For the week of January 14th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing David Gordon Green's Halloween rebootquel to Blu-ray. Here we are, with the second reboot (third, if you count the Akkad family going back to the well after the Michael Myers-free Halloween III: Season of the Witch flopped) of the Halloween series, and already Green has made something more thematically and narratively complex than anything else to star the William Shatner-mask-wearing killer. And that includes John Carpenter's 1978 original, which remains so elemental and pared-down in its approach to slasher horror that it feels more like a Grimm's fairy tale than a franchise starter. At its core, Halloween '18 is the Force Awakens of Halloween movies, meaning it's as much a remix as it is a remake/sequel of the original Halloween. Sometimes Green and his co-writers (Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride, and yes: the Danny McBride. More on his involvement later) pay inspired homage while still furthering their own thematic purposes: vide Carpenter's thrilling new score or the brilliant finale, which recasts Carpenter's climactic Laurie Strode/Michael Myers showdown, except with different parties fulfilling different roles. And sometimes...well, the less said about "the new Loomis" (Haluk Bilginer), the better. Like The Force Awakens, most of the reason this remix works lies with the actors. Jamie Lee Curtis is brilliant as a grizzled and alcoholic Laurie Strode; Judy Greer is even better as her long-suffering daughter. MVP might go to the great Toby Huss, who walks away with the movie as Greer's sweetly patient husband. And for all the postmodern references to the other Halloween films (while Green treats this movie as Halloween 2 and throws out everything in between, we get cute nods to the other entries), Green never shortchanges Myers (played by Nick Castle out of the mask and James Jude Courtney in it). Green sees him as an elemental force incapable of reason or bargaining. What I'm less keen on is McBride's involvement. For all the power that Green grants Michael's brutal slayings (which are horrifying without being gratuitous - you see far less than you think you do, thanks to some gruesome sound design/staging), the script itself is about 40% jokier than it should be. I appreciate the attempt to use humor to leaven the horror, but after a while, it feels like everyone is a character spitting some oddball McBride humor (the little kid who swears too much and acknowledges he's in a horror movie; the two cops arguing about proper eating and peanut butter bánh mì's) right before Michael explodes their heads or savages them against a bedroom floor. The tonal confusion begins to wear on you after a while, and I'd call label the movie's politics confused as well. The new Halloween wants to say something resonant about gender and trauma - specifically how society forces women to act in this regard - but it doesn't say it as thoughtfully as it could. The perils of a male-driven film about feminism, I guess. Still, the fact that a Halloween movie can provoke such strong feelings is reason enough for it to exist.
Martin Liebman wrote that "Rather than focus on Michael as an unstoppable entity, the character is humanized in a way that he has perhaps never been humanized before. The audience never sees him directly, but Green, from the outset, reveals glimpses, quick shots at angle, that show an aged man, his face revealing the weathering of time, outlined by a white beard. The character, audiences quickly learn, has not spoken for four decades. Michael Myers is flesh and blood that has grown outwardly old but the man inside remains obsessed with finishing what he started decades ago. It's not a physical condition that drives the character but rather a mental disfigurement that propels him to stalk Laurie Strode, the people closest to her, and those who stand in his way. That mental disfigurement which has followed Michael for four decades is what has driven his doctor to dedicate his life to understanding him and is what drives a key component in the film's most would-be delicious twist. There's a moment later in the film that's next to impossible to praise without spoiling the reveal, but it's the one legitimate left-field surprise in an otherwise rote movie that momentarily kicks the film, the masked killer, and the franchise into an entirely new direction. Unfortunately the opportunity to run with it is snuffed out in a matter of moments, but it's definitely the high point that could have rewritten the rules and been a transformative turn of events - literally and figuratively - for the franchise. Green chooses to ultimately ignore it, to tease, and settle for snapping the film and the audience back into routine, which includes a plodding and methodical middle stretch as Michael randomly kills a number of innocents around Haddonfield and pushes towards a climax that plays out without much ingenuity or surprise."
One of the year's most pleasant treats is David Lowery's wry The Old Man & the Gun. The film is so warm and funny and pleasant that it makes you reaffirm the virtues of such adjectives. We're so used to our cinema working us over that it counts as a welcome surprise when we're allowed to sit back and dawdle alongside the onscreen proceedings. The stakes are low; the tension is even lower; and that's okay because we like everyone so much. And chief among all these nice, likable people is Robert Redford's Forrest Tucker. Tucker is as well-drawn a character as Redford's ever gotten to play, a seventy-four-year-old bank robber who stole over $4 million in his lifetime and mounted over eighteen successful prison escapes. He's also deeply loves his life of crime, which means leaving his victims with their dignity intact and acknowledging the tenacity of the people who pursue him (most notable Casey Affleck's Texas cop – Affleck's mumbly, diffident work is the film's only misstep). And Redford brings all the gravitas that only a life's worth of performing can supply. Redford still has that thousand-watt charisma - the flirtation scenes between him and Sissy Spacek's kindly widow play like the AARP version of Before Sunrise (that's a good thing) - but he moves a little more unsteadily, his famed stillness now just as much a product of age as it is a signifier of his intensity. What keeps Forrest going is the same thing that powers Redford: the satisfaction of a hard day's work. Never has Redford seemed more in sync with a character he's played, and if this is his final film, it's an ideal one for an actor of his stature. It feels like he's finally examined everything we love about his persona. Best of all is the movie's surprising moral ambiguity. Lowery allows for two contrapuntal ideas - that Forrest is at his best when he's being bad, and that his actions do have a serious cost (vide the heartbreaking cameo from Mad Men's Elizabeth Moss) - and then expects us to hold onto both of them at the same time. It's yet another surprising way that this sweet trifle manages to still treat us like adults, and never at the expense of our enjoyment. That understated whimsy lingers longer than you might think. I'd call it brilliant, but maybe it, too, is just a job well done.
From Sony Pictures Home Entertainment comes a 4K pressing of Renny Harlin and Sylvester Stallone's hit actioner Cliffhanger. Within both men's respective careers, Cliffhanger holds a special position. For Harlin, it was the moment he seemed capable of becoming a bonafide action auteur rather than a hired gun, and for Stallone, it was the last time he was a true action icon, and one not bracketed inside ironic quotation marks. The opening setpiece alone is as good as we get in these types of movies: Stallone's crackerjack mountain-rescue ranger Gabe Walker has to save his partner Hal (Michael Rooker, in a rare good-guy performance) and Hal's girlfriend (Michelle Joyner) from a perilous location in the Colorado Rockies. Harlin's staging is so good, it's practically vertigo-inducing (I don't want to know how DP Alex Thomson got some of his shots - I'm just glad the shoot didn't kill him), and Stallone does such a nice job of tempering his superhuman physique with genuine vulnerability and fear. We're all the more gutted, then, when the worst happens - this whole opening functions like a lost Jack London story, which means it's a little disappointing once we cut to eight months later, and Cliffhanger essentially becomes Die Hard on a Mountain, as Walker becomes the only man who can stop a group of terrorists (led by John Lithgow) hunting stolen federal money. Still, as Die Hard copies go, Cliffhanger is right up there with Under Siege and Air Force One, with Harlin actively besting his own work on the 1990 Die Hard sequel Die Harder. The cinematography is gorgeous, the violence is gory, and Lithgow gives great Alan Rickman. One of the '90s' quintessential action blockbusters.
Of Cliffhanger, Martin Liebman noted that the film "is a delight of an Action movie that Sony has given new life through this must-own UHD release. Picture quality is not perfect start to finish but most of the imperfections appear to trace back to the source in some form or fashion. The Atmos soundtrack is absolutely of reference quality. Even with a few less-than-perfect visuals, this reviewer couldn't stop smiling."
Finally, Arrow Films is giving a new special edition to Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak. Together, Crimson Peak, Pan's Labyrinth, and 2001's lovely The Devil's Backbone form a rough trilogy that examines what happens what the supernatural pushes against violent human affairs. In The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, those affairs dealt with the bloody fallout of the Spanish Civil War, and in Crimson Peak, Del Toro focuses on matters of the heart: while struggling against the gender constraints of the late nineteenth-century, young writer Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) meets a mysterious aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) who promptly romances Edith and whisks her off to his ancestral home, a place that houses ghosts both figurative and literal. However, as in The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro doesn't cast his specters as stereotypical figures of menace. Rather, they represent unresolved pain and suffering perpetrated through brutal human actions, which mostly come courtesy of Hiddleston's unhinged sister (Jessica Chastain, playing her character's camp villainy to the hilt and delivering the film's best performance in the process). It's an interesting inversion - subordinating the supernatural menace behind the human trauma on display - but unlike both The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, the end result proves less than satisfying. Part of my issue stems from the look of Crimson Peak. Yes, the production design is, as per usual for Del Toro, utterly stunning, but Del Toro and DP Dan Laustsen are shooting in digital (probably as a cost-saving measure...such are the compromises made to support the R-rated genre feature), which has a smearier, strobier texture ill-befitting a 19th-century thriller. It's not quite Public Enemies-level digital noise, but the cinematography certainly lacks the velvet sheen of Del Toro's best filmic works. More problematic is the film's rote narrative. Del Toro and his co-screenwriter Matthew Robbins last wrote the disappointing horror-thriller Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, and their work here shares many of the same flaws. Despite the great work of the actors (outside a boring Charlie Hunnam, everyone in the cast is great, including Deadwood's Jim Beaver as Edith's loving, pragmatic father), all the main characters are one-dimensional ciphers navigating a melodrama that goes exactly where you expect it to. You could argue that such clichés are staples of gothic fiction; still, we know what's going to happen long before the other characters do. After a while, you get the suspicion that Crimson Peak would work better as a silent film, where the images and mood are allowed to overwhelm the risible dialogue and plot motivations, but Del Toro doesn't seem to trust his audience enough. An interesting misfire, but a misfire nonetheless.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film is nevertheless an artistically successful and dramatically absorbing work of art that only disappoints in an uninspired conclusion to an otherwise brilliant film...This is a film of enormous style that's practically bursting at the seams with a lovingly assembled and gracefully photographed narrative that's enhanced by the use of color, visual metaphor and motif, and striking digital and practical effects. The movie expertly blends artistic grace with unsettling imagery and horrific scares, all of which only serve to enhance one another; no single element dominates another, at least when the movie is considered in its entire context rather than in the inherent beauty of individual shots, scenes, and sequences. The house, which serves as the movie's central location in its second and third acts, represents the proverbial nonliving character. Del Toro has crafted it in a graceful state of disrepair in which it literally 'bleeds' from the floor while pure white snow gently drifts down from a hole in the roof and piles inside. But it's the larger context of the story around it that transforms it, and indeed every other piece of the puzzle, from resplendent curiosity to central element in a much more complex story."