For the week of September 18th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Wonder Woman to Blu-ray. I'll say this about the film; what a relief that DC and Warner have finally churned out something that audiences don't actively resent. With the exception of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, pictures like Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the execrable Suicide Squad have all labored mightily to teach viewers the importance of tempered expectations. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, jettisons the self-importance, agita, and outright misanthropy of those earlier superhero epics, and we feel the results from frame one. Gal Gadot's title character genuinely loves helping people, whether she's training to defend those less fortunate than she from her island home of Themyscira or actively fulfilling that promise during the film's WWI-set "No Man's Land" sequence (Wonder Woman takes on the German Army and saves a small French community - it's the most rousing sequence in the film), and the film itself doesn't cheapen that passion or condescend to it the way the other DC/Warner joints do every time, say, Henry Cavill's Superman gets misty-eyed about doing the right thing. You might have to go back to Richard Donner's 1978 Superman adaptation to find a superhero adventure as nakedly optimistic as this one, and in this grimdark day and age, we should applaud such unironic celebrations of decency. And audiences seem receptive to this message. To date, Wonder Woman is on track to become DC's highest-grossing live-action feature; if nothing else, its success invalidates a) the belief that only "serious" superhero movies deserve our attentions, b) that female leads can't open studio blockbusters (with this one feature, Gadot just joined the Jennifer Lawrence Paycheck Club), and c) that female directors not named Kathryn Bigelow can't make big action movies - kudos to Patty Jenkins for making the jump from smaller scaled stuff like Monster. Yet the film has achieved enough that I do wish it were better. Other than that "No Man's Land" sequence, the action scenes all rely too heavily on CGI-avatars bashing away at one another (the end boss fight has a digitized Gadot squaring off against a Big Bad who's underwhelming in live action and downright irrelevant when pixelated), which I guess isn't that bad, given how anonymous most of the non-Wonder Woman characters are. The film takes the time to introduce a host of awesome female warriors on Themyscira (Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright score top honors), but once the movie leaves for the mainland, we're stuck with Chris Pine's dashing-but-clichéd love interest, Danny Huston and Elena Anaya's personality-free baddies, and a comic-relief squad where each member (Ewan Bremner, Saïd Taghmaoui, and Eugene Brave Rock) gets exactly one defining characteristic. Still, the worst I can levy at Wonder Woman is that it's too familiar - the fact that its very existence makes a strong enough political statement is, I guess, good enough. It would be nice if the next movie were a little better, though.
For its first half hour or so, I was similarly a little lukewarm on this summer's sleeper hit The Big Sick, which Lionsgate is releasing this week. I like star Kumail Nanjiani and I love producer Judd Apatow, but the first act of this dramedy does very little to distinguish itself from Apatow's other features. While Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan are charming as fictionalized versions of, respectively, himself and his wife Emily Gordon (who co-wrote the film with her husband), their "lovable schlub and quirky gal fall in love" shtick plays like a less strident version of the Seth Rogen/Katherine Heigl pairing from Knocked Up, and Apatow can't help but make Nanjiani's character a struggling comedian. Yes, I know Nanjiani is a standup comic in real life, but it still feels like Apatow is trying to make elements from his much maligned Funny People happen by offering them in a slightly different package (here, we have Bo Burnham, Aidy Bryant, and Kurt Braunohler replacing that earlier film's more caustic Jason Schwartzman/Jonah Hill/Aubrey Plaza dynamic). The material with Nanjiani's disapproving Pakistani family (Adeel Akhtar, Zenobia Shroff, and Anupam Kher) is a little more culturally specific, yet even it feels sitcom-sanitized to an inch of its life - in terms of how heavily The Big Sick relies on mining ethnic stereotypes for comedy, we're not that far from something like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. However, just as this formula reaches its apex - acquiescing to his parents' desire that he only date Pakistani women, Nanjiani breaks up with Kazan's Emily - The Big Sick throws us a curveball. See, Emily falls into a coma, and her condition forces Nanjiani to confront his own prejudices and how they influenced his treatment of her. All of a sudden, the movie starts getting a whole lot more interesting. We get actual stakes that obliterate the "will they or won't they" pablum, not least of which are the phenomenal performances from Ray Romano and Holly Hunter. As Emily's father, Romano buries his quick wit under layers of befuddlement that he uses to shield himself from this very real tragedy, while Hunter is sublimely angry as Emily's spark-plug-of-a-mother; this would already be the worst experience of her life, except Emily briefed her on what a jerk Nanjiani was before Emily got sick, so Hunter finds herself also having to weather this feckless man-child. Romano and Hunter force everyone around them to up their game. We're no longer watching stock characters but rather all-too flawed humans stumbling around one another and trying their best not to screw up matters. Now, I still have some issues with this last ninety minutes or so. Like most Apatow features, The Big Sick could stand to lose fifteen or twenty minutes, and I do wish it had a more confident director at the helm - director Michael Showalter is a brilliant comic writer and performer, but he ranks as, at best, barely competent behind the camera. But the good stuff is so good that, by the end of the film, you forget the stuff that doesn't work. A real charmer.
Jeffrey Kauffman writes that "the film has had some unusual elements commingling with each other, but at this point The Big Sick takes another rather deftly handled detour when Emily's parents Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano) show up. They're initially fairly hostile to Kumail (they're aware that he and Emily have broken up), but a number of intervening events end up bringing them closer together (even as certain tensions between Beth and Terry escalate). Kumail, meanwhile, has become an almost obsessively devoted visitor to Emily's bedside, something that in and of itself seems to win over the initially disapproving parental units. Since many, maybe even most, coming to The Big Sick are going to know it's based on Kumail's real life and was co-written by his (still living) wife, there's no real 'suspense' here as to where the story is ultimately going. But that ends up not really mattering all that much, since all of the characters are so finely written and expertly portrayed. There is some real, honest emotion that accrues in the last half hour or so of the film, after Emily has awoken but happily ever after is still not assured. That aforementioned sweetness that runs through the film helps to assuage the feeling that emotions are being manipulated (rather skillfully, it should be admitted), in an approach that seems downright counterintuitive to the take no prisoners attitude many standup comedians employ in their routines."
Another week, another 4K restoration of a Steven Spielberg classic: this time, Sony is offering his Close Encounters of the Third Kind in Ultra HD. This 1977 sci-fi drama might be the most remarkable film Spielberg has ever made, and that's saying something, taking into account later-stage masterworks like Munich or Schindler's List. I have never seen a film this good emerge from such behind-the-scenes turmoil. Spielberg now has a reputation for being on time and ahead of schedule, but 'twas not always so. From 1975's Jaws through 1979's 1941, a Spielberg production connoted chaos that couldn't have been further from controlled, and Close Encounters makes the notoriously frenzied Jaws shoot look sedate. Spielberg's simple central hook - aliens dramatically make first contact with a number of humans around the globe - belies a script rewritten on the fly and cobbled together from at least a half a dozen writers (Spielberg gets sole credit, but he enlisted the efforts of, among others, Jerry Belson, Hal Barwood, John Hill, Matthew Robbins, and Paul Schrader), a budget that ballooned to seven times its original estimate (and threw Columbia Pictures into serious financial jeopardy), and a production slate that went so far off-schedule the film missed its summer release date AND forced the effects department to work on the (extensive) VFX right up to the edge of the film's revised November 1977 release. Put it this way: Close Encounters' infamous 1980 "special edition" was less a marketing/revenue generator as it was an opportunity for Spielberg to properly reshoot and finish production. However, if 1941 represented the nadir of that kind of shooting style, Close Encounters is the grand apex - everything about this film works. As a spectacle, it's without peer, and that's even in the context of Spielberg's other features. No one uses the widescreen frame better than he does, and his team of cinematographers (Vilmos Zsigmond was head DP, but the production sprawled so much that Spielberg pulled in John Alonzo, William Fraker, Allen Daviau, Steven Poster, Douglas Slocombe, and László Kovács – between the seven of them, they racked up seventeen Oscar nominations for their respective bodies of work) gives the film a scope that recalls John Ford's Monument Valley Westerns. Whether he's shooting in suburban Indiana or among the mountains of Wyoming, Spielberg keeps emphasizing the size of the natural world so that we'll be appropriately awed when the alien spaceships dwarf Earth's vast expanses. Furthermore, those special effects still impress forty years later. Yes, Spielberg pulled together a murderer's row of craftspeople (including Douglas Trumbull, Carlo Rambaldi, Ralph McQuarrie, Greg Jein, Richard Yuricich, and Dennis Muren), but he's also so skilled at staging and revealing the uncanny. Spielberg isn't afraid to cloak his alien crafts in shadow (or keep them off-screen entirely) or represent them as flashes of expressionistic light and color because he knows the impression of them is more interesting than their documentary physicality. Still, if Close Encounters were just a light show, it wouldn't hold the same power it does. Spielberg's masterstroke is filtering the uncanny through two very human true believers: François Truffaut's Lacombe and Richard Dreyfuss' Roy Neary. Lacombe is the government official we wish looked over us. He's humane and decent, and always open to the possibilities of a peaceful interspecies interaction. And Neary is us. Dreyfuss is my favorite of Spielberg's leading men. He always seems to be making up his dialogue as he goes along (the best exchange in the film: Neary asks his irritating son how old he is, and when his kid replies, "Eight,' Neary deadpans, "You want to live to be nine?"), and that improvisatory freshness gives the performance unexpected weight. When Neary first sees the aliens, he comes back forever changed, unable to process the normal routines of his wife (Teri Garr) and children, and Dreyfuss plays his increasing psychological separation from the "normal' world like a raw wound. His breakdown at the dinner table feels like Spielberg took inspiration from a John Cassavetes film. Neary almost destroys himself once he realizes that the universe is far bigger than it seems, and his quest to find the aliens begins to represent so much more than simple science fiction. To Spielberg, his search exists somewhere on the spectrum between finding true artistic expression and finding God. Hell, when Close Encounters reaches its masterful climax - an interspecies conference at the foot of Devil's Tower - I'm tempted to say the two are one and the same.
Almost as bracing a sci-fi feature is Paul Verhoeven's 1997 cult classic Starship Troopers, which is also getting a 4K upgrade. Here, too, do we see humans coming into contact with an alien species, yet Verhoeven's film is as cynical as Spielberg's film is optimistic. The aliens here are spiky-limbed arachnids, all stabbing legs and flesh-hungry beaks, both of which proves freakishly effective at rending the human cast limb from limb; Verhoeven and his RoboCop screenwriter Ed Neumeier took a decidedly R-rated approach to adapting Robert Heinlein's novel of the same name, and the result often plays like a war movie with the gleefully sadistic combat of a slasher picture. Certainly, you can enjoy Starship Troopers on those very base terms, given the $100-million budget and Verhoeven's facility for shooting violence - you couple those with the frequent, gratuitous nudity, and it often feels like Verhoeven is making the most expensive fifteen-year-old-boy movie ever made. As with RoboCop, though, the prurient surfaces act as a Trojan Horse, of sorts. Verhoeven and Neumeier use them to smuggle in the most devastating social satire since Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Admittedly, Heinlein was a smuggler, too, burying a pro-Objectivist manifesto inside lots of future tech and alien combat, but Verhoeven goes the other way. In his hands, Starship Troopers plays like a film the Nazis would have made if they won WWII. All of the "teenage" leads look like the poster children for Eugenics (Casper van Dien, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Seth Gilliam, and Patrick Muldoon attack their roles the way sentient Ken and Barbie dolls would) as they receive fascistic life lessons from the likes of their jingoistic history teacher (the great Michael Ironside) and deranged drill instructor (the equally great Clancy Brown), smiling and grinning through gory battle scenes in a manner no less unnerving than if Leni Riefenstahl were behind the camera. Verhoeven even throws in actual propaganda videos (much of Starship Troopers unfolds through state-mandated "infotainment" about the glories of war) and puts Neil Patrick Harris (the only actor who seems like he's in on the joke) in a SS officer's uniform just so it's clear Verhoeven is messing with us. My favorite joke, though? Most of the characters live in Argentina, the home for many a Nazi fleeing a WWII-war tribunal. Verhoeven even works in a few digs at the idea of a forever war. As the movie ends with jackbooted soldiers proudly serving a war with no end in sight, it's hard not to think of Afghanistan and Iraq. A subversive studio masterwork.