For the week of October 15th, Marvel and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing Ant-Man and the Wasp to Blu-ray. Here's what I remember about the film. Paul Rudd is so much better at this kind of dopey hero role than Chris Pratt will ever be. Evangeline Lilly should have her own franchise. The de-aging CGI used on Michelle Pfeiffer should make aging actors happy, or terrified. Michael Peña is a treasure, and his big truth-serum monologue is the movie's highpoint by a wide margin. Tim Heidecker continues his Bridesmaids tradition of being The Most Idiosyncratic Comedian Playing THE BLANDEST POSSIBLE CHARACTERS in Projects That Aren't His Own. The San Francisco chase scene is an all-timer action sequence as far as the MCU goes. And the first post-credits scene ranks among Marvel's very best. And that's about it. And I saw the movie a week ago. I would probably fail a test on basic plot points. Normally, that wouldn't bother me much - it's totally fine if Marvel wants to do something lightweight after the slaughterhouse that is Infinity War - except I adore the first Ant-Man, and this one just didn't grab me like that one did. It's just a little...flat, I guess? That first Ant-Man generated a lot of mileage from training Rudd's Scott Lang about the shrinking suit and its capabilities. Here, we've got a similarly procedurally-minded setup (Michael Douglas' Hank Pym and Lilly's Hope Van Dyne need Scott's help at getting Pfeiffer's Janet Van Dyne out of the Quantum Realm), except the details keep getting muddied. This movie has like four antagonists (Walton Goggins' sleazy restaurateur/tech smuggler; Russell Kim's obnoxiously cheery FBI agent; Hannah John-Kamen's quantum-fritzing assassin; and a fourth character who I won't name but who you can probably guess by looking at the cast list), and none of them is that bad. Even John-Kamen's menace is more misunderstood than anything. This film almost resolves its major conflicts with the expositional equivalent of a group hug. I'm not knocking the lack of conflict: rather, did we need four people when two would do? I suspect the first Ant-Man was scrappy because it had to be. Director Peyton Reed had to show that he was a more-than-acceptable substitute for original director Edgar Wright, and Marvel needed to course-correct the toxic publicity that emerged after Wright's unceremonious departure. The sequel, however, plays like no one's worried anymore, and in fact are doubling down on the things people liked the first go-round. And don't get me wrong - some of that fan service is fun. Rudd is a bigger goof than before, and I loved all of Peña's extra screentime. But there's something more nakedly calculated about the endeavor.
The only thing that's commercially calculated about Joel and Ethan Coen's 1998 cult classic The Big Lebowski - which is now receiving a 4K remaster - is the amount of times Universal has released some special-edition Blu-ray or DVD copy. If we're looking at Blu-rays alone, then Universal has put out nine variant editions in just seven years. That's an impressive rate for a movie that, back in '98, you couldn't pay audiences to see. The Brothers Coen had just scored the biggest critical and commercial hit of their career with 1996's Academy Award-winning Fargo, and their follow-up to that taut, violent comedy-thriller was Lebowski, a deliberately meandering, deliberately strange Raymond Chandler-riff that pivots around a lazily agitated stoner (Jeff Bridges' The Dude) who's upset that two dudes pissed on his rug. Sure, The Dude ultimately stumbles into a missing-persons case with ties to the porn industry (personified by Ben Gazzara's smooth Jackie Treehorn, who's responsible for the film's funniest moment), L.A.'s outsider-art community (in the form of a great Julianne Moore doing Lauren Bacall doing Marina Abramović), and a group of German krautrock musicians-turned-strident nihilists (Peter Stormare, Torsten Voges, and Flea), but ultimately, The Dude really just wants a rug that doesn't smell like pee. Time and time again, the Coens keep messing with our expectations of noir fiction. The central kidnapping gets resolved off-screen (and isn't even a kidnapping), with the Coens preferring to luxuriate in long, enjoyably hostile arguments between The Dude and his bowling partners Walter (John Goodman, in his most iconic performance) and Donny (Steve Buscemi, who spends most of the movie getting screamed at by Goodman). At times, the Coens threaten to jump ship and turn the film into a stealth sports movie, but just as they set up the rivalry between The Dude and John Turturro's insane pederast/master bowler, the Coens ditch that, too, for some noodlings about The Dude's fertility or the inspired dream sequence that's equal parts Busby Berkeley homage AND porno parody. And wrapping it all together is the narration from Sam Elliott's mysterious cowboy, except he actually makes things more confusing, not least because he might not be real. You can't blame audiences for rebelling against the film, nor for their eventual acceptance. As weird as The Big Lebowski is, it's also one of the funniest movies ever made. Line for line, the Coens have never made a more quotable picture, and they get career-best performances from both Goodman and Bridges, the latter of whom has basically been playing some variation on The Dude for the last twenty years. And that's not even counting all the tiny supporting parts that slay with just three or four minutes a piece - freakin' Tara Reid is just as good as the likes of David Huddleston, Jon Polito, Dom Irrera, Jack Kehoe, David Thewlis, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. It is just immaculate weirdness, performed to the nines and given a burnished sheen by Roger Deakins' gorgeous cinematography. I don't know if The Big Lebowski is the best Coen Brothers movie, but it'll definitely be the one for which they're remembered. Oh, how fortunes change.
From Olive Films comes a special edition of the 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On some level, I like thinking about Don Siegel's Body Snatchers more than I actually like watching it. Many have talked about this film as an extended metaphor for anti-McCarthyism OR anti-Communism (the film supports both reads with ease), but I find it even more notable as a screed against psychiatry. It strikes me as purposeful that screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring makes his hero (legendary character actor Kevin McCarthy, in a performance both iconic and deeply awkward) a two-fisted general practitioner, dispensing practical medical wisdom in both pill and prescription formats (he even kills three pod people by injecting them with a hotshot of concentrated medication), while one of the film's most prominent pod people is a psychiatrist who makes controlling one's emotions sound like a war crime. And that's not even counting all the dismissive references McCarthy makes about the practice being in the same league as witch doctors and pseudo-sciences like hypnosis! I knew psychiatry got a bad rap in the 1950s, but I had no idea the degree to which that mindset had permeated mainstream entertainments such as this. Again, it's fun to read the film from this perspective. But as a proper thriller, I'm not sure it quite works. I adore certain components. The early effects-work when the pods crack open and start pumping out squishy humanoids are gorgeous. You get why Joe Dante wanted to directly quote this scene in the first Gremlins. Pity the pods themselves never look convincing - there's a moment when McCarthy tosses a pod on the ground and it lands with all the impact of a slightly deflated beach ball. And the ending (the real ending, not the studio-mandated coda) is chilling, with McCarthy running through the freeway, trying to get anyone to listen to him, and Ellsworth Fredericks' camera closing in on him until the whole frame is McCarthy's panicked visage, illuminated solely by traffic lights that flash impressionistically in the night. However, at only eighty minutes long, this Invasion of the Body Snatchers feels padded. We have to suffer through about thirty minutes of introductions and painful romantic "banter" between McCarthy and Dana Wynter's photogenic-but-insipid female lead (basically, McCarthy sexually harasses Wynter, whose outrage is limited to gentle rebuffing. Ew), and only then do we get into the pod-people stuff, except I'd forgotten how nebulous the film gets when explaining the hows/whys/wheres of it all. This version never specifies if it's aliens or some organic aberration, and the mechanics of the pod replacements keep changing. At first, it seems like you have to be in the same room as a pod, but then you just need to be in the same vicinity (like, you can be sleeping in the bedroom upstairs while a pod is cloning you in the basement three floors below), and by the end, people are turning just 'cause they fell asleep even though there are no pods in sight. Still, if you like today's elevated-horror trend, now's as good a time as any to meet the movie that inspired it.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "this…special edition…offers a very impressive selection of bonus features that I think cover everything that a fan of the film would be interested in. The two audio commentaries in particular provide a tremendous amount of historical information that any serious film fan would appreciate. The foundation for the new remaster that was used to produce this release is actually the old master that Olive Films worked with when they prepared the first release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 2012. So, the film can look even better in high-definition, but I still think that this release is well worth picking up."
And now we move from elevated horror to Starz and Anchor Bay's complete-series set of Ash vs. Evil Dead, but in this case, that's not a problem. Starz has been trying really hard to crack into the upper echelons of original premium-cable programming, to mostly uneven effect: outside of Outlander and its four-season Spartacus reboot, its most traditionally prestigious series have struggled to find footing (one season of the uneven-but-interesting Flesh and Bone; two seasons of the dull Magic City; two seasons of the turgid dramas Crash and Boss; two seasons of the brilliant-but-underloved Party Down). How funny, then, that one of the network's most engaging shows should be the bloody, thoroughly disreputable Ash vs. Evil Dead. From the title on down, everything about the TV horror comedy is blunt force; we follow Evil Dead and Army of Darkness hero Ash (cult icon Bruce Campbell) as he takes on an army of the Deadites, his sawed-off shotgun and chainsaw arm (yep, you read that right) his preferred tools for Deadite bodily dismemberment. That's pretty much it, with the biggest surprises mostly limited to a) what horrible creature Ash will battle per episode and b) how much red Karo Syrup will get sprayed around the set (answer to the second question: a lot). Yet the series never flags or gets hung up on its own mythology. Part of that is the insane energy it generates. Evil Dead director Sam Raimi helms the pilot, and he (and his Academy Award-winning editor Bob Murawski) set a template that the other episode directors (including Michael Hurst, Michael Bassett, Mark Beesley, and Rick Jacobson) do an admirable job replicating. It's practically a live-action cartoon, full of distorted angles and whiplash editing and gross sight gags and loud classic rock, and the abbreviated episode length (outside of the pilot, each episode runs about thirty minutes) helps keep the pace taut and lunatic. Better still is the show's sense of humor. Ash vs. Evil Dead has no pretensions whatsoever towards serious Drama - it knows it's trash and revels in that fact. The show takes its tonal cues from Campbell's lead performance. Anyone familiar with the Evil Dead movies (particularly Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness) knows how profoundly inadequate Ash can be as a hero. He's the Ron Burgundy of horror protagonists, all moronic bluster and wholly unearned confidence (Ash's one superpower, if you can call it that, is that he can take a luxury-liner's worth of abuse and somehow not die). On the series, Campbell keeps finding new depths to Ash's idiocy, whether it's his pathetic vanity (Raimi introduces the character with a zoom-cut montage of Ash putting on...his girdle) or his unintentional complicity in the whole "dead coming back to life to kill and possess the living" problem (short version: Ash gets high and reads from the Book of the Dead to impress a woman he's trying to sleep with. Believe it or not, this isn't really a spoiler - we learn this in the first five or ten minutes of the show). Everything is just window-dressing, although I do like the chemistry between Ash and his so-called Wolf Pack (the appealing pairing of Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo). But this really isn't a show about people. It's about gore, and speed, and tasteless humor. On those fronts, it's a resounding success. For fans of the genre and of Evil Dead, highly recommended.