For the week of March 4th, Warner and MGM Home Entertainment are bringing Creed II to Blu-ray. It is insane to me that Rocky IV, which is the worst of the Rocky movies and a contender for Worst Franchise Entry of the '80s, somehow spawned the masterful Creed and now the very good Creed 2. What separates these Creed pictures from every Rocky picture since the original is their emotional intimacy. Creed is a rebootquel, sure, but it's also a finely-grained examination of a guy (the great Michael B. Jordan) with attachment reactive disorder who's trying to forge meaningful relationships, and all while being young and black in America. Creed 2 finds its titular character trying to set aside his father's legacy while tentatively starting his own family: much as he loves his fiancée Bianca (Tessa Thompson, all idiosyncratic charm) and de facto father Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, who has less to do than in Creed but is no less engaging for it), Creed can't quite escape the shadow of trauma and violence hanging over him. Quite literally, it seems: the Big Bad is Viktor Drago (Florian "Big Nasty" Munteanu), son of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren, quite good), who's raised his child on thirty years of resentment and abuse ever since Rocky schooled him in the ring. We're all trying to escape becoming our parents, and Creed 2 keeps that truth in the fore. And the actors respond in kind. Minus the distracting greenscreen backgrounds, the fight scenes are visceral and bloody - new director Steven Caple Jr. isn't a virtuoso like Ryan Coogler, but he's certainly good at conveying the ferocity of the brawls - although they don't hold our interest the way the human moments do. Rocky and Creed have a bedside confrontation after Creed is almost killed that hurts to watch - no one is better than Jordan at withholding and then slowly releasing vast wells of inner hurt. Better still are the quiet, tender moments where Bianca and Creed have to care for their special-needs child: their baby's degenerative hearing loss plays across their faces like a living reminder of their own frailties. You almost wish that performative honesty made it into the main narrative. This time around, Stallone wrote the screenplay (with Juel Taylor), and he's got an affinity for the hokey, as any Rhinestone fan can attest. In theory, I like the thematic contrast the family Drago provides, except the Dragos get so much less screen time that we never regard them with the same empathy as the Creed side of the story. I'm even less keen on how their presence unwinds some of the development Creed made in the last movie. It isn't a complete reset, but Creed definitely yields to his resentment in a way that feels uncharacteristic to his character's growth. Still, the actors are so good that the movie sweeps you up regardless; this is still probably the second or third best Rocky movie. It just suffers from not being Creed. Then again, what doesn't?
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that the film is "as much about realistic human drama as it is fighting...but these personal revelations often feel more like soap-opera theatrics than in previous installments, Creed included. Although a handful of genuinely heartfelt moments take place here (the father-son dynamics on both sides, as well as personal reasons why Adonis takes a while to accept the eventual rematch), Creed II as a whole feels not only overstuffed but also suffers from several obvious pacing problems. There's just not enough time for some of its bigger moments to build momentum: the film barrels full-force through a few key stretches and, in the process, robs smaller subplots of a much more lasting impact. But while it undoubtedly stumbles a few times along the way, Creed II checks almost all of the boxes that have kept audiences coming back for decades. I may not have fallen completely for it, but this is still a pretty good time at the movies."
The Academy Award-nominated The Favourite also hits Blu-ray this week. I went into this film, as many of you will, with great trepidation, which I accredit exclusively to director Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos' features - Dogtooth, The Lobster, and 2017's The Killing of a Sacred Deer - exhibit often exquisite formal control and tonal mastery. They're also brutally reserved and often needlessly cruel. And The Favourite is very much of a piece with the rest of his work. Lanthimos doesn't trust man-made systems and he hates authority, so the British monarchy proves a natural target for his bile: even as England slogs through a bloody war with France and daily political infighting between the Tories and the Whigs, the depraved and sickly Queen Anne (a towering and pathetic Olivia Colman) is more concerned with the sexual/emotional attentions of her two favorite chamber ladies (Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, equally brilliant in very different ways), both of whom are manipulating the whole of British politics solely so they can diminish the other in the Queen's eyes. What results is a love triangle wherein everyone's emotions are currency and no one gets what they want in the face of an indifferent universe. So, pretty typical Lanthimos. However, Lanthimos didn't write The Favourite (that honor goes to Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara), and that detail makes all the difference. For the first time, Lanthimos can't overload the frame with misanthropy. Davis and McNamara's script is hypercritical of the three leads, but it also affords each person a full measure of wounded humanity. Colman is dangerously capricious and mercurial, but she's also still grieving the deaths of her seventeen children. Weisz will resort to any atrocity to maintain the Queen's favor, but she's also genuinely concerned for her ruler's health and mental well-being. And Stone...well, her affections are the most mercenary, sure, but yours would be, too, if you spent most of your waking days slogging through grinding poverty and trying to avoid sexual assault. All of that sounds dire, except The Favourite might be the funniest comedy of 2018. I'm reminded of Dr. Strangelove in terms of how Lanthimos generates so much stupidity from our overall shortsightedness and vanity, and he's constantly elevating the proceedings with surrealist gags that approach Dadaism - an bizarre court dance sequence, or the way Stone strategizes against Weisz while dispassionately pleasuring her idiot husband (a very funny Joe Alwyn, AKA the latest Mr. Taylor Swift). As long as this Yorgos Lanthimos keeps making movies, I'll keep happily watching them. One of the year's finest features.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "what sets The Favourite apart is not just a certain modernity of…but a freewheeling filming style that actually makes some of Lanthimos' flourishes in The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer seem downright staid. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan resort to a glut of totally weird, askew, framings, including lots of uses of fisheye lenses and a penchant for almost giddy tracking shots that careen through the largely abandoned halls of Anne's palace. It's a totally off the wall presentational style that gives The Favourite a very unique appearance, one that frankly may chafe against the sensibilities of those who want their historical films offered 'straight, no chaser,' as it were...There's an underlying feeling of verisimilitude in terms of the emotions being experienced by the focal trio of women. And how refreshing, even bracing, is it to have a major film which in fact offers three outstanding 'lead' female performances (even if two of them were relegated to 'Supporting' status in the awards season)?"
From Well Go USA comes Lee Chang-dong's acclaimed anti-thriller Burning. I feel like I should like Burning more than I do. For one, it's an adaptation/reimagining of my favorite short story from my favorite Haruki Murakami collection of short stories: both this and Murakami's "Barn Burning" revel in the delicate ambiguity linking an aimless writer (played in the film by Yoo Ah-in), his former childhood friend (Jeon Jong-seo), and the wealthy stranger (a phenomenal Steven Yeun) who claims he likes burning down barns (greenhouses in the film). There's a mystery at the center of the story - Jong-seo disappears, leading Ah-in to puzzle over what happened to her - but Murakami is more interested in the mystery of the mystery. Nothing quite seems to add up. Ah-in's character says he feels little for this woman he can't stop thinking about, Jong-seo is the kind of flighty narcissist who might have gotten bored and run off on her own, and Yeun claims he's torched a building near Ah-in despite all evidence to the contrary. At its best, Burning conveys that same malingering unease. Co-writer/director Lee Chang-dong has distended the short story to a massive 147 minutes, but so much of that time is just spent waiting and watching alongside Ah-in. Chang-dong and his great DP Hong Kyung-pyo stage a lot of the scenes in long masters as if we're getting Life, Uncut. When the film is working - Jong-seo's rapturous/spooky topless dance to Miles Davis, the horrifying second-to-last shot in the film - we feel this grand paradox at work. Like Ah-in, we have the freedom to look around, to catch the totality of a moment, but the more we look, the more lost we start to feel. Take Yeun's mystery man. For 98% of his screen time, he's handsome, well cultured, and unfailingly polite in his interactions with his (many) friends and acquaintances. Yet the brilliance of Yeun's performance is to suggest his character has curated an expert playlist of charms so we don't see something rotten at his core. I've run hot-and-cold on Yeun in the past (he was just getting good on The Walking Dead right as the show stopped caring about him; he's kinda useless in Sorry to Bother You), but in Burning, he's a moviestar. In particular, he has a moment of brutally ambiguous tenderness during his final scene that took my breath away. The problem, however, is Chang-dong's approach. It's a punishingly long sit, and one that doesn't always yield the results that Chang-dong wants. Whenever the film is locked into the three leads' interactions, Burning excels, and that goes double for the haunting final hour after Jong-seo vanishes. But we spend a lot of time alone with Ah-in, and...well, that time is more variable. I could have done without the long subplot involving his soon-to-be incarcerated father: it gives us justifications we don't need (the character's inherited rage; the location of a safe filled with some sharp knives) for Ah-in's barely sublimated menace. Remember: runtime alone does not equal thematic depths.
Finally, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering Ben Is Back. This rehab dramedy is...problematic, to say the least. As it starts, the film plays like a more user-friendly version of Beautiful Boy; when her son (the titular Ben, played by Lucas Hedges) makes an unexpected return home from rehab, Holly (Julia Roberts) starts worrying whether or not Ben's actually in recovery or if he's escaped and looking to get high. Their dynamic is equal parts prickly and compelling - Holly loves her son but doesn't trust him one bit, while Ben's sweet reticence masks this well of self-loathing - and in a manner that reminds me of Jonathan Demme's underrated Rachel Getting Married. And had the film continued in this tensely understated manner, it might have landed more of its emotional blows. The problem, I'm afraid, lies with writer/director Peter Hedges. Hedges started making heartfelt, intimate character pieces: he wrote the novel and screenplay adaptation for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and his Pieces of April provided wonderful showcases for the likes of Katie Holmes and Patricia Clarkson. But somewhere along the way, Hedges went off the rails, first with the glorified sitcom Dan in Real Life and then with the incoherent Disney fantasy The Odd Life of Timothy Green. And Ben Is Back reflects this trend in microcosm as the human drama of the first portion gives way to nonsensical crime-movie plotting - some bad folks from Ben's old life kidnap the family dog, thus sending Ben and Holly on an odyssey to get back the dog and keep Ben clean. If that sounds tonally confusing to you, then you aren't wrong. I've now seen the movie, and I'm still not sure what Hedges is going for. At times, he wants social realism; at times, he seems to be attempting the kind of freewheeling crime-comedy Demme made in the 1980s (Married to the Mob, Something Wild) without any of the tonal precision Demme brought. It's a real mess. And here's where I bury the lede: it's a mess that I kinda recommend, if only for the wonderful work Roberts is doing. Roberts has always been a star, but she's gotten more interesting the older she's got, and she gives Holly this mesmerizing quality of tenderness and just-under-the-surface pain. In a better movie, she would have been the frontrunner for Best Actress. So it goes.