For the week of May 1st, Sony's "Choice Collection" is releasing a Blu-ray edition of Martha Coolidge's 1985 teen comedy Real Genius courtesy of Sony's "Choice Collection." If most teen comedies followed the sex-and-slobs template - scratch one The Sure Thing and reveal eight or nine like Porky's or Losin' It (God love Animal House, but too many people learned too many of the wrong lessons from it) - Real Genius distinguishes itself from the pack through sheer wit and genuine intelligence. Our hero is young Mitch Taylor (Gabe Jarret), a fifteen-year-old whiz kid whose advanced work regarding applied engineering sciences secure him early admittance to Pacific Tech University (a thinly veiled proxy for CalTech). Once there, Mitch tries to balance school life with various social engagements, but you'll never confuse Real Genius with something like Revenge of the Nerds. That smutty comedy mocked its heroes' cumulative I.Q.'s as much as it honored them, whereas Real Genius genuinely respects intelligence and the pressures that accompany it. Mitch is brilliant (and Jarret makes him appealingly guileless - it's a shame he didn't have a bigger acting career), but he's still very much a kid, and one whose obvious enthusiasm for science doesn't prepare him for the hierarchy of higher academia, personified by the sneering William Atherton as Mitch's sublimely arrogant faculty mentor (Atherton's work here is the gold standard for what the '80s douchebag should look like - he just edges out William Zabka in The Karate Kid). On the other end of the spectrum from Atherton, you've got Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) as Mitch's brilliant-but-feckless roommate, and it's Knight that helps to secure Real Genius' reputation. If anyone else played Knight, you'd have a fun-but-slight teen comedy, one that gains points for downplaying misogyny and sexism but also makes some unfortunate concessions to formula in the third act: Taylor and Knight learn that Atherton is using them to develop a deadly laser for a government assassination programs, and their efforts to undermine their boss turn Real Genius into a more conventional "Darn Those Adults" caper. However, Kilmer's work is sublime. He's always been an underrated comic talent (people swear by Top Secret, but he's just as funny in Shane Black's underrated noir farce Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), and Taylor is something special, a wild mix of young Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx, and Bugs Bunny in how insouciantly he regards the outside world. It's not enough that all of Taylor's lines are zingers - even his T-shirts are hilarious ("Surf Nicaragua" is my favorite). Kilmer personifies Real Genius' idiosyncratic charge and confirms its status as one of those movies where everything just comes together: Coolidge has such empathy for her leads, so she makes them relatable and funny even as Neal Israel, Pat Proft, and Peter Torokvei's script keeps generating comic fastballs for them to hit. The end result? Real Genius holds up whereas most '80s youth comedies grow ever more cringeworthy.
As part of their efforts to give popular catalog titles 4K showings (their John Wick 4K disc continues to perform well on home media), Lionsgate Home Entertainment is giving 3:10 to Yuma the Ultra HD treatment. You've got to give it to Yuma director James Mangold: with both this Western and the last two standalone Wolverine pictures (the solid The Wolverine and the even better Logan), Mangold has shown a knack for taking troubled projects and making them far better than they've any right to be. The Wolverine pictures redeemed a spinoff franchise that the execrable X-Men Origins: Wolverine almost fatally compromised, while Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma helped usher in a mini-Western resurgence (along with the Coen Brothers' neo-Western No Country for Old Men and Andrew Dominik's flawed-but-hypnotic The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) at a time when Hollywood had virtually stopped caring about the genre. Plus, Mangold was mounting a Western remake, specifically a remake of a good movie: Delmer Daves's 1957 original merits comparison with Fred Zinnemann's great High Noon, so no one was clamoring for the director of Walk the Line to fix what wasn't broken. Yet the 2007 3:10 to Yuma belongs on the shortlist with John Carpenter's The Thing and David Cronenberg's The Fly as the rare redo that, at the very least, stands as its predecessor's equal. The core structure is identical to the Daves feature. After the arrest of outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe, in one of the most enjoyable performances of his career), struggling farmer Dan Evans (Christian Bale) braves the natural elements and Wade's old gang in order to help transport the infamous Wade to the titular prison-transport locomotive. That said, Mangold and writers Michael Brandt & Derek Haas (working from Halsted Welles' original script to the degree that Welles receives a writing credit on the new film) add nuance and depth to an already rich text. Both Yumas take inspiration from Elmore Leonard's short story, which mostly restricts itself to the conversation that unfolds as Wade and Evans wait for the train in a nearby hotel room. Anyone familiar with his work (the uninitiated need to seek out Out of Sight and Justified now. Go ahead - I'll wait) knows that Leonard likes nothing more than to let criminal adversaries rhetorically duke it out, and the two movie versions foreground this moment, lingering on the grudging respect growing between the two leads. But Mangold adds so much incident around that central conversation that when it lands, it carries far more weight. These additions prove superficially more enjoyable, from the major setpiece where Evans and Wade need to escape a railroad-building chain gang to the contributions of a flavorful supporting cast that includes Logan Lerman, Dallas Roberts, Alan Tudyk, Luke Wilson, Peter Fonda, and Ben Foster, who steals the movie as Wade's alternatively psychotic/lovestruck right-hand man. Mangold's additions also provide more opportunities to see Wade and Evans in action, and to understand how they process the world. Wade is a bad guy, and he takes a certain zeal in his actions (my favorite moment: his nonchalant brutality in handling Kevin Durand's obnoxious peace officer), but he sees criminality as an extension of need, only transgressing when he must. As such, he doesn't know what to make of the stolid, honest Evans, who's on the edge of bankruptcy but won't bite at Wade's many attempts at bribery. It's a cliché, but each man is fascinated by the other's code, so that when they get a moment to pause, Mangold lingers over the verbal negotiation of their respective characters. True to form, that conversation ends in a rather spectacular gunfight, and credit to Mangold for staging it in clear and coherent fashion. But when the bullets fly, we're invested because of the human stakes established, and that quality sets 3:10 to Yuma apart.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "things are at least a little more dour in this reboot, including an early look at the war injury which has literally hobbled Evans, as well as some insight into his fractious relationships with his sons, especially older boy William (Logan Lerman), an element that wasn't really exploited (at least to this degree) in the 1957 version. When an uneasy truce develops between Evans and Wade after Evans and his sons witness Wade robbing the coach (including several deaths), there's more of a feeling of some kind of unspoken Code of the West at play in this version, as well (Wade had used Evans' errant cattle to waylay the coach, and Evans simply tells Wade all he's out to do is retrieve what's rightfully his). As with Leonard's original tale and the 1957 film, the bulk of this version actually deals with Evans 'escorting' Wade to the wonderfully named town of Contention, where Wade will be put aboard the titular train to serve time at a penitentiary. There are a couple of interesting sidebars this version employs...and a late intrusion by a supporting character is rejiggered here to help tie together the threads of family dysfunction in the Evans household and the general gist of Evans trying to regain his personal honor by delivering Wade to the hands of justice. In a way certain elements of this story which are (perhaps intentionally?) reminiscent of High Noon are somewhat sidelined in this version, but surprisingly the film still builds an incredible amount of tension, probably more so than the 1957 version. This outing is elevated by uniformly excellent performances, and director James Mangold delivers an often breathless pace which helps the film elide a few clunky clichés."
Finally, Magnolia Home Entertainment is bringing Raoul Peck's Academy Award-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro to Blu-ray. What Peck (who's also responsible for the great 2000 biopic Lumumba) has done here has more in common with resurrection than with a conventional piece of infotainment. Using writer/activist James Baldwin's own words (the core of which Baldwin wrote in his unfinished Remember This House), Peck manages to do nothing less than conjure the great man's spirit. Baldwin appeared in a lot of televised or filmed material (some of I Am Not Your Negro most sheerly entertaining material occurs whenever we see Baldwin on The Dick Cavett Show), and Peck frequently returns to this footage as a means of cementing Baldwin's physical presence, but Peck also blends in a kaleidoscopic array of archival footage (including Civil Rights-era news footage, vintage interviews with African-American leaders, and clips from Hollywood films that contextualize the on-camera treatment of African-Americans), and all while using Baldwin's Remember This House text as a kind of subjective internal monologue. Samuel L. Jackson provides Baldwin's voiceovers, and I don't think I've ever heard Jackson sound the mix of blazing intelligence and raw tenderness that he brings to the film. I Am Not Your Negro begins to assume an associative quality, as though Baldwin is trying to expound on his central thesis but must contend with his unquiet mind flashing to rawer, more personal moments of heartbreak and racial strife. The effect is not unlike watching the films of Nicolas Roeg, and we leave I Am Not Your Negro feeling like we've a better, more fine-grained sense of James Baldwin: who he was, what he cared about, and what kept him unsettled and apart. Yet the genius of Peck's work is in how it, like the best of Baldwin's writing, pushes past the confines of its subject's consciousness. In theory, Baldwin wanted Remember This House to act as his great treatise on the lives and violent deaths of Civil Rights activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., but Peck's presentation of that material gives it new vibrancy. When Baldwin speaks of the trouble in Birmingham, Alabama, seeming alien and remote to those living in more Northern climes, Peck intercuts CGI-imagery of the Martian surface, and he responds to Baldwin's lamentations about the racially turbulent violence impacting America in the 1960s and 1970s by bringing in clips from present-day Ferguson. As such, we sense the immediacy of Baldwin's mission, that race is the defining element of the American character, despite our efforts to pretend otherwise. Along with Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America, I Am Not Your Negro stands as one of 2016's most important films.