For the week of February 26th, Disney and Pixar are releasing the delightful animated feature Coco on Blu-ray. There's a lot to love about this film, which follows young Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) on a journey through the Land of the Dead, not least of which are its stunning visual eye, its deep appreciation for Mexican culture and music, and its unironic sympathy for all things family. But I think I'm most grateful for the presence of co-director Lee Unkrich. Unkrich was also responsible for the studio's grand 2009 adventure Up, and he brings such a unique approach to both features. Whereas most animated pictures hold themselves to fairly rigid narrative templates, Unkrich prefers a little more sprawling indulgence. He makes grand hangout fare that privileges character and emotion over plot, and as such, Coco has this bouncy unpredictability that keeps upending the central narrative throughline. Yes, we have a ticking clock, of sorts, as Miguel tries to reclaim his humanity before sunrise, except Unkrich keeps us from feeling that deadline too intensely. It's a good thing: in a more tightly scripted story, we might lose the breathtaking passing of Chicharrón (Edward James Olmos, in a heartbreaking little cameo) or the riotous sequence where Miguel ends up inspiring none other than a skeletal Frida Kahlo. To Unkrich's credit, when he does need to get us back on track, he does so admirably, gently emphasizing the importance of Miguel's unwitting partner Héctor (the great Gael García Bernal) and his great-great-grandfather Ernesto (Benjamin Bratt), although I'd wager that we're more invested in the "important" stuff because the film allows us to dawdle in its world. At times, Coco plays like Up in reverse (both even feature scene-stealing turns from goofy dog sidekicks), in that Coco ends with the heartbreak that Up foregrounds, and this emotional closer proves just as moving as anything in the Pixar library. If Pixar has been in a slump recently (The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, and Cars 3 are, at the very best, solid but unspectacular), then Coco pulls it right out. One of last year's most enjoyable features.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film's thematic resonance, story depth, and surprise final focus alone make it a treat, but so too does the film's attention to detail and sense of authenticity even in a film that journeys to an invisible world inhabited by the dead. The film is robustly constructed, with the filmmakers clearly pouring not only researched and recreated visuals onto the screen but doing so with an obvious passion for vibrancy and complexity, making the world a believable compliment to the story it hosts. The film is beautifully rendered, lacking nothing in terms of modern digital amenities including dynamic coloring and various environmental elements that are as dense and complex as the real world they recreate. Characters are richly detailed and perfectly voiced by an impressively talented cast that immediately falls into character and understands the movie's broad structural components as well as its intimately designed heart and soul. The film is the total package of visual and narrative excellence, unsurprising coming from Pixar, a studio that continues to place emphasis on narrative purpose and heart with its visuals, which are the best in the industry, serving as mere supports to something much more meaningful and beautiful than any computer could ever produce."
But Coco isn't the only showing from the Disney catalog: no, we also get a new "Signature" edition of the 1955 animated classic Lady and the Tramp. Look, on a practical level, this new iteration has little to recommend it over the film's previous "Diamond" edition other than that one is out of print, and this one isn't; as far as I can tell, the audio/video transfers are identical, and the Signature version even drops some of the earlier special features (although the digital copy on the new Blu-ray is nice). That said, if you don't already have Lady and the Tramp in high definition, then the Signature release becomes essential viewing. With every passing year, Lady and the Tramp looks more and more like a stone classic, and not for the reasons you might think. Sure, everyone remembers the spaghetti-eating scene between the titular characters, or the ending that flirts with darkness before ever-so-gently pulling it back, but the key to the film's enduring popularity lies in its first half hour, which ranks as one of the most lovely sequences in all the Disney canon. With breathtaking economy, directors Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske take us into the world of the Dears (voiced by Lee Millar and Peggy Lee); in theory, we're in the Midwest circa 1909, but what the film really gives us is Walt Disney's dream of Midwestern life, a small-town idyll free from all the social and political pressures of the real world. This space is no more realistic than Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu or Shangri-la - it should come as no surprise that Disney based Main Street, USA, in Disneyland off his Lady and the Tramp environs - yet it's as magical as any Hollywood dreamscape. It's in that world that we first meet Lady. I love how Lady initially expresses herself through non-verbal behavior, and how the filmmakers handle the slow, lazy passing of time (the transition between puppy Lady and adult Lady on the bed still takes my breath away). The storytelling patience here is admirable, so much so that I always sigh a little once Lady starts talking and the Tramp shows up. It's not that this material is bad (it isn't) - it's just that what comes before it is perfect, and you don't mess with perfection.
Martin Liebman wrote that the new "release of Lady and the Tramp adds a few new fluffy bonus features, removes a couple of admittedly inconsequential ones, carries over a few core goodies, and transitions some to digital. Video and audio remain unchanged. With the previous Diamond release out of print and fetching top dollar both new and used, now is certainly the time for newcomers to snag a copy of this classic film on Blu-ray. But for those who already own the previously released Diamond Edition, there's little incentive to upgrade beyond collection completion's sake, whatever it is one may collect, including packaging, which is very handsome."
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes the Academy Award-nominated Darkest Hour. The best reason to watch Darkest Hour is the phenomenal makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji. You've seen Tsuji's labors before - he worked with Rick Baker on the Tim Roth ape from Planet of the Apes and the Edgar alien from Men in Black, and he was responsible for making Joseph Gordon-Levitt look more like Bruce Willis in Looper - but his Winston Churchill prosthetics for Darkest Hour might be one of his two or three most impressive screen creations (alongside his incredible Mason Verger makeup from Ridley Scott's Hannibal). As Tsuji explains it (in target="blank">an awesome Vulture profile that's more interesting than Darkest Hour), star Gary Oldman and Churchill look absolutely nothing like one another, so the whole process of merging them unfolded as one of trial-and-error: make the face rounder, lose the eyes; widen the eyes, lose Churchill's baby-faced pout. Looking at the end result, I wasn't surprised to learn that Tsuji has been making outsized busts of famous historical figures. Even modeled on Oldman, his Churchill art has the same kind of fascinating sculptural density. Sadly, though, Tsuji's work is the only exceptional thing about the movie. This is as staid and conventional a docudrama as I've ever seen, so much so that it hardly seems the product of the otherwise nervy, idiosyncratic Joe Wright. Wright has brought a florid style not unlike Ken Russell to films like Hanna and the underrated Anna Karenina, and I suspect the high-profile failures of both Anna and Pan scared him straight. How else to explain Darkest Hour's tedious, unobtrusive restraint? Occasionally, Wright will toss in a welcome virtuosic flourish (a tracking shot through a bombed-out Allied camp; an affinity for overhead shots of WWII landscapes that, in one breathtaking instance, transition into a dead soldier's face), but for the most part, what he offers has the same visual polish as a decent HBO movie-of-the-week. Just a lot of dark, shadowy rooms filled with pasty white dudes arguing about war. DP Bruno Delbonnel gives the picture a lovely velvety texture, but you'll find little that I'd call cinematic. I'm reminded of Lincoln, which is the ideal for this type of movie: historically resonant, yes, but visually interesting and wittily scripted. You'll find little wit on display here - Anthony McCarten's script operates as a functional procedural, with only the actors working to juice the text. Kristin Scott Thomas does nice work as Winston Churchill's patient, flinty wife, as does the great Ben Mendelsohn as a surprisingly dashing King George VI, although I could have done without the bland Lily James (playing Churchill's new secretary), and I'm nowhere as keen as Oldman as the rest of the world is. He's fine, but he brings nothing special to animate the character, especially if you compare him with John Lithgow's less flashy work in The Crown. Again, Tsuji's art bring the part to life, and not the other way around.
Martin Liebman wrote that "for such a serious story and film, small lights of humorous character building moments and brief escapes from the dire realities of war humanize the character and the world around him. Churchill, gruff as he may be, carries much of the film's softer side, never a detriment to or deterrent from the main story but serving as a necessary foil for the dramatic intensity that unfolds throughout the film. Darkest Hour offers a secondary perspective through the eyes of his secretary, a woman who is run out of his room in tears within minutes of meeting him but who becomes a steadfast ally and even a friend. Her brother is in danger in Dunkirk, and as history falls on Churchill's shoulders, she carries the burden, too, as she puts his words to paper, essentially certifying world-shaping events. Gary Oldman is absolutely stellar, not simply standing in Winston Churchill's shoes but embodying the man with fierce tenacity and practiced yet effortless delivery."
Finally, we end with Criterion's release of Tony Richardson's Tom Jones. I don't think it's too sacrilegious to suggest that Tom Jones might be the most forgotten of all the Best Picture Oscar winners. We remember The Greatest Show on Earth for how bad it is and Dances with Wolves for how infamous, but outside of English lit. majors, you'd be hard-pressed to find many a) familiar with Tom Jones and b) aware that it won the highest honor at the 36th Academy Awards. And to some degree, the film deserves better. Using Henry Fielding's classic picaresque novel as inspiration, Richardson and his iconic screenwriting partner John Osborne took the story of the titular charming English rogue (Albert Finney) and used it as a framework for one postmodern filmmaking gag after another. They tell the story of Tom's birth in the style of a silent movie (complete with title cards), and they make every character aware that they're in a movie. Jones hangs his hat on the camera at one point, and the narrator will tell viewers when he's about to cut away from the proceedings because they're getting too racy. I get why this film won Best Picture - British and American audiences must have thought they were looking at a film communiqué from the future, so radical were the devices at hand (the French, unsurprisingly, wouldn't have been too impressed, given how much the film appropriates from their Gallic New Wave leanings). But Tom Jones is also remarkably undisciplined, and in ways that distract us from the provocative ideas and filmmaking conceits. Walter Lassally adopts a handheld, New Wave-ian camera approach that comes off as equal parts freewheeling and sloppy - the many day-for-night scenes degenerate into soft murk - and Richardson's decision to break the fourth wall feels more like a cute idea on which he never fully capitalizes. Finney seems rightly abashed to stare down the barrel at us (he gets one great moment in this regard, when he's arguing with an innkeeper over a missing 500-pound note and turns to us to ask, "Did you see her take it?"), and as such, these moments happen so infrequently that they never become an organic part of the aesthetic. And that's a shame since Richardson is trying to do something really cool, to expose the rot under the faux-gentility of the Georgian era, so much so that the film itself becomes an active participant in the deconstruction process. Ironically, though, an infinitely more formally composed picture would exceed Tom Jones in this manner: Stanley Kubrick's great Barry Lyndon, which uses painterly, static images and bone-dry understatement to deliver one devastating satirical cut after another. Kubrick understood that you need to apply exquisite patience to the worst human foibles, whereas Richardson preferred a battering ram. Still, Kubrick has no Oscars to Richardson's two, so what do I know?