For the week of May 8th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is releasing the "definitive director's edition" of Michael Mann's 1995 crime drama Heat. If this release is a North American release of the UK version that streeted a couple months ago, then Region A fans are in for a treat. For years, the mediocre stateside Blu-ray - that of the dated 1080p master and frightfully inconsistent Dolby TrueHD sound mix - was all we knew, whereas this "definitive" edition offers Heat a lovely 4K scan and (better still!) a DTS-HD Master Audio track that no longer struggles to modulate the different volume levels. Before, you'd have to jack up the volume in order to hear the whisper-quiet dialogue, and then BAM! the gunfights would kick in and explode your eardrums. Why it took so long for Heat to receive an appropriate release is beyond me; in its epic scale and psychological complexity, Heat merits comparison with The Godfather and Warren Beatty's Reds. In theory, Mann is telling another story about cops and robbers, and while you could fault him for rehashing old intrigues (both his Thief and Manhunter examine the thin line separating law and order, and Heat itself is a remake of Mann's 1989 telefilm L.A. Takedown), Mann gives Heat a sweep and technical virtuosity that rivals anything in his very accomplished career. One could argue, in fact, that Mann should have stopped making crime dramas after this one. The film plays like a repository of every cop-criminal cliché and character beat going back to Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Dig it - we get the cop (Al Pacino, finely toeing the line between caricature and nuance) whose job is his life, the con (Robert De Niro, giving one of his subtlest, most intelligent performances) who won't go back to prison, his unstable aide-de-camp (Val Kilmer) whose criminal acumen masks his personal failings, the gang (Tom Sizemore and Danny Trejo) that splinters from the inside, a big heist, an even bigger shootout, criminal fences (Tom Noonan and Jon Voight play two especially memorable ones), dogged leads, sleazy businessmen (personified by William Fichtner), and a final showdown between lawman and his quarry. Hell, Heat is so overstuffed that it works in room for at least three romantic conflicts (De Niro and Amy Brenneman; Pacino and Diane Venora; Kilmer and Ashley Judd), a family melodrama (Pacino's lifestyle has unintended effects on his stepdaughter, played by a young Natalie Portman), a wild card maniac (the terrifying Kevin Cage) who briefly threatens to turn Heat into a serial-killer thriller, and - most movingly - a character study of doomed recidivism (in the form of Dennis Haysbert's frustrated ex-con/struggling short-order cook), but Mann sketches these sideplots with such economy that the film begins to take on the richness of a Tolstoy novel. You could easily give Heat the subtitle, "A Portrait of Los Angeles," so full is it in its appreciation for the city and its denizens, and it's not a stretch to see how this geographic specificity would influence Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight or even David Simon and Ed Burns's masterful sociological procedural The Wire. Still, what resonates more than anything is the interplay between Pacino and De Niro's characters. Interplay might be a misleading word - they're only in three or four scenes together and only directly interact for maybe five minutes - but Mann, taking a play from Jean-Pierre Melville, encourages us to see the two as a symbiotic unit. Psychologically and spiritually, they're the same person: consummate professionals who've chosen to apply their gifts to very different ends, yet their very existence can only end in self-destruction. The reason that their famous diner conversation works so well hinges on this profound sadness that the actors bring. They couldn't respect (or need) each other more, but the only way they can be true to one another is by trying to take out the other person. In moments like these, Heat transcends its formula and becomes something more in line with Greek tragedy. A bonafide American masterpiece, and Mann's magnum opus.
It's a toss-up, though, as to which film streeting this week is best: Heat or Chantal Akerman's staggering Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, to which Criterion is giving a Blu-ray upgrade. I suspect they're on different ends of the same spectrum. If Heat is a maximalist epic, then Jeanne Dielman is maybe an epic of minimalism, letting Akerman treat the human condition in precise, intimate details. Over three long days (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday), Akerman records her title heroine (Delphine Seyrig, star of Alain Resnais' equally iconic arthouse sensation Last Year at Marienbad) going about her daily business. Emphasize long - each day takes about an hour of screentime (Jeanne Dielman clocks in at 201 minutes), with much of that time unfolding as static, unbroken takes of rather mundane actions. Jeanne does some dishes. Goes shopping. Makes dinner. Eats a little. Makes and drinks some coffee. Earns a little extra money from her side job as a prostitute, but don't let that salacious vocation goose your hopes for lurid thrills too much. Akerman uses that same dispassionate rigor to document Jeanne's sex work, focusing mostly on her patient setup/cleanup rituals before and after the act. The volume of simple minutia is staggering and initially tedious, and I can't blame viewers for abandoning Jeanne Dielman before Tuesday ends (the comparatively lithe Heat hustles along at 170 minutes). However, Akerman has made a true art film more than a conventional melodrama - it's practically a three-and-a-half-hour art installation - and as such, she does require our active participation. That means toughing it out through Jeanne's prosaic routines and watching her closely even as we get bored, and it's definitely okay to be bored. And after a while (maybe an hour, maybe two), a funny thing happens: we become rapt in the onscreen drama. What makes Jeanne Dielman such an important film is that it retrains us in the act of moviegoing. To a large degree, Akerman uses boredom to test what we find conventionally exciting until we recalibrate our own expectations. If it was at first agonizing to regard Jeanne's every action, our immersion in the details makes us attentive to everything she's doing, so much so that the deviations register with visceral force. This is the only movie where a woman dropping a spoon or cooking meatloaf have the cumulative impact as a thousand explosions in the Transformers pictures, and we realize the transformative powers of cinema, that it can take an otherwise unassuming, middle-aged woman and afford her the grandeur that only the silver screen can perform. There's a way where this film's very existence constitutes a political action (it functions as a genuine feminist manifesto, focusing on Jeanne's hyperdetailed routine both as an affirmation of her worth/presence while also criticizing the larger systems that force her into such tight constrictions); there's even a way you can argue that Jeanne Dielman is actually as narratively dense a piece of work as Heat (in an interview with The New York Times, Akerman argued that she "do[es]n't think it's minimalist...I think it's maximalist. It's big," so much so that "Delphine Seyrig complained that there was so much detail she didn't have to invent anything"). Regardless, Jeanne Dielman remains as uncompromising and crucial a feature as I've ever seen, and while it shares some DNA with, say, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon or Martin Scorsese's Silence (those two also use the moviewatching experience to get you to readjust your personal viewing lenses), it also abandons any of those features' more commercial elements to a degree that's downright heroic. Cinema exists for movies like this one.
Shout Factory has licensed two films from Universal Studios that, taken together, form as eclectic a serial-killer double feature as one could imagine. The most effective of the two is, by far, John Waters' 1994 horror-comedy Serial Mom. Waters has always loved charting the intersections between straight trash (Multiple Maniacs) and high camp (Cry-Baby), but Serial Mom proves his best fusion of the two. In one of her best performances, Kathleen Turner stars as Beverly Sutphin, a '90s mom who looks and acts like she's stepped right out of the 1950s, albeit with a twist: she murders anyone who threatens her family or impinges on her own sense of proper decorum. You immediately get what attracted Waters to the concept (she's like June Cleaver wielding a meat cleaver), and it's hard to tell what's funnier - the grisly brutality of the murders themselves (Beverly rips out a guy's liver with a fire poker) or the deranged hyperbole Turner brings to the part (she murders someone for failing to pay a video-rental late fee; she murders someone for wearing white after Labor Day). Furthermore, Waters gives Serial Mom a little bit of the satirical bite powering, say, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers once Beverly's actions make her an instant celebrity. The big difference is, Waters isn't interested in condemning us to the same degree that Stone is; he's getting off on Beverly as much as the next person and having too much fun to care. "Fun" is something that doesn't often grace the next Shout release, Gus Van Sant's 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Hitchcock's original film is one of the greatest horror films ever made while Sant's experiment is certainly...something. For Sant, the goal seems to be how much he can express himself creatively while working within the aesthetic/technical limitations of the 1960 feature. To that end, I'll give him credit. Somehow, this Psycho still feels distinctive. But it's distinctive in all the wrong ways, from Anne Heche's overly jittery Marion Crane, to Vince Vaughn's frat-boy take on Norman Bates (Vaughn played a great psycho in the underrated Clay Pigeons, but his work here is a complete and utter misread of the character as written in the Joseph Stefano script), to a series of bizarre, unnecessary flash-inserts that Sant puts into some key murders and land with all the grace of a particularly artless Soundgarden music video. Sant remixes so much that a few of his choices work. I like Julianne Moore and Viggo Mortensen's quirkier takes on Vera Miles and John Gavin's protagonists (she's always listening to her Walkman; he's a hipster cowboy), and William H. Macy adds wit and professionalism as Detective Arbogast. But then Sant will bungle the editing of the perfectly crafted shower and stairway murders (the shower scene, in particular, suffers from such slack pacing - "Mother" lingers awkwardly for what feels like an eternity before attacking Marion) or - even worse - add the revolting sounds of Norman pleasuring himself as he spies on Marion, and you wonder to what end all this corpse defacement was really necessary. Worth a look and nothing more.
As a palette cleanser, how about Frank Henenlotter's gonzo horror picture Brain Damage, courtesy of Arrow Films. Somehow, Henenlotter gets more recognition for his Basket Case series, and while I'm certainly a fan, Brain Damage plays like - and I know how this word is going to sound - his full-on masterwork. Brain Damage actually shares much of the same narrative structure as Basket Case; both center on the symbiotic relationship between an average Joe (actually Brian, and played here by Rick Hearst) and a...well, a monster. As far as Brain Damage goes, Said Monster is a talking alien parasite named Aylmer, and he cuts a deal with his initially unwilling host: Aylmer will inject him with doses of a highly addictive alien fluid, provided that Brian kills enough people to slake Aylmer's thirst for brains. The title, you see, has a double meaning, and one that begins to take on slightly more sociological import, given the movie's 1980s setting. Brian could be a crack addict, driven more by his need than by common sense or human decency. Yet like Larry Cohen's The Stuff or Michael Muro's Street Trash, any political agenda is secondary to lurid grindhouse thrills, and that's just as it should be. Henenlotter has never really had a multi-million-dollar budget (his works always look like they cost in the thousands of dollars) or a generous production schedule, and that run-and-gun aesthetic is still very much in play here, but Henenlotter's direction is so much more assured, and the insanity on display never falters. I mean, Aylmer alone is surreal enough to power the movie, but Henenlotter keeps tossing in violent/sexual mayhem just to make sure we're paying attention. Really, how could you not?