For the week of January 28th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment and Amazon Studios are bringing Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake to Blu-ray. Talk about a flex: the 1977 Dario Argento original is one of the most celebrated horror films ever made, a three-color-Technicolor reverie that features some unspeakably gruesome murder every ten minutes or so. Rare is the genre programmer that can unite both cineastes and gorehounds, but Argento achieved a singular alchemy; you don't remake a movie like this unless you're cashing a massive cinematic Blank Check (to borrow a phrase from David Sims and Griffin Newman). Enter Guadagnino, an arthouse darling who'd found something approximating critical and commercial success with his 2017 Oscar winner Call Me by Your Name. Guadagnino reveres the '77 Suspiria, and he wanted to use his newfound cachet to complete reimagine the film. No longer would it be just a violent fantasy about a dance studio run by a witches coven - Guadagnino wanted to mount a full-scale homage to 1970s New Wave German cinema, specifically the politically-minded melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Somehow, Guadagnino got his wish, backed with $20 million of Amazon's money. There's just one problem: everything about the movie. The new Suspiria isn't scary. It isn't interesting. It's the ugliest movie I've seen in a long while, and I'm not talking about content; the whole aesthetic of this thing is grey. At 152 minutes long (an hour longer than the original), it feels both punishingly overlong and shockingly incoherent. It actively resists any sort of viewer engagement - even the subtitles only confuse who is talking and where they are. I have no idea why Tilda Swinton is playing three people. I have even less of an explanation for why two of them are elaborate (and awful) full-prosthetic performances (Sad Bad Grandpa and Melting Pizza the Hutt, respectively). If I didn't know better, I'd say this were every bad student film ever made. How else to explain the references to the gender war, Nazi Germany and the rise of fascism (complete with twenty minutes of repetitive sidebars about the RAF and the Baader Meinhof Complex), or the obnoxious, symbolism-choked shock inserts Guadagnino assaults us with every twenty or so minutes to break the tedium? I almost started laughing at the first portentous title card ("Six Acts and an Epilogue in Divided Berlin"), and I finally broke into Max Cady-esque roars during the über-gory, nonsensical finale. Every decision it makes is the wrong one: essentially Amazon Studios financed the arthouse version of The Room. If Guadagnino gets to direct another movie, I'll be astounded. I wouldn't even trust him with a commercial. This is a fiasco.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "anyone who has seen the original Suspiria (which frankly had its own lapses in absolute logic) will know the broad general outlines of this version, though it's in the additions and/or differences that this Suspiria really finds its most unique offerings, though those offerings may not be necessarily supportive of the main tale and therefore not to everyone's liking. There's a whole subtext of religious fervor running rampant through the film, not necessarily limited to your everyday Satanic dance aficionado, but there's also a rather puzzling subplot involving the Holocaust, as personified by survivor Dr. Klemperer, who is still on the hunt for his missing wife who is presumed to have perished in the calamity (original star Jessica Harper shows up for a cameo as this character). There's also more information given over to what Argento himself called 'The Three Mothers,' but this aspect is presented in so opaque a fashion that it's hard to really glean much meaning from it."
From Criterion comes Norman Jewison's Best Picture-winning buddy-cop thriller In the Heat of the Night. In the Heat of the Night is not a subtle movie. This is a film where the most sinister figure of privilege is a plantation owner who still has black people hand-pick cotton for him despite the presence of more effective automatic threshers, where a group of white rednecks driving a car with a Confederate Flag on the front bumper try to run Sidney Poitier's Virgil Tibbs off the road. And it's just as thuddingly obvious about unfolding its central mystery. What unites Tibbs alongside Rod Steiger's racist southern sheriff Gillespie is the death of a local businessman, and boy howdy, does Jewison surround the murderer with neon lights. I won't spoil their identity here, but any thinking human would catch this creep in 0.05 seconds. And that's the point. Both Tibbs and Gillespie can't see past their personal/racial biases to notice the obvious scumbag running rampant. Gillespie's first big investigative step is to lock up Tibbs - he sees a dead body, hears about an unknown black man at the train depot, and immediately sends a deputy to arrest Tibbs. It almost doesn't matter that Tibbs is a decorated homicide detective (this might be the first buddy-cop thriller to hinge around a case of racial profiling). But Tibbs isn't blameless, either. He responds to that plantation owner's blatant, casual racism with an almost molecular level of disgust (and understandably so – Said Plantation Owner starts comparing black people to ferns that need harsh climates in order to survive). Tibbs's hate sets the case back since he spends way too much of the movie trying to fit this racist non-murderer into the murder plot. As a Best Picture winner, In the Heat of the Night doesn't rank alongside your Moonlights or Lawrence of Arabias - it's too basic from a narrative standpoint, like the pilot episode to a TV procedural - but its central thesis still holds true today. We could do a lot of good in this country if our prejudices didn't keep getting in the way. I'd say thus endeth the lesson, but it hasn't, and we haven't learned it.
Now that Disney owns Lucasfilm, we're getting a new Disney-sanctioned pressing of the 1988 fantasy Willow. I've seen Willow a dozen times or so, and I always wish I liked it more. All of the individual elements are sound. Hollywood is so starved for original fantasies that we've got to support whatever we can. Credit, then, to producer/co-writer George Lucas for throwing his considerable influence behind this swashbuckling tale of Willow Ufgood (the wonderful Warwick Davis), a kind-hearted Nelwyn who discovers a special baby in the woods and ends up becoming the unlikely champion against an evil sorceress (Jean Marsh, having a ball). Yes, Lucas is very much riffing off the structure of something like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings (right down to Willow's Hobbit-like stature), but so what? In 1988, the idea of a live-action Tolkien adaptation done even semi-right was too cost-prohibitive to consider, so better this loving homage than nothing at all. I take issue, however, with a problem common to Lucas' post-A New Hope: namely, the involvement of George Lucas the writer. Every time I watch Willow, I get lost in the ephemera of the world surrounding its titular character; all the history and magic may be clear to Lucas, but it isn't to me, and I miss the simplicity he brought to the Original Trilogy's worldbuilding. I also wish Lucas would wear his critical grievances less transparently - the inclusion of the evil General Kael (Pat Roach) (as in, Pauline Kael) feels like his Shyamalan-esque jab at anyone who ever wrote an unkind word about his earlier movies. Yet Lucas doesn't deserve all the blame. At this point, Ron Howard wasn't as adept at big studio action, and I say that as someone who loved his Solo work. His handling of the various setpieces is a little poky, a little sedate (Willow is a long 126 minutes). Still, for all its flaws, the film is charming enough that I can't hate it. The Dennis Muren special effects look better than something sleeker, and I'll always adore the interplay between Davis and his Han Solo-like sidekick Madmartigan, played by the then-peerless Val Kilmer. Would that more big-budget studio blockbusters were this openhearted and earnest.
Speaking of Disney: this Tuesday also offers the Mouse House's underperforming fantasy The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. For a film with two credited directors - Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston, each of whom seemingly got their own separate creative crew, if the end credits are any indication - The Nutcracker and the Four Realms works incredibly well, up to a point. Maybe more than that: for its first fifty minutes, I was convinced I was watching a sleeper gem. As his heroine Clara (Mackenzie Foy, struggling a little with the British accent) travels inside the kingdom of the Four Realms (a little Middle-Earth; a lotta Narnia), Hallström structures her journey as an atmospheric and virtually plotless mood piece. Sure, there's some business with Clara finding the key to a special puzzle box her late mother gave her, but Hallström is more interesting in the velvety texture of DP Linus Sandgren's compositions or the remarkably tactile environs of production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas. And he gets so much from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" compositions, which James Newton Howard weaves through his own tracks. We feel like we're drifting through some hallucinatory fantasia, all of which culminates in a stunning Misty Copeland ballet that lets Hallström impressionistically retell E.T.A. Hoffmann's original story about The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Yes, the costume design is a little inconsistent (I adore Keira Knightley's Sugar Plum Fairy - she eats her own hair like cotton candy - but Eugenio Derbez and Richard E. Grant look awful as, respectively, regents to the Lands of Flowers and Snowflakes), but the vibe is so patient and moody, and the overall aesthetic so beautiful, that it approximates the spirit of the original Fantasia better than anything since the real thing. So, naturally, I totally get why Disney freaked when they saw Hallström's original cut, and why they hired Joe Johnston to action it up. Do not buy the party line that Johnston stepped in only because Hallström had a previous engagement during reshoots - the last forty minutes of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms present a fundamentally different movie than what preceded it. Sometimes literally - the film exchanges the visual texture of what Sandgren brought for a flatter digital clarity. Johnston's section of the film also acts as a corrective to Hallström's moody vision. This film that had almost no plot develops a comical excess of it; we meet Helen Mirren's evil Mother Ginger and her mouse army, and Knightley's Sugar Plum Fairy creates an army of tin soldiers in response, and only Clara can bring order to the land, and it's so...basic. Individual moments work - the disturbingly jovial clowns that defend Mother Ginger are a great touch - and Johnston proves a competent hand at staging and shooting CGI chaos, but you've seen this movie before, and better. Still, the first half is so good and distinctive that I'm tempted to give it a partial pass anyways. And for film students, this film might be essential viewing: you get to track what seems to reflect Hallström or Johnston, and how these two tones made such a challenge for the editors.
Martin Liebman wrote that "costuming and set design are resplendent, and anything less from a major production of this scope and style would be a disservice to the audience at best and a death sentence for the film at worst. Victorian England is depicted as slightly dreary, seemingly in order to both emphasize the sorrow felt for [Clara's mom]'s recent death and to better showcase the contrasting wonders and colors of The Four Realms, which is made from a seamless combination of practical set pieces and intricately detailed and effortlessly inserted digital backdrops, foreground constructs, and fully realized characters. Unfortunately, all of it - even the film's lone ballet scene - rings hollow, offering viewers a scrumptious outer shell with little substance inside. The filmmakers have carefully assembled the film's these-and-those tidbits but almost conveniently forget the importance of the story within all of it."
Finally, Warner and DC Animated are bringing Reign of the Supermen to high-def. World Without a Superman, the DC trade paperback that collects the comics from the interregnum between Superman's death and subsequent return, runs about 240 pages, depending on the edition that you buy. The Return of Superman is even longer - a doorstop-busting tome that unfolds in just under 500 pages. Reign of the Supermen is 87 minutes long, 83 when the end credits start. You see the problem, of course. I'm no purist, and both World Without a Superman and The Return of Superman rank as fairly fatty cuts of beef, but even if you trim the excess away, you're still left with something substantial. How else would you introduce four different Supermen (Cress Williams' Steel, Cameron Monaghan's Superboy, Charles Halford's Eradicator, and Jerry O'Connell's Cyborg), their various allegiances and grievances with one another, the secret Darkseid (voiced by Tony Todd, who rules) plan that entangles them, and the circumstances holding the key to bring back the real Superman (O'Connell, again)? It's a lot, and Reign of the Supermen does not help matters one whit in adding a major Justice League subplot. Sure, it helps ensure greater brand synergy, but at what cost? You feel the strain of the material throughout Reign of the Supermen. Of the new Super People, Steel comes off the best, but I suspect that's because I liked him more in the comicbooks - he, and everyone else, barely get enough time to register as characters. Neither does Superman's loss and return. Of this and The Death of Superman's combined 168 minutes, the once-and-future Kal-El isn't a major character for maybe sixty of them. Granted, it's not as pronounced a rush job as Batman v Superman and Justice League packing similar content into maybe forty total minutes of screen time, but it still isn't ideal in terms of making us feel such a great loss. And all the while, the same problems that plague so many of these DCA features reoccur. The thin characterizations. The indifferent writing. The After-Effects-adjacent cel animations. I realize that DC and Warner are making product, but can they at least not be so obvious about it? At least Big Macs taste good.