doesn't try to copy Mendelsohn. Instead, he plays up Pope's fragility. This Pope could have been normal (well, comparatively so), but prison broke something deep in him, and Hatosy makes the character's savagery seem vaguely tender, like he's trying to keep everyone else from seeing how damaged he is. More than anything, I have faith in Wells and Lisco. Their last series, the underrated cop drama Southland, started out uneven and grew into one of the best procedurals on television, and there are signs that Animal Kingdom could mature in similar ways. As unsteady as it is in the early goings, the narrative gets tighter and more propulsive by the second half, and the writers grow less beholden to honoring the film's trajectory. We'll wait and see...
Finally, Criterion is giving one of the best, most distinctive American films of the 1980s a Blu-ray showing: Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish. Rumble Fish might represent Coppola's second attempt at transmuting the work of S.E. Hinton from literature to cinema, but I'd wager that anyone only familiar with Coppola's 1983 Outsiders adaptation won't know what to make of Rumble Fish despite the fact that both films debuted within months of one another. Minus some widescreen allusions to Gone with the Wind and Rebel Without a Cause, his Outsiders is a fairly straightforward adaptation, whereas Coppola uses the relative framework of Hinton's Rumble Fish - troubled Tulsa teen Rusty James (Matt Dillon) struggles in the shadow of his older brother, the near-mythical former gang leader Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) - for his own distinct ends. Some have compared what Coppola has done here with the work of François Truffaut, but outside the whole wayward youth aspect, I've never seen anything of Truffaut's that approaches Rumble Fish's stylization. Coppola has crafted a teen drama like no other: Rumble Fish is boldly experimental, fusing unbelievably kinetic gang violence (courtesy of Michael Smuin, co-director of the San Francisco Ballet) alongside broody introspection that has the surreal grace of a dream. Despite the stacked cast (besides Dillon and Rourke, we get appearances from Larry Fishburne, Diane Lane, Dennis Hopper, Tom Waits, Chris Penn, and Coppola's daughter and nephew - that is, of course, Sofia Coppola and Nicolas Cage), Coppola's most important collaborator might be DP Stephen Burum, whose monochrome, high-contrast aesthetic (minus some brief, striking pops of color) is awash in steam and rain and gliding menace. An argument between Dillon and Lane's character's plays out against the billowing white smoke of a brush fire, while Dillon's near-death experience after an aborted mugging wouldn't be out of place in Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. The density of visual invention is staggering, and I totally get those who view the film as a case of style overwhelming substance. But the more time passes, the more Rumble Fish looks like an essential component to understanding Coppola's personal and thematic obsessions. The whole film plays like the sibling rivalry between Coppola and his own brother August writ large, with Coppola using Dillon as his stand-in (simultaneously boorish and insecure) and letting Rourke (in a remarkable performance) represent August's bottomless empathy and ability that Coppola desperately craves (Rourke apparently styled his character on an artist grown weary of his trade, and that quality informs so much of the tension between the characters). In pictures like Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Tetro, Coppola would further explore this dynamic, although never was it so singular and hypnotic as in Rumble Fish.
Svet Atanasov wrote that the film is "a beautiful, unusually atmospheric film that does not have a conventional plot. Shot entirely in lush black and white, it is essentially a time capsule concerned with unique feelings and emotions rather than intricate relationships or group dynamics...This is a heavily stylized film with a distinct but also quite complex ambience that is capable of creating a very diverse range of impressions. The film has two minor but obvious weaknesses. The art-house nuances seem to directly affect the integrity of the main protagonists -- more often than not they seem too detached and are left contemplating dilemmas that appear too lofty for the film. On the other hand, the low-key minimalism is too weak to sustain the type of atmosphere most of Jim Jarmusch's films are known for... Unsurprisingly, the end result is a fascinating to behold but arguably somewhat uneven film."