For the week of August 7th, Shout Factory is bringing the '80s teen fantasy Teen Wolf to Blu-ray. By all accounts, Teen Wolf should be a footnote at best. It has the distinction of being the other film that Michael J. Fox headlined in 1985. Fox's Back to the Future became an instant classic and skyrocketed its young star and director Robert Zemeckis to the top of the A-List, while Teen Wolf almost wears its unremarkability like a badge of honor. The core premise – Fox's amiable nerd begins turning into a werewolf – feels cribbed from John Landis' great An American Werewolf in London, except director Rod Daniel and screenwriter Jeph Loeb (the same writer behind the The Long Halloween and Hush Batman comics) jettison that earlier film's full-throated approach to lycanthropy in favor of a far more gentle geek-makes-good narrative. Here, Fox uses his powers to impress girls, become the star player on his basketball team, and humiliate his local bully (Mark Arnold). The whole endeavor plays out exactly the way you'd expect it to, right down to Fox relying on his human abilities at a Big Game (because he had the strength inside him all along!) and having to choose between the affections of the most popular girl in school (Lorie Griffin) and the loyal friend (Susan Ursitti) who's loved him from afar. It's the filmic equivalent of a Big Mac. But somehow, Teen Wolf has endured even from under the long shadow that Back to the Future casts. Part of its success stems from its predictability. If Back to the Future delights in innovating and confounding the expectations of the '80s teen comedy, then Teen Wolf demonstrates the pleasure in hewing as closely to that template as possible. I'd liken watching the film to slipping into a warm bath – since you know where it's going to go at every beat, you can kinda sink into it, and all while enjoying the above-average work from Jerry Levine (as Fox's wiseass best friend), James Hampton (a delight as Fox's patient dad), and Jay Tarses (who walks away with the movie as an easily befuddled basketball coach). Furthermore, while Fox never mauls anyone savagely or tests the boundaries of Teen Wolf's PG-rating, the werewolf effects are better than you might expect, with Fox enjoying a big, practically-achieved transformation that bests anything in, say, Joe Johnston's Wolfman remake. And let us not forget how far Fox's natural charisma goes towards securing Teen Wolf's inherent rewatchability. In Back to the Future, Fox created an iconic teen protagonist even while limited to a staggering amount of insert and reaction shots (remember, Zemeckis had to reshoot the Marty McFly scenes and still use as much of the original footage as possible), so it stands to reason that he'd be just as compelling when interacting within the normal production fabric. If Fox thought his Teen Wolf character was less deserving of his ample talent (and I've read conflicting takes on that point), he certainly doesn't let that contempt bleed into the performance. We buy the formula because Fox sells it so well.
Almost as beloved a cult classic is Richard Rush's Freebie and the Bean, which Warner Archive is finally granting a Blu-ray release. At first glance, this 1974 buddy-cop picture seems as familiar to its genre as Teen Wolf is to the world of '80s teen comedies. Rush gives us two mismatched cops (James Caan and Alan Arkin) who bond over their pursuit of a dangerous killer. Rush could be building off the formula that Norman Jewison's Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night established, and he certainly generates some then-new beats that immediately became clichés: the dynamic between Caan's wild card and Arkin's nebbish pragmatist informs the similar relationship between Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Richard Donner's great Lethal Weapon, and Rush's love of vehicular mayhem carries over into Peter Hyams' Billy Crystal-and-Gregory Hines-starring thriller Running Scared, albeit with a change of scenery from San Francisco to Chicago. There's just one big difference between Rush's work on Freebie and the Bean and pretty much every other buddy-cop film ever made. Most of those other movies are normal. Freebie and the Bean is functionally insane. With one example (and more on it in a minute), you couldn't make this movie today, so gleefully does it flaunt its violent, sexist, and racist tendencies. Caan and Arkin's SFPD cops are so brutal and dehumanizing in their uses of force and intimidation that when I first saw Freebie and the Bean, I assumed that Rush was building to some big twist where we learn that they're criminal sociopaths impersonating law-enforcement agents a la Miami Blues. But 1) they're the heroes, and 2) Rush approaches their gross violations of power with a bouncy, slapstick affection: this is hardly a critical morality play like The Shield. Audiences would have found that glorification of bad behavior bracing in 1974, and it's even more shocking today, given how politicized the culture around police-brutality charges has become. Even the title carries an anti-P.C. charge. Caan's Freebie is a freeloader who is shameless in his pursuit of a free kickback, and Arkin's Bean…well, let's just say his nickname is a shorthand for a particularly unpleasant form of anti-Hispanic invective. It's all unrepentantly offensive, and I suspect that's why it's taken Freebie and the Bean so long to receive a Blu-ray edition. That said, credit to Richard Rush for keeping this thing moving at a deranged pace from frame one to the end credits. It plays like some madcap, adults-only cartoon, and if the velocity and impact of the gags don't mitigate the objectionable content, then they certainly keep you marveling at how breathlessly Rush is able to stage this material. I am not at all surprised that Freebie and the Bean was one of 1974's top earners – it prefigures the modern-day Hollywood blockbuster, beating Jaws to theaters by a year – although I still can't believe that none other than Stanley Freaking Kubrick was one of its biggest fans. Maybe he appreciated its lunatic verve as a respite from his ultra-sterile Barry Lyndon? The only contemporary buddy-cop movie to approach Freebie and the Bean is Michael Bay's 2003 Bad Boys II, which takes a similarly nihilistic approach to racial sadism and collateral damage, and which likewise uses Bay's nonstop technical virtuosity to paper over its human-rights violations. It is a club of two, and whether that's prestigious or infamous, only you can judge.
If nothing else, Freebie and the Bean's freewheeling sadism proves more exhilarating than anything in Guy Ritchie's terrible, frantic King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which also comes courtesy from Warner. You could smell the stink off this one long before it made its May 2017 release date; I don't have an exact estimate here, but I'm almost positive Warner started releasing King Arthur trailers a good eighteen months prior to its theatrical run. Rarely is that kind of run-up a good sign, and you could sense the studio's inability to sell this picture, as evinced through its tonally schizophrenic previews (some seemed to be pushing a lighter Kingdom of Heaven; some a Game of Thrones rip-off; only the last one, which made good use of Led Zeppelin's "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," made any significant attempts to argue that the finished product would be, y'know, fun) and constantly shifting release dates. But hey, you can't blame Warner for struggling with what Ritchie delivered. As the scrappy helmer of British gangster movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Ritchie was lightweight but amusing, a Tarantino wannabe who'd never reach his idol but made a good effort on the chase. As the newly minted blockbuster director behind movies like the Robert Downey Jr-starring Sherlock Holmes series, on the other hand, his hyperkinetic style makes one yearn for the relative nuance and subtleties of Michael Bay, and King Arthur is Ritchie's most dispiriting effort. At no point do Ritchie and screenwriters Lionel Wigram and Joby Harold ever settle on what kind of movie they're making. The only linking concept behind it all is "revisionist": we get a revisionist look at Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) and the Knights of the Round Table (including Aidan Gillen, Djimon Hounsou, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Craig McGinlay, and Tom Wu) that reconceives them as a bunch of wisecracking hipster thugs; then Ritchie tosses in a revisionist take on Arthur's origin story that finds him refusing the call (damn you, Joseph Campbell) as a brawler and petty thief; but wait: Ritchie also wants to engender some sympathy for the devil, so he makes some revisionist asides towards Arthur's Big Bad Uncle Vortigern (Jude Law, a delight to watch as the only actor who knows EXACTLY what this movie should be) that casts a human pall over his largest atrocities; and just because this damn thing wants to sap me of all my energies, it blends all these revisionist elements alongside tired fantasy tropes that swell the budget and puncture the eardrums (the end of this thing looks like it grew out of discarded CGI outtakes from the big Return of the King battle). Ritchie's earlier, sprightlier films also veered wildly between disparate tones, but there you admired the ambition Ritchie showed on such (comparatively) smaller budgets. Here, working off an estimated $175-million budget (although I guarantee you Warner spent a boatload more that it will never cop to), he can do anything and achieves almost nothing. Outside of Law, no one knows how to handle all these different elements, and I feel especially bad for Hunnam, whose presence in this is bittersweet. At the start of the year, Hunnam received the best reviews of his career for his work in James Gray's The Lost City of Z, and deservedly so – it's a revelatory lead performance, all nuance and buried hurt…and then King Arthur comes along to undo that goodwill and cement his post-Sons of Anarchy reputation as a lumbering meathead of limited screen interest. But it's Ritchie who comes out of this thing most tarnished. By my count, he's netted Warner Bros. not one but two failed franchise efforts: this and 2015's Man from U.N.C.L.E. reboot. Much as I liked the latter movie – the more I think about it, the more I appreciate its relative calm and disdain for the kinds of histrionic blockbuster beats in which King Arthur traffics – he's still responsible for two costly flops. If I were the Brothers Warner, I'd be seriously questioning my commitment to preserving his brand, and if I were Ritchie, I'd be considering the whole "adapt or die" dichotomy. Right now, he's erring perilously close to the die end of the spectrum.
Finally, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing Oren Moverman's The Dinner to Blu-ray. I keep waiting for Moverman to deliver on the promise he showed with 2009's wrenching, powerful The Messenger. That Iraqi War drama remains as humane and sobering a look at off-duty military life as I've ever seen, but Moverman's subsequent features have only progressed in fits and starts. Rampart stranded a phenomenal Woody Harrelson performance inside a generically murky corrupt-cop procedural, while Time Out of Mind underserved its great central turn from Richard Gere, and now The Dinner does likewise for its quartet of thespians; as good as Gere, Rebecca Hall, Steve Coogan, and especially Laura Linney are, they can't save a film that grows less and less sure of itself as it unfurls. For a little while, though, Moverman seems to have constructed something subtle and exquisitely diabolical. Using Dutch author Herman Koch's novel of the same name for inspiration, Moverman introduces us to two couples - Gere's ambitious politician and his much younger wife (Hall), plus Gere's younger brother (Coogan) and his spouse (Linney) - meeting for an elegant dinner. All the trappings and fineries can't hide the fundamental unease just below the surface, and the longer we spend in the quartet's company, the more we realize that an awful, curdling thing has brought them all together. Moverman and his longtime DP Bobby Bukowski get so much mileage from the initial uncertainties, shooting in long takes that slowly begin to trap us at the table, and his actors are uniformly brilliant - they use that enhanced scrutiny as an opportunity to psychologically flay off their own remaining social decorum, bit by excruciating bit. However, Moverman proves unable to keep the proceedings mounted to the table, and he begins to cut away as a means of reinforcing underpinnings that were so much more interesting when left unsaid. That delicate claustrophobia evaporates every time Moverman delivers some excessive backstory or an unnecessary flashback, and as good as this cast is, they end up struggling with the melodrama that Moverman (and I'm assuming Koch) have left for them. More pressingly, Moverman loses control of the tone he wants to convey. To really work, The Dinner needs some of the spark that powered Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or a Carnage, except Moverman doesn't have much facility for black humor, and the back end turns into an unpleasant slog. I'm willing to keep giving Oren Moverman chances: the raw talent is so good. But get better faster, please.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "The film benefits from some pitch perfect performances. It's nice to see Gere in a conflicted but generally honorable characterization as Stan, a guy with big ambitions but one who actually wants to do the right thing. Coogan, who has made much of his reputation in more comedically oriented roles, is sharp and disturbing as Paul. The unforgettable performance in this film belongs to Linney, however, and an incredible late scene involving her phoning home...is a textbook case of brilliant film acting. This is now the third film in a row that I've reviewed where I'm not sure if the literary ambitions of the source novel comfortably translate to the cinematic realm. Chief among these artificies [sic] is the conceit of splitting the film into 'courses,' which in and of itself is kind of a non sequitur given the fact that the film darts to and from the restaurant both spatially and temporally at any given moment. But even the emphasis on Paul's obsession with Gettysburg seems disconnected from the main narrative, unless one wants to see the Civil War as a metaphor for a really intense form of sibling rivalry. The subtext that Paul may have passed down a certain mental imbalance...is also left as an allusion more than a developed plot point. Despite these potential shortcomings, the film delivers on both emotional and perhaps especially moral grounds, exposing the traumas experienced by a quartet who can't even decide what the right thing to do is, let alone doing it."