For the week of July 22nd, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing Alita: Battle Angel to Blu-ray. We're so used to dystopian fantasies ladling on the miserablism that something like Alita takes us by surprise. Here's a zippy, energetic sci-fi adventure that privileges appearances from dog-loving bounty hunters and arachnid-like robot women, that still finds time for the lunatic mechanics of popular future sport Motorball, which plays like Roller Derby meets basketball meets Nascar meet Rollerball. And it does all of this in a tight and trim two hours. Its heroine (Rosa Salazar, who I think is giving a terrific performance behind the motion-capture body and digitally augmented eyes) is an open-hearted innocent who's still capable of bisecting robotic monstrosities from crown to crotch; its villain (Mahershala Ali, who spends a good bit of his screen time pretending to be another, more distracting actor) would rather get rich off Motorball than take over the planet. In fact, I find it oddly comforting that civilization as we knew it already ended 300 years before the film begins - Alita can keep the stakes low now that it's gotten its world-ending cataclysm out of the way. I credit director Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez has had a rough decade, and I say this as someone who was, at one point, a fairly moderate-to-major fan of the man, right up until he devolved from expert B-movie remixes like Planet Terror to straight-up DTV-esque garbage like Machete Kills. Here, working with his first $200-million budget, Rodriguez gets back to the DIY energy of his best films. $200 million seems like a lot, but recall that he inherited Alita from James Cameron. Initially, this was going to be Cameron's big Titanic follow-up, except his draft (co-written with Laeta Kalogridis) was so ambitious that Fox wouldn't greenlight it, and so Cameron moved on to Avatar. Cameron handpicked Rodriguez to direct in his absence, and the effect is interesting: parts of Alita look a little chintzy, whether it's the Uncanny Valley effect of Alita's face or the somewhat clunky compositing of digital backgrounds with the physical Iron City sets. Yet I found that unfinished quality charming, like Rodriguez is still trying to stretch a dollar as far as it will go through smoke and mirrors. It occurred to me - of course Cameron would see if the guy who made El Mariachi for $7,000 and a dream could realize Alita's $500-million vision at only $200 million. Within the parameters of insane Hollywood financing, Rodriguez is still working lean and mean. A delightful little surprise, delivered at the cost of a developing nation's GDP.
Arrow Films is going back in time to the 1980s this week with two important auteur-driven features: Kathryn Bigelow's The Loveless and John Hughes' Weird Science. For a good subset of geek cinephiles, Bigelow and Hughes are two of the '80s most important directors, and these films capture them at interesting inflection points. For Bigelow, The Loveless is Ground Zero, her first feature-length film. Even though Bigelow wasn't the sole creative architect (she co-directed alongside frequent David Lynch collaborator Monty Montgomery, who was played The Cowboy is Mulholland Drive), you can see her working out themes and obsessions that would dominate so much of her feature career. The Loveless might advertise Willem Dafoe as the star, but the aesthetic deserves top billing - this is a movie of gleaming surfaces, of inky blacks and dark leathers and smooth skin. The movie often feels very sexy even when there's no graphic content: remember than in Blue Steel, Bigelow did, after all, turn a .357 revolver into a potent metaphor for sexual power and release. Moreover, like everything Bigelow has ever made, The Loveless plays like a treatise on violence. I've read reviews branding this film as a more honest take on something like The Wild One, and you can sense Bigelow wrestling with the biker iconography someone like Marlon Brando brought to that 1953 classic (and that Dafoe co-opts here) and the darker, more antisocial currents powering such a lifestyle. However, there's a reason The Loveless is so hard to find; it's not that good. It often plays like an accomplished student film, and if you're a fan of Bigelow, you'll enjoy tracing the connections to her other works. But I might start, um, anywhere else if you're entering her oeuvre. Weird Science, on the other hand, shows Hughes as a director coming into full possession of his gifts. He'd already directed both Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club (The Breakfast Club premiered not six months prior to Weird Science's August release), and as such, Weird Science functions as a huge flex. For one, it has the highest concept of anything Hughes would ever direct. Yes, the narrative begins with the anxieties and foibles of two Illinois teens (Ilan Michael-Smith and the wonderful Anthony Michael Hall), but it quickly veers into sci-fi fantasy as Hughes' nerdy protagonists take a cue from Frankenstein and build themselves a person. A woman (Kelly LeBrock), to be precise, and if Weird Science deserves credit for anything, it's how deftly Hughes sidesteps the, ahem, implications of that premise. Our boys might generate LeBrock's Lisa from porno mags and their own teenage fantasies, but once she emerges in the flesh, they almost immediately blanch at doing anything sexual with her, and instead Lisa becomes a combination of Mary Poppins and the Genie from Aladdin, using her magic powers to help them self-actualize. As a foundational '80s teen comedy, Weird Science works. It feels like a long-running sitcom in terms of how smoothly and professionally Hughes sells this nonsense. But like Sixteen Candles, the sociopolitical dynamics haven't aged well. It's great that Lisa isn't a sexbot, but one wishes she had more agency outside of her nanny duties. And the movie gets less progressive in other ways: vide the bland female objects of Michael-Smith and Hall's affections (Suzanne Snyder and Judie Aronson), or the wretched setpiece wherein Lisa brings the boys to a bar in downtown Chicago, and Hall gets drunk and starts talking like he's Blind Willie Johnson. Hughes knows from entertainment, but he could have used someone to vet any ideas pertaining to race or gender.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Loveless Blu-ray review noted that the film "seems to want to kind of meld…over the top histrionics onto more of an Art House property, one that some may feel moves at a pretty glacial pace, despite lots of shots of motorcycles and some really cool vintage cars tooling around the back roads of Georgia…But if you look around, The Loveless isn't especially kind to some other characters (in terms of making them at least a little villainous), something that may have been intended to imply a general moral turpitude, but which struck me as having some issues at the screenplay level. Along with some arguably clunky writing, some of the supporting performances here probably can't quite match Dafoe's acumen, even at this early stage of his career. The film probably relies too much on trying to be a 'character' piece, when many of the characters are given some relatively unhelpful dialogue and some of the actors attempting to bring those characters to life can tend to stumble. Still, the film has style in abundance, and those interested in the early careers of Dafoe and Bigelow may well find this an agreeable enough diversion."
Maybe a more attentive viewer could tell you what's missing from Oliver Stone's new "Final Cut" of his 1991 docudrama The Doors, which Lionsgate is releasing in a special 4K restoration. According to Stone, he "made one cut of three minutes to a scene [he] thought was superfluous to the ending, which helps close out the film in a more powerful way," but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you where the elision occurs. As it did back in '91, The Doors maintains such a feverish, unbearable intensity over the course of its two-and-a-half hours that you don't process it as conventional scenes and moments. No, The Doors unfolds as musical movements, as screams of rage, as sensory overload writ large. Barring some of Ken Russell's more outré rock operas, The Doors remains the most experiential music biopic ever made. In a lot of ways, Stone doesn't care about the band itself. Oh, he loves the music. Almost every scene thrums to The Doors' songs, and when Stone wants to show the band on tour, he treats their concerts like Roman orgies, all violent, strobing incantations and terrifying physical altercations (I have never forgotten the moment from the band's Miami gig when a starry-eyed fan swan-dives from the balcony into the orchestra, and no one regards his suicidal act of love). But Stone casts three-quarters of the band as squarely professional drips: Frank Whaley and Kevin Dillon barely register as individuals, and while Kyle MacLachlan's Ray Manzarek gets a little more to do, he comes off like an elitist, pseudo-intellectual poseur before the movie shunts him to the background. As for front man Jim Morrison (a towering, ferociously diffident Val Kilmer), Stone sees only perplexing contradictions. Here's this rock god who looked like James Dean and maintained a cultish allure over his fans, yet he's all mesmerizing surfaces, carefully arranged to keep anyone from seeing how hollow he really was. We expect our rock biopics to prepackage easily digestible character arcs and emotional growth, so it's telling that The Doors's most crucial scene occurs when Kathleen Quinlan's journalist calls Morrison on his B.S. about his parents dying in a terrible car accident, revealing instead that Morrison's dad is a respected military man and his mom is painfully normal, and Morrison just tries to collapse in on himself like a dying star. He'd rather die than admit there's no grand romance or tragedy behind his origin story. To Stone, Morrison is a conduit, a way of throwing viewers into the single most persuasive evocation of the 1960s that I've ever seen. You experience this one like one long, relentless acid trip - it's one of the only movies about the '60s that feels like someone who lived through the decade actually made it. Stone got $38 million to make The Doors, which adjusted for inflation is about $71 million today, and the scope that budget affords him lets Stone recreate Venice Beach, Andy Warhol's Factory, and three or four massive concerts (with hundred of extras each) to an almost obsessive degree. No studio would greenlight this story at this particular price point (today, we're lucky if we get something like Her Smell, which covers much of the same thematic and emotional ground at a micro-budget, and was produced outside the Hollywood studio system), especially one that's as despairing as The Doors. If Morrison represents anything to Stone, he's the exact moment the ideals of the '60s soured, went commercial, lost their innocence. You look at Morrison spouting flower-child nonsense while raging and craving self-destruction, and you're reminded of Joan Didion, of the Rolling Stones at Altamont, of Charles Manson and the Spahn Ranch. Remember: Manson hung out with Dennis Wilson 'cause Manson wanted to be a Beach Boy, too. That's what The Doors is about. One of the great movies of the 1990s, but strap in.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a new version of Spike Lee's 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing. Ever a controversial figure, Lee has never been one to privilege subtlety when a bold gesture will do, and he organizes his entire film around one such gesture: he uses a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X together at Capitol Hill on 26 March 1964 as a proxy for all Do the Right Thing's thematic and political agendas. History tends to place these two Civil Rights activists at loggerheads with one another (the stereotype goes, Malcolm was a man of violence while King was a man of peace), but this picture tells a different story. In it, both men share a warm, hearty laugh together, finding a moment of common ground even in the most serious of circumstances (they were attending Senate debates on the Civil Rights Act). The implications couldn't be clearer - in the end, it's our shared humanity that binds us together despite our differences - and Lee keeps reminding us of that fact, whether he's having the developmentally disabled Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith) thrust copies of that selfsame photo to anyone within reach or letting the photograph fill the screen after the film's fiery, violent climax. Again, it's not subtle, but when you're dealing with race and socioeconomic inequality, it shouldn't be. Now, for about ninety minutes, Do the Right Thing is the single greatest hangout movie ever made. Lee brings us to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year, covering the interactions of a dozen or so folks as they wander the neighborhood and try to beat the heat, and all set to the dueling sounds of WeLuvRadio DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) and the impassive, "Fight the Power"-blaring Radio Raheem (Bill Duke). There's the aforementioned Smiley, of course, and Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), a shambling alcoholic who maintains his regal nobility even as he's having kids buy him Miller High Life and verbally sparring with the no-B.S. Mother Sister (Davis' real-life spouse Ruby Dee). There's the Korean grocer (Steve Park) and his family who haven't quite integrated into the Bed-Stuy dynamics, although they're not as clueless as the white yuppie (John Savage) who bought a brownstone when the price was right and represents the threat of gentrification. The aimless radical Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) looks for any cause to promote and anyone to annoy, his protests most often falling deaf on the ears of laconic delivery boy Mookie (Lee himself). And Mookie delivers pizza for Sal (Danny Aiello) and his sons (Richard Edson and John Turturro), their Italian pizzeria both a neighborhood staple and a friction point for racial tensions. And I haven't even mentioned Mookie's sister (Joie Lee, Spike's actual sister) and girlfriend (Rosie Perez), the irritable teens (Steve White, Martin Lawrence, Leonard L. Thomas, and Christa Rivers) giving everyone crap, or the makeshift Greek Chorus (Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, and the late, great Robin Harris) offering running commentary on neighborhood events large and small. Spike isn't going for naturalism here - he conjures this hothouse, heightened realism that's equal parts Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Gordon Parks, and Vincente Minnelli (the colors are so vivid and swoony, you get heat-stroke watching this movie), and all the better to reflect the simmering tensions forever broiling under otherwise mundane interactions. That's why the ending is such a gut punch: we spend the entire movie worrying something bad could happen, but we're not expecting the police to murder one of Lee's characters (a person who, in the original script, didn't die - Lee changed the outcome at the last minute and in so doing created something that resonates today with the ghosts of Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo) nor the full-scale riot that follows. The film's detractors have long criticized Lee for advocating violence with the riot - back in '89, Newsweek's Jack Kroll argued that "the film's climactic explosion of interracial violence...has been lit by a filmmaker tripped up by muddled motives" - but this take (and the others in this vein) are almost willfully myopic. Lee stages both events (the police brutality, the subsequent riot) like nightmares, all fire and pain and death. I have never been able to shake Mother Sister's agonizing howls as she watches the chaos. If Lee is siding with anything, it's that photograph. "Look at these two men," Lee seems to be saying as he cuts back to King and Malcolm. "They were able to find a better way, if only for a moment. Why can't we do the right thing, too?" Maybe the most vital film of the last thirty years. Maybe the best one, too.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov had a slightly different perspective, that "one part of [the film] is enormously attractive and funny, a wonderful time capsule that has effectively preserved the pulse of a unique place at a unique moment in time. I like it a lot. The other part, however, is very dark and manipulative, even dangerous because it attempts to convince that violence is a legit form of social protest. It is not, and it should never be excused and encouraged - under any circumstances. Violence can never heal and stimulate progress; it can only widen division and give wings to the wrong people. There is only one bonus feature on this release - the original press conference from the Cannes Film Festival - where this very point is brought up and quickly discussed, and I find this quite unfortunate."