For the week of October 29th, Image Entertainment is bringing the visionary grindhouse thriller Mandy to Blu-ray. Mandy defies conventional description. It's a blood-soaked love story. It's the worst acid trip you've ever been on. It's the Heavy Metal version of Hellraiser. It plays like if David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ronnie James Dio teamed up to make a grindhouse revenge thriller. Its correct aspect ratio is only when projected on the side of a van. It is seemingly all genres. It might not be ANY genres. What I do know for sure: My jaw dropped at the first King Crimson needle drop and never went back up. It's the most singular film release of 2018. Mandy deserves to be seen on the biggest movie-theater screen you can find. I want director Panos Cosmatos to direct a hundred films set in 1983 - Mandy announces him as a major talent. DP Benjamin Loeb gives lens flares a cutting, visceral presence. You have never seen anything like Mandy. The opening title card first appears seventy-five minutes into this two-hour-and-one-minute feature, and that's hardly the strangest defilement of our viewerly expectations. Co-writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn's script is consistently funny, but in the bone-driest, Jim Jarmusch-esque of ways. Bill Duke remains a stone badass, and he spends all his screen time sitting in a trailer. There are a series of dissolves between Linus Roache and Andrea Riseborough's faces that toe the line between audacious and nerve-wracking. This whole film feels like a blossoming panic attack. People will regard it as one of the seminal features in Nicolas Cage's oeuvre; it has that same delirious power as Raising Arizona or Bringing Out the Dead. His Mandy performance feels like a career summation: there are moments of tenderness straight out of Adaptation.; there are moments of mania that would make Vampire's Kiss seem restrained. And one more time: you have never seen anything like Mandy. It might be the best film of its kind. It's definitely the only film of its kind. Highly recommended.
How funny, then, that this week offers an opportunity to compare both late- and early-stage Nicolas Cage performances: once you watch Mandy, you can flash back to Cage's 1983 rom-com Valley Girl, which arrives in a new Shout Select special edition. On the surface, Valley Girl is Romeo and Juliet without the multiple homicides. The title character, Julie Richman (Deborah Foreman), hails from the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, but she finds her whole cultural worldview disintegrating after she falls for unpredictable L.A. punk Randy (Cage). You might guess that Julie's friends don't take too kindly to Randy, (Michael Bowen plays Julie's particularly loathsome ex-boyfriend), or that her and Randy's differences ultimately lead to a big third-act breakup-and-reconciliation; in both cases, you'd be right. Yet Valley Girl has endured as one of the 1980s great teen comedies. Director Martha Coolidge is a big part of why this film feels so fresh. As anyone who has seen Coolidge's 1985 cult classic Real Genius can attest, Coolidge lets her characters behave counter to the demands of the formula surrounding them, and Valley Girl is no exception. Julie might look like a shallow Barbie doll, but she's a lot more complex than people realize, and Foreman does a great job of letting her sensitivity creep out when we least expect it. Everything with her parents is just gold - Frederic Forrest and Colleen Camp play them as ex-hippie burnouts that now run a health-food store and are even stranger than Randy. But it's Cage who really elevates Valley Girl into something special. Thirty-five years later, his work here remains just as bracing as anything he's done in Adaptation or Mandy. Randy looks ridiculous, like a mix of Brian Wilson in the '60s and Lee Ving from Fear, and certainly Cage gives the character all sorts of weirdo physical and verbal affectations (he's shaved his chest hair into a bizarre V; his voice gets Marilyn Monroe breathy when he's really overcome with emotion). This was Cage's first big leading role, and he does everything and anything to make viewers notice him. But he also evinces that same uncanny control steering the madness in his best performances. Randy might look silly, yet he's never a joke. Cage convinces you that he's absolutely sincere in his love for Julie and then absolutely devastated when she dumps him (even if I disagree with how the film dramatizes the depths of his pain - it feels like an attempt to squeeze in more T&A). For Cage fans, this is essential viewing. That's the highest compliment I can levy.
In comparison to those two, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies suffers from a lack of ambition. What we're got here plays like four connected episodes of the Teen Titans Go animated series. It's maybe a little more meta than the show was - for the film, Robin (voiced by Scott Menville) is so bummed out that he hasn't gotten a feature-length movie about his exploits that he's almost too distracted to stop Deathstroke (Will Arnett) - but only just, how much Teen Titans showrunners Michael Jelenic & Aaron Horvath have always loved indulging in Looney Tunes-esque self-references. But that modest quality is the worst thing I can say about the Teen Titans movie. If you like the series, you'll like the movie. It's got the same wit, the same speed, and the same enjoyably cracked team dynamics. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies feels, to me, like a more natural extension of the tone set in the first LEGO Movie than in either LEGO Batman or LEGO Ninjago: it's a funhouse experience, one that satisfies basic storytelling demands (maybe in too rote a fashion - there is a twist involving Kristen Bell's Jade Wilson that you will see coming a mile away, although I think that's part of the joke) while offering a fairly dense buffet of gags. I liked the various superhero cameos (best in show: Patton Oswalt's hapless Atom and Nicolas Cage's surprisingly credible Superman), and I adored the little jabs at DC's own struggling film franchise - there is a preview for a badass Alfred spinoff that would be too silly to work were it not for the fact that Epix is currently developing such a TV show. Ultimately, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a sweet, inconsequential little time-waster, but it never stops moving, and it doesn't insult your intelligence. That alone counts as a big win, especially among DC-adjacent properties.
Stick with those three films and avoid Lionsgate Home Entertainment's The Spy Who Dumped Me. The Spy Who Dumped Me is mostly tedious filler, but there are two scenes where you can feel the movie suddenly lurch away from what it is towards what it should be. Ostensibly, we're watching some sub-Spy farce wherein a lonely thirty-something (Mila Kunis, who brings nothing of value to these R-rated comedies) learns her ex (Justin Theroux, fine and nothing more) is a secret agent and ends up on a globetrotting adventure with her loopy best friend (Kate McKinnon, who needs to start picking better projects during the SNL off-season), but that narrative is really just a loose framework upon which director/co-writer Susanna Fogel can hang a lot of forced improv. And McKinnon's one running bit is that she's constantly calling her parents to overshare details about her life no matters how chaotic the proceedings get. The first time this happens, we groan - she jabbers some crass nonsense into a phone about a one-night-stand's uncircumcised member. But then, about halfway into the movie (right after a surprisingly crunchy car chase through Vienna), we get a cut-away back to McKinnon's parents, and it's the loopy duo of Jane Curtin and Paul Reiser. Mom's in the kitchen; Dad's on the elliptical bike; and they're less concerned about all the various shootings/stabbings that making sure their daughter spends some time with a dear family friend in town. Then right before the big finale, McKinnon checks back in with her 'rents, who are watching Jeopardy, and despite her father's best efforts to turn down the volume, he ends up hitting the wrong button on the TV remote and jacking the LCD colors to some garish level. And it's bliss. Reiser, Curtin, and McKinnon are master improvisers, and even over the phone they create this nebbishly charming dynamic that's more engaging than anything else in the film. The movie is content to watch them play for a while, and I can imagine Fogel slumped over in her director's chair, realizing she made the wrong movie. Why settle for this wan buddy comedy between two actresses who look like they first met at the table-read, when she could have focused on how these manically supportive parents dote over their adult child? You could even keep the spy aspect if you swapped out Kunis for Curtin and Reiser. This family, trying to enjoy all the perks of modern Europe willing dodging assassins' bullet? That's the version of The Spy Who Dumped Me I want to see. As is, we get relief from the tedium for five collective minutes, and then we're back at it. I credit Vogel for pulling off some decent action scenes, but other than the Reiser/Curtin/McKinnon scenes, almost nothing here works. And Sam Heughan is not a movie star. It's weird that the constantly shirtless male lead from Outlander should prove less interesting than 3rd Rock's Dr. Mary Albright or Mad About You's Paul Buchman, but there you have it.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film is "a kind of parched desert of sound and fury, often, yep, signifying nothing...There's...a serious lapse of logic undercutting a central plot conceit in the film, at least for those who think about things for a moment. That nonsensical element involves [Theroux's] real motivations, since he does in fact return to the United States, shows up at the girls' apartment, and then encourages them to complete a mission involving (yet again) a thumb drive with important data before he is ostensibly terminated with extreme prejudice. Things are of course not as they might appear, but for those who examine these things perhaps a bit too intently (ahem), it might be a good exercise to revisit this whole scenario once certain revelations are made toward the end of the film. Without posting outright spoilers, there a huge looming 'why?' hanging over the whole [boyfriend] angle, even given the questionable device of his supposedly mortal wound. Who are the bad guys and who are the good guys is an underlying element of the film, and, again, there are certain illogical devices employed throughout the frequently overly frenetic screenplay that are never adequately developed or explained. This includes an almost throwaway moment where an expressionless model named Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno) just ups and kills a designer (?) after she receives instructions to go after [Kunis] and [McKinnon], because it turns out that she's also a former gymnast who enjoys killing and/or torturing people. But why have her shoot the guy at the runway show? It's just one of many odd little moments in the film that admittedly don't bear on the overall plot, but which just seem gratuitous and, ultimately, kind of needless and silly."