For the week of June 25th, Arrow Films is bringing Abel Ferrara's cult classic The Addiction to Blu-ray. Were there a dictionary with the phrase "acquired taste" in it, and were you to look up said phrase, you might see a picture of Ferrara accompanying the definition. As far back as his non-porno debut (yep - he's that kinda guy) The Driller Killer, Ferrara has delighted in taking narrative formula and fragmenting it through his own personal style and thematic obsessions. Enter The Addiction. On one hand, it's a horror movie about a New York grad student (Lili Taylor, in one of her best performances) who gets turned into a vampire (by the great Annabella Sciorra, who's really striking here) and starts stalking the city's denizens for blood. Ferrara wasn't a stranger to the genre (he'd just made the underrated Body Snatchers remake, and one could argue that his great exploitationer Ms. 45 takes on the doomed quality of a horror film), and The Addiction certainly fulfills our expectations for how vampire movies should behave. Part of the fun is watching Taylor adapt to her new normal, all of which leads to copious bloodletting and violence. However, just as he turned his stylish gangster melodrama King of New York into a meditation on the differences (or lack thereof) between good and evil, so does he have bigger ideas with The Addiction. The hint is in the title. Taylor takes to bloodsucking like a junkie taking to heroin; she even literally shoots up blood at one point because Ferrara is many things, but subtle is not one of them. The urge to feed starts to consume her, and Ferrara gives us a delightful little detour with his favorite leading man Christopher Walken, a reformed vampire who reads William Burroughs and tries to help Taylor stop jonesing for a fix. That said, Ferrara is one of the most cynical of indie auteurs, so you can guess how successful his heroine is, and he keeps underlining the futility of her struggle by having her (and the other characters) use philosophy to comment on the nature of the self and its predilection towards self-destruction. A lot of critics in 1995 found this philosophizing pretentious, and I get it - namechecking Burroughs and Nietzsche would seem overwrought in a regular movie, let alone a genre picture. But from Ferrara, I don't expect anything less. No matter how old he gets, he remains the quintessential indie agitator, making movies with the hungry abandon of the first-time filmmaker. Like I said, acquired taste, but for those who enjoy it, The Addiction will rank among his very finest pictures.
I really like writers-directors-producers-editors-actors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and their latest film The Endless acts as a bracing reminder of what makes them so interesting. The two make genre films, yes, but they're really interested in cross-pollination: Resolution starts as a cabin-in-the-woods-type chiller and then ends as a rumination on the nature of memory and how we involve ourselves in trauma, while Spring looks at the intricacies of first love in a way that recalls both Terrence Malick AND H.P. Lovecraft. It goes without saying, then, that The Endless is up to more than it seems. We start with two brothers who discover a horrifying secret when they return to the religious cult they escaped years ago, but first look at their names: Justin and Aaron. The film invites us to see these characters as proxies for the filmmakers (especially considering Justin Benson plays Justin and Aaron Moorhead plays Aaron), and the more these two try to reconstruct what happened in the past and how it connects to their future, it becomes tempting to read the whole film as an extended metaphor for their own careers. Are they ambivalent about abandoning any kinds of hopes for a more mainstream film career by following their idiosyncratic, indie ways? Are they making a commentary on the relationship between the artist and their art? Are they using such meta details to unhinge what's already a very tricksy little thriller? All of the above, maybe? It's hard to tell, and I'm hesitant to reveal too much about the proceedings since a) I don't want to spoil any of the film's surprises and b) I'm still not sure I'm clear on what's happening. Yet I'm glad for the experience. Most horror movies don't make you struggle this much, and I'm grateful for genre that isn't content to provide solely what you expect. I don't know if this is the best introduction to Benson and Moorhead (Spring is a little more accessible, and you kinda need to see Resolution for necessary context about this one), but as long as the two keep making movies like The Endless, I'll keep watching.
Of The Endless, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote "that The Endless seems open to any number of interpretations, and to foist mine on folks might not be fair (not that that has ever stopped me before, but I digress). The film seems to be about cults and monsters (the film begins with an epigraph from one H.P. Lovecraft), but in essence it really deals at least as much with sibling relationships (there's another, perhaps cheekier, epigraph that appears under the Lovecraft quote at the beginning of the film). I'm not sure The Endless actually holds up to rigorous logical examination, but it's a fascinating film and one that I think will spark a lot of conversation, especially if (as I suspect) Benson and Moorhead follow up with even more adventures with these characters."
From Sony Pictures Home Entertainment comes a new 25th Anniversary Edition of Sleepless in Seattle, designed to fill the void left by the sold-out Twilight Time edition. I get why it might have been a little unfair to make Sleepless in Seattle a limited-edition title; this is one of the most beloved romantic comedies of the last thirty years, and maybe the most weaponized use of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan's collective moviestar chemistry. How good are they together? Well, we often forget that the two spend the vast majority of the film separated from each other - writer/director Nora Ephron keeps Hanks in Seattle and Ryan in Baltimore, letting them first connect over his contribution to a late-night radio show. Hanks is grieving over the loss of his dead wife, and Ryan immediately falls for his emotional vulnerability even though she's never met or seen him, and it's all oh-so-very-much one of those movie contrivances, except who cares? Besides Hanks and Ryan, Ephron is also operating at the top of her filmmaking gifts, and her script gives everyone the kind of perfectly timed zingers and emotional asides that we wish we could deliver extemporaneously in real life but rarely do. In particular, Hanks's on-screen son Jonah (played by Ross Malinger) steals every scene he's given, in one of those wise-beyond-their-years kid performances that would be cloying if a) Ephron's dialogue weren't so good and/or b) Malinger weren't such a natural camera presence (apparently, Hanks resented the kid because he was getting all the best lines, but I'm choosing to believe that story isn't true - I can't imagine Tom Freakin' Hanks as so insecure that he'd be jealous of a child). Plus, Sleepless in Seattle knows that it's contrived. Ephron structures the whole film as a lightly self-aware gloss on An Affair to Remember, so we never think we're dealing with real-world logic. It's movie-logic, through and through, and by the time we reach the tearjerker ending, we're convinced it's the best kind. I might prefer the absurdist fantasy of Joe Versus the Volcano, but as far as traditional rom-coms go, Hanks and Ryan would never top this film.
As preparation for the upcoming Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Paramount Home Media Entertainment is offering 4K Blu-rays of the previous five Mission: Impossible thrillers. This series is one of my favorite blockbuster franchises. Unlike most four-quadrant fare, the Mission: Impossibles aren't afraid to experiment with style, offering little in the way of consistency besides star Tom Cruise and a few other core cast members (series lucky-penny Ving Rhames, and eventually Simon Pegg, Michelle Monaghan, and Jeremy Renner). That isn't a complaint: I doubt we would have gotten Brian De Palma's 1996 franchise starter if Paramount were more concerned with homogeneity. In '96, critics decried this film as aiding and abetting the death of serious cinema. Today, it almost plays like an art film, and one that's very much of a piece with everything De Palma has made. It's a thriller about the act of observation - the perils of when we open ourselves up to surveillance - and the long sequences that follow Cruise's Ethan Hunt investigating the circumstances surrounding his team's death recall nothing less than a PG-13 gloss on Blow Out, of all things. Only the end (where a bad guy flies a helicopter into the Chunnel) goes Hollywood-bombastic, but it can't negate the superior setpieces preceding it, most notably a government heist that De Palma fashions as a grand homage to Jules Dassin's Topkapi. By contrast, John Woo's Mission: Impossible II can't help but feel a little more commercial. Woo structures his M:I entry as grand melodrama, a pulpy, Australia-set love triangle between Hunt, a dashing thief (Thandie Newton, who would be much better on Westworld), and Hunt's former double (Dougray Scott, who's terrible as a villain equal parts petulant lover and Groundskeeper Willie), the latter of whom has stolen a terrifying bio-weapon. Very little of this makes sense, and Woo stokes Cruise's ego too much - all the slo-mo profiling and flowing locks get very ridiculous, very quickly. But the images themselves are hyperbolic, gorgeous, and worlds away from De Palma's icy remove. Mission: Impossible III feels like course-correction from either mode, dialing back both Woo's operatic style and De Palma's wonkish obsession with surveillance for a TV-ready caper that pits Hunt against an arms dealer (Philip Seymour Hoffman, and yep - you read that right) in possession of a potentially world-ending whatzit. Stress TV: writer/director J.J. Abrams pretty much just retrofits his pilot episode of Alias for the big screen, swapping in Cruise for Jennifer Garner and adding a couple more action sequences. As such, the scope is smaller than we'd expect for these kinds of movies, but Abrams never lets the pace flag, and Hoffman is a delight as the brutally apathetic antagonist. Scope isn't a problem Brad Bird would have with the series' fourth entry, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. He presents the film as three-or-four massive setpieces, all of which culminate in the nerve-wracking bit where Cruise actually dangles outside the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The story is almost non-existent, yet you don't care, given Bird's facility at spatially coherent, viscerally staged chaos. And then we arrive at Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, which acts as a stylistic summation of everything that preceded it. Like De Palma's more cerebral entry? You'll love the intricately edited sequence where Hunt tries to stop an assassination in an opera house. If you preferred Woo, we get a motorcycle chase that rivals M:I 2's cliffside car tango. Rogue Nation lifts the team dynamics from M:I 3 (I love how these movies make Simon Pegg a more integral part of the cast with every movie), while the setpieces almost approach the scale of Brad Bird's Ghost Protocol work, especially when Hunt is diving into an underwater server bank or hanging off the side of a plane. It's the franchise's jukebox adventure, and a consistent, relentless delight.