For the week of September 10th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the stylish heist spinoff Ocean's 8 to Blu-ray. Short version: the film is overwhelmingly, aggressively average. Here's why that's a problem. If we're looking at your typical narrative and thematic metrics, the initial Ocean's trilogy is also average. You can boil each down to, "Isn't Doing Crime Fun, & Also Don't We Look Fabulous Doing It?" But they don't feel average, thanks to director Steven Soderbergh. Even at their worst (Ocean's Thirteen), Soderbergh keeps gilding these disposable entertainments with all sorts of experimental filigrees. I'm thinking of how he baths Ocean's Thirteen in colored gels to reflect the shifting emotional states, or how he fashions Ocean's Twelve into a postmodern homage to '60s cinema. And Ocean's Eleven plays like The Sting in terms of the consummate moviemaking on display. But Ocean's Eight is just...there. It isn't boring, and the heist itself (stealing a six-pound Cartier necklace from the Vogue gala) unfolds with reasonable precision. It's a testament to both director Gary Ross and co-screenwriter Olivia Milch that even the nitpicks I had turned out to be key twists in the big post-heist dénouement. Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett do a fun Clooney-and-Pitt riff, and Anne Hathaway thoroughly steals the film with an exaggerated version of her own public persona. Yet you wish everyone was as vivid as Hathaway. Her costars get maybe one amusing beat before disappearing into the narrative. I love Sarah Paulson, but her introduction (as a former fence-turned-unwitting housewife) promises a more interesting person than the movie offers. Helena Bonham Carter's whole performance is an Irish accent and witchy hair. Bullock and Blanchett are playing cool, and they are, but I'd love some more of Bullock's comic jitters or Blanchett's uneasy vulnerability. You get the sense that Awkwafina (as the group's sassy pickpocket) would be the breakout star if she had one or two more substantive scenes at her disposal, although that's more than I can say for Rihanna, who decided her hacker would mumble-snarl her lines and nothing else. And the less said about Mindy Kaling, the better - why hire an established funny person and give them nothing funny to do or say? I don't know why Ross couldn't let these women pop. Prior to this film, he's shown an Old Hollywood knack for spotlighting his leads in Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, and even his ungainly The Hunger Games entry succeeds whenever people like Jennifer Lawrence and Woody Harrelson are emoting. I've also just named three of the four movies Ross directed before Ocean's Eight. For those of you playing our home game, that's just five movies in twenty years. Geniuses like Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson can get away with that record because they're brilliant and always researching the next film. Journeymen like Ross need to keep honing their craft or else they lose it. And that's just what happens here. Ross mostly knows where to put the camera or end a scene - too bad he can't bring any spark to the proceedings. I forgot who said it, but these movies are soufflés. They might look light and frothy, but they take a lot of work, and if you mess up the bake, they settle into a leaden mess. Suffice to say, Gary Ross is no good at making soufflés. Average just won't cut it.
From Sony Pictures Home Entertainment comes a new 4K edition of the horror-thriller Christine. For fans of this 1983 thriller - an adaptation of Stephen King's popular horror novel - Sony has rescued the film twice now from oblivion, first offering a value-priced disc to replace an out-of-print (and, thus, very pricey) Twilight Time version and now mastering the film in Ultra HD. The film deserves the attention - it remains one of John Carpenter's most underrated entries. At the time, audiences criticized Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Phillips for streamlining too much of King's source material. While Carpenter kept the story's central hook (a demonic 1958 Plymouth Fury wreaks havoc in a small American town), he jettisoned much of King's supernatural backstory (in the book, the titular vehicle is possessed by the spirit of Christine's first owner; in the film, Christine simply comes off the assembly line bad), putting the emphasis on young Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), the teenage kid whose fortunes change dramatically when he buys Christine. The bullied, lonely Cunningham becomes the heart of the film: his friendship with the much more popular Dennis Guilder (John Stockwell) initially helps him get by, but it isn't until he finds Christine that Arnie gains self-confidence, better fashion sense, and the attentions of the prettiest girl in school (Alexandra Paul). Sure, he has to kill a bunch of people in the process and lose his soul to a demonically possessed speedster, but love makes us all do crazy things, and so Carpenter's take on the material has the blackly comic sting of a tragic romance. That's not to say this is a perfect adaptation. Once Arnie fully goes over to the dark side, the film loses much of the humanity generated from his relationship with Dennis, and the reduction of explicit supernatural elements renders the big finale a little anticlimactic. But on the whole, this is a sturdy, scary little chiller, bolstered by good character work and Carpenter's unerring widescreen eye for generating suspense.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film gets "brand-new life on UHD. It's not that the previous Blu-ray was in any way poor, but it's impressive just how much room the image had to grow. Texturally, the UHD firmer, finer, sharper, and the grain structure is nearly perfect. In terms of its HDR color scheme, the image is given brand new life, with the titular car a particular beneficiary of the color format's performance. It's difficult to imagine the movie looking any better than this, to imagine Sony squeezing out any more life from the movie. Fans are in for a real treat and picture quality enthusiasts are, too. The Atmos track is fine and the (mostly) carryover extras are solid. Very highly recommended."
But the most exciting release of the week is the Criterion Collection's newly remastered pressing of Terrence Malick's 2011 epic The Tree of Life. America's most infamous perfectionist-transcendentalist, Malick created something here that in scope alone, dwarfed even his WWII meditation The Thin Red Line or his reimagining of the Pocahontas legend The New World. Ostensibly the story of a Texas family growing up in the 1950s, Malick spins off into the cosmos, contrasting the family's quotidian struggles and triumphs with nothing less than the birth of all life itself. Seven years later, the film still remains a daring gambit. We'll watch Malick's on-screen proxy (Sean Penn, who mopes around in the theatrical cut and nothing more) reminisce about the abuse he faced at the hands of his tortured father (Brad Pitt, in maybe the best performance he'll ever give), and then we'll cut to the Big Bang itself. We'll play alongside young Penn (Hunter McCracken) and his brothers (Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan) during summer's lazy days before watching dinosaurs tentatively navigate a new world. Malick zooms through all creation, often letting Penn's mother (a luminous Jessica Chastain) act as the bond between all realms, and the implication is clear - within even the most mundane human experiences, we contain multitudes. The film never wants for ambition. Still, I've always thought that Malick doesn't quite nail the pacing: The Tree of Life would work better either in a substantially shorter version that jettisoned all the metaphysical trappings or in a substantially longer version that gave equal weight/screen time to all the different stages of evolutionary life that Malick wants to cover. How interesting, then, that this Blu-ray version elects to do the latter. In addition to the theatrical cut, Criterion and Malick have put together an extended cut that runs almost an hour longer. This release was supposed to street two weeks ago, except Malick's editorial fiddlings ran long, as they are oft to do. IndieWire reported that Malick assembled a completely new cut of the film from an "enormous amount of footage he never used," a labyrinthine project that caused Criterion to go far "over [their planned] budget" for the release. Film historian and critic Glenn Erickson has gotten a chance to look at the new cut, and he writes that "almost every scene appears to have new, good added material...[Penn's character] seems to be introduced much earlier...We see the miserable home life of his main cohort in delinquency, who is physically battered by his father, not just bullied. [Penn]'s guilt and self-recriminations seem enlarged," all of which makes for an "even more demanding" experience. It appears the longer Tree of Life is something all the more remarkable: Malick's next film. Cineastes, rejoice.
Svet Atanasov notes in his Blu-ray review that he "was a bit surprised when it was initially revealed that Terrence Malick was working on a longer version of The Tree of Life because I thought that the theatrical version was quite wonderful. I have now seen the new extended version of the film and I feel that my satisfaction with the theatrical version is even stronger. Criterion's upcoming two-disc set features both versions of the film, with some newly produced bonus features that focus on its production history and director Malick's working methods."
Finally, the biggest surprise of the week might be the recent Superfly remake, which comes courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Morally, the film is pretty much indefensible. This is the movie that people think Scarface is, a deeply glorified look at drug-dealing culture that fashions young kingpin Priest (the quietly charismatic Trevor Jackson) as pretty much the ne plus ultra of cool. He styles his hair to look like Morris Day (to quote Michael Kenneth Williams, playing Priest's mentor), dresses like a GQ model, and unleashes lightning-fast jujitsu skills whenever the situation demands it. Yes, the whole movie hinges on his wanting to get out of the game and retire, but he looks so cool breaking bad, especially when soundtrack curator Future drops Curtis Mayfield's iconic "Pusher Man" over a montage of Priest expanding his dominion all over the American Southeast. And let's not even get into his relationship with his bisexual squeeze Georgia (Lex Scott Davis, from The First Purge) - the second we see that Georgia is also involved with Andrea Londo's exotic dancer, the movie essentially starts a countdown to their inevitable threeway (call it, "Chekhov's ménage à trois"). Yet as disreputable as this new Superfly might be, it's also consistently, deliriously entertaining. From Frame One - Priest's ice-cold verbal takedown of a sloppy rapper-turned-dealer - the film maintains the same effortless confidence as its lead. It's not that Superfly reinvents a familiar genre. We can predict every move it's going to make, from the rival dealer (Kaalan "KR" Walker) who wants Priest's blood to the way his hot-headed best friend (the great Jason Mitchell, working wonders with a thankless role) unintentionally jeopardizes Priest's empire. No, what Superfly has in triplicate is style. Director X (née Julien Christian Lutz, and just so we're clear - "Director" is his first name and "X" is his last) bathes everything in rich neons and velvety digital cinematography that recall both Hype Williams and Michael Mann, and his Atlanta location work reminds me of how Hiro Murai and Donald Glover cast the city on FX's Atlanta. X also allows for all sorts of delightful idiosyncrasies that a more unimaginative exploitationer might elide. I don't know what delights me more: Jennifer Morrison's female-McConaughey-as-dirty-cop act, Esai Morales' thoughtful drug supplier, or everything with the Snow Patrol, a group of drug lords that dress in all white and yes, that includes their various automatic weapons. Plus, Alex Tse's script gives the characters more wit and verbal dexterity than you might expect. I've seen a lot of movies in 2018, and the line of the year might be "It doesn't matter how smart you are in a world of stupid m***********s." Look, the original Super Fly was also ethically problematic grindhouse fare, so if we're to take Superfly 2018 following suit as a given, maybe the new film deserves credit just for doing so with such panache and lurid slickness. Moral compromises are rarely this much fun.