For the week of January 7th, we're getting two infamous/entertaining examinations of American culture's seedy underbelly, circa the 1990s. The more socially irresponsible of the two is Warner Archive's Judgment Night, which watches as four suburban schlubs take a wrong turn into Chicago's slums and end up fighting for their lives. As is, the movie functions as either a chase picture disguised as social commentary or social commentary disguised as a chase picture. Either way is problematic - Judgment Night ends up reinforcing all sorts of negative stereotypes about urban life that are classist at best and racist at worst. Yet director Stephen Hopkins orchestrates the chaos with such B-movie verve that you've barely any time to register sociopolitical complaints. Judgment Night also scores points for lining up the Most 1990s Cast Ever: our heroes are played by Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, and Jeremy Piven (in those halcyon days when he was best known for being John Cusack's best friend and having almost no hair), and the main heavy is Denis Leary, who dials down the humor while ratcheting up the demented intensity he brought to his "No Cure for Cancer" tours. It's a lot of fun, provided you don't think about it too hard. Shout Factory's take on similar material is the 1999 thriller 8MM, which I'd almost regard as a stealth masterpiece. It's just as hackneyed thematically as Judgment Night; if that movie claimed that urban decay hurts us all, 8MM uses its hero's investigation into a gruesome snuff film to argue that we're all masking deviant impulses. However, director Joel Schumacher is too much of a populist to hector at us. This is his full-scale noir homage, complete with a hard-boiled detective (a nicely understated Nicolas Cage) and all sorts of oddballs and sadists complicating his journey, the best of which are Joaquin Phoenix's surprisingly sweet adult-bookstore attendant and Chris Bauer's terrifying snuff performer Machine. I do take issues with some of Schumacher's approaches. He softens the ending of Andrew Kevin Walker's original script (Walker also wrote Seven, and his 8MM finale was even more lurid, if that's possible), and he saddles Catherine Keener with a thankless worried wife part. But in his defense, these audience-friendly changes get us to lower our guard, and before we know it, we're surrounded by the same depravity that Cage can't stomach. One of the 1990s most unsung thrillers.
Warner Home Entertainment and Hulu are bringing the original series Castle Rock to home media. This series emerged in the kind of secrecy that's now de rigueur for anything executive producer J.J. Abrams develops, but what little information we got was irresistible for a certain genre fan: Abrams and Manhattan showrunners Sam Shaw & Dustin Thomason would be telling a story set in the world of Stephen King's novels. The titular location is key - King used Castle Rock as the setting for no fewer than five full-length books, and that's not even counting the host of Castle Rock-centric novellas and short stories OR the other books/stories that refer to events from the Castle Rock area (King was doing the whole "extended universe" thing long before the MCU jumped on board). And that sense of narrative interlocking engages with King devotees, from the easter-egg-heavy credits sequence to the in-show references large (Scott Glenn has a major role as former Sheriff Alan Pangborn) and small (Jane Levy's wannabe writer talks about a relative who went crazy at a Colorado hotel). What I'm not as sure about is how all of this functions for those less familiar with Stephen King. When the main story emerges - after a near-mute stranger (Pennywise the Dancing Clown himself, Mr. Bill Skarsgård) emerges from a secret chamber in Shawshank Prison, a series of bizarre and violent happenings convince his lawyer (The Knick's André Holland) of a connection to his own traumatic past - we realize it's little more than an updating of that Twilight Zone episode "The Howling Man" (which Castle Rock wittily name-checks), and that might not be enough for anyone not digging on the Cujo and "The Body" teases. I can say that if nothing else, Castle Rock does a great job of replicating reading an early-to-mid-1990s King novel. Like Insomnia or Desperation, the series does worldbuilding setup so well, bringing exquisite patience and tension to the mystery surrounding Holland and Skarsgård's characters, only to flounder in lunatic plot threads (a masked apparition haunting Melanie Lynskey's character; the "schisma" theory that involves parallel realities and alternate dimensions) that the series all-but-drops for the slightly too-pedestrian climax. You can sense Shaw and Thomason trying, as King so often does, to figure out the plot as they're writing before settling on the most convenient story fixes. Still, Holland proves a more nervy and empathetic lead than these kinds of shows normally get, and the show does pull-off an all-timer of an episode: "The Queen" feels like a draft for the great Lost episode that never was.
From Lionsgate and A24 comes Jonah Hill's directorial debut Mid90s. As an actor, Hill has done little to disguise his desire To Be Taken Seriously (or his resentment towards those who don't); as a director, he's even more ostentatious in this regard, puffing up this otherwise low-key skateboarding dramedy with signifiers of great import. Sometimes you feel like Tom Ripley got a chance to make a movie, so precisely (and unnervingly) does Hill appropriate the styles and attitudes from other filmmakers. I love Chris Blauvelt's 16mm, Academy-ratio cinematography, but it almost obsessively recalls the hazy, disaffected mise-en-scène Gus Van Sant brought to pictures like Paranoid Park (also about skateboarders) and Elephant. It will not surprise you, then, to hear that Hill just finished working with Van Sant on Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, where Blauvelt also served as DP. The interactions between Hill's thirteen-year-old protagonist Stevie (a great Sunny Suljic) and his WeHo skateboarding family (including Gio Galicia, Na-kel Smith, Ryder McLaughlin, and Olan Prenatt) ring with a crass naturalism that's equal parts Jackass video and Larry Clark melodrama. And while nothing about the look of the film reflects Hill's most prominent filmmaking mentor - Martin Scorsese - not for nothing does Hill center his narrative around male characters who confuse intimacy with aggression and harbor massive self-loathing. Mind you, all of this is compelling enough as a movie - I haven't even mentioned Lucas Hedges and Katherine Waterston's heartbreaking turns as Stevie's resentful brother and his gently unfit mother, respectively - but it does ring a little hollow, like Hill wanted to show his mentors what a good boy he's been (and how he can do exactly what they do, if he wants). In some ways, the individual mid-'90s details feel the most personal to Hill. His eye for detail is almost Proustian for those who came of age in the decade, right down to "Wave of Mutilation" and "Kiss from a Rose" on the soundtrack and the Hulk Hogan Wrestling Buddy on Stevie's bed. Still, it's telling that the film feels most honest when it's regarding things instead of people. To Hill, things can be copied; people, less so. And yet, paradoxically Mid90s is still the most personal thing Hill has ever done. He is such a striver that even his most baldly transparent efforts to please/copy his mentors and change his narrative feel weirdly specific to Hill's particular psychology. The film is every anxiety, every insecurity, and every attempt to reframe them that Hill has ever had; even my reaction, that he's trying so hard to try so hard has dogged Hill since he decided he'd be a Serious Man with Moneyball. That sense lingers long after you've forgotten the details of Mid90s itself. You remember Hill and all of his complexities instead. I'm sure that's exactly what he wanted, if not quite in this manner.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "glories in little character beats, with quite a bit of information being delivered nonverbally, since at least some of the people inhabiting the movie are not prone to speaking in full sentences (that's a bit of a joke, but you get my point). But that very story element may...leave some viewers wanting, if only just a little. This is an unabashed 'slice of life' drama, and as such what you get is that — a slice. Hill even talks about a kind of analog in the commentary track, where he and Blauveldt mention wanting to use a stationary camera as much as possible (kind of hilariously, they talk about this at precisely the moment on of the few pans occurs). That stillness may suggest a certain static quality to this film, despite the noise and fury of marauding skateboarders, and that quality may keep Mid90s from building to the emotional catharsis it seems to be aiming for. Despite what some may feel are a few stumbling blocks, this is a film of really beautifully modulated performances, none more so than Suljic, whom I wouldn't be surprised to see among Hill's former Oscar category, Best Supporting Actor, when the Academy Award nominees are announced next year"
Finally, we switch gears from all that darkness to an iconic romantic comedy: Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron's When Harry Met Sally. For years, people have called this film the greatest Woody Allen comedy that Allen never made. I get the superficial connections (both set in Manhattan; both star a nebbish comic-turned-actor), but given Allen's rather disgusting reputation of late, I'd like to reclaim the film as wholly reflective of both Ephron and Reiner's very particular sensibilities. With the exception of the awful neo-noir Lucky Numbers, everything Ephron has done pivots off her fine-grained observations about gender differences and relationship peccadillos. Remember: this is a woman who used her essays to lacerate her own foibles and her novel Heartburn to examine her own (disastrous) marriage to Carl Bernstein, and When Harry Met Sally brings that same specificity to its titular characters, who take over a decade to connect with one another simply because they're so weird and flinty as individuals. Harry is an overgrown boy (it's no surprise he eats with casual slobbiness and stays up way too late watching TV - you get the sense adulthood gave him license to do all the things his parents said he couldn't as a child), while Sally is a Type-A control freak who wears her authority like a badge of honor. Sure, they initially can't stand each other, but eventually Ephron sells us on their tentative connection, and for the best possible reason: Harry and Sally grow to respect each other's individualism, and how it compliments the less-than-perfect parts of their own personalities. In that regard, the film mirrors Ephron's partnership with Reiner. You can imagine a version of this film where Harry and Sally are both so obnoxious that you don't care who they end up with, but Reiner is a fundamentally more cuddly soul than Ephron, and he wants us to love his leads. As with his Princess Bride or American President, Reiner bathes the film in warm cinematography (courtesy of Barry Sonnenfeld) and soothing music (Harry Connick Jr. supplies most of the songs) that give the proceedings the look of an autumnal Hallmark card, and he helps pitch down both Crystal and Ryan so their foibles play as witty rather than grating. Just a perfect movie all around.