For the week of April 23rd, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing the violent revisionist Western Hostiles to Blu-ray. My hope is that a month from now, I'll be able to say, "You know, I think I liked that." I certainly want to like the film. Writer/director Scott Cooper (rebounding in a big way from his awful Black Mass) is working squarely in Cormac McCarthy territory, throwing together an embittered U.S. Captain (Christian Bale) and his sworn Cheyenne nemesis (Wes Studi) on a perilous cross-country journey in order to examine how violence impacts the soul of the American character. We get lots of portentous speeches about putting one's soul at hazard (Rory Cochrane, playing Bale's second, is heartbreakingly good in this regard), punctuated with horrifying bursts of graphic carnage. Vide the opening sequence, where in a matter of seconds, Rosamund Pike's frontierswoman loses her husband, teenage daughters, and infant son to the depredations of a Comanche raiding party. Yep, it's that kind of movie, and all unfolding through Masanobu Takayanagi's gorgeous widescreen cinematography. Yet that weighty import starts to grate after a while. I respect Hostiles' inclination towards the meditative, but I'd lying if I didn't wish it'd pick up the pace some, especially once it slides into the same repetitive groove: Bale's group makes camp, someone muses quietly about the nature of killing, and then an unexpected menace kills someone horribly. We get no sense of forward propulsion, and while I appreciate that Cooper isn't interested in making a mismatched buddy picture wherein Bale and Studi put their s**t on pause (TM Larry Fishburne) to fight a common enemy, the constant stop-start renders Hostiles inert. Just as we're expecting the Comanches to emerge as the Big Bad, they exit the movie well before the halfway point. Then we get Ben Foster's disgraced U.S. soldier, but just as we're assuming he'll become a reliable threat, a) Cooper doesn't let him go full Hannibal Lecter, preferring to use the character as a none-too-subtle foil for Bale's own sins, and b) Foster too receives an unceremonious exit from the film. And I get it - Bale's past is the biggest "villain," but Cooper struggles with making the nebulous past scary. Furthermore, as good as Bale is, and he is spectacular - he gets more mileage from a look or a hushed admonition than most actors can with a full monologue - he can't disguise that Hostiles is, essentially, another white-savior movie. I'm aghast at why Studi doesn't have more to do. Studi cuts such an imposing figure that the movie mostly squanders, preferring instead to linger on Bale and Pike's mopey Caucasians. Again, that isn't a dig on Bale or Pike (who does terrific work herself), but rather disappointment that Cooper has less interest in Studi's dying war chief beyond what Studi inspires in Bale. Still, Studi has got a juicy supporting part compared to Adam Beach and Q'orianka Kilcher (playing Studi's son and daughter-in-law, respectively) - both of them get almost no scenes where they occupy the foreground and even fewer scenes with dialogue. And as a result, Cooper bungles the ending. It's technically well staged and very moving, but it focuses on the wrong people, and it reduces the suffering of a nation to the problems of a few sad white folks. It's 2018, Hollywood. Do better.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "it's perhaps indicative of just how far so-called 'revisionist Westerns' have come that Hostiles begins with a terrifying scene featuring a horde of Comanche warriors slaughtering a homesteader and several of his children. It's scenes like this, albeit admittedly nowhere near as graphic as this particular opening sequence is, that used to define the old school western, where it was typically cowboys versus Indians (as they were unavoidably called back then), with the Indians displaying signs of inherent 'savagery' and the good, civilized cowboys (or others) fighting them off and prevailing, establishing Manifest Destiny for one and all (or at least those of certain non-Native American ethnicities). But Hostiles quickly delivers its own none too subtle message by having the next sequence document a Native American family being violently rounded up (if not slaughtered as in the first vignette) by a bunch of almost nonchalant soldiers headed by Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale). Obviously, Hostiles is making the perhaps over obvious point that hostility tends to work both ways, and it's that simmering distrust that informs this interesting if occasionally overheated film."
It astounds me that critics didn't immediately fêteDead Man, which is receiving a snazzy new Criterion release, as Jim Jarmusch's finest-ever feature. Considering Jarmusch has only made one subpar movie (2009's frustrating anti-thriller The Limits of Control) and a handful of masterpieces, that's saying something, but such was the power of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. See, Weinstein hated that Jarmusch wouldn't cut twenty minutes out of Dead Man (Jarmusch doesn't make movies often, but when he does, he retains final-cut authority), so Weinstein responded by dumping the film and restricting critic screenings to the absolute bare minimum. You could see the Dead Man critical reappraisal come on in steady, surprised waves a decade down the line, like waking up late on Sunday morning or something - it was less a rediscovery than the realization we'd had a masterwork on our hands the whole time. Dead Man both feels a part of Jarmusch's oeuvre and deeply apart from it. For all its hipster cool and wry quirks (the monochrome cinematography recalls Jarmusch's early indie smashes Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law; the beyond-deadpan approach to plot and narrative reminds me of the equally plotty/aimless Mystery Train), Jarmusch traffics in a stark brutality of violence and theme that feels alien and hostile. Part of that is the Western ambiance - I always lean forward when Jarmusch makes a genre movie (his great gangster melodrama Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai or his vampire comedy Only Lovers Left Alive) - which Jarmusch demystifies to the point of abstraction. He and DP Robby Müller cast their black-and-white landscapes in geographical murk, be it mud/dust or driving snow, as if we're trapped in a fading daguerreotype, and then plunk and lurch their characters along to the strains of Neil Young's improvisatory, atonal guitar score. The shootouts, while violent, happen in delayed fits and starts (the characters doing the killing often seem as surprised as their victims), while the central pursuit that occupies most of the film loses all temporal signifiers. We could be drifting through purgatory, for all we know. And maybe we are: Jarmusch's antihero, the portentously named William Blake (Johnny Depp, back when he played characters instead of caricatures and also wasn't a garbage person), suffers a mortal injury within the film's first twenty minutes and spends the rest of the movie slowly dying, his life lingering just long enough to cross paths with an Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer, stealing the movie like it's his job), a pair of sexually fluid outlaws (Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton), and a tracker (the fearsome Lance Henriksen) whose reputation proves more terrifying than his actions. Blake's quest feels both elemental and sprawling, but in the way that 2001: A Space Odyssey or Stalker challenge the viewer. A major achievement from a major filmmaker.
Last April, it had seemed as though the Internet lost its fool mind for Paddington 2, which arrives this week courtesy of Warner Home Entertainment (fun fact: the Weinstein Company was supposed to distribute the film before Harvey Weinstein got jettisoned from the Hollywood glitterati, so now you know the rest of the story). While I enjoyed the first Paddington, at no point did it strike me as anything but a modest, low-key kids' movie (and both adjectives are good - minus this year's awful Peter Rabbit, the British are pretty good about doling out understatement in their children's entertainments), so I couldn't fathom it when The Washington Post wrote that the sequel acts as a balm "in a time of divisiveness and vulgarity" or when IndieWire's David Ehrlich started trotting out daily hyperbole for the picture, marveling at how "seamlessly this film sparks from riffing on Chaplin to commenting on the beauty of basic human decency… from Modern Times to modern times without skipping a beat". Hell, the film ultimately received three BAFTA nominations, and in major categories: Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Grant, who steals the whole movie - no one plays deluded, villainous nincompoops better than he), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Outstanding British Film. Again, I'd expect something fine, but the wave of critical consensus had moved the needle into outright rapture. And for Paddington 2's first act, I was convinced that all this praise was some kind of elaborate practical joke. Not that this early section is bad - it isn't. It's just very much of a piece with the first Paddington, as the title character (voiced by Ben Whishaw) bumbles around a gently fantastical London looking for work so he can buy a pop-up book for his beloved Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton). We see Paddington alternatively charm his close friends and neighbors (played by a stacked cast that includes Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi, and Tom Conti) and wreak some Keaton-esque slapstick as he adjusts to the working world (his accidental destruction of a barbershop is a cracking comic setpiece), and it's all very pleasant, if nothing more. Certainly, returning director Paul King has a nicer eye for this material than you might expect (it's Wes Anderson-lite, with an imagined trip through the pop-up book especially delightful), but there's nothing great in these opening twenty minutes, and I'd argue there isn't supposed to be. And then Paddington gets framed for trying to steal the book, and I realized how wrong I had been. For one, the tone darkens. There's a bit of the virtuoso, surreal Babe: Pig in the City in how Paddington adjusts to prison life, particularly given his relationship with the fearsome safecracker Knuckles McGinty (the wonderful Brendan Gleeson). Furthermore, without losing any of its charm, Paddington 2 develops thematic stakes that blindsided me. Paddington proves essential at uniting all those around him, but in his absence, his community devolves into mistrust and xenophobia. At times, I couldn't believe what I was watching: a sweet, wise fable that's ruthless in its takedown of Brexit-era politics. The whole film concludes on a beat both affirming and heartbreaking. Paddington 2 might be quietly devastating, but it's devastating all the same, and richly deserving of the accolades sent its way. One of the year's best films.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment continues to give 4K upgrades to their backcatalog with a new "25th Anniversary Edition" of A Few Good Men. This 1992 legal thriller might be the greatest TNT movie ever made. That's a compliment. When I was growing up, A Few Good Men have screened more times on TNT than any other single film (and I get it - it's star-studded, self-contained, and easy to program, once you cut the profanity), and I always stopped to watch some (if not all) of it. We often talk about clichés as a bad thing, and certainly A Few Good Men has its fair share: we follow a green Naval attorney (Tom Cruise, who'd play a mopier version of the same character in the following year's The Firm) who lucks into the case of his life when his self-defense trial turns into a stirring indictment of military corruption. By my count, that one sentence contains about three different lawyer-movie staples, and I haven't even mentioned how the film dusts off other old chestnuts such as a) The Capable Lawyer Who Doesn't Get a Fair Shake Because She's a Woman (Demi Moore), b) The Relentless But Principled Prosecutor (Kevin Bacon), c) The Morally Repugnant Authority Figure (Jack Nicholson, who devours the scenery so lustily you forget he's in the film for what amounts to an extended cameo), and, of course, d) The Nebbishy Comic Relief (Kevin Pollak, naturally). Here's the thing, though. What redeems all this formula and turns it into something approaching transcendent is the one-two pairing of director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. At this stage of his career, Reiner was nearing the tail end of one of the hottest directorial streaks in recent Hollywood history: from 1984's This Is Spinal Tap to this, Reiner was churning out one stone classic after another, and he brings to A Few Good Men the gleaming professionalism of an Old Hollywood affair. Cut out the swearing and toss in Van Johnson, Rita Hayworth, and Humphrey Bogart, and you could release the film as is in 1952. Still, as important as Reiner is in terms of shaping the film's style, it's Sorkin who elevates A Few Good Men to a stone classic. Nowadays, we accept Sorkin as the heir apparent to banter-savvy scribes like Leigh Brackett and Ben Hecht, but he was hardly a household name in '92. A Few Good Men made him one of the most recognizable film-and-TV writers in the business, and his stamp is all over this one, from the epic monologuing that immediately entered the pop-culture lexicon ("You can't handle the truth," anyone?) to the pleasurable-relentless emphasis he places on linguistic back-and-forth. With projects like The Social Network and The West Wing, Sorkin would cement his reputation, but as origin stories go, A Few Good Men is a pretty great one.
Martin Liebman wrote that the picture "remains one of the finer films of its time and within the Sony catalogue. Featuring a clinic on acting, a script to die for, quality direction, and a lightning pace even at well over two hours, few films can match it for overall dramatic intensity and narrative excellence. A Few Good Men joins the ranks of more than a few good UHD releases from Sony. The studio certainly seems to be leading the pack in the UHD race, and this is another winner. The film-sourced image is striking, the Atmos soundtrack effortlessly complementary, and while there are no new bonus features, the legacy content is fine."
And now we shift the conversation to B-movies and the genre's grandmaster: Charles Bronson, who's getting a four-movie collection this week. I've got little compunction with the films themselves. At their worst, they're trashy but enjoyable. Take the mob thriller The Valachi Papers, where Bronson takes us through the life of mob killer/informant Joseph Valachi. The film would always feel like a litany of familiar mob tropes, yet it comes off a little worse than that because it had the misfortune of premiering the same year as The Godfather! Anything would look inferior by comparison, although the picture chugs along at a decent enough pace, and Bronson lends it his customary hard-edged integrity. At least The Valachi Papers is more memorable (or infamous) than the mob-vs.-cop thriller The Stone Killer, which now places Bronson on the right side of the law as a cop going after a Mafia conspiracy. The Stone Killer plays like a test run for Death Wish; both features united Bronson and director Michael Winner, except Death Wish uses their sleazy energy for something more socially relevant, whereas The Stone Killer just seems sleazy. Better still is Bronson's manic action-comedy Breakout. Here, Bronson tries to spring a wrongly incarcerated man (Robert Duvall) from a Mexican prison; all sorts of misadventures ensue, and at a rapid clip. Director Tom Gries has a good feel for this material, and the cast is stacked with slumming professionals: besides Duvall, we get Randy Quaid, Fernando Rey, and John Huston. Still, the best of the bunch - and maybe Bronson's finest film full stop - is the great Walter Hill melodrama Hard Times. In theory, we've got another B-programmer, except Hill is a legitimate master, and he gives the picture a texture we don't expect. The Depression-era New Orleans milieu is rich and atmospheric, and Hill uses it to sneak in all sorts of observations about poverty and the will to survive. All that, and he showcases Bronson in three or four bare-knuckle brawls that rank among the star's most visceral action sequences. Yet you should qualify all this praise when considering this set. Why? Simple - Mill Creek is putting out this set, and all too often the distributor seems to favor the second part of the "bargain vs. bargain-barrel" home-media release division. All four movies are coming out on only two discs; I guess that works, if, like, video quality isn't your thing.