For the week of January 22nd, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing a 4K remaster of Groundhog Day to Blu-ray. On an aesthetic level, nothing about this modestly scaled fantasy-comedy screams 4K update, but when you've got a movie as good as this one is, it's hard to complain. Groundhog Day is a rarity: a perfect comedy, and one that packs so much thematic resonance inside a deceptively simple premise. Ostensibly, Bill Murray stars as Phil Connors, a weatherman who dreams of making it to the national TV markets, but as with so many of his roles, Murray is basically playing a variation on his own iconic persona: dry, sardonic, and endlessly convinced of his own superiority. He's such a prick that it'd be pleasurable enough watching Connors put up with small town America during his yearly Groundhog Day's sojourn to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, except Danny Rubin's script has far more on its mind besides city-mouse/country-mouse stereotypes. See, after reporting on the holiday and acting casually belligerent towards his producer (Andie McDowell) and cameraman (Chris Elliott), Phil settles in for the night and wakes up...on Groundhog Day...again...and again...and again. We're just as surprised as Phil is when he enters the Twilight Zone, and I continue to marvel at how thoroughly Rubin and director Harold Ramis exploit this premise. It feels like we get all the permutations of Phil trying to escape whatever temporal loop he's in - first he reacts with horror, then desperation, then mounting amusement at his ability to exploit this realm, then suicidal acceptance of his fate, before finally...but that's where things really get interesting. As funny as Groundhog Day is - and this is easily Ramis' finest directorial at-bat, so adeptly does he mine humor from the repetition of the day - it's also one of the few modern farces to get better when it starts to get serious. After Phil exhausts all the possibilities of his new reality, he does the truly unthinkable. He starts to look inward, to see which of his personal failings might be trapping him in this purgatory, and he tries to fix them. We talk about how good Murray is in more dramatic features like Broken Flowers or Lost in Translation, but he's almost ineffably touching here because we don't expect the depths he brings. One minute, Murray is riffing snarkily a la his Meatballs or Stripes protagonists, and the next, he's ruminating on his lack of character and trying to forge some kind of authentic human relationship. It's the platonic ideal of his whole sad-clown image. But leave it to Groundhog Day to find humanity in the most surprising of places. The film plays like Preston Sturges meets Ray Bradbury, layering in morality play on top of fantasy caper on top of Eastern mysticism, and in as graceful a package as you'd ever hope to see - it's amazing that a movie this dense clocks in at just over an hour and a half. Groundhog Day is a sneaky masterpiece, and if it takes 4K to attract new viewers, so be it. The movie deserves the attention.
Martin Liebman wrote thatGroundhog Day "is a special film not only for its comedic theatrics or one of the top performances of Bill Murray's career but for its blend of humorous and heartfelt storytelling about an aloof and self-centered man who repeats what he believes to be the worst day of his life that gradually turns into his best. A bad situation - one from which he cannot escape - becomes a life-changing exploration of his innermost soul amidst the ups and downs of small town life on a blustery winter's day. The film finds character complexity through plenty of humor. It balances a bit of crass content, localized flavor, repetitious yet ever evolutionary laughs, and narrative depth and meshes it all together with seamless precision, where the dramatic content and the comedic content become so effortlessly entwined that both feel prominent yet never overpowering, equal partners in telling a tale of redemption over time yet in no time at all. Filled with memorable dialogue, classic moments, unforgettable side characters, wonderful comedic antics, and touching narrative excellence, the film remains an icon of contemporary cinema and an infinitely re-watchable and ever-enjoyable tale."
As part of its effort to 4K-ify their backcatalog, Paramount Home Media Distribution is giving 4K Blu-ray releases to both 2008's Cloverfield and its 2016 follow-up 10 Cloverfield Lane. The less said about the first Cloverfield, the better. The pitch is probably the most interesting thing about it: what if Godzilla played out as a found-footage chiller? That approach works for approximately thirty minutes, and then we're spent sifting through some unendurable shakycam footage, lame mumblecore dialogue (courtesy of a cast that includes Mike Vogel, Odette Annable, Jessica Lucas, Michael Stahl-David, and Lizzy Caplan, who would go on to much better things after this movie), and a Bad Robot monster that looks just like every other creature producer J.J. Abrams trots out when he makes a monster movie. 10 Cloverfield Lane, however, has much more to recommend. After losing consciousness in a freak car accident, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up in the underground bunker of one Howard Stambler (John Goodman), a survivalist who claims that some kind of global catastrophe has occurred and that those people locked inside (which also include John Gallagher Jr.'s sweet-but-dopey carpenter) might be the last people on Earth. However, the longer Michelle spends underground, the more she grows unsure of Howard's story or his true intentions towards his fellow co-inhabitants. It's a great hook, and one of 10 Cloverfield Lane's greatest pleasures is how long it sustains the premise's inherent suspense. Don't let the title fool you - this film relates to the earlier Cloverfield in the same way any given episode of The Twilight Zone connects to the episodes before and after it. Director Dan Trachtenberg ditches the found-footage aesthetic, electing instead to tell the story in third-person widescreen images, and the sinuous, gliding way that he and cinematographer Jeff Cutter chart the space within the bunker reminds me - I kid you not - of Alfred Hitchcock. Simple actions - the three settling down for a meal, a trip to the bathroom, the need to change the air-filtration system - become nerve-wracking tests of will, especially once Trachtenberg and his co-screenwriter Damien Chazelle (you know, the guy behind Whiplash and La La Land) suggest that Goodman's character might be both right and wrong, a combination that unsettles more than either-or. And had 10 Cloverfield Lane maintained that course all the way through, we'd be looking at an exemplary genre feature. However, after about ninety minutes - and here I'll try to tread lightly - Trachtenberg hops genres to something closer in line with what the first Cloverfield had to offer, and the tension starts to deflate. I'm fine with movies that shift genres (From Dusk Till Dawn is one of the great B-movie siege movies precisely because it takes a hard turn from violent noir to splatter horror), except Trachtenberg bungles the balance of elements. We either need to spend less time on the first narrative and more time on the second (something closer to 50/50, as opposed to the current 90/10 split), or we need more overt elements from the second narrative strung throughout the first (think Night of the Living Dead or The Thing). 10 Cloverfield Lane's "new" content is fine when you're watching it, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Imagine someone suddenly flipping channels from one movie to another, so you lose much of the narrative investment you had in the first story.
From A24 and Lionsgate comes Yorgos Lanthimos' grimly funny morality play The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I certainly appreciated Lanthimos' 2015 black comedy The Lobsterwhen I first saw it, but it's lingered with me in all the wrong ways; it's too clever by half, and Lanthimos never quite pulls off the delicate tonal shifts, especially in its even more surreal second half. But The Killing of a Sacred Deer has only grown in stature the longer I've thought about it - the film might be Lanthimos' strongest work. Maybe that's because ultimately, Lanthimos is making a horror movie, and a viscerally unsettling one at that. After Colin Farrell's heart surgeon accidentally kills a man on the operating table, the patient's son (Barry Keoghan) ingratiates himself into the surgeon's life, only to make an ultimatum: kill someone from your own family, or else they'll all die. What transpires has more in common with a Grimm's fairy tale than anything resembling the real world - one by one, the surgeon's family mysteriously grows ill, first losing their ability to move before bleeding from the eyes, and all the while Farrell's arrogant father desperately tries to insist that he was never at fault. But as with The Lobster, Lanthimos isn't remotely interested in realism. DP Thimios Bakatakis shoots so much of this film in wide-angle lenses that distort and warp the otherwise normal suburban surroundings (Lanthimos filmed much of The Killing of a Sacred Deer in Cincinnati, but for all we know, we could in a planned community just north of Purgatory), and like Stanley Kubrick, Lanthimos has a gift for turning even the most mundane conversations into hostile portents of dread. Even before Farrell's family starts physically falling apart, they seem to speak in angry code - an early dinner conversation between Farrell and his young son (Sunny Suljic) about the latter needing a haircut reminds me of Barry Lyndon in how the subtext keeps swallowing up the affectless line readings. At a certain point, the normal world becomes anything but, giving Lanthimos the freedom to stage his horrifying climax, which finds the family bound together in their opulent living room for the most nerve-wracking of purposes. "Nerve-wracking" describes the whole movie, and I understand anyone who'd rather not subject themselves to the film's awful sterility. Yet I can't deny Lanthimos' gift for horror or the masterful performances he gets from his leads. Keoghan's awkward young sadist might be the most indelible screen villain of 2017, and he acts as a disturbing foil for Farrell, who always seems energized working with Lanthimos - in this and The Lobster, Farrell exhibits this controlled fearlessness that I never see elsewhere. And Nicole Kidman (as Farrell's wife) might be better than both of them. Just when we think we can rely on her as our moral exemplar, her character pivots suddenly and unmoors the whole third act. I'm not sure what larger points Lanthimos is making, but when the experience is this scary/funny/bizarre, it's hard to care.
Finally, we end with the most controversial release of the week: Twilight Time's Husbands and Wives disc. Even back in 1992, it was hard to process what filmmaker Woody Allen was doing here. The film premiered during the thick of Allen's public relationship with Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn - not to mention Allen's contentious separation from Farrow - yet it seemed to lean into this whole ugly situation. In telling the story of two married couples (Allen and Farrow; Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) that split apart, Allen gives his character a twenty-one-year-old paramour (Juliette Lewis) who motivates him towards divorce in much the same way Allen did when he met Previn. Often times, we find ourselves commenting on how Allen's art seems to resemble his life; Manhattan had his on-screen proxy romancing a seventeen-year-old (Mariel Hemingway) in a manner not dissimilar from his own relationship with then-seventeen-year-old Stacey Nelkin (Allen also fell in love with Hemingway during shooting because of course he did), but Husbands and Wives doesn't even need its mockumentary frame to fell like an honest-to-God documentary. This is one of Allen's most hostile, despairing movies, with Carlo De Palma's vérité camera darting about to catch every bitter insult exchanged between the four protagonists, and while I applaud the psychological depths it plumbs (Pollack and Davis are especially wrenching), I enjoy almost nothing about the experience. And in light of further sexual misconduct allegations levied against Allen, Husbands and Wives scans as all the more unendurable. Increasingly, I find it hard to separate the art from the artist, particularly in cases like this, where the artist is almost daring you to read them as one and the same.