For the week of February 11th, the Academy Award-nominated Bohemian Rhapsody is hitting Blu-ray. This is, without a doubt, one of the most perplexing Best Picture nominees in Oscar history. It deserves distinction alongside other dubious nominees like Cleopatra and the 1967 Doctor Dolittle. At its absolute best, Bohemian Rhapsody is an engaging jukebox musical - nothing more, nothing less. The film gets so much mileage from its Queen soundtrack: everyone has been raving about the massive Live Aid recreation that concludes the film, but I'm even more partial to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that led to the titular song's development (although the less said about the cutesy cameo from a certain Wayne's World star, the better). That said, a bunch of talented actors (Gwilym Lee as Brian May, Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor, Joe Mazzello as John Deacon, and an Academy Award-nominated Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury) playing dress-up does not a good movie make. Bohemian Rhapsody barely functions as a movie. What little narrative it has (cobbled together from a library of different treatments penned by Anthony McCarten, Peter Morgan, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson) hews strictly to Every Biopic Cliché Ever Made (I forget who said this on Twitter, but Bohemian Rhapsody is the version of Walk Hard that doesn't know it's a joke) as the film shifts robotically from Scrappy Rise to Perilous Fall to Triumphant Return. Worse than that, this is the Queen-sanctioned version of the story. We feel like we're not getting the most interesting or salacious details just so Brian May and Roger Taylor can preserve their public images. And while the film doesn't completely sanitize Freddie Mercury's sexuality, it can't help but seem a little squeamish trying to cover his attraction to men and battle with HIV in the least offensive, most PG-13 way possible. I'm not blaming Malek - distracting fake teeth aside, you can tell he's committed to finding the truth of Mercury, no matter how mass-produced his surroundings might be - only noting how the disconnect between fact and fiction compromises the film. Still, what lifts Bohemian Rhapsody from slight-but-unimportant to genuinely loathsome has nothing to do with what's on-screen, and everything to do with what transpired off it. Every dollar Bohemian Rhapsody makes directly benefits Bryan Singer, who retains sole directorial credit even though his erratic behavior (including several on-set altercations with Malek) got him fired and replaced with Dexter Fletcher, and who, allegedly, harbors a long, dark pattern of sexual abuse in the Hollywood community. Look, I get that the Live Aid stuff is cool, but you can watch the real thing on YouTube, and all without subsidizing Singer's indiscretions.
Far less problematic a biopic is Julian Schnabel's Vincent Van Gogh feature At Eternity's Gate, which arrives courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment. Not that we should expect anything conventional from Schnabel, but we haven't even left the black screen after the production credits before he starts working us. We hear Van Gogh's inner monologue: intimate, anxious, driven. The effect is less like voiceover and more like being trapped inside the artist – I was reminded of Jesus' narration in the first moments of The Last Temptation of Christ, and not just because the great Willem Dafoe plays both characters. Like Scorsese, Schnabel wants to humanize his subject to an almost painful degree, demolishing whatever barriers he can between his subject and us. Throughout the film, Schnabel and his DP Benoît Delhomme adopt a ragged, constantly propulsive visual language around Van Gogh. After Paul Gauguin (a terrific Oscar Isaac) joins Van Gogh in Arles, the camera frolics with the two men in a meadow as if it's a football the artists are passing back and forth. Often Schnabel will replicate Van Gogh's POV: sometimes the lower half of the image will be blurred and hazy (to replicate Van Gogh's vision troubles), sometimes a yellow hue will leech in and swamp the picture, or sometimes it appears as widescreen GoPro footage, bouncing and bobbing and warping across Arles as Van Gogh seeks to immerse himself in nature. The effect doesn't look that much like Van Gogh's paintings, yet Schnabel creates a similar approximation in cinematic grammar. This is film as impressionistic art, all smeared and pixelated, and it helps realize Schnabel's ambitious gambit: to make us perceive the world the way Van Gogh does. Starting with his brilliant 2007 biopic/sensory reel The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Schnabel has been ever more fascinated with turning cinema into some kind of experiential reverie. In that regard alone, At Eternity's Gate is a rousing success. I'm glad Dafoe has received so much acclaim for his performance as Van Gogh, but I suspect the film would function well without him. At its finest moments, we're Van Gogh. Dafoe is but the tortured conduit that helps facilitate that process. The movie bathes in that spooky possession.
From Warner Archive comes the 2004 comedy Starsky & Hutch, and it's here I make a bold, foolhardy claim: in its own unassuming way, Starsky & Hutch ranks as one of the twenty-first century's most important studio comedies. Back in '04, the reaction was more muted. Director Todd Phillips had scored a huge hit with 2003's Old School, and if that raucous frat comedy showed Phillips at his worst behavior, then Starsky & Hutch felt like a calculation towards mainstream audiences: it was PG-13, star-driven (remember: 'twas Old School that made Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn mega-stars), and deeply familiar, a jokey reimagining of the popular '70s cop series. Here, the titular Bay City cops (Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) go up against a sleazy drug kingpin (Vaughn, doing so much with a nothing part) peddling a chemically altered form of cocaine, and all while overcoming their interpersonal differences with each other. It will not surprise you that Stiller's Starsky is a by-the-book obsessive, while Wilson's Hutch is cheerfully corrupt (in his introduction, he pretends to be undercover so he doesn't get arrested when a heist goes south). The movie came, made money, and then vanished, subsumed in the wake of 2004's most influential comedy hit (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy). Yet Starsky & Hutch has endured far better than many expected it to. We can attribute much of that to Phillips. In a time when most comedies unfold as a series of extended improvisations, Starsky & Hutch benefits from Phillips' keen eye and crackerjack pacing - without this movie, I'm not sure if he develops the polish to pull off The Hangover. Even when he's pandering - the needle-drop soundtrack full of obvious tunes, the Snoop Dogg cameo as Huggy Bear - Phillips' commercial instincts are never less than immaculate. And that goes double for how he uses Stiller and Wilson. Outside of Zoolander, no movie has better used their natural chemistry, and while Zoolander is the superior movie, Starsky & Hutch cedes the most screentime to their offbeat rapport. Phillips even gives them a bromance that - and here's where we circle back to the film's overall importance - feels oddly ahead of its time. In the film's best scene, Wilson serenades an adoring Stiller with a rendition of David Soul's "Don't Give Up on Us, Baby," and I flashed onto similar absurdist beats in films like 21 Jump Street, The Other Guys, and Hot Fuzz. Starsky & Hutch plays like a dry run for those postmodern features: it includes all the de facto cop movie clichés so it can subvert them. I wonder if folks like Lord & Miller, Adam McKay, and Edgar Wright took a good look at this one. I certainly hope you do.
Even better than Starsky & Hutch is the great 1985 horror-comedy Fright Night. This film marks the exact moment when writer-director Tom Holland put it all together. He'd been moving towards this kind of arch, quietly subversive chiller in his scripts for Psycho II and Class of 1984, but Fright Night feels like the apex of everything Holland would ever want to do in the genre. He starts with an irresistible premise - what if Jimmy Stewart was spying on a vampire in Rear Window? - so he can introduce us to Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), a horny teenager who becomes convinced he's living next to a vampire. Like Rear Window, Fright Night traffics in a little light ambiguity. Charley is so frustrated that his girlfriend (Amanda Bearse) keeps rebuffing his advances that we're a little unsure if Charley is actually seeing his new neighbor Jerry (Chris Sarandon, in a performance that should have netted him an Oscar nomination) stripping down nubile young women after dark and drinking their blood. Holland gets a kick out of the suggestion that Charley's hormones are driving him crazy. Ultimately, though, this is a monster movie, and for all of Charley's many faults, he's right about Jerry, which brings us to Fright Night's most inspired creation: Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowell), Vampire Slayer to the Stars. Vincent used to be a cult icon of '60s horror (think Peter Cushing meets Vincent Price), but now he's a has-been, reduced to hosting Z-grade chillers on late-night television. When Charley comes to Vincent for help, McDowell does such a nice job of tempering the character's vanity and insecurity with his disbelief of this kid's crazy story. They make for a great horror duo, especially once Holland unleashes his gonzo third act, a special-effects extravaganza starring some still-stunning Richard Edlund FX (famously, Edlund waived his usual fee with the understanding that he could test out some new effects techniques, and the results exceed even his work in the first Ghostbusters). Fright Night is such a durable property that it spawned a great remake, of all things: the 2011 reimagining has an equally sharp sense of humor and a phenomenal Colin Farrell performance as its main bloodsucker. But the original is still the best.