For the week of July 23rd, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One to Blu-ray. I have massive issues with Ready Player One. If Spielberg has fixed many of the problems with Ernest Cline's nigh-unreadable source material, he's still made a few puzzling concessions. Ready Player One comments a lot about the nature of a person's digital avatar inside the VR realm of the OASIS, and how you're not limited to your generic biology in the slightest, so how come our hero looks - in both real and digital iterations - like a hunky white dude (Tye Sheridan, a good actor who's almost totally unremarkable here), especially when his female sidekicks (Lena Waithe and Olivia Cooke, both of whom are going to be huge in like two years) are so much more interesting and capable? Yet through sheer directorial muscle alone, Spielberg redeems so much of Ready Player One. He's stated that it, Jaws, and Saving Private Ryan 4K are the three most challenging pictures he's ever made; like those other two, it's also one of his most breathtakingly virtuosic. In terms of the density of images littering the screen, Ready Player One reminded me of his similarly ungainly-hypnotic epic 1941. Both present the setpiece as Mad Magazine splash page, with Ready Player One's two biggest sequences (a car race through a futuristic digital facsimile of Manhattan; a Lord of the Rings-esque siege against a gigantic castle keep) painting in pop-culture references and gonzo flashes of action. The bike from Akira slides under a Last Action Hero marquee while avoiding a T-Rex. King Kong swings from building to building, pursuing Back to the Future's DeLorean. Chucky goes stab-happy on hordes of corporate raiders. Mechagodzilla squares off against the Iron Giant. So it goes (set to Alan Silvestri's twinkling score and a host of '80s classics), and all while a thousand more pop-culture touchstones caper about at the corners of the proscenium. If that sounds a little overwhelming to you, well, it is. But as a technical achievement, I've never seen anything like it. You get acclimated to the inside of the OASIS so quickly that you never run into any Uncanny Valley issues, and the director once again proves him a master of orchestrating chaos for maximum spatial clarity. Furthermore, I'd argue that Ready Player One has a bit more on its plate than nostalgia-themed hyperaction. Critics wiser than myself have commented on the hypocrisy of Steven Spielberg using Warner Brothers' backing and $200 million dollars to make an anti-corporation screed. To some degree, they ain't wrong. But they're also missing the larger point, that any significant advancements in technology always unsettle the division between public service and commerce (we all need Internet; we all pay for it, too), and to Spielberg's credit, he stays in that middle region instead of proffering his support for the Pollyanna-ish ideal. Spielberg uses computer programmer James Halliday (Mark Rylance, who's so good he seems beamed over from a weirder, darker movie) as his own avatar. Yes, Halliday kicks off the film's Willy Wonka-adjacent stakes (find the hidden Halliday Easter Egg, win half a trillion dollars and control of the OASIS), but he also gives the film what little moral gravity it has. Just as Halliday never stopped lamenting how his financial bottom line ruptured what started as an act of pure artistic creation, so does Spielberg wrestle with balancing his own creative vision against his commercial success. And in the film's best moments, we get some glorious bridge between art and commerce. The key scene is an act of fanboyism on Spielberg's part, a reimagining of maybe the most iconic film from Spielberg's most important cinematic mentor. Sure, you can argue that it's crass, or that it, like Ready Player One, is a shameless manipulation of a shared cultural landscape. But think about the relationship between Spielberg and [REDACTED]. Look at the depth of the recreation, the level of detail. From one perspective, it looks like obsession. From another, it looks like love.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the effects are seamless, and they are chaotic. They're abundantly colorful, offering a dazzling array of prominent hues that contrast to the somewhat gray and bleak "real world" that has all but been lost to the make believe. And there's a level of creative freedom here that has heretofore been unavailable to filmmakers and digital artists if only because other movies were not conducive to the most wild and extreme imaginings; the opportunity for OASIS users to choose their own avatars, select their own vehicles, or populate any world where anything is possible means ultimate freedom in pushing boundaries and opening eyes to the possibilities that really exist in today's digital entertainment. It's almost ironic, though, that a movie that is partially a cautionary tale but also so attuned to the human condition - or what remains of it in the film's world, anyway - would feature such beautifully prominent digital constructs, but whether there's anything to that is up to the viewer to decide. It does say two things, though: the future of moviemaking is here, and the future of humanity is here, too. And there's great opportunity for both so long as there's balance. If there's not, there's great opportunity to lose everything."
Under its Vestron Collector's line, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is giving Blu-ray releases to two gory, H.P. Lovecraft-influenced chillers: Dagon and Beyond Re-Animator. Of the pair, Stuart Gordon's Dagon is the most interesting, though it's not without problems. As a director, Gordon never really got a full shot. The creative template he established during his tenure at Chicago's Organic Theater dogged Gordon his entire career: his films are often experimental, confrontational, and painfully threadbare. Even in his best pictures - Re-Animator, From Beyond - you sense ferocious thematic content laboring to overcome budgetary/production setbacks. And Dagon is no exception. On an instinctual level, no filmmaker gets H.P. Lovecraft better than Gordon, and he devises Dagon as a synthesis of both the title short story and Lovecraft's novella The Shadow over Innsmouth. The two play well together. "Dagon" provides the film's bizarre mythology (an ancient realm of aquatic, voracious god-monsters), while The Shadow over Innsmouth lends Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli a more traditional chase narrative: after being shipwrecked on an isolated Spanish island, American businessman Paul (Ezra Godden, a Brit sporting a terrible American accent) finds himself fleeing the mysterious locals. And you've got to award Gordon points for ambition. This movie is simultaneously a massive creature feature (with few exceptions, everyone in town is a monster of some sort), an underwater fairy tale, and a grand-scale homage to the films of Harold Lloyd. You read that last part right: Gordon dresses Godden in very Lloyd-like glasses and then sets him in motion, like we're watching the horror-movie version of Speedy. But Gordon could only secure his film's meager budget (about $5 million) from Spanish financiers, and you feel this compromise in every frame. I do love how the language barrier creates one more obstacle for Paul to overcome, and the various Spanish locales give Dagon a gothic rot Gordon couldn't afford otherwise. But I'm less keen on the terrible CGI Gordon has to settle for any time his camera dips underwater (the undersea kingdom stuff looks especially terrible), or the rushed production schedule that clearly didn't give Gordon much editorial coverage. Still, nothing betrays Gordon like the ending. Dagon tries to pack a movie's worth of twists, bloody mutilations, sexual violations, and bizarre lyricism into about twenty minutes (maybe?), and almost none of it works because it scans as careless. Still, at least Dagon counts as a noble misfire. In sequelizing Gordon's best film, director Brian Yuzna turns Beyond Re-Animator into the filmic equivalent of grave desecration. I love Jeffrey Combs, but his Herbert West here plays like a pale imitation of his original characterization - now West is in prison (in what's clearly Spain - Yuzna, too, had to rely on foreign financiers to enter production), now he's trying to continue his bloody work, now our patience is wearing. We spend too much time with Jason Barry's mopey romantic lead, and nothing about the special effects thrills like Gordon's tricks from the first movie. Hollywood - it's okay for some things to be one-offs. You know that, right?
Of Dagon, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the island section of Dagon is long on mood but unfortunately short on both narrative momentum as well as performance expertise. Almost immediately, and for reasons that aren't very well developed, Paul and Barbara become separated, and predictably that ends up leaving Paul more or less stranded. While the island initially appears to have no inhabitants (something that actually ups the 'creep' factor considerably), it of course turns out that there are 'folks' around, though they may not be making the next Lonely Planet in terms of any hospitality they may offer. The film tends to get increasingly preposterous as it develops its theme (Lovecraftian or otherwise) of a sort of mysterious cult that has arisen in this isolated locale, but here the kind of inept characterizations tend to undercut any sense of anxiety. Director Stuart Gordon has an almost Fellini-esque eye for bizarre faces, but some of the actors just can't quite muster the requisite menace to make things truly scary."
From Shout Factory comes two new John Carpenter releases: In the Mouth of Madness and Memoirs of an Invisible Man. We'll start with the best. Though indifferently received by audiences and critics in 1995, In the Mouth of Madness now stands as the last great film from John Carpenter. In the Mouth of Madness begins as a slice of neo-noir, as insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill, in an underrated, Bogart-esque turn) starts looking into the disappearance of acclaimed horror novelist Sutter Cane (Das Boot's Jürgen Prochnow). The more Trent digs, the more he discovers how potent Cane's fictions really are, and the film slowly glides into a supernatural realm, building in intensity to a chaotic, Lovecraftian finale that concludes the loose "Apocalyptic Trilogy" that Carpenter began with The Thing and Prince of Darkness. This is a nihilistic, disturbing tale, but like Carpenter's best works, it's fleet and incredibly exciting, and it creates a believable End of the World on a relatively modest budget. Yet while I have no trouble branding In the Mouth of Madness a lost Carpenter masterpiece, I can't do the same for his misbegotten sci-fi thriller Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Author H.F. Saint wrote a fantastic novel, a witty, postmodern take on H.G. Wells's classic The Invisible Man. And certainly screenwriter William Goldman can handle this kind of smart populist fare – if you're not familiar with his scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Harper, The Princess Bride, and Marathon Man, go mainline those features with a quickness. The problem, however, might be Carpenter, much as I hate to admit it. His skill lies in elevating scrappy genre fare, whereas Memoirs plays like a sci-fi gloss on Hitchcock's North by Northwest: after a freak accident turns him invisible, ad man Nick Holloway (Chevy Chase, and more on him in a minute) finds himself romancing a cool blonde (Daryl Hannah, better than this material deserves) and evading a government agent (Sam Neill, again, albeit less compelling here than in Madness) who wants to turn Nick into a weapon. Carpenter lacks the light touch necessary to pull this off – his action sequences are too forced, his sense of comic banter too understated (the humor in Carpenter's best films stems from a certain dry gallows quality). You start wondering how Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg would handle the same material. That said, I can't quite blame Carpenter. He stepped onto this project as a gun-for-hire, and he certainly got no support from Chase, who was apparently so steadfastly, resolutely against being funny in any capacity that a) he made life hell for everyone on set and b) turns in a lead performance with all the charisma of a particularly smarmy department-store mannequin. Dean Cundey's cinematography is predictably glossy, and I do like many of the indivisibility effects, but ultimately? Carpenter is better when he's forced to improvise.
My recommendation? If you're jonesing for a sleek mainstream entertainment, skip Memoirs and instead check out Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's luminous A Matter of Life and Death, which is one of the three best films the pair ever made (behind The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, in that order) and maybe their most accessible feature. Hell, it might sound too accessible to some. You read its setup – an RAF flyer (David Niven, beyond charming) survives a catastrophic plane crash, only to find that Heaven (personified by the great Marius Goring) screwed up and should have let him die – and you might assume Powell and Pressburger have made something in line with the beyond-sentimental A Guy Named Joe; it does not help Matter's image that Niven has also fallen in love with an American radio operator (Kim Hunter), so he's even less willing to give up his corporeal form. Yet the end result is a consistent delight, and above all else, I credit Powell and Pressburger. If The Red Shoes and Colonel Blimp showcase how the two could package dark, subversive content within Technicolor froth, A Matter of Life and Death untethers them from weighty responsibilities. They seize on the opportunity to turn the film into a special-effects bonanza: almost every scene has some sort of trickery, from the endless stairwells and processing centers in Heaven (the Powell and Pressburger version of the Afterlife looks like a cross between King Vidor's The Crowd and Terry Gilliam's Brazil) to the witty interludes on Earth that threaten to pull Niven from his earthly reverie. In particular, Powell and Pressburger stage a massively complicated freeze-frame situation (where Niven can move around two table-tennis players while they're frozen and their ball hangs in the air) that looks as seamless as anything David Fincher or the Wachowskis have attempted. Furthermore, Powell and Pressburger don't entirely dodge lending their film substance. To everyone on Earth, Niven's push-pull between life and death looks like a series of unpredictable seizures, and Powell and Pressburger never rule out the possibility that their hero might be suffering delusions caused by wartime trauma. That gentle ambiguity carries over to the contrasting depictions of Heaven and Earth. We might expect Heaven to look more stunning, except DP Jack Cardiff films it in stark monochrome, whereas Earth blooms in gorgeous Technicolor. The implication is subtle but unmistakable: as far as Powell and Pressburger are concerned, life is always better than death, even if we've little to fear from what's next.