For the week of June 18th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is distributing the Steven Soderbergh thriller Unsane on Blu-ray. Here's the thing about Steven Soderbergh: you will find no American filmmaker more self-analytical about making movies that he is. Even when he's making a trifle like the Ocean's pictures, he's questioning the idea of pure entertainment and what we (the spectator) expects from it; hell, when he's prepping something more substantial, he's trying to advance the medium along other parallel lines, like when he treated his 2009 masterwork Che as an opportunity to field-test the then-new RED camera. So it goes with Unsane. We're getting a pretty conventional psychothriller wherein a disturbed young woman (Claire Foy, who - faulty American accent aside - is a revelation here; you can practically see her synapses firing when she's in distress) finds herself mysteriously committed to a psych ward and becomes convinced that a hulking attendant (The Blair Witch Project's Joshua Leonard) is stalking her. Soderbergh scores some satirical points early on about the mercenary nature of the health-care system (thanks, primarily, to a wonderful Jay Pharoah), but he drops the social treatise aspect pretty fast to riff on both Roman Polanski (Foy's increasingly brittle hold on sanity recalls Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion) and Brian De Palma (especially given some of the more lurid twists in the second half - at times, I thought I was looking at a black-box version of Dressed to Kill). Very little in the film will surprise you (unless you weren't already a fan of Foy, in which case, get ready to meet your new favorite actor), but it works you over all the same, and I loved how Soderbergh and screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein & James Greer acknowledge that even if Foy is telling the truth about her stalker, she still has a litany of other mental issues clouding her judgment. What makes Soderbergh's popcorn entertainments more defensible is that Soderbergh is never really content to just coast. Even here, as he riffs on countless "woman in peril" tropes, he's flexing other muscles, whether that's experimenting with the iPhone camera he uses to shoot the whole film (the grainy, splotching digital quality gives Unsane the texture of a nightmare - parts of this film look like David Lynch's unsettling, overlong Inland Empire) or conveying exposition through almost impossibly long camera takes and setups. No matter the circumstance, Soderbergh is after the challenge, and he'll find it anywhere he can.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film's "weak point comes at what should be its high point: the third act and climax. While the film begins as a fascinating study of a battered and resultantly fragile psyche and evolves into a tense drama of imprisonment and questioning sanity...it ends on a fairly routine sliding scale back towards nondescript Thriller territory, though the final scene does, at least, reinforce character, themes, and more abstract concepts and components constructed and explored throughout the film. Still, the film works extremely well and proves immensely effective as a dark and dangerous character piece that portrays [Foy's character] on the teetering edge of clarity and confidence in her reality and gradual sink into real madness where little, if any, previously existed. Whether all of her fears, both outside the hospital and inside, are with merit is up to the film to explore and the audience to decide, but Soderbergh certainly gives the viewer every opportunity to soak it all in with a uniquely crafted piece that's intimately and unsettlingly constructed, a perfect blend of visual and thematic disharmony that gets to the center of [Foy's] further unraveling of her already unraveled life."
I cannot fault the blunt-force impact of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, which is getting the Criterion Collection treatment this week. On a purely cinematic level, the film - a video essay on America and its relationship with guns - represents the apex of everything Moore had been doing. He continues to style himself as a humanist muckraker (his look - a baseball-cap-clad, shambling everyman - was as deliberate as the costume choices a comic-book artist makes for a hero or villain) questioning corporate malfeasance in his landmark 1989 documentary Roger & Me, yet he does so through the kaleidoscopic aesthetic (part-Oliver Stone polemic, part-SNL skit, and part-South Park shock effects, which are fitting, considering the presence of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in Columbine) he honed over four collective seasons of TV Nation and The Awful Truth. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, with Bowling for Columbine, the medium is a big part of the message. Moore does not equivocate one whit in his gun-control beliefs (he lets you know five minutes into Bowling for Columbine that he thinks Americans are gun-crazy), but he's also savvy enough to know that many folks will reject that perspective if presented by itself, so he'll goose it with some cartoons, a flip infographic or ten, or celebrity commentary from none other than shock rocker Marilyn Manson (who strikes one as eminently thoughtful and level-headed when discussing how violent media might have affected school shooters like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold). And at its best, the film's energy sweeps you up regardless of your political affiliation. Moore has such control of his filmmaking gifts, and he knows exactly how to break your heart, if he so chooses; I still vividly recall the collective pall that settled over the audience when Moore cut to actual security footage of the Columbine massacre. Yet I can't help but find Moore himself a little objectionable - he's too manipulative, and that's the flip side of his directorial gifts. Moore doesn't content himself with facts and argument. He wants you to hate the other side of the gun-control debate, and the way he goes about stoking our enmity has never sat well with me. He'll distort facts or make up statistics, although Moore sinks no lower than the film's queasy centerpiece when he confronts then-NRA president Charlton Heston to make him answer for America's gun deaths. At the time, Heston was suffering from early-stage Alzheimer's, and so Moore comes across as a hostile badgerer of a sick old man. In this time of fake news and truthiness, we need to very careful about how we enter a political dialogue, and I can't help but fear that Moore may have caused more harm here than good. Still, an important, troubling, problematic film.
Finally, Universal is also offering a Blu-ray showing for the sci-fi sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising. I came to the first Pacific Rim well after its 2013 debut, and it left me cold; as with Crimson Peak or the first Hellboy (and, frankly, the Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water), Pacific Rim reflects the way filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro will privilege gorgeous production design and immersive world-building over anything resembling narrative momentum and functional dialogue/character motivations (Del Toro's characters are often as frustrating as anyone you'd find in a Michael Bay movie, albeit nowhere near as unintentionally hostile-racist). If nothing else, this Steven DeKnight-helmed sequel fixes one of those issues in a big way. I don't really care for Uprising, but star John Boyega almost makes it worth watching. In theory, he's playing the son of Pacific Rim's Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), but in actuality, he's a one-person charisma service. Boyega is having a ball playing monsters and robots, and he helps to make his scenes in the sequel more infectiously fun than they've any right to be. But Boyega is really the only improvement. We probably get a little more "GIANT MONSTER SMASH" action this time around, and much of it unfolds under brighter city skies (Del Toro slathered the original Pacific Rim in so much murk and rain that the aesthetic quickly tippled over from "atmospheric" into "cost-effective": not since the 1998 Godzilla used natural gloom so aggressively to keep CGI-rendering costs down), except the shift is less of a net gain than you might think. DeKnight has no real facility for staging the big monster-robot fights, which is odd, given how consistently entertaining the fights were on his Spartacus series, and the light does expose the limitations of the CGI budget. Plus, Boyega might be a star, but his co-leading man Scott Eastwood is anything but. Hollywood, I know it's tempting to keep casting Eastwood because he looks just like his father, but the creepy CGI version of Clint from Rango has more spark and personality than this actual slice of Eastwood genetics. I will say that Pacific Rim: Uprising engineers a nifty little twist that I didn't see coming - problem is, it has to rest the dramatic tension on Charlie Freakin' Day, of all people, and as hilarious as the Once and Future Charlie Kelly is, he lacks the gravitas to go where Uprising needs him to be. Can we please just let this franchise go? John Boyega has better movies that need him.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is made of a standard arsenal of genre archetypes: the disgraced former pilot (who is also a legacy), the handsome group leader, the raw young genius, and an appropriately diverse collection of interchangeable secondary young bloods who serve no other purpose than to pilot a few of the extra Jaegers. The plot is likewise trite, pretty much cobbled together from a slow, predictable, very routine script…'unimaginative,' one could call it. After the team is put together, after new Jaegers are introduced, the film just mechanically moves into its obligatory action scenes. Sure it[']s big, fun, and loud, but nothing about the movie comes as a surprise, nor does it pursue any kind of narrative depth. It's pure escapism, superior to Transformers at least with a more balanced approach to its humor, but it's also just a generic sight-and-sound spectacle, lacking the depth and sharpness of the original. Even the action scenes fail to feel special. They're just a collection of crashes and destruction with predictable, tired, and trite 'poses' thrown in that aim to up the 'cool' factor but that instead just suck any and all semblance of an identity from the movie."