For the week of April 1st, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing the Transformers prequel Bumblebee to Blu-ray. The new film is just as much a reaction to the preceding Transformers movies as Justice League was to the Man of Steel-through-Batman v Superman DC run. Those DC adventures were self-serious, brutal, dark, but Justice League bounced around with a forced "WE HAVE FUN NOW" rictus, even digitally lightening some scenes so we could better see through the murk. The Michael Bay section of the Transformers oeuvre is worse - to a film, these children's toy commercials pride themselves on being sexist, racist, nihilistic, xenophobic, and deeply hostile, with action scenes so dense and ka-bonkers they feel like you exploded a Stan Brakage short in extreme close-up. Bumblebee, then, might open with the destruction of Cybertron and a finale where one building-sized robot uses an oil tanker to kill another building-sized robot, yet it goes about its business with comparative...gentleness, dare I say? The male lead is Dominican actor Jorge Lendeborg Jr., and not once does he traffic in offensive Latinx stereotypes: he's a sweetly dorky hunk who's supportive and kind and decent. When the Decepticons and Autobots attack one another, their wounds don't spurt arterial gouts of green and black oil (one of Bay's least remarked-upon violations in his Transformers pictures). No longer is Optimus Prime the military hawk who preaches liberty or death. Now, in his cameo-sized appearance, he's extolling the virtues of banding together and standing up for all people. Best of all is Hailee Steinfeld's heroine, a tough-as-nails, spunky, deeply vulnerable STEM kid. Steinfeld gives the best performance in the franchise, and new director Travis Knight (of Kubo and the Two Strings fame) never makes her slink around in low-cut tops and high heels to command attention. It's a direct rebuke to the kinds of women (Megan Fox, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Laura Haddock) Michael Bay was all too fond of propping up as "normal" women. Now, make no mistake about it: this trend towards decency is just as cynical and calculated a decision as Justice League's faux-lightness was. Had Transformers 5: Apparently The Autobots Worked with Harriet Tubman and Also Killed Hitler? made a bazillion dollars, we'd still be choking down Bay's rancid worldview. But it underperformed, and that financial slight meant Paramount finally started listening to the Megatron-sized vat of complaint letters they'd started getting since Bay used his camera to trace Megan Fox's oiled body at the start of the first Transformers. Still. cynical sweetness is better than no sweetness at all. For all its faults, I think I prefer Bumblebee's corporately rejiggered worldview. We need more Nice in our lives, even if someone's counting on Nice scoring beaucoup bucks in the global market.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "reboots the franchise with a more sincere, grounded origins story that rights so many wrongs that became apparent throughout Bay's run at the top. It's a live action recreation of the original cartoon, with some liberties taken but the robots by-and-large look like the cartoon counterparts, even if there's still that necessary level of complexity beyond the surface that Bay introduced in his films. It's a nice balance between maintaining the style of the 'G1' ('Generation 1') Transformers and those seen in the Bay films. Bumblebee's production design team has found a proper balance between functionality and familiarity. The film's opening battle on Cybertron will leave fans of the classic Transformers line grinning from ear to ear. Right away the film establishes its new look, grounded in the original and most familiar visual aesthetics, signaling its intention to, essentially, have its cake and eat it, too, to play the movie big and spectacular but hearken back to the classics fans know and love."
The prevailing critical attitudes towards Adam McKay's ferociously angry Vice mystify me. When McKay released The Big Short in 2015, critics fêted him as the new Oliver Stone. I liked it just well enough, but I found the film less of a movie than a two-hour video essay starring some insanely famous people. Now McKay trots out the exact same approach for this Dick Cheney biopic, and the tide turns. The only thing that's changed is the subject - if anything, McKay has only further honed the mix of infographics, celebrity cameos, and dramatic reenactments that made The Big Short so distinctive. Perhaps the subject is enough to sour public approval. Post-recession, we didn't have any trouble uniting against the avarice of the banking industry, but with Vice, McKay has his sights set on the entire Republican Party, and he's taking aim during the most divisive political period in American history since...I dunno, Andrew Jackson, maybe? And Dick Cheney is just a means to an end in terms of McKay's larger social criticisms. As far as biopics go, Vice operates around an interesting disconnect. Normally, cast and crew are on the same page about their subject, but that isn't the case here. You can tell that Christian Bale and Amy Adams have so thoroughly internalized Dick and Lynne Cheney, respectively; if these two actors disagreed with the Cheneys politically, you wouldn't be able to tell, given the way they inhabit the Cheneys' public and private personas like a second skin. But McKay? He hates these two, and he keeps deliberately undercutting Dick and Lynne even while Bale and Adams give them a full measure of humanity. It's in McKay's disdain for Dick's background: he paints Dick as less a brilliant political manipulator than a shiftless layabout forced into politics by his conniving, power-hungry wife. Or how McKay instructs most of the cast around these two to approach their roles like hammy SNL impersonators. McKay makes it all too easy to think of Brick Tamland watching Steve Carell's idiot Donald Rumsfeld, and Sam Rockwell goes so broad as George W. Bush (in his five minutes of screen time) that Will Ferrell's iconic Dubya work starts seeming more nuanced. And when Dick has his five heart attacks, McKay treats them as comic punchlines - Dick regards each life-threatening attack with the studied nonchalance of a person remembering they can deduct out-of-pocket medical expenses on their tax forms. According to McKay, the capriciousness of people like Cheney lead to (and was far more insidious than) our current political situation, so you get why he's less-than reverent. Still, this freewheeling attitude might be as divisive as the times McKay is excoriating.
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Clint Eastwood's The Mule to Blu-ray. This is, above else, a very silly movie. If Eastwood's previous two films (Sully and The 15:17 to Paris) erred in taking two relatively minor incidents and failing to make them seem more expansive, The Mule weirdly goes the opposite route, telling the thrilling story of ninety-year-old drug mule Earl Stone (Eastwood, natch) in as sedate a fashion as possible. Do not expect Breaking Bad. Long stretches of the film pass with Eastwood just driving cross-country, singing on his radio, eating ice cream, and bantering amicably with the strangers he meets along the way. If not for the relative polish of Yves Bélanger's cinematography, you'd think you were watching the least consequential travel documentary ever made. And there's something to be said for the observation that The Mule functions as "a superhero movie for old people." Eastwood's character remains an unflappable driver in his advancing years; he earns the respect of the toughest figures in the drug war (Bradley Cooper plays the narc; Andy Garcia plays the kingpin); and he sexually satisfies a quartet of giggling sex workers in two separate threesomes. Yet in its odd, no-stakes way, The Mule is the most fascinating film Eastwood has made since his late-stage masterpiece Gran Torino. We're so quick to criticize his politically polarizing public persona that we often forget what a thoughtful, self-aware filmmaker he can be. The Mule is no exception. If films like Gran Torino and Unforgiven find Eastwood interrogating questions of violence and the ethics behind his own iconography, The Mule plays as something more probing: an attempt to make amends for everyone he's hurt over his storied career. It's no accident that Earl excels at everything he does (he shifts from horticulturalist to drug-runner as seamlessly as Eastwood transitioned from acting to directing), nor are we surprised that his protagonist has done so at the expense of every important personal relationship in his life. With the exception of his granddaughter (Taissa Farmiga), everyone hates Earl, and none more so than his bitter daughter, played by Eastwood's own daughter Alison. Alison's performance itself? Not great, but the meta-commentary is priceless, especially if you go into The Mule thinking about, say, that controversial Esquire interview wherein Eastwood expresses his thoughts towards fatherhood and family life as "for a man, once you've sired your pups, you're done," and all in front of his son Scott, at that. The Mule reveals no small amount of guilt on Eastwood's part for such a mentality, giving the film a frisson it might not otherwise have. Eastwood even makes time to address the ways people have stereotyped him after his infamous appearance at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Earl may be many things, but he's no bigot, and the best scenes show him amicably charming lesbians, members of the Latinx community, and black people (at one point, he even offers a mea culpa to a black couple after making an unintentionally racist comment). People are complicated, Eastwood seems to be saying. That's always been the case in his films, and it remains so for The Mule. A logy, offbeat, and strangely essential entry in the Eastwood canon.
Randy Miller III wrote that the film "is slightly more complex than its surface story, effectively balancing the stress and desperation of Earl's new job with the growing distance at which he travels from his family. More than anything else, it's a somber and meditative road movie where the aging grandfather ultimately seeks redemption for his tireless work ethic; perhaps it's even semi-autobiographical, considering Eastwood's film output. All the while, The Mule deftly wades through grey moral territory within several layers of its story; almost no one is completely good or evil, and we're all the better for it. Earl makes several attempts to reconnect with his family and even uses most of his earnings to help struggling members of his community. [Cooper's] Agent Bates, trying desperately to perform his job despite pressure from his quota-seeking boss (Laurence Fishburne), likewise struggles to maintain his own family life due to long hours. Even Earl's estranged ex-wife [Dianne Wiest] and daughter, at first unwilling to put up with any more of his selfish and reclusive behavior, can't hold a grudge forever. These small sub-plots, just to name a few, are what separate thoughtful and considerate movies like The Mule from more straightforward popcorn fare that puts thrills and suspense before three-dimensional characters."