For the week of April 30th, meet Warner Home Entertainment's 12 Strong and Lionsgate Home Entertainment's Winchester. Both of these films fit the bill if you're looking for something mindless to watch on a dreary Sunday afternoon. Of the two, I might give the edge to Winchester, if only because it's the most aggressive - directors Michael and Peter Spierig have delivered what is, essentially, a high-toned funhouse ride, as a jaded doctor (Jason Clarke, better than this material deserves) learns the spooky secret behind the labyrinthine, massive estate of firearms matriarch Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren, much better than this material deserves). Spoiler: it's ghosts, with Winchester designing the home as a trap to keep all sorts of violent spirits at bay. Of course those ghosts start wreaking havoc, and the whole thing proves a workout on your home-theater sound setup. But if you're at all familiar with Sarah Winchester, then this movie version feels all the more like a missed opportunity. Winchester fashions her as a proto-Ghost Whisperer, whereas the real-life woman was more like Charles Foster Kane, a millionaire several times over who, by all accounts, lost her mind and built this house as an unintentional testament to her crumbling sanity. That's the movie I'd rather see.
So it goes with 12 Strong, which likewise uses a fascinating historical event to serve mundane ambitions. Here we have the previously classified story of the ODA 595, a covert Army division that, after September 11th, went into Uzbekistan to rally guerilla forces against the Taliban. By all accounts, their journey was fraught with peril, but the movie version? Standard "men on a mission" fare, and without any of the idiosyncratic charm of a The Dirty Dozen. None of the cast registers all that strongly (star Chris Hemsworth shows little of the charisma he brings to the Thor pictures); the film's biggest sin might be how indistinctive it renders the blazingly distinct pairing of Michaels Peņa and Shannon. 12 Strong kinda reminds me of the Shekhar Kapur remake of The Four Feathers, which similarly took a vibrant adventure story and rendered it into "fine" territory.
And now, I suspect I might sound like a hypocrite as I consider the case of Magnolia Home Entertainment's In the Fade, the new film from Fatih Akin. If 12 Strong and Winchester turn the interesting into the deeply familiar, In the Fade goes the opposite route. For most of its runtime, it plays like an intimate character study. We meet Katja Sekerci (Diane Kruger, phenomenal), and we watch her life spiral out of control after her husband and young son die in a terrorist attack. I've liked Kruger in other projects (Inglourious Basterds, the underrated American version of The Bridge), but she makes me profoundly uncomfortable here, and I mean that as the highest compliment. Her emotional self-destruction - as she struggles to process her family's death alongside the legal nightmare keeping her from justice - proves genuinely wrenching, and that's all Kruger. She elevates the piece to a place of raw emotional vulnerability. And it's right at that point that In the Fade starts to shift, oh so subtly, from quietly observed drama to formula fare. Like some arthouse version of The Foreigner, Katja decides to take matters into her own hands, and In the Fade loses much of what made it so special. Kruger is great all the way through, but we've seen this movie before, and many times, at that.
Finally, Kino Video is offering another slate of Touchstone programmers from the '80s and '90s. The most fitfully entertaining is Jane Austen's Mafia!, which writer/director Jim Abrahams has structured as the gangster-movie equivalent to his great Airplane!. That's right: it's a jokey spoof which follows the Godfather-esque ascent of Jay Mohr's bumbling innocent to the realm of top mob capo. As with Airplane!, Abrahams sends out the gags so fast that, in theory, you barely have time to acknowledge the clunkers, except all of Mafia!'s jokes are much less fresh than what Airplane! offered. I love some of the work that Lloyd Bridges (playing an idiot riff on Don Corleone) does here, but on the whole, there's a very good reason we transitioned over to the Apatovian school of movie comedy. Far more interesting Touchstone fare are the Ron Shelton dramedies Blaze and Play It to the Bone. For a little while, Shelton could do no wrong: Bull Durham's mix of cynicism and heart quickly established Shelton as a raunchier Frank Capra, and he gives that quality a real workout with the underrated Blaze. Shelton is riffing on the life of controversial Louisiana governor Earl Long (Paul Newman), and stress riff - Shelton chooses to present this freewheeling, boozy politician through the eyes of Long's longtime mistress Blaze Starr (the wonderful Lolita Davidovich). Their relationship proves unconventional in even the most unconventional of locations (Louisiana), but it's also highly enjoyable. Shelton's dialogue is aces, and Newman and Davidovich make for an irresistible pairing. Would that I could say the same thing for the central buddy pairing in Play It to the Bone, the 1999 sports comedy that torpedoed Shelton's career for a long time. Antonio Banderas and Woody Harrelson are effortlessly charming, but they struggle to make endearing Shelton's hackneyed protagonists, two has-been boxers - and best friends - who stand to hit paydirt if they square off against one another in the ring. What transpires plays like a bad Shelton imitation: his dialogue is profane but not witty, and Banderas and Harrelson can't elevate the ugly strain of homophobic banter Shelton gives them. I guess the end brawl is technically impressive, but it's also way too violent a capper on an otherwise aimless buddy comedy.