For the week of June 17th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Jordan Peele's newest horror epic Us to Blu-ray. The film's first shot is its most important one - it's reflective of the problems that will, slowly and surely, erode away at Peele's sophomore venture. While the previews sell the film as a more socially aware riff on home-invasion thrillers like The Strangers, Us actually begins with a white-on-black text card informing us about the thousands of miles of mysterious hidden tunnels just beneath the surface of these United States. I was reminded of the last time a movie so thoroughly exploded my expectations with one opening text crawl: that'd be M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, folks, wherein Night first revealed that his big post-Sixth Sense affair was not a supernatural thriller but a hyper-serious examination of comic-book mythology. Unbreakable certainly has its ardent fans, but upon retrospect, it's the film that began Night's downward trajectory, the one where he first felt obligated to live up to an admiring public's expectations without necessarily having the same creative spark motivating his work. And I'm really worried Jordan Peele is facing the same fate. There are a lot of things to like about Us. The film's first hour is a master class in building and deploying suspense. We know that eventually, the Wilson family (Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex) will have to do battle with a quartet of red-suited doppelgangers, but Peele is in no hurry. Instead, he and DP Mike Gioulakis (doing next-level work here) create this oppressive atmosphere of menace. The density of mirrored numbers and visages and framings suggests an eerie parallelism, like two alternate realities slowly facing one another before colliding. And when the stabbing starts...let's just say there's an extended sequence in an ultra-modern AirBnB that ranks as one of my favorite horror setpieces in recent years. Yet Us worries me for the same reasons Unbreakable worried me about Shyamalan. Us hinges on twists in a way that Peele's Oscar-winning Get Out didn't, particularly once it becomes far more ambitious. Its social agenda grows more pronounced. And it's often ludicrously incoherent in terms of how it broadens its scope and deepens its mission. Peele seems to be criticizing Generation X and the sins of America under Reagan, but to what end, I'm still unclear: he ends the film on a striking visual metaphor that's almost completely lacking in dramatic tension. Furthermore, Peele loves surrealism and ambiguity, and he's at his best when he just lets his movie be weird...which is why I can't fathom why he has his villain make an exposition dump in the third act, a dump that, by the way, a) makes no sense, b) goes on too long, and c) suggests a whole complicated (and crazy, and not in a good way) mythology that has spiraled out of Peele's control. Here's the movie you make when no one tells you "no." That it turned out as well as it did is a testament to Peele's skills as a director, writer, and sculptor of performances (if nothing else, I don't worry about him falling prey to the same dialogue traps that Shyamalan keeps bumbling into). But it's also an indulgent mess, one that overstuffs you with fascinating ideas and hopes you'll think it profound. One or two of those messes are fine. Three or four of them gets you to The Happening.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is built almost entirely around the psychological. [Nyong'o]'s longstanding mental wounds stem from a preview, of sorts, of the future, the child version of herself coming face-to-face with, literally, a living, breathing mirror image. Her fears are all but dismissed by her husband who quickly alters course when confronted with his own vision of himself and of his family. But it's the mental anguish that drives the film, and Peele gradually pulls back the veil on something much larger than a mere physical duplicate. That revelation and its details are not necessarily vital to the story, which is more concerned with deeper thematic drivers that speak to a wide array of content, from individuality to oppression and well beyond. Peele reveals just enough for the audience to puzzle through the real-world ramifications while building a well versed entertainment vessel to hold the deeper content. It's another job well done from one of the up-and-coming greats."
Also from Universal comes The Beach Bum. With this stoner comedy, writer/director Harmony Korine lets star Matthew McConaughey go full McConaughey. This isn't McConaughey's best performance - that'd be in Interstellar, thank you very much - but it is his most McConaughey performance. Even his character's name, Moondog, seems less like a script choice than an actual nickname one of McConaughey's lovably debauched friends might coin for him at three in the morning. The evening itself wouldn't stick, but the nickname sure would. You'd have to go back to Dazed and Confused to find a McConaughey role so locked into the star's own singular blend of nonsense philosophizing, gentle hedonism, and bleary-eyed charm. Your reaction to that vibe will dictate whether you find The Beach Bum engaging or asinine. What little plot it has acts as a setup for a series of episodic bits between McConaughey and a cast full of ringers. From what I can tell, Snoop Dogg is playing himself (he waxes poetic about how successful "Gin and Juice" was while it plays at a party), yet everyone either calls him "Ray" or "Lounge" (both are short for "Lingerie," because why not). Martin Lawrence comes in and crushes about ten minutes as Captain Wack, a dolphin-obsessed sailor with a coke-addicted parrot and a questionable criminal record; Zac Efron is even better as a deranged paint-huffing addict who loves Creed (the band, not the movie or character) so much he started a cover band. At one point, Moondog destroys a mansion with a hobo army. At another, Jimmy Buffett emcees one of Moondog's poetry recitals. There's a lot more, or less, depending on your tolerance for the whole thing. I found it charming. The Beach Bum feels like one of those high-concept '80s comedies like Stripes or Caddyshack, only directed by a dirtbag Terrence Malick. For all the chaos on display, Korine and his ace DP Benoît Debie shoot in ultra-wide, mostly handheld images that they hyper-saturate with color. And they let in just enough pathos to keep things from getting too weightless. Moondog experiences something close to shock when he learns his wife Minnie (Isla Fisher, so good in her brief screen time) and Ray are having an affair; he crumples even more when Minnie dies suddenly in a car accident brought on by too much fun and not enough good judgment. Even the plot, as it were, has this odd gravity. Minnie's will cuts Moondog out of her massive inheritance unless he writes The Great American Novel. All his actions, then, exist in search of greater artistic transcendence. Like I said, weird movie. And there's a 98% chance they just Bowfinger'ed McConaughey into the movie.
But the best release of the week might be Under the Silver Lake, which comes courtesy of Lionsgate and A24. It's possible I'm overrating this one because of how cruelly A24 treated it. After a disastrous premiere at Cannes last year, the studio shelved the film until last April for a three-day theatrical release and subsequent VOD dump. I doubt it, though. I've seen it three times, and it remains the richest, most disturbing, and most resonant American film I've seen all year. From a formalist standpoint, Under the Silver Lake plays like Alfred Hitchcock adapting Thomas Pynchon (it feels like a truer representation of Pynchon's sensibilities than PTA's Inherent Vice adaptation, in many ways). Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell exerts tight control over the proceedings - the film abounds with illusions to Rear Window, Vertigo, Chinatown, and Blue Velvet - yet it still feels like the product of a singular intelligence. I liked Mitchell's previous film, the postmodern monster movie It Follows, but Mitchell is operating on a completely different level here. How he managed to create such an expansive vision for only $8 million, I'll never know. This work plays like one of the definitive L.A. movies, so in tune is it with the city's unique mix of allure, alienation, and nihilism. No one works; everyone parties; and the whole city casually slouches towards Bethlehem. DP Mike Gioulakis gives the look the widescreen patina of a nightmare, and Disasterpiece's score seamlessly transitions (or, rather, mutates) from Bernard Herrmann to Jerry Goldsmith to Jonny Greenwood. All that, and still the film functions as the most excoriating indictment of toxic masculinity since Fight Club. Mitchell doesn't disagree that our culture thrives off status/wealth inequality and insidious codes of behavior. However, he doesn't condone the masculine avatars oozing their way across such a ruined landscape. In the best performance he's ever given, Andrew Garfield makes for a quietly terrifying protagonist, his slacker diffidence masking something more savage. Yes, Mitchell has a solution to the mystery of the missing girl (Riley Keough) Garfield is obsessed with, but Garfield himself remains more enigmatic by the film's ambiguous close. And what we do learn revolts us. Garfield reminds me of Johnny Truant from Mark Danielewski's postmodern farrago House of Leaves in the way he tries to use pop culture and his easy charm in place of an actual personality. Your reaction to the film is not a given. Some of you may lock into the film's sense of millennial unease. Others will see narcissism and entitlement. Neither response is wrong. That's what Mitchell is examining, I think: that ineffable panic when we can no longer tell what came first, the condition or the side effect. And the fear that both are here to stay. A modern masterpiece.