For the week of September 4th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing a welcome 4K upgrade of Ridley Scott's landmark sci-fi thriller Blade Runner. Scott has accrued quite the reputation as a screen futurist despite directing only a handful of true sci-fi pictures (five, by my count); it just goes to show the influence Blade Runner (and Alien) has cast over his career. A very loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner fashions itself as a tech noir, of sorts, about a jaded "blade runner" (Harrison Ford, giving one of his best performances) tasked with hunting down four rogue androids (Daryl Hannah, Brion James, Joanna Cassidy, and Rutger Hauer), and certainly the 1982 theatrical cut made the film's neo-noir aspirations all the more explicit. Like some digitized Raymond Chandler novel, Blade Runner exists in a Los Angeles that symbolizes the moral ambiguity on display - Lawrence G. Paull, David Snyder, and Syd Mead's neon-and-rain soaked cityscapes convey the sense of a world on the brink - and the studio-mandated voiceover has some of the same hardboiled remove that wouldn't be out of place in The Maltese Falcon. Yet to brand Blade Runner a simple neo-noir ignores its most fascinating complexities, many of which Scott has foregrounded in the years after its unsuccessful theatrical run. Bit by bit, Scott has pulled away the connective tissue (the voiceover, some explicit plot beats), and these changes have turned the film into the great blockbuster art epic. It's elliptical and strange, with a pulse somewhere between a lucid dream and a waking hallucination (Vangelis' score is a translucent, shifting thing: you sink into it), and all the better to get at what really fascinates Scott. If the central narrative behind the androids is much-ado-about-nothing (screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples create such a fascinating antagonist in Joe Turkel's Eldon Tyrell - he's like a more beatific version of Noah Cross from Chinatown - except Scott dispenses with him in such a perfunctory manner), Scott's attitude towards the androids themselves is anything but, and we realize he's styled the film into a tone poem about what it means to be human. Never has Scott more expertly manipulating our allegiances. We respond initially to Ford's Rick Deckard because he seems like a conventional hero (he's Indiana Jones, for god's sake), but over time, Deckard evinces such coldness and brutality that we struggle to like him. The "replicants," then, emerge as the film's stealth protagonists, for their lifeforce and spirit. Even when they do terrible things (and Scott stages and shoots a few moments of violence that are, in their own ways, as unsettling as anything in Alien), they act only out of survival and protection. Nowhere is this clearer than in Hauer's beautifully modulated performance as the head replicant, who grows into Blade Runner's tragic heart. Decades before he'd try to do likewise in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Scott would find himself sympathizing with the next stage in technological evolution, and he needn't have tried ever again. You can't top what he's achieved with Blade Runner. A modern masterpiece.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that "compared to the dated Blu-ray, Blade Runner's UHD presentation can't help but look better, but it's more than better—it's astonishing. The improvements begin with the opening logos, where the pixelated tree representing the Ladd Company unfurls across and down the screen without a hint of the flicker and aliasing that have been there on every prior version, including the 2007 Final Cut Blu-ray. The opening aerial views of 2019 Los Angeles have always been impressive, but prepare to gasp when the Tyrell Building comes into view, with each window, level and outcropping now sharply and crisply resolved. (The Blu-ray is blurry by comparison.) Throughout the film, the UHD's resolution reveals so much detail in the remarkable model work that it almost breaks the illusion of scale. If the cityscape were any clearer, you'd see that it was made of miniatures…[However,] the selection of extras included in this package has been the source of major confusion, and Warner is almost entirely to blame. First, the press release for this set was less than a model of clarity. Second, when screeners were sent to reviewers several weeks before street date, the contents of the package didn't match what was listed in the press release. Third, and most importantly, the selection of extras for this set is nonsensical, omitting key features that are essential to an understanding of the history leading to the Final Cut of Blade Runner. Here's the short version: There is one, and only one, extra that is new to this set and unavailable with any other edition. That is the trailer for the Final Cut, which has been remastered in 4K and HDR and appears on the UHD disc. Nothing else is new, but many things have been dropped....The bottom line is that, with respect to extras, this edition of Blade Runner adds nothing of consequence, while at the same time making crucial subtractions that are both unnecessary and unjustified."
Less impressive? Sony's raunchy Rough Night, which aspires to ride the trend of R-rated, female-led comedies that Bridesmaids started but ends up squandering most of its ample potential. Rough Night grew from the minds of Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs, both of whom work on Broad City, which might be the best comedy on television. Aniello and Downs even brought along Broad City co-lead/creator Ilana Glazer to star, and the main plot strokes reflect that series' deeply cracked sensibilities; Rough Night plays like a gender-swapped remake of Peter Berg's pitch-black farce Very Bad Things, of all things, detailing the gruesome unraveling of a bachelorette party after the bride (Scarlett Johansson) and her best friends (Glazer, Jillian Bell, Kate McKinnon, and Zoë Kravitz) accidentally kill a male stripper and then decide to try and dispose of the body. That's an audacious comic premise in any context, and at times, Rough Night nails the exact right mix of horror and humor - Glazer basically plays a slightly more crass version of her Broad City persona, which is a very good thing, and the moment when Bell's unhinged party girl fells the stripper is a queasy marvel. Overall, though, Rough Night feels like it's been focus-grouped to death. Outside of Glazer, none of the leads makes much of an impact - Bell has played the comic wild card many, many times before, McKinnon doesn't get much to do outside a silly Australian accent, and Johansson and Kravitz are way too straight-laced to register amidst the insanity - and the film keeps sanding down its most interesting edges. Very Bad Things ultimately became too gore-soaked and nihilistic for its own good, but at least it had the courage of its convictions: Rough Night, by comparison, can't help from qualifying the inciting incident so that we never find our leads that repugnant. By the end, I kept expecting a reveal that the stripper wasn't really dead, and while the film never drops that particular shoe, I think I might hate the actual conclusion even more. Not only does it resurrect one of the most enervating clichés from '80s comedies (it turns into a half-assed action/crime movie. See also: Twins, Turner and Hooch, and many more), but it absolves the heroines' sins in an manner that defangs anything that might have been potentially subversive. We often complain about the tendency towards Hollywood remakes, but I'd certainly take a better Rough Night, and stat.
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes a new 4K edition of Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods. More than many of Lionsgate's other 4K special editions, The Cabin in the Woods feels uniquely qualified to receive the most impressive technological upgrade that HD can provide; it's not that the film represents the apex of home-theater reference material a la Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but rather that this breathlessly ambitious horror-comedy innovates and deconstructs genre narratives with a speed that's half screwball farce and half solid-state-drive. Not that you'd know it from the setup, which is pure Evil Dead: during a vacation in the titular cabin, five college students (Kristen Connolly, Anna Hutchison, Jesse Williams, a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth, and Fran Kranz, a delight as the group's resident stoner) find themselves fighting for their lives against supernatural monsters. You might guess that blood spills, and that not everyone in the group makes it home alive, and you would be correct. However, while Goddard and Whedon love these kinds of movies (they even hired Evil Dead 2 cinematographer Peter Deming to act as the DP here), they're careful to lace their fondness with an acid criticism of every dead-teenager slasher ever made, namely how messed up it is that viewers get off on the butchery of young flesh. I'm loath to spoil too much (discovering The Cabin in the Woods's secret is half of the fun), but I can say that it involves a genre infusion beyond the film's jokey-bloody tone and an almost gleeful demolition of horror-movie clichés. Like how none of the young leads quite fit inside the stereotypical box for which they've been cast, from Hemsworth's surprisingly thoughtful football jock to (especially) Kranz's drug-addled burnout, who starts out as a Wooderson riff and reveals himself to be about twice as resilient than we might expect. Or how, for a film ostensibly about killing kids, the two most enjoyable performances come from Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins as two office stiffs who act like they've stumbled out of an Aaron Sorkin program. Or the deliriously inventive third act that acts as a spiritual sequel to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's controversial fourth season, in terms of the responsibilities it forces on us about the relationship between viewers and the things that go bump in the night. We're practically in Funny Games territory when The Cabin in the Woods roars through its (perfect) finale, except Goddard and Whedon aren't so misanthropic that they want to use their social aims to brutalize us. Somehow, The Cabin in the Woods succeeds in criticizing our reaction to horror while still giving us the best time at the movies we could ever want, and that meld of admonishment and engagement couldn't be more disarming. One of the essential horror films.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "is presented on 4K UHD courtesy of Lionsgate Films with a 2160p transfer in 2.40:1. Shot on film and finished at a 2K DI, The Cabin in the Woods offers noticeable if sometimes fairly subtle upticks in detail levels, sometimes kind of unexpectedly, as in the kind of viscous texture of the liquid underlying the very first credits sequence. Reds are especially vivid throughout this presentation courtesy of HDR, and there are some interesting new yellowish tones when the cabin is first spotted. There's a lot of fairly dark material scattered throughout the film, and while grain resolves naturally even in these darker moments, blacks looked a bit on the milky side to me. Shadow definition is at least incrementally increased in the 4K UHD presentation. Fine detail is often excellent in close-ups, and the CGI (especially in the endgame) looks surprisingly sharp and well detailed throughout."
For his entire career, director Sydney Pollack remained a frustratingly inconsistent filmmaker (even his "classics" like Tootsie and 3 Days of the Condor are sometimes baggy and slack), but he made an unequivocal masterpiece with They Shoot Horses, Don't They, which arrives courtesy of Kino Video. The film centers around a Depression-era, marathon dance competition, where contestants see how long they can dance through a series of increasingly difficult challenges, but do not confuse this picture with something like The Band Wagon or 42nd Street; Pollack styles They Shoot Horses, Don't They like a vision of Hell. His protagonists (including Michael Sarrazin, Jane Fonda, Susannah York, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, and a heartbreaking Red Buttons) dance mechanistically, and the more they push their bodies, the more they risk brutalizing themselves out of the cash prize they desperately need. And Pollack does a masterful job of making us feel this pain, whether it's through his roving camera that conveys his protagonists' brutal exhaustion or the spectacular Gig Young performance (as the competition's ruthless M.C.) that plays like a terrifying mix of Joel Grey in Cabaret and Satan. It all culminates in an absolutely merciless finale, and one that lends a horrifying irony to the title. They Shoot Horses, Don't They is Pollack's only truly uncompromising film, and I'm amazed it emerged out of the 1960s - it shares none of the optimism or good spirit synonymous with the decade. But like Dennis Hopper's better-known Easy Rider, it cast a wary eye on the permissiveness and freedoms that the '60s brought and then pulled up something dark and wriggling. In fact, I think They Shoot Horses, Don't They might be an even stronger feature than Easy Rider, and certainly one of the decade's most unsung films.
Brian Orndorf noted that "Pollack works so well with period details, the feature almost achieves a documentary atmosphere, taking time to meet a few of the contestants and understand the rules and demands of the contest, watching Rocky weed out sickly types, trying to keep the dance floor healthy enough to preserve a lengthy show for paying audiences. It's a vivid collection of personalities, with primary focus placed on Gloria, a bitter, depressed woman who's been unable to find a career in the movie business, turning to marathon dancing for a monetary miracle. She's confrontational but drawn to Robert's soft demeanor, requiring his presence to participate, but bonding with the young man, sharing disillusionment with Hollywood. Supporting players are equally prized by the production, getting to know neuroses and personal history, with combativeness often disrupting the slog of the dance. Gloria can't keep away from Ruby, challenging her choice to not only participate in the marathon while pregnant, but to have the baby at all during such bleak times, putting thoughts into her head that rile up James. Alice is hoping for a boost in publicity from a contest win, but her need to remain glamorous is abruptly blocked by the physical pain of dancing and its excruciating psychological demands. And there's Harry, who's far too old to be participating in such an endurance tests, but he's determined to join the race, struggling to keep up with others as time passes. Pollack carefully weaves spectacle with intimacy, also preserving Rocky's presence in the story, with the ringmaster knowing far more about the marathon details than he lets on to the contestants, while exercising his showman skills, trying to keep audiences entertained with emotional manipulations."