For the week of September 11th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing a 4K remaster of Steven Spielberg's landmark E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to Blu-ray. What else can one say about E.T. that hasn't been said already? That it's one of the finest family films ever made? That John Williams' score may represent a personal high point even for him? That it features some of the most naturalistic, affecting children's performances (courtesy of folks like Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, and a very tiny Drew Barrymore) I've ever seen? Or that the special effects don't seem primitive even today because of how cannily Spielberg integrates them into his film? I'd just be repeating myself, but given that everyone has already seen the film, maybe it's okay to rehash what works so well. For a science-fiction fantasy about what happens when young Elliott (Thomas) befriends the titular wayward alien (created by Carlo Rambaldi, who also created the Alien xenomorph, and if that cognitive dissonance doesn't make your head spin, I don't know what will), Spielberg is careful to ground the proceedings in a finely-grained portrait of suburban life. The world Elliott occupies couldn't be more dissimilar from E.T.'s. He and his friends roam around McMansions under construction when they're not plopped in front of the TV, all of which makes E.T.'s presence that much more spectacular. I mentioned that the special effects still work like gangbusters, and I credit this perspective shift. The real world looks so mundane and normal that any intrusion would shock, so Spielberg knows we'll paper over any perceived hitches in the practical effects work. Furthermore, Thomas does more to legitimize E.T. than even Rambaldi does. We buy their relationship because Thomas never condescends to the puppet, never sees it as anything less than an equal. If E.T. isn't one of the five best films Spielberg has ever made, then it's number six, and only because of a slight sag around the start of the third act. After establishing the bond between Elliott and E.T. with such power and economy, Spielberg and screenwriter Melissa Matheson indulge a little too much in the misery that separates the two; you might, as I did, start surreptitiously checking your watch the third or fourth time an imperiled Elliott starts panicking over the dying E.T. However, Spielberg more than compensates for the downtime. That final action sequence, where Elliott and his friends embark on a desperate chase to return E.T. to his spaceship, might be the director's single most virtuosic filmmaking stretch. At the very least, it's right up there with the Devil's Tower setpiece from Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan. Nobody does this kind of wide-eyed, sincere fantasy better than Steven Spielberg, and even he can only make so many - he and Matheson were clearly trying to recapture some of that E.T. magic with 2016's Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG, yet as lovely as much of that film is, it can't just can't compete. The medium keeps chugging along because of movies like E.T..
Color me deeply surprised, but despite all of the toxic criticisms of Universal's The Mummy reboot, I didn't hate it. Now, in no way would you mistake The Mummy for a good movie; it's fundamentally confused about what kind of movie it is (at times, you think it wants to be a blithe actioner a la the Brendan Fraser Mummy; at times, director Alex Kurtzman seems to harbor serious horror aspirations), it resembles Iron Man 2 at times in terms of how nakedly it wants to establish future franchises (and nothing's more egregious than the film's use of Russell Crowe, whose character introduction received derisive laughter at my screening), and it's far more comfortable sidelining the title character in order to stoke star Tom Cruise's healthy ego. Put it this way: the promotional materials spent far more time detailing the zero-G flight Cruise made to film the movie's most engaging action sequence than they did covering Sofia Boutella's undead monster. And yet I had a good enough time with the proceedings. At times, The Mummy approximates the sublime mediocrity of something The Happening, where it seems to exist at such total counter-purposes to what studio blockbusters are supposed to do that you can't help but laugh. I'm thinking of how, for a movie that cost in excess of $125 million (and that's just what Universal will cop to), The Mummy seems perversely resistant to presenting any kind of consistent spectacle. After the Iraq-set opening and the much-touted plane-crash sequence, it feels like Kurtzman got overwhelmed and restricted the film to a series of dimly lit antechambers. Or how it keeps winking at references to a series (Universal's wannabe "Dark Universe" franchise, which somehow has its own logo despite having a very uncertain future) that does not exist in any meaningful fashion. God love Crowe, but imagine the Nick Fury post-credits teaser from Iron Man elongated to a full half hour, and you'll have a sense of what Crowe has to deal with here. Or how you can see the faint outlines of a movie that was supposed to be a one-off for Cruise, right before the studio went into damage-control mode, dumped a truckload of money at their star's feet, and then awkwardly re-jiggered the ending in an effort to give Cruise yet another series to headline. Heck, The Mummy even has the gall to shamelessly rip-off the most memorable beat from John Landis' great An American Werewolf in London (short version: New Girl's Jake Johnson is playing a personality-free Xerox of that film's Griffin Dunne character), a move culminating in an ending twist that's tossed off so carelessly the actual dialogue practically functions as its own Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary. It's all so dumb, and I get why people hated The Mummy so much. But I couldn't stop laughing, and for that, I'm grateful. Something to be said for drastically lowered expectations, I expect.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is slow to start and its pacing never recovers. Action scenes are scattered and most of them were in some form or fashion teased to downright depicted in trailers. The film plods through backstory and narrative development with little concern for accessibility. Various plot devices entwine the core story and characters with suffocating complexity and interconnectivity. That's not to say the movie is difficult to follow through its basic machinations, but the endgame remains shrouded (and rightly so...to an extent, particularly is it relates to whatever Universal may have coming up next for the franchise and as part of that larger Dark Universe). But its in-film purposes feel vague, and scenes are often connected together by flimsy-at-best narrative arcs. Supporting action scenes don't deliver much that feels new; most of them would probably wok just as well edited into most any other Tom Cruise Action flick from the last decade or so. The only real difference is what he's shooting at, and where he is doing the shooting. The film struggles to find rhythm or even a real, tangible hook. But even with a sharper narrative and more efficient editing, it's doubtful that the movie could ascend all that far beyond big-budget mediocrity."
Drastically lowered expectations also end up benefiting another Universal release: the 4K pressing of the studio's microbudgeted The Purge series. When The Purge hit theaters in 2013, most people wrote it off as a fairly unspectacular home-invasion thriller. Yes, it has a phenomenal hook - one evening a year in a dystopian USA, the government legalizes murder - but that quality quickly gives way to a Strangers riff with cruddier digital cinematography and a predictably invested lead turn from Ethan Hawke. But predictable sells, so it surprised no one when director James DeMonaco returned for 2014's The Purge: Anarchy. However, Anarchy is the rare sequel to outstrip its predecessor. For one, it's more exciting - DeMonaco ditches most of the horror trappings in favor of survival action, offering a low-budget riff on The Warriors as five strangers (Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford, Kiele Sanchez, and Zoë Soul) try to survive the night while making their way through a city erupting in chaos. Sure, DeMonaco doesn't have the formalist chops of a Walter Hill or a John Carpenter (the smeary, jittery editing and camerawork prove as distracting as they are thrilling), but he keeps the action barreling along, and he gets a lot of mileage from Grillo's charismatic performance as an unnamed vigilante with a rigid moral code. In an alternate movie-reality, he'd be playing The Punisher to great acclaim. More importantly, though, Anarchy makes The Purge's subtext text, explicitly ascribing political motives to all the action with the revelation that right-wing forces use the Purge to oppress the lower classes and maintain their foothold over the country. And DeMonaco doubles-down on this message for the aptly titled Election Year, which finds Grillo's hero now protecting a leftist Presidential candidate (Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell) from both angry civilians AND from her political opponents. As a movie, Election Day isn't as good as Anarchy (it lack that film's propulsive spirit, and Mykelti Williamson is flat-out terrible as one of the good guys), and as propaganda, the film is such a blunt, obvious piece of work that it makes The Jungle seem subtle. All of the bad guys look like Mitt Romney, and the film's tagline was "Keep America Great," for crying out loud. Still, I found it bracing just the same to see a major studio release with so radical a political agenda. In these days of four-quadrant conformity, any idiosyncrasies stand out, no matter how imperfect they are.
Finally, Mill Creek Entertainment is offering a full-series set of Peter Berg and Jason Katims' brilliant Friday Night Lights. This sports-themed drama was the Little Engine That Could during its five-year run. Like its central high-school football team, it kept defying the odds thrown its way. The general rule of thumb is that you remake the bad properties, not the good ones, and Berg's 2004 original film was very, very good, and certainly not demanding a TV version two years later. Season One, which followed the trials and tribulations of the Dillon Panthers in small-town Texas, quickly established itself as, at the very least, the equal of the movie version. Yes, the high-school cast often looked a little too GQ/Maxim-friendly (it was never easy to buy the beyond-gorgeous Minka Kelly and Taylor Kitsch as average sixteen-year-olds), but they brought such humanity and grace to their characters that you could overlook their physical perfection, with special honors going to Adrianne Palicki as misunderstood "bad girl" Tyra Collette and especially to Zach Gilford as haunted, uncertain third-string quarterback Matt Saracen. However, a funny thing happened. Slowly but surely, showrunner Katims began shifting the focus from the kids to their driven Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler, in the role he'll be remembered for) and his compassionate wife Tami (the great Connie Britton), and a well-done teenybopper melodrama became a series about relationships full stop. Taylor and Tami have one of the iconic TV marriages - funny and honest and supportive - and Friday Night Lights derives such pleasure from watching these two adults negotiate their personal and professional ambitions together. Chandler and Britton are so perfect together that they alone keep you watching even through the justly maligned second season, which found Katims pivoting unsuccessfully into all-out soap opera (two of the teens actually kill a guy and then dispose of the body!) in an effort to boost ratings. Luckily, Katims reversed course for the third season, and the show regained its footing as a nuanced study of human behavior. But the public had stopped caring by that point, and in any other scenario, that would have been that, and we'd be talking about another entry in the "Brilliant But Cancelled" roster. However, DirectTV stepped in for the third season, prolonging the series' life and allowing Katims to radically reinvent the show. See, the DirectTV deal came with a vastly reduced budget, so in Season Four, Katims wrote off many fan-favorite characters (goodbye, Jason Street and Smash Williams!) and kicked Coach Taylor off of the Panthers, a move that relegated him to the mostly all-black East Dillon team. The result? The most racially incisive season of television since the fourth season of The Wire. Katims took a hard look at what it meant to be young and black in America, and he did so through his new teenage lead, Creed star Michael B. Jordan. Season Four is so good that the fifth and final year of Friday Night Lights can't help but feel like a let down, if only a little - the character work is still stellar, and the finale is genuinely wrenching. Here's hoping Mill Creek treats the show with the respect it deserves.