For the week of September 24th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering a new 4K upgrade of John Carpenter's landmark 1978 horror movie Halloween. Five people die in Halloween. Five (plus one dog), with one occurring off-screen and the other four with so little blood as to make the shower scene in Psycho look like a maelstrom of graphic violence. And I say this not to spoil the uninitiated (spoilers, I guess, for a forty-year-old movie) but to illustrate one of the great contradictions at the heart of this classic chiller. For a movie that kickstarted the slasher genre and inspired the more ample bloodletting in the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, this first Halloween is a model of formal restraint. In fact, it shares more DNA with Robert Wise's great The Haunting. Both pictures emphasize atmosphere and creeping suspense over more explicit displays of the supernatural. Carpenter tells Halloween with the elemental economy of a great fable: a monster (Michael Myers, played by Nick Castle as an unstoppable brute in a modified William Shatner mask) escapes its dungeon in order to terrorize the inhabitants of a sleepy small town, and only a driven sage (Donald Pleasance's psychologist Dr. Loomis) and a pure innocent (Jamie Lee Curtis, whose Final Girl Laurie Strode has proven as iconic as Myers) can stop it. That's it, and like a Grimm's fairy tale, the film's mix of fantasy and menace continues to hold audiences rapt. I suspect the main reason we're seeing a 4K remaster now is so Lionsgate can capitalize on David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's upcoming Halloween reboot/sequel/reimagining, but still, I can think of few contemporary horror movies that would benefit from the added texture and detail as much as this one would. Like any of Carpenter's best features, Halloween evinces a level of artistry that stands apart from anything else in the genre. This was the first of five collaborations between Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey (of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park fame), and they bring the same sense of gliding menace that they gave The Fog and The Thing. It takes a long time for Michael to attack the first of the film's main characters, but the wait is excruciating, thanks to the brilliant staging, nighttime photography (inspired, I kid you not, by the color photography in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis), and Carpenter's uncanny synthesizer score. Forty years later, Halloween still feels like a revelation: a spare, clean masterpiece of horror.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Halloween items have been on the shelves for weeks now, and in fact Christmas knick knacks may well already be showing up as well, so a late September release of the venerable John Carpenter film…may seem relatively appropriate in a seasonal kind of way. Of course, with Lionsgate's often baffling array of choices for its 4K UHD line, it turns out there may be an 'ulterior motive' of sorts, one that the studio is commendably up front about in the press sheet they sent me along with this release, namely that this new 4K UHD release of Halloween is meant to amp up interest in the upcoming version of Halloween, which is set to debut just a couple of weeks before the actual spooky holiday…That said, I found this to be even darker than the 35th Anniversary edition, and the opening sequences looked even more desaturated and gray toned to me than the already pretty monochromatic 35th Anniversary edition looked. The major controversy…seems to be with regard to the audio options included on the 4K UHD disc, to which I'd add the perhaps odd choice by Lionsgate to get rid of their remainders on the 2007 Blu-ray version."
By comparison, Lucasfilm and Walt Disney Home Entertainment's Solo: A Star Wars Story isn't as masterful, but it's still a great deal of fun. Not since World War Z have I been so pleasantly surprised by something as ostensibly DOA as Solo. After a fraught production/post-production schedule that harbored huge recastings (goodbye, Michael Kenneth Williams; hello, Paul Bettany), backstage infighting (given his track record of late, Lawrence Kasdan should not have near the amount of pull he seems to possess), rumors of acting coaches hired under duress (for poor Alden Ehrenreich), and...oh yeah, the replacing of two brilliant misfits (Phil Lord and Chris Miller) with a genial yes-man (Ron Howard), you'd expect some misbegotten abortion like Justice League or The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Certainly not this: a charming, confident, and effortlessly exciting sci-fi-western that sets modest goals it can easily exceed. Most of these Star Wars pictures operate with the fate of the known universe at stake. Solo, on the other hand, puts its antiheroes - Han (Ehrenreich, who isn't Peak Harrison Ford but who doesn't embarrass himself, either), Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), and Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson, who comes across like Richard Boone from The Tall T, all ambling charm and casual menace) - in hock to a very nasty crime lord (Bettany, stealing the movie with only two scenes at his disposal) and sends them off to boost a valuable power supply so they can pay off their debt. There's very little goosing that modest setup, and even the performances feel appropriately taciturn and dry, although maybe that's because the actors were tired having to act out the same scenes multiple times after Howard starting reshooting. To be sure, we get some last-minute "answering the call" script beats from a ragtag group of proto-revolutionaries striking out against the Empire, but Jon and Lawrence Kasdan's script wisely sublimates that more conventional content. Your mileage may vary, but not every summer blockbuster needs to have Thanos committing galactic genocide. Better to just plug Han into an inconsequential lark and enjoy the ride. And enjoy, we do. I enjoyed Han's desperate improvisation in escaping from a Fagin-like space worm. I enjoyed the lovely arc given to Han and Chewie's relationship - it plays as both surprising and inevitable. I enjoyed Donald Glover, who takes a bland part (on the page, Lando Calrissian has almost nothing to do) and turns it into a delicious, pansexual homage to Billy Dee Williams. I enjoyed all the action sequences, with an early train heist and Han's famed "Kessel Run" first among equals (close second: when Phoebe Waller-Bridge's delightful L3-37 droid instigates a robot uprising during a tense infiltration). And I enjoyed Ron Howard's muscular direction. "Muscular" isn't usually an adjective we associate with Howard, yet here he is, crafting visceral combat and a refreshingly grimy, lived-in aesthetic. Maybe the biggest surprise here is how Howard and his great DP Bradford Young bathe this hundred-million-plus-dollar summer blockbuster in murky shadows and omnipresent grit. We have to look a little harder to see what's going on, and that sense of tactile reality sets Solo apart from every other film in the Star Wars franchise. On a pure direction level, Solo ranks among Howard's strongest efforts. Look, I don't want to oversell Solo too much. It's a very competent movie directed by a very competent director who often over-explains to his four-quadrant audiences. But it's also understated in ways that most blockbusters are not. I cannot imagine Infinity War (which I liked a lot) allowing any of its characters the same quiet complexity given to the Lando and L3 dynamic, or Deadpool 2 shutting up long enough to pull off something like Solo's true climax: a quiet showdown that wouldn't be out of place on Justified and that rectifies the biggest sin George Lucas made when he went a' tinkering with the first Star Wars. We expect these event movies to save the world, yet for all its behind-the-scenes drama, Solo reverses course. That's reason enough to be grateful.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that the film "feels intimately familiar yet resoundingly new. The new story builds the foundation for the character who will one day turn the Falcon around and aid Luke in destroying the Death Star. That's perhaps the most critical component, that essential character fashioning that sets up the complex hero who evolves from smuggler and scoundrel to key cog in the Rebel Alliance. Of course none of that is directly conveyed in Solo but it is certainly implied within the context of the character's evolution and particularly his actions in the third act. Alden Ehrenreich captures the character's heartbeat with commendable enthusiasm and stability. He more or less looks and sounds the part and that he pulls it off is no small feat considering the enormous shoes he fills, not so much literally but certainly figuratively, finding that swagger and cadence and understanding those more minute character beats that play into the idea that Solo will one day make that choice to aid the Rebellion, to rise above his own greed and fight for something larger than himself. Donald Glover does much the same for Lando. Both men work the angles their characters give them, which requires a careful balance between the lighter beats that carry the personalities and the more intensive arcs that define them at the core."
From Arrow Films comes the thrilling 1973 procedural The Day of the Jackal. In adapting Frederick Forsyth's beach-read favorite about the titular assassin (Edward Fox, never better) hired to kill former French president Charles de Gaulle, director Fred Zinnemann does an interesting thing, and one that merits comparison to his landmark Western High Noon. See, while High Noon takes a spare story (a small-town sheriff stands up to three killers looking to take him down) and tells it with an almost-Expressionistic level of style and intensity (the real-time plotting device; the fevered close-ups and editing rhythms), The Day of the Jackal unfolds in the opposite manner. Zinnemann is dealing with a complex, globetrotting spy game: we jump from England to Austria to Italy to France, cutting between the Jackal's meticulous arming-and-infiltration plans and the French police's investigation (headed by a fine, understated Michel Lonsdale) of the assassination plot. Yet Zinnemann approaches the material as if he were making a documentary. Unlike, say, the film's histrionic 1997 remake (which I kinda like, fundamental Bruce Willis miscasting aside), Zinnemann never artificially cranks the narrative for cheap thrills. He's focused on clarity and accretion, telling this story at a measured pace (a deliberate two-and-a-half hours) and at a certain remove from all its characters. I think of The Day of the Jackal as a movie of medium and wide shots - we never get too close to anyone because Zinnemann wants to make sure we're always sure of the various political machinations informing all the various perspectives. Here's the magic trick: this approach should prove unduly dry, except we're always on the edge of our seats. Zinnemann knows he's got a hell of a story to tell, and he's right in assuming we'll be more invested if we have to work (a little) to put it all together. One of the best films of the 1970s.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the picture "would seem to defy the 'logic of suspense,' since anyone who has paid attention in basic 20th century history class is going to know going into this enterprise that Charles de Gaulle was not in fact assassinated - ever. But…the plot mechanics are so intricately woven that there is in fact incredible tension constructed out of watching the 'mere' logistics being arranged…One of the things that helps to establish a baseline of anxiety which almost runs rampant through the film is the character of The Jackal himself…a seemingly inherently suave sort who is nonetheless almost appallingly vicious at times. In fact one of the story's repeatedly disturbing aspects is just how unperturbed The Jackal is when he's confronted by 'little' obstacles like people who may know too much for their own good. Let's just say that aside and apart from any attempted murder of Charles de Gaulle, there's an accruing body count in this film as The Jackal goes about his appointed rounds attempting to arrange a supposedly foolproof way to off the French President…A couple of the most visceral moments in the film are when The Jackal is suddenly confronted by something unexpected, which is when his feral tendencies show themselves."
Finally, we end with two additional Lionsgate 4K remasters: the violent Marvel pairing of the 2004 Punisher and its 2008 sorta-sequel/secret-reboot Punisher: War Zone. I realize I'm probably in the minority here, but I've always found these Punisher thrillers to be gently underrated. Yes, no one's ever mounted a wholly satisfying film/TV version about the character (Netflix's TV series has the best Frank Castle performance - courtesy of Jon Bernthal - but mires it in bloat and narrative dead ends, and the less said about the misbegotten 1989 Dolph Lundgren vehicle, the better), but Lionsgate comes the closest with these two. Of both films, the '04 Punisher struggles the most with tone. Writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh can't decide if he wants to honor the hyperviolent Punisher take of Garth Ennis' "Welcome Back, Frank" run or make an homage to the introspective revenge thrillers of the 1960s and '70s (à laPoint Blank or Rolling Thunder), so the finished film lists unsteadily between the two poles. First, we'll get a long stretch of Castle (Thomas Jane) brooding over the death of his family and methodically disrupting the criminal operations of Tampa money launderer Howard Saint (an atypically restrained John Travolta); then we'll transition into the garishly brutal throwdown between Castle and Kevin Nash's "Russian" or the gory shootings/stabbings the Punisher dispenses in the third act. Still, as messy as Hensleigh's tonal shifts are, he got lucky when he hired Jane. The one-time heartthrob/ace character actor attacks the part like he's doing Hamlet - you can imagine how he would have deepened Frank Castle if he'd been around for the sequel. Therein lies the biggest problem with Punisher: War Zone. After an acrimonious pre-production period, the studio replaced Jane with Ray Stevenson and essentially started the character from scratch. The decision leaves War Zone with a taciturn vacuum at its center. Stevenson is charismatic as hell on HBO's Rome, only he plays Castle as a plodding bore, nonverbally splattering bad guys across DP Steve Gainer's widescreen frame. Note the use of the word "splattering," though. Director Lexi Alexander compensates for Stevenson's deficiencies by leaning hard into the viscera Ennis brought to the comics. Along with Guillermo Del Toro's grisly Blade II, War Zone might be the goriest Marvel movie ever made, so gleeful and unrestrained is its savagery (there's a rocket-launcher-related death that still makes me cackle). It keeps going over the bloody top, never more so than when Dominic West and Doug Hutchison share the screen as Big Bads Jigsaw and Loony Bin Jim. It feels like the two are doing an R-rated riff on Jack Nicholson's Joker, yet their campy energy is all of a piece with War Zone's many comic-book excesses. Think the NC-17 version of the Adam West Batman, and you'll have a better sense of War Zone's unique charms. If that's not a sterling recommendation, I don't know what is.