For the week of January 15th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 to Blu-ray. I suppose that in this time of endless reboots and sequels, I shouldn't be surprised that someone greenlit a Blade Runner sequel, but I certainly wasn't pleased. More than most films, Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic just doesn't seem to warrant a big-budget follow-up. It's too elliptical, too strange, a Raymond Chandler knock-off cross-pollinated with some William Gibson and then filtered through a thick haze of marijuana smoke. Blade Runner doesn't care about traditional narrative payoffs or audience identification - even today, it plays like a gleaming alien object. Plus, it initially lost a lot of money, so it's even more inexplicable that Warner would invest $150 million (and that's what the studio's copping to - it could be much more) to sequelize a movie that wasn't a conventional success by any metric. Still, anyone familiar with Villeneuve knows he's a real filmmaker (Sicario, in particular, is one of the decade's great films), and his name was enough to dampen a lot of my initial skepticisms. And after five viewings, I can say that I like what Villeneuve has done. He is working again with the legendary DP Roger Deakins, and together, the two create images that are as indelible as anything as anything Scott and his (equally brilliant) cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth conjured for the first Blade Runner. Villeneuve and Deakins never try to copy the earlier film's aesthetic - if Scott/Cronenweth defined Blade Runner through dripping rain and bustling cityscapes (think a live-action Metal Hurlant splash page), Villeneuve/Deakins work in mist and snow. We're re-entering this world after a digital cataclysm has wiped much of society clean, so the hazy, ashy images here suggest a world in the aftermath of a nuclear fallout. We have to struggle a little to make anything out, and that work mirrors the experience of "K" (Ryan Gosling, working squarely in tortured Drive territory here), a replicant Blade Runner (as an android who hunts other androids, Gosling does such great work at letting that paradox consume him) who discovers a box full of bones on a routine mission and eventually finds himself negotiating a conspiracy that could unsettle the balance between humans and robots. More than that, I should not say because Warner frowns on spoilers, although if that's the case, I do wonder why all their marketing spoiled the biggest spoiler: that Gosling's investigation brings him into the orbit of Harrison Ford's retired Blade Runner Rick Deckard. In a perfect world, Ford's appearance would be a complete surprise (Villeneuve certainly structures it that way in the film), but even I have to admit that how Blade Runner 2049 intertwines these two characters makes for a more coherent/interesting noir mystery than we find in the original Blade Runner. In particular, the first hour and change is phenomenal - it does such a nice job of balancing genre demands with far weightier thematic concerns that are equal parts Arthur C. Clarke and Andrei Tarkovsky - and Villeneuve gets good performances out of everyone, with Sylvia Hoeks (as a violent replicant enforcer) and Dave Bautista (doing subtle, beautiful work - he might be a great actor, full stop) taking top honors. Even Jared Leto (as the film's nominal Big Bad) isn't terrible, once you get past the fact that it's Jared Leto. After a while, though, the film loses some of its focus. While I never found the film boring, it is a long 164 minutes, and I wonder if screenwriter Michael Green could have triaged some of that on the script level. As with his Logan script, it takes Green too much time to introduce a key plot component, and to the detriment of the movie's narrative propulsion. Furthermore, the film has a huge villain problem - the end feints so hard towards another sequel that you wonder if the film were just saving a legitimate bad guy for that movie, and to the detriment of this one. But here's the thing: the original Blade Runner is just as flawed in its own right! It balances good and bad with the same aplomb 2049 does, so by that standard, the new film is a rousing achievement. Unsurprisingly, Blade Runner 2049 flopped at the box office, yet I suspect it will endure. It holds the same hushed appeal of its predecessor.
The best movie of this week, though, is Joe Dante's utterly charming Matinee, which gets a special-edition release from Shout Select. Like most of Dante's non-Gremlins work, Matinee didn't get half the attention it deserved during its 1993 release window. And that's a shame, given that this sweet, goofy ode to 1960s creature features might be Dante's best film. He takes viewers back to Key West, Florida, circa 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis rages in the news, but young Gene Loomis (Jesse Fenton) is more focused on sci-fi monster movies, specifically the oeuvre of schlockmeister Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman). Dante based Woolsey on William Castle, who used all sorts of gimmicky tricks to bolster the Z-grade stories on screen (stringing skeletons through the theater during House on Haunted Hill; installing buzzers under the seats to mimic the titular monster's attacks in The Tingler), but even Castle never did anything as calculated as Woolsey does here - he figures he'll capitalize on Key West's constant fear of nuclear annihilation (given its proximity to Cuba) and premiere his latest chiller Mant (half man, half ant - you get it) there so the movie will seem so much scarier by comparison. In any other hands, Matinee might play like Testament or something, but Dante turns it into a comic-book hangout movie: he luxuriates in the exaggerated 1960s decor and especially the movies, practically cackling alongside Loomis as his young hero gorges himself on horror movies. And he's got the perfect scene partner with Goodman, who gives one of his best-ever performances here. A lesser movie would turn Woolsey into some opportunistic huckster, and certainly, Woolsey knows he's not making Citizen Kane. But he's also deeply in love with making movies and scaring people, and Goodman conveys this sense of boundless joy at getting to do what he does. Goodman has a speech about why we love scary movies that had me in tears: it plays like a Capra-esque rallying cry for movie nerds the world round. And Matinee capitalizes on that joy over and over again in its transcendent second half, which covers the Mant premiere, with all its glories and absurdities (not least of which is Mant itself, Dante's pitch-perfect homage to the deadpan lunacy of movies like This Island Earth or Donovan's Brain), to brilliant effect. Yet for all its humor and madcap energy, Matinee ends on a moment of melancholy that feels all the more earned in today's global climate. You watch this one with a lump in your throat. Here's hoping Matinee, like Innerspace or The 'Burbs, receives a much deserved rediscovery.
From Universal Studios comes one of 2017's biggest bombs, the mystery procedural The Snowman. Since its publication in 2007, people have been clamoring to adapt Jo Nesbø's novel of the same name, and for good reason: on paper, The Snowman functions as a perfect thriller, with a flawed, noble hero (Norwegian cop Harry Hole), a diabolical murderer (who leaves a snowman at the scene of his/her crimes), and some shocking twist every few pages. If you just stay out of the way and shoot the source material, you're guaranteed a competent movie...which is why I'm at a loss to explain how things have gone so catastrophically wrong here. Almost nothing about The Snowman works on screen. I guess Michael Fassbender is predictably committed as Hole, and DP Dion Beebe has yet to lens a bad-looking movie, but really, that's about it. From the start, something seems off. Director Tomas Alfredson (replacing Martin Scorsese, who should be thanking his lucky stars he's no longer attached to this turkey) can't seem to find a satisfying rhythm, either to introduce us to the killer or to Hole, and so the film feels like its first act lasts far longer than it should. The herky-jerky editing doesn't do him any favors, admittedly; scenes either play a beat too long or end abruptly before we can figure out why they matter, and I was shocked to see Scorsese's masterful creative partner Thelma Schoonmaker listed as The Snowman's editor, given how purposeless the narrative flow is. Then I remembered something - when Schoonmaker edits something not for Scorsese, she's usually pulling a salvage job, trying to eke out something coherent during post-production (she did the same for Kenneth Lonergan during the torturous post-production of his teen melodrama Margaret). I should have taken her presence as a red flag, not to mention the involvement of no fewer than four screenwriters (Hossein Amini, Peter Straughan, and Søren Sveistrup, with uncredited help from Matthew Michael Carnahan) on a job where, given the relative linearity of the source material, only one or two would have sufficed. As such, you ache for the absurdly talented cast (Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Chloë Sevigny, James D'Arcy, and J.K. Simmons) floundering in this mess, although no one has it worse than Val Kilmer, whose detective (I think?) makes no sense (literally - he barely speaks, and when he does, it's clear someone else is dubbing his voice) and seems like he's been CGI-composited into some of his scenes. At this point, The Snowman makes four disappointing franchises for Fassbender, but I think I feel worse for Alfredson. His Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy adaptations established him as the best kind of cinematic genre purveyor; he could craft literate, intelligent thrillers aimed squarely at an adult audience that were no less exciting for their maturity. We need more filmmakers who don't just pander to children, but The Snowman is the kind of fiasco that ends careers. A real shame.