For the week of November 12th, Lionsgate is offering much deserved 4K upgrades to three classic actioners: First Blood, Rambo: First Blood - Part II, and Rambo III. What makes this series so fascinating is the same element that animated the Rocky franchise: namely, star Sylvester Stallone. Back in 1982, Stallone was a rising action star who hadn't shed the critical cachet from his Academy Award-winning Rocky script, and First Blood offers him a hell of a dramatic showcase. As Vietnam veteran John Rambo, Stallone gives one of his finest performances. He uses some of the vulnerability that made Rocky Balboa so engaging, except we soon realize the character's softness masks inner pain that proves deadly to a small Pacific Northwestern town. See, Rambo hasn't had an outlet to process the trauma of his war experience, so when Brian Dennehy's official Sheriff Teasle starts scapegoating him for minor vagrancy, Rambo snaps and unleashes chaos on Teasle's men. What gives First Blood its power - and it remains as lean and purposeful an actioner as I've ever seen - is the deep ambivalence director Ted Kotcheff and Stallone (who penned the script) afford both sides. We sympathize with Rambo even as his savagery terrifies us, while Teasle is an officious blowhard who still doesn't deserve to die at Rambo's hands. That tension makes First Blood a minor miracle: a rugged adventure about PTSD and America's disrespect for its veterans. But as with Rocky, that sociopolitical relevance quickly melted away, and thus we have Rambo: First Blood - Part II. Here, Stallone's vanity had gotten the best of him (it started with his bulging, vainglorious turn in Rocky III, come to think of it), which meant that Rambo mutated from sensitive monster to a 'roided-up icon. If First Blood took a clear-eyed look at the Vietnam-era, Part II offers wish-fulfillment - after serving time for the events in First Blood, Rambo gets a chance to finally win 'Nam for the good U.S. of A. It's ridiculous, yes, but also a whole lot of fun, thanks to James Cameron's pulpy script, Jack Cardiff's comic-book-poppy cinematography, and George Cosmatos' explosive action choreography. Wish that I could say the same for Rambo III, which double-down on Part II's jingoism to diminishing results. The third installment swaps out Vietnam for Afghanistan, letting Rambo fix the Middle East as he tries to rescue his old mentor (Richard Crenna, trying vainly to give a real performance amid the nonsense), except director Peter MacDonald lacks both Kotcheff and Cosmatos' flair for action. Plus, the whole bit with Rambo aiding the Taliban? Let's just say that detail hasn't aged well and leave it at that. Oh well - two out of three ain't bad. Here's hoping Rambo gets a chance to mature like Rocky did in Rocky Balboa and Creed, and no: 2008's hyperviolent (and deliriously entertaining) Rambo does not count.
In his First Blood review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "is considerably more shaded in its portrayal of an erstwhile Vietnam vet who is probably struggling with some pretty serious post traumatic stress disorder. In fact parts of First Blood are kind of strangely reminiscent of Walking Tall, at least insofar as there's a focal character with a somewhat troubled past who attempts to confront rampant corruption in the local constabulary. And in fact a lot of First Bloodactually takes place stateside, again perhaps defying wobbly memories which may tend to place the entire Rambo trilogy overseas, with Rambo seeking revenge on a number of characters who in any other film might have been thought of as the ostensible 'good guys.'" Then, in his Rambo: First Blood Part II review, Jeffrey took a moment to spotlight Jack Cardiff and "the often sumptuous imagery Cardiff's camera caught through many decades of stellar work...Cardiff's output never really slowed past what some might perceive as his 1950s and (early) 1960s heyday, though some may feel the overall quality of both film and television efforts Cardiff contributed to may have diminished at least slightly from his storied collaborations with the likes of Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and John Huston. Perhaps at least to some viewers, one of those questionable entries in terms of overall quality might be the second Rambo film, helpfully titled Rambo: First Blood II to work in both the focal character's name (missing from the original in its original release title) while also alluding to the official name of the first film. Kind of ironically for all the criticism the film received at the time, in some ways this 'sophomore' offering may be the best remembered of all three Rambo films, especially for those who have 'wobbly memories'…and may tend to think of the entire 'franchise' as having taken place in Vietnam."
Just as silly is Warner Home Entertainment's release of the surprise hit The Meg. It seems almost reductive to say The Meg is nowhere near as good as Jaws, but to The Meg's credit, most films are nowhere near as good as that Steven Spielberg classic. Here's something more apropos: in its current form, The Meg makes Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea look like a masterwork. Everything about The Meg feels like a compromise. Before the end of the first big setpiece - a submersible rescue on the bottom of the Marianas Trench - you realize why people better than Jon Turteltaub (he of 3 Ninjas and National Treasure fame) haven't been able to crack it over the last twenty-one years. Steve Alten wrote a terrible book back in '97 (Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror) but at least it was gory enough to sate the interests of readers both discerning and otherwise. However, there's a huge paradox at the center of this movie-ready concept (an ancient Megalodon starts wreaking havoc on the seas): the shark is sixty-feet feet long (seventy five in the movie version). Ergo, you'd need a massive budget to realize the creature, and unless you're Ridley Scott, you don't get to make a $150-million gorefest. The version of The Meg that made it to screens is very much a PG-13 film. Turteltaub gives the movie the obnoxiously peppy tenor of one of his National Treasure entries. DP Tom Stern's cinematography is bright and clear and totally lacking in visual mystery, and every other character is cracking wise like they're the fifth lead in a Transformers movie. Rainn Wilson is the most egregious offender in this regard (none of his jokes are funny, and his jerkface industrialist's motivations make zero sense from scene to scene), but everyone else smiles too much in this movie, and often when their lives are in the greatest peril. In fact, in its whole 110-minute runtime, The Meg pulls off only one decently thrilling suspense sequence: Li Bingbing's oceanographer goes underwater in a shatter-proof cage so she can inject the Meg with poison, but all hell quickly breaks loose as the shark ends up damn near capsizing the boat she's cabled to in the process. Dodgy CGI aside (the Meg looks as bad or worse than Jaws's faulty animatronic shark), this scene is a small masterwork of terror, with Turteltaub mining so much tension from crosscutting between the boat and the cage and then ladling small mini-crises on top of those two big ones. It's almost Spielbergian in its build, and we see how The Meg might work best at PG-13. But then it's back to sanitized tedium, and not even the great Jason Statham (who's predictably wonderful as the male lead) can improve matters much.
Also from Lionsgate is Juliet, Naked. It's an interesting beast, this one: Juliet, Naked functions as both a fine romantic comedy and a failure of adaptation. The original Nick Hornby novel puts a lot of emphasis on the central dynamic between opinionated fanboy Duncan Thomson (played in the film by Chris O'Dowd), his rock icon Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke, and more on him in a minute), and Duncan's increasingly beleaguered girlfriend Annie Platt (a terrific Rose Byrne). Anyone familiar with Hornby's High Fidelity knows what a keen eye Hornby has for the ways we let pop culture define our personality, and on the page, he uses Annie to reveal all the ways - both good and bad - we're not terribly dissimilar from our media idols. But this film version sands off one side of this triangle until it's practically a line; the Jim Taylor-Tamara Jenkins-Evgenia Peretz script all-but-abandons Duncan after the first half hour, thus demolishing most of Hornby's salient observations about fandom and obsession. Yet Juliet, Naked still works. For one, O'Dowd is so obnoxious that we feel little of the grudging sympathy we have for him in the novel. He's a caricature of a pedant rather than a real person (you wonder what someone like Simon Pegg would have done with the part). And more importantly, it's easy to forget O'Dowd the second Hawke comes shambling into the movie. Hawke is having one hell of a 2018, and his fading rocker couldn't be more dissimilar from his tortured Father Toller in First Reformed. You get why Tucker cultivates so many ardent fans - he's earnest to a fault and even more un-self-consciously affable - but Hawke manages to foreground his foibles, how his once-irrepressible youth has aged into feckless immaturity. Yet what links the two performances is Hawke's peerless craft. You never see him acting; Tucker just is on screen, despite navigating all sorts of complicated emotional minefields. There's a moment where Tucker has to simultaneously yell at his young son, genuflect to a room full of ex-girlfriends, and try to charm Byrne, and he handles all these shifts like a great ballet dancer. It's enough to redeem all the stuff Juliet, Naked leaves out.
Finally, Pixar and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing Volume 3 of the Pixar Short Films Collection to Blu-ray. I remember what a big deal when the studio released its first shorts collection. As technically rudimentary as some of the films were (I'm thinking specifically of "The Adventures of André and Wally B." or "Tin Toy"), they offered an essential glimpse into Pixar's development process: without using the shorts to experiment with all the complicated digital elements, we'd never get something as emotionally and narratively resonant as Toy Story. However, Pixar has now gone from the scrappy, flashy underdog to one of the most commercially successful studios in the world, and their Volume 3 shorts reflect that journey. At their best, we have something like "Sanjay's Super Team," the Academy Award-winning "Piper," and the wonderful, surreal "Bao" (which is also available on the new Incredibles 2 disc) – that latter piece takes the specific cultural experiences of Pixar animator Domee Shi and then devises a narrative about growing up that's both heartbreaking and horrifying. But just as many of these features feel like corporate product: a way to keep alive current Pixar/Disney IPs. How else to explain the Inside Out follow-up "Riley's First Date," the Monsters University companion piece "Party Central," or the Cars adventure "The Radiator Springs 500"? Many folks have lamented a certain impersonal formula to the longer Pixar films, so in that case, these shorts merely correlate to the studio's output as a whole. In that case, they are a valuable critical document, even as they make it easier to lament Pixar's corporate trajectory.