For the week of March 18th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to Blu-ray. This gorgeously animated and richly emotional superhero adventure is the Cabin in the Woods of superhero movies. Just like that postmodern slasher, you can enjoy Spider-Verse as a genre exercise. It's an origin story for Miles Morales (voiced, and wonderfully so, by Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn teenager who gets bitten by a radioactive spider, starts developing strange and wonderful powers, and has to stop a quantum-physics nightmare capable of destroying all matter in the universe. Sure, the individual details might look a little different - unlike default Spider-Man Peter Parker, Morales is a mixed-race kid with two doting, attentive parents (Luna Lauren Velez and Brian Tyree Henry, who might be the MVP of 2018 between this, Widows, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Atlanta) - but screenwriters Rodney Rothman and Phil Lord (one half of the Phil Lord-Chris Miller partnership responsible for The LEGO Movie and 21 Jump Street) do such a careful job of remixing the "traditional" Spider-Man narrative that we see echoes of the familiar in all the changes. And for those out there who can't fathom a world without Peter Parker, Into the Spider-Verse has you covered there, too - Chris Pine voices the platonic ideal of the character, all bubbly charm with just a hint of world-weariness to reflect the character's twenty-six years. We expect that Parker will discover Morales and train him in what'll amount to the superhero version of Creed, bridging the gap seamlessly between old and new stories. But that's not quite what happens. I'm loath to spoil too much of what Spider-Verse has to offer, but let's just say that while Miles does embark on his own hero's journey, the path there stutters and frays and pixelates in ways we're not expecting. And here's where the Cabin in the Woods comparisons intensify. That film used its Evil Dead-esque setup to comment on why we watch horror movies in the first place. Into the Spider-Verse performs the same function for the whole superhero genre: it looks at this culture that's simultaneously sprawling (an endless cycle of sequels and reboots and rebootquels) and restrictive (we expect the same variations on the same stories), and it interrogates the tension between these two states. Why do fans want the same thing in a realm where anything is possible? What do they gain from that repetition? What do they lose? On that last point, Spider-Verse isn't subtle: a lot. And everything about the film seems reverse-engineered to show us what we're missing when we settle for the same. From the opening scenes, it's boldly surreal, a mix of 2D-cell elements and 3D effects that captures movement as visceral abstractions, and that's before Miles gets bit, and the whole movie starts flashing between styles that run the gamut from Ang Lee's Hulk transitions to Seurat's pointillism. I might disagree with the trailers spoiling the appearances from at least four other Spider-people, but in context, the decision suggests infinite other storytelling possibilities, and demolishes whatever preconceived notions we might have about how these films should treat form and character. Hence why the choice to center around Miles works so well. Miles, too, faced his own idiot-comic-book-geek backlash ten years ago, so this movie makes definitive his viability as an exemplar of the Spider-Man mythos. Better than that, it loves even the not-so-super parts of Miles, whether we're talking about his casual neglect of his loving-but-busy parents or his insecurity over being one of the few students of color at a mostly-white school. He's Spider-Man because he's human. Opens the playing field wide open, wouldn't ya say?
If Spider-Verse was Sony's big 2018 family programmer, then Mary Poppins Returns might be Disney's. Whatever affinity you have for Rob Marshall's film depends, in large part, on your love for its 1964 predecessor. The sequel pays respectful homage to all of the major Mary Poppins signifiers, and with a modicum of pandering modern references (the one big exception: London's hardscrabble manual laborers now tear-ass around the city on BMX bikes like it's 2003). As in the original, the sequel has a virtuoso setpiece blending live-action and animation; here, it's when the titular character (Emily Blunt, standing in for Julie Andrews) brings the Banks children (Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, and Joel Dawson) into the artwork on a ceramic bowl, and happily, the animation mimics Disney's mid-'60s cel-artwork. We get a song every three-to-five minutes, and everyone ends the picture in a state of forced uplift. However, if you found the original a tedious, shallow, and punishingly overlong sit that used its technical acumen to disguise its almost complete and total lack of any substantive content, I suspect Mary Poppins Returns may rank somewhere between a root canal and a timeshare pitch meeting. This new feature begins promisingly enough, actually. Whereas David Tomlinson's George Banks was a joyless, money-hungry scold who only needed to learn the value of a good time, his now-grown son Michael (Ben Whishaw, in the only performance that approximates actual human behavior) is facing dire straits: he had to borrow more than he had in the wake of his wife's sudden death, and now he's got five days before the bank (personified by a sneering Colin Firth in a part that practically cries out for Hugh Grant) collects his house as payment. His family has already had to pull together to deal with their emotional grief, but even their best efforts can't compete with the cold realities of the financial world. Cue Blunt's Mary Poppins, who swoops in on a kite, ready to guide the Banks clan through their moment of crisis, except that's not quite what happens, and it's the biggest problem with how tightly Mary Poppins Returns clings to the first movie. From what we can tell, everyone is processing Mrs. Banks' death as well as possible. What they need is more time and money, and outside of one climactic deus ex machina moment, Poppins provides neither. She is just a joy-crazy automaton. As skilled a performer as Blunt is, the role ends up feeling like a whiff for her because Blunt is capable of so much more than that. The better version of this movie would let Blunt engage with the far knottier financial and emotional currents at play. Instead, we spend 130 minutes going through the motions. I cannot remember one bit of the Marc Shaiman score, and the less said about the overly frenetic, edit-heavy dance numbers, the better. It continues to astound me that Rob Marshall, who emerged as somewhat of a wunderkind in the world of dance choreography, cannot translate that skill into technical filmmaking. Between this, Chicago, Nine, and Into the Woods, Marshall has shown no facility for capturing the intensity and kineticism of a live musical on film. Furthermore, a more ruthless editor could have cut the long, pointless sequence with Meryl Streep as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda's big music number (the one with the aforementioned BMX-riding Cockneys) and lose absolutely nothing of thematic or narrative importance. Both sequences are just empty pomp, which I guess are on-brand for the Poppins franchise. I don't know if I'd rather hear them or the reverse warning as the dump-truck full of money backs up onto the Disney lot.
Martin Liebman wrote that "when Mary Poppins enters the picture and the children enter a magical portal to an underwater world by way of the bathtub, things begin to change. It quickly becomes apparent that Poppins hasn't arrived solely to care for the children's physical needs but also, and more importantly, to help them rediscover their imaginations and become 'children' once more. In essence, Poppins wants them to act their age. Emily Blunt rediscovers the character's personality in a nearly perfect portrayal. It's not a mirror image of the Julie Andrews take on the character, though; Blunt doesn't make Poppins entirely her own, but she does find the look and spirit and timelessness remarkably well. The young actors who portray the Banks children are also well cast and behave as believable siblings who go with the flow on a remarkable journey into rediscovering their childlike wonder. Lin-Manuel Miranda carries the film forward as Jack the lamplighter and in many ways mirrors Dick Van Dyke's performance of Bert from the original film while also shaping the character into a unique individual (Van Dyke also makes a wonderful cameo late in the film). The sets and costumes have been carefully created and bring a seemingly authentic recreation of 1930s London to the screen."
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes a 4K pressing of Andrew Niccol's Lord of War. I hated this movie when it first came out, and I think I like it even less now. Given the recent controversy over gun rights in the country, Lord of War should have gained something in the realm of topicality, but it's a measure of this film's badness that it benefits not one whit from relevant current events. The world of international drug running is a fascinating one, and from what I gather, writer-director Andrew Niccol met with actual gunrunners as he developed the picture. However, Niccol labored too hard to protect their identities - he elides all the interesting details about their work. Characters summarize when they should explain about how gunrunners move product or negotiate with different foreign agents (Lord of War often plays like a trailer for a longer movie), and all while Niccol works himself into a lather doing his best Scorsese impersonation. I will always be more generous towards pictures like American Hustle and I, Tonya because of how ineptly Lord of War apes Scorsese. We get wall-to-wall narration that conveys nothing of value (compare this to Casino, which uses voiceover so brilliantly when discussing the inner workings of mob casinos that you feel like you're watching a documentary); slick marriages of violence and humor that aren't all that tense or funny; and ham-fisted needle drops that tell you what you think so aggressively they feel like thought-indoctrination. For Pete's sake, the film plays "For What It's Worth" during a war scene and then the Jeff Buckley "Hallelujah" over the antihero's dark moment of the soul. As Said Antihero, Nicolas Cage is nicely understated, and he has a few good scenes with Ethan Hawke (who's incapable of hitting a false note even as his ATF agent acts as a mouthpiece for the film's social agenda). That said, Jared Leto also has a major role as Cage's little brother, and he negates what little good there is. Wanna know how bad Lord of War is? Niccol has a character unironically say, "I'm the luckiest man in the world," right before blowing up in a McBain-esque car explosion. We're a long way from Gattaca, people.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film is "a surprisingly thoughtful and at times rather provocative look at arms trading. Nicolas Cage has come in for his fair share of brickbats for some of his latter day performances (including by yours truly), but he's rather effective here as a scoundrel you can nonetheless at least kind of root for. In fact there are a number of scoundrels running rampant through Lord of War, and one of the kind of interesting if maybe subliminal things that happens as one watches the film is the same kind of desensitization to horrifying violence that several arms purveyors or utilizers in the film seem to have 'mastered.' The film's stylistic gambit of often dense grading choices and almost dreamlike (nightmarish?) framings achieves considerable improvement in this new 4K release, though I personally wish grain resolution could have looked a bit more consistent. The Dolby Atmos track is another nice improvement, though it comes with the forewarning that Lord of War may not totally satisfy those wanting a nonstop array of action adventure sound effects."
Finally, Kino Video is bringing Todd Haynes' atmospheric melodrama Far from Heaven to Blu-ray. Haynes might be independent cinema's most ardent fan of cultural pastiche. In his celebrated/notorious 1987 short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, he famously used Barbie dolls to tell the tragic tale of the Carpenters' front woman, and that process of using one form of pop culture to reflect on another has guided almost every subsequent film Haynes has made. However, with Far from Heaven, Haynes pushes this approach to its boldest, most expressionistic extremes. In telling the story of troubled '50s housewife Cathy Whitaker (a brilliant Julianne Moore), Haynes structures his work as a grand-scale homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, specifically Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. DP Ed Lachman gives all the colors the vibrancy of a three-strip Technicolor print, and the Elmer Bernstein score wouldn't be out of place on something like To Kill a Mockingbird. The challenge that Haynes poses to himself is whether or not he can approach such an antiquated aesthetic with the relative thematic freedoms of the twenty-first century. Sirk was certainly interested in issues of race, gender inequality, and sexual discovery, but he could only hint at such matters in the subtext; Haynes, on the other hand, can tackle these matters more boldly. Cathy seems to have the perfect family until she learns that her husband (Dennis Quaid, heartbreakingly good) is a closeted homosexual. She ends up sparking an intense emotional connection with her gardener (Dennis Haysbert), except he's black, and the optics of a white woman and a black man in small-town America inflame the more conservatively minded folks around Cathy (including a very funny Patricia Clarkson as Cathy's obnoxious best friend). As an intellectual exercise, Far from Heaven is never less than fascinating - it reminds me of David Lynch's Blue Velvet in terms of how it wants to tarnish the image of America in the 1950s. But outside of Moore and Quaid's deeply emotional performances, the film remains a little too chilly for its own good. That's the risk that Haynes often runs - that he ends up mounting a beautiful art project instead of an absorbing narrative - and here, once you've figured out his game, Far from Heaven doesn't have much to offer. Still, it merits a viewing on the strength of its visuals alone, and of Moore's full-throated performance. She might look like a caricature, but she manages to find the beating human heart under those immaculate surfaces.