For the week of August 21st, Marvel is making a big Blu-ray showing with a number of notable titles. First - and best - of the lot is the Marvel-Disney co-production Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2. I adored this sequel, and I say that as someone who wasn't a huge fan of the first film; the 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy hums along off the strength of its great cast, but it also hits pretty much every superhero cliché along the way, ripping off the inspired (lifting the fate of Vin Diesel's Iron Giant for his Groot here) and uninspired (once again, Marvel builds to a showdown involving a falling whatsit in the sky) alike. You got the sense that director James Gunn was on his best behavior, lest he let in some of the perversion of his Slither or Super and risk exile from the MCU. Here's the thing about success, though: it can embolden rather than restrict, and Guardians of the Galaxy was such a big hit that for Volume 2, it feels like they stepped out of the way and let Gunn be Gunn. Gunn loves messing with his audiences, and while he can't slather on graphic violence and gore (this is still a PG-13 adventure, after all), he's found a way to provoke from within the confines of the blockbuster template. Most of these pictures, even the good ones, follow rigidly controlled narratives that emphasize the action setpieces. The Avengers's New York City battle. Captain America: Civil War's superhero showdown. Doctor Strange's reality-defying chase sequences. Gunn's solution? Foreground the offbeat tangents and background the action whenever possible. Volume 2 ostensibly introduces the Guardians (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, and Vin Diesel) battling some tentacled atrocity menacing an alien city, except Gunn couldn't care less about the action, choosing instead to keep his camera centered on Diesel's Baby Groot as he dances away to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" as his teammates brawl in the background. It's a strategy he'll repeat throughout the rest of the film - he'll let a tense prison break devolve into an extended Three Stooges-esque riff between Groot, Sean Gunn's Kraglin, and Michael Rooker's Yondu (Volume 2's not-so-secret weapon), or he'll insert a hilariously mundane search for batteries, of all things, into the Final Boss Fight. That prankish spirit lends Volume 2 a whiff of the genuinely transgressive (especially for four-quadrant audiences), like we've wandered into a kid-friendly version of Steven Soderbergh postmodern caper The Limey. However, if Gunn were only interested in goosing viewers, Volume 2 would be amusing but shallow, and he's got more on his mind than that. More than anything, Gunn is a dyed-in-the-wool sentimentalist, and his desire to take seriously his heroes' emotional journeys proves more surprising than any cheeky detour from pop-cinema expectations. For a movie that, yes, does build towards a power-mad villain hell-bent on intergalactic domination, Volume 2 still feels surprisingly intimate, given Gunn's focus on interpersonal dynamics. In the first Guardians of the Galaxy, Karen Gillan's Nebula was a striking practical effect and nothing else; now, Gunn dives into the root of her sibling rivalry with sister Gamora (Saldana), and what he finds enriches both characters past simple good-and-evil archetypes. Cooper's Rocket Raccoon remains a reliable source of one-liners and cartoon mayhem (his delightful, Glen Campbell-scored ambush of a Ravager patrol wouldn't feel out of place in a Bugs Bunny cartoon), except Gunn keeps letting Rocket's insecurities and trauma over his genetically engineered origins bubble to the surface - you get the sense that Gunn empathizes with Rocket above everyone else, and if there's any justice, he'll take center-stage in Volume 3. And as for Peter Quill (Pratt), he finds his loyalties torn between adopted father Yondu and actual father Ego (Kurt Freaking Russell, the only person alive who could play a human planet with such charm and knowing self-awareness) in a way that blindsided me. I walked out of Volume 2 deeply shaken, and I credit three elements in particular: 1) Gunn's sensitivity to the way family both binds and liberates us, 2) Rooker's incredible work as Yondu (if there were any justice in the world, he'd be up for a Best Supporting Actor nomination next winter), and 3) the beyond-perfect deployment of Cat Stevens' "Father and Son." Marvel should use Gunn's work here as justification to be just as bold with their non-Guardians properties, to let their characters have the freedom to be silly when it's appropriate and heartbreaking whenever necessary, and to never let anything like the end of the world (or worlds) get in the way. Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 is such a full meal: I've barely had time to wax poetic about how Bautista wields a one-liner (he lands every punchline he's given. Every. Single. One) or how skillfully Gunn uses his needle-drops throughout (his appropriations of Looking Glass's "Brandy" and Jay and the Americans' "Come a Little Bit Closer" are Tarantino-level genius) or how Marvel has finally cracked its villain problem or how wonderfully Pom Klementieff and Sylvester Stallone (yep!) fit into this universe or how I've never been happier to see both David Hasselhoff or PacMan or...but I'm starting to babble. Ultimately, Volume 2 pulls off the hat trick. It's better than the first one in ways that make its predecessor retroactively more impressive, and all by magnifying everything that makes that one strange and idiosyncratic. This is Marvel's best film, and the single most enjoyable film of 2017.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that the film "maintains the same boisterous spirit, arguably more critical to the film's success than even any narrative connections or dramatic developments. Few films are so dependent on identity as these, and director James Gunn, who also helmed the original, never allows the movie to miss a beat, whether in its most insanely over-the-top action scenes, its comical overtones, or its most intimate character moments, all of which often intertwine into the same sequences. Though it may be overlong by a few minutes, it captures that same beat that's partly its heartbeat soundtrack and partly its lifeblood rhythm which comes from the uncannily strong connection shared amongst the cast and the characters they portray that plays right into the franchise's core strength of family. Even as secrets are revealed, new characters are introduced, as humor abounds, as explosions dot the movie's landscape, as character quirks and quips flow like running water, Gunn and company maintain a harmonious, connective balance that through all the bickering, mayhem, reveals, tunes, and trials keeps the movie feeling fresh, invigorating, and always in-tune with its strengths, what its fans want, what its characters and universe need. Few films and franchises come as harmoniously precise as this."
If only Marvel's Netflix division were as engaging. This week, we're getting Blu-ray editions of Jessica Jones: The Complete First Season and Daredevil: The Complete Second Season, and taken together, these programs illustrate the growing pains that Marvel has when it comes to long-form television programming. The good: we have two perfectly cast central characters. As Jessica Jones, Krysten Ritter gets that starmaking performance she's deserved since Breaking Bad and Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23; she is so idiosyncratic and offbeat that she's able to elevate Season 1 past its rote "Superwoman takes on All-Powerful Big Bad" setup. Just as good in his own quiet way is Daredevil's Charlie Cox, who's able to capture both Matt Murdock and his red-suited alter ego's nimble physicality as well as his bottomless capacity for guilt and self-sacrifice. Given the character's, ahem, problematic former iterations, it means something that Cox has assayed the definitive Daredevil interpretation. The bad: for both Jessica Jones and Daredevil, everything surrounding the title characters is far more problematic. It's hard to say which season is more disappointing. Daredevil 's sophomore year gets points for introducing The Punisher (Jon Bernthal, who legitimately invokes 1970s De Niro in the part), but then showrunners Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez strand these wonderful creations inside a convoluted thriller plot involving ninja assassins, corrupt politicians, and Daredevil's former lover-turned-international assassin Electra (Élodie Yung), all of which move about half as fast as they should. Season One was similarly deliberate in its pacing, yet its central villain (Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin) was so absorbing that we were willing to spend a little extra time with his audacious criminal power play. But D'Onofrio is sidelined for much of Season Two, and no one, unfortunately, merits the same degree of attention. Jessica Jones, on the other hand, roars out of the gate. With breathtaking economy, showrunner Melissa Rosenberg puts her superwoman-turned-P.I. on the trail of Kilgrave (David Tennant), a mutant who can compel people to do anything; for Jones, this case is personal, given the extended sexual violations Kilgrave once forced on her. I've never seen Ritter more forceful on camera, and Tennant conducts himself in the early goings with a wrathful, quiet malice that's more terrifying than any previous MCU villain, except Rosenberg loses control of the narrative, and what should be a tight, six-episode miniseries distends itself into thirteen episodes. Tennant, in particular, struggles with this leaden pace. The more Rosenberg and her writers let him talk, the less menacing he gets. What we're left with, in both cases, are two exceptional leading performances and a whole lotta dross. I wish I could get more excited about Marvel's upcoming Defenders series, but based on the evidence here, there's not a whole lot of there there.
Switching gears, we arrive at Kino Lorber's long-awaited release of the 1991 Coen Brothers classic Barton Fink. Joel and Ethan Coen have cultivated such an impressive body of work that, presupposing you've blocked the existence of both Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers (and for your own sanity, you should - I'm sure the Brothers Coen have), it's easy to assume they exist above the trivial concerns of us mere mortals. But you would be wrong, and Barton Fink is proof; it grew from a notorious bout of writer's block that plagued the Coens during the making of Miller's Crossing. Here's the difference between the Coens and everyone else. Whereas writer's block might have defeated a thousand other filmmakers, the Coens leaned into it for inspiration, ultimately generating this darkly comic character study of a pretentious New York playwright (John Turturro, in the performance for which he'll be remembered) who travels to Hollywood to write screenplays and immediately suffers his own creative block. As anyone who saw their underrated Hail, Caesar already knows, the Coens love satirizing Old Hollywood and the pompous jackasses powering its core, and Barton Fink's 1940's milieu gave the Coens their first such opportunity to bite the hand that feeds them. In their La La Land, no one does any work or even seems to watch movies, and it's hard to tell who's worse: Michael Lerner's hyper-aggressive studio head, who delights in reducing artistic integrity down to its basest consumer elements (he keeps invoking the "Barton Fink feel" he wants for an otherwise disposable boxing picture), or Fink himself, who constantly spews platitudes about honoring "the common man" even as it becomes clear he can't see past his overwhelming elitism. Fink's a phony who doesn't know it (his name is perfect), but the Coens sure do, and they structure their film as a series of increasingly ghoulish indignities their protagonist must suffer for his sins. After a while, his writer's block starts seeming like the least of his issues - he becomes the unwitting confederate/grief-mop for John Mahoney's violent alcoholic author-turned-screenwriter (Mahoney is brilliant, playing a riff on William Faulkner), starts sleeping around with Mahoney's lover/emotional security blanket (Judy Davis, phenomenal), and struggles to connect with his amiable goof of a neighbor (John Goodman, in what would have been his definitive performance had The Big Lebowski not rolled along) who represents...but more than that, I should not say. Somewhere along the line, Barton Fink morphs into a full-on horror movie, and coming from the Coens, that's the cruelest cut of all. Only they could represent both the struggle to find the creative process and then the process itself as a fate worse than death. The Coens have made many incredible films in the years post-Barton Fink, yet this one still merits consideration as their magnum opus.
Brian Orndorf wrote that the film "is many things to many people, but it's a tale of Polanski-scented horror at heart. The threat doesn't necessarily emerge from an external source, finding Barton's tormented by his own mind, a once trustworthy friend that served him well in New York, wowing the elite with plays teeming with working class woe, playing into his desire to take theater from the privileged and hand it over to the masses, allowing the unwashed to stare into a mirror for two hours and ponder their own existence. In Los Angeles, Barton is powerless, a stranger in a strange land, taking refuge in the Hotel Earle, which only employs two people…tasked with creating B-movie drama inside a room that's filthy, with peeling wallpaper that ejaculates glue, while a pesky mosquito keeps the writer on edge, feasted on at night. It's Hell, Coen-style, with the devil himself the very process of writing without inspiration, keeping Barton in front of a blank page, facing his worst nightmare during a lucrative opportunity. Atmosphere is king…with the Coens making viewers feel every twitch in the character's body. It's the finest performance in Turturro's career, embodying slack-jawed fright when faced with the character's creative futility, and there's delight in Barton's elevation of nobility as he discusses his sympathy for the common man."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is finally giving a Blu-ray upgrade to Alex Cox's wrenching docudrama Sid & Nancy. Ostensibly, Cox wants to take viewers back to the days of the Sex Pistols, although he isn't a bit interested in offering a hagiography of the band itself. No, as the title suggest, his film is a brutal accounting of the romance between bassist Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman, in a justifiably starmaking turn) and groupie Nancy Spungen. The two met, got hooked on heroin, fell in love, and then suffered horrible drug-related deaths. That's Sid & Nancy in microcosm, and Cox is relentless in documenting their long, slow decline. The closest analog to Sid & Nancy, in terms of how viscerally it presents drug abuse on society's fringes, is Danny Boyle's 1996 masterpiece Trainspotting, yet unlike Boyle, Cox never tries to seduce viewers with the pleasures of the junkie lifestyle. He's hypercritical of the late-1970s punk scene, casting it as an anarchic wasteland one passes through on their way to Hell. His film assaults you with endless permutations of fire, vomit, and trash (Roger Deakins' vérité cinematography is tactile in all the worst ways - you feel like you need a Hep A booster shot when the movie is over) until you're just as worn out as Sid and Nancy. Anyone expecting the dry wit of Cox's 1984 classic Repo Man should recalibrate their expectations - what little humor there is exists of the gallows variety, like when Sid slams his head against a brick wall to show some affection towards a strung-out and ripped-off Nancy. It's that kind of movie. Still, Sid & Nancy maintains a distinctive integrity, and one I haven't been able to shake in the weeks since my first viewing. Cox might have nothing but contempt for all punk signifiers, but he's deeply empathetic towards his two leads, both of whom are heartbreakingly good. As Nancy, Webb has this ability to convey her synapses trying (and failing) to fire. She'd love to be a picture of domesticity, except her addiction to all things punk-related keeps her frighteningly off-balance. Webb plays her like a doll so broken we're not surprised to learn that her stabbing death was probably a) self-inflicted and b) not suicidal. And Oldman is a marvel as Sid. For a guy who specializes in extreme characters, his Sid Vicious exists on a plane of relative calm from everything else, despite the fact that everything Oldman does is big: his hair, his attitude, his emotional agony during the film's third act. That contrast reflects the film's relentlessly manic mise-en-scene, for one, and it also speaks to Oldman's fundamental understanding of the character. Sid is a stupid, uncomprehending child who gets swept up in the excesses of others without really understanding them himself, and Oldman digs so deep into that dim reserve that the film takes on an almost-documentary realism. Even with everything he's done in the thirty subsequent years, Sid Vicious remains one of Oldman's two or three greatest performances. The longer we spend mired in Sid and Nacy's predicament, the more we see them as messy, foolhardy, and profoundly human people. A flawed masterpiece.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that the film "is fast, chaotic and unfiltered, which is probably exactly what a credible film about the punk era should be...Sid embraces [Nancy's] eccentricity and quickly gets hooked on the same dangerous drugs that she has been poisoning her body with. It is all downhill from here. There are a few scattered episodes in which Sid chooses music over the drugs, but his addiction is already a lot stronger than him. The saddest and perhaps ugliest sequence in the entire film is in the second act where Sid and Nancy visit her family. They gather around the table and have dinner together. At the end, Nancy's parents basically force the couple to go to some lousy hotel on the opposite end of town. The whole thing is truly painful to watch. Oldman and Webb look good together - the clothing and hairstyles are quite wonderful - but occasionally some of the outbursts feel seriously exaggerated. Then again, one can probably easily argue that this is exactly the type of erratic behavior that Sid and some of the other Sex Pistols members were known for. Johnny Rotten has been quite critical of this film because apparently Cox never consulted him. He believes that a lot of the material in the film does not reflect accurately the evolution of Sid and Nancy's relationship. He has also described his portrayal in the film as absurd."