For the week of April 22nd, the main studio titles are new 4K upgrades. The most exciting one? Ridley Scott's 1979 horror masterpiece Alien. I can think of few films more deserving of the added richness and clarity. In designing their science-fiction world, Scott and DP Derek Van Lint create an aesthetic that recalls Brueghel and Jean Giraud: cluttered, sterile/functional space technology will give way to revoltingly organic hellscapes that operate with no remorse and with maximum sadism. As lean as the proceedings are (credit the great Walter Hill, who reworked the Dan O'Bannon/Ron Shusett script into the screenplay equivalent of a Zen koan), that contrast between technological sprawl and biological invasion offers so much thematic red meat for critics and scholars. View Alien, if you will, as an extended metaphor for the Vietnam War, or for what we lose when we give too much of ourselves over to the machines. Or feel free to disregard those lofty ideas entirely and enjoy the film as the single greatest slasher movie ever made. Scott has long said the two biggest influences on Alien were 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. You can feel the latter title throughout the film's relentless second hour, wherein the horrifying alien xenomorph (designed by H. R. Giger - speaking of the film's high-art inclinations! - to resemble an insectile, gender-fluid anomaly that propagates through oral rape and has zero morality or conscience) stalks a cast of absurdly overqualified performers (Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, and Sigourney Weaver, who became a genre icon with her work in this series) through a dark and spooky spaceship. It's such an elusive, menacing, singular genre picture, and I'm continually amazed that it started a franchise. While I like certain parts that follow (James Cameron's action-heavy Aliens; David Fincher's introspective Alien³), this first Alien has the spare, nightmarish power of a perfect one-off. Ridley Scott would make good films again, that's for sure. But none of them approach what he accomplished here. A modern masterpiece.
Speaking of 4K remasters, Disney and Marvel are using theirs to help promote the upcoming Avengers: Endgame, giving upgrades to the Russo Brothers' first two at-bats in the MCU: Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War. Other than The Avengers, Captain America: The First Avenger might have been the most satisfying of Marvel's Phase One pictures – it had an Indiana Jones-esque sense of derring-do and fun, and Chris Evans' warm, noble portrayal of the title superhero was, in its own way, as iconic and perfectly calibrated as Robert Downey Jr.'s take on Tony Stark. The Winter Soldier not only bests all of Marvel's Phase Two output, but it might be the studio's best adventure period. Like Iron Man 3, the new film opens shortly after the fierce Manhattan battle that concluded The Avengers, but unlike Tony Stark, Steve Rogers isn't coping with a traumatic near-death experience. For Rogers, life is the problem, as the recently unfrozen WWII icon struggles to find his place in the 21th Century while running covert strike missions for S.H.I.E.L.D. Evans is so good at conveying the inner turmoil of this unstuck-in-time hero that The Winter Soldier would work as a fairly plotless character study, but Steve's ennui quickly gets overshadowed after he unwittingly discovers a massive conspiracy and is forced to go on the run to unravel it. From that moment on (which kicks off with a great Nick Fury-centric action sequence), The Winter Soldier barrels along like some inspired mix of The Bourne Identity and 3 Days of the Condor, and it's a credit to directors Anthony & Joe Russo (who made their bones helming episodes of Community and Arrested Development) that the pulpy blockbuster elements mesh well with the more somber paranoid thriller beats: they get away with placing a tense elevator brawl and running gunfight alongside a delirious exposition dump that comes courtesy of an evil computer A.I. I have minor nitpicks with the film – the Winter Soldier himself gets too little screen-time to really factor as an important character, and the identity of the ultimate Big Bad will come as a surprise only if you've never seen Rush Hour, Minority Report, L.A. Confidential, or Witness - but they just don't matter when compared to everything that works, including Rogers' different types of equally charming buddy chemistry with both Scarlett Johansson (someone give Black Widow her own spin-off movie already!) and Anthony Mackie (who steals every scene he's in, as is his wont), the full-impact action sequences, an absolutely perfect needle-drop of Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man," and Marvel's willingness to detonate well-established sections of its movie universe for dramatic effect. We'd all complain about summer movies a whole lot less if they were as good as Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
And Civil War comes pretty close! The most misleading part of the film is the part of the title that comes before the colon. Sure, Steve Rogers is the central character, but Civil War often plays more like Avengers 2.5 in how it knots together so many protagonists around Cap. In the wake of The Winter Soldier, Rogers is even more committed to finding and helping Bucky, but a violent international incident (the best action sequence in a picture overstuffed with great ones) jeopardizes Rogers' pursuit and mobilizes the world against the Avengers' unrestricted response protocol. The political fallout quickly grows personal - while Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., obviously) supports more government sanctions on the Avengers, Rogers couldn't find the idea more distasteful, and their ideological schism fractures the superhero community, pitting familiar faces (War Machine, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Falcon, Vision, Ant-Man, Black Panther, and Spider-Man) against one another. And that's not even factoring in the machinations of Daniel Brühl's mysterious Big Bad, all of which makes for a packed 147 minutes. A word of warning: newbies to the Marvel Cinematic Universe should not start here, given that you need to see like nine movies minimum to have any clue of what's going on here. However, if you are up to date on your Marvel homework, then enjoy the endless superhero permutations (we start with Team Stark vs. Team Rogers, sure, but almost ten years of Marvel movies means things are never that clean, whether we're watching Cap's closest allies Falcon and Bucky spar with each other even as they're trying to protect Cap or longtime friends Black Widow and Hawkeye pulling their punches when they find themselves on opposite sides of the Cap/Iron Man divide) and massive action setpieces, not least of which is an airport battle pitting the Avengers against one another that starts big and keeps expanding. Civil War is a rarity: a big-budget action epic that consistently maintains tension even though it really doesn't have any bad guys. It makes perfect sense that Stark would want to regulate his own actions - we're in the last stages of a self-maturation process that began when he left the cave in the first Iron Man - just as we never doubt Rogers' hardline stance against regulations (he did live through both Hitler and HYDRA, after all), so we're pulling for the two to work out their logical differences as it becomes uncomfortably clear that a peaceful resolution will not happen. Even Brühl isn't playing a one-dimensional baddie. There's a way to view this film where he's the hero, at least in his own mind. Everything comes to a head in a climax that reminds me, in fact, of the grim wrap-ups to Seven and Oldboy. I'll be dammed if Civil War doesn't earn that darkness.
In terms of horror, note the 4K pressing of Robert Eggers' great The Witch. For his first feature-length film, Eggers crafts the story of a Puritan family banished outside of the community. Things couldn't be worse for the bunch: the crops are dying, the father (Ralph Ineson) is weaker than he seems, the mother (Kate Dickie) resents the sudden shift in status, and the eldest son (Harvey Scrimshaw) keeps stealing uncomfortable glances at his rapidly maturing older sister (Anya Taylor-Joy, in a revelatory performance). It's almost a relief, then, when the greatest threat emerges from without, as a witch living in the woods starts trying to destroy the family. And it is a witch. Eggers explicitly announces her threat as she steals the family's infant son (she streaks through the woods, clutching the child and wearing a Don't Look Now-inspired red cloak), so that even when the family suspects one another of mischief, we know they're under the thrall of dread powers. However, after her introduction, Eggers denies us any visages of the unequivocally malevolent for a long time. He prefers understatement and suggestion to any overt terrors. Since we know about the witch, Eggers can play with our expectations, seeding doubt in all the family's increasingly panicked actions. Does the father chop wood to try and reassert his masculinity, or is he under a control not his own? Does the mother believe that Taylor-Joy's tremulous daughter acts as the vessel for supernatural evils, or is she jealous of the young woman's beauty and youth? Are the youngest children (Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson) speaking to the family's goat - named Black Phillip, which isn't foreboding at all - out of boredom or something darker? Even when the film delivers a nerve-racking exorcism sequence (it's a moment far scarier than 90% of the horror films I saw all last year), we can't quite place the source of the hysteria. Eggers is so precise in his manipulation: I thought of Roman Polanski and Rosemary's Baby, and of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining - Eggers' cinematographer Jarin Blaschke delivers the same level of aesthetic mastery, composing The Witch as though it were a series of the most horrifying Vermeer paintings ever. Eggers does such an expert job of building tension and withholding conventional scares that I confess I found the last fifteen minutes a bit of a deflation. Blood is spilled, evil is revealed, and we trade in that chilling ambiguity for something a little more comprehensible, a little more earthbound. The not knowing will always be scarier than the known, although I do appreciate what the ending's doing conceptually (suffice to say, Eggers has a strong feminist-political message to push). But even considering my problems with the ending, there are things in this film that I can't shake. A wizened hand moving over an infant child in a manner both tender and obscene. Dickie's character finding comfort in the most horrific manner possible. The way blood milked from a goat's udder seeps into cold straw. Mark Korven's relentlessly unsettling score, which plays like terrifying outtakes from Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood soundtrack. And the face of Black Phillip, seeming to contain the answers to everything, and nothing. Ultimately, The Witch gets under your skin like few movies can - it belongs on the shortlist (with The Babadook, It Follows, and Green Room) of the twenty-first-century's finest horror offerings.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "pastoral horror story, given the subtitle A New England Folktale, reminded me in a way of The Wicker Man, with an atavistic, agrarian society attempting to ferret out signs from the Divine in the workings of Nature, not always to felicitous results. The Witchplies a somewhat familiar 17th century environment, albeit with a spooky supernatural air wafting through the misty woods, and that 'folktale' element tends to (perhaps ironically) give the film a rare feeling of authenticity, as if some long ago banished history had suddenly sprung to life and been reenacted for the edification of the audience. The Witchdoesn't really traffic in standard horror tropes like jump cuts, booming LFE or even outright signs of graphic gore (there are a few disturbing images in the film, but they're relatively restrained, at least within the context of much contemporary horror cinema). Instead, much like The Wicker Man, there's a slow but steady accretion of angst that ultimately creates a very discomfiting mood, one that becomes increasingly hard to shake as the intentionally minimalist story proceeds."
Finally, we shift gears to the Criterion Collection and their release of Elia Kazan's brilliant A Face in the Crowd. For a guy so widely (and justly) derided for naming names during the HUAC trials of the 1950s, Kazan certainly spent much of the remainder of his career atoning for his sins against his fellow Americans. His most bracing act of creative atonement is A Face in the Crowd which remains, along with Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole and Sidney Lumet's Network, one of the most savagely prescient media satires ever made. Even in 1957, Kazan understood the dangers of an ever-expanding, ever-rapacious media engine - he'd seen all the damage Joe McCarthy was able to spread through McCarthy's televised hearings - and he personifies them through Patricia Neal's ambitious young television producer Marcia Jeffries, who's desperate to capture the public's attention. Her masterstroke? Genial good ol' boy "Lonesome" Rhodes (a terrifying Andy Griffith, in the best performance he'd ever give), whose folksy charm Jeffries wants to exploit for maximum commercial appeal. Certainly, this idea - that those who produce media often abrogate their ethical responsibilities in favor of profit sharing - rings true today; just think of the reality shows, for example, that take gross liberties with their stars as long as doing so yields higher Nielsen ratings (The Bachelor, Survivor, Floribama Shore, Duck Dynasty: take your pick). Yet Kazan allows for a threat more insidious than the media itself. Rhodes might look like a rube, but underneath the Southern charm lies a calculating political operator: the second he gets famous, he immediately starts exploiting his success, engaging in loathsome behavior both on and off screen. Somehow, the on-screen stuff is worse: Rhodes starts using his platform to prompt his vile political agenda, and when he can't even mask his contempt for his audience anymore (in a scene that, unfortunately, no longer plays like satire), he starts lying about his viewership and engineering fake applause just to stoke his ego. To Kazan, the media might be bad, but guys like Rhodes are worse - the same DNA flowing through Rhodes connects him to fellows like McCarthy, or Stalin, or Hitler. Essential viewing.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov had a slightly different interpretation, that Kazan "was an idealistic social justice warrior who truly believed that the Communist Party had the right ideas and vision for the country and under its leadership the future would be as bright as he had imagined it. But then Kazan gradually began understanding how rotten the red ideology is, and when Stalin's henchmen went to work to exterminate the 'enemies of the people' he distanced himself from the pack. Kazan realized that the ultimate goal of communism was to destroy America, not make it a better place. When he identified various communist sympathizers that he had interacted with before the HUAC committee, the pack did not just expunge him, they made him one of their greatest enemies. Now decades later it isn't difficult to argue that Kazan's best work came after the final phase of his awakening, and that A Face in the Crowd remains his most prophetic film. The manner in which Kazan diagnoses the corruption that is corroding the unions from the inside in On the Waterfront for instance is still impressive, but his understanding of the media and the elites that control it in A Face in the Crowd is quite simply extraordinary. There is a clinical precision in their deconstruction which can just as easily be utilized to accurately explain the contemporary media machine and its chief operators...Rhodes is not a monster. He is just a disposable puppet that is allowed to grow only because it serves the needs of the real monster, which is the media machine whose giant tentacles have successfully penetrated millions of homes across the country. This is precisely the reason why Kazan repeatedly shoots him in compromising situations where it becomes painfully obvious that he does not have the killer instincts to survive on his own...What exactly has changed since the theatrical premiere of Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd? Well, the merger between the political class and the media machine is practically complete, which means that the elitists have a firmer grip on the type of information that is dispatched to the masses. With the expansion of the internet and the centralization of its traffic management, now the same people can even determine precisely how and when the information is consumed by the masses."