For the week of April 9th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Phantom Thread to Blu-ray. Like Barry Lyndon or Stalker, Phantom Thread feels like some alien, totemic work of genius, so dense and rich and profound that you end up resenting the first viewing because you know it won't be enough to unpack it all. To some extent, all of writer-director P.T. Anderson's films have worked like this, but whereas Boogie Nights and Magnolia demand repeat viewings so you can catch all the doodlings at the margins, his post-Punch-Drunk Love output has grown more esoteric. Anderson might have dialed down the overt technical virtuosity (although anyone who looks at movies like The Master and Inherent Vice and determines them aesthetically bland needs to start weaning themselves off sugar), and in its place he's introduced a series of cinematic monoliths: as with, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the game comes from wrestling with its strange corners and perplexing dimensions. So it goes with Phantom Thread. In theory, Anderson is using the world of dressmaking to examine human relationships. His primary subject, esteemed fashionista Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis, retiring with a bang), values his trade, his sister (an icy, brilliant Lesley Manville), and his revolving door of lovers - and in that order - yet for all his exacting personal and professional discipline, he can't control the psychic upheaval he feels upon meeting a demure young woman (the astounding Vicky Krieps) who's far less naïve than Woodcock assumes. However, that description makes Phantom Thread feel more digestible than it really is. See, Anderson is setting a trap, both for Woodcock and for the viewers, and he lures us in with all the expectations we might bring to the film. So what can I tell you? I can say that Anderson (working as his own DP, albeit with a host of talented lighting technicians and camera operators) gives the film a velvet texture that's half-Powell-and-Pressburger picture, half-Merchant-Ivory-from-the-1980s. I can say that if this is to be Day-Lewis' last role, it's one of his finest, and far funnier than one might expect from the Method Heir Apparent to Lawrence Olivier: his interplay with Krieps and Manville recalls, at times, an especially profane Oscar Wilde farce. But even his presence feels like a feint, as if Anderson used his leading man's appeal solely to herald the North American arrival of Krieps, whose placid, unnerving turn as Woodcock's beloved is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. Her shifting emotional states reflect the Jonny Greenwood score, which vacillates from peak Bernard Herrmann to something resembling the disturbing Ligetti cuts that Kubrick often used. Ultimately, this is the movie mother! should have been. Instead of Darren Aronofsky's manic sadomasochism, we get this gliding elegance that harbors infinitely more disturbing revelations about the nature of genius, and whether or not any creative can maintain a success relationship with another person. To that end, the whole film unlocks with one line at the very ending, revealing itself as the last thing we expect (I should tread carefully, but it's kinda Fifty Shades of Grey for the non-brain-damaged). Still, for all his teasing, Anderson remains infinitely wise about human desire. I suspect Phantom Thread might not play well for those who've never been in long-term partnerships - it's so needle-point specific in its intentions. That universality grips us even when the film itself is slipping the knife in between our ribs. If I'd seen Phantom Threadlast year, it would have been the best film of 2017. But I didn't, so it's easily the best film of 2018. I doubt that'll change by year's end.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "may be described as a movie about obsession. The obsession comes from two sides, which clash. On one side is Reynolds, who is a slave to his structure. On the other is Alma [Krieps], who is determined to break Reynolds free of his routine and see him see the love she has for him. Both of them forcefully will their ways on the other. Reynolds verbally chastises Alma every time she stands in his way, whether innocently and inadvertantly [sic] disrupting his ways or willfully forcing him to succumb and come to a point where he absolutely needs her. To speak of how she does so would be to spoil the film, but suffice it to say she undertakes extreme measures to break an extreme man. Whether it will work is the question, and whether the audience will accept the resolution is another entirely, but the movie is one of compromise, no matter how extreme the requirements to do so may be, or may become. Characters are very well crafted. Reynolds is a confident man in himself, in his wants, and in his abilities as a dressmaker. He is careful, precise, adheres to routine, and his unflinchingly straight path all ensure he's on-point for every step of the dress making process. He craves attention, high society, and demands that the world bend to his every whim, spoken or unspoken, known or implied. Alma has lived a much less glamorous life, one of distance from all those things Reynolds takes for granted. She lacks confidence but suddenly feels important as the centerpiece of Reynolds' life, however fleeting those moments may be. She is a common girl who suddenly finds herself in the world of glamor, wearing exquisite clothes, coming to appreciate her body type, but the warmth and romance quickly fade when Reynolds, carefully building a dress to suit her, turns the moment from almost arrousingly [sic] sexual to cold and distant when his sister enters the room, sizes Alma up, and the quasi-lovemaking session turns into another day at the office for a man who finds more pleasure with a measuring tape in his hand rather than a woman's warmth against his body."
The key shot in Warner and DCU's Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay comes right around at the halfway mark. The titular assault team (Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, Copperhead, Killer Frost, and Bronze Tiger, voiced by Christian Slater, Tara Strong, Liam McIntyre, Gideon Emery, Kristin Bauer van Straten, and Billy Brown, respectively) are driving cross-country in search of a mystical whatzit (a card that allows the bearer to pass straight from Heaven to Hell at the moment of death, natch), and they pass a roadside billboard promoting the "Hairy Palms" forest, exit 69 (of course). It's a throwaway gag, but it speaks to the whole tonal ethos guiding this animated adventure: smutty and smuttier. The jokes are crass, the sex more graphic (we visit at least two strip clubs, one for each gender, and we get a little full frontal cartoon nudity, courtesy of supervillain Knockout), and the violence persistent and splattery; the opening action sequence, which finds the Squad raiding mob boss Tobias Whale's train, has more gushing head wounds and spurting severed limbs than your average episode of The Walking Dead. These DCU features have been edging towards an adult audience with the R-rated Gotham by Gaslight, Justice League Dark, and The Killing Joke, but Hell to Pay embraces the lack of content restraints with visceral abandon. And that's to its credit. This is easily DCU's more enjoyable DTV venture since The Flashpoint Paradox All that chaos translates into the studio's best action sequences and seems to add a little self-aware humor - besides the aforementioned road sign bit, we get a great flashback for Maxim Steel's superhero-turned-male stripper (yep, you read that right) to detail how he won - and lost - his position as the most underwhelming Doctor Fate iteration in DC history. It helps, too, that in just an hour and a half, director Sam Liu and screenwriter Alan Burnett crack the actual Suicide Squad better than the live-action version ever did. With the exception of Bronze Tiger, none of the antiheroes are actually good (Deadshot might only ice bad people, but he's still an unrepentant killer), so the movie never condescends to them by having them try and...I dunno, save the world or something. Their mission is low-stakes and completely off the books, and the less you know about it, the better; Liu and Burnett dovetail the events of this movie into The Flashpoint Paradox with more structural/narrative elegance than I expected. My default DCU complaint still stands - blood or not, all of these movies would benefit from the animators getting one-to-two-more months to work and flesh out the barren, detail-free background - but it's saying something that this time, I didn't obsess about the visual quality that much.
Oh, the curious case of Alex Proyas! I can't think of a genre auteur who made as striking a debut as Proyas did (with the violent comic-book adaptation The Crow and the brilliant sci-fi-noir Dark City), but he's never approached those lofty heights in subsequent years. Case in point: the apocalyptic thriller Knowing, which Lionsgate is giving a 4K release this week. For about forty minutes or so, Proyas hooks us good. His hero, a brilliant astrophysics professor (Nicolas Cage), starts analyzing a strange sheet of numbers pulled from inside a children's time capsule, and what he discovers shocks him: the numerical sequence seems to correspond to a host of recent disasters, and what's worse, the numbers appear to be counting down to...something. While Proyas isn't working with the special-effects budget of Dark City or I, Robot, his formalist technique casts such a spell, almost as if we're watching the serious version of National Treasure, in that both star Cage as an academic searching for clues inside aging/aged texts, although I'll take Knowing's moody foreboding over National Treasure any day. This study culminates in a horrifying plane crash that Proyas largely captures in one take, and just when the tension gets unbearable, Knowing loses its mind. First in an entertaining way: Cage begins to notice strange figures observing his work from the shadows, and their presence causes him to overact wildly. If you've ever wanted to see Cage flip out and attack a tree with a baseball bat, Knowing is the film for you. However, the silly intensity of Cage's performance clashes against unfortunate earnestness of Knowing's big third-act twist. To say more would be unfair, except that these mysterious figures have less in common with, say, the Strangers in Dark City and more with some allegorical entities pertaining to one of Cage's all-time preachiest cash-grabs. Ultimately, Knowing is never boring, and Proyas keeps our interest the whole way, but even he can't compensate for the film's insultingly dumb final sequence.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review called Knowing "almost ludicrously overheated at times (no pun intended...), with a number of logical and/or presentational lapses that make it almost laughable on occasion. I'll refer interested readers to Marty's review for a basic plot summary, but let me give a couple of examples of elements that (for me, anyway) just didn't quite work, or at least were passingly questionable. The film's introductory flashback to 1959 is really rather arresting, with a neatly disturbing performance by Lara Robinson as a seemingly deeply troubled little girl named Lucinda Embry. Lucinda is a student at the brand new William Dawes Elementary School. (There's a probably intentional subtext here, since the real life Dawes was instrumental who forewarned the American colonists of impending doom due to encroaching British forces, and Knowing's focal character of John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) assumes much the same 'role' as he attempts to warn folks of another, even larger, calamity that awaits them.) In an almost ridiculous elision, Lucinda's teacher talks about a contest that had been held to celebrate the school's opening (which is already open, by the way, as evidenced by the class itself), which Lucinda has won, suggesting a time capsule. Only here's the thing: the teacher says the decision on the winning idea has just been made, and yet right there outside the school is an absolutely deluxe concrete plaza with an equally ornate chamber for the time capsule. There's also a handsome tubular metal time capsule there as well. Someone did some extremely fast planning, is all I can say."
Finally, the last big 4k reissue this week is Universal Studios Home Entertainment's newest release of The Incredible Hulk. Undoubtedly, we're seeing this title resurface because we're so close to Avengers: Infinity War's big theatrical premiere (gotta love that corporate synergy), and now seems as good a time as any to reassess Louis Leterrier's controversial superhero actioner. Perhaps The Incredible Hulk was doomed no matter what. By the time it hit theaters in June of 2008, it was bound to suffer by comparison, both to Jon Favreau's far more important MCU outing Iron Man as well as to Christopher Nolan's Academy Award-winning Batman thriller The Dark Knight, and that's if viewers even planned on giving this new Hulk a shot following Ang Lee's esoteric, perplexing take on the character (full disclosure: I'm one of those weirdos who loves the flamboyant strangeness Lee wrought, even though I'll be the first to admit Lee was committing career suicide). However positively or negatively you feel about The Incredible Hulk, you can't deny that all those other features dreamed bigger, whereas Leterrier was content to make what is, essentially, a multi-million-dollar episode of the old TV series. As Bruce Banner, Edward Norton does his best Bill Bixby, spending most of the film on the run until circumstances (Tim Roth's mutated super-soldier The Abomination) force "the other guy" (to borrow a phrase from Joss Whedon's far sprightlier Hulk take) to emerge and defend a terrified populace. Despite that menace, screenwriter Zak Penn (with a massive uncredited assist from Norton, who was a big part of why this Hulk never took off - more on that in a sec) keeps the stakes low - the biggest collateral damage impacts a South American soda factory and a few blocks in Harlem - and the big Hulk appearances down to a minimum: really three total, one per story act. For the most part, the film's core exists in the relationship between Banner and his ex-girlfriend Betsy Ross (Liv Tyler, adequate and nothing more)...and you're starting to see why none of this feels particularly essential. Leterrier might have been developing the picture prior to Iron Man's release, but the end result feels like a rush job designed to capitalize on the emerging MCU, with the bare minimum paid to story and character. The action scenes are a cut above the film's narrative failings (Leterrier brings some of the kinetic action choreography he employed in The Transporter and Unleashed), although the CGI Hulk doesn't look great, and the less said about the ugly Abomination rendering (and the weirdly truncated final boss fight), the better. Now, Norton claimed his preferred cut (at almost 135 minutes) addressed many of the thin characterizations and associative leaps, except he spent so much time complaining about that unseen version than promoting the final cut that he did The Incredible Hulk more harm than good. It does not help that as Banner, Norton is merely fine (and no more), playing the part with a simmering intensity that works better on TV than on the big screen. By the time we reach the finale, the film has done so little to advance the character or his world that I'm always surprised whenever another MCU picture references this one (Banner's "I kinda...destroyed Harlem" line in The Avengers always takes a second to register). Take The Incredible Hulk as a feature-length "What If" story, one that poses zero threat to Mark Ruffalo.