For the week of April 15th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing M. Night Shyamalan's "Eastrail 177 Trilogy" to a close with the release of Glass. Forget Lady in the Water or The Village; Glass stands as the most ambitious picture that Shyamalan has ever mounted. It's the third in an unlikely franchise, one that tries to marry the quiet introspection of Unbreakable with the gonzo pulp of Split. It's a postmodern commentary on why we need superhero stories, how they give voice to humanity's dizzying highs and lows. It's even a form of Freudian self-analysis, as Shyamalan subdivides his perceived gifts between his three leads (Bruce Willis' unbreakable hero represents Shyamalan's strength; Samuel L. Jackson's brilliant "Mr. Glass" is his intellect; and James McAvoy's dissociative-personality case is his unpredictable creative spark) and shows how he used these skills to overcome almost a decade's worth of critical opprobrium. And it attempts to do all of this on a relative micro-budget: Shyamalan and Blumhouse brought this idiosyncratic vision to life with about $20 million (Zack Snyder needed almost $100 million to chase similar aims with Sucker Punch). All of which leaves me deeply conflicted. On one hand, we need weird personal fare like this invading multiplexes; on the other, Glass might be Shyamalan's most embarrassingly bad movie. Like Lady in the Water, Glass gets way too high off its unwarranted pretensions. In theory, I like the bait-and-switch Shyamalan is pulling - he sets up an epic showdown between his three main characters only to lock them in a mental institution for most of the movie - except the execution is turgid and self-important. Characters don't talk: they speechify about the metaphor and purpose of the genre, and none more egregiously than Sarah Paulson, who plays the doctor evaluating all three leads. She delivers reams of nonsensical thematics right down the barrel of the camera like Shyamalan wants to be Jonathan Demme but has no sense of Demme's warmth or humanist agenda. And while I'm glad Shyamalan got his confidence back, the way he has his leads portray it is problematic, to say the least. Shyamalan has this bottomless love for everything his protagonists represent, but both Jackson (giving the film's best performance despite having way less screen time than you might expect - it's an extended cameo) and McAvoy play dangerously unstable psychotics - it's hard to appreciate McAvoy's creative spark when we also see him literally eat a policeman's face. As such, Glass often acts like The Incredibles for sociopaths. Somehow, though, all this insanity is more tedious than it might read. Shyamalan is operating in full Happening mode in terms of filmmaking incoherence. The film feels cheap (the big climax unfolds in maybe the least visually distinctive arena possible), and with the exception of Jackson, none of the performers can elevate the tone beyond turgid muck. In a sense, comparing Willis between this and Unbreakable will give you the best sense of how far Shyamalan has fallen. Willis is thrillingly understated in Unbreakable. Here, he's almost literally sleepwalking through the proceedings. He's often isolated during ensemble sequences since he probably shot all his material separately over a week, and while I can't be sure, I noted a few shots where his face seems CGI-added under his character's poncho hood, like they pasted him over a stand-in. If Shyamalan can't get his lead to care about the proceedings, how can he make us?
Martin Liebman liked the film quite a bit more, writing that "Shyamalan builds and executes the film with a slow but sure hand. There are lengthy stretches featuring Dunn and Glass doing little more than sitting still while [Paulson's] Staple speaks to them, diagnoses them, and lays out a 'treatment' plan for their mental blocks and fantasies, as she believes them to be. There's more interaction with The Horde, unavoidable with the multiple personalities surfacing in response to any given situation or stimulus, but that allows the series' anchors - Dunn and Glass - to reveal their place and purpose in the film with added mystery as they are slowly folded into a much larger narrative. Staple is the film's most interesting character. As the film explores the parallels and demarcations between fictional and 'real' heroes and villains and various comic book tropes are introduced and often slyly rather an overtly folded into the story, it becomes clear that there's something to Staple's work beyond 'treating' the men's supposed aliments. Shyamalan builds the film, much as he always does, with the greater purposes and truths masked and slowly peeled away at opportune times. Staple indeed becomes something more than just a stand-in, and a second watch proves much more rewarding than the first, allowing viewers to piece together the story as Shyamalan introduces hints rather than wait for the reveals, to understand where the characters and the story are going with the foresight to better appreciate the artistry in the writer/director's purposes for it all."
Far better a mainstream Hollywood fantasy is the unjustly neglected The Kid Who Would Be King. Minus a little midsection bloat, The Kid Who Would Be King ranks as one of the best, most delightful YA fantasies I've seen in a long time. It is also the second film in eight years from writer/director Joe Cornish. Cornish's debut feature was the sci-fi-comedy stunner Attack the Block, but as inspired as that picture was (Cornish picked Jodie Whitaker and John Boyega as the Next Big Things well before Doctor Who and Star Wars), he has struggled in bringing his other projects to fruition. He has writing credits on both Tintin and Ant-Man, but he passed on directing Star Trek Beyond, and that decision set him back quite a bit, commercially speaking. There's a reality where he makes The Kid Who Would Be King to get something on his CV before the decade is up. Luckily, the film feels just as personal to his creative/thematic interests as Attack the Block. The Kid Who Would Be King does an expert job of weaving together non-cloying, populist entertainment with some biting social criticism. Yes, the film's spine deals with twelve-year-old Alex Elliott (newcomer Louis Ashbourne Serkis, son of Andy) discovering that he's the modern heir apparent to King Arthur, and all the swashbuckling adventures and comedy that such a tale would connote. Cornish has lost none of his fastball in terms of staging action choreography - the end battle in Alex's prep school plays like if John Carpenter made a kids movie - and he's still got a great sense for casting young talent, but underlying all of that is a warning against strongmen and the global slide towards fascism. The reason that Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson, who spends half her brief screentime covered in vines and the other half as a CGI dragon) is able to reassert her evil over Britain is because decades of authoritarian political nightmares have weakened the country's moral fiber. Cornish name-checks Brexit - he flashes newspapers covers with Trump and Erdogan. To Cornish, the Round Table should be divorced from status or class: it should consist of the diverse and the kind. Just a wonderful little surprise – why it got dumped in January, I'll never know.
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes the release of two catalog titles: Smokey and the Bandit II and Smokey and the Bandit: Part 3. I can enthusiastically recommend the first in the series, the 1977 smash-hit Smokey and the Bandit. That movie is a treasure: a sloppy, smiley, energetically goofy chase picture that director Hal Needham overstuffs with gags and stunts and the sparkling interplay between stars Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. Parts 2 and 3, however, are a sobering lesson in why not everything needs to be a franchise. Smokey and the Bandit II shares almost as much in common with Ghostbusters II and Anchorman 2 as it does the first Smokey. All three of these sequels pretty much just retread over plot and character beats from their predecessors, and all to diminishing results. So, as with Smokey 1, we have the Bandit (Reynolds) transporting illegal cargo across state lines, simultaneously trying to charm Field's spirited love interest and avoid Jackie Gleason's loathsome Sheriff Buford T. Justice. Except this time, the magic is gone. Needham tries to add some ridiculous twists involving the nature of the cargo and the Republican National Convention, of all things, but Reynolds is so checked out that you can practically see him checking his watch and counting down the time before Happy Hour (a good portion of the film was shot in and around his Florida ranch, which feels appropriately lazy). Most dispiritingly, Reynolds and Field had undergone a very public break-up, and they carry that enmity into the characters' onscreen dynamic: only I Love Trouble struggles more at forcing rom-com banter between actors who loathe one another. Somehow, though, Smokey and the Bandit: Part 3 is even worse. By 1983, Reynolds and Needham wanted nothing to do with these movies, leaving Universal to jerry-rig a premise wherein Gleason ends up playing both Justice and a new Bandit (according to Hollywood lore, the first cut of the film was called Smokey Is the Bandit). But test audiences didn't understand this bizarre twist, and the studio hastily reshot the Gleason-Bandit half with Jerry Reed's Cledus instead and then added a last-minute Reynolds cameo to mitigate the damage. Spoiler: it didn't work, and the series died.
Looking for a better piece of heartland Americana than the Bandit sequels? Try Jonathan Demme's masterful comedy Melvin and Howard, which gets a limited-edition release from Twilight Time. It's both a blessing and a curse that Demme cemented his legacy with the Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs; as technically accomplished (and scary) as that serial-killer thriller is, it's also a far cry from the funkier and more humanist character studies Demme so clearly adored. Of those latter features, I'd call it a toss-up between this and his subversive rom-com Something Wild as Demme's finest at-bat. Melvin and Howard is definitely the gentler of the two, a docudrama that plays kinda like modernized Preston Sturges. Demme's hero, Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat), is a classic beleaguered everyman: he's essentially decent, but he's piss-tired of being poor and always looking to short-circuit his station in life. Then, one day, he stops to offer a ride to a disheveled vagrant (Jason Robards), gives the old weirdo a quarter before dropping him off at the Desert Inn...and then learns that Said Weirdo was Howard Hughes, and that for this relatively meager act of kindness, Hughes is leaving Dummar over $150 million in his will. Melvin and Howard thrives off the disconnect between the Dummar-and-Hughes scenes and the human comedy that follows. To wit: Robards lets Hughes be a little creepy, and Demme isn't afraid to emphasize how quietly unsettling his ride with Dummar is (P.T. Anderson has long cited this film as one of his favorites, and you can see clear echoes in The Master's spooky motorcycling scenes). But Dummar's home-life is looser and delightfully odd - even before he has to weather the media-and-legal fallout from Hughes' will, Dummar glides through a parade of oddballs, the best of which are his two wives Bonnie and Lynda (the great Pamela Reed and Mary Steenburgen, respectively, the latter of which won an Oscar for her work here). Demme is never happy when he's indulging his characters' idiosyncrasies. Watch Melvin and Howard and see why.