For the week of May 21st, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the dark comedy Game Night to Blu-ray. I had a film teacher tell me once that his greatest fear was that the Filmmakers of Tomorrow would spend too much time emulating their favorite directors at the expense of their own artistic expression. Someone like Martin Scorsese definitely wears his influences on his sleeves, but even when Scorsese is making, say, a full-scale Powell-and-Pressburger homage (The Aviator and The Age of Innocence), he's doing so to satisfy his own creative agenda. I suspect my teacher would blanch if he saw Game Night. As mainstream studio fare goes, you could do a lot worse. It's easily the best of the Jason Bateman-New Line R-rated farces, with good performances from a talented cast (the movie's biggest laughs go to Rachel McAdams and Jesse Plemons, the latter of whom turns in one of the year's best comic performances as a menacingly pathetic cop with a dead-eyed stare and an unnerving attraction to his bichon frise Bastian) and a reliance on farce-like plotting/direction over formless improv. But it also has little reason to exist other than to spotlight directors John Francis Daley (Sam from Freaks and Geeks) and Jonathan Goldstein's fanboy-like ardor for David Fincher. Everything about the film plays like a Fincher mash note. The narrative unfurls as a jokey riff on The Game. Here, a group of friends (Bateman, McAdams, Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, and Kylie Bunbury) find themselves immersed in an oft-violent, interactive roleplaying game that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. Heck, Kyle Chandler (having a ball tarnishing the burnish on Friday Night Lights's Coach Taylor) even fills in for Sean Penn as the reprobate sibling (of Bateman's responsible adult) who may hold the key to the Game's true intentions. However, Daley and Goldstein (working from Mark Perez's script, which labors to pay off all its three-act setups) then use this framework to hang all sorts of visual and aural references to Fincher's oeuvre. They shoot establishing shots in the same tilt-focus cinematography that Fincher used for The Social Network's rowing sequence; they indulge their Panic Room love with a CGI-assisted microphotography trip through Plemons' creepy evidence board; and they slather everything in a Cliff Martinez score that sounds like Daley and Goldstein played Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's great Social Network score during pre-production and then asked Martinez, "You can do that without us getting sued, right?" And again, there's no sense that Daley and Goldstein want use this material for anything other than a surface affectation. By the time Magnussen's dopey himbo is gleefully watching a fight club in some rich dude's basement (don't ask), you begin to wonder if Fincher should be flattered, or file a restraining order, or sue for residuals. Maybe all three.
Still, I'll take the derivative-but-fun Game Night over...whatever Clint Eastwood is doing with The 15:17 to Paris, which Warner is also releasing this week. In theory, I like Eastwood's approach here. Yes, he's working in fairly staid docudrama mode - he's dramatizing events in and around the 2015 Thalys train attack - but unlike, say, his Sully or American Sniper biopics, The 15:17 to Paris has a metafictional wrinkle. As the American servicemen who helped stop the attack - Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos - Eastwood has actually cast Stone, Sadler, and Skarlatos to play themselves. That one creative decision alone adds an eerie verisimilitude to the train sequences; we are watching Stone, Sadler, and Skarlatos reenacting acts of violence that they lived through three years ago. The mind reels at the fusion of fiction and nonfiction, and kudos to Eastwood for such a quietly avant-garde move. Pity the movie isn't better. What works: everything on the train is phenomenal. Eastwood has always been a skilled director of action (lest we forget, he helmed The Outlaw Josey Wales, for cryin' out loud), but he really upped his game with American Sniper (how many eighty-four-year-old directors get more visually kinetic the older they get?), and he brings that film's same unpredictable, jagged violence to The 15:17 to Paris. Here's the thing, though. In real life, the train raid lasted a matter of minutes. In trying to pad out the eighty minutes surrounding the train, Eastwood flails, and in a way I've never seen from him. Beat for beat, most of the choices he makes boggle the mind. Like his casting of comedic actors in staid dramatic parts: we're distracted watching folks like Judy Greer, P.J. Byrne, Tony Hale, and Thomas Lennon because we're waiting for them to be funny even though we're pretty sure this isn't that kind of movie, but then why cast these performers in the first place? Or his formless handling of the movie's long midsection: as we watch Stone, Sadler, and Skarlatos travel through Europe, it feels like we're watching someone else's mundane vacation footage. Even the big casting conceit fails Eastwood. Stone, Sadler, and Skarlatos are many things, but "charismatic performers"? Not one of them. They function like placeholders for better actors, but it figures. The 15:17 to Paris works like a placeholder for a better movie.
We always have to wait too long for a new Aardman adventure; to some extent, I'm just glad Early Man exists to give me my fix (thank you, Lionsgate Home Entertainment). Aardman and filmmaker Nick Park created the iconic Wallace & Gromit and are responsible for helping shepherd along Chicken Run and 2015's brilliant Shaun the Sheep Movie, and Early Man finds them taking that same cracked, stop-motion aesthetic to the days of prehistoric humans. More specifically, prehistoric humans (led by Eddie Redmayne's earnest hunter-gatherer) living in what would become Manchester, England (the Aardman folks are the most delightfully provincial of creatives: their children's entertainments feel needle-specific about British morays and eccentricities), and moments before they stumble upon the denizens of the Bronze Age. See, the haughty Lord Nooth (a very funny Tom Hiddleston) wants to eradicate Redmayne and his kind in order to expand his far more technologically advanced civilization, although if you're familiar with Aardman, you've probably figured that Early Man has no desire to turn into some kind of war movie. No, for its first half, we get a goofy comedy that revels in slapstick and goofy human behavior. Redmayne's clan consists of a bunch of weirdoes and oddballs who are content to scavenge for food (their main nemesis: a sly rabbit who'll remind you of a silent Bugs Bunny), while the Bronze Age royals delight in wealth and the strangest of excesses, including a talking bird (Rob Brydon) that can record messages in the exact tone and intensity of the original speaker. So much of this material is so good. I found myself marveling at the fact that Park has finally made a good version of something like History of the World: Part I or Year One. However, I'm less keen on the film's most surprising detail, which the previews didn't spoil, even though I'm now going to (if you want to go into the movie fresh, stop reading now). It turns out that Early Man is something of a sports movie, with the prehistoric heroes challenging the Bronze Age villains to a football (read: soccer) match in order to establish dominance in the region. This twist suits the British-culture vibe, but it also adds a bunch of clichés that are decidedly less fresh: we get a mid-movie training montage, a final game, and even an enthusiastic team supporter who wants nothing more than to prove his mettle on the field. This being Aardman, Said Supporter is a boar named Hognob, but you'll still be able to see where this thread goes the moment it's introduced. Still, my issues aside, a very enjoyable diversion.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "there's absolutely no question where this is all leading, including but not limited to Nooth's subterfuges, an unexpected Bronze Age ally showing up to coach the Stone Age folks, and/or who ends up taking home the trophy. With that understanding firmly in place, it's just as undeniable how sweet and often laugh out loud funny Early Man is. A lot of the humor is silly physical stuff, elevated by the lovably wacky puppets that Aardman is so skilled in creating and animating, but there's some fun (if equally ridiculous) verbal sparring that takes place as well. It all plays out in an appropriately cartoonish environment that at times perhaps tends to rely on The Flintstones-esque gags (i.e., a giant beetle acting as an 'electric' razor), but which still delivers both heart and hilarity in about equal measure."
Shout Select is doing David Lynch fans a solid and putting out a new special edition of his 1990 noir melodrama Wild at Heart (Twilight Time's limited edition went out of print years ago). Wild at Heart feels like the Rosetta Stone in terms of decoding David Lynch, Narrative Filmmaker. Prior to this, Lynch had established himself as the most accessible of all experimental filmmakers. He used striking imagery in The Elephant Man to make alien what is a conventional biopic and later inserted fetishistic sex and violence into Blue Velvet which, on its own, isn't a million miles removed from the noir tropes we might see in They Live by Night or Gun Crazy. Even Eraserhead is remarkably coherent for a midnight-movie head-trip. And for its first half, Wild at Heart seems like it will follow suit and offer up an extreme version of a lovers-on-the-run thriller: we have two criminal heartthrobs (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) driving cross-country to flee the deranged socialite (Dern's real-life mother Diane Ladd) who wants to split them apart, and all while evading the deranged assassins (including J.E. Freeman, Grace Zabriskie, and David Patrick Kelly) hired to give this love story an unhappy ending. Right when we expect these forces will collide, Lynch pretty much drops all the narrative connections linking them. What remains is a series of vignettes, some funny (Crispin Glover's brilliant one-scene cameo as Uncle Dell), some sexy (Dern and Cage spend an awful lot of time rutting in sleazy motel rooms), some violent (witness Willem Dafoe's terrifying late-stage entrance as Bobby Peru), or some inexplicable mix of the three (Sherilyn Fenn's haunting death scene along Route 66). Now, jarring as the shift away from anything resembling forward momentum might be, Lynch is only establishing the same pattern he'd follow in everything from Fire Walk with Me through last year's brilliant/frustrating Twin Peaks return: he'd let genre act as but a pretext for a series of thematically linked art-installation pieces. We might lose patience with Inland Empire or the new Twin Peaks, but that's on us. With Wild at Heart, Lynch couldn't have screamed at us any louder about exactly the kind of filmmaker he wanted to be. That said, I can respect how Wild at Heart liberated Lynch and still find it tiresome. It's episodic to a fault - for every thrilling Bobby Peru-led robbery, we have to put up with Lynch tossing in a gaggle of eccentrics (that John Lurie, Jack Nance, and Pruitt Taylor Vince drinking scene crosses from funny to tedious) just for the sheer weirdness factor. And the film has a cruel streak I find off-putting. I'm not sure Lynch likes Dern or Cage's characters much (we meet Cage seconds before he beats a man to death, and later Lynch has Dafoe sexually humiliate Dern in the worst way), but I'll take their shrillness over Lynch's treatment of Harry Dean Stanton, who enters Wild at Heart as its warmest, most sympathetic character and is summarily tortured and executed for his troubles. Even in something as hostile as Lost Highway, Lynch always has had affection for his screen misfits. I'm not sure we get that here, and the film suffers as a result.
Finally, this week also plays host to a parcel of 4K remastered discs. From Sony Pictures Home Entertainment comes the war dramas The Patriot and Fury. I might be in the minority, but I've always gotten a big kick out of the Revolutionary War-set Patriot. Sure, it's corny as all get out - this is a movie, after all, where the Revolutionary War becomes but a backdrop for a once-peaceful frontiersman (Mel Gibson) avenging his son's death at the hands of the Redcoats - but director Roland Emmerich has a great sense of scope (lest we forget, he also directed Independence Day), and he marries the story's historical sweep to an oft-grisly depiction of musket-and-cannon-era atrocities. It helps, too, that stars Gibson and Heath Ledger are so charming, although they get pretty stiff competition from Jason Isaacs as the sneeringly evil Big Bad: Isaacs is pretty much playing Snidely Whiplash without the mustache. Plus, I'll always have a soft spot for a movie wherein Mel Gibson asks if he can sit next to a widow (Joely Richardson), who then replies, "It's a free country. At least, it will be." By comparison, Fury is a lot grimmer, but what do you expect from writer/director David Ayer? It stands to reason that the guy who wrote Training Day and the most serious Fast and Furious movie would rope together a star-studded cast (led by a very good Brad Pitt and a very mannered Shia LaBeouf) for a WWII epic about PTSD. We're in the final days of the war, and Pitt's armored-tank unit (including LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal) just needs to stay alive a little longer, but their own fraying mental states may prove just as deadly as a Nazi platoon. It's an interesting approach; it's also more-than-a-little unpleasant, with only Lerman's tremulous rookie maintaining our sympathies (Bernthal's brutal hick, in particular, is so odious that you keep hoping someone will frag him). I actually suspect that Sony found Ayer's miserablism problematic, too - how else to explain the finale, which finds these unlikeable characters making a sudden about-face towards redemption? Still, the film looks good, and the battle sequences are frightening. However, I suspect people will be more interested in The Matrix and Jurassic Park's respective 4K debuts. And rightly so: taken together, these two might be the two most influential blockbusters of the past thirty years. I'm less keen on Jurassic Park than most people are - sixty percent of it represents Steven Spielberg's best tendencies, while the remaining forty percent represents his worst tendencies - but even I can't ignore the verve of its action sequences (with top honors going to the T-Rex's big entrance and the raptor hunt through the kitchen) or the impact its (still) impressive CGI graphics had on an entire generation of filmmakers. In fact, it's probably not overstating matters to say that Spielberg's advancements in the field made The Matrix possible. The two films have nothing in common, plot-wise (Jurassic Park is a slick monster movie; The Matrix is a dystopian sci-fi actioner), but you can draw an evolutionary line from Jurassic Park's dinosaurs to The Matrix's bullet-time action scenes. And all in the name of pastiche - instead of inventing a new genre, the Wachowski Siblings took what they loved from other movies (I counted liberal lifts from the two best Terminator movies and Chinese wuxia epics, among many others) and books (the Wachowskis owe a debt of gratitude - and maybe a check - to William Gibson, considering how much of his Neuromancer makes it into this one) and overlaid a slick Joseph Campbell hero's journey. We might care, if the performances were less witty (how good is Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith?) or the action sequences less insane (the whole Morpheus rescue is a masterwork of action choreography), but they aren't, so we don't.
Of The Matrix's 4K debut, Michael Reuben wrote that the film "is a landmark...and whatever one may think of its creators' subsequent output (including the two sequels), its significance and continued popularity are beyond dispute. Its language and motifs have permeated everyday speech, and the characters of Neo, Trinity and Morpheus have become pop culture icons. After The Matrix, film fighting styles grew more elaborate and had to be more creatively photographed to keep pace, and wire work became standard practice. Special effects were permanently altered by such inventions as 'bullet time.' Not since Terminator 2 had mass audiences been so thoroughly wowed by a film's visual innovation...To its credit, Warner has also remastered the film's 1080p standard Blu-ray, based on the new transfer and sound mix, so that Matrix fans who haven't yet upgraded their equipment can enjoy at least some of the benefits from this modern classic's 4K overhaul...The new 1080p disc isn't available separately, but acquiring the complete UHD package is an investment in the future. If you love The Matrix, sooner or later you'll want to be able to experience it in the best presentation it's ever had."