For the week of May 20th, Gunpowder & Sky is bringing the blistering rock-and-roll drama Her Smell to Blu-ray. Her Smell is the best American film of the year, but only in America would a masterwork like this face such casual neglect. The problem is half filmmaker Alex Ross Perry's and half ours: Perry makes the kinds of films that went out of vogue in the 1970s, and we don't provide the platforms necessary for Her Smell (or any non-studio-funded indie) to build proper support. Unless you live in Los Angeles or New York, you probably didn't get much of a chance to see Her Smell in theaters (when this article posts, it will have just ended its week-long-only run in my hometown), so marginalized has the arthouse experience become. It's our loss. While I've liked many of Perry's previous films, they have struck me as intelligent but glib - pictures like Listen Up Philip and Golden Exits recall a more mumblecore-y blend of Philip Roth and Noah Baumbach. But Your Smell represents a massive leap forward. Reuniting with his Queen of Earth star Elisabeth Moss, Perry has crafted an expansive, ambitious work that feels definitive in how it portrays both celebrity and the psychological cost of artistic success. Moss plays his subject, the Courtney Love-esque rocker Becky Something, whose riot grrl act galvanizes the punk group Something She (including Agyness Deyn as the band's bassist and Gayle Rankin as the group's loyal-but-not-stupid drummer). But when we first meet Becky, she's lost all perspective: she's high on drugs and alcohol and pseudo-religions and God knows what else, and all while struggling with what's likely some form of undiagnosed mental illness. Her Smell, then, charts, in often agonizing detail, Becky's long, horrible breakdown. The title is apt. Perry and his DP Sean Price Williams keep us so tight in on Becky that we struggle to breathe. Becky sucks up all the oxygen wherever she goes, ranting and screaming and puking and bleeding and spiraling and rampaging. The film often takes on the tenor of a horror film, with Ryan M. Price's sound design perpetually pulsing and throbbing (it sounds like Becky's synapses trying and failing to fire), trapping us inside Becky's psyche. I think I gasped the first time Perry cut to a shot featuring natural light – the moment arrives more than halfway through the film, and it fractures the air of carefully cultivated claustrophobia when we're least expecting it. Still, you could stage Her Smell in a black-box theater, and as long as Elisabeth Moss was headlining, it would retain its blistering power. Not since Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence have I seen a lead performance this nakedly compelling and revolting. The dexterity with which Moss lurches between violent aggression and withering self-pity is dizzying to watch. When Perry does slow things down, it's for moments like the electrifying close-up where Becky watches the highly talented - and camera-friendly - girl group (Cara Delevingne, Amber Benson, and Dylan Gelula) that will eventually replace her, and about nine thousand emotions pass across her face as Becky realizes she's about to be supplanted. As good as Moss was on Mad Men, this performance feels like a career summation. And I'm calling it now: because of the way Hollywood works, no one will care come Oscar season. The arthouse gets smaller every day; the dominance of fare like Avengers: Endgame becomes all the more inevitable; and an American masterpiece like Her Smell can disappear. Don't let that happen. Buy the Blu-ray. Stream the VOD copy. Stand up for Her Smell, or else all of this is for naught.
I can get behind something emotionally grueling like Her Smell; I'm less keen on the grueling actioner Crank, which Lionsgate is releasing on 4K this week. I get that the Crank movies are beloved cult properties. The premise is both ridiculous and irresistible: after learning he's been fatally poisoned, hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham, in the role for which he'll probably be remembered) sets off on an hour-long quest to get revenge and save his girl (Amy Smart) before his heart gives out. In theory, it's kinda like D.O.A. meets F-Zero, considering that every so often, Chelios needs to zap his heart like a car battery in order to boost his adrenaline and keep him alive a little longer. The video-game logic is clear from the opening minutes, which offer some cheeky 8-bit footage, as well as the film's multi-tiered approach to boss and side missions. Here's Chelios on a foot chase, which gives way to a gunfight, which moves into a car chase, which somehow ends up leads to a hospital rampage, which ends when the motorcycle chase starts, and the whole shebang climaxes with a fairly insane helicopter fight against the Big Bad. The L.A. environs often lend Crank the patina of Grand Theft Auto 5, especially given the flagrant disregard for law and order. And if you love Crank, then go with God. But I've never been able to get past filmmakers Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine. I like their practical solutions to low-budget filmmaking - Neveldine/Taylor will throw their DP out windows or behind cars to get action coverage, and they shoot with as many cheap digital cameras as they can find. But the end result is so frenetic that, at times, it's hard to watch. The chase scenes in Crank all give me motion sickness, so liberally do Neveldine/Taylor direct camera movement. They also indulge in seedy behavior that frequently crosses the line from transgressive to tasteless. There's no moment in Crank as gross as Crank 2's stripper shooting (y'know, causing silicone to spill out of her chest), but the way the treat poor Amy Smart in this one makes me gag. Someone once described Crank as if John Waters made Speed. Somehow, the end result just isn't as fun as that combination sounds.
From Kino Lorber comes another controversial release: Oliver Stone's political biopic Nixon. Depending on who you talk to, Nixon marks the last gasp of Stone's relevance as a mainstream filmmaker or a painful reminder that his maximalist style exhausted itself with Natural Born Killers. I'd argue the film splits the difference. There's a lot to like here, not least of which is Stone's expansive vision. Former President Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) might be the central character, yet the film itself is just as concerned with the culture surrounding Nixon's rise and precipitous fall. Back in the 1990s, we treated adult dramas like studio blockbusters; Disney gave Stone almost fifty million dollars to make this dense character study, and Stone squeezes the budget for everything it's worth. He and DP Robert Richardson flit between at least three different film stocks (widescreen 35mm, Academy ratio 8mm, and textured 16mm) in color and monochrome, and production designer Victor Kempster is responsible for what feels like over fifty distinctive locations. We need the space; how better to contain the rogues' gallery of political fixers, gadflys, and operatives surrounding the title character? Actors like James Woods, Madeline Kahn, J.T. Walsh, Bob Hoskins, Dan Hedaya, Saul Rubinek, Ed Herrmann, Larry Hagman, Ed Harris, David Hyde Pierce, Powers Boothe, E.G. Marshall, David Paymer, Kevin Dunn, and Paul Sorvino hold the frame like gargoyles: Stone uses their faces and personas to shorthand so much of the creeping menace invading Washington. At times, it's a pleasure just to sink inside the world Stone has created. What I'm less sold on is Nixon himself. I like that Stone tries to empathize with the man (Stone treats him like Charles Foster Kane and throws in many visual allusions to Citizen Kane) - I also think Hopkins is fundamentally miscast in the part. The performance doesn't work as imitation, impression, or embodiment. You always see Hopkins, and it's distracting when he slips into mannerisms more consistent with his Silence of the Lambs or Remains of the Day leads. As for this Blu-ray, while Disney already released a Nixon Blu-ray, this version presents the shorter theatrical cut alongside Stone's 212-minute-long director's cut. For that, I'm grateful. Yes, at 184 minutes, the theatrical version doesn't exactly hustle along, but it moves with more purpose and focus than the longer version. I'd wager that both Nixon and JFK represent the most egregious examples of Stone using director's cuts to distend his work past their most effective runtimes. Nixon doesn't need the padding, particularly when we arrive at the long conversation between Nixon and Sam Waterston's black-eyed CIA chief. Stone can claim that politics cut the scene (he based Waterston on CIA director Richard Helms, and the agency was not pleased), but good editing should have left the sequence on the cutting-room floor. Most of the extra footage is similarly interminable.
Finally, we end with Universal Studios Home Entertainment's release of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. Endings are hard. The first two How to Train Your Dragons stand as some of the decade's finest, most emotionally resonant family fare, but it oh-so-gently drops the ball with Part 3. To be fair, The Hidden World is not unenjoyable. Director Dean DeBlois has such a sprightly environment in which he can play: the riders of Berk, who stand united with their once-fearsome dragon adversaries. The now-adult Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) leads the pack, with his trusted dragon Toothless at his side, and their relationship gives the film some much-needed weight. The How to Train Your Dragons have always functioned as stealth dog movies (Toothless is pretty much the greatest puppy you'd ever hope to know), and The Hidden World leans hard on the affection these two have built on each over almost a decade. So far, so good. I even like how Toothless gets an arc that mirrors Hiccup's in the first How to Train Your Dragon. There, Hiccup had to assert his independence in front of his stern-but-loving father (Gerard Butler, seen only in flashbacks here), and now Toothless is doing likewise after he meets the beautiful female "Light Fury" dragon. It all culminates in an ending that's kinda perfect...but the journey there is way sweatier than we're used to with the How to Train Your Dragons. DeBlois spends too little time with Hiccup and Toothless, and too much time with an underwhelming villain. F. Murray Abraham voices the legendary dragon hunter Grimmel, and while Abraham is having a ball, the character is a whiff, less threatening than Djimon Hounsou's Drago and way less emotionally affecting than the first film's inter-species prejudices. You don't feel the movie organically developing a villain from the larger themes. Nor does it help that the Light Fury is so colorless as a character. If there's one thing the How to Train Your Dragons excel at, it's nonverbal character development. Toothless' body language is so precise - he has a mating dance in The Hidden World that's Chaplin-esque in its blend of comedy and pathos - so we wonder why Light Fury didn't merit the same attention. After a while, the decision to underserve Light Fury seems endemic of this film's bigger woman problem. To wit: it establishes both Hiccup's girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera) and mother Valka (Cate Blanchett) as strong female authority figures before stranding them behind a bunch'a diffident dudes. We're left, then, with a threat that isn't threatening and a central narrative that isn't compelling, and all the great action sequences and moving emotional beats of the final ten minutes can't quite compensate. But again, endings are tough, and I found myself sympathizing with The Hidden World's problems rather than resenting them. These issues have felled better movies: if The Godfather: Part III exists, then I suppose we can make time for The Hidden World.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film focuses on positive, if not difficult, messages of life progression and letting go. The film finds its soul in the passage of both literal and figurative time. Hiccup and Toothless grow up rather fast in the movie, thrust forward by circumstance but also an evolving maturation and understanding of self and the world in which they live. Hiccup is forced to grow as a leader when a great danger threatens Berk's way of life. Astrid…is his rock, and it is her devotion to him, admittance of how she has grown better for having him in his life, that gives him the confidence to boldly make the right decisions for his people as well as for his dragon Toothless, who himself discovers a new purpose in life when he meets the Light Fury with whom he falls head over heels in love. Both personal growth and the overhanging threat of danger seem destined to draw the dragon and its rider apart, but the question is whether their separation will be on their own terms or through circumstances beyond their control. The picture's conclusion is not risky or unsurprising and its villain is not particularly memorable. But the film's isn't about dramatic surprise and it is certainly not about overshadowing its established characters with a scene-stealing bad guy."