For the week of June 10th, Marvel and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing Captain Marvel to Blu-ray. I like a lot of the moves that Captain Marvel makes. We're so burned out on the superhero origin story, and the smartest thing that directors Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck and writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet do is to fragment it. When we first meet Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), she's just an elite Kree warrior named Vers who patrols the galaxy with an intergalactic A-Team of fighters (Gemma Chan, Algenis Pérez Soto, Rune Temte, Djimon Hounsou, and a very charming Jude Law). But her brain is a jumble of fragmented memories and visions, and the way Boden, Fleck, and Co. parcel out Vers' understanding of herself allows the film to cover the same ground of an origin story in a slightly more idiosyncratic manner than usual. It helps, too, that Larson is so good. This is the most exciting Marvel discovery since Dave Bautista as Drax - Larson gives Vers equal parts Downey Jr. charisma and Chris Evans decency. And I really enjoy the decision to root Captain Marvel in 1995. Boden and Fleck use the most obvious '90s signifiers possible - a fight sequence scored to "Just a Girl," a well-timed reference to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (hell, Annette Bening dances to Nirvana's "Come As You Are" at a key juncture) - but they fire all those nostalgia centers regardless. Best of all is Ben Mendelsohn as the nominal Big Bad, a shape-shifting Skrull after a very familiar-looking energy source. Mendelsohn is buried under unimpressive prosthetics that make him look like Monster Tom Hardy from Star Trek X: Nemesis, but Mendelsohn fights through the make-up to deliver a naturalistic and very charming heel turn. He goes small, riffing improvisationally and Monday-morning quarterbacking the plot from the sidelines, and in the process creates the most lived-in, quirky persona in the film. The problem is, Captain Marvel needs to move a lot of pieces to set up Avengers: Endgame, so more often than not, people are speaking in reams of dense exposition. These moments just elude Boden and Fleck. Marvel grinning it up with her best friend's adorable daughter (Akira Akbar)? Priceless. But Law word-vomiting nonsense about the Supreme Intelligence and the duties of the Accuser Race? Less so, and there's far more of the latter. On a script level, this is one of the most insignificant features in the MCU. It's hard to muster much enthusiasm in Marvel's powers when they seem so...confusing, and harder still when Boden and Fleck bungle almost every major action beat. They just can't make the scope work for them.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "beyond the narrative ebbs and flows is also a now-routine spectacle of sight and sound, of grandiose visual effects that play right into the long-established MCU style. A catchy 90s soundtrack pulses the movie's lifeblood through the speakers...but it is Brie Larson who delivers a formidable performance as a character in search of herself. It is her arc that beyond the laser blasts and explosions and typically quick-move and high-impact visual effects truly grounds the picture. Larson never plays the part tiny, even when she is forced to question her own motives and wrestle with the realities of a life she knows and the truth about who she is, where she comes from, and who it is with whom she has allied herself. The character experiences a seemingly unending reveal of questions and answers, each one bringing a new weight to her shoulders until that moment when she brushes it all aside and rises to become the hero she was destined to become. One of the film's best scenes shows her as a youth, falling down after crashing a bike or being brushed back by a pitch in a baseball game, and standing back up. She builds a resilient hero, resilient certainly in terms of her physical prowess but also resilient in terms of her mental stamina. It's not a particularly novel arc but Larson and the filmmakers explore it convincingly, thoroughly, and agreeably, turning a fairly makeshift character into one worth cheering for."
From Sony Home Entertainment comes the 35th Anniversary Edition of Ghostbusters, which bundles that 1984 classic and its 1989 sequel together. Ghostbusters is still one of the great monster movies of all time, and it succeeds because it emphasizes the right things. The monster lore is fine; something something Gozer, something something ancient prophecy, something something end of all humankind as we know it. It's fairly rote pulp (although Richard Edlund's still impressive VFX goes a long way towards grounding the fantasy in something resembling reality), but we care just the same because of how engaging the characters surrounding the mayhem are. Along with the Action 4 News Team in Anchorman, the Ghostbusters themselves are the closest we've gotten to a Marx Brothers revival in the past forty years. Ernie Hudson is the sympathetic Everyman (the Zeppo of the group), while Dan Aykroyd's childlike Ray feels like a (non-mute) riff on Harpo in the same way that the late, great Harold Ramis stands in for Chico with his acerbic Egon. And then, as the film's resident Groucho, we have the one, the only, Bill Murray, who plays every scene - ghost attack and exposition-dump alike - with a wink and a sarcastic quip. Everyone remembers Murray's big moments ("The flowers are still standing!" "We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!" "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"), but some of his best scenes pair him with Sigourney Weaver, who does a wonderful Margaret Dumont alongside his Groucho. The care and humor afforded to Weaver's nominal love interest is indicative of the attention afforded to all the characters, and I mean all the characters. Director Ivan Reitman stocks the cast with ringers down to the smallest parts, including Annie Potts' wonderfully deadpan Janine, William Atherton's slimy EPA official Walter Peck (who's the butt of the film's dirtiest jokes), and Rick Moranis' hilariously self-confident dweeb Louis Tully. Everyone is so enjoyable that we fall for the ghost-and-monster nonsense hook, line, and sinker - we even take seriously the sight-gag brilliance of Ghostbusters' final Boss Fight. Sony's Blu-ray set also contains the much maligned Ghostbusters 2, which is ripe for rediscovery. No, this sequel isn't as good as the original, and it's easy to see why critics in 1989 leveled such harsh unoriginality charges at the film (it really just replays the first Ghostbusters with a fancy new coat of paint, not unlike Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues). But it's consistently funny, even when it's rehashing old beats - Murray's casual insouciance barely redeems an ending that swaps out one unlikely giant creature romping through Manhattan with another equally unlikely one - and given that Ghostbusters 2 is the last time we'll see all the original Ghostbusters together in live-action, it retains a certain nostalgic, melancholy charm.
Paramount Home Media Distribution is giving a 4K upgrade to Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Michael Bay's name alone brings all sorts of negative baggage (and really, can you blame anyone who had to suffer through Pearl Harbor or any of the Transformers movies?), but couple his dubious cultural cachet with one of the most politically incendiary tragedies of recent years? A lot of people were worried that Bay would turn the film into some jingoistic campaign platform, yet most serious cineastes just didn't want him to apply his bombast and customary...ahem, lack of subtlety to such a sensitive subject. However, in many ways, Bay is the perfect person to direct something like 13 Hours. Whatever you think of him artistically or politically, Bay remains a distinctive visual stylist - he's a maximalist who specializes in the accretion of chaos - and 13 Hours presents, for the most part, a brutal combat situation that gets more intense as the fighting continues. Even before the film erupts into one bloody firefight after another (pitched primarily between the U.S. Ambassador's compound and the Benghazi CIA operations base), Bay keeps the tension cranked as high as he can. Benghazi circa 2012 was one of the most dangerous places in the world, a fact that turns even menial recon ops into potential nightmare material for the movie's primary CIA contractors (John Krasinski, Max Martini, David Denman, Dominic Fumusa, Pablo Schreiber, and James Badge Dale, giving the film's best performance). Working with DP Dion Beebe (Collateral) and editor Pietro Scalia (Gladiator), Bay creates harsh, discordant images, with the propulsive editing and jittery digital camerawork keeping us from getting our bearings, and if the aesthetic gets a little disorienting (a common complaint lobbed at Bay), that's how it should be. As the audience, we should be on our toes the whole time: we should always be wondering whether a random passerby means well or ill. Once the shooting does start, it's almost a relief, if only because Bay's protagonists are so freakishly competent at handling themselves in combat. Sure, their skill (and the way Bay fetishizes their bodies) is reminiscent of the military stuff in, say, Transformers, but it makes more sense here because a) the Benghazi contractors are former Navy SEALS, and those guys can do almost anything, and b) they actually did hold back hostile Libyan forces for an ungodly period of time. As with his great Pain & Gain, Bay's relative fidelity to the truth helps us swallow what might seem clichéd or patently ridiculous in his non-docudramas. Now, regarding the film's politics...that's more complicated, in good and bad ways. Good: Bay affords the Libyan characters more humanity than you might expect, and he acknowledges that the situation there requires far more nuance than simple military interference. Bad: you wish Bay could have afforded all his characters that same level of nuance. As compelling as his six heroes are, Bay presents their CIA superiors in baldly one-dimensional terms, from the section chief (David Costabile) who shirks from every tough decision to an arrogant intelligence agent (Alexia Barlier) who almost never makes the right call. But ultimately, those are small quibbles in an otherwise tense and exciting war movie. When Bay's characters are holed up in the CIA compound and fighting back waves of attackers, we could be watching an updated version of Zulu or Assault on Precinct 13. That's very good company.
Martin Liebman noted that the film has "staying power. It's no doubt destined to be remembered as one of the modern warfare classics for its impressive technical merits but, more importantly, reproduction of a proud but, at the same time, damning moment in modern history. The film shies away from overt political commentary, but there's no mistaking its stance. Above all of that, however, it's an honest tribute to those who lived and died. The film deserves to be remembered in the same breath as the similarly constructed and themed Black Hawk Down."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Swing Time to Blu-ray. The sixth of their ten pictures together, Swing Time holds the distinction of their most satisfying joint feature: it's more lively than Top Hat, and the musical numbers are better than those in, say, Carefree. If you're into the pair, then I can't recommend the movie more highly. But if you're not, then Swing Time becomes a more complicated proposition. For all its strengths, the film makes concessions to formula that are more than a little wearying. We find Astaire's charming hoofer trying to win back his fiancée (Betty Furness); he's got to earn $25,000 to prove himself to her father (Landers Stevens), and so Astaire starts performing in shows with a talented dancer (Rogers). What transpires will not surprise you - these are Astaire-Rogers movies, after all, not Astaire-Furness ones. While you could argue that Swing Time set the template, we've seen it replicated and refracted so many times since (Silver Linings Playbook is sort of a stealth remake) that it makes for a longer sit than Swing Time's 103-minute runtime might suggest. Maybe the only shock is that it took a committee of writers (Howard Lindsay, Allan Scott, Dorothy Yost, Ben Holmes, Anthony Veiller, and Rian James) to engineer this decidedly simple plot (I suspect RKO kept hiring people to write individual scenes). What lingers are the dance sequences, one of which ("Never Gonna Dance") might be Astaire and Rogers' finest on-screen collaboration, and credit to director George Stevens for handling all the big numbers in such an unfussy, spatially coherent manner. Astaire once said, "Either the camera moves, or I do," and Stevens honors the latter half of that statement, cutting only when necessary and framing his leads so we can see their whole bodies in motion. However, Stevens tends to shoot all the non-dancing stuff in the same manner: the whole movie, then, feels visually flat. And that sedate aesthetic wasn't necessarily the norm, even for 1936. Sure, later musicals like Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon took advantage of more-modern technological innovations, but look at Busby Berkeley musicals like 42nd Street or The Gang's All Here! Those dispensed with plot in order to focus on expansive, borderline surrealist musical numbers, and I think I prefer that lack of coherence to Swing Time more staid conventionalities.