For the week of March 19th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the hit action-comedy Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle to Blu-ray. I think I slightly underrated this film when I first saw it in theaters. In updating the Jumanji story for the twenty-first century (and make no mistake - this film is definitely more of a remake/reboot than a sequel, one late-act reference to Robin Williams aside), Welcome to the Jungle makes some moves that work (changing the gaming platform from a board game to an NES-style console) and some that seem a little stale (retrofitting the whole endeavor to suit a familiar "Be yourself" message). As such, I remember thinking Welcome to the Jungle serviceable and nothing more. I may have remarked that if you were looking to get out of the cold, you could do a lot worse. But the picture works a lot better on a second viewing. There's something to be said for formula delivered at an energetic, unpretentious pace, and director Jake Kasdan never condescends to the material in this regard. He's been struggling to deliver satisfying studio fare since his underrated 2002 comedy Orange County (movies like Sex Tape and Bad Teacher do his CV no favors), and here, I think he's cracked the formula. After quickly and efficiently establishing the rules of Jumanji (you get three lives, and if you use all of them, you die for real), Kasdan stages a series of cracking action setpieces, the best one being Karen Gillian's wonderfully awkward seduction/beatdown of a few Jumanji goons. They aren't quite Raiders of the Lost Ark-level caliber, but they work, and even when you're aware of the CGI manipulation at hand: a heavily digitized helicopter chase and jaguar pursuit still thrill, thanks to Kasdan's facility for shooting action. However, it's ultimately that whole self-empowerment message that elevates Welcome to the Jungle beyond its humble origins. All four of the leads (Gillan, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black) are merely videogame avatars for the far less imposing teenage characters (Morgan Turner, Alex Wolff, Ser'Darius Blain, and Madison Iseman) playing the game, and that disconnect between inside and outside yields results both comic and touching. It's funny watching Black copy the mannerisms of Iseman's Instagram-crazy teenage girl (and if nothing else, Welcome to the Jungle merits attention for just how funny Black is - he hasn't been this riotous since maybe School of Rock); it's unexpectedly moving watching The Rock struggle to balance his physical gifts against all the roiling insecurity Wolff's geeky outsider constantly feels. Here, too, I credit Kasdan - he directed the pilot of the late, great Freaks and Geeks, and he brings enough of that show's genuine angst to keep the proceedings authentic.
Martin Liebman wrote that "this film's success or failure falls squarely on the characters and the cast that portrays them. The script is witty and packed with humor, but never obnoxiously so; it's a Comedy, and the cast hams it up and has fun with the character moments which are many and equally dispersed between the four primaries. Jack Black, probably the most reliable comedian working in movies today, is hilarious. He commits to the part - a self-absorbed high school beauty queen dropped into the body of a middle aged, pudgy man - with glee and no boundaries. Scenes of self-deprecation are a joy, and he nails the cadence of the overstressed teenage girl who is not simply out of her body and (more importantly) out of touch with her phone but also out of her league, at least until she realizes she has a gift for reading a map, ironic since she'd otherwise probably have an app dictate directions to her and likely wind up as one of those people who drives off a cliff because she too trusting of her device and too distracted to watch where she's actually going. Dwayne Johnson is awesome portraying an allergy-riddled weakling teenager who, amongst the four, is the most familiar with video games. Karen Gillan rocks as a shy girl who is suddenly Lara Croft, and Kevin Hart does classic Kevin Hart as the support character who totes a magic bag full of whatever the others need and who will explode if he eats cake (it sound ridiculous but provides one of the movie's funniest scenes and, hey, what a way to stay on that diet!)."
There's little that's immediately authentic about Joe Dante's 1989 cult classic The 'Burbs, and maybe that's why I find it so charming. I have to imagine that, following the relatively poor box-office showing of Dante's great Innerspace, no studio was going to let him near a big-budget property for a while. The 'Burbs represented, on the surface, a gentle course correction. Dana Olsen's script takes a cracked bit of social satire (Tom Hanks's bored everyman becomes convinced his mysterious neighbors are murderous Satanists) and filters it through the limited confines of one suburban neighborhood. However, if you're familiar with Joe Dante, then you know he's a cinema fetishist on par with Quentin Tarantino or Frank Tashlin, so you'll find it no surprise that he took The 'Burbs and let it go delightfully insane. Yes, Dante restricted himself to a studio set, but only as an opportunity to pay homage to the greatest limited-location thriller of all time: just like Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, The 'Burbs feels far more expansive than it is, thanks to Dante's peerless technical control and beyond-dynamic camera effects (the work that DP Robert M. Stevens does is on par with vintage Spielberg or Zemeckis). Even the Colonial Street set itself feels like a series of sedentary in-jokes - it's the same backdrop for series like Dragnet, Leave It To Beaver, and eventually Quantum Leap and Desperate Housewives. The end result feels like stereotypical suburbia on acid, and I doubt Dante would have it any other way. Still, he'd have a winner on his hands if we were judging The 'Burbs on performances alone. At times, the actors make the film play like a live-action King of the Hill: Hanks is an exasperated straight man one Texas accent away from Hank Hill, Bruce Dern plays the local Dale Gribble-esque conspiracy nut, Corey Feldman could be a more coherent riff on the easygoing Boomhauer, and the late Rick Ducommun walks away with the movie as a pathetic busybody just as hilarious-sad as Hill's iconic Bill Dauterive. I mention King of the Hill because it cares about so many of the same things as The 'Burbs does - the cartoonish caricatures, the hang-out vibe, and the unyielding belief that there's nothing funnier than an person's weird little foibles. If The 'Burbs isn't the best Joe Dante movie, then it's certainly one of my favorites, and good on Shout Factory for giving it the respect it's always deserved.
"Respect" is a word I've always bandied about when discussing Takashi Miike's brutal gangster melodrama Ichi the Killer, which Well Go USA has given a new restoration. I do not "like" Ichi the Killer; on an almost cellular level, this film exists to disgust and revolt. The whole opening operates as grisly provocation, with first Ichi (Nao Omori) pleasuring himself to a brutal attack (that Miike genders in some deeply comfortable ways) and then the similarly pain-obsessed Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano) graphically torturing a criminal rival before cutting off part of his own tongue. At times, it plays like Miike is daring the audience to look away, so relentless is his assault on our sensibilities, and none of it feels "good." But I have no doubt that Ichi the Killer is exactly the film that Miike set out to make, and as such, it has a sort of horrifying intensity. Like Kakihara, Miike is fascinates with the intersection of cruelty and pleasure, but while pictures like Audition and Blade of the Immortal allow him to filter this interest through more conventional genre expressions, Ichi the Killer is a deep dive immersion into the ugliest parts of this human experience. Hence my respect for what Miike is doing. I might find much of the proceedings reprehensible, but I can't fault Miike for delivering exactly what he's promised. It helps, too (if only a little), that Miike's formal mastery is so pronounced. Believe it or not, but Ichi the Killer is actually a comic-book movie (it takes inspiration from Hideo Yamamoto's manga), and it plays like Miike's Dick Tracy, so pronounced are the various stylistic and aesthetic effects. Again, I don't blame anyone who can't make it through this one (I didn't finish it on my first attempt), and I doubt I'll ever watch it again, but Miike is an artist, and Ichi the Killer, in its own bloody, visceral way, is a gory slab of art.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "any number of…potentially pejorative adjectives could be lobbed at Takashi Miike's controversial effort, including repulsive, grotesque, disturbing, degrading, et al. And yet the film maintains a peculiarly high profile in the eyes of many, despite imagery that virtually assaults the viewer, and a stylized approach toward ultra violence that may seriously upset more sensitive audience members. That very style would seem to harken back to another film made at the nexus of media sensation and rampant, over the top violence, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Like Stone, Miike seems to be making the point that the very depiction of violence is part of what fuels modern media. If Stone's target (so to speak) was the 24-hour news cycle, perhaps the case could be made that Miike was focusing on violence in film itself and how that affects the audience. It's a deliberately provocative thesis, one made even more provocative by Miike's predilection toward offering some of the most savage imagery imaginable. As a result, Ichi the Killer is most decidedly not for everyone."
Finally, Lionsgate is giving a Blu-ray showing to the low-key mystery-thriller Small Town Crime. I'm getting really tired of this increasing trend towards "Aborted TV Pilot Syndrome." As in, some creatives write a spec pilot and have to retrofit it into a standalone venture when prospective financiers say they're interested in the script but not in producing a TV show. The Justified and Breaking Bad pilots aside, most first episodes don't have enough intrigue to sustain a whole movie because they only need to pique your interest so you buy into the remaining five, or eleven, or twenty-one episodes of television. Well, Small Town Crime feels like a failed pilot, and it evinces all the shortcomings of the medium. We get a host of supporting characters (Michael Vartan's gruff-but-sympathetic cop; Octavia Spencer and Anthony Anderson's quirky married couple; Robert Forster's badass rich guy; Clifton Collins' irritating pimp/gunsel Mood, with his atypical moral code and predilection for Motown) with little to do, ostensibly because they'll get their own standalone episodes a little further down the line; and they all buttress a one-off mystery that a) isn't that surprising or suspenseful but b) wouldn't really need to be if its sole purpose was to setup the world of the series. To Small Town Crime's credit, it's a little better directed than most pilots are - Eshom and Ian Nelms are more-than competent filmmakers, especially concerning their surprisingly visceral approach to violence (vide the nasty moment when an evil henchman gets his jaw blown off and doesn't die) - but by the time we end with the hero applying for the P.I. license that will, ostensibly, come in handy over a series that simply does not exist, it's hard to feel like we're paying premium rates for something we should get for free. And yet I can't quite dismiss Small Town Crime, and for one simple reason: John Hawkes. Every generation deserves its own Robert Ryan, and we've got Hawkes, who shares Ryan's gift for simultaneously conveying recklessness, vulnerability, and tremulous authority. As Mike Kendall, an alcoholic ex-cop-turned-unlicensed P.I., Hawkes is tremendous. His opening scene, which finds him drinking heavily while pumping iron (and then nonchalantly sicking up all his beer afterwards), is a character introduction on par with Paul Newman's iconic Harper entrance. Even when Small Town Crime gets too cutesy for its own good (everything with Collins' character; a sneering Big Bad who also wears a distracting hearing aid), Hawkes grounds the proceedings, and the worst thing about Small Town Crime not going to series is that we don't get to watch him shamble along, week after week.