For the week of November 6th, Scream Factory is giving a Blu-ray release to one of the most underrated comedies of the 1980s: John Landis' paranoiac farce Into the Night. By 1985, Landis was facing the greatest personal and professional challenges of his life. Sure, he'd hit big with films like National Lampoon's Animal House and Trading Places, but he'd just finished a very public legal battle over his involvement in the deaths of actors Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen during production of his Twilight Zone segment. To call Landis persona non grata in Hollywood would be an understatement, so he channeled his frustrations into this jet black comedy about an insomniac engineer (Jeff Goldblum, in one of his least mannered and most engaging performances) who learns his wife is cheating on him, heads out into downtown Los Angeles, and then spends the rest of a very long, very strange evening protecting a mysterious young woman (the luminous Michelle Pfeiffer) and trying not to get murdered in the process. You can sense Landis in Goldblum's character - here's this guy who loses all his conventional moorings and feels like he can't trust anyone - so it was more-than-a-little heartbreaking when this personal picture crashed and burned upon its theatrical release. To some degree, I get why audiences didn't flock to this one. As any Blues Brothers fan can attest, Landis often struggles with pacing (it's why An American Werewolf in London, at just over ninety minutes, is his best film - Landis keeps the proceedings lean and relentless), and Into the Night is no exception. It runs almost two full hours, and you feel every minute: the film plays like a series of loosely connected vignettes, only without the musical numbers and action setpieces that absolved The Blues Brothers of the same sins. That said, Landis achieves almost a Lynchian sense of dread here, and I credit the film's episodic nature. I've seen the film a couple dozen times since I was a teenager, and I still have trouble predicting what's going to happen. Landis will drop some screwball banter between Goldblum and Pfeiffer, only to transition into a moment of unexpectedly chilling violence (Landis stages a drowning here that is still hard to watch), and then maybe he'll land somewhere right between the two, like whenever the film's casually savage terrorists Tasmanian-Devil their way through a scene. Or he'll have Bruce McGill vamp as a pissed-off Elvis impersonator. Or he'll let Richard Farnsworth break your heart as a kindly, dying millionaire. Or he'll let David Bowie and Bo Diddley break each other in a mano-a-mano brawl that plays like Dadaist performance art, not least of which because it's David Bowie and Bo Diddley fighting to the death. Yet the film has an odd integrity. It approaches all this insanity with the same dry bemusement as its hero, a choice that probably doomed its box-office aspirations even as it guaranteed its cult bonafides. As hipster-noir-screwball-conspiracy thrillers go, Into the Night might the best of its kind.
In his Blu-ray review, Stephen Larson wrote that "John Landis proved that he was adept at doing a thriller in addition to his masterful brushstrokes of comedy...While Goldblum and Pfeiffer carry it, this is largely an ensemble picture with many recognizable faces including Dan Aykroyd, David Bowie, Richard Farnsworth, Bruce McGill, and Vera Miles. Landis also crowds the film with many of his industry buddies and collaborators, which was a source of consternation for a number of critics and something that hurt Into the Night's box office prospects. For example, Variety predicted that Into the Night [would] 'probably be into the ether in a hurry unless there is an extensive trivia interest beyond Hollywood in how many of his filmmaker friends director John Landis can fit into one wandering romp.' New York Times film critic Vincent Canby noted the presence of at least a dozen directors, including David Cronenberg giving a nice Scanners in-joke as Okin's group supervisor...At least a couple of the directors' parts (e.g., those by Paul Bartel and Roger Vadim) are important to the story and their placement shouldn't be viewed as arbitrary. Landis incorporates his trademark sights gags with aplomb but also shows his chops as an action director. Into the Night contains its share of contrivances but there wasn't a moment in which I thought Landis was unsure what he wanted to do with the material."
Hot take: if we're talking screwball comedies, I prefer Into the Night to George Cukor's 1940 classic The Philadelphia Story, which Criterion is releasing this week. Far more accomplished people than myself have called The Philadelphia Story one of the greatest screwball comedies ever made - hell, it netted Academy Awards for co-star Jimmy Stewart and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart as well as additional nominations for Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Freakin' Picture - and when the film is working, I get all the love. Katharine Hepburn is a delight as Tracy Lord, a wealthy socialite who finds herself weighing the romantic affections of two very different men (Cary Grant and Stewart) not twenty-four hours before her marriage to a third man (John Howard's fuddy-duddy). Cukor structures the entire film as a comic showcase for his leading lady. You watch Hepburn's wonderful alcoholic interlude with Stewart or pretty much all her interactions with her on-screen sister (Virginia Weidler), and you wonder how anyone ever considered Hepburn box-office poison. There's just one big problem: from a gender-politics standpoint, The Philadelphia Story is laughably, brutally offensive. And I'm not even talking about the central conceit, where Hepburn has to choose a man in order to find happiness. That old cliché has been around since movies started being movies, so for better or worse, I think I'm inured to it. No, I'm talking about how problematically both male leads treat Hepburn even as the film itself encourages us to root for them. Stewart might be his usual charming self as a down-to-earth reporter who finds himself falling for Hepburn's rich girl against his better judgments, but his charm in no way excuses how often he condescends to her or criticizes her status. Again, some of their interplay hews to conventional, "The more they bicker, the more they like one another" tropes, except the screenplay is way too quick to have Hepburn humble herself to this supercilious ass instead of holding her ground. That said, the Hepburn-Stewart dynamic is a model of progressive equality compared to what goes down between her and Grant. Grant's character divorced Hepburn because he'd gotten fed up with her headstrong nature, and Cukor conveys this irritation by having him grab her by the face and throw her down. And that's the first scene in the movie! I cannot convey how buck wild it is to watch the romantic lead physically assaulting his wife as his big introduction, and how glibly the film tries to chuckle over his actions. If ever there was a film to watch with tempered cultural expectations, it's this one, and even then, it's hard not to cringe. His Girl Friday never makes Rosalind Russell less-than when she confronts her leading men; Bringing Up Baby lets Hepburn maintain her glorious weirdness without the threat of spousal abuse. You wish The Philadelphia Story could have followed suit. Classics can be disappointing, too.
Unfortunately, Disney/Pixar's Cars 3 continues this string of disappointments. If the default response to the Cars franchise tends towards "measured apathy," my reaction skews more positively: I like the Cars movies. The first Cars benefits from a hangout vibe and some beautiful Southwestern landscapes, while its sequel admirably/foolishly goes in the exact opposite direction, jettisoning the relaxed tone for a frenetic, James-Bond-for-kids adventure. But people hated the last Cars, so Cars 3 feels like a course-corrective in the worst way. Director Brian Fee and screenwriters Kiel Murray, Bob Peterson, and Mike Rich elect for the drama-free saga of Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson, again) as he struggles with his age and feelings of inadequacy. Yes, nothing says kids' entertainment like wrestling with your own mortality, but Cars 3 can't even offer an interesting spin on that subject. While the previews hinted that McQueen suffers a fatal crash, the actual accident occurs at the end of the first act and leaves the hero with his pride bruised more than anything else. From that point on, Cars 3 turns into a lower-stakes Days of Thunder - McQueen teams up with a billionaire racing enthusiast (Nathan Fillion) to rehabilitate his body and his psyche, and all as the arrogant young hotshot who beat him (Armie Hammer, giving the most enjoyable performance in the film) continues to dominate the racing circuit - except without that film's thrilling racing sequences or the amiable chill of the first Cars. In fairness, I'm making Cars 3 seem worse than it is. Compared to, say, The Emoji Movie, Cars 3 is practically Grave of the Fireflies, in terms of quality, and I do like how the film ultimately handles McQueen's spunky new trainer (Cristela Alonzo). But a) none of this feels necessary, and so we spend the film waiting for it to justify its existence, and b) Cars 3 does make one morbid creative choice that sinks the whole movie. See, McQueen occasionally gets Yoda-like wisdom from his deceased mentor Doc Hudson, and I was shocked to hear new dialogue in the voice of the late, great Paul Newman. That's not an impersonator. Rather, Pixar repurposed some of Newman's outtakes from the first Cars. I'm sure Newman signed some sort of vaguely draconian contract with the Mouse House, but something about using the voice of the dead without their explicit permission unsettles me. It brings up questions of intellectual property and the limits of the control you have over your image, questions that this amiable trifle is ill-equipped to answer.
Martin Liebman noted that the film "sees the franchise turn down the logical and inevitable road, following an aging hero who isn't ready to call it quits but who is clearly being passed by younger and better cars. His best days on the track may be behind him, and he's forced to accept, no matter how hard he pushes himself, no matter how much he wants to keep on racing and keep on winning, that he's just not the car he once was. In Cars 3, Lightning McQueen is running on fumes and racing and training almost entirely on heart. The question is whether that's enough for him to remain competitive and a regular in the winner's circle. In a way, the movie is more for adults than it is for kids. The younger viewers will certainly love it for its speed and flash and wonderfully realized and robust animation, but the themes will most assuredly speak more to the adults in the audience who may be falling out of, or are already beyond, their prime. The film does its best to make a sobering fact-of-life reality a fun and infectious family film, and to its credit it doesn't betray its story or the unstoppable ticking clock with a bogus end. In fact, the film ends on a very positive note, certainly not one that would have worked in either Cars or Cars 2 but one that is here a fitting tribute to the characters and the themes in this film and in the greater franchise. Kudos to the filmmakers for being true to truth, even in a movie like this."
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the first season of the hit HBO series Westworld to Blu-ray. You got to give it to showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy: if you're gonna remake something, this is the type of thing you remake. I suspect your memories of director Michael Crichton's 1973 original are far more charitable than the film itself deserves; for every iconic image (Yul Brenner as a dead-eyed robot cowboy) and concept (what if all the androids at a theme park malfunctioned and turned on the humans?), the first Westworld spends a lot of time dithering on go-nowhere subplots (freaking Dick van Patten is in much more of the original movie than you probably remember) and hopelessly asserting Richard Benjamin as a virile male lead. As goofy camp or as a test run for Crichton's far more successful Jurassic Park (and Congo, and Micro, and Timeline, and Prey...you get the idea), Westworld works, but it leaves a lot of room for improvement. Thankfully, Nolan and Joy get started right away. While they keep the central conceit - an adults-only, Western-inspired theme park where visitors can engage the android populace in whatever manner they want - the showrunners immediately shift our sympathies to the robots. Whether we're spending time with Evan Rachel Wood's winsome frontierswoman Dolores or Thandie Newton's savvy madam Maeve, Nolan and Joy encourage us to view the synthetics as beings capable of the same emotional and psychological registers as humans have. Newton, in particular, delivers one of last year's great performances as a woman realizing that her internal programming refuses to compute with the codes the park's technicians keep forcing inside her. Each reboot plays like a violation of sorts, so naturally we begin to resent the human cast (including Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Jimmi Simpson, Luke Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, and the great Jeffrey Wright, who is heartbreakingly good here) and their increasingly depraved/violent/abusive attempts at control. The ethical landscape reminds me of Alex Garland's great Ex Machina, only on a grand scale: HBO has funneled Game of Thrones-level money into a surprisingly philosophical look at our moral responsibilities in a digital universe. At times, you could be watching a Red Dead Redemption adaptation (Nolan has spoken at length about how important this videogame was in influencing the look and feel of the show), except the open-world atmosphere provides as many conceptual perils as it does physical ones. In thinking about the way that gamers (here represented as all of Westworld's visitors) react inside the park, I'm reminded of the most famous line from the most famous of all Crichton adaptations: "[They are] so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." On that level, Westworld is a rousing success. I cannot wait for Season Two. On a narrative level, though...ay, there's the rub. See, Nolan is also the co-screenwriter of such sci-fi dramas like The Prestige and Interstellar (he's also Christopher Nolan's little brother. Talk about burying the lede), and he applies much of the same narrative sleight of hand that he brought to those other properties to Westworld. Here's the problem: movies move quickly enough so it's easier to camouflage the twists, whereas TV's more languid pace gives viewers time to figure out the tricks, and that's exactly what happens here. Nolan seeds two major twists that most attentive viewers will figure out before the season is half over - admittedly, they're good twists, but they don't surprise us because we're hyper-aware of the scaffolding that supports them. More problematic are the production woes that shut down Season One for almost a year. Nolan has admitted that the writers needed time to figure out where the show was going, and they did concoct a doozy of an ending...except it doesn't quite fit with what's preceded it, especially concerning the revelations about Hopkins' mysterious park developer. Still, I love the universe of this show so much I'm far more inclined to overlook these issues - there's nothing quite like Westworld on television.