For the week of September 25th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Transformers: The Last Knight to Blu-ray. As someone who's been railing against these movies since 2009's inane AND racist Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Last Knight actually kinda worked for me. I'm not convinced my more favorable opinion isn't the result of a TBI (Bay's Transformers pics are so concussively loud that you do put yourself at physical hazard when you catch them in IMAX), but I also suspect that Bay might have heeded some of his critics this time out, if in his own diffident and hostile way. Bay still seems constitutionally incapable of flattering his female leads in ways that don't ludicrously sexualize them (I expected him to put Laura Haddock's English Literature Professor in heels and a bustier whenever possible; I found it more than a little creepy how willing he is to do the same for sixteen-year-old Isabela Moner), yet he's dialed down the rampant racism and misanthropy considerably, so much so that it no longer feels (as it does with Revenge of the Fallen or Transformers: Age of Extinction) like he's trying to make Bad Boys II but for kids. Now, Bay being Bay, he has to compensate somehow, which means he ladles on narrative and tonal oddities. You might think you're having some sort of non-elective drug trip while watching the prologue - the opening whisks viewers back to Camelot and presupposes that Merlin (Stanley Tucci, and the fact that he's playing a completely different character from his Age of Extinction is somehow not the most buck-wild thing about this movie) used Transformers to help the Knights of the Round Table defeat evil - except then Bay and his literal-writer's-room-of-a-script-committee (Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Ken Nolan get the official screen credits, but their work folded in contributions from Akiva Goldsman, Andrew Barrer, Lindsey Beer, Gabriel Ferrari, Zak Penn, and Jeff Pinkner) toss in some nonsense about the very first Transformer corrupting Optimus Prime, an anti-Transformer squad that can pursue Mark Wahlberg's human protagonist (that way, Bay can mount the most incoherent remake of The Fugitive ever made), and the partnership between a monologuing Anthony Hopkins and, I kid you not, his most trusted aide, a psychotic, human-sized Transformer named Cogman (Jim Carter, who plays Cogman like a sociopathic version of his Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey). Couple all that with Bay-ADD-inflected action eye, and you've got something that those with epilepsy should avoid but that should satisfy everyone else, in the way that a hundred Butterfingers bars satisfy. For Michael Bay, that's high praise, indeed.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "it might not even be that the plot is too stuffed and complex (though it is, most assuredly, ridiculous). It's that everything around it is too stuffed and complex. in typical Michael Bay fashion, the movie is overwhelmed by visual excess, whether that be digital excess or filmmaking excess. It's burdened by slow-burn scenes and character moments that add nothing to the narrative. It's hindered by untimely and overbearing humor. Right off the bat, even when Bay is attempting to establish a serious tone, which if in no other way is made known by the ominously low music, the moment is countered by random bits of humor that completely drain the sequence of its foreboding energy. Audiences might literally yell 'shut up!' at the screen more than once, brought to a breaking point by the film's failure to grasp simple concepts like the importance of pacing, narrative flow, and keeping a check on structural excess. It's also likely that the audience's thoughts might drift to contemplating how it's even possible that a movie this large in scope, so kinetic, so complexly assembled, so painstakingly put together to make literally every shot in some way visually unique can be so absolutely slow and borderline unwatchable. It takes less than thirty minutes - less than a fifth of the movie's runtime (and it might make the audience run out for a fifth of something else, too) - to grow fatigued of the movie and wish for it to end. But, really, story doesn't matter. It's just a journey towards the inevitable large-scale action scenes. Nevertheless, this is one of the most tone-deaf, brain-busting, and butt-numbing films ever made. It's more bloated than any Pirates of the Caribbean film, which is really saying something, and it makes Dead Men Tell No Tales look brilliant by comparison."
I have some issues with Walter Hill's cult 1979 Western The Long Riders, which Kino is offering in a special-edition upgrade. The story of the notorious James-Younger gang could fill a ten-hour miniseries, so at just over an hour and a half, The Long Riders can't help but feel like the Classics Illustrated version in how much it relies on montage and episodic vignettes. That's the bad news. The good news is, The Long Riders does about as perfect a job as possible at presenting this abbreviated take on the story. For all his facility with the genre, Hill has only made about four Westerns (six if you include his Western-inflected Extreme Prejudice and his historical drama Geronimo: An American Legend), but The Long Riders alone would be enough to cement his bonafides. Hill gets the terseness of violent men under pressure - their easy tempers, their surprising loyalties - and he stages the film as a series of increasingly bloody showdowns that test his antiheroes' steely resolves. Certainly, The Long Riders owes a debt to Sam Peckinpah; one can trace the origins of The Long Riders' gory, slow-motion gunfights back to Peckinpah's classic The Wild Bunch. In many ways, though, Hill improves on Peckinpah. Peckinpah might have had a bigger budget (you can see Hill stretching every dollar he's got), but Hill is a better writer, and the verbal exchanges have some of the snap you might find in Elmore Leonard's classic Westerns. Not for nothing, Hill produced and directed the Deadwood pilot, which also might not exist without Leonard's baroque affection for loquacious killers. Furthermore, if Peckinpah only wanted to demythologize the West, Hill thinks his characters are just too damn cool, and his affection makes The Long Riders more engaging that the often nihilistic Wild Bunch. Yes, people like Robert and Charley Ford (Nicholas and Christopher Guest), strike us as weak and morally inferior, but then you've got Stacy Keach's pragmatic Frank James, or Keith Carradine's spirited Jim Younger, or - best of all - David Carradine's Cole Younger, who might be the single biggest badass in the elder Carradine's long roster of big badasses. You wish Hill had gotten to make another movie with Carradine just to give the actor the star vehicle he deserved, but for now, The Long Riders will certainly suffice.
From Warner Archive comes Christopher Guest's hilarious mockumentary Waiting for Guffman. I might be in the minority: most people can quote Guest and Rob Reiner's 1984 rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap chapter and verse, but I vastly prefer Guest's solo directorial efforts, with Guffman being first among equals. As with his great A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, Guest adopts a vérité approach to document the lives of his lovably hapless dreamers, in this case a group of wannabe theater folks staging a production for the sesquicentennial anniversary of small-town Blaine, Missouri. It is not a spoiler to suggest that most of the main characters are, to put it mildly, spectacularly untalented, from the married travel agents (the great Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara) who rule the roost that is Blaine's amateur-theater program to the nebbish dentist (Eugene Levy) who's convinced that persistence can override his innate lack of charisma and make him a star. Yet Guest and his crew love these people so much that Waiting for Guffman never feels too mean. They might be fools, but they're our fools, dammit. Nowhere is this affection clearer than in Guest's lead performance as Corky St. Clair, the theatrical "impresario" who dreams that "Red, White, and Blaine" will be his ticket to Broadway and points beyond. St. Clair is one of Guest's greatest comic creations. At any given moment, he lives his life through about eight layers of self-deception - he insists that legendary producer Mort Guffman will be traveling from New York to rural Missouri in order to attend the play almost as strongly as he insists on his heterosexuality even when everything about St. Clair suggests otherwise - but Guest gives St. Clair this optimism that transcends anything that might just appear foolish or small. It's touching when St. Clair sets aside a reserved seat for Guffman in the audience or when he moons over the dim-but-hunky mechanic (Matt Keeslar) St. Clair has cast for reasons other than he acting ability. St. Clair is a dreamer, and against all odds, he makes us believe in him.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Michael Haneke's beyond-disturbing The Piano Teacher to Blu-ray. With the exception of his Academy Award-winning Amour, Haneke has long cultivated a reputation as cinema's premiere misanthrope - the people in films like The White Ribbon, Cache, and Code Unknown come off as neglectfully deluded at best and dangerously self-absorbed at worst - although it's a toss-up as to whether his slasher-movie screed Funny Games or this brutal character study presents the most unpleasantly extreme version of humanity's ills. Your mileage may vary, but I'm going with the latter. The great Isabelle Huppert (giving a fearless performance, as is her wont) plays the title character, whose placid veneer masks a deep well of sadomasochistic yearnings. When she engages in a torrid affair with a student (Benoît Magimel), she finally finds an outlet for her desires...except maybe not, and that's what makes The Piano Teacher so unsettling. For most of their relationship, Huppert refrains from conventional sex with her young ward, and Haneke refuses to clarify if Huppert's character is actually getting off on the withholding or if she's too scared of what she really wants to express it properly. This tension culminates in an act of sexual violence made all the uglier because of Haneke's pronounced ambivalence: either he's punishing his heroine for her actions or he's suggesting that only total self-destruction will satisfy her. For the viewer, neither option is all that pleasant. It's impossible to say you enjoy The Piano Teacher. The film is simultaneously sterile and repulsive, and one doesn't have to stretch to suggest that Haneke treats Huppert with a cruelty that tipples into outright misogyny. Nevertheless, if we're assessing films by whether or not they achieve their stated goals, then The Piano Teacher is a rousing success. It wants to make you feel awful, and it succeeds handily. Watch this and Paul Verhoeven's equally disturbing Elle for the type of double-feature that will make you question your faith in humanity.