For the week of May 28th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Annihilation to Blu-ray. More than anything filmmaker Alex Garland has ever done, Annihilation seems reverse engineered to confound expectations. It's an adaptation (of Jeff Vandermeer's very good book, which reads like if Stanley Kubrick wrote a YA novel) that perversely jettisons or drastically remixes much of what made the source material distinctive. It's an alien invasion thriller where the "invasion" (if you can call it that) occurs randomly and unfolds with clinical reservation. And it's a hard sci-fi story that deals almost exclusively in mystical (borderline soft-science, despite all the technobabble) allegory. Even the previews promise a far different experience than what Annihilation delivers; if you go in expecting an Alien riff, you will walk away disappointed. Despite staging some moments of genuinely horrifying carnage, Garland is more interested in referencing Andrei Tarkovsky than Ridley Scott. Even the film's graphic violence lingers more because of the way Garland foregrounds the unnerving, inhuman detachment surrounding it than for the brutality itself. There are things you can't unsee here, made all the worse because no one reacts the way you'd expect, from a rotting bear abomination that roars in the screams of the people it's eaten to a disembowelment/live autopsy where all the participants involved (including the shuddering "patient") approach the cut flesh and oozing blood with almost childlike wonder. The whole film feels somehow ragged, unstable, yet I found that quality transfixing. While I liked Garland's directorial debut Ex Machina, Annihilation feels like the richer work because it's more comfortable trading in ambiguity. Garland's biggest strength is also his biggest limitation: in films like Ex Machina (or his scripts for 28 Days Later and Sunshine), he can turn complex subjects into genre fodder, except he ends up yielding too much ground to the genre side. VideSunshine's descent from metaphysical physics into high-toned slasher movie, for example, or how often he'll undercut 28 Days Later's savvy reimagining of the zombie movie with one-too-many adherences to the stupid things people do in zombie movies. But Annihilation grows more obtuse as it goes along (just as its alien entities grow more inexplicable as the characters near the lighthouse at the center of the film's mysteries), concluding in a chillingly abrupt ending that plays like if vintage John Carpenter got to remake 2001: A Space Odyssey. Furthermore, Garland might be trafficking in unstable elements, yet he does so with such confidence. Minus the overlong first half and some flash-forward interview segments (both of which seem like studio interference), Garland layers in visual clues and references that, once you process them, dramatically impact your overall understanding of what's happening. I'm reminded of Phantom Thread, in terms of how he uses subtle minutia to unhinge the film upon reflection. Ultimately, this is a frustrating, exhilarating, terrifying work from a major artist, and one of the year's best films.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "explores some very interesting ideas and introduces subtle hints of deeper themes amongst the more foundational journey into madness and the unknown. It is perhaps that Garland has created a world that is physically familiar and aesthetically pleasing but also mentally maddening and oftentimes crudely horrific that keeps the audience drawn to the world of The Shimmer, engaged in the story and concerned for the almost certain deterioration of the group that enters is deceptively dark clutches. That juxtaposition is a powerful tool that the film employs in nearly every sequence, allowing individual shots and longer scenes to build towards moments of not always narrative surprise or technical ingenuity but certainly the world's, and by extension the story's, next evolution. Garland's world is fantastic, but it never looks or feels grandiose. It's careful in what it reveals, strict in its depiction of how the alien entity has reshaped the world. It's very grounded in its fantastic constructs, which are sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly woven into the narrative's greater fabric. The film is bold in many of its choices but not so bold, usually, to cheapen any of the critical visual or narrative components that define it."
I still cannot believe that Midnight Cowboy, which is getting a fancy Criterion upgrade this week, ranks among the Academy Awards' Best Picture winners. Even when you compare Midnight Cowboy to darker Oscar fare like The Godfather or No Country for Old Men, it still feels particularly nihilistic - witness the story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight, in a brave, guileless performance), a dim hustler who decides he wants to try his luck selling his body in New York and immediately crashes into the city's urban blight and crushing poverty. Director John Schlesinger takes full advantage of pre-Giuliani NYC, in all its scummy glory, and to the degree that you want to take a shower even before Joe ends up bungling his awkward sexual assignations. What tenderness we can find exists in the relationship between Joe and Dustin Hoffman's two-bit hood Ratso Rizzo after the latter befriends the former, but Schlesinger can't keep from complicating this small instance of human connection: Rizzo is suffering from a myriad of physical and emotional maladies, not least of which is his puppy-dog crush on Joe, even though Joe is too dumb to either realize or reciprocate Rizzo's affections. The whole film grinds up these two and deposits them far worse for wear at the end of its grim 113 minutes, and we're left feeling almost as bad as our heroes. I understand that not all Best Picture winners are as feather-insubstantial as Titanic and The Artist, but you do expect a little bit of uplift to leaven the darkness (The Godfather and Braveheart have an epic sweep. The Departed and No Country are often very funny), and Midnight Cowboy works to deny viewers any sort of relief. As such, I can't help but respect it, for its uncompromising nature, for the perversity of its instincts. The film doesn't give a damn whether you like it or not, and still it won Oscar's highest honor. This integrity helps paper over some of the aspects that haven't aged so well, most of which begin and end with Dustin Hoffman. I get why Hoffman took this role - you would, too, if you were worried about getting typecast as diffident nebbishes a la Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. But Rizzo feels less like a real person than he is a compendium of actorly tics: he's a gay, reedy-voiced, Pigpen-level dirty, sickly-coughing, limping Method experiment, and after a while he starts playing like Hoffman's idea of a street person rather than the real thing. It's a distracting performance, and it pulls the focus away from Schlesinger's portrait of New York and Voight's career-best character turn. Maybe Hoffman is the reason the movie won Best Picture: he's a reminder that Midnight Cowboy is only a movie, and not just a descent into the dregs of society.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "The film…oozes pessimism, though Joe's awkward comments occasionally brighten up things a bit. The film has the rawness and energy that nowadays only select independent films have - it is as honest as it could possibly be, never even attempting to be politically correct. For example, when Joe is thrown out of his hotel he realizes that the quickest way to earn a couple of bucks is to visit a corner of the city where the cheapest male prostitutes work. It is a terrible decision but for a desperate man like him the only logical one. The goal of the film, however, is not to explore the city's seediest corners; Joe's experiences there are simply part of his street education. After Joe and Ratso reunite for a short period of time the film becomes warmer. The two encourage and help each other, make a couple of good moves, and for a while it looks like they might get a break. But then they come to realize that the city is not for amateurs like them and the tone of the film again changes dramatically. The final third of the film, where the realization occurs, is incredibly moving. The acting is exceptional. The Graduate might have transformed Hoffman into a star but Midnight Cowboy convinced everyone that he was destined to be a legend. And rightfully so, as his character, Ratso, is amongst the greatest in American cinema. For Voight, who is absolutely mesmerizing as the naive Texas longhorn, Midnight Cowboy was the film that made him a star."
Although if you find Midnight Cowboy to be a seedy affair, you ought to check out Melvin Van Peebles' exploitation classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Van Peebles plays the title character, an entertainer in a brothel who gets wrongly accused of murder, escapes the custody of the police, and becomes a revolutionary hero, lashing out against the hypocrisy of white America. Van Peebles wears his political agenda on his sleeve (the tagline for the film was "Rated X By An All-White Jury"), and I can only imagine what it would have felt like to watch Sweet Sweetback seeking retribution against racist cops and biker thugs right at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement. However, there's a real disconnect between the intensity of Van Peebles' message and the luridness of the sexual content. As legend has it, the film was so cheap (it cost only $150,000) that Van Peebles couldn't hire stunt doubles, and somehow he took that to mean that a) all the sex scenes should be real, and that b) he really needed to "participate" in them. I don't know what's worse - the fact that Van Peebles actually contracted gonorrhea during production, or that he had his then-thirteen-year-old son Mario play Sweetback in the film's opening flashback to the character's first sexual experience. No, as I type it, the kid thing seems worse. The low-budget aesthetic gives Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the gritty nonchalance of a snuff film. I can't deny the importance of what Van Peebles has wrought - Sweet Sweetback opened up a lot of doors for black filmmakers, and it established the blaxploitation genre as a commercially viable form (the film made bank, grossing over $15 million, and likely because Van Peebles proved so savvy in how he marketed the film's controversial subject matter) - but like Midnight Cowboy, it's one of those necessary movies that makes you feel just terrible.
Brian Orndorf's Blu-ray review noted that the film consists of "a series of encounters for the titular character, who's on the run after beating white cops, literally sprinting his way to Mexico after setting himself up for a lifetime in prison. Rage is in clear view, but Van Peebles embraces oddity, putting the character in charged situations with women and gangs, trying to conjure a nervous energy that either explodes with acts of sexual intercourse or violence. Plotting is thin but energy is palatable for the first hour, with Sweet Sweetback welcoming confrontations from all sides, though it saves much of its resentment for Caucasian characters, who are expectedly one-note aggressors in profound fear of an enraged black man who's nearly impossible to capture. Helping to sell the mood of Sweet Sweetback is wild editing from Van Peebles, who elects to make an art project over a traditional thriller, taking time to assemble surreal set-pieces where the fugitive experiences hostile encounters and dangerous environmental elements. The visual impact of Sweet Sweetback is impressive, but there's a limit to the jazz-inspired filmmaking rhythm. When Van Peebles runs out of things to do with this world, technical achievements are often amplified to cover dramatic gaps. More exhausting is the score by Van Peebles and Earth, Wind & Fire, which locates a cool pocket of funk to support Sweetback's run, but runs it on a frightfully tight loop, becoming a torture device as the movie nears completion and the same stretch of music is heard for the 100th time."