For the week of August 27th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the wild sci-fi-revenge thriller Upgrade to Blu-ray. Right from the jump, I realized Upgrade would be a cut above everything else writer/director Leigh Whannell has helped craft (Saw, Insidious). You know the endless production company credits that precede a movie? Whannell somehow found a way to realize that CEO-exec self-aggrandizement in a manner both witty and gently foreboding. As a result, the movie starts working on you before the first official frame, and Whannell maintains that disarming engagement through ninety-five breathlessly paced minutes. He's got a great hook: the story of a paraplegic auto-mechanic (Logan Marshall-Green, in one of the year's great unsung performances) who makes it through a personal/emotional tragedy with the help of an experimental A.I. (named STEM and voiced - wonderfully so - by Simon Maiden) that's hacked into his nervous system, Upgrade plays like if you cross-bred The Punisher with Her. Whannell's dialogue is functional and unobtrusive, and his direction is clean and more technically impressive than you might realize; Whannell employs a lot of unshowy oners and precise coverage, allowing him to orchestrate a decently crunchy car chase on a comparatively tiny budget. It also seems he's learned a trick from his former Saw and Insidious partner James Wan. In Furious 7, Wan would lock the camera down on one actor during especially brutal hand-to-hand combat, but Whannell outdoes his old buddy here, offering the most striking uses of that aesthetic I've seen. Marshall-Green will give STEM control of his body when he's in a tight spot, and the camera locks into our hero, the world pivoting and shaking around him, all while his face registers this kind of stunned paralysis. It's such a great way to convey the simultaneous precision and chaos of this unknown entity "taking the wheel," so to speak. Look, on one hand, Upgrade is just well-made exploitation fare - I left the theater thinking how well it appropriated RoboCop's velocity and carnage, and how little it borrowed of that 1987 classic's satirical import. And it is formulaic to a fault, at times. I hated that the hero's wife gets fridged, or that it telegraphs one of its Big Bads' reveals not five minutes into Act One. But Whannell juices the film with such energy that we almost don't care, and while I may have predicted the first big twist, Upgrade has a far nastier one that completely blindsided me. Like its central A.I., the film keeps innovating in ways you don't see coming.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "screenwriters, directors, and actors often undertake the unenviable challenge of gaining audience trust and sympathy right off the bat when tragedy strikes minutes into a movie, before there's ample opportunity to fall in love with characters and become invested in their lives and relationships. Upgrade succeeds, the first of many signs of something special coming together within the movie's futuristic fabric. There's a raw emotional spillage as the distressed Grey watches his wife perish, literally unable to move a muscle and seeing her final breath mere inches from his eyes. His struggles as a literally and figuratively broken man carry enough weight to allow the audience to become invested in his plight and cheer for his success...Logan Marshall-Green easily draws the audience into his plight and his recovery, which makes the coming antagonism between himself and the world around his wife's murder, not to mention the brewing emotional disconnect between himself and STEM, all the more compelling...Upgrade sort of has the feel of a Neill Blomkamp film, and one could see Sharlto Copley in the role of Fisk, one of the film's key villains. But Whannell does make the film his own, with some impressive camera work that accentuates Grey's sudden superhuman powers and a hard-edge industrial score that compliments the movie's bleak output and extreme violence. Logan Marshall-Green excels in the lead role, building up his character only to see him torn down into a shell of a man in a matter of minutes."
Next up is Chloé Zhao's brilliant character study The Rider. As Brady Blackburn, a rodeo rider trying to find something resembling meaning after a horrible accident prematurely ends his career, Brady Jandreau proves uncommonly magnetic; Jandreau just happens to also be a former rodeo rider trying to find something resembling meaning after a horrible accident prematurely ended his career. This practical experience proves most wrenching. When we see Jandreau tame wild horses (in long, impossible takes that aren't actually impossible because, again, Jandreau can actually do these things) or help train a young rider on a makeshift bronco simulation, there's just no artifice on display. It's just pure instinct, and it engages more than any Hollywood elite after a six-week post-production boot camp. Still, The Rider's real star is Zhao. She's managed to craft a fusion of fact and fiction that somehow never feels exploitative; even when she's guiding Jandreau's actual sister Lilly or his best friend/mentor Lane Scott (who endures intensive rehab after a near-fatal car accident) around the requirements of narrative storytelling, she does so with a touch both empathic and respectful. She cares about these people and what they mean to Jandreau. At times, The Rider plays like a feature-length therapy session for its star. By all accounts, Jandreau felt as rudderless as his (lightly) fictionalized counterpart, and Zhao gives him space to grieve his former life, to try and creep towards a new normal. It's all part of Zhao's agenda: to examine the idea of conventional masculinity (not for nothing does The Rider deal with actual cowboys, those stereotypical paragons of masculine authority) in order to see if it allows for anything resembling tenderness or vulnerability. All this, and within a cinematic space that consistently amazes. Zhao must have shot like 65% of this film during magic hour, and the shots of the South Dakota prairie play like vérité John Ford. Her cinematographer Joshua James Richards might be working in handheld, but he helps lend an epic grace to Brady's internal struggle. In some ways, it's a shame The Rider got locked into the indie circuit. This is a genuine widescreen event, and one that you should see on the biggest screen possible. Imagine if Richard Linklater and Terrence Malick got together to make a western. That's The Rider. I will be there on opening day for everything Chloé Zhao makes henceforth.
Finally, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering a thirtieth anniversary edition of Francis Ford Coppola's wonderful Tucker: The Man and His Dream. It's funny - for whatever reason, cineastes the world round decided that Coppola floundered during the 1980s even though so many of his best films sprung from that decade. Think his S.E. Hinton double-feature The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, the experimental musical One from the Heart, or this, a candy-colored docudrama that merits distinction alongside Coppola's Godfather pictures (the first two, anyways). Ostensibly, Coppola is working within a traditional rise-and-fall narrative, telling the story of Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges, in one of his two or three best-ever performances), a beyond-optimistic engineer who's almost manically obsessed with creating a technologically advanced car during a time (the 1950s) when any independently-minded upstart couldn't hope to break the Big Three's control of the automobile industry. And sure, Tucker's individual beats hew pretty closely to what we'd expect, from the strain his ambition puts on his family (most notably his wife, played by the great Joan Allen) to the very powerful enemies he makes along the way (in a nice little piece of stunt casting, Coppola casts Jeff's real father Lloyd as Michigan Senator - and Tucker's biggest adversary - Homer Ferguson). However, in terms of execution, Tucker makes us forget we're watching well-worn conventions. Coppola initially devised the film as a Brechtian noir musical (during the 1970s, he roped in Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green to write the music and lyrics), and while that approach proved financially unrealistic once American Zoetrope started to crater, Coppola still directs with the same rhythms he'd bring to a splashier production. This Tucker moves like a musical without songs, cutting on movement and building to gaudy montages that approximate big dance numbers. At times, you'd think you were watching a feature-length trailer (or promotional ad, given Tucker's field) for the movie itself, given the breathless energy in every frame. And my God, that Vittorio Storaro cinematography! What Storaro has done looks like rich, modern three-strip Technicolor: if Vincente Minnelli were making movies in 1988, they'd look just like this one. Yet as much fun as Tucker is (and it's a blast), Coppola isn't an easy lark. Viewed in the context of his entire career, Tucker reveals just as much about Francis Ford Coppola as it does about Preston Tucker. Like Tucker, Coppola was a wunderkind in his chosen field (cinema), yet he wasn't content to excel within the confines of the medium. He had to keep pushing - keep unsettling - no matter how much financial or personal risk he accrued in the process. Tucker wanted to build a car that no one had ever seen before; Coppola made an expensive anti-musical (One from the Heart) and a war film just as chaotic as the real thing (Apocalypse Now) because he felt movies had gotten too safe. Kindred spirits, really, except Tucker's melancholy ending reveals the one key difference between the two men: Coppola has no illusions about what happens to dreamers like them. Doesn't mean they stop dreaming, though.