For the week of October 2nd, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales to Blu-ray, which is the fifth entry in the now-fourteen-year-old Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Outside of the MCU, it's rare that Movie Five ends up injecting fresh blood into a lagging blockbuster series, and unfortunately, Dead Men Tell No Tales is no exception. Like Jason Bourne or Star Trek V: The Final Frontier before it, Dead Men Tell No Tales scores the unenviable goal of both cheapening AND rendering irrelevant the often-good work that preceded it; I can't imagine anyone clamoring for another Pirates venture after this logy adventure that finds the tiresome Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, collecting a paycheck and nothing more) trying to elude the grasp of vengeful pirate ghost (or is it ghost pirate?) Captain Armando Salazar (Javier Bardem). It's not that the first three Pirates ventures broke any new narrative ground, but they still worked for two reasons: 1) Depp's mincing, craven Sparrow seemed borderline revolutionary within the conventions of the blockbuster genre, and 2) director Gore Verbinski enlivened the formula with his abundant visual invention and wit (full disclosure: I'm a Verbinski apologist and probably can't be trusted - The Lone Ranger and A Cure for Wellness get more play in my house than freakin' Casablanca). But new-to-the-series directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg are far more workmanlike in their efforts. Without Verbinski's gothic, lurid sense of mise-en-scene, we're stuck focusing on the chugging plot mechanics that rope in Orlando Bloom's boring Will Turner from the first three movies (Sparrow ends up partnered with Turner's teenage son, played by Brenton Thwaites, who might be blander than Bloom) and strand both Depp and fellow returner Geoffrey Rush. I feel badly for Rush - he tries to give Barbossa some depth of human feeling, but the writing strands him with an arc that worked so much better in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 - but Depp has checked out of this series worse than a second-semester senior. You could reduce his whole performance down to a series of addled reaction shots and some CGI-de-aging effects that probably let Depp check out early for the day while his stand-in took over. If there's anything worth recommending here, it's Bardem, who is his predictably brilliant self. Apparently, no one told him this flick was a cynical cash grab, and he throws himself into the part, enlivening Salazar with the kinds of oddball touches that made his Skyfall baddie such a treat. Even drenched in CGI makeup, Salazar registers as a very real, very human menace. Still, his work throws the mediocrity surrounding him into even starker relief. I remember a time when the Pirates of the Caribbean movies themselves offered more than just flash and bang. The times, they are a' changin'.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "might be new in name, but it can't shake a feeling of franchise fatigue that permeates nearly every moment. Another crew of cursed sailors made up of complex visual effects? Been there, done that. Action scenes could be dropped into any other film in the franchise and, with a few tweaks to the digital animation to swap out characters, they'd fit right in. Character moments, gags, and the movie's basic cadence feel all-too-familiar. The plot is bloated and contrived and even some main characters feel unnecessarily tacked on and thrown in, shoved to the forefront for story convenience more than anything else. The movie isn't exactly teeming with reasons to watch. Even the aforementioned special effects, as fantastic as they may be and which extend well beyond Salazar and his crew, cannot be considered a draw, not when they're just variations on the same style seen in the pervious [sic] four films and certainly not when several other overwrought Summer blockbusters are competing in the same marketplace of empty stories propped up by endless and increasingly complex visual effects. It's all window-dressing masking a dull story and largely directionless meandering for a series in need of retirement or, at least, a very long respite."
Here's a better way to spend your evening: launch Dead Men Tell No Tales into space, and then put on the special extended cut of Richard Donner's 1978 masterpiece Superman: The Movie, which is getting a special Warner Archive release. Superman is as joyous and affirming a blockbuster adventure as the latest Pirates of the Caribbean is dispiriting and bland. Nowadays, it's hard to imagine a time when comic-book movies didn't dominate the theatrical landscape, but it was Donner who legitimized the genre in ways no one had imagined. Gone were the chintzy cliffhangers and rudimentary special effects of the 1950's Superman TV series; Donner opened on a massive, crystalline representation of Superman's home planet Krypton, and he got Marlon Brando to take center stage as Superman's father Jor-El. Admittedly, Brando isn't very good (famously, Brando rooked producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind out of $3.7 million and 11.75% of the total profits for what amounts to maybe twenty minutes of screen time), but Donner uses Brando's presence and the scale of the Krypton sequences as his own Mission Statement: attention must be paid. For the next two-ish hours, Donner keeps delivering on that promise. The sequences with teenage Clark Kent (Jeff East) in Smallville play like the greatest slice of Americana ever made, all sprawling cornfields and widescreen vistas - Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography justifies the film's existence all by itself. There's more poetry in the sad, quiet death of Clark's adopted father (Glenn Ford, doing heartbreaking work) than in either Man of Steel or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And when Superman grows up and moves to Metropolis, Donner switches tones so gracefully we almost don't notice. If Donner looked to John Ford for the Smallville sequences, then Howard Hawks deserves credit for the second half. This part of the film is practically a screwball comedy, zooming from fast-paced newspaper banter at the Daily Planet (Jackie Coogan and Margot Kidder attack the material like they're doing His Girl Friday) to the sublimely goofy dynamic between Gene Hackman's vain, deluded Big Bad Lex Luthor and his idiot henchman Otis (Ned Beatty). Some people find this material a little too broad, and I get that, but I also don't care. Everyone is having too much fun. Furthermore, I'd wager we still take the second half seriously because of Donner's true masterstroke: casting a young, virtually unknown Christopher Reeve as adult Clark Kent/Superman. When Reeve is playing Clark, he does a pitch-perfect Harold Lloyd, emphasizing the character's gangly befuddlement and lack of self-confidence. He looks like a lumbering noodle, so it's all the more remarkable when Kent switches into his Superman costume and those insecurities vanish. We're looking at a moviestar, period, and the definitive live-action interpretation of the character. Sure, some elements of Superman haven't aged so well (the "Can You Read My Mind" love montage; the nonsensical way Superman saves the day at the very end), but the majority of Donner's epic, humane vision will endure far longer than anything Zach Snyder has mounted thus far.
Almost as good: Warner and DC Animated's Justice League: The New Frontier feature, which is receiving a special "Commemorative Edition" this week. As far as DCA's animated stable goes, The New Frontier is one of their strongest feature-length entries (only The Flashpoint Paradox and the full-length The Dark Knight Returns offer anything in the way of competition), and that's saying something, given the source material. The late, great Darwyn Cooke's original graphic novel is, in its own way, as good as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' much fêted Watchmen, and it might present even more potential minefields for a film adaptation. While Cooke does bring together many classic DC heroes to fight an all-encompassing evil, he's more interested in evoking the promise of the 1960s than presenting a cohesive narrative. Long stretches of his New Frontier unfold as gorgeous vignettes, whereas this movie version hustles along. What director Dave Bullock and screenwriter Stan Berkowitz have done is to create an adventure that takes place in Cooke's universe even as it radically condenses the overall scope. Sure, Bullock and Berkowitz toss in little nods and cameos to side players from the book version, but he keeps the focus on Hal Jordan (voiced by David Boreanaz), Martian Manhunter (Miguel Ferrer), Wonder Woman (Lucy Lawless), Superman (Kyle MacLachlan), and Batman (Jeremy Sisto) as Cold War tensions cause them to mobilize and fight together. The shift is a little jarring at first, but you get used to it, and a big part of why the movie New Frontier works is the fidelity to Cooke's artwork. These characters and environs look like Cooke originals, and anyone familiar with his New Frontier or his awesome Parker series will appreciate the aesthetics. My biggest criticism? The DC Animated house style. With the exception of both Flashpoint and The Dark Knight Returns, most of these DC features clock in at under eighty minutes. I get that animation is expensive, and I'm not advocating for a straight New Frontier translation, but if ever a movie practically begged for an extra hour, it's this one, if only to let us luxuriate in Cooke's blissful optimism.
For the week's third major superhero feature, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering a 4K upgrade to Matthew Vaughn's 2010 comic-book thriller Kick-Ass. Nowadays, Kick-Ass plays like a test run for Vaughn's far more effective Kingsman - both adaptations of Mark Millar comics, they share the same R-ratings and affinity for cheeky dark humor - although the earlier feature certainly has enough to justify its existence. For Vaughn, the central plot conceit - a teenager (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) gets the ever-lovin' crap beat out of him, and the physical rehabilitation that follows leaves him near-impervious to pain, thus turning him into an unlikely superhero - is less interesting than the opportunity to examine why we're so attracted to comic-book vigilantes. All of Vaughn's costumed characters, from Taylor-Johnson's title hero to the spoiled gangster's son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who eventually becomes his arch-nemesis, have this extreme facility for doling out graphic punishment, and Vaughn gooses the on-screen carnage to the degree that, after a while, it becomes really difficult to separate the heroes from the villains. Nowhere is this uneasy tension more prevalent than in Nicolas Cage and Chloë Grace Moretz's father-daughter crime-fighting duo. These two end up serving as Kick-Ass's unlikely mentors because they're so gleefully brutal, and when the film simply observes the damage they leave in their wake (the single-take setpiece following Cage as he savages a warehouse full of henchmen; Moretz's foul-mouthed stabbing of a hapless criminal good), it takes on some of the subversive power of James Gunn's underrated superhero deconstruction Super. Yet Cage and Moretz are so good that you relish all their screen-time - they maintain this genuine tenderness even when, say, Cage is shooting the twelve-year-old Moretz in the chest to prepare her for an enemy's bullet (don't worry - she's wearing body armor), and you realize how skillfully Vaughn has trapped us in the same attraction/repulsion cycle ensnaring his main characters. If Kick-Ass had focused around their characters, it would be in contention for one of the best superhero movies ever made. However, it stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and there, the plot thickens. Taylor-Johnson has become a very strong performer in recent years - he is flat-out terrifying in Tom Ford's postmodern Nocturnal Animals - but at this point in his career, he conveyed a certain affable void. His work as Kick-Ass practically neuralizes itself from your memory as you watch it, and it's only by virtue of Vaughn's clever action-movie staging and the great supporting performances that you maintain focus whenever Taylor-Johnson is on-screen. Again, I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but where's Zac Efron when you need him?
Of the 4K release, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "when the film has a memorable sequence offering Nicolas Cage as a supposed nurturing father who repeatedly shoots his darling daughter (who is equipped with a Kevlar vest, it should be noted), that's just one indication of a rather impish and maybe even pitch black sense of humor, an element that can clash a little uneasily with the film's hyperbolic violence...This presentation has pluses and minuses, many of which have been seen in some other Lionsgate 4K UHD releases. There's a definite uptick in detail levels throughout the presentation, with everything from the gruesome injuries some characters experience to more mundane elements like the spandex fabric of superhero costumes have a palpability that is more pronounced than in the 1080p Blu-ray version. Perhaps the biggest difference in the 4K UHD version comes courtesy of HDR, however, with the palette, which is already bordering on the surreal throughout the film, gaining significant new pop and saturation levels. From the first moment, with the red caped "mental case" high atop the skyscraper, there's an incredible vividness in primary hues especially that is quite remarkable. Later, after Hit Girl enters the fray, her bright purple hair also pops in a more lustrous way than it does in the 1080p Blu-ray version."
Finally, this review of David Lowery's postmodern A Ghost Story (which arrives on Lionsgate Home Entertainment this week) might not hold up after a second viewing of the film; I'm still struggling to process what Lowery and his team have done here. Made in secret and on the cheap after production wrapped on Lowery's far more mainstream Pete's Dragon remake, A Ghost Story resists almost all conventional descriptions. Yes, it looks like a hipster-inflected Ghost or something - Casey Affleck's scruffy musician dies and then aimlessly haunts his beloved (Rooney Mara) - but Lowery has no interest in delivering any traditional payoffs whatsoever. The central romance, as it were, has the adrift vagueness of a mumblecore indie (we don't spend much time with the two before Affleck dies, and from the little we do get, all we can tell is that she's a little high-strung and he's irritatingly diffident about decision making), and the supernatural element yields neither thrills nor sentimental uplift, a fact Lowery underscores by having Affleck's ghost appear as a white sheet with two holes for eyes. It's a child's conception of the undead (I thought of Peanuts more than once), and Lowery mines his ghost's simple appearance for some deadpan comedy and pathos: the subtitled conversations Affleck has with a neighboring spirit feel like outtakes from a Jim Jarmusch movie, and the mid-movie scene where he impotently starts smashing plates and dishes has more raw power than anything else in the movie. However, A Ghost Story is the rare film that's both slight and ambitious, and this quality makes it difficult to discuss. Without leaving the confines of the couple's shabby rental house, Lowery makes it clear that he has grander ambitions beyond just a little mood piece, and he explores some metaphysical corners that I wasn't expecting. Yet in doing so, Lowery also abandons the central relationship before A Ghost Story is even half over. Mara, in particular, is so good at conveying a kind of anesthetized depression (she eats damn near an entire pie and then pukes it back up in a single take - the moment is way more riveting than you might think) that she single-handedly grounds this movie despite all its quirky noodling; when she departs, A Ghost Story never fully recovers. Furthermore, I'm having a hard time reconciling the delicacy Lowery shows in aesthetically representing a spectral journey (the long, Tartovsky-esque camera takes; Daniel Hart's atonal score; the formality of the 1.33:1 aspect ratio) with the exposition dump he uses to signify the movie's major tonal gear shift - Will Oldham shows up (as does Ke$ha, believe it or not) and drops some wannabe Richard Linklater monologue about the nature of human existence just so we won't be too confused during the trippy diversions A Ghost Story makes in its third act. To Lowery's credit, he ends on an absolutely perfect grace note, except I'm not sure he's earned it. The ending hinges on an emotional connection he's long since jettisoned for (I kid you not) the expanses of eternity. It's a frustrating, inconclusive film. You owe it to yourself to see it.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that the "looseness [of the film] requires a certain tolerance on the part of the audience to get to what is the film's best aspect, its rumination on the passage of time and the persistence of memory. Some of the conceits employed, as in a sudden shift to the wild west, are iffy at best and lunatic at worst, but every conceit in this intellectually interesting film pales in comparison to its central one, and for that I refer you to some of the screenshots accompanying this review. How do you feel about a 'character' who's a bedsheet with two Kean sized black eyes, especially when said character is wandering through vast outdoor vistas? I have to confess I just found it all giggle worthy, and therefore couldn't make it through some of the supposedly emotionally wrenching bits without kind of laughing under my breath. Those with a different kind of tolerance than I evidently have, with regard to this particular presentational aspect, might therefore resonate more strongly with what are actually some rather fascinating ideas that Lowery seems to want to explore. In other words, I feel like perhaps more than many other films, A Ghost Story is going to be one of those 'your mileage may vary' options based almost entirely on how you feel about a guy in a sheet."