For the week of November 19th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the hit romantic-comedy Crazy Rich Asians to Blu-ray. I've read reviews criticizing the film for its relative lack of depth. "It's just a bunch of shallow rich people flexing their status for two hours," they say. But what makes the film quietly revolutionary concerns who gets to flex Said Status. I don't disagree that there's not a lot of thematic significance here. What we've got is a Nancy Meyers movie, basically, a celebration of wealth and class privilege so gaudy that even Vincente Minnelli would find it OTT. The A-plot is a bit of lifestyle porn wherein a Chinese-American professor (Constance Wu) accompanies her dreamy boyfriend (Henry Golding) to Singapore for his best friend's wedding; in the B-plot, Wu struggles to balance her modest background against the insane cultural expectations of her hubby's mother (Michelle Yeoh, giving the film's best performance), but not to any degree that would derail the film's Mega Happy Ending (TM Wayne's World). As in a Nancy Meyers movie, director John M. Chu keeps the conflict to a minimum and the wish fulfillment off the charts. Except whereas Nancy makes The Whitest Movies You'll Ever See (she probably thinks Steve Martin counts as a POC), Crazy Rich Asians casts Asian performers almost exclusively. I think there's just one semi-significant speaking role for a white actor - the TA Wu uses to demonstrate Game Theory in her big introduction - and that dude is on-screen for maybe thirty seconds total. The rest of the film plays as a celebration of both Asian cultures and Asian faces. There's such diversity in the various representational styles, whether we're moving from Wu and Golding's beautiful-stoic leads to Yeoh's affecting formalism to Awkwafina's improvisatory riffs. Every frame of this film reminds you how taupe most Hollywood features look - it's all the more impressive that a major studio (Warner Bros.) went all-in on non-Caucasian representationality. So yeah: the film is shallow and glossy and feather-light. But considering Hollywood desperately needs to make conventional entertainments that reflect the whole population rather than the whitest contingent, Crazy Rich Asians can't help but play like a mission statement. Forget pushing complex sociopolitical issues in microbudget indies: the best way you normalize diversity is in $236-million-grossing rom-coms and $180-million-costing blockbusters. Diversify beyond just four quadrants, and the rest will follow. Thus endeth the lesson.
The Criterion Collection is offering a new special edition of Billy Wilder's classic farce Some Like It Hot. As big an impact as the film made in 1959 (it has made like $40 million off a $2.9-million, and many of those earnings are still unadjusted for inflation), it might be even more popular today. AFI has ranked it twice - #14 on its 100 Greatest Films List and #1 on its Hundred Greatest Comedies List - and it routinely pops up as one of the most significant features in the careers of Wilder, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe, the latter of whom was never more iconic on screen than she is here. And to some extent, I get the love. Wilder and his frequent script collaborator I. A. L. Diamond pepper Some Like It Hot with innuendos and asides that seem all the naughtier because they're thumbing their noses at the Hollywood censors, and they have no better scene partner than Jack Lemmon. As Curtis' best friend and increasingly enthusiastic cross-dresser, Lemmon steals so much of the film that you're surprised there's anything left for anyone else. His scenes with Joe E. Brown (as a millionaire who's obsessed with Lemmon and couldn't care less about his actual gender) hit this screwball rhythm that's ten times funnier because each person takes their relationship seriously. Yet I've always found the picture somewhat underwhelming. Part of that is its length. Some Like It Hot runs a full two hours and feels it, whereas I prefer my comedies more fleet of foot - I'll take the manically paced His Girl Friday or Duck Soup over Some Like It Hot, especially when Wilder slows things down interminably to focus on Curtis and Monroe's burgeoning love affair. But I've also never understood Hollywood's affection for comedies about cross-dressing. Whether it's this, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, or Victor/Victoria, this template has proven unusually hardy, especially the socio-gender changes of the past thirty years. There's something weirdly retrograde about movies where nothing's funnier than a man in a dress, and Some Like It Hot scaffolds way too much of its humor off such a shallow incongruity.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review noted that "the recipe behind this delicious classic comedy is pretty simple - it is one dose top-quality acting presented with an equal dose of top-quality directing. So, it should be easy to replicate, right? Wrong. In a long archival interview conducted for The Dick Cavett Show that is included on this release, Billy Wilder actually explains why entire ranges of similar films became impossible to make many decades ago. The explanation is in the second part of the interview where Wilder brings up the great actor Claude Rains, whom he admired immensely, and then reveals how the unique talent that made these films disappeared. Wilder even addresses the particular kind of supporting actors that were lost and clarifies how after them the big Dream Factory that Hollywood once was began to crumble. The interview is beyond fascinating because it essentially sums up what is now painfully obvious - Some Like It Hot and all the other true classics of the era were made by genuine stars whose talent and personalities made them special. It really is this simple, and of course having been blessed to work with the best of them Wilder knew it all along."
Far more interesting a reissue is the Scream Factory pressing of Bernard Rose and Clive Barker's cult classic Candyman. For a movie that didn't make much of an impact in 1992, Candyman feels so bracing today. Its horror hook (pun very much intended) is strong enough to power the movie alone. While researching urban legends, a Chicago graduate student (Virginia Madsen, sympathetic and intense) actually comes face-to-face with one: the title character (Tony Todd, in the performance that made him horror royalty), a hook-handed specter who kills you if you utter his name three times in a mirror. I'm always shocked at how savage Candyman's actions are (SPOILERS: poor Kasi Lemmons... END SPOILERS), or how poetically Rose conveys them. Candyman began its life as a Clive Barker short story ("The Forbidden"), and Rose understands that Barker conveys terror through means both horrific and sensual. Rose approaches the film's anti-hero and his economically depressed Chicago environs with a poet's eye. And in theory, that should be enough to secure Candyman's place in the canon - it's scary and incredibly well made. Yet what makes it feel like a minor miracle is its social agenda. Candyman himself is less a monster than a supernatural reflection of the indignities the black community has faced over the past two hundred years. It's no surprise the film unfolds in and around Cabrini Green, a still-notorious slum – Candyman could be a personification of the turmoil and violence plaguing the area - nor are we shocked to learn that post-Civil War tensions shaped the character's origin story. The nature of his past is so traumatic we maintain a curious sympathy for him. After all, nothing he does is any worse than the circumstances that scarred him, and by extension, so much of this country's socioeconomic makeup. For those reasons, Candyman deserves mention with Night of the Living Dead and Get Out as one of the most racially incendiary horror films ever made.
Finally, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering a Blu-ray of the histrionic comedy-drama-agitprop mélangeBlindspotting. It's weird how some releases come in twos. In 1997, we got Dante's Peak and Volcano; 1998 brought us Armageddon and Deep Impact; and this year we get Blindspotting and Sorry to Bother You, which somehow both cover the subgenre of "racially motivated surrealism set in Oakland, CA." Yes, one could argue that the current political climate (and subsequent conversations about race and class) has inspired a lot of this kind of art over the past two years, but the geographical overlap that Blindspotting and Sorry to Bother You is so weirdly specific that it bears especial notice. The Oakland of Sorry to Bother You represents a nightmarish alternate reality where wealth and apathy have replaced morality; in Blindspotting, director Carlos López Estrada and his screenwriters (Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, both of whom also star in the film) take inspiration from the alternately comic and tense After Hours in order to riff on criminal justice and recidivism. The film's ex-con hero (Diggs) desperately wants to go straight, but the system is rigged against him, and he finds himself in a Kafka-esque struggle to stay out of trouble for the last seventy-two hours of his probation. In many ways, we're lucky to have someone as charming as Diggs anchoring this madness - his natural charisma is so appealing that we're with Blindspotting even as it makes one increasingly dark turn after another. Ultimately, I do find Sorry to Bother You the more successful of the two films. As messy as it is, that picture goes about its social agenda with ferocious unpredictability, while Blindspotting is a more conventional. I mentioned After Hours, but there's also a lot of Mean Streets here, too, given the ways in which Diggs's relationship with his self-destructive best friend (Casal, who is...a little much, to put it mildly) proves just as dangerous as the world around him. But I respect its passion, and taken alongside Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting presents a world wherein the rise of multiculturalism has done little to quell all sorts of endemic sociopolitical inequalities.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the chaos and the potential problems with making it unscathed through probation are on hand in the very funny segue from [Diggs's] parole board hearing. From showing [Diggs] in shackles in an orange jumpsuit in front of an unseen judge handing down the terms of [Diggs's] probation, the film abruptly switches to a marijuana smoke filled car where [Diggs] is in the back seat, with [Casal] and another guy in the front. An informational title tells us that there are three days more or less to go until [Diggs] has completed his probationary period, but the smoke-filled car soon turns out to be a gun-filled car as well and the film goes to almost lunatic excesses to convince the audience that disaster is certainly in the cards for the hapless would be ex-con. Instead, Blindspotting repeatedly plays upon these expectations of Murphy's Law unfolding by first diverting attention and then, in one devastating sequence, subverting all the fear about [Diggs's] future in a really disturbing moment that is unfortunately more 'ripped from the headlines' than many folks would want."