For the week of December 4th, Paramount is bringing David Lynch and Mark Frost's long anticipated Twin Peaks revival to Blu-ray. It is not an understatement to suggest that for many, getting more Twin Peaks justifies this whole reboot/remake culture that has ensnared the zeitgeist. Forget new Will & Grace or the dispiriting Fuller House: here, we find one of the screen's great auteurs (David Lynch, natch) returning to traditional narrative filmmaking for the first time since 2006's alternatively maddening/brilliant Inland Empire. Although in retrospect, perhaps "traditional" is the wrong word. See, as weird as Twin Peaks's initial run was, it did hew closely to the demands of network television. Squint past the demonic possessions and creeping dread, and you've got a portrait of small-town eccentrics that one might mistake for a David E. Kelley dramedy (the fact that more commercial television fare like The X-Files and True Detective have co-opted so much of Twin Peaks's signifiers only adds to its mainstream cachet). But Lynch wasn't happy (how could he be?), so he severed his relationship with the series in catastrophic fashion, using the bleak, nihilistic Fire Walk with Me prequel to immolate all the cuddly details that fans loved. We get that vision of Twin Peaks for Season Three. Ostensibly, we get appearances from fan favorites like Harry Goaz and Kimmy Robertson, and occasionally the series will traffic in the kind of loopy anti-comedy at which Lynch has always excelled - god bless him and his team for Michael Cera's wonderful Wally Brando. On the whole, though, this new Twin Peaks is dark, inscrutable. So much of this season deals with Kyle MacLachlan's Agent Cooper as he struggles under the thrall of the psychotic BOB (and if these names don't make sense, then you have a lot of catching up to do - Twin Peaks doesn't ingratiate itself for newbies), and I don't think MacLachlan has ever been better. He gives a tour-de-force performance, unpredictably shifting from charming to pathetic to deeply menacing. And Lynch styles the entire show to reflect his spatial and psychological dislocation. It's not a nice place to be, and sure, the graphic violence and sexuality that Showtime's content standards allow Lynch contribute to that sense of menace, but Lynch's willfully disregard for plot proves even more unsettling. This is the series as art installation - long stretches unfold as abstract registers of sound and visuals. To some degree, I can't tell you what happens in this season because Lynch doesn't make it clear. What matters more is creating a mood, a tone. If you loved the original Twin Peaks, you may hate this. But for Lynch acolytes, this new Twin Peaks is essential viewing.
If you can chart the exact moment Will Smith became a bonafide moviestar to Independence Day (it's the punch that launched a thousand memes), then Men in Black (the trilogy of which is getting a 4K remaster this week) surely underlined his durability. The first Men in Black is little more than an alien-inflected riff on Ghostbusters, and a fairly slight one at that; it moves quickly and doesn't actively insult your intelligence, but I can't shake the feeling that it exists primarily to a) give executive producer Steven Spielberg another multi-million-dollar IP and b) let director Barry Sonnenfeld trot out his best Coen Brothers impersonation. Yet Smith galvanizes the whole experience. He is playing the most clichéd of clichés - the wiseass cop who's not as slick as he thinks he is - and you still can't look away from him. Credit to Sonnenfeld: he knows that Smith's the coolest guy in the room, and he uses our affection of Smith to stage some gags (Smith getting thrashed by an alien tentacle while partner Tommy Lee Jones impassively questions a witness in the foreground; Smith blithely trash-talking a giant cockroach) that play about 50X funnier than they'd be with any other person. Unfortunately, the center couldn't hold when it comes to this particular franchise. How else to explain 2002's labored, unfunny sequel, which squanders Rick Baker's brilliant alien designs in favor of sloppy plotting and a couple of terrible villain turns (Johnny Knoxville and Lara Flynn Boyle, both awful)? That Tommy Lee Jones seems especially checked out isn't a big surprise (minus The Homesman, Lincoln, and No Country for Old Men, he seems to regard acting as a hostile assault on his person), but Smith's manic overplaying is. You can sense he's aware of what a dog this movie is, and he's laboring frantically to find something funny. True, 9/11 doomed Men in Black II in ways no one could anticipate (the original finale took place on the Twin Towers, so the filmmakers had to hastily improvise a new conclusion deep into the post-production period), but no averted disaster, man-made or otherwise, could have saved this misbegotten sequel. That's what makes Men in Black 3 so remarkable. Yes, it's not essential and yes, Jones is more openly unhappy on camera than he's ever been, but it's also the most blithely enjoyable entry in the series. In resorting to that hoariest of science-fiction tropes (Smith must go back in time to keep Jemaine Clement's alien convict from killing Jones and destroying the galaxy), Sonnenfeld succeeds in jettisoning everything that doesn't work about the franchise. Spoiler: that's Tommy Lee Jones. After about twenty minutes, we trade up to Josh Brolin's pitch-perfect Jones-from-1969 imitation. Without losing the actor's taciturn gruffness, Brolin brings this wonderful sense of play to all his interactions. The character isn't as hardened as he'd become, but Brolin is also tickled pink to be playing his old No Country partner. His joy does wonders for Smith. No longer is he trying to over-compensate on the charm-offensive front; Smith, you sense, is content to hang with Brolin and riff. So are we.
Also from Sony: a new 4K remaster of Jumanji, not-at-all-cynically-timed to coincide with Dwayne Johnson's upcoming Jumanji sequel. I've never been as big a Jumanji fan as most millennials my age seem to be - I'll always prefer the spooky, black-and-white drawings of the Chris Van Allsburg book - and rewatching this 1995 adaptation helped me articulate why: it's way too dark. The whole film plays like a nightmare repository of things that would terrify a nine-year-old. Our hero, young Alan Parrish (played as an adult by Robin Williams) gets trapped inside a magical board game for almost thirty years, and when he finally gets out, he's old and his entire family is dead, AND all the monsters from inside the game have gotten out, too, and want to kill him, not least of which is Jonathan Hyde's frightening big-game hunter Van Pelt, who'd like nothing more than to blast a fifty-caliber hole through Alan and his fellow gamers (Bonnie Hunt, Bradley Pierce, and Kirsten Dunst). Plus, if you're expecting Williams to play an ebullient joker a la the Genie from Aladdin, I've got some news for you. He's miserable and sad most of the time, never more so during this whole subplot about cycles of abuse wherein Alan's dad (also Hyde, reinforcing a connection to Van Pelt that's even scarier as a result) was distant and abusive to him, so Alan finds himself being distant and abusive towards Pierce, and somehow that concept is far more psychically unnerving than any of the CGI-and-practically-achieved animals. Look, I'm self-aware enough to acknowledge that my unease probably means the movie is working. The effects still hold up today, and director Joe Johnston has always excelled at this kind of high-concept adventure: if you like Jumanji, I would argue that The Rocketeer and Captain America: The First Avenger are even better. But I can't help but find that cognitive dissonance between kiddie thrills and genuine peril to be more than a little disquieting. Nothing's going to dissuade you from watching Jumanji if you're already a fan, but if you're not, then proceed with (a little) caution.
Here's the thing: Lionsgate's failed franchise starter American Assassin is nowhere near as bad as its critical reputation might suggest. Sure, we're getting the budget-priced version of this globetrotting thriller, but once you accept the stock establishing shots and preponderance of murky interiors as a given, the film totally works as a B-rate actioner. It's propulsive and violent (the digital squib blood aligns American Assassin with Sylvester Stallone's junky Expendables franchise probably more that the American Assassin team would like); it traffics in global-terrorism stereotypes that went out of vogue after the last Jack Ryan adventure (amazingly, that's a compliment - I love The Sum of All Fears, retrograde as its worldview might be); and it benefits enormously from two phenomenal supporting performances. Michael Keaton isn't stretching at all as the titular character's shadowy black-ops mentor, but you won't care. No one plays potentially duplicitous better than Keaton, and he relishes diving into the character's ambiguities. Furthermore, in this most predictable of potboilers, Keaton gets the only surprising moment, a moment of frenzied violence that recalls his unhinged Beetlejuice turn, of all things. And Taylor Kitsch is his equal as the film's more traditional heavy. Again, he's playing an archetype - Keaton's former protégé who went rogue (think a less sexually ambiguous version of Silva from Skyfall) - except we always understand the wounded humanity that pushed Kitsch to the dark side. I don't know what it is about this guy - as the male lead, he barely registers (John Carter and Battleship, we hardly knew ye), but give him a juicy supporting part here or in this fall's even better Only the Brave, and he's the second coming of James Dean. A better movie would give either of these two characters center stage: the spy who knows where all the bodies are buried because he put them there, or the American patriot who turns towards terrorism after his country betrays him. But Keaton and Kitsch aren't the leads. That honor goes to Dylan O'Brien, and therein lies the rub. O'Brien is fine in the Maze Runner movies because they require nothing from him. Both actor and movie are lightweight, and that's okay. But here, as a fledgling CIA operative hunting anyone involved in the murder of his fiancée, O'Brien strikes one as fatally out of his depth. I feel bad for the guy. He's clearly subjected himself to ruthless physical conditioning so that we'll buy his facility during the movie's many action sequences, but every time he opens his mouth...ouch. O'Brien's voice has the breathy cadence of a child playing grown-up (vocally, he's got a little of that Ryan Gosling squeak without any of Gosling's unsettling charisma), and we never buy the pain that ostensibly propels him from one violent conflict to the next. Is his underwhelming presence enough to sink American Assassin? No - it's a fine timewaster. But where's Chris Hemsworth when you need him?
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "you pretty much know (or at least should know, if you've ever seen a movie of this ilk before) what you're in for...with a hardnosed trainer trying to deal with a rule breaking brat who can't (or won't) follow orders, but who keeps getting the job done anyway. Along the way it's revealed that the chief villain in this piece, known mostly as Ghost (Taylor Kitsch), has a long history with Stan (of course), and is out to create a nuclear catastrophe. There's a putative love interest as well in the form of an embedded spy named Annika (Shiva Negar), who turns out to be - well, I won't 'spoil' anything, other than to say this particular twist is going to surprise no one. The film has a number of really well done action elements, but it's hobbled by its familiarity and by a really unhelpful climax that sees a nuclear bomb being detonated beneath the ocean, which in turn creates a spectacularly unrealistic CGI tsunami that almost takes out the Sixth Fleet. It's all resolutely silly stuff, but it's played with some considerable conviction by Keaton, O'Brien, and Kitsch, all of whom strut about with testosterone virtually oozing from their pores."