For the week of October 22nd, we open with two Stephen King properties: Scream Factory's loaded Creepshow special edition and the equally impressive Lionsgate/Vestron disc for Maximum Overdrive. Taken together, both films define the extremes of the Stephen King Movie Spectrum. In its own way, Creepshow is every bit as good as The Shawshank Redemption or Misery. While not a technical adaptation, Creepshow nails the funhouse horror vibe you might find in a collection of King short stories like Night Shift or Skeleton Crew: it's the single greatest anthology film ever made, with King offering five ghoulish tales of terror. What sets Creepshow apart from other pictures of its ilk is that unlike, say, Trick 'r Treat or V/H/S/, there isn't a dud in the bunch. Maybe you prefer the grisly creature feature "The Crate," the insectoid menace of "They're Creeping Up on You," or the comedically-tinged body horror that is "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" (which stars King as the titular nincompoop), but you can't deny the across-the-board craft. From a directorial standpoint, this is George Romero's most virtuosic effort - he makes the proceedings look like a living E.C. comic book. I would be surprised if Ang Lee didn't take a hard look at this one before he made Hulk. And King - who wrote the script - never lets the pace go slack. He's in Master Campfire Storyteller mode. Every one of his five spooky tales leaves us wanting more. Would that were the case with Maximum Overdrive, which fully deserves its rep as one of the worst films of the 1980s. Here, we have the reverse problem: Creepshow gave us five shockers for the price of one, Maximum Overdrive distends King's (mediocre) short story "Trucks" to feature length. You get why, though - it has a great hook, detailing the chaos that erupts when all machines suddenly become sentient and attack Earth's human population. Unfortunately, the film suffers from two fatal flaws. 1) It suffered massive, obvious cuts at the hands of the MPAA. By 1986, the rating board was striking back at horror movies that trafficked in gratuitous carnage, and Maximum Overdrive feels particularly compromised, especially in the movie's notorious "kid gets run over by a steam roller" scene. But 2), and most importantly, King himself was, by all accounts, so strung out on illicit substances that he could barely put together a grocery list, let alone control a stunt-heavy horror movie, and as a first-time director, to boot. Some people enjoy the "so-bad-it's-good" quality of the film, and to be fair, I enjoy the AC/DC songs and lunatic Pat Hingle heel turn. But overall, scrap this junker, and rewatch Creepshow instead.
Or, if you need a change of pace altogether, how about Shout Select's release of the Barry Sonnenfeld crime comedy Get Shorty? Released in 1995, Get Shorty is a reminder of when Sonnenfeld could do no wrong; he'd just scored with two Addams Family movies (the second, Addams Family Values, might have been a financial underperformer, but it's also one of the wittiest studio comedies ever made), and he was two years away from the massive critical and commercial success of Men in Black. Sonnenfeld was riding high, and so he branched out (for him, anyways) with this more grounded, adult farce about a small-time mob loan shark (John Travolta, in a performance that is more spirited and interesting than his celebrated Pulp Fiction turn) who goes to Hollywood to collect a debt and ends up falling in love with the movie business. Sonnenfeld's treatment of this material is Coen Brothers-lite: we might expect more interplay between the social violence of Hollywood power rankings and the actual violence of Travolta's day job, but Sonnenfeld is content to keep things breezy and hang out with the characters (besides Travolta, we get inspired performances from Rene Russo, Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, James Gandolfini, Dennis Farina, Miguel Sandoval, David Paymer, Bette Midler, and Danny DeVito, doing a wicked riff on Dustin Hoffman). And Sonnenfeld gets away with this, considering screenwriter Scott Frank pulls so many of these characters from Elmore Leonard's satirical novel. No one wrote low-lifes and dialogue better than Leonard, and Get Shorty would be a success if it simply transcribed the original text. It does more than that, but you get what I mean. About the only criticism one can levy against Get Shorty is that it feels slight. Sure, it's the weightiest film of Sonnenfeld's career, but it doesn't have the depth of subsequent Elmore Leonard adaptations: both Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight have greater melancholy as well as greater narrative spark. But Good Elmore Leonard still satisfies, especially when it's also Great Sonnenfeld.
The gonzo social satire Sorry to Bother You also hits Blu-ray this week. I often thought about how brilliantly Stanley Kubrick time-stamped all the political/social/cultural concerns of the 1960s with Dr. Strangelove, and how difficult it would be to do likewise for 2018. But that was before Sorry to Bother You. In its savage, pitiless excoriation of contemporary American culture, writer/director Boots Riley's film feels definitive in the same way that Strangelove must have in 1964. What Riley has done is to analyze all the dominant fears and trends of this very turbulent time and then distill them down to one idea: by and large, people confront the worst news possible with a collective "Meh." Riley understands that most of us are like his beleaguered protagonist Cassius (a nervy, wonderful Lakeith Stanfield): we inoculate ourselves to the destabilization of Western Civilization because we've got bills to pay and healthcare to secure, and without either, we're all two-to-four weeks away from homelessness. Cassius starts working as a telemarketer as RegalView (whose offices are anything but - Cassius' immediate supervisor has a host of prison tattoos, and Riley captures the whole space in harsh fluorescents and sickly beiges) because he owes his uncle (a fine, if underused, Terry Crews) weeks of back-rent, without which Said Uncle might lose his house. It's life or death, so Cassius gets scary good at assaying his calls (for books, or something - the movie is fuzzy about what RegalView sells) in a "White Voice" (provided by David Cross) that strips away Cassius' ethnocultural signifiers and speaks directly to the customers' own naked yearning for quick success and easy comfort. Cassius knows he's lucked into something bad, and he's absolutely not okay with using it to help vaguely nefarious foreign nations purchase unambiguously nefarious weapons of mass destruction, except those ill-gotten gains pay off his uncle's loans, put Cassius in a swanky Oakland penthouse, and net him a frighteningly sleek sports car. And here's where I should tread carefully because whatever you're thinking, Sorry to Bother You goes so much further than you assume it will. Suffice to say, Cassius' success leads him to discover the worst thing in the world, something so hideously appalling and unbelievable that it's a long time before we realize the movie is playing the reveal straight and isn't proffering some dream sequence or easily dismissible bit of allegory. Cassius panics and rejects his calling, vowing to blow the whistle. But he's got blood on his hands (or, rather, head, for reasons that get funnier/more chilling the longer the movie runs). Whether or not he's too far gone to make a difference is very much up for debate. So is whether or not anyone will care if he goes public. If Kubrick held Dr. Strangelove in such tight control to reflect the hold the conservative 1950s had over the 1960s, maybe Riley's freewheeling mania is only appropriate if we're ever to understand the apocalypse towards which we're slouching. The most essential film of the year.
You've always got to be careful with Mill Creek Entertainment in terms of A/V quality, but kudos to them for putting out Community: The Complete Series. Years from now, I suspect television historians will rightly regard Community as the great unsung network sitcom. I'm reminded of James L. Brooks' Taxi - both shows thrive off the unpredictable push/pull between bitter snark and genuine sentiment. At first, Community played like entertaining-but-familiar formula: take one high-concept hook (Joel McHale's disgraced lawyer has to attend community college in order to earn his law degree), filter it through a diverse group of ringers (McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alison Brie, Donald Glover, and Chevy Chase, riffing on his own public image as a hostile bumbler), and present the two in one neat little twenty-two-minute package. The jokes come so fast - and the cast rivals Parks and Recreation for Best Ensemble - that Community could coast on energy alone, except that's not creator Dan Harmon's style. If you're not familiar with Harmon, I'll spin it for you quickly: he's the brilliant and beyond difficult mind behind the Adult Swim hit Rick and Morty, and like that show's self-destructive scientist Rick Sanchez, he'd rather blow up a good thing than risk becoming complacent with it. From Season 2 onwards, Community loses whatever polish it had and becomes more ragged, unstable. It also gets funnier, turning the world of Greendale Community College into a Pop Art fantasia that's equal parts Frank Tashlin, Looney Tunes, and Ingmar Bergman, given the relentlessness with which it plumbs its main characters' psyches. The whole endeavor feels unsustainable - I wasn't surprised that Community had to fight for renewal every year, or that NBC fired Harmon after Season Three for, well, where do you start (alienating Chevy Chase. terrorizing his writer's room. sexually harassing staff writer Megan Ganz. feuding constantly with NBC brass. all of the above)? As such, Season Four felt like pale fan fiction, and the cast ultimately petitioned to bring Harmon back. True to form, his return unsettled more than it soothed. Chase bailed at the end of Season Four; Glover left partway into Season Five; Brown announced she wouldn't be returning for a sixth-season; which migrated to Yahoo when NBC decided it couldn't abide any more of Harmon's heartaches. But for all its chaos, the Harmon Years: Part Two felt like Community again. This doesn't read like a rave - I realize that now. But give the show a try. There's nothing like it on television. Probably won't be ever again.