For the week of July 24th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing an all-timer to Blu-ray: the animated drama Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Flush from the success of their hit television show Batman: The Animated Series, directors Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm received the go-ahead to take their stylized version of the Dark Knight to the big screen. Certainly, Mask of the Phantasm gives fans of the series everything they'd want from a feature film: Batman's pursuit of the vigilante killer The Phantasm unfolds through characteristically vivid action and economical storytelling (the movie clocks in at a fleet seventy-five minutes long), but with a widescreen scope and import that exceeds anything on The Animated Series (and that's not a knock on the show - last week, screenwriter Alan Burnett mentioned that the animators had to rework their storyboard conceptions in moving from 1.33:1 to 1.85:1). But Radomski and Timm also deserve credit for using cinema's slightly relaxed content standards (believe it or not, but in 1993 some people thought Mask of the Phantasm was too violent - its relatively chaste death scenes acted in contrast to The Animated Series, which couldn't show anyone getting killed) to deepen and expand their psychological profile of Bruce Wayne. The defining trauma in Wayne's life is the murder of his parents, although the physical pang of their deaths proves less enduring than the psychic scars left on their son. Through judicious flashbacks, Mask of the Phantasm reveals a younger Bruce Wayne at the start of his crime-fighting career (this part of the film plays like a great riff on Batman: Year One) - he's torn between honing his violent abilities and trying to eke out some modicum of normalcy when he falls in love with Dana Delany's spirited Gotham socialite. The Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko, and Michael Reaves script takes this struggle seriously - the flashbacks are the heart of the movie, as opposed to filler that delays the asskicking - which makes it all the more wrenching when we cut back to the present-day. Try as he might, Wayne can't escape becoming Batman, and the flash-forwards remind us of how doomed he is. The Phantasm, then, reflects this internal tragedy in purely physical terms. Like Batman, he hunts Gotham's criminal underworld, except he has no compunctions about killing the wicked, and it isn't a stretch to imagine an alternate reality where Wayne's inability to normalize forced his hand in the same violent manner. This whole contrast prefigures the killing-vs.-not killing argument between Batman and the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, and like that Academy Award-winning Batman adventure, that willingness to interrogate moral concerns within the framework of the superhero genre such gives Mask of the Phantasm uncommon power. Animated movie or not, Mask of the Phantasm remains one of the greatest Batman movies ever made, a condition that puts it in the running for Best Comicbook Movie Ever Made. Twenty-four years later and countless DTV features, and it still casts a long shadow.
Just as influential, albeit in a completely different manner, is Stuart Gordon's 1985 horror-comedy Re-Animator, to which Arrow Films is giving the deluxe, special-edition treatment this week. I guess Re-Animator is a literary adaptation - technically, it takes inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft's 1922 short story "Herbert West - Reanimator" about a medical student who discovers how to reanimate dead tissue. It's like a lot of Lovecraft's lesser works: you'll get a kick out of it if you're into turn-of-the-century horror clichés, but it's also more-than-a-little labored and purple in ways that often afflicted Lovecraft. The film, however, is an unabashed horror masterpiece, as spooky and sly as any horror movie you could hope to see. Gordon keeps Lovecraft's basic framework, letting West (Jeffrey Combs) and his long-suffering sidekick Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) run rampant across the fictional Miskatonic University as they mount one hideous experiment after another. What Gordon adds, though, is a full-throated approach to the horror that hasn't lost much of its gross-out power. Re-Animator originally received an X rating, and for good reasons: when West's creations aren't tearing people apart and eating one another, they're engaged in unspeakable sexual depravities, not least of which is the queasy/scary setpiece wherein a reanimated head starts to lasciviously menace the nether regions of Barbara Crampton's nude coed. This kind of lurid violence could be unbearable - think about something like William Lustig's Maniac, which is technically accomplished but unrelenting grim in its leaden savagery - but Gordon isn't interested in making a faux-snuff film. He's conceived Re-Animator as a gore-soaked comedy, of all things, and one that's far more nuanced than you might expect in its approaches to the humor. The monster attacks, particularly during the bugnuts last half-hour? Gordon paces these scenes like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoons, so madcap are the editing and stages of the kills. Better still is Combs's performance as West. As mad scientists go, he's less Dr. Pretorius than something out of a Coen Brothers movie. No matter how deranged the proceedings get, Combs gives West this arrogant, blissful detachment. He's so convinced of his own genius that anything less is an inconvenience at best and a moral indignity at worst, and if those moral indignities start eating other people? Well, no one respects the scientific method these days. At various points, Combs's dry energy turns Re-Animator into a comedy of manner AND a bloody snobs-vs.-snobs farce (the real Big Bad is David Gale's elitist Academic Dean, who wouldn't be out of place menacing the Deltas in Animal House), and you get why Combs immediately became a cult icon. I doubt Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2 would have taken on the patina of a splattery Three Stooges short without Re-Animator; you look at Peter Jackson's early monster movies (Bad Taste, Dead Alive), and you can't miss the Re-Animator DNA either. One for the history books, this picture.
The docudrama Silkwood, which Kino Lorber is releasing this week, remains one of the most interesting films that the late Mike Nichols ever made. Ever since his 1966 directorial debut - the blistering adaptation of Edward Albee's great Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Nichols established a reputation as a consummate director of actors, and by the time Silkwood rolled around in 1983, he'd had almost twenty years to hone this gift. As the title character, a blue-collar nobody who uncovered major safety violations at an Oklahoma nuclear-power plant, Meryl Streep gives one of her best performances. Silkwood came out a year after her Academy Award-winning work in Sophie's Choice, and I can't imagine a better showcase for Streep's gifts than watching her morph from a tortured Holocaust survivor to Silkwood's earthy factory worker. Still, Streep is really just first among equals. Nichols has such a knack for capturing Silkwood's middle-America milieu, and his film is at its best whenever it's lounging alongside Silkwood and her tight-knit group of friends and coworkers. Nichols loved to let his performers reveal their most unexpected gifts, so as much as Silkwood is Streep's movie, it also acts as a stealth showcase for then-typecast performers like Cher and Kurt Russell (playing Silkwood's lesbian best friend and her diffident lover, respectively). Yet while Silkwood continues Nichols' long-storied facility with actors, it does represent a marked change in his development as a filmmaker. Prior to Silkwood, Nichols seemed to delight in pushing any and all filmic and aesthetic boundaries. He was a master of the widescreen frame, and he would construct these meticulously composed long takes while playing all sorts of aural games on the soundtrack; his Carnal Knowledge feels like the lovechild of Michelangelo Antonioni and Vincente Minnelli, while his more uneven Catch-22 adaptation offers one formally daring setpiece after another, from the opening takeoff sequence to the way Nichols fragments and distorts Yossarian's horrifying memories of doomed gunner Snowden. Even his landmark comedy The Graduate looks and moves like no farce on Earth, but after Nichols stalled out on a series of costly flops (the ludicrous The Day of the Dolphin and the underrated The Fortune), he got less precious and more cautious. Silkwood represented the emergence of this new austere Mike Nichols. From this point on, his movies were content to get out of the actors' ways and record behavior, when what made him so unpredictable before was his ability to get great performances in the least conventional manner possible. For something more lightweight like his 1988 farce Working Girl, that no-frills style works, but Silkwood turns into a full-fledged conspiracy thriller in its back end, and I wish Nichols had been more aggressive in juicing the dread and paranoia that its title character feels. The Mike Nichols who made The Graduate would have plunged into the abyss.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving a Blu-ray release to Albert Brooks's iconic 1985 comedy Lost in America. I've long heard people call Brooks the West Coast Woody Allen, and while I get the surface justifications for that comparison - both are Jewish, both got famous doing stand-up, and both mine their own deepest anxieties for their brands of funny - reality doesn't quite support that claim. For all his neuroses, Allen has the heart of a born entertainer (it's why people love films like Annie Hall and Midnight in Paris so much - when he's making a comedy, Allen never lets a little existential ennui get in the way of a good punchline), whereas Brooks treats comedy like an opportunity for extreme psychoanalysis. His films are more confrontational, less user-friendly (it's part of the reason he's only directed seven films in almost forty years: he's far less adept at playing the Hollywood game than Allen is), and Lost in America stands as his most representational work. Like so many satirists working in the 1980s, Brooks viewed the consumerism ruling the decade with an eye both repulsed and fascinated. Lost in America, then, lets Brooks rail against how the ideals of the 1960s folded under the Almighty Dollar. His married heroes (Julie Hagerty and himself) decide to quit their corporate lives, buy a Winnebago, and search for the Real America, but America, unfortunately, has other plans for them. Brooks stages their downfall like a slow-motion train crash, letting the film unfold through a series of exquisitely painful comic vignettes. Brooks confidently strides into his boss's office to ask for a promotion and ends up getting fired; he antagonizes a temp agent and gets saddled with a crossing-guard job; he tries to negotiate with a Vegas casino owner after Hagerty catches gambling fever and loses all their money. What these moments lack in polish (another way Brooks and Allen are different - Allen matured into a stunning technical filmmaker, and Brooks never did), they gain in queasy nuance. Brooks lets them all run about twice as long as we're expecting until they become the rhetorical equivalent of, say, a Fred Astaire dance number: if we're to fully experience how unrelenting this American Machine is, we've got to watch every second as it breaks Brooks's protagonists. As such, Lost in America might be the most influential acquired taste ever made. Some people cannot stand watching Brooks and Hagerty squirm, but I'd be amazed if people like Noah Baumbach, Ben Stiller, and especially Larry David weren't obsessed with the film. In particular, each Curb Your Enthusiasm episode plays like Lost in America in miniature. Here's a test: watch this tête-à-tête between Brooks and the incomparable Garry Marshall. If you laugh, you'll like the rest of the film. If you don't, then flee now.