For the week of July 16th, Wes Anderson's great Isle of Dogs hits Blu-ray. There is part of me that wants to engage critically with Isle of Dogs. That wants to talk about director's Wes Anderson use of the widescreen frame (I feel like I've only processed maybe 40% of the film, so dense is the visual information at all corners of the screen) or how he weaves in at least three different animation styles at any given time (stop-motion, Japanese woodcut stills, and traditional cel animation) or how the charges of racist cultural appropriation leveled against the film seem gently misguided at best and foolhardy at worst. And maybe I'll have time to address those points at some later date. But a bigger part of me just wants to give Isle of Dogs a big hug. This is, by far, Anderson's warmest and most inviting feature film. For a guy who makes movies that look like living dollhouses, Anderson has always flourished in the disconnect between his candy-colored aesthetics and the aching emotional withdrawal of his protagonists. This time, the emotional through-line is more direct and immediate than anything Anderson has heretofore attempted. Anderson's preteen hero Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) loses his beloved dog Spots (Liev Schreiber) when Atari's uncle, the fearsome Mayor of Megasaki (co-screenwriter Kunichi Nomura), quarantines all dogs get to Trash Island, where they'll slowly die of a fatal canine-flu. But Atari doesn't care, and he tries like hell to get Spots back. Anderson being Anderson, of course there's more to it than that (evil robot dogs, a couple of wise dog sages voiced by F. Murray Abraham and Tilda Swinton, a preteen newspaper drama that plays like JV Sam Fuller, and a political conspiracy that seems to reflect a certain American president more than it does anything specific to Japan), except no longer do we have Richie Tenenbaum mooning over his (adopted) sister from afar. Atari loves his dog and wants to save him, full stop. And Anderson seems galvanized by this emotional vibrancy, both in terms of the larger design elements (see this film on as large a screen as possible) and the character possibilities. I can't imagine Anderson writing someone like Bryan Cranston's Chief before Isle of Dogs, and not just because Chief is a literal dog. Rather, Chief is this exposed nerve of emotion, a dog that uses anger (the repetition of his "I bite" line grows more powerful with each utterance) to try and mask the deep loneliness at his core. What ultimately transpires between Chief and Atari will not surprise you, and you likely won't care - the emotional dynamics between determined boy and angry dog are so rich that the formula feels reborn.
Still, as great as Isle of Dogs is, the best movie of the week (and maybe of the year) is Lynne Ramsay's bruising neo-noir You Were Never Really Here, which arrives courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment. The film exists at the nexus of my two favorite genres: B-movie noir and postmodern art exercise. That marriage sounds improbable, but they work together far better than you might assume. To wit: if noir formula tells us what to expect in terms of plot, we can take other opportunities to experiment, and perhaps more boldly than we might otherwise because we can ground the viewer in whatever comforts the narrative offers. Think John Boorman with Point Blank or Steven Soderbergh with Haywire. And now Lynne Ramsay has You Were Never Really Here. At its core, what we have is Taken meets Léon: brutal-but-noble war veteran Joe (the sublime Joaquin Phoenix) becomes the protector of a senator's preteen daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) who sits at the epicenter of a terrifying human-trafficking conspiracy. You could guess what goes down off that brief synopsis, and you'd probably be right. But how it happens proves consistently breathtaking, and that's all Lynne Ramsay. Anyone familiar with her great Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, and We Need to Talk About Kevin knows what a master Ramsay is at making the subjective terrifyingly visceral; outside of Martin Scorsese, no one is better at drowning us in the internal realms of folks we'd rather not encounter. So it goes with Joaquin Phoenix here. The easy move would be to give Phoenix an action franchise in much the same way many of his peers have gone galloping after their own. However, whenever Joe lashes out, Ramsay and her ace DP Tommy Townend distort or withhold the most graphic punchlines. They'll hold the camera too close to Joe so all we'll process is frenzied struggling or have him strike just off camera or - in the film's showstopper setpiece - convey his rampage through grainy security footage, the images skipping from one camera to the next, set to the eerie remove of Rosie and the Originals' "Angel Baby." As a result, we never get to "enjoy" the violence, especially considering we spend far more time in its aftermath: the pooling blood on the floor and the agonizing pain of the wounded, of which Joe too finds himself. Ramsay presents so much from his perspective - looking into a mirror, crushing a jellybean before eating it, staring into the night of an unnamed metropolis that glows and flutters like an early Stan Brakage short - that we don't get a good look at Joe until about five minutes into the film. By that point, the damage is done, and if there's any constant, it's Jonny Greenwood's atonal, ambient soundtrack, which somehow gives form to all the confusion rolling inside Joe. I took a deep breath as You Were Never Really Here reached its (pitch perfect) ending. It might have been the only one I took during the whole film.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "the disconnect between style and content is probably best exemplified by a film that obviously helped to inform You Were Never Really Here and which is cited rather prominently on a pull quote on the front cover of the Blu-ray release, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. But Scorsese had the good sense to frame his story within a grittily realistic context, something that added to and perhaps even reflected the psychological disruptions Travis Bickle was experiencing. By contrast, Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay infuses You Were Never Really Here with stylistic conceits from the get go, where an opening sequence features near hallucinatory sound design of at least two people whispering a 'countdown' of sorts, which is then met with the unsettling image of Joe with a plastic bag over his head. Even this might be viewed as 'grittily realistic' had Ramsay not opted for a montage like approach, and there are similar stylistic flourishes regularly skewing You Were Never Really Here away from its 'kitchen sink drama' foundational elements toward something decidedly more in the Art House arena...If Ramsay seems a little uncertain as to how to approach this disturbing subject matter and this equally disturbing (and disturbed) main character, Phoenix commits to his performance with his typical intensity, bringing Joe's anguished interior life to the surface even when the presentational style tends to keep the character at arm's length. Ramsay is not a 'frequent flyer' in film production, and her attempts to marry weighty substance with at times flighty style don't always mesh perfectly here, though both her fans and appreciators of Phoenix may find this an interesting 'near miss.'"
Less substantial is Universal Studios Home Entertainment's Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty. I Feel Pretty doesn't aim particularly high, but for about eighty minutes, at least it's funny. I credit Schumer's sketch-comedy experience. When the film works, it unfolds as a series of skits on one core concept: the disconnect between Schumer's regular gal thinking she's supermodel-attractive and the increasingly incredulous reactions from everyone around her. At times, it feels like you're watching her Inside Amy Schumer writing staff workshopping this idea, except each alt take gets a five-to-ten-minute sketch. What if we plugged Schumer's character into a Tinder date? What if she entered a bikini contest? How about if she were the receptionist at a Marie Claire-like fashion empire? We get a half-dozen more variations on this theme, and although the film does get repetitive, filmmakers Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn do a good job of making this material look slick (their DP, Florian Ballhaus, gives the picture some of the sheen he gave the iconic 2006 rom-com The Devil Wears Prada) and the performers look polished. Schumer still isn't much of an actress, but her bull-in-a-china-shop confidence fits this cartoonish premise, and Silverstein and Kohn wisely surround her with even more talented comic performers. Besides hilarious bit parts for comedians Adrian Martinez and Dave Attell, I loved Rory Scovel as the sweetly idiosyncratic love interest, and Busy Phillips and Aidy Bryant (playing Schumer's best friends) make Schumer's shtick funnier through their nicely understated reaction shots. Best of all? The great Michelle Williams, who's playing Marilyn Monroe playing Schumer's neurotic fashionista boss. At any given moment, Williams is working on seven or eight different levels of meta-performance, and all of them are fantastic. And as long as I Feel Pretty keeps offering these amiable sketches, it merits a light recommendation. The problem is, it also feels bound to the strictures of traditional studio fare, so at a certain point, the fun has to stop as Schumer loses her confidence (right at the start of the third act), and her life falls into disarray. The jokes stop, too, for nearly a full half hour, leaving us free to contemplate how limited Schumer is as an actor (being funny on-stage or during a standup set do not immediately translate into thespian prowess) or how offensive the main premise is. To wit: even though the movie argues that confidence is sexier than physical attractiveness, it does so by having Schumer think she's as hot as, say, fashion model Emily Ratajkowski (who is predictably terrible in a small role as - surprise surprise! - a super-pretty model) and thus indirectly validates all those surface standards of beauty that the film purports to condemn.
Of the film, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film is essentially a billboard for the power of positivity: envision it, believe it, and it will happen. Follow that mantra, repeat positive thoughts over and over in the mirror and, eventually, they will come to define one's identity. In the film, Renee skips over the time it takes to believe and jumps straight into the ideal (?) end result, of course with a more humorous bend. But the point of the movie is that life is a mind game. It's about perception and projection. It's not so much what others see, it's what others believe, and that begins with what the individual in question believes. If someone walks with their head down, others will see a drooping person with no confidence. If they walk with their head high, chest out, and projecting an image of success, confidence, and ready to tackle the world, that's what others will see, too. There can be overconfidence, too, as the film humorously explores in a few over-the-top scenes, but the film's core message is solid, if not trite."
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the video-game adaptation/Dwayne Johnson-vehicle Rampage to Blu-ray. Of today's top box-office draws, Johnson has always been the most nakedly populist in his ambitions. That's not a slight; in a recent Rolling Stone profile, Johnson spoke of his responsibility to "always take care of the audience. You...never send an audience home unhappy," and his entertainments feel precisely calibrated for safe, stress-free enjoyment. That said, there's a difference between "safe" and "stupid," and Rampage places under that latter ranking. I dig the instinct behind the film. The video game from which the film takes inspiration has little in the way of narrative texture - you select either a giant gorilla, lizard, or wolf, and then you smash up different cityscapes - so Johnson and his team have the freedom to reinvent this premise any way they want. Unfortunately, Said Team consists of mainly Johnson's San Andreas collaborators (that film's director, Brad Peyton, also directs Rampage), and most who've seen that 2015 disaster picture would probably rank it as one of the junkier entries in the Rock The Dwayne Johnson canon (it makes Central Intelligence and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle look like Midnight Run and Raiders of the Lost Ark, respectively). So it goes with Rampage. What Johnson and Peyton do to get us to that rampaging-monsters action is invent a whole lot of genetic tampering nonsense wherein an evil research consortium (personified by Malin Åkerman and Jake Lacy, both of whom play so over-the-top that you'd think they were co-starring in the Seltzer-Friedberg parody version of Rampage) creates a pathogen capable of turning animals into larger, more aggressive versions of themselves. A more self-aware movie might use this device to infect The Rock (he'd then be the biggest moviestar in the world, both financially and literally), but no, he stays human-scaled the whole time, playing a primatologist (and former Special Forces operative, so you know he can throw down) trying to cure his beloved albino gorilla George from the pathogen's effects. And this decision hamstrings the film - it doesn't know if it would rather be a mismatched buddy picture between Johnson and a giant ape or if it wants to go the Godzilla route and focus on wanton destruction, so it never fully commits to either. Whenever we start getting into the Rock-George bond, the film whisks us away to the chaos that the wolf and/or lizard are causing, and these beasts only start really throwing down on a city (a heavily-digital version of Chicago) during the last third. It's just a little thin, and no amount of charm from the likes of Johnson or Jeffrey Dean Morgan (having a ball as a sleazy government agent) can make up for that deficiency.