For the week of January 21st, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the space drama First Man to Blu-ray. If nothing else, the space and astronaut-testing sequences justify a viewing, and on a huge screen. Director Damien Chazelle largely withholds any sense of conventional grandeur. Working in 16mm, he and DP Linus Sandgren emphasize instead claustrophobic physical details: the tiniest of portholes Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) uses to navigate through space, the bulging and dented metal comprising the terrifyingly imperfect spacecrafts surrounding Armstrong, the omnipresent squeals and roars of unseen engines and atmospheric pressures. Whenever Armstrong is off the ground, First Man offers an experiential endurance test. It's thrillingly subjective stuff. And then Armstrong goes back home, and the movie just deflates. It does not help that the domestic-life scenes lack both interest and excitement, or that Chazelle always feels like he's dutifully turning in required homework. We've seen this stuff before - the sad wife struggles to support her astronaut husband - and try as the great Claire Foy might, she can't do anything to enliven the material. Furthermore, Chazelle doesn't direct Foy to offer any shades different from her psychotically driven male leads. Gosling is in fanatic-Drive mode, which might work if Foy was more lively or emotionally open, but she just matches Gosling's unnerving intensity, and what are we left with? A tired domestic drama about two anxious and repressed adults. More and more, I wish La La Land had flopped. It would have found more acclaim as a cult hit twenty years from now, and Chazelle would have had to downscale and get Whiplash-scrappy again. For all its strengths, First Man plays like no one told him no. That's a bad thing for any filmmaker.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "it's safe to say in the otherwise should-be spoiler free sanctuary and hallowed halls of film review etiquette that Apollo 11's mission to the moon is ultimately a success, with the pod landing safely and Armstrong taking that first step onto the surface. Chazelle presents it with an awe-inspiring realism that makes the moment - now approaching half a century since it happened - feel as if it's just happened before the viewer's eyes, balancing between scenes of transportation to the lunar surface with the astronauts working in the shuttle while still keeping the focus squarely on Armstrong's emotional state. Character clarity on the moon, even behind a golden reflective visor, is precise. Even without the benefit of peering into Armstrong's eyes in every Lunar shot, as the film often does in the time leading up to the moon walk, Chazelle and Gosling manage to convey deep, sincere, plainly apparent character intimacy that at once conveys feelings of accomplishment, wonder, and grandeur for the mission's success and personal triumph but also the contrasting and conflicting emotions of loss that have not carried Armstrong to this destination but that have certainly accompanied him there, shaped his journey beyond the strict number crunching and technological challenges. The scene ends with an emotional release that ultimately defines what the movie is all about."
Speaking of auteur-driven flops: Arrow Films is providing a new special edition of Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner's unfairly maligned Waterworld. Nowadays, it's almost a cliché to rep for Waterworld, but I was there opening weekend in 1995, and I found the film just as transporting then. What Reynolds and his screenwriters (Peter Rader and David Twohy, the latter of whom would later create the Riddick character, and you can see a lot of early DNA for Riddick in Costner's Mariner) have done fits into comfortable genre territory. Basically, they're making Mad Max except on water, as Costner's mutant marauder makes his way through a post-apocalyptic Earth where rising sea levels prove just as dangerous as scores of violent warrior tribes. We get a histrionic Big Bad (a deranged Dennis Hopper, giving the most enjoyable performance in the film), a predictably boring love interest (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and a little kid (Tina Majorino) who just might hold the key to civilization's future, and a whole lot of other details that play out pretty much exactly as you'd expect. But predictable isn't always a bad thing, especially when it's done so well. I've liked a lot of Reynolds' other movies (his Count of Monte Cristo is one of the all-time great cable-TV movies), but here, he's working on a scope that frequently astounds. This world feels so fully realized, and when Reynolds uses it to stage massive action sequences, Waterworld offers the kind of gonzo blockbuster filmmaking we so often want but rarely get; its two best setpieces, the Mariner's chaotic escape from an aquatic border town and the finale showdown against Hopper's forces, could alone power lesser adventure pictures. And we get both of them here. More and more, I think people criticized Waterworld for its excess of blockbuster spirit, which might have felt too frenetic in 1995 but now feels ahead of the curve - something like Transformers 5 is less a movie than a series of escalating climaxes, none of which are as classically captured as they are in Waterworld. It feels silly calling a $175-million movie a hidden gem, but there you go.
The Criterion Collection is offering the most interesting film from one of Hollywood's most interesting auteurs: Elaine May's 1976 seriocomedy Mikey and Nicky. May is a towering figure in the world of comedy; her improv routines with Mike Nichols are still the stuff of legend, so confrontational and unpredictable are their conversational rhythms. Yet for the most part, May brings an obsessively cultivated sense of pace and structure to her feature-length films. She went full Terrence Malick on both A New Leaf and Ishtar, taking ages to hone and shoot her scripts and then even longer in the editing room as she calibrated the pace of the final cut. Yet Mikey and Nicky stands apart from her other films. Many critics are quick to credit the involvement of filmmaker John Cassavetes, who stars as Nicky. When he wasn't playing a stock scumbag in Hollywood blockbusters (The Dirty Dozen, The Fury), Cassavetes was using those corporate paychecks to finance microbudget indies not a million miles removed from Mikey and Nicky. Here, Cassavetes' Nicky is a low-level mob stooge who tried - and failed - to fleece his boss out of some ill-gotten gains, and the film wallows in his character's anxiety and paranoia the same way Cassavetes did for Ben Gazzara with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. May even brings along Cassavetes' favorite leading man, Peter Falk, to play the Mikey end of the equation: Mikey is Nicky's oldest friend (and maybe the only person Nicky trusted), but as they try to avoid a mob assassin (the great Ned Beatty), they can't help squabbling over a lifetime's worth of slights and grievances in a manner not dissimilar from Husbands or A Woman Under the Influence. However, I'd argue that Mikey and Nicky reflects Elaine May even more than it does John Cassavetes. I'm tempted to call it her most personal film. Unlike the rigorously scripted A New Leaf and Ishtar, Mikey and Nicky unfolds as unscripted improvisations between its title characters. Yes, Cassavetes was letting his actors improvise in 1958's Shadows, but May was immersing herself in that process as far back as 1950. As such, Mikey and Nicky takes on the tenor of a Nichols-and-May long-form experiment. Hell, sometimes it feels like uncut Nichols and May, full stop. Just like Cassavetes and Falk on-screen, these two made a living improvising with one another until it all went south. The two broke apart in the early '60s, and by all accounts unceremoniously - in a phenomenal 2013 Vanity Fair profile of the two, Nichols and May recount a performance of "Pirandello" that left them emotionally and physically bruised. Without going too far into spoilers, let's just say that Mikey and Nicky also reflects the violent effects of such intimacy. And then there's the title: Mikey (May) and Nicky (Nichols). You watch this one from an analyst's chair.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "the film instantly begins to fall apart because it becomes painfully obvious that Cassavetes and Falk are essentially trying to outdo each other with character improvisations that completely invalidate the seriousness of the bookie's situation. There are a lot of quick jabs followed by bloated monologues, plenty of the shouting that many of Al Paicno [sic]'s characters are known for, and theatrical posturing of the type that just does not mix up with authenticity. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the entire film, however, is that at one point Cassavetes completely loses control of his character and neither May nor Falk dared to state the obvious. During a visit to the home of a 'popular girl' the supposedly paranoid bookie adopts multiple personalities - manipulator, abuser, cynic, and joker - that add such awful artificiality to his relationship with his trusted friend that when minutes later he does the same thing at a different location and for a different reason with the one woman that he supposedly truly cares about it is actually difficult to watch. The entire segment is so amateurish and so fake that it hurts."
That said, you don't get more amateurish than the three-hour-long meme Best F(r)iends. Writer/director/comedian/bad-movie enthusiast Paul Scheer has claimed that Greg Sestero's original script for Best F(r)iends was just 100 pages long. After finishing the 198-minute, two-volume final cut of the film, I'd wager that there's still only 100 pages (roughly 100 minutes) worth of content here. Everything else is filler, and excruciating filler, at that. Even though it doesn't spring directly from Tommy Wiseau's psyche (Sestero penned the script, and Justin MacGregor directed), it suffers from the same issue plaguing EVERY postThe Room Wiseau project: it keeps nudging you in the ribs so you'll know it's in on the joke. A ninety-to-a-hundred-minute version of Best F(r)iends might work. Most of the craziest stuff unfolds in Volume 2, and at times, it reaches this fever-pitch that's equal parts inept true-crime riff (apparently Wiseau's character dated the Black Dahlia?) and inept soap opera, complete with ludicrous cliffhangers, "shocking" returns from the dead, and a R.J. Cantu heel turn that General Hospital would deem too big. But Volume 1 is utterly useless as a movie. You need maybe ten minutes of it, tops, to set up the plot (Sestero's drifter teams up with Wiseau's eccentric mortician to start stealing gold teeth from dead people), and the rest belongs in the editing room, never to see the light of a Blu-ray special-features menu. You're so burnt out watching Volume 1 spin its wheels that you won't care when Volume 2 gets marginally more interesting. It's very possible that I'm done with the whole cult of Tommy Wiseau. I'll always venerate The Room as a bad-movie totem, and I find The Disaster Artist a surprisingly deft analysis of what Hollywood does to the people who orbit it. Something like Best F(r)iends, though, plays like it was made on a dare, and that I cannot abide. It's anti-art.