For the week of June 19th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Life to Blu-ray. I'm gonna go on a rant for a second (TM Dennis Miller). This sci-fi horror illustrates one of the biggest ideological concerns plaguing Hollywood these days; we don't really make B-movies anymore. Prior to like 1977, Life would have occupied the undercard of a first-run double-feature, and with good reason. It's a monster movie, centering on a team of astronauts who barely have time to discover a single-celled organism on Mars before the lifeform starts growing and trying to devour them all. Life is fundamentally no different from It! The Terror From Beyond Space or Planet of the Vampires or The Thing from Another World, and were this one as modestly scaled as those other cult favorites, I think I'd have enjoyed it more. There's real pleasure to be found from watching a good B-movie balance (or try to balance) its genre ambitions with practical financial concerns. However, since the machine Hollywood now prefers to take the B-movie shell and administer a serious cash infusion (best possible example: the most recent iterations of the Fast and the Furious pictures, which, way back when, took inspiration from a no-budget Roger Corman IP), so now we have a version of Life that comes in at $58 million dollars when only $8 million are necessary, that uses big stars (Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation's Rebecca Ferguson, 47 Ronin's Hiroyuki Sanada) and studio gloss (CGI galore, most notably assisting the monster's development and the impressive, unbroken camera take that opens the film) to apply some Gravity-esque prestige to what is fundamentally a slasher movie in space. The reason analysts fear the collapse of the mainstream movie system is because of pictures like Life, which get inflated beyond their needs and then don't effectively ignite the box-office. End of rant, and with that, I should probably admit that despite my concerns, I actually found Life to be a not-unenjoyable time-waster. Yes, it's derivative and predictable and way too simplistic, but it moves fast and maintains a reasonably high level of interest. Those characteristics have come to define director Daniel Espinosa's American output, most notably Safe House, which overcomes its Silence of the Lambs-meets-Lethal Weapon setup through confident filmmaking choices and good action. Espinosa pulls off the same tricks with this Alien riff. We might know exactly where Life is going, but Espinosa doesn't condescend to us, and he helps compensate for the lack of depth in Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick's script by adopting a surprisingly nasty edge towards its main characters. Life is absolutely ruthless in terms of who lives and who dies, and the R-rating lets Espinosa get creative whenever his alien entity starts feeling frisky (one imagines if he could have promised Sony a PG-13 rating, the studio would have given him $150 million, so I guess we should be thankful for small favors). Nowhere is this attitude more refreshing than in the big climax - Espinosa, Reese, and Wernick establish what looks like a beat-for-beat gloss on the Gravity ending except...things don't necessarily play out that way. And if nothing else, Life functions as a better Alien movie than the actual one that came out last month. So, yeah. I resent Life ideologically, but I found the movie itself pretty charming. Like Walt Whitman sez, I contain multitudes, I guess.
But the best film to hit Blu-ray this week - by a country mile - is John Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano, which comes courtesy of Warner Archive. If you love movies at all, stop reading this review and blind-buy a copy. It's that good, and certainly better than anything I'll write below. Still, since I have to try, here goes nothing: if writer-director-playwright John Patrick Shanley does nothing else, he'll have earned his way into heaven for this one, an idiosyncratic, wholly original comedy about a miserable everyman (Tom Hanks, in one of his great early performances) whose terminal illness involves him with a deranged billionaire (Lloyd Bridges), three very different women (all played by Meg Ryan), and a Pacific Islander tribe (led by Abe Vigoda and Nathan Lane, of all people) that believes the only way to salvation is if one brave person throws themselves into a volcano. The whole situation is insane, but Shanley knows a thing or two about negotiating the extremes of human behavior. His Academy Award-winning Moonstruck ascribed a comic lunacy to the pitfalls of falling in love, and Joe Versus the Volcano is even more wise/unexpected when it comes to looking at why human beings act the way they do. But audiences in 1990 fled the picture in droves, and in part, one can attribute the film's commercial woes to mismarketing. Warner unfairly branded Joe Versus the Volcano as a romantic comedy, and that description couldn't be more inapt. Shanley was making a parable about nothing less than How Difficult It Is To Be Alive. Sure, the relationship between Hanks and Ryan's characters factors into those themes, but if you're expecting more of the same from the Sleepless in Seattle/You've Got Mail lovebirds, I suspect you'll be just as confused as audiences were during its initial release. By having Ryan play three different people, Shanley encourages us to see each permutation as variations on how Joe might best tackle life. The first woman freaks when she learns Joe is dying, representing an overall fearfulness he's trying to conquer; the second is far more ebullient but shallowly so, a self-described "flibbertigibbet" who handles the stresses of day-to-day existence by taking none of it seriously; and the third is a neurotic but clear-eyed realist who learns how to accept whatever slings and arrows life has to offer. While this philosophical development isn't as conventionally satisfying as if the two (or four, I guess) simply fell in love, the device lingers the way Groundhog Day does. On every level, Shanley is aiming to wrestle with profound, simple truths. However, unlike Groundhog Day, Shanley has far greater directorial ambitions. If on the page Joe Versus the Volcano functions as a smart morality play, the film version plays like grand absurdist fantasy. The opening sequence, which finds the title character (Joe, not the volcano) trudging through the indignities of his corporate job, deserves comparison with - I kid you not - King Vidor's The Crowd or Fritz Lang's Metropolis in how it uses the power of expressionistic visuals to convey the overwhelming soulsickness at Joe's core. And Shanley keeps topping those images, whether it's the stylized nighttime scenes during Joe's mid-film stint as a shipwrecked sailor (I'm reminded of the ocean liner in Fellini's Amarcord) or how the Waponi tribe and environment seem equal parts Busby Berkeley musicals and Looney Tunes cartoons. All this visual invention, and never at the expense of Shanley's brilliantly dense, witty screenplay - hell, he even takes the "Magical Black Man" stereotype and kinda makes it work, thanks to good writing and a phenomenal Ossie Davis performance. I'd say they don't make 'em like this anymore, but they never really did. An idiosyncratic, stealth masterpiece.
Michael Reuben wrote that "Shanley keeps this twisted tale and its outsized personalities poised on the brink of self-parody, aided by witty dialogue, unexpected plot turns and a production design (expanded by endearingly quaint pre-CG effects from ILM) that lends Joe's magical-realist world a convincing heft and substance. But essential to the film's coherence is the skilled central performance by Hanks. Still a few years away from being (re)discovered as a serious dramatic actor, Hanks endows his unlikely character with a relatable everyman quality, thereby conferring a measure of credibility on the increasingly improbable events transpiring around him (anyone who can keep a straight face during Nathan Lane's clowning performance as The Waponi Front Man deserves some kind of award right there). Shanley's script provides Hanks with his own share of comic riffs, especially when Joe quits by telling off his boss and trashing his office (thereby fulfilling a fantasy no doubt shared by at least half the audience), but it's Hanks's ability to react believably in the craziest of situations that solidifies Joe Versus the Volcano as a modern-day fable about living life 'in a state of total amazement' (to quote Patricia). Whether you think Joe ultimately achieves that state depends on how you feel about the film's ending, over which Shanley struggled, ultimately opting to leave much of it to the viewer's imagination."
On the absolute opposite end of the spectrum? Shout/Scream Factory's release of The Lawnmower Man, which ranks as one of the most enjoyably terrible films ever made. How bad is The Lawnmower Man, you ask? And I answer: it's based on a short story by Stephen King, who is responsible for directing the Bad Movie Masterpiece Maximum Overdrive (in King's defense, he was doing a lot of cocaine during production), yet King took one look at The Lawnmower Man and sued to get his name removed from the film. Certainly, the finished film and the short story bear almost no resemblance to one another. The short story (it runs less than eight pages in most editions of King's Night Shift anthology) is a blackly comic, absurdist fable about a guy who hires a lawnmower man that a) may be an emissary of the god Pan but b) definitely is a maniac who eats his own grass clippings (and worse); for the film, Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett's script virtually (I'm so punny) abandons everything about that premise to make what is essentially Flowers for Algernon with Virtual Reality. In a logy performance that would have jeopardized his James Bond audition had The Lawnmower Man come out a few years later, Pierce Brosnan stars as a brilliant scientist running experiments on how virtual-reality technology expands human potential. Somehow, after going through some nonsense with a chimpanzee and some stereotypically hateful government agents, Brosnan ends up running secret tests on his sweet, cognitively challenged lawnmower man (Jeff Fahey, trying his damndest to elevate the part and failing spectacularly), but because Science Is Bad blah blah blah, Fahey gains both hyper-intelligence and an unyielding thirst for world domination. You wonder why Leonard and Co. even wanted to try and yoke this story to Stephen King's original work (other than the financial considerations...), but that way lies madness, and you're far better off reveling in the grand incompetence on display. I don't think the effortlessly charismatic Brosnan has ever been this boring on camera (and yes, I've seen Die Another Day), but Jeff Fahey (who's done great character work in Lost and Grindhouse) certainly helps compensate by taking all the expected mentally challenged performance beats and overdoing each so loudly you could hear them from space (one wonders if Ben Stiller was an ironic fan of the film). But Fahey is somehow more believable than the atrocious CGI graphics, which looked crappy even in 1992: they're less distracting when someone is just watching a computer monitor, but the second we get full access to the VR world...ugh. This is the kind of effects showcase that actively sets back innovation in digital arts - I'm astounded Brett Leonard re-entered this VR milieu again with 1995's serial-killer-cyber-thriller Virtuosity, although by then, he learned that it was probably wiser to downplay the effects in favor of performances (stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe are as good there as Brosnan and Fahey are bad here). Every few minutes the narrative makes some huge associative leap (why does Jobe go evil so fast?); every act has at least one or two hanging plot chads (the chimpanzee subplot, anyone?). If you try to figure it all out, you'll go insane, so best just sit back and cackle at the madness. Now, I should take a moment to say that this review only applies to the theatrical release. Because we're dealing with Shout/Scream Factory here, we also get a much longer director's cut - it's a whopping thirty-three minutes longer than the theatrical version - and just a cursory Google search suggests that viewers find this iteration far more dramatically and narratively satisfying (if nothing else, I've read about a handful of vital story beats that the director's cut restores). But the theatrical cut is so goofily, transcendently bad that I'm tempted to stick with it for the rest of my days. Some trash needs no explanation.
Finally, we end the week with as strange a curio as I've ever seen: Hal Ashby's noir drama 8 Million Ways to Die. For fans of detective fiction, the source material is unimpeachable; many consider Lawrence Block's original novel to be the finest of all his Matthew Scudder mysteries, with the alcoholic ex-cop having to unravel a diabolical conspiracy involving one of Hell's Kitchen's biggest drug kingpins, and all while painfully confronting his own substance abuse and moral failings. I hate the expression "plug and play," but it certainly applies to adapting this novel for the screen - as long as you remain faithful to the narrative and get out of the way, you can't mess this one up. Hal Ashby, God rest his soul, messed this one up. A brilliant editor and director, Ashby always turned an eye both jaundiced and gentle towards American institutions; while Ashby was fond of lacerating the rich (Harold and Maude), the government (Being There), and the military (his brilliantly profane The Last Detail), he does so with this dreamy, improvisational grace. His characters, no matter how hateful, are all holy fools, and he feels so much affection for them. By comparison, I don't think Ashby cares about anyone in 8 Million Ways to Die. As Scudder, Jeff Bridges delivers one of his first unintentionally aimless performances. You wouldn't think you were looking at the most inventive and charismatic American moviestar of the 1980s, given how uncomfortable he seems trying to accommodate Scudder's many foibles. Sometimes he makes Scudder a burnout; sometimes he's a moral exemplar; sometimes he's not far removed from the kind of avenging angel Liam Neeson played in Taken; but he has no idea how to modulate all these pieces, and I blame Ashby for stranding him on the search for the character. Furthermore, Ashby has either no facility or no interest in the noir mechanics at work. Oliver Stone's script (with uncredited assists from Ashby's Last Detail and Shampoo scribe Robert Towne) is an appropriately sleazy piece of work, but it needs someone like Brian De Palma to juice out the pulp. Ashby, by comparison, creates this druggy haze that slows the action way down (you can sum up this entire problem with Ashby's inexplicable decision to transplant the action from the grit of New York to sunny Los Angeles), and again, that wouldn't be such a problem except we're not terribly interested in the characters on their own. Now, because Ashby is a genuine auteur, some bright spots emerge. As the Big Bad, Andy Garcia makes a fast, nasty impression - his Angel Moldonado would be a star-making villain turn in any context, but Garcia so thoroughly dominates the otherwise logy proceedings that his work feels all the more impressive. And the very ending - a beach-side stroll between Scudder and Rosanna Arquette's female lead - plays like the sweet, quirky movie Ashby might have wanted to make all along. 8 Million Ways to Die is probably most valuable as a cautionary tale. Ashby's own personal struggles were overtaking the atmosphere on the set: the production company actually fired him on the last day of production, and as a result of his dissatisfaction over the final cut (the studio recut the film without his involvement – I can imagine no unkinder cut for a former editor), Ashby never made another film before his death in 1988. Still, it's not hard to look at this mess and ache - what it could have been, and for what it did to its sad, singular auteur.