For the week of October 9th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Baby Driver to Blu-ray. This crime-comedy-musical confirms a suspicion I've harbored about writer-director Edgar Wright: pair him with Simon Pegg, and Wright's one of the greatest genre filmmakers around (I'm of the mindset that their Cornetto Trilogy is practically perfect in every way), but on his own, he's a bit more problematic. In fairness, Baby Driver is a marked improvement over Wright's Pegg-free Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and for a good while, it's quite a bit more than even that. Wright introduces us to the film's central conceit - that his tinnitus-afflicted getaway driver Baby (Ansel Elgort) blares music so constantly he ends up creating a de facto soundtrack to his own life - with a opening chase sequence that's as invigorating as anything Wright has ever done. While three robbers (Jon Hamm, Eiza González, and Jon Bernthal, who's only in the film for about ten minutes) raid an Atlanta bank, Baby cues up The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Bellbottoms," which ultimately motivates the wild dash Baby makes as he speeds and swerves the getaway car to freedom. Wright has always loved marrying music to on-screen action (Shaun of the Dead's "Can't Stop Me Now" zombie beating or his music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song," which now seems like a test run for Baby Driver), but Baby Driver finds him operating at a whole different pace and intensity. When the film is working, as it most certainly is during the "Bellbottoms" chase, it plays like some mad fusion of Vincente Minnelli and Grand Theft Auto. Now, nothing else Baby Driver has matches the invention and wit of the opening, but for the hour or so that follows, Wright keeps things humming along so smoothly that you barely note the diminishment. Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos' razor-precise editing turns even the most mundane of exposition dumps into a kinetic marriage of music and image, and the performances cue right into that simultaneously arch-sincere tone that Wright gets from merging hard-boiled noir with YA romance (Baby's attempts to romance Lily James's waitress let Wright stage a number of widescreen homages to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). In particular, CJ Jones is heartbreakingly good as Baby's deaf foster father, and Hamm is a revelation as the slipperiest of Bank's criminal confederates. Just when it looks like Hamm is coasting on his easy charm and charisma, something cracks, and he ends up providing this candy-colored fantasy with genuine menace. But like Scott Pilgrim, the center can't hold, and Baby Driver starts falling apart, and almost as spectacularly as the heist-gone-wrong in the last half hour. It's only a little at first - Baby does something stupid that feels like a script cheat to kick off the third act - and then things start getting exponentially dumber, with characters nonsensically yielding to the plot over their own psychology (the abrupt about-face that Kevin Spacey's criminal mastermind pulls is insulting) as this poppy chase picture devolves into a series of rote, bloody shootouts. Still, I think I almost prefer Baby Driver's feint towards violent nihilism over its last-minute sentimentality. After what feels like more endings than The Return of the King, Wright concludes things on a note of sappy treacle that much ruins the Simon and Garfunkel song from where the film takes its title. Does the good stuff make up for the bad? Yeah, but barely, and over time, I'm not sure if glib energy and charm alone will compensate for the last twenty minutes or for James's personality-free female lead (anyone claiming that Wright's non-Spaced output suffers from too many woman characters who lack agency - Baby Driver is going to give you a whole helluva a lot of ammunition). We just need Simon Pegg, now more than ever.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is contagious and fun, even considering the darkness that surrounds its characters and story. Violence, crime, heavily flawed characters, past tragedies, dangerous present circumstances, and bleak futures are all keystone plot points in the film, but Wright finds a tonal balance in his hero, a music lover whose life soundtrack not only defines a scene but sets a mood and counterbalances the darkness with toe-tapping fun. But the film does ensure its characters face their demons and foes and are placed in unenviable situations as their lives and realities and barriers and boundaries and hopes and dreams come crashing down, literally and figuratively both for Baby. All of them are much more than the sum of their exteriors, some more fully fleshed out than others, but the film, for all of its bleak plot points, takes care to give them all a voice, whether it's through music, their actions, or their relationships with one another. Few films enjoy such a fine-tuned balance of deeply personal characters, chaotic action, grim realities, and the hope that takes shape in love and understanding."
One of the week's most inexplicable releases is Warner Home Entertainment's 4K upgrade of the Peanuts Holiday Collection. Don't get it twisted - I'm certainly not criticizing the Peanuts features themselves. Far from it: even forty and fifty years later, these holiday specials have lost little of their wry, gentle insights. The genius of Charles Schulz's iconic Peanuts comic lies in its melancholy. To Schulz, adolescence played host to insecurity, depression, and shame, and his Peanuts characters were little better at triaging these concerns than most adults. Take A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, for example. Instead of the usual platitudes about the meaning of Thanksgiving, Schulz roots the episode in human-scaled anxiety, with Charlie Brown panicking after Peppermint Patty invites herself and a bunch of friends to his special dinner. Yes, Snoopy provides reliable slapstick laughs, but even those can't quite ameliorate Charlie's worries that he's going to let someone down. And if he's not stressing over proper decorum, Schulz is questioning the very nature of faith itself: in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, eternal optimist Linus starts questioning the existence of his beloved Great Pumpkin deity, and what it might mean for Linus to live in a void without it. That's heady stuff, and for kids, no less. Still, Schultz's animated masterpiece is A Charlie Brown Christmas, which remains the greatest holiday special of all time. I can't think of a mainstream entertainment that so perfectly encapsulates how warmth and profound loss go hand-in-hand during the holidays - Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums might be the best movie ever made, and even Anderson had to crib from A Charlie Brown Christmas' house style (he samples Vince Guaraldi's iconic jazz soundtrack at some key moments) to land its mixture of humor and sadness. So why call this set inexplicable? Easy - I'm not sure what a 4K master adds to these features. You can only reveal so much at 4K resolution, and the fear is that either you gain little from the standard HD encoding or that you throw the print defects into starker relief. Still, anything that gets eyeballs on Peanuts is a good thing, I guess.
From the Criterion Collection comes filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska's musical-fantasy-satire-horror movie The Lure. Credit must go to Smoczynska: she's succeeded in delivering something that resists easy categorization. Theoretically, she's riffing on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, except that classic fable provides but the starting point for this tale about two mermaids (Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska) who trade the sea for a shot at stardom in the nightclubs of 1980s Poland. Also they have an unquenchable thirst for blood. Yep, it's that kind of movie. In some ways, The Lure is the ultimate Criterion collection release. Like Marketa Lazarová or Hausu, it's a deeply idiosyncratic slice of world cinema that melds genres almost as aggressively as it pushes social commentary. And like those other features, I think I respect The Lure more than I outright like it. For every moment of twisted inspiration, Smoczynska will indulge in weirdness for weirdness' sake - even at only ninety-two minutes long, The Lure would work better were it fifteen minutes shorter - and the rampant tonal samplings ultimately diminish some of its larger thematic and cultural aspirations. As gender commentaries go, it's no Ginger Snaps, and even the The Little Mermaid connections feel a little obtuse because of all the distractions. Yet I'm glad The Lure exists. Most movies have such timid ambitions that it comes as a shock to encounter one as singular as this one, faults and all. Werner Herzog once said that we need new visions or we die. If nothing else, The Lure has plenty to offer in that regard.
Finally, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is giving wide releases to four Best Buy-exclusives: Problem Child, BASEketball, EDtv, and Bowfinger. As comedies go, this grouping practically defines the term "mixed bag," but many viewers should be able to, at the very least, derive some nostalgia-based yuks from the lot. Hell, nostalgia is practically all that 1990's Problem Child has going for it. For a whole subset of '90s kids, Problem Child was a mainstay on late-afternoon television, and for good reason - it's practically an extended pilot for a sitcom that never was. You got Three's Company's John Ritter mugging and pratfalling as he attempts to care for Michael Oliver's hellion of a title character, and that's even before you factor in Wings's Amy Yasbeck and Seinfeld's Michael Richards popping up in key supporting roles. Ostensibly, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (both of whom penned the quite good Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt) wrote a far darker version of the movie that Universal bowdlerized in the editing room, but I don't know if that rumored cut would have made the same impact on that coveted five-through-ten-year-old age bracket. Still, at least Problem Child, compromised though it might be, plays like a dumb kids' sitcom. The biggest problem with Ron Howard's EDtv is that it thinks it's smarter than it is. Howard wants to make all sorts of trenchant observations about the then-nascent reality TV movement, except the Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel screenplay is far too content to default to a safe Faust-lite morality play about a genial slacker (Matthew McConaughey, natch) who becomes the first reality-TV star and has to avoid all of celebrity's attendant pitfalls. For a movie with as stacked a cast as this one has (besides McConaughey, we get appearances from Elizabeth Hurley, Jenna Elfman, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres, Rob Reiner, Martin Landau, and Dennis Hopper), the proceedings all feel pretty toothless. Howard runs a real lovely set, I'm told, so maybe the promise of some comfy money was all it took for these actors. Furthermore, when you pair EDtv against its brilliant and similarly minded contemporaries Pleasantville and The Truman Show, it seems all the more lightweight. Thank goodness for BASEketball, I guess, which quickly jettisons whatever pretensions it has towards social commentary (professional sports has become bloated and self-serving. In other news: water is wet) in favor of a series of rapid-fire gross-out jokes. Some of that spirit is Airplane! co-director David Zucker, but BASEketball takes most of its raunchy cues from its stars - and South Park co-founders - Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Rarely does BASEketball reach the comic highs of their notorious TV show, but it is consistently silly, and Parker and Stone prove genuinely appealing physical performers. However, best of all is Bowfinger, which ranks as one of the great studio comedies of the past thirty years. Director Frank Oz reunites with his Dirty Rotten Scoundrels star Steve Martin for a genuinely biting satire of Hollywood elites. In an attempt to skyrocket to the top of the studio system, down-on-his-luck never-was Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) decides to shoot a no-budget sci-fi thriller (the ludicrously named "Chubby Rain") around the biggest star in the world (Eddie Murphy) without, y'know, Said Star having any knowledge that he's actually in the movie. To say that complications ensue would be an understatement, and Martin's brilliant script packs in one zinger after another about Hollywood outsourcing, studio waste, gender politics, and - most hilariously - Scientology, the last in the form of Murphy's kabonkers cult...um, religion Mind Head. The whole thing slots together like a classic farce. Plus, it represents the last great performance from Murphy, who's a wonder as both the paranoid Hollywood icon and his sweet, doofy twin brother. We always talk about The Nutty Professor and Coming to America when we're discussing Murphy and multiple roles, but he was never as funny and affecting as he is here.