For the week of June 24th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing Tim Burton's fascinating Dumbo remake to Blu-ray. I tell ya, I don't know what kind of filmmaker Burton wants to be anymore. I know he doesn't want to work for Disney: that much is sure. The second half of his live-action Dumbo remake represents the most excoriating act of corporate filmmaking immolating the studio that supports it since the Wachowskis used millions of Warner Bros' dollars to fashion Speed Racer into an anti-capitalism screed. Dumbo's main villain is the fantastically named V.A. Vandevere (a phenomenal Michael Keaton), who represents nothing less than the worst possible version of Walt Disney himself. Vandevere styles himself as a cultural aesthete who wants nothing more than to entertain (when he first sees Dumbo fly, he lets out an exaggeratedly saccharine "You've turned me into a child again"), but Keaton and Burton are all too happy to reveal the cynical calculations underneath. His immaculately styled hair is a toupee; his high-borne accent is B.S. (Keaton drops back into his Beetlejuice register when he thinks no one important is listening); and his desire to house Dumbo and the low-rent circus that found him reeks of the worst kind of corporate takeover. Just this year, the Disney/Fox merger went through, and one of Disney's first acts was to shutter the Fox 2000 branch and fire around 3,000 employees. It's hard not to think about that news when Vandevere fires everyone at the old circus, subsumed by Vandevere's Disneyland-esque amusement park (here called "Dreamland" and featuring obvious proxies for the Magic Kingdom and Epcot). And when Burton's biting the hand that feeds him, Dumbo is at its most entertaining. But it takes a long time to get to this point. The first hour, which introduces us to the titular character and the misfortunes of the Medici Circus, is almost melodramatic in its sentiment - besides the cratering fortunes of the circus, we get two traumatic circus disasters, including the one that separates Dumbo from his mother - yet Burton is no better at conveying pathos as he was in Big Fish. Certain moments work. As the circus' shambling ringleader, Danny DeVito scores laughs playing a PG-rated Frank Reynolds (he's got some business with a CGI-monkey that isn't unamusing), and Burton devises a few neat visual gags for the performers in the circus (my favorite: when the snake charmer gives people hugs, his snake hugs them, too). But the stuff with Dumbo registers as disingenuously maudlin: Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins are all cloying delivery and Spielbergian-awe-faces as the film's preteen heroes. I feel especially badly for Colin Farrell. He's taken the time to create a real character, a former circus cowboy who loses an arm in WWI and is suffering from a terrible case of PTSD, only Burton has no idea what to do with human beings. So, again: I don't know who Burton is anymore. I'm not sure even he knows - I don't get the upside of him meandering through emotional beats he can't convey before flipping Disney the bird and setting the studio ablaze.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is at its best when offering its interesting perspective on the circus road life, the struggles and realities behind the spectacle, and exploring the human hearts that beat life into the movie. The story as it is told and seen through the one-armed widower and his children is where the film soars, but it loses its footing as the rather trite and predictable beats take over, as Burton shifts focus from his human characters to the expectedly CGI-heavy scenes of Dumbo in flight and in peril and bringing an ever-expanding and increasingly complex series of locations and designs into the movie. The later scenes and sequences simply move the picture from one set piece to the next, building on linearly designed dramatic notes with little feel for honest depth and breadth. Burton finds just enough character in Dumbo and the elephant's plight - its search for its captive mother -- to keep audiences invested in that arena, but the film's high flying spectaculars just seem to stand in the way of the more substantial character beats."
Also from Disney comes the far less complicated Cinderella, now in Disney's "Signature" Series Blu-ray line. This 1950 animated classic has no subversive instincts or intentionally controversial agendas: sure, today it's easy to criticize the film's retrograde gender attitudes (Cinderella stakes her happiness on finding love with a wealthy man), but Walt Disney was only reinforcing cultural modes that were the norm in 1950 (he didn't have the benefit of hindsight). Taken on its own merits, Cinderella is a simple fairy tale about a put-about young maiden who triumphs over her evil stepmother and wins the heart of Prince Charming. That's it, and if I've any serious issue with the film, it's how slight the whole endeavor feels. For animation buffs, Cinderella remains essential viewing. Despite all their creative successes, Disney and his team still hadn't fully cracked "normal" human forms by 1950. The studio could anthropomorphize animals or offer broad human caricatures like nobody's business, but when they mounted realistic people, the effect always looked a little flat (rewatch the title character in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and tell me I'm wrong). Cinderella, then, marked a huge leap forward. Not only did Cinderella's villainous stepmother and buffoonish stepsisters look terrific, but so did the comparatively restrained heroine and her handsome love interest. Except the story around them has scaffolding to support only about forty-five minutes, and Cinderella runs just over an hour. That's a lot of filler, mostly in the form of the bumbling mice Jaq and Gus-Gus. They help Cinderella clean house and avoid the clutches of the stepmother's cat Lucifer, and as spirited as much of this content is, you can't shake the feeling that the Cinderella crew knew how thin the narrative was, so they retrofitted a bunch of short-film sketches just to pad the runtime. As such, you experience a little cognitive dissonance watching Cinderella. It's clearly one of the jewels in the Disney Vault, yet little about the movie itself seems elevated enough to warrant that importance.
Martin Liebman called the film "an indelible classic that is a must-have for any serious home video library. This new Signature release isn't heads-and-shoulders superior to the Diamond Edition, if it is better at all. The new commentary track is the highlight and a delight, and some may be enticed by the fresh digital code, but unless one is a Disney completist and/or is eager to experience the excellent new track, there's little reason to upgrade (video and audio are identical, too). For new buyers, though, it's a must own."
Kino Lorber is offering a long-awaited Blu-ray of David Lynch's terrifying Lost Highway. Outside of his misbegotten Dune adaptation, I can think of no Lynch release as reviled upon its opening release as Lost Highway was. This might be his nastiest movie: a mean potboiler loaded with some of the most unpleasant sex and bloodshed of Lynch's career. At times, it feels like even Lynch knows he's gone over the edge. He begins the movie with one protagonist (Bill Pullman's alienated jazz musician) that he violently mutates into a completely different character (Balthazar Getty's callow teenager), almost as if all this madness is too much for any one person to handle. Between the on-screen content and the blistering hard-rock soundtrack (David Bowie's "I'm Deranged" acts as the leitmotif for the whole movie), you don't watch Lost Highway - you just try to survive its assault, so you can't really blame critics for rejecting the film outright, to the degree that Lynch even made ads touting the bad reviews hurled his way. There's just one tiny little problem. For all its savage excesses, Lost Highway might be the best film Lynch has ever made. It's certainly the scariest. Lynch has always excelled at capturing nightmare logic on camera, and somehow he sustains this pitch of frenzied surrealism for almost two and a half hours. Whole sequences get lodged in your brain and stay there. Robert Loggia's mob boss assaulting a driver for tailgating, Loggia's rage becoming scarier and funnier as it builds. A sex scene between Getty and Patricia Arquette's femme fatale that DP Peter Deming shoots using headlights, each flash fragmenting the already-porous barrier between reality and insanity. Getty's descent into an ultra-sterile mansion, a trip that ends in a ghoulish murder I haven't been able to unsee. Robert Blake's chilling appearance as a white-faced ghoul who's somehow capable of being all places at all times, none of them good. Yet like Blue Velvet, Lost Highway ties all this churning weirdness to a surprisingly coherent narrative. After being suspected of a brutal murder, Pullman becomes Getty, who in turn gets in too deep with Loggia's crew. Lynch could be riffing on David Goodis or Jim Thompson, albeit with an updated thematic agenda guiding his aims. Lynch had O.J. Simpson on the brain when he was developing this movie, and the disconnect between someone's public and private personae - especially in the wake of unfathomable violence - fuels every creative decision Lynch makes here. A work of horrible beauty.
But the biggest release of the week is Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace, which arrives courtesy of the Criterion Collection. I mean that literally: in adapting Leo Tolstoy's 1300-page classic, Bondarchuk constructed a four-part, seven-hour epic that features some of the most technically audacious blockbuster filmmaking in the history of the medium. See, Bondarchuk had the full support of the then-U.S.S.R. - he pitched his War and Peace as a grand work of nationalistic pride, one that would overwhelm King Vidor's Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn-starring Hollywood version - and the Soviet government indulged Bondarchuk's every filmmaking caprice, no matter how extravagant. When Bondarchuk needed to raze a village to the ground, he built one and destroyed it on camera. When he needed to convey the lives of his Russian aristocrats, he got permission to shoot in the finest royal halls and mansions - most of the props you see were on loan from museums and archives. Hell, when Bondarchuk had to shoot a comparatively simple wolf hunt, he found a specific rare breed of dog used to track and chase wolf packs in the 1800s! We get massive battle scenes with thousands of extras and party sequences that make Visconti or Coppola's work in same look sedate, and all captured with a 70mm camera that sweeps and tracks with heedless abandon. At times, you'd think you were watching some kind of grand New Wave behemoth. Bondarchuk uses a host of in-camera tricks and effects, including (but not limited to) split-screen setpieces, split diopters, optical process shots, and frenzied handheld work. A debauched party scene looks like an Oliver Stone outtake, the camera lurching and cutting as if drunk. And how Bondarchuk got the overhead shot of troops spiraling in on one another, I'll never know; thousands or bodies form a great eye, moving in clockwork tandem. Battle scenes unfold in sped-up motion, punctuated with slow-motion reveries that get at something like ecstatic truth. I'll never forget the moment when a Russian soldier, felled by French guns, reels in agony as troops march inexorably past him. I'm not convinced, however, that this War and Peace deserves its reputation as some kind of Lawrence of Arabia-esque masterwork. It's certainly impressive as an object - if you can get the chance to see War and Peace projected on the biggest possible screen (like the Lincoln Center's essential run this year), take it. I respect the hell out of the film's scope and ambition, but it's all wild, undisciplined energy. You wonder what would happen if Bondarchuk had the talent of an Orson Welles or Martin Scorsese and could yoke these effects to moving human struggles. That issue never plagued Tolstoy. Despite his novel's size, Tolstoy filters the action through complex human psychology: we become immersed in the lives of insecure noble Pierre Bezukhov (played in the film by Bondarchuk), his idealistic cousin Natasha Rostova (Lyudmila Savelyeva), and the alienated military hero Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), and their struggles in turn add stakes to the Napoleonic Wars. Bondarchuk, on the other hand, gets off on surfaces and scope without any real sense of character development. Furthermore, he has fatally miscast himself in the lead. Pierre is supposed to be a callow young aristocrat getting a crash course in how the world works, and Bondarchuk looks like a fifty-two-year-old shaved gorilla. You get the sense that if Bondarchuk had been more disciplined, he would have found a more appropriate actor, and he would have modulated his cinematic effects without overusing them. As is, War and Peace is essential viewing, but asterisks abound.